all that dust’s first batch of releases has received critical acclaim across a variety of print and internet media and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, ORF (Austria), France Musique, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and others.
Speaking of contemporary music labels, we got a new one this year: a small and highly specialist UK outfit called all that dust, run by three artists and dedicated to releasing new works and classics of the repertoire.
A bijou catalogue of carefully crafted CDs.
For a new label, these five releases are an extremely ambitious and auspicious opening gambit; I really can’t wait to hear what comes next.
all that dust is a determinedly grassroots venture, deeply embedded in the community its recordings represent.
The five initial releases from all that dust – all beautifully recorded and smartly designed – offer an impressive overview of the founders’ range of interests. A sublimely patient account of Feldman’s For John Cage finds Knoop partnered with Aisha Orazbayeva, an extraordinary Kazakh-born violinist. Avant Muzak, a collection of puckishly referential chamber works by Matthew Shlomowitz, is performed with style and abundant cheek by the superb Norwegian ensemble asamisimasa. On a third CD, inconnaissance, the formidable French cellist Séverine Ballon makes her debut as an equally uncompromising composer. The discs are housed in attractive digipaks of consistent design, always a good omen for a desirable library addition. Two more all that dust releases, each offering a cornerstone work for solo vocalist with taped electronic accompaniment, are available exclusively in high-resolution download formats: Fraser’s arresting rendition of Milton Babbitt’s stormy Philomel, and a similarly potent performance of Luigi Nono’s La fabbrica illuminata by the British mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg. Both recordings were captured in binaural sound, producing a vividly three-dimensional presence when played through good headphones.
Kompositionen, die in ihrer Feinheit und Vielschichtigkeit bis an die Grenzen des Hörbaren gehen und häufig spatial, räumlich sind. Die Staubpartikel des Klanges werden wie unter einem Mikroskop hörbar, konzentriert und scharf und zugleich umfassend. … Die Dramaturgie aller Produktionen von all that dust ist somit wirklich als eine künstlerische Einheit zu begreifen, fein aufeinander abgestimmt sind die in ihrem Charakter durachaus sehr unterschiedlichen Werke.
atd1 was listed in 5against4’s Best Albums of 2018 and was awarded a Diapason d’Or in April 2019.
a mesmerising, almost hypnotic performance that seemingly brings the world to a stop for 74 minutes.
This slow-paced piece doesn’t contain hummable tunes, but it’s intensely beautiful at times, Mark Knoop’s, soft, bell-like piano chords sharing the space with Aisha Orazbeyava’s violin… a perfect musical decluttering
Aisha Orazbayeva and Mark Knoop deliver a gorgeously austere, decidedly quiet reading of the pared-down epic. The pair cycles through the composer’s simple patterns with exquisite precision, each utterance voiced with different bow techniques and amounts of pressure, to imbue the sense of stasis with endless change.
The work in question seems a conscious attempt at formalizing a disorientation of memory. The effect is of a hallucinatory stasis, not dissimilar to the canvases of Mark Rothko, where little happens – very beautifully.
atd2 was listed in The Wire’s Top 10 album releases of 2018 (Modern Composition category).
a witty, absurdist masterpiece of contemporary sound art.
Avant Muzak, a collection of puckishly referential chamber works by Matthew Shlomowitz, is performed with style and abundant cheek by the superb Norwegian ensemble asamisimasa.
…the selection and arrangement of these, mostly pre-existing sounds becomes the primary compositional motor. The series of fragments must spark off each, revealing something that was not clear at first, or building a narrative that plays with listeners’ expectations. It is here that great care is evinced by the pieces: they are organised with no little love.
atd3 was nominated for a Deutschen Schallplattenkritik Award 2018 and listed in Sequenza 21’s Best Instrumental and Recital CDs of 2018.
The effect of Séverine Ballon’s musical odyssey inconnaissance is best elaborated as a masterpiece of music whose microscopic elements of tone, pitch and tempi are conflations of musical ideas miraculously welded together: new, alert and alive.
Something that didn’t fit in the shape of words was transported to my ears through my headphones, a secret message that filled me with the kind of comprehension that defies articulation.
Ballon makes no use of computers in these compositions, and yet, the influence of electronic music pulsates throughout the entire album.
At times, [Ballon] lets the sound slip away to almost nothing without ever losing its presence, letting details recede and emerge, with contrasts in dynamics and activity that always feel natural.
atd4 was listed in National Sawdust’s Top 10 classical releases of 2018.
The tape part, it has to be said, has never sounded more pristine and brilliant than it does in this recording… Engineering the recording binaurally has made it into a deeply immersive experience through headphones, one that throws us into the heart of what Philomel is going through, and which demonstrates how radical, accessible and affecting Babbitt’s often-overlooked music really is.
The word immersive is over-used. But listening to new recordings of Milton Babbitt’s Philomel is a disorientating, vertiginous experience. The listener finds themselves plunged, instantly, into an all-encompassing sound world in which bloops and gurgles of electronic sound appear to come from all possible angles, anchored by the central node of Juliet Fraser’s soaring solo voice.
atd5 was listed in BBC Radio 3 Hear and Now’s Top 10 album releases of 2018, and listed in The Herald’s Top 10 Classical releases of 2018.
This binaural mix is stunningly involving, placing one deep at the core of the work’s drama, heightening all the crushing weight and diaphanous drift that it contains.
Nono weaves in factory noises and the voices of workers with pre-recorded and live soprano, performed here by the astonishingly agile and expressive Loré Lixenberg.
[…] there is craft in abundance on this disc. piano piece 2015 and we’ll meet again from the same year sandwich seven prosaically-titled 2016 works, presenting a cornucopia of musical ideas and techniques. […] More than a diary or sketches, each piece reflects a musical mind contemplating and reconsidering music, as played and heard upon the piano.
Tim Parkinson has toggled nonchalantly between experimental performance pieces and scored music, all of it investigating the meaning of sound. Mark Knoop sensitively explores that latter material on Piano Music 2015-2016, a set of often-austere solo works arriving as discrete studies that feel obliquely connected.
I’ve been waiting a year for the next batch of releases from All That Dust . The first bit of great news is that one of the new CDs is dedicated to Cassandra Miller’s works for voice … [T]his addition gives us some important details of the bigger picture of her music, casting her work into a different light.
This CD […] contain[s] a singular style of sonic material that is simultaneously refreshingly new yet with a seemingly familiar style of singing — a warped version of something that one feels one has heard before and with exceptional musical results.
Rodgers has discerning ears and keen antennae for musical architecture, and she never disappears down a rabbit-hole of forgetting that granular synthesis is only the means, not the ends. The simple massaging of skins and cymbals into life in A to B — kneading, scraping, tapping, tickling, slapping — is elevated to another level by the electronics, which colour in fleeting harmonic patterns and shift the natural percussive grain into the realm of acoustically impossible sustains and attacks.
[Stockhausen’s] electronic music was created as a four-channel tape, and that vivid, spatial element of the work emerges with startling immediacy in this first binaural recording of the electro-acoustic version, with percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys. Heard through headphones, their performance gives a tingling sense of the aural perspectives that played such an important role in Stockhausen’s musical thinking at that time.
Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music has been explained as his interpretation of Native American ritualistic circle or ghost dances, the means by which a people connected to their ancestors. The music appears to be unbounded, and it exists before the musicians take the stage and continues long after the performance has concluded. If we carry that concept into the 21st century, the music could have, maybe should have been, the score to The Matrix science fiction film series… Belgian guitarist Kobe Van Cauwenberghe steps inside that matrix with his performance of three Braxton compositions with his Ghost Trance Solos by layering loops and electronics over his guitar in real time. The effect is astonishing and as hypnotic as an ensemble performance.
Duos for Other Instruments bevat twee stukken. In Ersatz maakt Veltheim repetitieve bewegingen, terwijl Pateras een indringende klankwolk produceert en in Golden Point is het evenzeer een aaneenschakeling van minuscule patronen. In beide gevallen met een drone tot gevolg die gedurende het gehele stuk als een hardnekkig lage drukgebied blijft hangen. Klank, pure klank, dat is waar het om gaat.
While other composers may reward your closer attention, Johnson just seems to compound your uncertainty. Are you sure of what you’ve heard? When it’s over, you remember the experience of listening, but the image created in your mind is defined by its obscurity… The sound quality is particularly good, given the extreme dynamic range needed to catch a reasonable impression of the piano in performance. Ben Smith would appear to play with all the exactness and greater musical consideration needed to bring these pieces into tentative life, with a talent for letting each sound fade and die in their own way.
The overall impression left by this collection, this documentation of determined innovation over the span of Johnson’s career so far via and with ruins from Europe’s musical past, is of a profound and enchanting aesthetic experience. It is an expression of the sublimity of rupture and decay, and of making something contemporary out of the ruins of the past.
Veteran Welsh experimental violinist engages in an extreme pursuit, following a loose road map of extended techniques on a harrowing 52-minute trip. The microscopic gestures and electronic-like thrum are daunting, both for performer and listener. Davies listened to her first pass on headphones, filling in the gaps and supplementing flagging energy with a second layer of sound. It’s a truly psychedelic experience.
There are layers of hasty woody bow drill rubbing, wobbling harmonics, and the intermittent whistling and wheezing of strings sounding from a bowing gesture whose iterations contain noticeable variations but are similar enough to seem repetitive for the duration of the track. Its moving parts in incongruous cadences conveys a sense similar to being inside a vehicle breaking apart at high speed. And like shaking it simultaneously seems not moving and moving, repetitive and not repetitive.
Despite all we know about the violin and the once-new ways that people are playing it, Angharad Davies’ album gwneud a gwneud eto/do and do again transports us to another landscape altogether. We are strangers here and that is good. […] I am grateful that Davies pushed herself to the limit to reveal to us her world full of colour, hue and motion, as well as commitment, perseverance and discipline.
Each of the four pieces here, none of them very substantial, is a gem… Most sonically spectacular of all is the metallic sound world of l’Orologio di Arcevia, with its jangling array of piano, tubular bells and ’spiels, apparently inspired by the sound of a clock in a belfry. It comes wonderfully alive in the performance by Joe Richards and Mark Knoop, and heard as intended through headphones, it’s fabulously involving, too.
In this release, a bold statement is made right away: a piece for 12 flutes is recorded by a single flautist, and a piece for eight violins is recorded by a single violinist. So on for the whole disc: this is recorded music. Not just out of convenience, but for reasons imminent to the music, such that it’s almost an argumentative point on the part of the label.