A piano-percussion duo comprised of George Barton and Siwan Rhys, GBSR Duo wowed our audience with a performance of Nicholas Moroz’s Intralatent at hcmf// 2019. While they’ve only been active since 2013, those seven years have seen seismic transformations in what they do; they’ve staked out an interest in working with modern composers in unique environments, expanding their repertoire dramatically. With a history of performing on their own and in different groups, the duo pool together years of experience as interpreters, alchemising faithful listening and inventive translation.
Like everyone, this year’s been long for the duo, and plenty surprising: they’ve had some concerts cancelled, others delayed, and a few digitised. They’ve started making new music, just for the sake of it, which is weird when you’re usually tackling deadlines and brainstorming projects. And they’ve also released an album, performing Oliver Leith’s wonderful new piece good day good day bad day bad day, which they finished recording with minutes to spare before the UK’s lockdown began in March.
We caught up with GBSR Duo to chat about the album, as well as other music they’ve been working on, and the accident of transforming their flat into a rehearsal space.
How’s your year been so far?
It’s been a mixed bag! Many of the projects we had planned for this year have been postponed or cancelled, which is a source of great regret. But we were very lucky to complete the recording of our new Oliver Leith release just before lockdown – in fact we wrapped on 23rd March, the day lockdown was announced, and they locked the studio behind us.
We’ve carried on working on various projects during lockdown but, given the continued uncertainty about the future, we’ve had to find other centres in our lives than only our work. It hasn’t all been roses but in that respect at least the recent months have been oddly therapeutic, despite all the many anxieties and uncertainties the year has brought with it.
A multi-track improvisation made by GBSR Duo during lockdown
Have you been recording/making music much in lockdown, together or separately?
We’ve been making some home recordings. First, we’ve each been enjoying building up free improvisations, recording an improvisation in response to and over the previous improvisations to create multi-layered textures. So far we’ve been doing that entirely separately and without any kind of particular aim other than for its own sake. It’s a silver lining to lockdown and the regrettable evaporation of most short-term goals and deadlines that it becomes possible to pursue a creative idea for its own sake and with no end in sight, however absurd that idea.
In May we were scheduled to be Artists in Residence at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, including working with their emerging composers at the Peter Reynolds Composers Studio. The festival was inevitably cancelled but we suggested an expanded PRCS so that the composers could workshop their pieces with us via Zoom before we recorded revised versions at home.
We also recorded some pieces for a Music We’d Like to Hear podcast that comes out on August 28; these are Barbara Monk Feldman and Howard Skempton. George had to learn how to audio edit in order to cut around passing traffic for the Monk Feldman, which never really rises above the volume of a whisper. It’s one of our favourite existing pieces for piano and percussion.
You mentioned your new album out on Another Timbre, playing a new piece by Oliver Leith. How did it come about and how did you work on the piece with Oliver?
The idea of Oli writing GBSR a very large-scale piece came up initially between Oli and Siwan at some point in 2015/16, and was batted around for a long time before it was eventually commissioned and premiered in 2018 at St John’s Smith Square. It was a very hands-on collaboration – Oli came to our flat several times for sound exploration sessions in 2017 – he borrowed instruments to experiment on, and we left rambling phone messages demonstrating new techniques we’d come up with down the phone. It was love!
A word that kept coming up in our conversations was ‘tactility’. There was clearly an idea to focus very closely on the interaction of the hands with the object and the liaison of that interaction with the sound produced. Oli also became somewhat intrigued by our tiny flat in Homerton which combined piano practice room, living space, percussion storage unit and, increasingly, chamber rehearsal room. He had the idea to replicate this kind of sounding environment on stage, focusing the attention on instruments as objects and as furniture in addition to as a source of sound and music.
Repetitive and obsessive interaction with the objects of music (practice) also has an analogue in neurotic returning again and again to unsettling or pacifying thoughts and ideas. A living space of that nature was an analogue of our somewhat overburdened minds. By creating a similar living-space environment for onstage interaction, Oli drew attention to both the embodied and vulnerably enminded nature of the performers in the piece. That feeling is heightened by the duration, where you feel as though you are living with the performers rather than simply consuming the musical product. The undercurrents at play here subliminally give the piece a great deal of emotional power. Perhaps we are biased, being so close to the work and its genesis, but we think it is a masterpiece of the quiet multivalent emotional power of small gestures.
The piece is sort of homespun in terms of instrumentation, making use of unexpected/homemade sounds and objects. Was this something you tried to capture in recording?
The music definitely gives the sense of creating a continuity between refined instrumental sounds and the unrefined sounds of domestic objects. On the one extreme you have the sound of the piano and the timpani, old instruments that have gone through centuries of refinement; on the other you have struck glass bottles, and the keyboard loaded with samples of blown bottles and whistling. But the vast majority of the instruments of good day… actually fall into an intriguing middle ground where they are musical instruments but because they are quite unrefined instruments, or they are being used in an unusual way, or they’re prepared somehow, you become aware of the fragility of their connection with the music and the tactility of the sound production.
As well as naturally homespun instruments like the swanee whistle and musical saw that inherently sound unrefined, there are, for example, flexatones and waterphone playing precisely-pitched single-note material (which they’re not naturally very good at!); glockenspiels deconstructed, their keys used like shakers; vibraphone prepared with blu-tac to be less resonant and somewhat out of tune, etc. Even the bottles undergo a kind of ‘treatment’ themselves over the course of their movement, so that their as-it-were ‘musicality level’ is always changing and thus always present to the ear. Through the whole piece they are gradually filled with water from pipettes, changing the pitch and altering the resonance level of the bottles from bright, to dull, to mellowly ringing.
Producer Mark Knoop worked closely with Oli and with us to agree on the sonic aesthetic from very early on; it was clear that the piece demanded getting in really close to the instruments and the voices, almost uncomfortably close, removing any sense of barrier between audience and performers. Some of the movements call in performance for silent mouthing of words; Mark and Oli agreed on a super-close mic’d ASMR video-style approach at the recording stage; and then Mark mixed in such a way that the voices and mouth noises often teeter on the edge of audibility. Mark also came up with some amazing ideas for picking up some of the environmental sounds that come from the instruments (including the pipette mics, especially to pick up the sound of water dripping into bottles and discarded dropping pipettes falling to the floor in the first movement), and mixed the album to foreground things like the whirring of the vibraphone motor, the sound of the synthesiser keys, and the intake of breath.
You’ve also recently recorded a piece by composer CHAINES for a new Nonclassical compilation. How’d this piece come together?
George had worked with CHAINES a couple of times over the years in different contexts. All the music of theirs that he’d played and that we could find out there was really different but it was all great. But it all shared a quality that’s become more important the longer we’ve been working in new music, which is that it is music that doesn’t seem to be written for anyone else’s benefit, or to impress anyone – it is devoid of ego or posturing. It combines quite disparate elements quite naturally because it seems to flow from an entirely ingenuous curiosity about sounds and styles. It’s quite virtuosically composed in many respects, often using sophisticated sound processing and production techniques as fundamental compositional parameters, but the virtuosity is worn lightly, without drawing attention to itself, and with humour often mixed in too.
We collaborated remotely with CHAINES quite closely in producing the recording, which we also recorded at home, but during the compositional process they chose to work almost entirely on their own – so we had very little idea what the piece was going to be almost until it was delivered. Ultimately what arrived was this incredible snapshot piece, a sort of domestic head-trip that starts with the sound of a hectic home environment, with crying babies and cats wailing, building those sounds up into an increasingly seasick dance, before finally it all falls apart into an exhausted heap. Hard to believe it was written last year really because that trajectory feels oddly close to home now!