Crash Ensemble: Reactions – Sounds of the lockdown come alive in mocking commentary, naked voices and racing heart rates

The 17 duos of Crash Ensemble’s [Reactions] were commissioned to fill the live music vacuum of 2020. They vary in tone and style, and in the lockdown connections they explore.

Anselm McDonnell’s Cross-Purposes gets right into it, with a wittily processed soundtrack of public pandemic statements married to a mocking commentary from cello and clarinet. Diamanda La Berge Dramm’s Arena is a musical bash for scraping, grating violin and guitar with sometimes naked-sounding singing voices and spoken texts.

Éna Brennan’s lockdown escape was running. Her Runaway uses heart-rate data as the basis of a “tempo map” and the real-time heart rates of the performers to control electronic processing. Short but fascinating. Rachel Lavelle’s This is the Space between your Hand and Mine presents cello and double bass as a percussive blitz, followed by an exploration, sometimes violent, of string textures.

Jonathan Nangle’s Sotto Voce repeats melodically splayed-out writing for two guitars followed by a wind-like rush that crescendos to an abrupt silence with something of the repetitiveness of the Apple TV series Severance in a clear metaphor for lockdown lassitude.

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Less successful are Seán Ó Dálaigh’s dilatory, improvisatory Proximity Studies for guitar and percussion and Bebhinn McDonnell’s naive-sounding Disruption for viola and double bass. Sebastian Adams’s 2021.4 is an elaborate conceit that uses practically inaudible trombone sounds to stimulate a tam-tam, all in the same neck of the woods as Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I, but mostly more refined.

Anna Murray’s Crosstalk references the pitch-bending lines of the Japanese shakuhachi in a fluctuating dialogue between flute and violin with, woven into it, just a single moment of blurred speech. Stephen Shannon’s One Day takes trombone and percussion on the collection’s chirpiest journey, with Deirdre Gribbin’s Provoked City for cello and double bass making a much longer case for hopefulness.

David Fennessy’s Jack is a wild ride for the thin, sometimes fragile, sometimes violent soundworld of two unplugged electric guitars. Bekah Simms’s Stone or Rot has cello and double bass caught in a focus so close it brings to mind some relentless industrial process. Rose Connolly’s Who Are We Now? goes from whistling high cello to spaced-out electric guitar that turns wild and grungy. Amy Rooney’s Pendulums and Sundials is a world of playfully chasing flute and clarinet that shifts into a lower-pitched realm where the intertwining instruments seem sonically almost interchangeable.

Siobhán Cleary’s The Dust Veil for viola and double bass is a response to a sixth-century environmental catastrophe. The piece cuts from haloed ghostly grating and groaning into dry instrumental chopping and on to sustained strained dissonance. In Anna Mieke’s Groundwork, “an interplay between cello, double-bass and the topography of a mountain range”, the dominant feeling is of being wafted along.