To begin by stating the obvious – this is very beautiful music. And with a recording that is very beautiful, at first it feels hard to know what to say. I like it a lot. It is very enjoyable on repeated listens. It is pretty, generous music. Lush, calm, slow, expansive, easy, subtle. My dad, appreciator of lots of different music (though perhaps less familiar with much of the music that would usually be reviewed in TEMPO), also likes it a lot. He is happy to listen to it again and again as we both work in the kitchen in my family home in Newcastle, as the season turns from summer to autumn and the sky glows bright blue.
Largely based on modal, consonant harmonies, this long-form, semi-improvised recording explores subtleties of timbre and tuning through the juxtaposition of the equal temperament of an old Hammond organ and the Pythagorean tuning of the shō, a Japanese fixed-reed instrument. The shō is traditionally used in gagaku to create what we in the West would call cluster chords, but its set of available pitches is near-diatonic. This creates a world of essentially consonant clustered harmony, which is ever so slightly off-kilter from the tuning system of the Hammond. Railton's cello can traverse both worlds, but the clusters of the shō are what form the backbone of this 45-minute improvisation.
Ogawa and Railton recorded their duo of shō and cello first, and then Ogawa subsequently overdubbed the Hammond to add a bed of harmony and resonance. This is, in some senses, simple music – transparent in its construction, sensitive and straightforward in its execution. The meeting of Railton’s cello with Ogawa’s shō as well as the Hammond organ is inspired as all three instruments can have a metallic brightness to them, which creates a timbrally consonant sonic landscape. The listener is therefore presented with an improvisatory dialogue that has, at times, very blurred delineations of voice. In a simple way, this leads me to read into this music a real sense of generosity, a genuine spirit of collaboration.
Within the first 30 seconds, the music has unfolded from a single note into a harmonic cloud that juxtaposes the shō's tuning with that of the Hammond, establishing the minute discrepancies of pitch that are the focus of the entire recording. Unlike much contemporary music that experiments with tuning, though, this ‘detuned-ness’ is very subtle. This is a less abrasive contrast than that which is often heard in, say, the music of Catherine Lamb (a composer and frequent collaborator of Railton's, whose work is also centred on tuning). Lamb's music is often on more of a tightrope, much sparser and more explicitly and deliberately ‘detuned’. This record does not feel especially vulnerable. Its slight slippage of tuning is, rather than unsettling and challenging, warm and liquid, to my ears at least. In this sense, it called to mind the soundtrack to the 2022 film Aftersun – which makes sense, given that it was composed by Railton's fellow experimental cellist Oliver Coates.
This represents a divergence from the darkness of much of Railton's work. Her usual deployment of electronics, field recordings and an unsettling, fragmented gestural landscape is replaced here by slowness and warmth. I perhaps expected this record to be similar to Railton's recent release with organist Kit Downes (Subaerial, 2021, SN Variations), which was also improvised – but it isn't at all. Subaerial was recorded using the organ in an Icelandic cathedral, and fragments of reincarnation features an old, battered Hammond organ, and yet fragments of reincarnation has a much more religious atmosphere. The opening's stately organ gesture reminds me of the Anglican choral music that I loved in my undergraduate years. The solemn, warm modality of the music of Howells feels like an unlikely reference point for the improvisations of Lucy Railton and Michiko Ogawa and yet that's what comes to mind repeatedly when I listen to this recording. The gestural language is similarly sweeping and assured, much less murky and nebulous that what have come to expect from Railton's work.
The beauty of this record reminds me of some of my favourite ambient tracks – the work of Chihei Hatakayama, specifically the album Mirrors, from 2011. Though that album is hazier and has interludes of unpitched texture in the form of field recordings, it feels similar in its deployment of consonant clusters and wavering brightness. And it feels ridiculous and trite to say, but this also reminds me of Brian Eno's richest, slowest, brightest music, like Music for Airports’ ‘2/2’ (1978).
And while moments in this improvisation do stretch and slip away from pure modal consonance, with the shō's clusters overlapping at times to create some temporary instability of modality, the music never really changes in mood away from its fundamental warmth. Structurally, the piece is built around the aitake series of 11 chords that the shō would conventionally play in gagaku, and this gives the recording a pleasing structure of flexible, reiterative cyclicity, which at the 45-minute mark simply ends. This is apparently what gave Ogawa and Railton their title, fragments of reincarnation. Perhaps this is the lapsed Catholic in me speaking, but I can only assume that they also felt the religiosity of the title to be appropriate – reincarnation feels an aptly grand, generous idea for this music.
I refer throughout to the interview Ogawa and Railton gave to another timbre ahead of the release, which can be found at www.anothertimbre.com/ogawarailton.html (accessed 9 September 2023).
