Scott Mclaughlin: We Are Environments For Each Other

Description

Developed over ten years of collaborative work between Scott McLaughlin, violinist Mira Benjamin and pianist Zubin Kanga, 'we are environments for each other' takes the listener on a journey of shifting textural layers, evolving harmonic structures, and slow musical contemplation. Here violin and piano eschew conventional chamber music idioms to conjure fluctuating, sustained drones. This record continues McLaughlin's long standing work with the idea of 'material indeterminacy', using the way an instrument responds in the hands of a performer to guide musical forms. In these pieces, music exists not as sequences of predetermined sounds but as sets of possibilities; areas of exploration for the performers to carefully unfold. Each recording on this record is just one possible realisation of the work, tightly bounded within an agreed soundworld, but with the possibility to take a different direction in the moment of any performance.

In the opening track, we are environments for each other [trio], the instruments are no longer texturally distinct, as the electric violin becomes part of a feedback system that resonates the strings of the piano, merging together in a manner that is at once a single entangled thing, and two competing inputs to a complex system. In the endless mobility of listening, the specially devised technique of 'drone-bowing' takes the re-tuned violin into a world of harmonics and noise, surrounded by ethereal electronic textures. Finally, in the unknown there is already a script for transcendence a recognisable piano sound acts as a bell-like refrain, although the piano's strings are mostly excited by an EBow, rather than by striking the keyboard, eliciting sustained, slowly-shifting textures.

'we are environments for each other' is a record that showcases McLaughlin's use of material indeterminacy to elicit compellingly original musical relationships, an exploration of sounds on the edge, of becoming nothing or more-than-one-thing.