Ed Bennett: My Broken Machines 

Decibel, Fidelio Trio, ConTempo Quartet, Garth Knox, Paul Roe
NMC [D169]
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Finding Ed Bennett’s music, even with his new album to hand, is not an altogether straightforward task. This is not due to a lack of vitality, or of invention – the seven pieces of My Broken Machines exhibit these qualities unceasingly – but because his music is made up almost exclusively of paraphernalia. Scratches, de-tunings, key clicks (the mind-clutter of the musician), assert themselves in the foreground as seemingly immovable objects; as does marginalia of a more generic kind, with the bastard offspring of venerable forms, sound effects, cartoon music, fairground muzak and the like, providing the subject matter for most of these – sometimes grotesque – essays on modern noise.

But then, as the pieces unfurl, and Bennett’s craft embeds itself in the listener, a vision more human than mechanistic asserts itself. Through the obsessively repetitive fragments of Stop-Motion Music or the interruptive bolts of the title track the struggle to perceive a disintegrated world becomes the challenge, not the appreciation of process for its own sake. It’s also a pleasure to hear how Bennett, working also as director and co-producer, has so completely persuaded his performers of the validity of the project. Decibel, formed by the composer in 2003, is an ensemble that seems to feel this music, as if through instinct, and the ConTempo String Quartet and the Fidelio Trio bravely break out of their formal confines, leaving only a glimmer (but a glimmer nonetheless) of their classical selves.

Best of all, and this again speaks of Bennett’s complex but direct emotionality, are the two solo pieces, Monster for bass clarinet and tape and Ghosts for amplified viola d’amore. In the respective cases Paul Roe and Garth Knox, always the most vital and nuanced of performers, work through the imposed asceticism of the composer to produce statements that, if not liberated exactly, always promise that the world is there to be overcome.