FIVE THOUGHTS ON EVERYTHING | textura | June 2020
“Jobina Tinnemans clearly has a knack for getting noticed. The Dutch-born, Wales-based composer scored Killing Time, a 2013 commission, for chamber ensemble and—wait for it—twenty-five knitters; a year later, her composition Shakespeare and Hedgeshear worked two table tennis teams and hedge trimmers into its design. Other works have been staged on a glacier in Iceland and catwalk in New York. Common to all is the composer's embrace of extra-musical phenomena and its incorporation into her productions.
Being a physical recording only, Five Thoughts on Everything might seem to offer a less audacious outlet for Tinnemans' artistic expression. Yet while the material offered is purely aural, the five adventurous pieces, world premieres all, are hardly wanting for boldness. That's in keeping with the composer's own practice, grounded as it is in not only her classical piano training but electronics, sound processing, and contemporary art. After a 2007 move to a remote peninsula in Wales, she began threading sounds from the natural world into her compositions, illustrations of which appear on the release. One of the more commendable things about it is that each of its pieces presents a different sound world, the cumulative result a flattering portrait of an artist whose work's marked by imagination and curiosity.
Warbling analog synthesizers intermingle with acoustic piano during the dramatic overture Midtone in G, a spacey combination that suggests Tinnemans would make an excellent choice of soundtrack composer the next time someone does a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. That opener's a gateway drug of sorts for what follows when the subsequent productions shift into even stranger territories. Wholly different from Midtone in G, Djúpalónsdóttir & Hellnarson conjures a natural-sounding space, the composer having manipulated recordings of the South Iceland Chamber Choir's vocalising to simulate the cooing, cawing, and squawking of bird-like creatures; as if the material isn't already captivating enough, Tinnemans amplifies the effect by conjoining to it the cries of actual kittiwake seagulls.
Nature sounds appear also in The Shape of Things Aquatic, at twelve minutes the longest of the settings. Bird chirps and burbling water figure prominently, the composer having collected material at the coast in Pembrokeshire and the Gulfoss waterfall in Iceland. While the nature sounds remain identifiable as such, radical processing transforms the source material into an abstract field of combustible noises and electronic treatments, the latter alternating between delicate shimmer and engulfing noise. It's an episodic piece, however, that sees an unaccompanied piano section surface halfway through before it expands with the addition of creaking electronic effects. Two years ago, Tinnemans was commissioned to create a work to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Edgard Varèse's iconic Poème Électronique, created for the Brussels World Fair in 1958. The result, Varèsotto, Hinterland of Varèse, honours him in presenting the album's broadest soundworld, folding as it does into its seven-minute menagerie vocal whoops, orchestral instruments, bird chirps, and electronic effects.
As unpredictable and wide-ranging as those pieces are, it's the penultimate Microbioism that perhaps surprises most. At the start, bright synthetic glissandos create the impression of micro-organisms darting about; even more startling, however, is the booming kick drum that materializes halfway through and clears the way for a funky industrial-techno groove to lock into position. If a programmed beat of the kind heard rumbling from a Berlin club in the middle of the night is the last thing one might have expected on Tinnemans' release, it at the very least testifies to the openness of her creative process.”
-Textura (June 2020)