Jamie Crofts / Jim Simm / Thomas Darby: 5 Diurnes, the Brayford Pool (Lincoln) by day
SOUNDkiosk

5 Diurnes, the Brayford Pool (Lincoln) by day isn't the latest release from composer Jim Simm (who also goes by Jamie Crofts), but it serves as an optimal representative example of this very intriguing artist's work. A small number of acquaintances, among them UK-based composers and musicologists Robert Orledge, Michael Parsons, Howard Skempton, and Virginia Anderson, is familiar with Simm's music but beyond that awareness is modest, due perhaps in part to the artist's nature. The impression that forms is of a creator whose energies are wholly centred on the work at hand and not self-promotion.

Indicative of the broad range encompassed by Simm's music, 13 Elegies, Riparian Zones (various), an early 2019 release comprising two-minute solo piano compositions, was followed later in the year by 5 Interzones (for time-stretched piano), which features pieces averaging approximately twenty-five minutes apiece designed for sound installation application (like other Simm and Crofts releases available from SOUNDkiosk).

Some preliminary clarification is needed to appreciate what 5 Diurnes, the Brayford Pool (Lincoln) by day is all about. Combining piano music (credited to Crofts) with words (to Jim Simm and Thomas Darby), the forty-six-minute work comprises one section of on ongoing ‘Waterways of Lincoln' project and was designed as an installation piece. In contrast to a nocturne, a piece associated with the night, a diurne is a composition relating to daytime. A waterway at the centre of the city of Lincoln, the Brayford Pool serves as a home to the city's university and marina on its south bank and restaurants, pubs, bars, hotels, and a cinema on the north. The island on the Brayford Pool is a source of some mystery, some believing it covers buried treasure or that it's guarded by ancient objects.

Each diurne includes text: Simm's words for the first, fourth, and fifth grew out of a public consultation in which people were asked to complete the statement, “What I like most about the Brayford Pool is…”; the second (text by Darby) and third (Simm) were based on a 2010 newspaper article containing the headline: “Is a long forgotten secret buried beneath the island on the Brayford Pool?”

The spoken delivery is striking, even a little bit haunting, with the speaker's English accent helping to give this aspect of the presentation distinction. There is no attempt to be theatrical, the reading instead intended to be documentary in style with the focus on the “imparting of information.” Performance notes also clarify that each diurne has a core rhythm (time signatures such as 14/16, 17/16, and 13/16 are used), and with certain words repeating throughout—“it can be (misty, pretty, tranquil, calm, etc.),” “(relaxing, feeding swans, passing, chatting, etc.) by the water”—the piece exerts a lulling effect on the listener, an effect further reinforced by the structural alternation between voice and piano in “Diurne 1” and “Diurne 5” and the generally becalmed pitch of the performance. With piano continually intoning in the background, the reading of the text is spaced evenly throughout the second setting, the text this time observational and mystery-laden as it traces someone's submersion in the pool and eventual emergence with the relic in hand. Twenty-seven questions are posed in “Diurne 3,” queries such as “Is the island believed to possess the spirit of the Lincoln imp?” and “Is it true that a photo exists from 1957 in which the island does not appear to be there?”; similar to the opening and closing pieces, it's during pauses in the piano playing when the voice appears.

March 2020