Christina Vantzou - No. 4

A Closer Listen

How do you loosen time? Many consider time to be rigid and inescapable, but it is not. Much of the world just ‘lost’ an hour by welcoming spring with Daylight Saving Time. Take a long-haul flight, and time becomes elastic. Even when you are still, it can ebb and flow in times of great distraction or focus. We need not be governed by our own invention.

Christina Vantzou cites sleep and ‘the loosening of time’ as profoundly impactful on her work. From one angle, the pair seem at odds – the first is acceptance of the body clock’s regularity, the second rejection of time’s regularity. But just as time can escape its rigid structure, so too can sleep (it is a 20th century idea that it be confined to one uninterrupted chunk of the 24-hour cycle). This lack of structure and delineation is especially pervasive across the splendid and understated No. 4. Its textural ambience seems to drape over the liminal space between the absolutes of day and night, wakefulness and sleep. Vantzou has always straddled modern composition and ambient; here she finally steps toward the latter, as though in a dream. It’s a natural transition.

“Sound House” is the barest of pieces, a light synth texture partially illuminating a corridor that grows increasingly ominous, as a droning cello beckons us onward. Are we sleepwalking? If so, the haunting vocals that end the track suggest a dreamer ill at ease. Elsewhere, prosaic titles commingle with musical abstraction. In “Doorway”, gently piercing strings penetrate the soft furnishings of cello and piano as though rending holes in the ordinary, creating passages to the extraordinary. “Staircases” is more lucid. A mournful string ostinato – one of few distinctive melodies across the record – reins in a fragmented, distracted piano line. But repeated listens reveal layers of vocals and synths like diaphanous curtains to a strange outside.

All the tracks share this translucent quality, borne of either the airy timbre of the wordless vocal and synth layers (“Glissando for Bodies and Machines in Space”), or the hesitant or languorous acoustic instruments (the piano in “Some Limited and Waning Memory”). The voices are many – keys, strings, harp, vibraphone, marimba, vocal and percussion – but their use is sparing and their dialogue minimal.

And those voices are not always in agreement.  There has always been dissonance in Vantzou’s work, but on No. 4 the colours are pallid. Dissonance has evolved into eeriness. A monotone bass line guides us through “Garden of Forking Paths”, and we try not to look up at the wraithlike forms we imagine encircling us above. An unknown being beckons us at the start of “Lava” – the record’s most salient moment – but it soon disappears into a mist of strings. Were we dreaming again? Together with label-mate Steve Hauschildt, Vantzou offers us a moment of levity with closer “Remote Polyphony”, whose cleansing arpeggios and drones chart us a steady course from disorientation toward wakefulness.

I suppose we should see what time it is. (Chris Redfearn-Murray)

The Quietus

Christina Vantzou is a maths teacher by day and, if her music is anything to go by, her classroom must be a strange and otherworldly place. Her music has been described as ethereal, but it is much more than that. There is nothing floaty or fey about the deep, muscular soundscapes constructed by Vantzou and her collective. She worked on this album over two years with musicians who play percussive and expressive instruments including vibraphone, gong, bells, marimba, harp and synthesizers. The group approached the creation of the eleven tracks here through a process of what Vantzou describes as “prepared spontaneity”, everyone arriving with ideas and knowing those ideas will become something else. The result is an immersive album of remarkable clarity, entirely confident, drawing the listener all the way in.

Vantzou’s music could also be described as ambient, and particular influences can be detected. The theme of sleep is explored throughout the album, and tracks are reminiscent of Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange’s Inventions For Radio. However, instead of spoken dream narrative over layers of shifting sound, Vantzou brings quiet and distinct instrumental lines to the fore. The album also brings to mind Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, as though the samples were played by live instruments, or the less excitable tracks on his Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, where the music seems to drift in space. ‘At Dawn’ has a synthesizer playing the trace memory of a tune. There are no words on this album but there are vocals, including a gasping vocal wave on ‘Some Limited And Waning Memory’. An unspoken narrative binds the tracks together and they progress through states of uncertainty - from the uneasy strings of ‘No. 4 String Quartet’ to an enquiring piano on ‘Staircases’ to Haxan Cloak-esque threat on ‘Sound House.’

The album is varied, full of miniature surprises. ‘Lava’ swells from start to finish just as its title suggests, coming closer and closer. But is that really the riff from Status Quo’s ‘Pictures Of Matchstick Men’ at the start? ‘Garden Of Forking Paths’ sounds like a recording of a bouncing ball, both unsettling and funny. Final track ‘Remote Polyphony’ is a wash of sounds, like a whole world waking up at once, both beautiful and troubling. It is a powerful piece, and a fitting conclusion to an album that is dense, involving and rewarding. Christina Vantzou’s musicianship and that of her collaborators makes her music seem both simple and inevitable and to achieve that is, as everyone knows, the hardest thing of all.

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Drowned In Sound 80

No. 4 draws the listener inward, but is not melancholic, at least not in a classical sense. It’s like taking comfort in oblivion, in the slowness of things. Vantzou says she is influenced by sleep and dreamlike states, and in this album you can hear it. Almost every note is heavily weighted. The drone is very intense and obscure, like air that is very clear but very thin. In ‘Staircases’ there is a mickey mousing decrescendo effect that feels like gently tumbling down the stairs, letting go. In ‘String Quartet’ there is a sense that the feeling of slowness is not a gradual depression but a process of surrender, as notes linger on, time stretches out, and we give up on anticipating the next sound, just letting it surprise us.

The sweetness of ‘Staircases’ maintains in ‘Some limited and waning memory’, where melodies for piano are accompanied by airy chorals rather than strings. ‘Percussion in non space’ is a very short track with some brief phrases reminiscent of Polish composer Gorecki , sweet melodic sequences which sound disconnected, like bells ringing into outer space. The whole album is wraithlike, as if it is visited by disappearing and constantly transforming spirits. The only track to really feature rhythm, ‘Garden of forking paths’ builds the sense of the supernatural with a form of resonant drumming, like an echo from a distant temple.

Overall No. 4 is serene, still, and deep. It doesn’t allow you to become transfixed by predictable patterns by rather relaxes you into accepting the next step, whether you are being visited by a herd of headless horsemen, flying away on a magic carpet or sinking slowly, irresistibly, into torpor.