Ed Williams is a guitarist, harpsichordist and composer exploring the interstice between early music practices, free improvisation and experimental composition. His language involves noise as a tool for unfolding and breaking down the sonic elements inherent in Western notions of musical coherence.
He holds ABRSM Grade 8 in Harpsichord and Classical Guitar and graduated his Bachelor of Music with a First from Edinburgh University. He received the composition diploma “en Cycle Spécialisé” from the CNRR of Marseille and continued studies in Maxime Barthélémy’s Electroacoustic Composition class at the Cité de la Musique. He is currently studying under Andrea Neumann and Alfred Zimmerlin at the Hochschule für Musik, Basel, for the MA Open Creation. He has curated several concert series in Marseille and participated in founding various free improvisation outfits, touring Europe and North America with these and other projects including the Insub Meta Orchestra.
He has released recordings on Edition Wandelweiser, Creative Sources, Tombed Visions, and has self-released tapes and CDs for which he designed the covers.
His podcast Echo Chamber (2017-2019) explored the aspects of the different experiences experimental musicians develop in their relation to composition, improvised performance, and the ethereal quality of musical creation in general.
He currently translates texts for contemporary music publisher Maison ONA, including the 32-CD double box set of music by Denis Dufour.
I had the honour to be invited to the home of Canadian composer John Beckwith in autumn last year. He came to see Tandem in concert at Toronto and I took the opportunity to sit down with him later on and have his thoughts on the art of musical composition.
Topics varied from writing music to text; hymn-tune and nursery-rhyme rhythms; operas; acting and performance in theatres, as well as electroacoustic composition. He even put questions to me about my improvisation projects – how we prepare an improvisation and the importance of human connections between improvisers.
Various names pop up, such as John’s long-time collaborator, poet, and friend James Reaney, and my ever-present late father, two problematic quotes of whose we chew over: “Various species of experimental music not made of notes might give pleasant listening experiences, but I don’t see why every pleasurable listening experience has to be called ‘music'”; and “Most music is a conversation with itself”.
The music you hear throughout the episode comes from various pieces of John’s repertory. The orchestral extracts featuring at the beginning, middle and end of the conversation all come from John’s 2016 piece, ‘Calling’, performed by the New Music Concerts Ensemble. You can also hear the first movement from ‘Pages’, for solo piano and performed by Barbara Pritchard, and the enigmatic second movement from the set of six fantasies for guitar, ‘Ut re mi fa sol’, performed by Peter Higham.
PS Don’t adjust your sound system! There’s an intermittent buzz in the right-hand channel of these recordings, due to my faulty Zoom microphone. Sorry.
AND (Anouck Genthon, violin, Ed Williams, guitar) is pleased to announce the release of three new EPs taken from various performances. The first we’re releasing, AND in Leipzig & Kopenhagen, features recordings of our 2016 tour and also has Ed playing harpsichord.
A note from Ed:
These tracks are taken from two performances back in 2016. Both are extra special.
Straight after the tour I took the plane to the UK for my father’s funeral. As a Baroque music scholar, his influence on me was huge, and I went on to explore the themes of grief and musical philosophy with a podcast called ECHO CHAMBER and a sound installation, ECHO ORGAN, a year later. So in both of these recordings, I’m at the very beginning of the grieving process whose relevance to music I was only just starting to perceive.
KOPENHAGEN was the last concert in the tour, and not only did I have the funeral in my mind but Koncertkirken’s Bjorn proposed that I try the venue’s harpsichord. As a trained harpsichordist, I couldn’t resist. We’re very proud to have performed in this pairing, usually reserved for Baroque performances and here played, as always with AND, in purely improvised instant composition.
Although for LEIPZIG we used the usual instrumentation of electric guitar and violin, it was also a very strongly emotionally charged concert as I’d spent the afternoon in the Tomaskirche, the church where J S Bach had been cantor and where my dad had played many times. Thinking of this person I’d just lost, I cried just about all the tears in my body as I watched the flame of the prayer candle extinguish.
An update on some of the exciting things happening soon or that have just happened:
Super nice concert with Ben Grossman and Vincent Roussel at the Grotte de l’Hermite in the nature outside Marseilles (see photos below). I also took Ben aside to dig into his musical background and talk about Stravinsky, a discussion which will become a new Echo Chamber episode in the coming months.
A couple days ago the Bears were back this time with double bassist Nghia Duong in our first Heard Of Bears invite… concert since summer. Thanks Nghia!
UPCOMING RELEASE NO.1 Coming very very soon will be the final concert version of Echo Organ, electroacoustic piece featuring as part of my sound installation of the same name, and which has enjoyed broadcasts this year as part of Radiophrenia and Festival Futura. This is a highly personal project which I am extremely proud of, and have chosen to release it myself for free download for anyone interested.
UPCOMING RELEASE NO.2 my first proper solo album is yet to be released on Creative Sources Recordings. Its release will coincide with my performance for Clara de Asis’ Ernestine concert series on October 21st.
I spent several days last summer with composer, improviser and spinet-player Christoph Schiller at his somewhat legendary studio in Basel. Given the concentrated subject matter, and the sheer length, of the discussions, I decided to make a three-part Echo Chamber special that deals overall with the question of freedom in musical composition:- composition as an emancipatory means to deeper reflexion and a more sincere gestural approach.
Toward the end of our three days of conversations, we focused on the problem of words; the problem of musicians trying to communicate between one another despite speaking different languages, ideas becoming lost in translation, and the difficulty of choosing the right words in even one’s own language.
We also look at the problems posed by the following quote from my late musicologist dad: “the more that people believe that music expresses or arouses emotions, the more they want others to agree.” This takes us onto the descriptive words used for music, and leads us to consider the deliberate theatricality of Baroque music amongst others.
The music featuring in this episode comes exclusively from the sublime album ‘Tse’ by Christoph Schiller in trio with Pierre-Yves Martel and Cyril Bondi.
PS Don’t adjust your sound system! There’s an intermittent buzz in the right-hand channel of these recordings, due to my faulty Zoom microphone. Sorry.
I spent several days last summer with composer, improviser and spinet-player Christoph Schiller at his somewhat legendary studio in Basel. Given the concentrated subject matter, and the sheer length, of the discussions, I decided to make a three-part Echo Chamber special that deals overall with the question of freedom in musical composition:- composition as an emancipatory means to deeper reflexion and a more sincere gestural approach.
Composition in the sense we discuss it here becomes a tool that is more efficient in prying open interior dialogues within the musician than any score-less method; a tool whose sharpening is the result of a simultaneous rejection of Romantic ideals, various amalgamations with new technologies and improvised methods, and the embracing of the earliest written music practices.
The music you hear throughout this episode comes from Christoph’s bewildering piece Missa, recorded in Basel in 2016 and featuring many of the musicians and singers from the Millefleurs ensemble.
PS Don’t adjust your sound system! There’s an intermittent buzz in the right-hand channel of these recordings, due to my faulty Zoom microphone. Sorry.
exciting things happening beginning with a secret concert in a secret cave with Ben Grossman (TBA), and ending for now towards the end of October with a solo release concert at the Ernestine concert series as I release my first solo album, out on the Creative Sources label.
More soon.
en commençant par un concert secret dans une grotte secrète, plus d’infos à venir,
et en terminant avec une performance solo pour les Ernestine series vers fin octobre, qui sera également soirée de sortie de mon premier album solo, ooh j’ai hâte moi aussi !
I spent several days last summer with composer, improviser and spinet-player Christoph Schiller at his somewhat legendary studio in Basel. Given the concentrated subject matter, and the sheer length, of the discussions, I’ve decided to make a three-part Echo Chamber special that deals overall with the question of freedom in musical composition:- composition as an emancipatory means to deeper reflexion and a more sincere gestural approach.
Composition in the sense we discuss it here becomes a tool that is more efficient in prying open interior dialogues within the musician than any score-less method; a tool whose sharpening is the result of a simultaneous rejection of Romantic ideals, various amalgamations with new technologies and improvised methods, and the embracing of the earliest written music practices.
I took great pleasure in choosing what music to accompany these conversations, what sounds of Christoph’s that I not only have a personal fondness for but that also best give some kind of musical parallel to the content of our discussions. For Freedom & Composition Part 1, Christoph’s joint album with violinist Anouck Genthon, Zeitweise leichter Schneefall (Newwaveofjazz, 2019) fits the bill perfectly.
PS Don’t adjust your sound system! There’s an intermittent buzz in the right-hand channel of these recordings, due to my faulty Zoom microphone. Sorry.
Mon invité pour le dix-septième épisode fut le saxophoniste improvisateur Sébastien Branche. On s’est retrouvé chez lui à Leipzig en printemps pour prendre le thé et discuter les origines et la continuité de sa pratique de musicien expérimental, ainsi que celle de masseur shiatsu et professeur de mathématiques. Je m’intéresse beaucoup à son approche singulière et hyper-sensible envers un traitement musical du son, silence et bruit qui le mène sur un chemin que je trouve, il m’excusera, quasi-chamanistique.
Intéressé par les phénomènes perceptifs, il axe son travail principalement sur la matière sonore, se présentant avant tout comme un « faiseur de sons » qu’il donne à entendre. Il joue aujourd’hui dans le duo de saxophones Relentless, en duo avec l’altiste Cyprien Busolini ou avec Miguel Garcia à l’électronique, et en grand orchestre avec l’IMO. Il développe par ailleurs un travail en solo au saxophone ténor sur pied et électronique (Lignes), ou au soprano avec l’eau (saxoph2one). Il a joué en Europe dans divers festivals ou salles, pour des concerts, de la danse ou des balades sonores.
Cet épisode mets en écoute exclusivement l’éblouissant album Pnoladeu Avvrhig, deuxième sortie du duo de Sébastien avec Miguel A. Garcia.
Trouvez tout sur Sébastien, y compris ses autres sorties et où les acheter 😉 sur son site:
Fifty years is a very long time, in any terms aside the geological. AMM’s The Crypt is a legendary recording for anyone touched by experimental, avant-garde, and underground music today. Like all artistic milestones, it not only impresses by its continuing influence but by its continuing force of being that makes you double-check it really was created such a long time before anything similar.
At the end of 2018, Sound and Music‘s Sam Mackay invited me to write an article for the British Music Collection’s 50 Things blog series. Produced by Sound and Music, this series “takes items from the British Music Collection as their starting point, highlighting lesser-known connections and marginal stories as well as familiar names and narratives. Featuring contributions from composers, performers, writers and broadcasters, #BMC50 Things will help build a rich picture of the backgrounds, practices and diverse perspectives that have shaped the landscape of new music in the UK.”
For the article, I focused on AMM’s legendary 1968 recording ‘The Crypt’, and got an immense joy out of not only listening to this again but really trying to put words to it, not forgetting the context into which it sprung, dating back to already half a century ago.
Here’s the track as found on YouTube, with the full article below:
Article by Ed Williams
This record came out just over 50 years ago. That is nuts.
Fifty years is a very long time, in any terms aside the geological. AMM’s The Crypt is a legendary recording for anyone touched by experimental, avant-garde, and underground music today. Like all artistic milestones, it not only impresses by its continuing influence but by its continuing force of being that makes you double-check it really was created such a long time before anything similar.
AMM as a group is, in the best sense possible, similarly prehistoric. Formed in 1965, they had only had a couple of years of experimentation before the Crypt session, but founding members Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe and Lou Gare were already making free-jazz audiences of the time seriously reconsider the limits of their own radicality.
I’m wary of euphemistic and overenthusiastic adjectives to describe experiences like performances and recordings, and words like authentic, ethereal, and raw might be some of the most tempting to use and the most confusing. But how else to rationalize such an experience as experimental music performance? Its very nature is ethereal – or is it ephemeral? – in that it’s one of only a few successful methods humans have found to transcend everyday experience; the best performances often resembling a purgatorial distillation process of religious rites, sexual volatility and subliminal fantasy.
I’ll try to avoid authentic and ethereal (didn’t I just say purgatorial?), but if there’s one word that I might excuse to sum up AMM’s The Crypt, it’s raw. That holy grail of underground aesthetics, rawness, is present in every grating echo and serene siren song discernible in the maelstrom that is this recording. This is, may I remind you, FIFTY years ago. There’s scraping, screaming, ambiguous rattling, contributing to a cacophony of feedback (feedback! in the 60’s!). All common fare nowadays – go to any performance of music roughly within the ‘free improvisation’, ‘experimental’, ‘post-free-jazz’ or even ‘noise’ categories today and you’ll find the hallmarks of what AMM has been so influential for:- everyday instruments (especially saxes, kits, guitars, cellos, as in The Crypt) being distorted beyond recognition through extended techniques; everyday objects’ musical souls exorcised through contact mics; electronics simultaneously swirling in the background and creeping into your eardrums’ inner reaches. But this recording dates from June 12, 1968. The Beatles hadn’t even broken up yet.
Speaking of which, how did audiences react to this kind of thing? Paul McCartney apparently went to one AMM session and said it was too long. Who doesn’t feel that after their first improvisation session, looking around thinking “is everybody here seriously into this?” And that’s nowadays, after decades of digesting Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, myriad electronic musics, and all things Zappa. Imagine it over fifty years ago.
From a 2019 standpoint, this would still constitute a difficult, protracted listening session for even a seasoned audience – but that makes me so much happier than to think that something this remarkable should dilute with time and habit. It just goes to show how valuable this record is as an early leap into the rabbit hole of artistic exploration – one we’re still hesitant to follow.
Ed Williams 