In the liner notes of Belgian clarinettist Dries Tack's new solo album, Adjacent Spaces, we are told that he is determinedly not trying to emulate ‘an artfully played melodic instrument in the service of a beautiful orchestral sound’. There is no question that he is completely successful in this mission: there are only a handful of recognisably clarinet-like single notes and even these, on the bass clarinet, often only appear momentarily before being split into multiphonics. Tack also says that he isn't interested in ‘Showing off… playing as many notes as quickly and elegantly as possible… that's exactly what I don't want’. But, despite himself, there is a great deal of virtuosity on display here in a wide range of unconventional techniques – what we used to call ‘extended techniques’ – including playing just with the mouthpiece, or without the mouthpiece with air sounds and brass-player lip buzzing directly into the instrument, plus a great deal of vocalisation, all delivered with energy, technical command and complete commitment. Tack has planned the disc of six pieces to move from more conventional ‘new’ techniques (multiphonics for B flat clarinet) through wild simultaneous singing and playing, to progressively using less of the instrument until the final piece, in which he doesn't play it at all, using just his lips and vocalisation. It's a neat idea and, taken as a whole, is a fascinating project. While some of these pieces might not perhaps work satisfactorily as ‘pieces’ in isolation, there is never a dull moment and always something sonically arresting going on.

He opens with Sciarrino's well-known (to clarinettists), and surprisingly often played, Let me die before I wake, which he calls ‘old’ new music – it was written in the year of his birth, 1982. Before I read the liner notes it seemed to me odd to include it here among all this new work written especially for him, but his reasoning is quite persuasive. It was written for what he calls ‘a strange bird in the instrument's family’, but it isn't actually that strange. This is a full-Boehm system instrument that has a few extra keys and goes down to a low E flat rather than the usual E, so that players can transpose parts for the A clarinet without the need for a second instrument. It was quite popular in Italy and Eastern Europe – all the major makers produced them until they fell from fashion, with only the Czech maker Amati now still making them, I think. Sciarrino wrote the piece for the great Ciro Scarponi (who tragically died at only 56, in 2006), who played a full-Boehm instrument. The clarinet multiphonic fingerings in Bruno Bartolozzi's pioneering 1967 New Sounds for Woodwind Footnote ¹ are for the full-Boehm, as are those of that other great Italian player Giuseppe Garborino in his Method Footnote ² of 1978 – so the instrument is very much part of the Italian DNA and mid-twentieth century clarinet playing in general. Rather than playing the piece on a normal B flat, Tack talks about finding an instrument that turned out to be in poor condition and deciding to use it despite its flaws and imperfections: ‘so that the resistance and struggle can be heard. We also deliberately recorded at night to make a real sense of effort and exhaustion at the end of the piece’, which, I'm afraid, I can't hear, but it does add to the more personal reasons he gives for including the piece. The main issue for performers is, I find, the speed of the tremoli, all of them to be split into multiphonics and mostly played extremely quietly. Some of them are fast and some measured, depending on the note lengths, but the latter ones are often quite slow and plodding and your ear is drawn to the repeated oscillating major third and minor ninth rather than a balanced conglomerate with all the high harmonics that you should be listening to. When they're fast you hear this wonderful fragile, ethereal quality that is present in, for example Contours – Music for Clarinet, Kate Romano (2005, Metier, MSVCD92074), the earlier 6 Capricci for solo violin and his other string writing, and this, for me, is the essential Sciarrino soundworld.Footnote ³ Tack sometimes achieves this, but it isn't always controlled and successful: perhaps it's the poor instrument.

The five other pieces are a world apart, not least because they all involve electronics, mostly live. I'm guessing that some of the bass clarinet part in Hunjoo Jung's refLEction refRAction difFRAction (2016/19), with live electronics, was improvised by Tack – the liner notes tell us that the piece is very much a collaboration. There is certainly a strong nostalgic whiff of free improvisor Peter Brötzmann's 1970s manic wall-of-noise style saxophone playing, singing while playing and aggressive squawking, accompanied by industrial noises and electronic static. This, together with Tack's vocalisations, which include sounds of in-breath strangulation(!), is all very entertaining in a slightly retro-schlock-horror sort of way.

Michael Maierhof's Splitting 47 (2020) was also a collaboration it seems. Written for just the bass's mouthpiece and crook (neck), there are additional physical ‘splitters’ apart from the electronics, with vibrations created by playing into a plastic cup with a nail and washer in the bottom and a glass ball on a stick. This would be good to see live, as would all these pieces, but I'll come back to this at the end. Reminiscences of the 70s are here, too, most prominently in that sustained ‘circular saw’ noise that Brötzmann used but was also a favourite of Vinko Globokar, using a small cymbal as a mute with his trombone. But this is a much more nuanced and successful piece, only marred by the many digital silences separating fragments or episodes which would work better if they were simply silences in the same acoustic as the player.

Malin Bång's Split Rudder (2016/19) goes a step further and, like Globokar's 1973 Voix Instrumentalisée, uses a bass without the mouthpiece, with vocalisations and brass-player lip buzzing. It was originally for bass recorder and adapted for Tack. We are told there is a microphone inside the instrument; it would be good to know where, if it isn't just in the bell. There are very precise different air sounds together with flutter-tongue, which is all pitched (though there is no singing) by fingers on keys and by changing the shape of the vocal cavity (the kind of movement from an E to a U or OO sound you would use in vocal harmonics). There are also some intriguing low bass sounds, like a pizzicato double bass – I'll be disappointed if these were created electronically. The whole of the first section works very well, and a kind of narrative carries the listener along: in fact, Bång tells us that ‘the musical material and the course of events have been influenced by the focused and dramatic storytelling of the ballad Briggen Blue Bird of Hull by Swedish composer and troubadour Evert Taube’.Footnote ⁴ There seem to be some handheld jingles (I think), which take you into a second section where two-pitch lip buzzes are introduced. The piece has shape, direction, drama and a clarity and detail unsullied by ostentatious electronic noise.

Stefan Prins’ Inhibition Space #2 (2021), for bass and electronics, sounds like a piece for electronics: there are no audible, recognisable clarinet sounds here. ‘A complex acoustic landscape is created via a feedback system in which the bass clarinet is only one of several components.’. Tack tells us: ‘feedback wanders through the instrument, so in a way the instrument controls the feedback. But I don't “play” the instrument. I use it more like a kind of sampler or control surface for the feedback.’ The ‘landscape’ is surprisingly gentle, calm and interestingly detailed. Only in the last three or so minutes of its 18 does the piece get excited with the usual noisy feedback before a fragmented, quiet coda.

Ui-Kyung Lee's As long as you love me ends the disc with a deconstructed clarinet. At the opening just the barrel is used, the second section uses the mouthpiece, the third has keyclicks, the fourth just the bell, all of this with vocalisations, and it finally just plops and kisses. It is entertaining and humorous (using all the sounds, and more, we've heard in the other pieces), a kind of satire but with underlying serious intent: ‘how can one free oneself from conventions, from aesthetic constraints, in order to find one's own way’. Writing a piece for clarinet without using the instrument in the way it was designed to be used is one way of doing it, I suppose, but Lee is also concerned with the ‘excessive veneration of certain father figures in contemporary music’, and he makes the point in the last third of the piece, perhaps bluntly, by playing then distorting and destroying the anthem used for the former North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il. After this stops abruptly, the final short section ‘is made up exclusively of the childlike sounds of plopping and kissing. And it is precisely this reduction to a seemingly banal, yet idiosyncratic material with a positive connotation that may create the space for new ideas to emerge.’

There is, for me, an issue with pieces for acoustic instrument/s and electronics where, as is quite usual now, the instrument is made to deploy all the novel sounds, vocalisations and ‘noises off’ to make it sound as little like itself as possible and therefore much easier to integrate with electronics. This is not a problem as such, but listening on disc it is difficult to discern what is instrumental and what isn't, which may, of course, be the point. All of these sounds can be achieved electronically, begging the question in some instances, why bother with the player? In the case of this disc clarinettists with a working knowledge of ‘new’ techniques will be able to spot and enjoy the acoustic sounds, but it certainly isn't always easy, which is why these kinds of pieces (in fact, all new music using novel sounds) really only work live. I want to see Tack playing and get an idea of how he makes these sounds. With good diffusion, visually/aurally one has a chance to separate out human from machine even if the intention is that they are one. In any case, this is a fascinating and rewarding disc, even if as a headphone experience a perplexing one.