When I was first made aware of this project at the end of January, it comprised four mini-albums, mostly by Chicago composer-musicians; by mid-March, when I started writing this review, there were nine. So, naturally, this is going to be somewhat of a cursory and incomplete review by the time I finish writing it, and it will most likely appear almost myopic by the time it is finally published. This is not just because the weekend EP project is a prolifically augmented collection, but because its aesthetic scope has become increasingly difficult to pin down.
It is only natural, then, that any attempt to provide a succinct overview to this project would be a disservice. Even such a seemingly obvious comment such as ‘these composers demonstrate a broad unconcern with large-scale forms in favour of a self-sufficient, pithy, DIY aesthetic’ doesn't work, since Sivan Cohen Elias's contribution, ‘EVE & ADINN’, is culled from a radically ambitious operatic project, centred around a feminine artificial intelligence which ‘believes itself to be human’, that has occupied her for over three years. The vocal distortions here are gooey and unsettling, morphing through pitch, timbre, reverb and identity, recalling Stockhausen's most outré work with Vocoders (the bit in FREITAG aus LICHT where a (male) ice cream cone goes into a (female) pencil sharpener especially comes to mind). It's never overwhelming, though; in fact, the overall texture is quite sparse, even monophonic. With some hindsight, this seems like a result of the 72-hour strictures of the project: Cohen Elias's music, particularly in the satellite works from her operatic project, almost always is overwhelming. And, separated from its visual component – Cohen Elias's uniquely hypnotic use of expanded puppetry – this EP offers listeners a rare chance to really appreciate, on their own terms, each of these finely crafted, highly elusive sounds and their impossibly nuanced transformations (try to parse out where the prepared harp played by Kasia Szczech ends and the prepared piano played by Cohen Elias begins).
Aesthetically similar, if not conceptually so, is Louis d'Heudieres’ ‘Autoglossia’, a low-fi (and, at several junctures, chiptune-y) suite compiled from iPhone recordings d'Heurieres made of his own voice overlaid with the sounds of, as he disarmingly puts it, ‘stuff I had to hand’, assembled using C-C-Combine, software designed by Rodrigo Costanzo. It comprises the tracks ‘Autoglob’, ‘Autoglop’, ‘Autogloss’, and ‘Autoglott’. The third of these is the highlight for me: it's actually very catchy, and it brings to mind the MIDI-funk of Ford & Lopatin. Sometimes the album can strike one as a bit twee – as in the last track when d'Heudieres’ already exhilarated squeals are sped up to Chipmunk speeds over grating string pads – but this feels less like an unintended consequence and more a conscious and deliberate aesthetic pursuit, so it's not really a criticism on my part as much as simple description. Indeed, d'Heudieres’ offering certainly feels the most like an actual EP – some cassette with a hand-drawn cover that you picked up for three quid at a basement gig you don't really remember – and each track feels like a song in a commercial, if ultimately unsettling, sense.
On the opposite extreme of technological mediation is Maayan Tsadka's ‘amplifikǎːtsija naː.tuːˈraː.lis’, which might be the most haunting album available so far. Described by the composer as ‘a possible life cycle of a sound amplified through natural objects’, the album is a sort of sonic inventory of plant life and tuning forks that the composer has accumulated. The obvious precedent is Cage's Child of Tree and Branches (or, say, Wolff's Stones), but in those cases the natural objects are making the sounds one expects them to, while Tsadka's seed pods sound positively ethereal. Like Cohen Elias's EP, this collection appears less like a self-standing work than a foot in the door to the composer's practice more generally, and one becomes compelled to discover how Tsadka will deploy these objects and sounds in future performances.
It seems like the only conceptual through-line of the project is its foregrounding of the conditions under which these EPs are produced. This transparency is quite nice, I think, and may well serve as a corrective to the usual New Music World Premiere, where a finished piece is (ideally) immaculately exhibited to the community. Conversely, these EPs bear heavy marks of their production, which has a different effect for each composer's aesthetic: Cohen Elias explicitly presents her album as a truncated work-in-progress, while d'Heudieres incorporates the constrictions into his wilfully unpolished aesthetic. Such a range of engagement alone is enough to highly recommend this project, which, by the time this review is in print, will certainly have hours of compelling music in its roster.
All albums from the Weekend EP Project are available – name your own price – at https://weekendepproject.bandcamp.com/.
