claire rousay
phenomenal pair of recordings. baron's playing on 11/04 at 15:00 is a highlight amongst many highlights
Favorite track: at Cafe OTO 11/04/2023.
Side A
Ecka Mordecai - Cello, Voice and Chair
Rory Salter - Guitar, Feedback, Electronics and Eggflute
Side B
Derek Baron - Piano
Rory Salter - Piezo Buzzers, Feedback, Cassettes, Tapehead, Tones and Switches
Recorded by Billy Steiger (A) and Kyle acab (B)
Mixed by Shaun Crook (A) and Rory Salter (B)
Mastered by Rory Salter
Thanks to
Cafe OTO, Fielding, Jackson, Nick and Roxanne
credits
released December 17, 2023
Rory Salter is a musician, artist and technician living in London. He has released albums under various projects with Alter, TakuRoku, Infant Tree, Teeth, MAL, Bison, Kashual Plastik and more. His music is formed through experimentations with acoustic & electronic instruments, faulty technologies, cassette tape, feedback and voice; motivated by a relationship to changing and chaotic environments, objects and walking.
Ecka Mordecai is a British artist based in London. Situated between sonic, performative and olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation: entwining cello, horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity.
Both intimate and exacting, this body-driven practice defies formal constraints, undoing the limits of genre and allowing for works such as Aequill Sound, a line of niche perfumes inspired by elements of the East London soundscape, or Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), the album in which Ecka explores myriad internal states using the compositional device of a creaking door hinge (or charniére).
Performing since 2010, Ecka has appeared alongside the likes of David Toop, Malvern Brume, Thurston Moore, Keeley Forsyth, Ilan Volkov, Ex-Easter Island Head, Greta Buitkute, Dave Birchall and Kate Armitage. She has played at Cafe OTO, BBC Glasgow, Islington Mill and inside a Berlin wasserturm, amongst others.
She has projects with Revox tape performer Valerio Tricoli in the duo Mordecoli (The Addiction, Hedione 2022), and in the trio Circæa with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (The Bridge of Dreams, Faraway Press, 2019).
Derek Baron is a composer, writer, and teacher from Chicago and New York. They have released music with Penultimate Press, Regional Bears, OtoRoku, Recital, and other labels. Collaborative projects include the amateur chamber ensemble Cop Tears and the music/writing duo Permanent Six Flags. They also operate, with Emily Martin, the "Reading Group" record label for new and archival audio.
Derek's upcoming projects and releases include a new Cop Tears release entitled Our Favorite Music, a book with Permanent Six Flags, and a solo chamber/collage album entitled Holy Restaurant, as well as several scores for dance and film. The Game of Letters is a new chamber work written for Apartment House.
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following texts were written by these three musicians about the impression of the concerts happened in the cassette.
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I was in the audience that night.
It had rained before the show and the room was filled with warm, humid bodies.
The stage lights seemed colder and brighter than usual as Derek Baron elegantly made their way towards the grand piano positioned at the back of the stage.
Rory Salter climbed into a tangle of objects he’d arranged upon a table, set at the boundary of stage and audience.
I’m familiar with his technique of spreading out, interrupting our point of focus.
A rustle of paper as Derek arranged a score, a sneeze and gradual layering of tones set my ears in background-noise-mode. I receive Rory’s music the same way I receive an urban soundscape by foot; not because his instruments sound like car traffic, building sites or the hush of an extractor-fan-outlet, but because they behave as such.
My ears become saturated, unable to listen to any one thing in particular and I ‘switch off’, sensing sound as pressure: weather changes.
In this vague, thick, air, Derek delivered the first chord from Bach’s “Es woll’ uns Gott genädig sein,” slowly and deliberately, producing an alignment of parts that felt enormously significant. They play the piano with a straightforward tenderness I’ve never heard before, a kind of absence, maturity or acceptance of what it means to play.
Listening to the performers, I felt an emotion I’ll call ‘affirmation’, by Derek’s decision to perform this borrowed piece whilst Rory improvised without aim. Together, they communicated an unwritten narrative, a sense of knowing without knowing.
When Rory set off a load of battery-powered buzzers, drowning Derek in a long, dystopian din I graciously accepted our fate as the audience were buried beneath a piercing racket.
It felt right. All parts played out, all elements delivered without tension or disbelief.
The following day, a member of the audience tweeted ‘last night I saw someone play the batteries at café oto’.
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I wasn’t in the audience that night, so my hearing of the artifact has something of that mystifying benefit of hindsight. Without the accompanying image of hesitant hands, heads turned to listen to each other’s offering before making a decision to pluck or scrape or lean back, I as a listener can be fooled into thinking that every decision was destined to be just so––that I am hearing a careful composition of layers of voice, strings, clicking of plastic buttons, creaking of chairs, air blown through a straw. That shimmering, spectral strum that fills in the gaps of the four-note cello ostinato, mapping a tonal space that gives unlikely gravity to the low wandering, from above, locating it in space like a sundial hanging from a ceiling: how to hear a recording in such a way that remembers that it could have been any other way? In other words, what is the better question behind “is this music improvised or not”? For instance, how would you arrange a presentation on the properties of a vibrating string without speaking? Pluck, bow, tremble, worry, grunt, click, elaborate, photograph?
The items in a small display case on a rotary turn out to be looking back at you: a pair of pastries, or diamond earrings, you can’t tell which because of the vitrine’s glare. Then someone beside you coughs and you’re brought back to yourself. But this isn’t just a return to the comforting sour calm of the everyday––a winter matinee?––it’s the recognition that, whether we like it or not, all music is improvised. It is my sense that we will “like it” more or less depending. When Ecka and Rory created this particular whirlpool, I was preparing for a transatlantic flight that would embitter me to this fact for a while. It would be only gradually, in fits and starts at keyboards of various kinds, over the next few months, until finally being greeted by their creative hospitality in April, with the memory of that music they had performed earlier in the year––something I didn’t know I knew until later––that I would get, fittingly, just in time, that we are making this music together.
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To follow form, I wasn’t in the audience for either night.
Ecka was ill the day of our duo. She spent the hours preceding, indulging in the dramatics of whether or not she would make it to the show, and I was at best nervous about this. Regardless, she arrived.
We had decided beforehand to time our performance with candles that burnt for roughly 20 minutes, stick-like and bright red from Lai Loi in Deptford. These were pierced into new potatoes and sat on a small table between us.
Perhaps when listening to the recording you can indulge in recreating this environment, with a small group of candles, for me it guided the music.
Myself and Derek had spent some time talking online, mostly about Reading Group releases and shipping costs. The evening that we played together at OTO was the first time we had met in person, and for me it would have been the first time performing with someone I’d never seen play before.
Derek asked if I had any ideas for the performance, and gently informed me they had rehearsed some of the piano parts from my record. We decided instead that we would do whatever felt right, without these parts, and Derek presented some sheet music.
I had with me some instruments I had been using at recent solo performances. Piezo buzzers attached to 9v batteries, a disembodied tape head and cassette tape stuck into a notebook, small feedback devices, switches and old preamps with test tones. The music was performed at the beginning of the night, under glaring white lights.
To me, it's right that these performances sit alongside one another. They compliment each other in play and playback.
In listening you could almost combine them, and on a personal level I feel there's sympathy.
Something that strikes me about the recordings is what feels to me like a sense of play with brokenness. Hearing audible tails of Ecka’s cold, my interactions with failing technologies and feedback, Derek’s slow paced recital - Even down to Ecka’s off the cuff amplified creaky chair and the technical errors in the recording from the night of the 11th. These elements are to me not ‘happy accidents’, but a dedication to acknowledging situations and finding a space to perform within them. For me there's a sense of joy and tension in those moments that we didn’t attempt to polish or control.
supported by 13 fans who also own “Not Quite a Trio”
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