Beatrice Dillon Seven Reorganisations

The naturally open-ended navigation of themes in
Seven Reorganisations
is exemplary of an artist whose
thoughtfully considered catalogue is hailed among the most notable in modern experimental music. Beatrice
Dillon’s first entirely acoustic composition allows her ideas on fundamentals of space and light, structure and
tone, to unfold in beguiling, inspirational new directions unveiling whole new facets of a musical vision that
continues to reveal itself with each new release.
Derived from a Mark Fell commission, the album features a version recorded in a London studio setting, and
another taken as a live recording made at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2023. The same compositions are here articulated
by the same performers, distinguished by subtle alterations of atmosphere and dynamics on each side.
The studio parts remain tethered to Beatrice’s practice with the use of discrete edits of drily close-mic’d
parts judiciously rearranged across the stereo field with a near-hallucinatory minimalism. In exquisite
juxtaposition, the live iteration relinquishes that control to Explore Ensemble’s sextet of players cycling the
piece’s musical cells in a reverberant room. The recordings encourage listeners to revel in psychoacoustic
frissons of overtones and microtonal, timbral intricacy, whilst also highlighting the way her score appears to
prompt the performers to stop, breathe, listen and look around them, before deciding where to go next.
The schisms of fixedness and ephemerality to
Seven Reorganisations
are surely in keeping with Dillon’s
enduring obsessions with structure and motion in organised sound, but can also be attributed to an ever
expanding grasp of interrelated artforms. Extramusical cues from W.R. Bion’s psychoanalytic assertion
“Inability to tolerate empty space limits the amount of space available”, and the deconstructionist philosophy
of S. Korea’s Byung Chul-Han’s statement, “Leaving things out, to better hear what’s kept in”, are guiding
principles as much as the misty depth perception found in Hasegawa Tohaku’s C.16th Japanese folding
screens, or the shifting focal points of Terri Weifenbach’s photography (as featured on this album’s cover).
Perfect metaphors for the way the composition and mixing seduces you into its filigree detail and use of
negative space - the listener activating its latent detail.
Comparable to Cage’s ‘In a Landscape’ in its etheric, harmonious beauty, or Pascale Criton’s ‘INFRA’ in how
the music feels out the spaces in-between, Beatrice’s clean diversion from club music exposes a related,
but whole other, architecture of sound that propels the imagination, embodied in reverie. Close listening
rewards with passages of frankly astonishing iridescent beauty in the arp flutters of ‘Seven Reorganisations I’
andsublime tension of its lulled lacunæ in ‘Seven Reorganisations II’, with an absence of repeating melody that
makes return journeys feel like revisiting a perpetually unresolved, waking dreamscape.