Keiji Haino has rarely been one to avoid portentous titles and boy howdy has he stayed on-brand with My Lord Music I Most Humbly Beg Your Indulgence In The Hope That You Will Do Me The Honour Of Permitting This Seed Called Keiji Haino To Be Planted Within You.
I’m just going to assume for a moment that you don’t know Keiji Haino but are quite fond of the hurdy gurdy. This record doesn’t sound like what you’re thinking of. If you know what Keiji Haino sounds like, this record is very much what you’re thinking of. I’ve never known Haino to play keyed instruments (as in piano-like) — which in itself is an oddity, given he’s played most other categories — and so the gurdy is an oddity, from one perspective.
What he seems to be doing a lot of is using kind of fractional approaches — the chien or “buzzing bridge” of a gurdy produces a lot of textures and rhythm typically, but Haino (I think) uses it on very delicate thresholds such that it produces a consistent white noise. The keys of a gurdy usually produce single melodic notes, but Haino’s approach dwells more on sustained notes, partial depressions, and wee slides. I’m by no means a gurdy specialist, but Haino is a long way into extended technique and I suspect the doctrinaire gurdyist (can’t move for them lately, right?) would baulk at a lot of this record. I think it’s also worth saying that this is relatively benign so far as Haino goes — a previous gurdy record of his (The 21st Century Hard-Y-Guide-Y Man, PSF) was largely high-end screeching drones. Effective and impressive, but a lot less approachable than this record. There are melodies here, albeit distended, and it’s cumulatively more of a groaning haunted house than an explosion at a banshee convention.Oddly, also this is reminiscent in parts of some inventions in twentieth century violin repertoire — odd, because I’m not aware of Haino playing bowed instruments. I keep being put in mind of George Crumb’s Black Angels or the sonorist Krzystof Penderecki — harmonic scraping in service of inhuman screams. It’s perhaps not entirely surprising, given the wheel drone is literally bowing strings, but it’s not common to the gurdy to sound specifically like a violin, due to the (typically) highly tempered keyed notes. That is to say – Haino’s genius here lies in eliding the typical sound of a gurdy while not disappearing into unholy noise. It’s very easy to make an instrument sound like noise, but it takes care to make a very specific instrument do something it doesn’t normally do while creating a deeply unsettling soundworld.
It’s tricky to place this record — which isn’t to say it’s sui generis (because what is), but rather that I keep thinking of much more highly composed music. From interviews I’ve read, I’m pretty sure a lot of that stuff is anathema to Haino and I think genre is aligned strongly with method (and lots of other context besides). But for what it’s worth, twentieth century avant-garde composition with strings sits neatly alongside this — whether the more mellow likes of Giacinto Scelsi in drone mode, or Ellen Fullman‘s long string exposition, or Éliane Radigue‘s electronic hums. Finally then — I have a good thirty+ records of Haino’s, so I feel somewhat qualified to say: this is his best record for a few years. While I’ve always enjoyed what he does, I do have something of a sickness — but My Lord Music… is a real return to the fragile and terrifying core of his work for me, dynamic and touching and achingly rough at times; and quite, quite perfect.-Kev Nickells-
