Eva-Maria Houben + John Hudak – Paloma Wind (LINE, 2024)
Joshua Minsoo Kim:
https://toneglow.substack.com/p/tone-glow-149-our-favorite-music
„Paloma Wind is one of the year’s most mystifying albums […] What immediately stands out about Paloma Wind is that it feels like a decidedly different sort of album than the ones that either artist typically makes. […] There’s a sort of magic to the way the chimes ring out, and you feel how weighty it is when the album fades to silence and you contend with the sounds in your own immediate surroundings.“
Boomkat Product Review:
Spellbinding, spectral elisions of percussion and field recordings by veteran minimalists Houben & Hudak make a sterling new addition to Richard Chartier’s label, Line.
“This piece concentrates on the act of listening and on the process of a gradual emergence of a “we” (including both composers and listeners), which is based on the longings for a free and unlimited listening experience allowing various kinds of associations, visions and day-dreams. The two composers in co-operation are listeners—and the listeners will become composers while listening. Therefore, the composers do not try to describe in a detailed way the origin of the basic sounds and the work of converting sounds. A precise description would not allow people to imagine freely for themselves.
The composers focus on the development of a community of listeners and on the quality of the material. The piece sounds out the aesthetic potential of the sounds and attempts to sensitize the ear of the listener to the acoustic possibilities. The aim is to support inner and outer listening. Following this path to free listening, sonic material and musical material melt. In our listening, we may find mixtures of various sounds belonging to different social, cultural, musical, sonic environments. All kinds of objects are suitable to widen our sensitivity.”
Eva-Maria Houben – finding some stuff (Sawyer Spaces, 2024)
https://sawyerspaces.bandcamp.com
Matthew Blackwell
As a member of experimental group the Wandelweiser collective, composer and organist Eva-Maria Houben flirts with silence, letting long tones fade away into, or small spectral sounds arise from, a static hum. “Music may exist ‘between’: between appearance and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something ‘nearly nothing,’” Houben is quoted in The New Yorker. In a long and prolific career, she has explored this idea with a range of instruments, ensembles, choirs, and orchestras. On finding some stuff, she continues her investigations with, well, stuff she has found: bits of metal and wood from old machines discovered in Bretagne, France. Nature sounds from Greece, The Netherlands, and Germany form the background of the piece, and organ tones drone over top. Each layer of the composition unfolds gradually, slowly revealing new depths in barely perceptible shifts. This creates a calm, contemplative atmosphere in which even the most mundane sounds (crows cawing, sirens in the distance) become major events. As with the best Wandelweiser pieces, finding some stuff can easily slip out of awareness, but it can just as easily return to dazzle with moments of rare beauty.
https://daily.bandcamp.com/best-field-recordings/the-best-field-recordings-on-bandcamp-april-2024
Eva-Maria Houben – breath for organ (Second Editions, 2018)
Julian Cowley
Breath for Organ extends through 75 minutes the soundtrack to a sustained act of awareness and attention. It is meditative. It is also sculptural, although using materials that are skeletal and translucent in place of organ music’s familiar massive blocks. This recording was made in a church in Krefeld, once Roman Catholic now Russian Orthodox. The instrument itself is no longer in that location. These circumstantial facts seem oddly relevant to the music’s muted fabric of implication and its overarching irony. Odd taps, knocks and clicks register the presence of pedals and stops, the frame of the apparatus, the organ’s lurking bulk, The music’s connective tissue is embodied breath. Ghostly notes, some shrill but mostly soft and hollow, surface over a perisistent ambient rumble. An oblique experience yet curiously compelling.
Eva-Maria Houben – together on the way (HCMF 2021 / Part 2)
Simon Cummings
Another unusual trio came together in St Paul’s Hall on Thursday night to give the world première of Eva-Maria Houben‘s together on the way. Featuring Houben on organ, with
GBSR Duo’s George Barton on percussion and Siwan Rhys on piano, the piece was a sublime example of music-making as an act of journeying, without a specific destination in mind. Echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson’s sentiment that “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”, and on the strength of this 80-minute sonic journey, it was impossible to disagree. Houben’s role provided context, laying down not merely a dronal foundation but an atmosphere, into which Barton and Rhys sporadically placed isolated gestures. The combination of these polarised but complementary ideas meant that almost every sound from percussion and piano had an implied (at least potential) significance, like small droplets falling onto the surface of a large lake. Yet this created a paradox due to the
impression that, over time, no individual sound seemed to have importance in and of itself in relation to the large-scale cohesive effect. Put another way, one’s perception was repeatedly pulled between short and long durational perspectives, with both at different points and in different ways seeming less meaningful than the other. (Another consequence of this was that watching the performance felt more than usually redundant, to the extent that seeing what the players were doing seemed to actively work against appreciating its short- and long-term effect.)
This meta-ambient flexing was made more fascinating by the occasional realisation that Houben’s drones had shifted position; in practice, they were constantly on the move (in the same way that glaciers move), in the process setting up seemingly accidental episodes of diatonic lyricism and gorgeous sequences of far greater harmonic complexity, the latter of which, often containing soft shimmering or juddering pitches, created the illusion of prolonging the reverberation from Barton’s gongs and tam-tams. Our perception of time was entirely distorted: sped up during the 80 minutes of music, which went by surprisingly quickly, but then twisted the other way, slowed to a crawl, during the short silence following the end of the piece, which felt like it went on forever. Even though the piece didn’t so much arrive as “stop travelling”, i could have happily kept going in its company for a whole lot longer.