The aptly titled Stuttershine by local composer, performer and sound artist Austin Buckett features recordings of Buckett’s piano alongside Melbourne’s Silo String Quartet, subtly chopped and processed. The results end up somewhere between Morton Feldmann and Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto, slow string passages and minimal piano notes smeared and stuttered from live performance into firmly electroacoustic compositions.
The play between live performance and later treatments creates the music’s central tension, but what makes these pieces outstanding is the almost spectralist understanding of sound and tone Buckett brings both to the original material and to post production. Unlike neo-classicists Olan Mill, for example, whose Paths I listened to alongside this work, the processing creeps in subtly, from faint, unnatural warbles of violin through to juddering waves of repeated sliced tones. Even these extreme examples are dry and restrained, unlike Olan Mill’s thick soup. This is best demonstrated by ‘Palais’, (perhaps a reference to Feldman’s late opus Palais du Mari), in which a lone piano note is surgically sliced and layered microscopically atop itself, building to a crescendo of jagged tics.
Elsewhere its difficult to detect any electronic tinkering, as in the title work, creeping string tones sustained over sharp dissonant piano, before they start to slip off their axis and the effects become clear. What’s fascinating is how gradual Buckett allows this to occur: one moment we’re in an air-filled recording space with five live musicians, the next the lifeless environs of an audio workstation, with no idea of how we got there.
Joshua Meggitt
