Music for Two Flutes is one of those numerous documents of modern composition with deceptively humble titles. Both Ceòl Meadhonach and SLUB, the pair of pieces presented on this digipak release from Hideous Replica, are certainly written for and performed by flutes, but what each actually sounds like transcends (yet does not hide) such a minimal approach. I’m revealing my own inexperience when I admit I have always associated the instrument with an almost saccharine whimsicality, all delicate twitter and flutter. Artists like Olencki and Cocks, however, are recent fixtures of an extensive avant-garde flute tradition: from Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5 (1936, rev. 1946) and Luciano Berio’s Sequenza I (1958) to Toshio Hosokawa’s Works for Flute (2021) and Lao Dan’s bamboo flute improvisations, I have a lot of catching up to do. But one doesn’t need that knowledge to enjoy this music, which almost seems to answer my naïveté with a confident Oh, just wait.
Ceòl Meadhonach (Olencki, 2021), literally “middle music” in Scottish Gaelic, takes inspiration from the traditional bagpipe genre of the same name, and its tones and timbres couldn’t be further from my initial expectations. The composition unfolds in the form of repetitive drone-phrasings powered by breaths so forceful they overwhelm the instruments’ normal capacities, the metal bodies rattling and buzzing in a controlled cacophony that would make a purist cover their ears in dismay. But Ceòl Meadhonach isn’t about noise or aggression; like its partner piece, it strives toward a charged meditativeness, hypnotic and electric. Recorded in the same sessions back in July 2021, SLUB (Cocks, unknown year) explores form and physicality in a similarly subversive textural domain (“As an instrument activated via buzzing, the flute’s scales and acoustic systems are reconfigured; SLUB is the act of submerging into the instabilities of this reconfiguration”). In a subdued flurry of atonality and precise extended techniques, the topographies of the flutes themselves are sketched out in increasing detail, every curve and key lit up by sonic contrast dye.
Noise Not Music 