Christian Mason Time - Space - Sound - Light Octandre Ensemble - WIN910291-2 - Contemporain

The time of year, the time of day, the intensity of light; the warmth, the cool; the breeze, the wind, the rain; the touch of the air, the rippled flow of the river; the presence and activity of people and other beings going about their lives: a paradoxically unpredictable mix of expected and unexpected happenings that contributes to the precise conditions of the moment in which we find ourselves... To be here, now, has a particular feeling and a unique sound-identity - the coincidence of so many layers of life - that could not be any other place at any other time. We do not always notice these things, of course – we cannot maintain a constant state of alertness – but life sometimes affords us the conditions to contemplate and dwell on details that might normally escape us, to feel a heightened awareness of our surroundings, and a corresponding deepening of inner experience. A spell in residence (2019-20) at the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia, overlooking the river Regnitz in Bamberg - with its beavers and kingfishers, summer swimmers and shadowy fish - proved to be such a time for me, and it is the essence of that time that I hope is to be found distilled here in these recordings. At the heart of the residency was a concert for which some of my closest collaborators - founding members of Octandre Ensemble - were invited to perform a carefully conceived sequence of pieces spanning thirteen years (2006 - 2019), yet all somehow connected in sound and spirit. One thread running through them is the note ‘E’: intoned repeatedly by the piano, like a prayer, at the opening and close of …just as the sun is always…; shared around the ensemble in I wandered for a while…; held by the harmonica as a fixed point in the shifting harmony of Remembered Radiance; flickering in harmonics on the cello in Incandescence, as the 5th/10th partial of the C-string and the 3rd/6th/12th partial of the A-string; and finally singing on the flute in Heaven’s Chimes are Slow, as the note from which melodies are born, and to which they return. Like a charm, each player plays the ‘E’, and each is also the dedicatee of a piece that couldn’t have been written for anyone else: Bird learning to fly (2017) for Corentin Chassard, Remembered Radiance (2018) for Joe Houston, I wandered for a while… (2019) for Audrey Milhères. This spirit of friendship is so important because it gives a special vitality to the playing, and the music being played. This album presents - almost exactly - the programme that we performed one evening in August 2019 in the main hall of Villa Concordia, recorded in the same space several years later, during a week in July 2023. It was important that the recording took place here, because the qualities and idiosyncrasies of the space had a significant impact on the nature and presentation of the music: the resonant acoustic of the stone stairway leading to the hall (playing position of the piccolo at the start of I wandered for a while…), the windows overlooking the garden and river (which let the evening light in), and the gallery - also with its own reverberation (perfectly suited to the resonance of the cello) - viewed through an arch from the main hall, as if framing one reality, while keeping others in mind. The only difference from our live performance here is in the opening piece, A kingfisher dives into the sun..., a soundscape composed of layered and processed field-recordings (dawn chorus, screaming swifts, fields of grasshoppers, the plop of a kingfisher diving) which were all recorded in the vicinity of the villa - a sonic taste of summer in Bamberg. Originally a 25-minute version with video played as the audience entered the hall, it felt necessary to shorten it for the present context (without video; without the attendant rituals of performance). Still, it serves the same purpose: to meditate on the beauty and necessity of sounds beyond human control, to surround us in the warm glow of summer and to focus our listening attention for what is to come. Music has a special capacity for encoding and communicating intangible qualities of experience. It opens us. It enables us to connect with times, places, people and possibilities far beyond the here and now and to project ourselves into situations where memory and imagination intermingle in a new reality, unique to each listener. Rather than simply documenting a past event of personal importance, I offer this album as an invitation to go on a sound-journey of your own, with only the wish that it might lead to unexpected destinations. (Christian Mason)