Graham Reid | | 2 min read
Overtone Piece
As we've noted in reviews of a couple of recent books about Yoko Ono, people are increasingly aware that she's in her Nineties and by some accounts unwell.
There's a kind of concerned death watch going on and a review of her remarkable career.
There was a recent retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern and touring exhibitions keep her name and physical art alive.
Her music is readily available – son Sean curating the estate – but that will always be the dividing line for many.
This album is something different and unusual: not a tribute or covers album – there have been a few of each – but sonic inspirations taken from Grapefruit, early Sixties book of instructional poems (akin to koans perhaps) in which she invited the reader to imagine new possibilities, think of clouds, immerse yourself in spaces and so on.
That little book encapsulated and anticipated much of her art which followed and through the “imagine . . .” instructions, influenced John Lennon who, almost a decade after she had written them, recorded Imagine, a song which he would later admit was deserving of a co-credit to Ono (which she eventually got).
This Stockholm-based collective take a very liberal approach to Ono's written pieces: the 14 minute opener Secret Place has a pastoral drone like a very dialed-down spin-of from Fripp and Eno's experimental pieces; City Piece seems to be busy and overlapping found conversations recorded in the street; there are short pieces for Orchestra in which various instruments are hit, scraped and punished . . .
Many of the 20 pieces are doubtless better witnessed than heard, the seven minute Bicycle Piece for Orchestra for example which seems to involve whipping a bike at one point. Or maybe not.
Yes, there are bits of screaming, running water recorded, Clock Piece (you can guess and the lengthy alarm is admittedly annoying after a while) . . .
Some of this will be familiar territory to those who endured those first two Lennon-Ono albums.
However as with her plastic art, installations and so on, it's a mistake to judge this by the conventions of music.
This is sonic art which owes something to John Cage and experiments with sound. Heard and witnessed in a gallery or performance space would offer a better appreciation.
Not having access to my copy of Grapefruit – which to be honest I have rarely revisited in the 60 years since I first got a copy – it is difficult to say just how these sounds spin off from Ono's instructions. But maybe you don't need to know, just listen and imagine.
This isn't to say there aren't some fascinating pieces here – Wood Piece is for those who'd accept an abstraction of gamelan, that opener and the equally restful Overtone Piece perhaps high points – and its worth remembering that Ono was trained musician (piano) before she moved into conceptual art and the Fluxus movement in New York.
That said, all these pieces recorded live, are probably not even for those who have an appreciation of Ono's solo albums.
This exists in a rare and rarely visited place. That's why it is in our Further Outwhere pages.
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You can hear and buy this double album at bandcamp here.
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