Bite of the Orange

lthough many political observers are preoccupied with Norwegian oil and what changes these reserves have brought to that country, when it comes to improvised music, brass is a more appreciated commodity. That’s in part due to Trondheim-born tuba player Martin Taxt who has initiated unique roles for his elephantine tone-inflected instrument. He’s moved beyond orchestral and Jazz coloration – or rhythmic bass functions – to collaborate with noise and electronic experimenters, other instrumentalists and even singers.

Another role involves intersection with others who expose a multiplicity of timbres available from these instruments, as does as part of the Microtub tuba trio with fellow Norwegian Peder Simonsen and British microtonal tuba exponent Berlin-based Robin Hayward. Bite of the Orange, recorded in Italy in late January 2016, is the band’s third CD. Ranging farther afield into the noise/processing/electronic interface, hjem was recorded in Moscow five months earlier. Here Taxt improvising alongside local Kurt Liedwart generating sine waves from his ppooll program, and Saint Petersburg’s Andrey Popovskiy whose sound sources are violin, electronics and objects. Each CD is less than one-half hour in length.

Brevity is the soul of wit is one overused cliché, but the germ of truth in that is never more obvious than with these CDs. During the single track which makes up the Russian-recorded disc, careful attention can be paid to the nuanced broken-octave connections among three tonal outputs. At first, continuous tuba lowing is obviously outlined against the oscillating electronics and abrasively scraped objects from Liedwart, which stand out like descending icicles on a snow bank. Soon however, as shrill violin-string plucks and granular synthesis from the ppooll become more prominent, nearly translucent sound overlays the interaction, creating a nearly opaque squirming mass. Eventually though as noises resembling the grinding of gears become aurally obvious and Taxt’s inner-tube-like blows become shriller, the narrative is divided between alpine meadow-elevated and recessed coal mine-low timbres. For extra drama, clock-like ticking is heard in the silences behind blowing as if the improvisation is counting down to a climax. Finally the apex is reached as static and wave forms quiet to reveal what sounds like receding footfalls.

Should hjem be described as aural sfumato, overlaying sound layers with no perceptible transition among them, than Bite of the Orange could be defined with another term from the visual arts. Grisaille, which is decorations in a single color that produce a three-dimensional effect, is essentially the result of harmonizing three instruments that on the surface are as indistinguishable as eggs. Although Simonsen and Taxt play microtonal C-tubas and Hayward a microtonal F-tuba, microtonal is the key adjective here because Hayward has researched and created these microtonal prototypes so that more timbres can be used by the brass players.

This album isn’t anything like an auditory laboratory report. Yet as early as the first track, while the harmonized three appear to output the same squirting tones, the finale involve the subtle segregation between bottom-of-the-sea-like pitches and elevated treetop-like tones, with the brass connection continuously dissolving or stalling. Finally, during “Violet Man”, a Hayward composition like the title track, the three reach a point if discordant romanticism. Although connections evolve at tortoise-like speed, the leisurely pace allows the trio to bask in the luxuriously balanced melody. The ending arrives when quivering tones connect briefly, and then rapidly disappear. Not designed for languid or cozy listening, these CDs should impress low-brass fanciers and anyone interested in unconventional, 21st Century musical connections.

Nochmals wenige Töne, dieses Mal aber langgezogen, vom Blech, genauer drei Tubas, übereinandergelegt, mikrotonal, schwer. Es braucht diese Länge, um die tonliche Feinheit aufzuzeigen. Ähnliches hatten wir auch schon. Das erste Stück des englischen Komponisten und Tubisten Robin Hayward heisst ”Bite of the Orange”, das zweite ”Violet Orange”. Es ist schwierig, den Unterschied zwischen diesen Farben festzumachen, aber wie dann das dritte Stück ”Violet Man” (Gesamtdauer der CD: 25 Minuten) allmählich in die Tiefe absinkt, ist schon von einer gewissen Imposanz. 

The trio Microtub goes much deeper than Niels Van Heertum, deeper into the deep spheres of intonation. British Robin Hayward plays on microtonal F-tuba with Norwegian Martin Taxt and Peder Simonsen (who replaced Kristoffer Lo) who play on microtonal C-tuba claim to be the first, and most possibly, the only microtonal tuba ensemble. Microtub also claim to create sounds where “the doors of the underworld slamming”. The trio often uses colour-coded sculptural scores to define areas of harmonic space in just intonation, presenting geometric structures to be explored by the players over time.

Microtub's third album is actually a 25-minutes EP, recorded during the trio’s one week residency at the Palazzo Stabile Art Center in Piemonte, Italy in January 2016. Hayward composed the main pieces, “Bite of the Orange” and “Violet Man”, focusing on the 11th and 13th harmonics, resulting in a strong microtonal character. These pieces not only highlight the commanding and highly disciplined interplay but also the nuanced, challenging architecture of these pieces. Taxt and Simonsen microtonal C-tubas produce the base foundation of dark and raw, almost still, guttural voices while Hayward microtonal F-tuba suggests a delicate, brighter flow, gently soaring above Taxt and Simonsen tubas. On these pieces the three microtonal tubas sound as merging into a unique time and space dimension that almost freezes, as it is embraced by the long, sustained drones. The short trio piece, “Violet Orange”, offers a more dynamic atmosphere with distant traces of playfulness. 

Despite the clear investigative-experimental approach of Microtub, these pieces have a powerful impact. They sound as otherworldly rituals that demand a new manner of listening. It is quite difficult to resume your daily commotion after such a purifying listening experience.

Microtub's Bite of the Orange is a curiously engaging release of what are, essentially, tuba drones. The engaging part is how quickly one is drawn into the dark and sonorous, yet not unfriendly worlds of tectonic shifts.
 
The long tones of tuba are punctuated by the sounds of the engaging and disengaging embouchures, as the musicians pause to take breaths before diving in again. In a technical sense, their work has a focus on microtonal scales and instruments that play these notes between notes, but the knowledge of such is almost beside the point. Bite of the Orange is an autopsy of the deep areas of the ocean, or the most intimate moments of thunder, drawn out, slowed down and laid bare for the listener. 

Spenning og oppløsning. I Microtub hører vi Taxt sammen med engelske Robin Hayward og Peder Simonsen, alle på kvarttonetuba. Besetningen åpner for en særegen utforskning av klanger og teksturer, som gir assosiasjoner til den ungarske modernisten Gyorgy Ligeti, så vel som til rockeband som Radiohead. Trioen kombinerer komposisjoner med impro, og Bite of the Orange inneholder to lange stykker av Hayward med en kollektiv improvisasjon som et hengsel imellom. Komposisjonene bygger på treklanger, langsomt og meditativt i førstesporet, og raskere og i mer dynamiske forløp i det siste. Improstykket samler disse trådene. Her arbeider tubaistene med uventede tonesprang og undersøker spenning og oppløsning. Det som i starten kan virke som statisk og dvelende musikk, viser seg ved nærmere lytting å være et tett, årvåkent samspill som generer øyeblikk av stor skjønnhet.

Here we have two new releases on Norway's Sofa Music and on both discs we find music played  with a tuba. On the first disc it is exclusively a tuba, but then by a trio of players. Robin Hayward,  who has presented quite a few works on the tuba, which we reviewed, plays a 'microtonal F-tuba',  Martin Taxt and Peder Simonsen both play a 'microtonal C-tuba. This is their third album for Sofa  but it is the first I hear from this trio. One could easily think that this is within the realm of  improvised music, but Robin Hayward composed two of the three pieces, the two longer ones and the trio composed the short one in between these. This is, at twenty-six minutes, is a rather short  CD, with two pieces of ten/twelve minutes and one that is over three minutes, sandwiched in  between. But what is captured with in this time frame is something that is very captivating. These  three pieces are very minimal in development and the range of the three tubas is very close to each  other, so we have this dense, intertwining sound of the tuba. Drone like obviously, but then in a  very natural way. I noticed before that the tuba might seem like a very unlikely instrument for this kind of microtonal music, which borders closely to ambient music, but if you listen to this, it makes  very much sense to use this instrument in such a way. I was reminded of the music of Phill Niblock, but in the live approach of Microtub towards recording, one hears the breathing and the decay of the sounds (unlike in Niblock's own recordings, so another point of reference might be the work of Pauline Oliveros, even when Microtub use no electronics at all. This is however very much as deep listening as Oliveros' music, and it's simply a highly refined experience.

Microtub ist ein Trio um den Musiker, Komponisten und Musikforscher Robyn Hayward, der schon mit einer ganzen Reihe unterschiedlichster Projekte ebenso unterschiedliche Auftritte und Aufnahmen produziert hat. Sein Hauptinstrument ist die Tuba und sein Hauptfeld die Mikrotonale Musik. Als Erklärung hierzu habe ich mal etwas aus den Wikipediaeintrag zum Thema kopiert:

Mikrotonale Musik arbeitet mit mikrotonalen Intervallen, d. h. Intervallen, die kleiner als ein Halbtonabstand sind. Entsprechende zwischen den herkömmlichen Tonstufen liegende Töne werden zwar in klassischer Musik oder in Pop und Jazz schon immer eingesetzt (in Glissandi, Portamenti etc.), trotzdem spricht man hier nicht von mikrotonaler Musik. Eine derartige Musik muss vielmehr mit einem mikrotonalen Tonsystem verbunden sein oder mikrotonale Zeichen enthalten, die nicht nur sporadisch eingesetzt werden. Es müssen nicht zwangsläufig mehr als zwölf Töne pro Oktave vorhanden sein. (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikrotonale_Musik).

Bite of the Orange ist nun das dritte Album des Trios seit 2011. Den Hörer erwarten drei Stücke mit 25 Minuten Musik, die eine abgrundtief dunkle und traurige Atmosphäre verbreitet. Die Klänge der drei Tubas breiten sich nach dem Schema der Mikrotonalen Musik langsam aus. Die Töne werden sehr langgezogen gespielt und im Zeitlupentempo verändert. Der daraus entstehende, sehr atmosphärische Klang weckt durchaus Erinnerungen an tiefe Dronemusik, die dunklen Bassklänge der Tuba(s) brummen in der Magengegend und die dunklen Klänge verschlingen den Hörer wahrhaftig.

Das mag für manchen Hörer oder in der falschen Situation gehört sehr erdrückend, ja bedrückend sein, ansonsten ist es durchaus ein sehr ungewöhnliches Klangerlebnis. Die Aufnahmen sind von bester Klangqualität, man hört den Raum, die Instrumente und die Musiker (Hall, Klang, Atmen und Klackergeräusche von Instrumenten und Stühlen). Eine erstklassige Arbeit im Bereich der Mikrotonalen Musik.

Wer die Musik von zum Beispiel Bohren und der Club of Gore für noch zu fröhlich hält, sollte mal ein Ohr auf diesen Sound werfen.

To be released via Sofa Music on February 10th, 2k17 is "Bite Of The Orange", the third album of the Microtub project which is comprised of the three tuba players Robin Hayward, Martin Taxt and Peder Simonsen. Together, the three musicians cater a approx. 26 minutes menu of three deep and droning compositions, creating spheres of hand- or better lung-crafted organic Ambient through their long and layered tuba tones, resonating with each other to a very calming effect which defo are a fascinating example of how Ambient music can be created without any electronic effects and components at all. Recommended! 

Whereas many microtonal explorations manifest as tiny, pinging blips, Microtub’s Bite of the Orange is constructed using immense, elongated notes. Perhaps somewhat obscurely and tangentially, I find myself considering Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’, specifically the following couplet:

My vegetable love should grow 
Vaster than empires, and more slow.

No, not on account of the popular tumescent implications most readings of the lines offer: I’ve even explored the mirthsome connotations of Marvell’s emerging bulbous courgette during undergraduate seminars in an attempt to draw some kind of engagement from a room of late teens who really couldn’t give a crap about Elizabethan poetry, but that’s not why Bite of the Orange evokes Marvell in my mind. Instead, I’m drawn by the poem’s allusions to the Aristotelean connotations of a love borne out of the vegetative soul, as commented on at length by Lawrence Burton in his magnificent Anatomy of Melancholy, one of my favourite 17th Century texts (largely, it’s true, on account of Burton’s magnificent language). Burton makes a connection between the ‘vegetative soul’ and ‘natural love’; a love which is a slow-growing, evolutionary condition.

Granted, an orange is not a vegetable, but, like this slow-growing love, Bite of the Orange moves at an almost imperceptible pace, organic. Microtub’s slow, microtonal explorations require patience, and it’s only through time that a true appreciation of its qualities and its sonic depths can be truly appreciated.

The three tracks seep into one another, both in terms of the structures of their titles, and sonically. ‘Violet Man’ ventures into the dark, its low rumblings feeling their way through subterranean territories and poking the deepest recesses of the mind, and the three long-firm tracks combine to offer a full, panoramic perspective on the nuanced tonalities three microtonal tubas can create.

Bite of the Orange is not an album of action. It is an album which unfurls, creeping, revealing its aspects in greater detail the more closely one listens.

IDEA: Exploring pitch relations within a multidimensional space.

WHAT: Three compositions for microtonal tubas performed by the trio of Robin Hayward, Martin Taxt and Peder Simonsen. Outwardly, this is drone music, plain and simple, composed of sustained tones moving at a measured pulse, allowing the performers to linger in each successive triad and save its essence. And yet, despite the occasionally architectural feel of events, everything is in constant flux - each pieces making use of out-of-phase breath work to create a sensation of liquidity within the harmonic fabric.

The thirteen-minute title track keeps the harmonic relation between the tubas stable, as they move through different pitch spaces. The eleventh partial takes center stage here, a harmonic relationship which does not even exist in its pure form within the well-tempered system. The piece pits Taxt's and Simonsen's bass-heavy c-tubas against Hayward's f-tuba, which hovers above them like a giant moon, allowing the tangy taste of the partial to glow in its full, orange splendour. The color indications in the titles, reference were selected by Hayward on the basis of his impressions of their particular character.

Even more striking is ‘Violet Orange’, which packs a thrilling dramaturgy into a mere handful of gestures and a bare three minutes. Taxt and Simonson are holding the same notes in the bass frequencies, as Hayward oscillates between two different partials in the upper registers, ever so delicately rotating the harmonic space. The effect is one of being held weightlessly in suspense, of potentially infinite contraction and expansion, of a friction that is caught somewhere in between the extremes of tension and release.

WHY: For microtub, the truly rewarding questions lurk underneath the surface of the aesthetically pleasing: Which pitches should be played? How long should they be held? What happens when they change? To arrive at more than just visceral answers and a veritable system, Hayward's research process is akin to that of a scientist looking through a high-resolution microscope. As a first, yet decisive step, he developed the microtonal tuba in close collaboration with renowned brass manufacturer B & S. This unique instrument allows the performer to play even those partials of a fundamental note with absolute precision, which traditional counterparts rooted in the well tempered tradition were, at best, capable of approximating.

Beside these performative aspects, being able to play in equal tuning had immediate compositional consequences as well, in that a dizzyingly deep microcosmos of harmonic relations suddenly became available. For anyone interested in the particulars, there is an excellent paper available. It was only through a self-written software, Tuning Vine, that this space could sensibly be accessed. The program translates multidimensional interval grids into visual representations very much akin to the inner structures of atoms, rendering them intellectually and emotionally graspable. Spending time within this space in search of rewarding relations is not just a pre-requisite for the microtonal composition process. It is already one of its most important building blocks.

Despite these scientific leanings, the trio's music still exudes a powerful visceral quality. Bite of the Orange sounds both strangely familiar and strikingly alien, clearly circumscribed yet filled with infinite possibilities. It is often said that all music has already been written. As microtub's intriguing sonic research proves, whomever made this claim may just not have been digging deep enough.

Το τρίτο άλμπουμ των Microtub με τίτλο Bite of the Orange, φέρνει τους τρεις τουμπίστες- Peder Simonsen, Martin Taxt και Robin Hayward- όλο και πιο βαθιά στης σφαίρα του τονισμού. Παίζοντας, οι δυο μικροτονική σε ντο τούμπα και ο έτερος σε φα, εξερευνούν μουσικές που δημιουργούν τρομερά μεγάλα χρονικά διαστήματα χρησιμοποιώντας μακριές νότες με αποτέλεσμα ακουστικές που δεν έχουν προηγούμενο. Ένα είδος μετα- μοντέρνας ηχητικής τελετουργίας. 
Πηγή: www.musicpaper.gr

The bright title and pastel artwork don’t quite prepare you for the droning, ominous sound of three tubas more or less in harmony. ‘More or less’ because these are three microtonal tubas: Microtub are billed as ‘the world’s first microtonal tuba ensemble’. The microtonal tuba, conceived by Hayward and only developed in 2009, is an extraordinary invention, bringing within reach every conceivable pitch within the instrument’s five-octave range. On first listen, Bite of the Orange, the trio’s third album on Norway’s SOFA label, is as lacking in immediately recognisable features as a flat landscape under snow. Yet though these three tracks sound, on first listen, as though someone has switched off the lights, you can pick out the detail as your senses adjust. The pace is glacial, the power colossal. All thick, brooding harmonies and uncanny microtones, it’s the most appealing conversation between foghorns you’ll hear this year.

Keine Melodien hier. Ist aber auch nicht das Konzept. Bei Microtub steckt das Programm ziemlich exakt im Namen, denn das Trio Robin Hayward, Martin Taxt und Peter Simonsen spielt mikrotonale Tuba, in dreifacher Ausführung. Hayward, der mit seiner Erfindung des Hayward Tuning Vine die erforderliche alternative Stimmung der Instrumente möglich machte, komponiert für Microtub Stücke in reiner Stimmung. Grob gesagt, auf Basis der Obertonreihe und deren harmonisch reinen, ganzzahligen Proportionen, wozu man andere Töne als die etwa auf einem Klavier gebräuchlichen benötigt. Um es kurz zu fassen: Die hier verwendeten Intervalle sind nicht nur anders, sondern zum Teil auch kleiner als die üblichen Halbtonschritte, was in sehr eigenen Frequenzen resultiert. Microtub erkunden diese Zusammenklänge als langgehaltene Akkorde, keine Drones, bloß sehr fein granulierte Harmonien, bei denen sich die Töne herrlich aneinander reiben. Trotz eher statischer äußerer Form wird die Luft permanent in präzise Schwingungen versetzt, die wie bewegte Laserstrahlen ihre permanent mutierenden Räume definieren. Eine auf durch und durch natürlichen Zutaten basierende Musik, die gleichwohl an elektronische Klangwelten erinnert, sehr irdisch und außerweltlich zugleich.

Co powiecie na trzy osobową orkiestrę grającą na mikrotonalnych tubach?

„Bite of the Orange” to już trzecie wydawnictwo tria Microtub założonego przez Robina Waywarda(mikrotonalna tuba F), Martina Taxta (mikrotonalna tuba C) i Pedera Simonsena (mikrotonalna tuba C).

Z tego, co się dowiedział, to Wayward zaczął rozmyślać nad stworzeniem tego mechanizmu gdzieś w okolicach 2003 roku. Jednak do realizacji doszło dopiero sześć lat później. Nowy system umożliwił grę w zakresie pięciu oktaw. Wszystkie systemy strojenia pozostały jak najbardziej dostępne. A samo palcowanie przy użyciu opcji mikrotalnej, czyli mechanizmowi zaworowemu pozwalającemu przełączać się pomiędzy standardowym i mikrotonalnym systemem na tym samym instrumencie, ma charakter intuicyjny.

„Bite of the Orange” to dryf w głąb nisko brzmiących dronów wydostających się z wnętrza tub, które wbrew pozorom jawią się naszym uszom w wersji makro. Mikrotalne harmonie skutecznie dezorientują, a zarazem szczelnie wypełniają przestrzeń stereo. Jest tak gęsto, smoliście, choć eterycznie, że już żaden dźwięk się nie przeciśnie. Kto nie posłucha, ten tuba!