ROBIN HAYWARD – States Of Rushing

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It is with deep regret that I announce my most recent disease, the reason behind a definitive decision that should have already been taken quite a while back. Giving a really meaningful account of recordings involving the use of canned exhalations and saliva-related noises resonating in metallic conduits – whatever the source – has become an insurmountable barrier for this reviewer. In the last decade or so I have listened, initially with pleasure, to hundreds of CDs that, one way or another, have gradually conformed to a growing number of unwritten rules and aesthetic conventions. The press has been filing them under dozens of names and categories; I won’t add any. It’s not Robin Hayward’s fault, of course: in this record from a couple of years ago he did manage to make this listener perk up his ears, in search of new things to cheer for. The tuba is an interesting machine in that sense, and Hayward is definitely more intelligent than the many a wannabe I’ve had the delight to meet along the “spit-and-gurgle-inside-the-instrument” path. However, the truly gripping moments of States Of Rushing are still too few to place the disc amidst the ones whose spinning will be reiterated, which is basically the same of what usually happens with similar releases, most of them macroscopically ballyhooed by compliant groups of well-connected writers. Essentially, those flashes of involvement occur when the protagonist stays for protracted periods within insistent rhythmic capsules whose slight “human” irregularity causes some vibrational extrusion in the cranium. That ceaseless “thunk-thunk-thunk” nearly reaches a hypnotic effect, and that’s saying a lot in an area infested by the virus of everlasting tedium. But I’m too outmoded and deprived of precious time to keep struggling for words to illustrate outings where not a single pitch – a significant pitch – is emitted. Warm-and-wet air and infinitesimal fractions of upper partials resonating inside tubes – frequently in “practically inaudible” mode, even if that’s not the case here – won’t be tolerated further. This – barring prodigious efforts that one can’t even imagine at the moment – will be the final time in which you’ll read about analogous materials on Touching Extremes.