On the go and in between

“Even without detecting in the figure of the refugee or exile the emblematic figure of our time, the loosening of the bonds with a place of origin is no longer rewarded by a search for a promised land. The loss of a deep-rootedness that would provide an identity is no longer perceived as a lack that needs to be filled. We strangers in our own land, and conversely we feel at home everywhere.”
Mario Perniola, Ritual Thinking (tr. Massimo Verdicchio)

The Italian philosopher Mario Perniola, in his 2001 essay collection titled Ritual Thinking cited above, dug deep into what it means to be on the go and somewhere in between. Transience becomes tangible. What was self-evident fades away without making room for new habits. Perniola's words run like a thread through A Basement Suite, the longest work on this portrait album by Tim Mariën, and resonate throughout the Belgian composer’s entire sound world. Mariën's music settles in Perniola's liminal world, between borders. Here too, musical self-evidences are called into question. Here too the listener can make a landscape of tones their own while listening and wandering.
At first, Mariën 'uproots' our listening experience through his use of unconventional musical tunings. These deviate from the normative division of the octave into 12 equal parts (the equal temperament), yielding a greater diversity of (microtonal) pitches. Mariën's use of tuning took shape during his musicological study of Harry Partch’s music theory, one of the 20th-century figures who, in Partch's own words, put an end to "the western world's three hundred years of 12-tone paralysis." In a different way than Partch, Mariën initially distills tunings from tones that are naturally present in the harmonic overtone series. He does this through his own, open method. In this liberating approach, turnings do not get bogged down in a fixed basic principle. They are changeable and are even mixed (as in A Basement Suite). They spread out and become a range of possibilities for the composer. Marien's flexible method is strongly tied to his practice of rebuilding and retuning instruments to play his microtonal scales. He seldom works with on perfect Steinways. Instead, his instruments are like antique, worn pianos, a discarded harpsichord, or a traveled mandolin. Mariën retunes these and gives them a new life. Sometimes the fragile state of these instruments prevents them from being tuned to perfection. But it is precisely this unruly materiality of sound, which runs counter to the theoretical perfection of tuning systems, that Mariën cherishes in his works.
Furthermore, Mariën often allows the instruments, with their unique timbres and microtonal scales, to simultaneously develop varying transformational processes in his compositions. He himself imagines a sea with various undercurrents and 'audible' waves on the surface. To create the ‘inaudible’ processes that lie behind this layered structure, he approaches the intervals in the scales he works with as time intervals: when tonal distances shrink or increase, so too does the duration. But although it takes shape through this self-referential process, Mariën's music never becomes abstract. Instruments are in constant in interaction, taking over intervals, gestures and even playing techniques from each other. These sometimes theatrical gestures act as signposts for our ears, as we wander through Mariën's exciting soundscape. While the polyphonic mass of his music shrinks, swells and boils over into climaxes, images and choreographies of movements emerge. For even as Mariën challenges our familiar musical experience with his tunings and abstract procedures, communication remains present in his music. We become 'strangers' to it, but can still feel at home.

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With Melissa (2001), we find Mariën at an early stage in his idiomatic development. He composed the piece for keyboard, retuned timpani and a 16-string guitar, which he himself converted and christened 'chordotrope'. The strings of this experimental instrument, which is played with a slide like a lap steel guitar, are tuned in an extended overtone series, which also underpins the microtonal tone collection of the other instruments. Two polar forces drive the course of the composition. Initially, the keyboard and chordotrope weave from the quasi-tonal opening motif an almost childishly naive duet. This duet is violently disrupted when the timpani erupt, taking the lead in fortissimo.
Such emphatic narratives fade away in Toeënwâs (2010), written for Ictus Ensemble Here Mariën unleashes his layered working method, combining his ‘rebuilt’ and microtonally retuned instruments (an antique piano, 12-string guitar and reed organ) with percussion (a retuned marimba), flute and trombone. The curious title is a transcription of toonwijs (literally: 'tone wise'), an idiomatic expression native to Mariën's hometown dialect. Someone who is 'tone wise' has mastered the principles of a certain activity. Indeed, in Toeënwâs Mariën experimented for the first time with his idiosyncratic procedure for structure. By approaching pitch intervals also as time intervals, he established the length and structure of the sections of the piece. Throughout those sections the sound surface is in constant motion, propelled by the trilling figures which the instruments continuously exchange with each other. The piece abruptly ends in an entrancing, beguiling loop of sounds. There, the marimba and piano repeat the same motif, which creates a pleasantly disordered ending through their contrasting tunings.
A Basement Suite (2020) takes us to the heart of Mariën's liminal sound world. Perniola's quote about homelessness echoes throughout. This suite for string ensemble, written for Tiptoe Company, unites three pieces Mariën composed and reworked between 2012 and 2020: Basement of Strings, Unresolved Streets and Tomorrow Started the Game I As "strangers in their own country," the musicians here play, among other things, a string by string retuned harp and a weathered harpsichord that Mariën reanimated. The microtonal piano used in Toeënwâs makes a reappearance, accompanied by a 'bass piano', in which Mariën has tuned one of the strings for every key one octave lower, resulting in a muffled, bell-like timbre. The microtonal sound field that the stringed instruments let resonate in the suite is perhaps the most surreal, but also the most fascinating, on the entire album. With a division of the octave into 72 fine but equal parts, it sits between the boundaries of pure and equal temperament tuning systems.
The liminal approach of A Basement Suite goes even further: the boundaries of the pieces themselves are also porous. Mariën conceived the suite as a modular composition, in which the three pieces can be rearranged and attached to each other in all sorts of ways. In the version for this album, Unresolved Streets (2015) was given a chorus role. Mariën took the title of this short quintet from a quote by oboist and conductor Werner Herbers, who said in regard to the American avant-garde jazz composer Robert Graettinger: "[...] in some parts of his work there is a shapelessness, some wandering off into 'unresolved streets'." Indeed, that description suits Mariën's piece perfectly. With alternating plucked and bowed textures, the instruments seem to be searching for a solution that simply fails to materialize. Like Perniola's traveler, the piece wanders through A Basement Suite, where it assumes a new identity with each repetition. It appears as a slightly overenthusiastic counter-voice when it emerges before the end of Tomorrow Started the Game I (2018) has come to a conclusion; and it becomes a resting point when, after the frenetic density of Basement of Strings (2012, new version 2020), it hesitantly brings the entire suite to an end.

In Tomorrow Started the Game I, Perniola's traveling figure is quite prominent. The title is taken from a message sent by an Iranian musician who had met Mariën's girlfriend on a Greek island. The game refers to the journey to Western Europe that the musician would undertake. Mariën gives the traveler’s journey a voice in his piece using a well-traveled street-musician’s mandolin, that at times seems to get lost among the other stringed instruments. The unintentionally meaningful grammar of the message also resounds in the musical form: it is as if past and future are mixed together. For example, solo passages for the two pianos emerge, disappear, then return with other instruments later in the suite. Earlier passages could be heard as alternative endings for Basement of Strings. In the latter piece, Mariën's layered approach seems to come to a boiling point. Uninterrupted layers of vibrating figures, motifs and effects pile up in an overflowing wonderland of sound concepts that is as alienating as it is appealing.

Text: Anna Vermeulen
Translation: Thomas R. Moore