Agency by William Gibson 
A good title because the music comes from two minds – flute virtuoso Laura Chislett and composer Edward Cowie, born in England but now living in Australia – and you may be in two minds about it for a few plays, too.
I’m a fan of Steve Hillage’s “Rainbow Dome Musik”, a 1979 ambient album commissioned for performance in the Rainbow Dome at the Mind-Body-Spirit Festival, a year after Brian Eno released “Ambient 1: Music for Airports”; Eno gets the credit for inventing ambient music but Hillage perhaps was the inventor of new age music. I digress; this is reminiscent of Hillage in that it is just sound, washing along, although more varied and harsher than Hillage’s gentle music for an exhibition.
Cowie writes: “I guess the easiest way to describe it is that it’s music made and performed without preconditions and which is performed in the moment. Its perhaps most familiar ‘habitat’ lies in the fields of some forms of jazz, though both baroque and the so-called ‘classical’ periods of music featured improvisations within a concerto at places called cadenzas. The soloist was expected to improvise virtuosic episodes derived from some of the themes and harmonies of the movement in which the cadenza appears.”
Birds figure highly. “Pre-Dawn and Dawn: Australian Bell Birds” sounds suitably majestic, the flute doing its best didgeridoo impression (and a quiet and gentle digi it would be), creating the impression of birds against an ancient landscape, forested in this case. (Bellbirds are honeyeaters, the name referring to their bell-like call).
The later “Boom Time – Bitterns at Leighton Moss” is haunting and beautiful, low notes on the piano played slowly, the flute in the next room, and some sounds that could be inside the piano. A good word painting of walking through a bird sanctuary as dusk falls.
Cowie is a painter and so is his wife Heather (she painted the cover) and track two is “Guten Morgen, Herr Kandinsky!”, Kandinsky being an abstract painter. One piece, “Lake Eacham Blue” (which is almost very slow blues), is inspired by her work.
A surprisingly listenable album all things considered, and one I will continue to play.
This came out earlier this year on Metier, MEX77121.
JMC
