August News 2001 New Releases reviewed by Dan Warburton: On DVD: Morton Subotnick Archie Shepp The Residents Pimmon / Stilluppsteypa & TV POW Matching Mole Book review: Phil Freeman Alan Licht & Tamio Shiraishi Hubbub Lionel Marchetti / Voice Crack / Jérôme Noetinger On Rectangle: Red / Noël Akchoté / David Grubbs Last Month Next Month

Morton Subotnick

ELECTRONIC WORKS Vol.1
Mode Mode 97 (DVD-ROM)

After Roger Reynolds' "Watershed" (Mode 70), this is the second excursion of NY-based Mode Records into DVD territory, a costly venture no doubt but one well worth investing in - after all, as Rob Young is fond of reminding us in his liner notes, Mort Subotnick's "Touch", originally released in 1969, actually sold 40,000 copies, and if only half of the punters (clearly not just local San Francisco acid-heads) who bought theirs back then buy this too, it'll be worthwhile both finacially and artistically. Though "Touch" has been reissued several times, it still sounds remarkably fresh. Sure, the squarewaves and squiggles are as much period giveaways as Mellotrons and Rocksichords, but there are whole passages of this work that would have many of today's laptoppers drooling in amazement. "A Sky Of Cloudless Sulphur", originally commissioned in 1978 by loudspeaker manufacturer JB Lansing and broadcast at the opening of a new factory (music for the workers never sounded like this before) appears here in its entirety for the first time. "Sulphur" is a more meditative work, taking its time to explore the timbral resources of the Buchla synthesizer, and it's easy to see in retrospect why Nonesuch released only the second movement ("Dance") at the time, mixed down from its original 8 tracks to humble stereo.
The real technological coup here though is "Gestures: It Begins With Colors", a brand new work specially conceived for the interactive medium, with texts by Sumner Carnahan recorded by Subotnick's wife Joan La Barbara and computer graphics designed by his son Steven (it's a family affair..). Though the composer has provided his own sixteen-minute version of the piece for the DVD, listeners are invited to insert the accompanying CD ROM and create - or rather mix the work themselves. The program is designed to recognise up to 24 gestures (from short straight lines to vicious wiggles) as drawn by the mouse, which switch between sections of the work - moving the cursor round the screen mixes the music differently, and leaving the mouse alone for several sections triggers the stories (which one you get depends on the last gesture you made), which can be interrupted at will by moving the mouse once more. Not only is the number of the permutations infinite, but the piece itself will apparently go on forever (each story repeating) until you choose to quit the program. Steve Subotnick's graphics get a bit tiring after a while, but there are literally hours of fun to be had switching between the texts and creating your own journey through this rich and rewarding musical/textual landscape. Go wiggle.

Archie Shepp

ST LOUIS BLUES
Jazz Magnet JAM 2006
Roswell Rudd & Archie Shepp
LIVE IN NEW YORK
Verve

The New Thing, or at least those who started it, has grown older and slipped quietly into the jazz mainstream. Listening to these two recent offerings from Archie Shepp, it's sometimes hard to believe this is the same guy who was preaching fire and anger thirty-odd years ago - his voice (singing voice, that is) is as rich and rusty as Al Hibbler as he turns in touching versions of old chestnuts like "St. Louis Blues" and "God Bless the Child". On the Jazz Magnet album he's joined by bassist Richard Davis and Sunny Murray on drums, plus "guest star" Leopoldo Fleming on percussion. Fleming adds a few touches of congas here and there, and a very annoying flexatone on Davis' "Total Package" (Davis' bowed work here is the highlight of the album). Murray sounds laid back and far back in the mix, but delivers some nifty brushwork on "Steam" (how many times has Shepp recorded this piece now?) and some loping swing on his own "Et Moi". Shepp's raspy, fluffy tenor is perfect on the ballads, of course. It's a pleasant set of pieces with no great surprises. Lousy cover though, and some annoying typos: who the hell is Billy Holiday?
More or less the same can be said of the set recorded last year at New York's Jazz Standard. Flanked by two New Thing trombonists - Rudd (rip-roaring as ever) and Grachan Moncur III (still sounding lean and sleek) - and backed by a Reggie Workman/Andrew Cyrille rhythm team, Shepp serves up no standards on the menu, only originals (though in a way, pieces such as "Steam" - yes, again - have become classics in their own right). Amiri Baraka puts in an appearance to read his "We Are The Blues", but we're a long way from "Black Dada Nihilismus" (not that Baraka can't still do the business either: witness the NY Art Quartet's 35th Reunion album last year on DIW). Shepp doodles on piano from time to time, but can't resist playing his own bass lines and gets tangled up with Workman, who sounds rather uninspired. On "Ujamma" Moncur sets off on a solo but gives up when Shepp comes in - did they rehearse or just show up and jamma, I wonder? Shepp's "Déja Vu" more or less sums it up: yes, we have heard these guys before, but they're still good, if not exactly burning. New Thing hardly, but Real Thing certainly.

The Residents

ICKY FLIX
East Side Digital ESD 81572 (CD)(DVD)

Supposedly to annoy their fans, the Residents decided to release this DVD video compilation (including four never-before-seen videos and a 17-minute "concentrate" of their mythical unfinished 14-hour film "Vileness Fats") with two possible soundtracks: you can choose the original or the "brand spankin' new" version. The CD, unsuprisingly, offers just the latter, and hardcore Residents completists will probably want it if only for the "Vileness Fats" music, but should be warned that these "new" versions already sound more dated than the originals: they're MIDIfied and mastered to death (presumably to show off your hifi to its best advantage, though pesonally I don't give a damn about 5.1 Surround Sound), and they're mindnumbingly tedious. Go for the DVD instead: not only do you get the original 1976 KKK-plays-Wilson Pickett video of "The Third Reich 'N Roll", Graham Whifler's absurdly inventive "One Minute Movies" and "Hello Skinny" (1980), video versions of the Freak Show CD ROM but also "Just For You", the Residents' sensational take on "We Are The World", a real honest-to-God MTV vomitfest with lead vocals by.. a giant fluoresent toy monkey! My personal favourite, "Songs for Swinging Larvae", with Whifler's amusing and distressing six-minute child kidnap (this was banned everywhere at the time) isn't by the Residents at all, but their Ralph labelmates Renaldo and the Loaf. Some of the material is plain awful (I can't decide which is worse: the new version of "Constantinople" or the video), some inspired (Steve Cerio's hilarious kill-a-commie shooting gallery for "Stars & Stripes Forever"), but it's all pretty weird. Where else can you see Siamese twin wresters fighting themselves to death? There's just about enough here to screw you up for the rest of your life.

COPPER HATS

Pimmon

Freedom From
Stilluppsteypa / TV Pow
WE ARE EVERYONE IN THE ROOM
Erstwhile 016

It's a plain beige envelope on which a photocopied photograph of a small boy (portrait of the artist as a young man?) has been stuck - inside, an unmarked CD is slipped into a folded paper giving some track and artist info much of which is illegible: the paper was apparently pulled from the photocopier in mid-copy.. Slip the CD into your player and enter the world of Pimmon, aka Paul Gough, an Australian laptopper whose few outings so far have all been highly original. "Copper Hats" is too, but avoids the miminal glitchery of his other Mego and Meme releases and piles up layers of sonic information - some of which seems to be sourced in field recordings or percussion sound - into imposing structures which manage, curiously, to sound both vast and claustrophobic at the same time. "Don't Fence Me In" (not, sadly, a cover of the David Byrne song) is a real thriller, as fragments of sound debris from the outside world get sucked into Gough's software and beaten to a bloody pulp. Terrific stuff.
In stark contrast to the handmade cottage-industry feel of Freedom From is the minimal hi-tech packaging of Erstwhile - assembled from live laptop battles recorded in several US cities late last year, the splendidly-titled "We Are Everyone In The Room" is 49 minutes of aural tag-wrestling between expat Icelanders Heimir Björgulfsson, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson (aka Stilluppsteypa) and Chicago's Todd Carter, Brent Gutzeit and Michael Hartman (TV Pow). "Michigan Impossible" sounds more like "traditional" live computer music than the elaborate montage of "Copper Hats", but the trademark clicks, static crackles and low hums are also intercut with samples of electric pianos, passing traffic and what sounds like a kitchen table conversation in Dutch (Stilluppsteypa moved to Amsterdam in 1997 to work with new music technology at STEIM). "For Starters We Have Nothing Conclusive" begins as a grim and grimy funeral march and ends up as a digitized waterfall, while "Where's Your Asian Girlfriend" and "International Starving Artists" return to a more rather arid soundworld. It's debatable whether one actually "enjoys" Erstwhile releases in the accepted sense of the word, but there's certainly enough on this one to keep your ears busy for quite some time. The Icelanders are right too when they advise you not to use headphones: this'll give your woofers (and your downstairs neighbours) a real thrill.

Matching Mole

SMOKE SIGNALS
Cuneiform Rune 150

"Recorded in Europe in 1972" reads the back tray. In fact we start off in either Belgium or France, with Robert Wyatt introducing his band before launching right into "March Ides" with a bravura countdown reminiscent of Charles Mingus' "All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother". (I'll hazard a bet Wyatt was familiar with the Mingus album, just as I'm prepared to wager that his spoken French was a damn sight better than he had the public believe.. Matching Mole is, after all, a pun on "machine molle", the French translation of Soft Machine.) The line-up and much of the featured material reappears on the second (and final) MM studio album "Little Red Record", recorded later that year after extensive European touring: Wyatt on drums and vocals, Phil Miller on guitar, Dave McRae on electric piano and Bill MacCormick on bass. Forget the unnecessary apologies for the quality of the recordings - the sound is as good as the playing. Throughout the set Wyatt seems to be having as much fun with his cymbals as Sunny Murray, all the while leaving McRae and Miller plenty of room to stretch out. With the exception of Wyatt's "Instant Pussy" - not the same piece as "Instant Kitten" on the first eponymous MM album, but featuring his similar demented fuzzed-out vocals - all the pieces are by McRae and Miller, but it's Wyatt's astounding drumming (about which enough has been written already) that provides both rhythmic and textural backbone. The highlight is Miller's "Lything & Gracing", a veritable symphony in twelve minutes moving from absurdly swinging triple time to extended guitar and bass solos - but check out Wyatt's fabulously loose drumming behind MacCormick's agile but meaty bass - and back again. Yes, the drugs were good back then.

Phil Freeman

NEW YORK IS NOW!
The Telegraph Company, Brooklyn NY 212pp. $16.95

One of the best put-downs I can remember was Steve Martin's throwaway line to a heckler: "Yeah, I remember my first beer, too." Without wanting to come across as the Old Man of the Mountains (being only eight years older than author Phil Freeman myself), I venture to suggest he might live to regret some of the in(s)anities he's committed to print in this book. A self-confessed metalhead, Freeman starting writing about free jazz with missionary zeal in Juggernaut, his aim being to persuade Slayer and Marilyn Manson fans to start buying Borbetomagus and Albert Ayler. "The problem with jazz today is this, and only this: in order to survive as a living music, jazz must reach more listeners than it does now. Which means record sales, pure and simple." A noble goal indeed, and one to which all STN readers and writers undoubtedly aspire, but truncated interviews with a handful of local heroes (William Parker, David Ware, Matt Shipp, Joe Morris, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter and Charles Gayle) interspersed with cursory descriptions of their albums and spiced up with a few personal anecdotes of the Vision Festival and some gratuitously nasty attacks on other musicians and journalists is not the way to go about reaching it. One could also bemoan the lack of a decent index, but as Freeman isn't exactly hot on cross-referencing his assertions, it probably wouldn't make much difference. The "Recommended Listening" discography is as farcically one-dimensional as the rest of the book (Morris, Shipp and Ware each get more albums listed than Ornette, Coltrane and the Art Ensemble put together).
Folk who live in and around New York are, of course, used to considering the place as the centre of the universe, but to write a book on free jazz in the United States at the turn of the 21st century without mentioning the scenes in Boston and especially Chicago is parochial in the extreme. Just as distressing is Freeman's dismissal of John Zorn (and with him, the Downtown scene that has done as much for free jazz as the Vision Festival over recent years). Describing Zorn as someone who "cannot bring himself to work respectfully within a tradition" would seem to indicate that Freeman has heard neither The Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet's "Voodoo" nor "News For Lulu", to say nothing of Zorn's work with John Patton. Undaunted by his ignorance, though, Freeman goes further: "He [Zorn]'s not a jazz musician. He undermines any tradition or style to which he turns his hand." This, ironically, might be a statement Zorn could concur with, though Freeman's venomous description of him as a "huckster" seems to make it clear it's intended as an insult. While grudgingly admitting Zorn's role in the establishment of the Knitting Factory as a venue of international repute, Freeman chooses not to give him any credit for raising the profile of Tonic as a club space, and elsewhere writes of the "destructive umbrella of Zorn and the various artists he's sponsored." Perhaps he should have asked Wadada Leo Smith and Milford Graves for their opinions. I wonder if he broached the subject of Zorn with William Parker. He manages to mention "Harras", Zorn's 1995 outing with Parker and Derek Bailey, another musician who Freeman has evidently completely misunderstood. "His [Bailey's] music can seem autistic to a first-time listener. Only when collaborators attempt to drag him out of his self-imposed exile does any truly exciting music result." (Freeman goes on to cite Bailey's albums with Keiji Haino and Ruins, both ironically masterminded by Zorn). Derek Bailey needs no dragging out of any exile: he's one of the most available and enthusiastic collaborators on the planet. As far as that "first-time listener" goes, I wonder who Freeman could be referring to - I think I could hazard a guess.
We're all entitled to our personal preferences, of course - and good passionate journalism necessarily involves a healthy dose of subjectivity - but Freeman's description of Ornette Coleman's seminal "Free Jazz" album as "interesting for a time, but overall a novelty and little more" certainly raised my eyebrows. In his glorification of Matt Shipp, a woolly, cliché-ridden and uninformative chapter, Freeman evidently feels the need to compare him with Cecil Taylor, but the only way he can find to do it is by attacking the latter: "Taylor's compositions fail to achieve forward motion at all, and give the impression of treading water." Remarks like this seem to beggar belief - has Freeman actually ever listened to a Cecil Taylor album? Holy shit, if you're so minded you can criticise Taylor for all manner of things, but surely lacking forward motion isn't one of them!
Other breathtaking examples of Freeman falling in love with the sound of his own pen: "Miles Davis quite often turns high notes into awkward squeaks". "Throughout the [Other Directions In Music] album, there is never a unison melody line stated by the two horn players; rather they continually exchange short phrases and runs." ["Soul Search"] provides a glimpse of yet another side of Morris, closely related to the music made by the Quartet but, in its own way, very different." Buried in the mud of such amusingly meaningless drivel are some real pearls of knowledge, though: we learn that Joe Morris is "clearly informed by, if not indebted to... the angular, excoriating work of the late 1970s British post-punk quartet Gang Of Four." If you're out there reading Joe, please email us and confirm you're a Gang Of Four fan (I'll be delighted if it's true). Freeman's final chapter tells the story of the recording sessions for Ware's "Corridors and Parallels", to which he was apparently invited as a a kind of groupie (he makes a special point of telling us how he called Shipp and Ware to discuss the sessions). Surprised at seeing Shipp using a Korg synthesizer, the author describes their new music as "like a jazz version of a piece by ambient-electronic titans The Orb. [..] I was immediately reminded of [..] Alvin Lucier, LaMonte Young, or soundtracks to mid-1980s films by John Carpenter, like "Christine" and "Escape From New York."
I for one can't wait to hear a David Ware quartet that sounds like LaMonte Young and John Carpenter (though I'll pass on The Orb though, if you don't mind).
Freeman is evidently so besotted with his heroes that he totally fails to see the glaring irony of many of his pronouncements. His "Great Man Theory" - the publishers obviously thought this was so good they chose to feature it on the press-blurb - which seeks to define jazz history (amongst other things) as being dominated by "singular, iconic figures who stand against the tide and become magnets for Destiny", though intended as a broadside aimed at Ken Burns (as if another one was needed), is presumably to be taken tongue-in-cheek, given Freeman's effusive and unmitigated praise and admiration for his Great Men Parker, Shipp and Ware. Along with Burns, Wynton Marsalis also gets a panning (surprise). I'm now rather fed up of self-righteous sniping at Marsalis: he's perfectly capable of shooting himself in the foot as it is. If Cecil Taylor wants to have a go at him for having "no technique" (see STN#19 - rather difficult to swallow that, especially since CT goes on to praise James Carter to the skies, but never mind), I guess he has his reasons; Freeman seems to be going for Wynton's jugular merely as a way of scoring cool points with his heroes. But wait, check this out, on page 97: "Campbell is very much rooted in the tradition. Indeed, it's his hard-bop foundation which allows him to go as far out as he does. He remembers where he started, so he can always go back." For "Campbell" read "Marsalis": the jaw-dropping irony is simply hilarious.
"The life of a music critic is a tough one, economically speaking.." wails the author on page 164. Too true, Phil (ask any Signal To Noise writer), but you're not likely to make friends and influence your peers and potential employers by belting them in the teeth. A book which purports to discuss the relevance and artistic merit of free jazz in New York 2001 descends into abject ranting against critics, including the NY Times' Ben Ratliff ("snide undertone") and Down Beat's Howard Mandel, here accused of "energetically fellating" (!!) Marsalis. Freeman describes Gary Giddins' enthusing about Satchmo as "nearly enough to make me projectile-vomit", but later down the same page complains about "the virulent anti-intellectualism that characterizes 90 percent of discourse on any subject in contemporary America," before complaining that rock journalists have to "treat rock bands with the respect commonly afforded kings, rather than what they deserve, which is more often than not a two-by-four in the chops." However, we're told, "rock critics, according to Shipp, grasp the music more quickly, in all its depth." Hiding behind the quotation from his hero one senses a smug justification of the author's own stance, and a virulently anti-intellectual one at that. Quite what Matthew Shipp thought was to be gained by allowing his (somewhat lukewarm) endorsement of the book to be printed on the back cover is beyond me.

Alan Licht & Tamio Shiraishi

OPEN FOR KEVIN DRUMM
Freedom From
Alan Licht
PLAYS WELL
Crank Automotive CAR09

In the long and fascinating correspondence with Bruce Russell that formed the liner notes of his "The Evan Dando Of Noise", guitarist Alan Licht wrote: "I guess I don't make a big distinction between a harmonious, tonality, consonance, rhythm view of the universe as rationally ordered and the free noise/chaos theory. Order is a subset of chaos." The cassette-only release on Freedom From of his 1999 Tonic set with Tamio Shiraishi (ex-Fushitsusha) is another chaotic subset of Licht's universe, too far-out for pop but too noisy for improv, a twenty-odd minute snarl of grainy distortion with Shiraishi's nails-on-chalkboard sax and occasional rumblings in Japanese recalling earlier editions of Rudolph Grey's Blue Humans (arguably the first band to stake a claim to the uninhabited territory between No-Wave rock and free jazz, and significantly the group where Licht cut his teeth). Fans of free noise, Sonic Youth-style power improv, Corpus Hermeticum and Licht completists will love it.
Thumbing his nose at the small, exclusive world of improv/noise purists, the back tray of the "Plays Well" CD shows Licht product sandwiched between Alabama 3 and the Alan Parsons Project in the bins of a Japanese record store (a crazy idea of alphabetical order, but never mind), as if to say "whether I want it this way or not this is the company I keep." "Remington Khan", a live recording made at NYU in 1997, is a 37-minute stream-of-consciousness free flowing solo whose ten last minutes biodegrade into a fuzzy noisefest. It's an infuriatingly fascinating ride, recalling Papa Garcia as much as Licht's occasional playing partners Loren Connors and Jim O'Rourke, though the fact that it's played against a backdrop of a constantly pulsing C - a kind of oblique iambic homage to Terry Riley - situates the whole piece in the context of the (early) minimalism the guitarist is so evidently fond of. Licht takes pop and rock guitar stylings and subjects them to a motivic workout even Evan Parker would be proud of - make no mistake: this is improvised music, as much as a Derek Bailey album is, with the difference that Licht not only makes no attempt to avoid the idiomatic, but actively revels in it. Alan Licht plays!
"Well" is one of Don Van Vliet's a cappella poems from "Trout Mask Replica", an album that arguably brought the worlds of pop and free closer together than they had been at any time before (and as such a logical precursor of Rudolph Grey's Blue Humans projects, and hence Licht's own aesthetic). Encyclopaedic as his knowledge of pop music is, I wonder, back when he recorded this in 1995, if by chance Licht was already familiar with the version of Beefheart's "Orange Claw Hammer" (with Zappa jamming along on guitar) that finally found its way onto the Revenant "Grow Fins" boxset. Whether he was or not is rather academic: either by curious coincidence or conscious homage, he does the same thing here - in playing along behind Beefheart's original recording (copyright be damned!), Licht teases this literary equivalent of a free jazz solo into the structure of a straight pop song worthy of the Feelies. Four minutes in, just when you think you've got the concept sussed (Alan Licht Plays "Well"!), the track starts sliding once again into noisy entropy before without warning it CUTS to.. Donna Summer! It's a four-bar loop from the bridge of "Dim All The Lights", complete with archetypal disco-queen vocals, over which Licht layers sustained (e-bow?) guitar wails. Another loop follows three minutes later, and another three minutes after that, by which time the tension is terrific - you've nearly forgotten the disco source: this could almost be Neu! Or Rhys Chatham - so much so that when the original song kicks in at 16'00" the audience reaction (this was recorded live at Transmissions in July 2000) is positively ecstatic. Licht lets the song play all the way through, an exercise in pop musicology, complete with its octave skipping basslines, 8+8+8+8+8+8+8+8 bar bridge, cheesy half-tempo ballad breaks and all the other standard trappings of disco. It's as clear and classical as a Warhol silkscreen of a Campbell's soup can (and a reminder that Pop Art is not only Art but also Pop), until Licht's nasty, gritty guitar comes back in to soil the canvas - we go from Warhol to Rauschenberg in twenty seconds. As the Transmissions set sputters to a close, Licht fades us back to 1995 for a second version of "Well", which he sings himself this time over a minimal organ drone eerily reminiscent of Nico's harmonium, as a reminder of how far we've come on this thought-provoking and highly enjoyable journey. Alan Licht plays well!

Hubbub

UB/ABU
For4Ears CD 1241

Hubbub is a Paris-based quintet featuring Jean-Luc Guionnet and Bertrand Denzler on saxophones, Jean-Sébastien Mariage on guitar, Frédéric Blondy on piano and Edward Perraud on percussion. In the small world that is improvised music in the French capital (or anywhere else you care to mention), collaborative ventures abound: Swiss-born Denzler and Mariage both play in Chamaleo Vulgaris, Guionnet and Perraud have a long-standing duo act, Calx (and have a couple of releases due on Cadence later this year), and pianist Fred Blondy plays in various duos and trios with everyone. Hubbub is a project for long attention spans - the two pieces that make up this album last respectively 26 and 28 minutes, and each takes its time to unfold. Perraud's use of bowed and scraped cymbals and Mariage's atmospheric guitar thread in and out of the texture, while the saxophonists lay down long lines and follow them into music that perhaps has more in common with contemporary classical writing - especially the musique spectrale of Grisey and Murail - than it does with the hiccups and splatters of your "standard" improv sound (that said, track two really gets rocking after ten minutes or so). It's not hard to listen to, but you have to pay attention. If there are any palm-readers out there, maybe they'd like to enlighten me on the fortunes of the person whose hand was photographed for the album cover - gazing into my own crystal ball, I foresee a long and artistically fruitful future for all concerned.

Lionel Marchetti / Voice Crack / Jérôme Noetinger

DOUBLE WASH
Grob 318

Maybe it's just the album cover, maybe it's the reverb, but there's a distinctly outdoor feel to this latest offering from Alpine explorers Noetinger, Marchetti (microphones, speakers, tape recorders) and Voice Crack's Norbert Möslang and Andy Guhl (as ever on "cracked everyday electronics"). It's practically impossible to tell just from listening what "instruments" they're actually playing, but the resulting rich dish of crackles, whirrs, squeaks, loops and glitches is delicious. (Difficult listening? Nonsense.) Noetinger is best known - at least outside France - for his mini-CD "Cinema For The Ear" series, and it's tempting to try and approach "Double Wash" with a child's imagination and sense of wonder (I say this because my two-year old seems really fond of the album). If you're just starting in on electroacoustic improv, this is a good place to begin from; seasoned observers of Voice Crack and Metamkine won't be disappointed with their latest outing either.

SONGS FROM A ROOM
SIMPLE JOSEPH
THIRTY-MINUTE RAVEN

0Red
SONGS FROM A ROOM
Rectangle International REC BC2
Noël Akchoté
SIMPLE JOSEPH
Rectangle International REC AM2
David Grubbs
THIRTY-MINUTE RAVEN
Rectangle International REC AC2

Last year's "Felk", the debut album from Olivier Lambin (aka Red), was a hard act to follow. I nominated it as my Album Of The Year for the Wire magazine without a moment's hesitation: its combination of fragile boozed-out voice, broken lo-fi home recording and oddball electronica was intensely moving, and its two cover versions - Hank Williams' "I Saw The Light" and Talking Heads' "Road To Nowhere" - were highly original reworkings. It was announced at the time in Rectangle's promo material that Lambin had picked up a copy of Leonard Cohen's "Songs from a Room" at a fleamarket somewhere, and here, one year later, is his version of that album in its entirety. In the intervening months, Lambin has been quite busy touring and the desperate who-gives-a-damn-if-anyone's-out-there-listening edge to his voice has been replaced by a more assured delivery - in short, he's now trying to sound like Red. "Songs" seeks to revisit the cracked computer world of "Felk" and play the same cards: "The Partisan" tries to reinsert the motoric pulse of "I Saw The Light" but it just doesn't groove the same way in compound triple time. The combination of ravaged vocals and strange sounds inevitably brings Tom Waits to mind (Red includes several Waits songs in his live set), but his reading of "Story of Isaac" goes beyond influence and homage and verges on carbon-copy plagiarism - not helped perhaps by a sample of Wait's "Johnsburg, Illinois". It also seems that the electronics which were an integral part of the weirdness of "Felk" have now become little more than a Red trademark: the gritty distortion behind "The Old Revolution" and the tweets and bleeps throughout "You Know Who I Am" both sound strangely gratuitous, as if there just to disguise rather ordinary readings of an unexceptional songs. I should temper these comments with the admission that Cohen has never been my favourite songwriter, but his deceptively simple harmonic structures and foursquare metrics do allow ample room for intelligent and diverse reworking: the compilation album "I'm Your Fan" originally released by the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles (and reissued by Columbia in 1991) contains some fabulous covers by the likes of James, Lloyd Cole, Nick Cave and John Cale and still sounds fresh a decade on. Similarly, I confidently expect to be listening to "Felk" in 2011, but "Songs from a Room" may by then have found its way to a fleamarket.. To be recycled by the next generation, perhaps.
In contrast, Rectangle head honcho Noël Akchoté's "Simple Joseph" doesn't try to follow its predecessor "Alike Joseph" into bleak grainy amp noise. The ultra-delicate pulsings of "101" and immobile sine/dronescapes of "202" and "303" seem closer to the Zen purity of recent Japanese improvisors (Sachiko M, Toshi Nakamura) than to the earlier album's Sonic Youth fuzz. Akchoté's been hanging out with David Grubbs quite a bit these last few years, and the final "404", with its layered acoustic guitar white-note clusters, wouldn't be out of place on a new Grubbs album. I suspect if "Simple Joseph" were released on a more culty (at least this year) label like Erstwhile this might attract more attention than its modest black and white spotted cardboard cover seems to demand (then again, Akchoté and Rollet have always pursued their own agenda with Rectangle, their only criteria for releasing something being "we like it..").
Talking of new Grubbs albums.. here comes "Thirty-Minute Raven", a studio reworking of a piece Grubbs recently performed at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The ever-faithful John McEntire provides percussion, and Grubbs (guitar, synth and computer) is joined by the Rectangle stablemates who guested on last year's Drag City album "The Spectrum Between", namely Akchoté, Quentin Rollet on alto sax and Charlie O. on organ. Its insistent computerized pulses and lush scoring have more in common with Gastr Del Sol's final album "Camofleur" than with the balladry of Grubbs' first Rectangle outing "The Coxcomb", but also seem to indicate that Grubbs is intent on marking out his own small plot of land in the backwoods of American minimalism. Even if Akchoté and O's brief cameo appearance throws in some twisted harmonies, McEntire's drumming and Grubbs' Zen country guitar are reassuringly the same as ever. It probably didn't take them very long to do, but it's fresh and summery and, if you can take the non-stop pulses, very enjoyable.

Copyright 2001 by Paris Transatlantic