Bryn Harrison - Towards a slowing of the past (CD)

Bryn Harrison writes music that deliberately disorients. The British composer—obsessed with "time, memory, and cyclic structures"—follows Feldman's lead, creating perceptual labyrinths where past bleeds into present and nothing stays quite where you expect. Towards a slowing of the past, a 45-minute tour de force for two pianos and electronics, achieves disorientation through sheer density: a whirlwind of notes that somehow maintains "delicacy and deftness of touch."

Mark Knoop and Roderick Chadwick—both veterans of Harrison's intricate demands—navigate this terrain with staggering precision. The piece descends inexorably, dropping two octaves over its duration while decelerating to half its original tempo. Pre-recorded electronic sounds (originally conceived as live electronics) run backwards, pitch-shifted and speed-adjusted, evoking what Harrison calls "feelings of immobility, redundancy or even complete stasis." Midway through, everything halts: a two-minute sustained chord in the electronics, a startling caesura that "changes everything while changing nothing save perception."

Marc Medwin, writing for Dusted Magazine, compares it to Radigue's droning palimpsests or Schoenberg's third orchestral piece: "The music teems with sonic undercurrent in a superficially static frame." Each note, he observes, is "suffused with color, each sonority a frequency kaleidoscope." Off Shelf notes how the music "hits different on each listen—and sometimes doesn't hit at all," making more sense as you sit with it, "much like the emotions it conveys."

Harrison explains his title's seeming contradiction: "Music is well placed to create distortions of memory or to confuse our sense of presentness, pastness and futurity. I particularly like titles that contain a sense of contradiction or impossibility." The work demands what Medwin calls "the encapsulation of concentric occurrence framing and framed by the static multidirectionality of memoried experience."

Knoop and Chadwick spent years preparing. "With a work like this, the devil's in the detail," Harrison notes. "The writing is highly textual and requires clarity and precision and a special kind of touch." They devised strategies for accented grace notes—gauging stress and emphasis across registers—and slightly off-kilter rhythms. The result, recorded at St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield, is what Another Timbre calls "extraordinary, virtuosic work"—music like "being caught up in a whirlwind, swirled round and round."

Medwin's conclusion: "The best way to come to terms with it all is to listen again."