Hal Rammel - Like Water Tightly Wound

Crouton
crou034

Growing up, my family had a toy piano among our household stuff. Basically a small wooden box, top painted baby blue, the instrument had about twenty keys (twelve white, eight black?) which I all but ignored in favor of the open ended rear of the thing. There, emerging from the dark interior, floated some twenty metal rods at varying angles off true, their ends within easy plucking reach. And plucked they were. You could attack them individually or strum them en masse, delicately or with enough force to send them clanging into one another, setting the whole box abuzz with resonations.

These memories were necessarily rekindled upon hearing Hal Rammel’s fine new release, “Like Water Tightly Wound”. The 10” vinyl arrives in subtly seductive packaging: A creamy brown 78rpm style, Disc-o-File outer sleeve (complete with a cataloguing box) contains a lovely, dull pine green inner sleeve, within which resides the thick, glossy platter as well as a page of notes, set in typescript. The notes immediately reference Harry Partch and that’s certainly a valid point of departure, at least insofar as carpentry is concerned, if not theory. Rammel has designed and built several instruments that, generally speaking, consist of palette-shaped piece of resonant wood to which he’s affixed any number of metallic rods, saw blades, etc. which sprout at irregular intervals and provide, when plucked, stroked, rubbed or otherwise excited, a huge range of tones. Unlike Partch, there’s no explicit theoretical structure behind the placement or nature of the rods. Rather there’s a more intuitive method involving “juxtaposing a very wide variety of pitches and tonal qualities from bright to resonant to dull to buzzing…I’m concerned with relative pitch in a soundworld free of mathematics.” He utilizes palette-shapes so “that music might be shaped by a sculptural form rather than the instrument shaped to play any preconceived notion of what should be musical.”

The music sounds intuitive as well, almost as though Rammel is discovering the capabilities and potentialities of his designs as he’s playing them. Two pieces, about nine and ten minutes in duration. Each keeps several sonic qualities going at once, though there’s nothing remotely pyrotechnic going on. The underlying, fairly consistent element is a gorgeous, liquid-y tone, just the sort of thing you’d expect from a plucked metal rod embedded in resonant wood. One makes immediate connections to the world of Cage’s prepared pianos as well as picking up a faint scent of Bali. But there are also generally more abrasive rubbed tones, from deep to squeaky, as well as high chittery ones. The sound just kind of tumbles out, like marbles from a jar, scattering and colliding, forming random but beautiful patterns as they go. That kind of downhill cadence is felt throughout, as if the rods are actually growing from the side of hill and you’re pinging from one to another as you somersault and cartwheel down. The music retains a ruminative character but balances careful consideration with a willingness to just let things happen and see what transpires. The results are simply lovely, deep and, for some of us, intensely nostalgic.

If you own a turntable, do yourselves a favor and pick this one up.

crouton