Menu

Catherine Christer Hennix

a3512384661_16

The Deontic Miracle, “Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku” (Blank Forms/Empty Editions, 2019)

, ,

This second installment of Blank Forms’ ongoing Christer Hennix archival series is quite a radical departure from the wonderful Selected Early Keyboard Works, which is a hell of a surprise as both albums originate from roughly the same period (Stockholm, 1976). The key difference is that Keyboard Works was composed of (mostly) solo rehearsal tapes made during the Dream Music Festival, while Hegikan Roku captures the ensemble’s actual public performance. 

In fact, it was to be The Deontic Miracle’s only public performance, as Hennix wryly notes that the trio were “the most rejected band ever formed in Sweden.” While that is somewhat heartbreaking, it is easy to see why this project was not warmly embraced: challenging art is often described as being “ahead of its time,” but The Deontic Miracle must have seemed like they existed outside of time altogether. 

Even by today’s standards, an amplified Renaissance oboe and sarangi trio playing dissonant, Just Intonation drone music would likely clear a room instantly (as would a lot of other albums that I like). As such, this is definitely one of Christer Hennix’s most difficult releases, but it features some very bold and uncompromising work indeed. It is wonderful to see it finally surface.

Catherine Christer Hennix was first inspired to form The Deontic Miracle by La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, which she encountered during her time in NYC. Young would prove to be quite an influential figure in Christer Hennix’s life, as would Pandit Pran Nath. She first met both at a festival in 1970 and would later study extensively with each. 

Roughly a year after that meeting, the first incarnation of The Deontic Miracle was born in Sweden. Unfortunately, the ambitious endeavor was cursed right from the start, as the dozen jazz musicians Christer Hennix enlisted did not adapt to Just Intonation well at all. Exasperated, she completely gutted the ensemble until it was just herself, her brother Peter, and Hans Isgren. I am not at all surprised that the hapless jazzmen had so much trouble wrapping the heads around Christer Hennix’s radical vision though, as she is an accomplished mathematician and complex mathematical ideas have always played a central role in her work. 

Moreover, her musical inspirations at the time were probably so far out as to be nearly incomprehensible to most musicians: the NYC avant-garde scene and Hindustani raga influences were probably as close to the mainstream as she ever came, as she was similarly fascinated with Japanese Gagaku music and the thirteenth-century vocal music of Perotinus and Leoninus. 

In hindsight, it is legitimately remarkable that she was able to find two people who were even aware of all of those disparate threads, much less interested in helping her combine them into radical new forms. To my ears, the two lengthy pieces that comprise Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku most closely resemble the uncomfortably harmonizing drones of Japanese imperial court music—the Gagaku influence is definitely the most powerful guiding force here. 

After an initial flurry of fluttering and trilling oboe virtuosity, the opening “Music of Auspicious Clouds” coheres into a heavy, slow-moving fog of endlessly shifting, buzzing, and nerve-jangling drones. I suspect the underlying thrum originates from the sine wave generator and the “electronics” credited to the trio, but I am not sure what kinds of sounds Isgren could conjure from an amplified sarangi. The heart of the piece, however, lies in the clouds of ugly harmonies that converge and dissolve in an eternal ebb and flow of simmering tension.

The following “Waves of the Blue Sea” is initially a bit less harrowing, as the trio allow a bit more space into their oboe eruptions. It favorably reminds me of Terry Riley’s great “Poppy Nogood” at times, though Riley’s trilling and overlapping flurries of saxophone sounds considerably more meditative and indebted to Eastern drone than Christer Hennix’s similarly trilling flurries of oboe. Before long, however, that reverie curdles into a grinding and uncomfortable miasma of otherworldly harmonies quite similar to that of “Auspicious Clouds.” The two pieces on Hegikan Roku may start somewhat differently, but the ultimate destination is very much the same every time.

It is amusing that two pieces inspired by such normally pleasant and calming tropes (clouds and the blueness of the ocean) can feel like a sensory assault or plunge into deep existential horror in Christer Hennix’s hands, particularly when contrasted with the similarly Zen-inspired but distinctly not-terrifying work that Peter Hennix recorded over the course of his own career.

Notably, this album even explicitly borrows its name from a 12th century book of Chinese Buddhist koans (“Blue Cliff Record,” in English). Unrelenting tension and intense discomfort are not traditionally sensations that I normally associate with Zen Buddhism, which makes Christer Hennix’s interpretation an especially fascinating one. My working theory is that she heard these pieces very differently than I do, finding a reassuring mathematical order at the heart of the cacophonous entropy.

I would be curious to learn how much the actual form and structure of these pieces was deliberately engineered though, as it seems like the focus is almost entirely on harmony. That central focus has not changed much in the ensuing four decades, but I do feel like Christer Hennix eventually got a bit more interested in framing her harmonic experiments in a tighter and more satisfying compositional arc. While it is entirely possible that I am imagining/projecting that, her early work definitely feels like it relied very heavily on sheer audacity (I include The Electric Harpsichord in that statement, which was also recorded in 1976).

Notably, the album’s description mentions John Coltrane as one of the major reference points for this performance, which was a comparison that I initially found perplexing. After listening to it fairly deeply on headphones, however, I began to see that it made perfect sense: Christer Hennix and her brother regularly unleash fiery, Coltane-esque squalls of notes on their oboes, but the Just Intonation tuning of the instruments makes them sound more like an extra-dimensional insect swarm than jazz.

In fact, just about everything about this performance still sounds jarring and alien to ears conditioned to Western modality, which is quite an impressive feat: though they were not appreciated for it, The Deontic Miracle were absolutely visionary in their complete rejection of conventional form, melody, and harmony. This performance would have blown minds in the right time and place, but Sweden in 1976 was neither of those things, so this one show was like a bright and beautiful star spectacularly burning out forever. Or at least close to it, as it would be another roughly 35 years before any of Christer Hennix’s singular compositions saw any public release. 

Happily, the first work that eventually surfaced was the stunning The Electric Harpsichord, which made a hell of an impression and instantly created an audience for other lost works from one of the 20th century’s most radical and innovative composers. Among those, Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku admittedly stands as the most challenging endurance test, making a truly rough entry point for the curious. For the already converted, however, it is yet another landmark Christer Hennix release that is quite unlike anything else on earth.

Samples can be found here.

a1025358498_16

Catherine Christer Hennix, “Selected Early Keyboard Works” (Blank Forms/Empty Editions, 2018)

, ,

It is quite rare for me to be interested in anyone’s archival rehearsal tapes, but Catherine Christer Hennix’s oft-fascinating career has been woefully under-documented until only recently. In fact, this is arguably her formal vinyl debut, a milestone that improbably took more than four decades to reach. These recordings date back from 1976, when her ensemble The Deontic Miracle was performing at the Dream Music Festival in Sweden, but the album mostly features Hennix by herself playing a keyboard tuned to just-intonation. Given that these three pieces were never intended for release, it is no surprise that there is occasionally a meandering, improvisatory feel, but a few of them blossom into a wonderfully hallucinatory swirl of uneasily harmonizing overtones. Selected Early Keyboard Works is a bit more than a fine collection of unreleased material though, as it highlights a more unpolished and intimate side of Hennix’s vision than her other releases. More importantly, it features one of the greatest pieces ever recorded by the La Monte Young/Pandit Pran Nath milieu.

The decision to open this album with “Nouvelle mode des modalités” was a curious one, as there is absolutely nothing about it that would make me think that it was a Catherine Christer Hennix piece. Instead, it just feels like a lot of mid-20th century experimental and avant-garde music: a stop-start splatter of discordant, chromatic note clusters that was primarily interesting at the time because it was rejecting conventional Western modality. More accurately, it sounds like an extended electric piano solo decontextualized from a Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis live performance: throw in a weirdly lurching funk groove and some chords and it would probably be fairly enjoyably, but it just feels kind of indulgent and directionless on its own.

That triggered an immediate and incorrect conclusion from me that these tapes were unrepresentative juvenalia recorded before Hennix had developed a distinctive voice (beyond a general yet deep passion for just-intonation and Eastern-influenced minimalism, at least). That conclusion initially made plenty of sense, as The Deontic Miracle were still performing pieces by La Monte Young and Terry Riley along with Hennix’s own compositions at the time. However, Hennix’s stellar Central Palace Music dates from the exact same period and even the second part of “Noevelle” sounds recognizably and wonderfully Hennix-ian. The difference between “Nouvelle mode des modalités II” and its predecessor is a surprisingly simple one, however, as Hennix merely switched from staccato clusters of notes to rippling flurries and added a sine-wave drone. In doing so, she shifted the emphasis of the piece from melody to harmony, something just-intonation is infinitely better suited for, as Hennix coaxes a wonderfully vibrant, shimmering, and otherworldly fantasia out of her Fender Rhodes.

The following “The Well-Tuned Marimba” is even better still, as the eerie drones of Hans Isgren’s sheng weave darkly dissonant harmonies with Hennix’s gently churning and glimmering web of strange arpeggios. It is easily one of the finest pieces that Hennix has ever recorded, filling the room like a murky and vaguely menacing supernatural cloud. While it only lasts for about 18 minutes, it feels like a veil has been pulled away to offer a brief glimpse of some kind of infinite, extradimensional void of cosmic horror lurking just behind the precarious façade of our reality. It is quite a glorious illusion, feeling far more like a living and hallucinatory nightmare world than a mere composition. Sometimes I forget that Hennix’s work is absolutely the most visceral and disturbing of all the Pandit Pran Nath-inspired minimalists. “The Well-Tuned Marimba” is a good reminder that her drone work is just one facet of a vision that can also descend into some rather dark and deliciously uncomfortable territory.

The album’s final piece “Equal Temperament Fender Mix” is also quite unique, if a bit less audacious. As the title indicates, Hennix changed her tuning to 12-tone equal temperament, but the subtle harmonic difference between one unusual tuning and another is more or less lost on me. To my ears, it is far more significant that she added tape-delay to her arsenal, a tool that she wields brilliantly. It sounds a lot like reverb-swathed lo-fi recording of a broken music box struggling to play a classical piano sonata, but quickly losing the thread as overlapping delays transform the piece into a bleary pile-up of stuttering and plinking melodic fragments.

Apparently, this double album is merely the first installment of a planned series of archival Hennix releases. If this is what Blank Forms was able to unearth from just early rehearsal tapes, it bodes quite well for the rest of the series. As whole, Selected Early Keyboard Works is a strong collection that illuminates an early and formative phase in Hennix’s development into a formidable and truly unique composer. As a somewhat devout fan, it was a delight for me to hear an album so radically different from her other releases, as well as was quite a pleasant surprise to discover that it was still legitimately excellent (if a bit raw). The bigger surprise, however, was that this is not an album strictly for the fans, as “The Well-Tuned Marimba” is an absolute stunner. In fact, I hereby declare it to be one of the true masterpieces of 20th century minimalism.That alone makes Selected Early Keyboard Works a significant and revelatory work. The rest of the album is just icing on the cake.

Listen here.

a2440766813_16

Born of Six, “Svapiti” (Important, 2013)

, ,

Catherine Christer Hennix has certainly had a very curious career, to say the least: she worked at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence lab in the ’70s, was a research professor in mathematics at SUNY New Paltz, studied with Pandit Pran Nath and LaMonte Young, collaborated with Henry Flynt, and made some singularly challenging and adventurous music that somehow never got formally released until her 1976 performance of The Electric Harpsichord was finally issued by Die Schachtel in 2010. Now in her mid-60s, Hennix has beautifully capitalized on the belated interest in her music to become the reigning queen of deep, Eastern-influenced drone. This latest release is not a far cry from last year’s fine Chor(s)san Time-Court Mirage album, but it is every bit as good (if not better).

I must admit that I was pleasantly wrong-footed by Hennix’s current direction after being initially exposed to her through the somewhat maniacal and sinister-sounding The Electric Harpsichord, as she now sounds like a completely different artist. Of course, that makes perfect sense, given that over 30 years separate the recordings and that none of the evolution that occurred between them was ever formally documented or released. Also, neither this nor the Chor(s)san album are solo endeavors: for Svapiti, Hennix is rejoined by Chor(s)san vocalist Amelia Cuni, as well as new collaborator Werner Durand (credited with “invented wind instruments” and “drones”).

Given that Svapiti is about as “drone” as music can get, it might seem like Durand played a very dominant role in the album, but the trio’s contributions are so blurred together that it is often impossible to tell who is doing what. In any case, the crux of the composition seems to be a gently quavering, hazy, and layered bed of Hennix’s vocals accompanied by a steadily buzzing sitar or tambura drone. In fact, for long stretches, that is all there is (the piece clocks in at nearly an hour). The beauty lies in the details and the transitions, as the trio gradually embellish their hypnotic thrum with Durand’s viscerally breath-like and stuttering wind instruments, as well as Cuni’s increasingly prominent and ritualistic-sounding chants (which take their inspiration from Indian classical singing).

Svapiti also steadily grows in density and power as it progresses, but does so in an impressively organic and slow-burning manner. The most prominent change is the introduction of some deeper wind instruments, which unpredictably blurt and throb rather than languorously drone. Also, some of the higher-pitched wind instruments begin to swirl together to create a roiling, dissonant miasma that dissipates almost as quickly and unexpectedly as it came together. That is ultimately the piece’s harshest moment, but a few other surprises gradually emerge from Svapiti‘s ebb and flow as well, the most memorable of which is a juddering, burbling interlude of Cuni’s heavily processed vocals.

While Born of Six definitely take quite a bit of their direction, as well as their name*, from Indian classical music, there is actually a bridge that links Svapiti to The Electric Harpsichord: the use of Just Intonation. I imagine that there are also quite a lot of deeper philosophical and/or behind-the-scenes structural concepts linking them as well (Hennix is big on that sort of thing), but the two albums are as different as night and day from a listening perspective. 

Consequently, it is very hard to contextualize Svapiti within Catherine’s (very limited) discography. It is also a bit reductive to even classify this album as “drone,” as it is prone to some rather jarring, strangled, and somewhat abrasive passages that occasionally push the piece into somewhat challenging and nerve-jangling territory (a trait shared by labelmate Pauline Oliveros’ recent work as well). The important thing, however, is that it is all very good (which it is). The Electric Harpsichord probably remains the most bracingly original and essential release in Hennix’s oeuvre, but Svapiti deserves a place of honor for presenting her distinctive vision in a much more listenable way.

Listen here.

(*“Born of Six” refers to the Vedic sage Narada’s assertion that the tonic note originates from a combination of nose, throat, chest, palate, teeth, and tongue.)