September News 2001 New Releases reviewed by Dan Warburton: The Circle Trio Joachim Gies Daevid Allen The Angels of Light Axel Dörner / Kevin Drumm Vinny Golia Chris Jonas' The Sun Spits Cherries Mr Dorgon Un Drame Musical Instantané The Chicago Underground Quartet Taku Sugimoto Evan Parker / Richard Nunn Cornelius Cardew THE ENTIRE MUSICAL WORK OF MARCEL DUCHAMP Last Month More September Releases Next Month

The Circle Trio

LIVE AT THE MERIDIAN
Sparkling Beatnik SBR 0024
The_Space_Between
THE_SPACE_BETWEEN
482 Music 482-1007

Proof, if any were needed, that free improvisation doesn't necessarily have to be a non-stop barrage of splats, pops, fizzes and other various "extended techniques", these albums recorded live in the Bay Area feature deep listening accordionist Pauline Oliveros in two of her current projects: the Circle Trio also features the magnificent violin playing of India Cooke and the vocal wizardry of Karolyn Van Putten, while The_Space_Between includes Philip Gelb on shakuhachi, Dana Reason on piano and Barre Phillips on bass. The concentration during the 53-minute Meridian Gallery set is so intense that not even a cellphone ringing out can distract the musicians. The strong, earthy lyricism of Cooke's violin and Van Putten's passionate singing are underpinned by Oliveros' sustained tones to produce what can only be described as 21st century pan-global folk music, music that speaks loud and clear to anyone on the planet. It's absolutely breathtaking and if you choose not to buy it, it's your problem.
The quartet set recorded in Berkeley in September 1998 (listen carefully and you can hear insect nightlife in the trees) is a little punchier, and perhaps a tad on the long side, though it's mean to quibble when the playing is as fine as this. "The Space Between" was originally the title of a 29 minute piece on Philip Gelb's "between/waves" album on Sparkling Beatnik (1999, also featuring Oliveros and Reason). Guesting on bass, Barre Phillips - on superb form throughout - brings weight and authority to the proceedings. Shakuhachi and accordion blend beautifully to counterpoint Reason's choppy piano preparations and Phillips' spiky col legno work - it's supple, pointillistic and fast-moving but has no need to resort to frenzied macho spluttering. Top models these days regularly take out insurance as a precaution on certain prominent parts of their bodies.. I sincerely hope Pauline Oliveros has done likewise for her ears: they're absolutely priceless.

WHISPERING BLUE

Joachim Gies

Leo Lab CD 074

Berlin-based saxophonist/composer Joachim Gies turns in his fifth album for Leo, a discreet and generally meditative solo exploration of his "new playing techniques" (though, contrary to what his liner notes might have you believe, quarter-tones, circular breathing, slap-tonguing and multiphonics have been part and parcel of free jazz and improvised music since the 1960s). Avoiding the blood'n'guts approach of Scott Rosenberg, the tortured introspection of Michel Doneda and the endless shimmering crystal perfection of Evan Parker, much of "Whispering Blue" (espcially the title track) sounds like a set of composed études. Sticking a mute down the bell of the sax allows Gies to coax out some particularly tasty multiphonics, while "In The Deep" (sadly the only bass clarinet offering) explores the plethora of tiny noises that go to make up the instrument's sound - the opening and closing of valves, the click of keys, the fringes of the overtone spectrum fraying as the note dies away. Despite moments of great beauty (which display clear mastery of the instruments), the album as a whole seems to scatter in different directions rather than grab the attention. The four "Aus der Ferne" pieces (which add pre-recorded material) are less impressive, precisely because they're less intimate; similarly on "Galeforce" Gies plays his tenor with a trombone mouthpiece but the resulting three minutes seem fluffy and don't somehow display the same finesse as the other pieces. I look forward to more whispering and less galeforce next time round.

Daevid Allen

Daevid's U Of Errors 2: e2 x 10 = tenure
InnerSPACE 7715

"If you are changing.. how do you know who you are?" sings the original Pataphysical Teapot himself, Daevid Allen, on this, his "sophomore" album with his San Francisco-based University Of Errors (their first, "Money Doesn't Make It" was apparently recorded in just 24 hours in an all-night jam session in late 1998; this one apparently took them a week). Like certain leafy districts of San Francisco, Allen has always made a point of not changing, and still sounds as stoned immaculate as on his early mythic outings with Soft Machine and Gong. Many of his faculty members have been recruited from the Mushroom organisation, including drummer Patrick O'Hearn (billed as Pat Thomas: not to be confused with the Engish keyboard improvisor), trying bravely to do his best Jaki Leibezeit impression, despite a barrage of rather outdated reverb effects. Though there are some effective and spooky vocal treatments on "Ocean Motha", the album as a whole sounds weighed down with guitars, which, in conjunction with somewhat unimaginative material (most of the tracks are one or two-chord jams, happily stuck in Allen's beloved Lydian mode) leaves the listener feeling as worn out as Allen's voice by the time it's all over. The central span of songs drifts into a weird adaptation of lines from W.B. Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innesfree", delivered by Allen in a bizarre accent dredged up from somewhere in the middle of the Irish Sea (part Welsh, part Irish, part Scottish), after which the gleeful trash of "Pinky's Party Song" with its Frippy guitars sounds somewhat forced. This is Allen's first US band since New York Gong in 1979, but compared to the knockout punch of their album "About Time" (driven on by the demonic rhythm section of Bill Laswell and Fred Maher), the sophomores at the U of Errors have a lot of credit hours to do if they ever intend to graduate. Then again, as Prof. Allen sings, "One man's truth is another man's lie."

The Angels of Light

HOW I LOVED YOU
Young God YG16

Whatever happened to those nasty, antisocial post-Industrial college students (like me) who skulked around in the mid 1980s with Swans tapes in their Walkmans? Well, they probably graduated, settled down, got married and stashed their Swans albums in a dusty corner of the attic (face it, "Raping A Slave" isn't the thing to put on if you're inviting your boss and his wife round for dinner..). Happily, the Swans' figurehead Michael Gira has also grown older with you, and the black and white cover photographs that adorn "How I Loved You" (Gira's parents?) are less, shall we say, striking than the bared teeth of "Filth". Look a little closer at the lyrics, however, and the same powerful images are still there (lines like "put your dirty white hands inside me" and "suck the hatred from my mouth" are vintage Gira), though the lush instrumentation - a veritable lasagne of guitars, topped off with castanets, glockenspiels and breathy female backing vocals - cushions the blow somewhat. Swans music was always oppressively, even terrifyingly, slow, and while none of the ten tracks on offer here could be described as a disco stomper, the torpid atmosphere seems, at first listening, more bearable. But as "New City In The Future" emerges from its haze of Farfisas and Casios (like Philip Glass's "North Star" heard underwater), Gira curling his mouth round the word "here" with both intensity and detachment, the perfect embodiment of "polished white stone, bruised feet and shattered bone", the same monumental power that characterized his early work becomes increasingly evident. It ends up as a kind of slow-motion spaghetti-Western version of Sonic Youth's "Death Valley 69", Bliss Blood (or is it Siobhan Duffy?) playing Lydia Lunch on downers to Gira's Thurston. "My Suicide", with its in yer face vocal and guitar mix, sounds curiously overproduced coming right after, but this is probably deliberate. Just as listening to a Swans album from start to finish leaves you feeling worn out and in need of a good bath, "How I Loved You" induces the same cumulative queasiness. So, if you're angling for a promotion by inviting the boss round for supper, you might want to leave this one off the evening's playlist too. Try it when he's gone home, about 3am, with a glass of good bourbon.

Axel Dörner / Kevin Drumm

Erstwhile 015

Music rarely gets as extreme as this. For a couple of years, Jon Abbey's Erstwhile label has been putting out the cutting edge of electro-acoustic improv, beautifully recorded and elegantly packaged, but I heard even he had difficulty at times working out whether these extraordinary sounds were made by trumpeter Dörner or table guitarist Drumm. Perfectly in line with the Erstwhile post-AMM aesthetic ("you've never heard instruments sound like this"), it was only a matter of time before Dörner popped up on the label. As Keith Rowe observed in a recent interview, "how could a trumpet player break through into something new? Suddenly, since Dörner, they've done it!" The folks in the bunker at IRCAM in Paris spend about a million dollars a year developing software gadgetry and these two blow them out of the water with a trumpet and an electric guitar.. That said, if you're thinking of putting this disc on while you enjoy a quiet candlelit dinner, you're in for serious stomach illness. Instead, sneak it into an Eminem jewel box and screw up your kids forever. Come to think of it, as a youngster (a sick one at that) I used to amuse myself catching wasps and slowly half-drowning them in empty jam jars before ceremonially flushing them down the toilet. Now I know what it sounded like for the wasp.

Vinny Golia

CLARIENT
Meniscus MNSCS 008

"I wound up with myself and the B flat clarinet standing in a room alone, and having a lot of fun", writes Vinny Golia in the notes. A lot of improv albums these days, especially solo projects - which can all too easily end up as immaculately curated exhibitions of the latest "extended techniques" - don't sound like they're having much fun at all. At the risk of making "Clarient" (dyslexics beware) sound more conventional than it is, Vinny Golia is very good at story telling (and if you scoff at that for being old hat, that's your problem), building each extended solo block by block with a sense of architecture more normally associated today with jazz than improvised music (genres be damned, it's all music..). Along the way, if he comes across a multiphonic, he stops to inspect it as attentively as John Butcher would, sometimes - not always - allowing it to change his itinerary and take the music along a different path. The clarinet, unlike the saxophone, comes loaded with cultural references from outside jazz, namely klezmer and classical music - the plaintive call and response passages sent me back to Messiaen's "Abîme des oiseaux", and I suspect Golia, like Michel Portal before him, could give a pretty fine reading of Boulez's "Domaines" if he put his mind to it. The only complaint is, as ever, album length (67 minutes), though far be it from me to suggest which of these nine rich and satisfying improvisations could or should be left out.

Chris Jonas' The Sun Spits Cherries

THE VERMILION
Hopscotch HOP 8

For his second album with The Sun Spits Cherries, soprano saxophonist Chris Jonas crossed the street in Brooklyn and enlisted the services of pianist Myra Melford to add to the TSSC's original line-up (Jonas, Joe Fiedler and Chris Washburne on trombones, Andrew Barker on percussion). Good move. Melford is consistently superb throughout, building both heroic CT-style solos and brief, delicate interludes from tiny clear melodic cells (she also studiously avoids drowning everything with sustain pedal, unlike far too many pianists). Jonas' ensemble sound is tight and dry, almost military (on "Portico Line"), and he's evidently assimilated the best qualities of two of the musicians he's worked with: Anthony Braxton (flexibility and a sense of surprise in compositional structure) and Cecil Taylor (clear, consistent and insistent presentation of a defined pitch universe). The music, without ever swinging, propels itself forward by the accretion of melodic and rhythmic building blocks, in a manner closer to contemporary classical music than to jazz (whatever "jazz" means these days): the crystalline serialism of late Stravinsky haunts the intricate canons of "Prosperity" and the chorales of "Betta", while the wilder passages ("Ottoman", with its athletic pianism and wailing trombones) recall Xenakis' "Eonta" (with better pitches). Jonas neither hogs centrestage nor overdoes the extended techniques, but leaves plenty of room for the music to develop. Consistent, thought-provoking and totally satisfying.

Mr Dorgon

ERECTION + WRECKAGE
Jumbo Recordings

Mr Dorgon, aka ex-Dim Sum Clip Job saxophonist Gordon Knauer, seems to be as well known for his practical jokes as for his music (this is the guy who hilariously claimed his duo recording with William Parker was originally issued in 1936 "when the players had a break from touring with Sidney Bechet"). I suppose "Erection + Wreckage" can either be taken at face value as a serious artistic statement or as some kind of joke at the expense of the so-called serious music press and especially the poor buggers who buy the album. Assuming the former hypothesis to be true, you could argue that tracks 5 to 13, where Knauer plays very slowly through a set of well-known Christmas carols, in some way reference the origins of jazz in African-American church music. You might also mention that musicians as diverse as Monk and Van Morrison have had a go at recording hymn tunes. Or perhaps his (deliberately?) amateurish sax playing is to be taken as a meaningful questioning of the value of technique - so what if John Coltrane had better saxophone technique than your ten-year-old kid.. does that make his music intrinsically better? Is track four of this disc - where Dorgon seems to be jamming along with an entire tropical rainforest - a reference to the emerging trend of environmental field recordings of improvised music, or a sly pun on the meaning of "urban jungle" (what the heck were all these insects doing in New York, anyway?)? Is track 14's thumb piano a witty reminder of American minimalism's African origins? Is the final track (eleven minutes of regular banging on a conga drum recorded in someone's apartment) a disguised homage to LaMonte Young's "X for Henry Flynt"?
Much as I like the extreme high register clarinet squeals of tracks 15 to 28 (the longest just over two and a half minutes), and the rather plaintive piece with the insects, the carols and the conga track - called "Very Stoned" by the way, and it sure sounds it - are pretty uninteresting unless one chooses to ascribe some sort of extra-musical meaning to them. So, is Dorgon just simply - if you'll pardon my French - fucking about? I leave it up to you to decide - I can afford to laugh, because I didn't pay for my copy.

Un Drame Musical Instantané

TROP D'ADRENALINE NUIT
GRRR 2024

Though it's probably of no interest to you whatsoever, yesterday I was prevailed upon by a friend to go and see Jean Eustache's "La Maman et La Putain", supposedly one of the French cinema's all-time classic movies, a 1973 black and white yawn that drags on for three hours and forty minutes, basically the story of a guy who spends all his time trying to handle two girlfriends, both of whom consume phenomenal amounts of whisky and smoke innumerable cigarettes. It was mindnumbingly boring - if only because it had aged so badly. Amazing to think then that barely four years later, Jean-Jacques Birgé, Bernard Vitet and Francis Gorgé went into a studio to record "Trop d'Adrenaline Nuit", now finally reissued (after being unavailable, incredibly, for 15 years) and stunningly remastered. All three provided percussion, in addition to which Birgé played ARP2600 synth and flutes, while Vitet, best known as a trumpeter, also had a go at sax and violins (to quote David Byrne) and Gorgé (man)handled guitars. Quite apart from their Braxtonian multi-instrumental virtuosity, the striking thing about DMI was their willingness to incorporate extra-musical elements: Birgé would sneak into cinemas and record film dialogue (I hope to God he never tried "La Maman et La Putain"), recite texts of his choosing (here extracts from a book by filmmaker Jean Vigo), the radio would be left on during recording sessions (the hitherto unreleased fourth track here "Sancta Papaverina" actually features.. the Pope!), and the whole resulting joyous pot-pourri would be cranked to saturation level. Too much adrenalin, all right. Don't worry if your French is a bit rusty - these guys are speaking a whole new language and words are just one part of it; they belong right up there with the classic weirdos of French underground music - Mahogany Brain, Jac Berrocal, Jean-François Pauvros and the mythic trio Axolotl. As the French say, "Ca n'a pas pris une ride" (literally, not a wrinkle in sight, meaning it's just as fresh now as it was in 77); some albums - Braxton's "For Alto", Chadbourne's early Parachute duo with Polly Bradfield, Zorn's "Classic Guide To Strategy" - just step right out of time, and this is definitely one of them. If that cravat-sporting gigolo brat in "La Maman et La Putain" had been listening to shit like this instead of Edith Piaf and Deep Purple, you would have had a real cult film..

The Chicago Underground Quartet

THE CHICAGO UNDERGROUND QUARTET
Thrill Jockey Thrill093

They're not really underground anymore, to be honest. Sucked into the slipstream of the Tortoise phenomenon, cornettist Rob Mazurek's (and guitarist Jeff Parker's) various Chicago Underground projects have been stockpiling rave reviews for more than three years now. After the Duo, Trio and Orchestra, here's the CU Quartet, Mazurek and Parker joined by Chad Taylor on drums and Noel Kupersmith on bass, and to my mind it's their most satisfying outing so far. Satisfying, but also perplexing - only three of the nine tracks pass the five minute mark, and almost all seem to end too soon, as if the listener is invited to imagine how they might have developed had the master fader not been dragged down. Not averse to incorporating new technology - there are good doses of ProTools mixology and effects throughout - the group has produced a kind of virtual jazz, a near-perfect studio artefact that makes no attempt to hide the technology underpinning the recording process. "Virtual" is not a put-down: this music, unlike certain stretches of the last Isotope 217 album, isn't cold, but it's definitely cool (in both senses of the word - poised and calculated, but also surprising and - if you'll forgive the word - groovy). Check out the vibraphone work, for example. Long a mainstay of the Tortoise/Isotope sound, vibes operate as a distinctly cool, spacy signifier in jazz and film music - think not only MJQ, but also Teddy Charles' chilling chords behind the ultra-tense "Nature Boy" as recorded by Miles and Mingus in 1955, or Bobby Hutcherson's fluid accompaniment on Dolphy's "Out To Lunch". Dolphy hit the nail on the head when he said: "Pianos seem to control you; [Bobby's] vibes seem to open you up.." - Mazurek and Parker understand this perfectly: the space scored into the CUQ's arrangements signifies openness, i.e. the possibility of open-ended listening, multiple perspectives, detachment (I hesitate to say irony for fear it be confused with cynicism: cynical these boys are not), virtuality.
"Tunnel Chrome" alternates Glassy guitar arpeggios with glassy vibes (there's no theme as such), Mazurek's digitally squeezed horn entering past the track's halfway mark. End of cornet solo, end of track. "Four in the Evening" is a tiny and utterly delicious harmon-mute ballad, with Parker's guitar and Taylor's brushes sloping off in different directions before the piece vanishes into thin air like a wisp of smoke after barely one and a half minutes. "A Re-occuring Dream" puts Parker's multi-tracked and at times Marc Ribotesque guitar upfront, while Mazurek etches delicate Don Cherry-like swoops in the background. (Cherry indeed seems to be a model not only for Mazurek's cornet style, but also for much of the latterday Chicago attitude: as the first to prove that free jazz didn't have to be non-stop revolutionary preaching but could also be innocent, light, fresh and fun, Cherry would I suspect feel perfectly at home in today's Chicago scene.) "Welcome", with its folk-inflected melodies, seems to invite comparison with Sonny Sharrock's blistering reprise of "Bialero" on 1969's "Black Woman", except something has shifted - Parker wisely makes no attempt to emulate Sharrock's nasty, scratchy edge, and the Taylor/Kupersmith rhythm section is delightfully supple, even floppy, in comparison with Milford Graves and Sirone thirty years back in time. "Three in the Morning" a long, loping Cherryesque head, emerges out of a haze of forwards/backwards guitar lines, and features some splendid bass work from Kupersmith before slipping in the surprise up-a-semitone shift beloved of pop songs and then.. fading out! "Total Recovery" brings in the electronic percussion but uses it on that most basic and primal of African rhythms, the three against four, while Parker inserts some deft finger-picking that wouldn't be out of place in a studio session in Bamako. "Sink, Charge, Fixture" returns to the looser rhythmics of free jazz, sounding like a multiple introduction to a track that never arrives. Instead the vibes return for "Wo ist der Kuchen, Meine Frau", another spaced-out modal head interspersed not with solos as such but atmospheres, colourings (Taylor is superb here). The final "Nostalgia" could almost pass for a 1960s Wayne Shorter ballad, apart from a few strange digital growls and loops buried back in the mix, but things get decidedly bizarre after one and a half minutes. The theme returns, but so does the craziness, as if the music (or the musicians) can't or won't decide which way it should go. It eventually goes nowhere, ending on a strange repeating bleep that stops abruptly after thirty seconds. A fascinating end to a fascinating album.

TAKU SUGIMOTO

ITALIA
A Bruit Secret 01
TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA
NO-INPUT MIXING BOARD
A Bruit Secret 02
AXEL DÖRNER
TRUMPET
A Bruit Secret 03

Recent years have seen a proliferation of small bijou labels - Erstwhile, Grob, Meniscus, Fringes -devoted to the more user-unfriendly regions of contemporary improvised music. Metz-based musician/journalist Michel Henritzi's A Bruit Secret ("secret noise") imprint is an austere project - all white labels, minimal information - which aims to document solo improvisations from today's leading practitioners. For these releases, he couldn't have picked three more cutting edge players: over the past five years Japan's Taku Sugimoto has been subtly redefining guitar music, moving towards a world of tiny, perfect gesture, a music closer in feel to Feldman and late Cage than to titanic noisemongers such as Caspar Brötzmann and Thurston Moore. His friend and frequent collaborator Toshi Nakamura "plays" a mixing board whose output is fed back to the input, the resulting feedback-generated music building upon itself like coral into suprisingly diverse forms - Nakamura's work with Sachiko M, Keith Rowe (on Erstwhile) and Bruno Meillier (Siphono) has been highly acclaimed. Much has also been written about Berlin-based trumpeter Axel Dörner recently - not content with being a highly proficient free jazz player (when he wants to be), he's also a composer worthy of attention - his contributions to the Chris Burn Ensemble's "Navigations" (Acta 12) and the Zeitkratzer album "Xtensions" (ZKR 9903) are well worth checking out - but it's thanks to his work as an innovator in trumpet techniques that he's best known.
Taku Sugimoto's "Italia" groups together three live recordings, two from Milan, one from Bologna, from concerts organised by Giuseppe Ielasi (one wonders why he didn't release them itself on his Fringes imprint!) at the end of last year. Sugimoto has been quite prolific in recent times in terms of his duo releases (with Kevin Drumm, Günter Müller, Annette Krebs..), but his solo playing is especially wondrous. Comparisons will be drawn with 1997's highly-acclaimed "Opposite" (hatNOIR), but whereas that album consisted of a string of exquisite miniatures, in "Italia" the guitarist has all the time in the world to stretch out in. There's a lot of quiet music out there on the market, from Bernhard Günter to Morton Feldman, but Sugimoto - along with Radu Malfatti and very few others - really knows how to use silence. "Italia" is absolutely spellbinding.
Toshi Nakamura's " No-Input Mixing Board 2" (following last year's Volume 1 on Zero Gravity) is another utterly captivating listening experience: unlike Sugimoto, Nakamura plays with continuity and gradual transformation, starting each piece with a fragment of feedback ("something happens and I work with it..") and gently sculpting it into a complete musical ecosystem. Sometimes he lays down (apparently) static carpets of sound ("nimb#13"), sometimes he constructs almost Reichian gradual processes through looping and lengthening his material ("nimb#14"). Material determines form and structure: the regular clicks and reverberant backgrounds of "nimb#15" create a desolate post-industrial soundscape of austere beauty.
Calling his solo album "Trumpet" seems to be a clear reference on Axel Dörner's part to American trumpeter Greg Kelley's album of the same name released last year on Meniscus (Kelley was among the first to acknowledge Dörner's pioneering work), but whereas the American's album consisted of 12 tracks, all but two under four minutes long, Dörner's contains just two, respectively 25 and 17 minutes in duration. In point of fact the first runs continuously (and I mean continuously, without the slightest break - imagine putting a microphone somewhere inside your domestic plumbing system and recording the results) for 21 minutes, and is followed by 4 minutes of silence, during which Dörner probably passed out. The second piece is more fragmented and timbrally diverse, alternating threatening low-register growls with high-frequency hisses. Like Radu Malfatti, Dörner investigates the sonority of breathing through the instrument with utter rigour. It's not exactly easy listening, but in its own way it's quite amazing.
I'm prepared to bet that in years to come, these three albums - and, dare we assume, the forthcoming releases on A Bruit Secret (mini-CDs from Annette Krebs on guitar and Andrea Neumann on inside piano are in preparation) - will become sought-after collectors' items. If you care about what's going on in the vanguard of improvised music at the turn of the Third Millenium, you owe it to yourself to check this label out. Contact m_henritzi@club-internet.fr and tell him I sent you.

Evan Parker / Richard Nunn

RANGIRUA
LEO CD LR 314

At this stage of his musical development, Evan Parker could probably record with Jimmy Carl Black playing telephone book and wastepaper basket, make it sound good and better still (or worse, depending on your point of view) release it as an album. Richard Nunns, for all his laudable work restoring and mastering traditional Maori musical instruments, doesn't manage to push the saxophonist into anything other than a cursory skim through his extraordinary arsenal of techniques. None of the fifteen pieces lasts very long, and none of them gets very far before the limitations of Nunn's instrumentation make themselves felt. There's not much you can do with a Poiawhiowhio ("a small perforated gourd that is swung around the head") except, well, swing it around the head. Despite occasional nostalgic flashes of Parker's early explorations of interval and melody (bits of this sent me back to "Summer", his very first recordings with John Stevens in 1967), it seems that Martin Davidson's Emanem imprint has ended up with the cream of the crop of Parker's recent recordings, and other labels have had to make do with second best. For completists only.

Cornelius Cardew

FOUR PRINCIPLES ON IRELAND AND OTHER PIECES
Ampere 7

When Cornelius Cardew was run over and killed in somewhat suspicious circumstances near his home in Leyton, East London on the 13th December 1981, rumours inevitably circulated throughout the left-wing intelligentsia (the composer was an active member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and fervent advocate of Irish Nationalism). Controversial anti-establishment lawyer QC Michael Mansfield later even went so far as to say that he "would not be surprised if the agents of the State decided his time had come" ("Death of a Dissident", Independent Magazine, 9th May 1992, p.26). One can only surmise that if the agents of the State had been listening to this collection of Cardew's piano music, recorded in Milan in 1974 at the height of his involvement with Mao-style socialism, they wouldn't have found very much to justify a sinister political killing - compared to the vicious outbursts of later 70s punk and the seriously political pronouncements of The Pop Group, this sounds about as threatening as afternoon tea at your granny's.
English Experimental Music's fascination with outmoded dance forms and blatantly (blandly) tonal language is worthy of a lengthy study in its own right. In his enthralling 1974 polemic, "Stockhausen Serves Imperialism", Cardew argues quite cogently against the rhetoric of the avant-garde that he once fervently espoused, claiming, to quote Virginia Anderson's liner notes to this album, that "the language of both the experimental and academic avant-garde movements tends to obscure source melodies and alienates the audience through a perceived cleverness of intellectualism." But did he seriously believe his compositional solution, a return to somewhere between late Baroque (he described himself as a "star player of Bach") and Gershwin, complete with twee crushed notes and frilly Liberace glissandi, to be capable of inspiring the masses to take up arms and bring revolution onto the streets of Europe? Survey the last quarter century of history from today's vantage point and this music sounds disarmingly naïve, even plain awful. Cardew's friend and footsoldier in the Scratch Orchestra, guitarist Keith Rowe (who has remained unswervingly experimental in his music with the group AMM) wonders what Cardew was trying to achieve with his revolutionary music: "If you try to make artefacts which are rejected in the sense that Duchamp wanted them to be, Cardew really achieved that with those later compositions. They are totally rejected, by everyone. Any music lover would reject them. I don't think that's why he did them, but I do think they have that quality. I don't like them."
As the emancipation of Ireland was a subject close to Cardew's heart, I wonder how he would have reacted to the success of a song like U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (not to mention other ghastly pop reflections on the subject by the likes of the Cranberries) - surely if the goal was to reach the masses, Cardew should have set his sights on the language of pop and rock and set about subverting the cultural imperialism of the record industry by producing hard-hitting revolutionary pop, rather than writing what seems to be little more than dreadful pastiche. If he'd attempted a set of variations on an epic scale (as did Fred Rzewski with his "The People United..") he might at least have been able to engage with his audience on a heroic Beethovenian level; if he'd more openly espoused the rhythmics of rock and jazz (as did Louis Andriessen with De Volharding) he might have been able to present his music in the street to the man in the street - as it is, this collection of miniatures (the longest just over four minutes in duration) seems destined to languish as an outdated curiosity on the shelves of municipal lending libraries - along with the writings of Mao Tse Tung.
Marcel Duchamp

THE ENTIRE MUSICAL WORK OF MARCEL DUCHAMP

Petr Kotik / SEM Ensemble Ampere 5
Nam June Paik
WORKS 1958-79 Sub Rosa SR 178

Artists associated with one medium have often branched out into others, further to explore and understand their creativity (or to liberate another demonic aspect of it) - Don Van Vliet abandoned his alter-ego Captain Beefheart twenty years ago to devote himself exclusively to painting, and we all know that both Schoenberg and Cage were gifted visual artists in their own right. But now that orgiastic animal-slayer Hermann Nitsch has taken to releasing umpteen-volume box sets of his (utterly tedious) music, it seems it's open season for visual artists to bring out albums of their "compositions". Face it, it's a good niche market and small indie labels are more tempted to release something mediocre by a big name than take a risk investing in unknown new talent. Sadly.
Orginally released back in 1976 on Multhipla Records, the elegant realisation of Marcel Duchamp's "Erratum Musical" by Petr Kotik and his SEM Ensemble has been lovingly reissued by Ampère (shame about a few annoying clicks and sound problems during playback: let's hope it's just me who ended up with a faulty copy). This maverick work - though one is inevitably forced to question the whole notion of "work" when it comes to Duchamp - was dreamed up as part of the eight-year-long artistic and conceptual reflection that led to the "Large Glass" ("The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even"). In essence it predates Cage's experiments with indeterminacy by nearly four decades - Duchamp wrote notes on tiny pieces of manuscript paper, juggled them in a hat, took them out one by one and wrote the resulting score as a three-part vocal piece for himself and his sisters. A more elaborate and more visually entertaining system of composing by chance is also specified, in which numbered balls corresponding to specific instruments available fall through a funnel into a toy train to be picked out and played. Obviously much depends on the realisation: Kotik's instrumentation - alto flute, trombone, celesta and glockenspiel - is delicious and sensual, and inevitably brings Morton Feldman to mind, while a version of the same piece for different forces could easily sound quite hideous. As it is, the player piano version of the piece sounds remarkably fresh and, in its fondness for silence, could almost have come from today's ultra-minimal Wandelweiser School. A little more information on how Kotik orchestrated his versions would have been welcome, though.
Nam June Paik is best known these days as a video artist, but as Michael Nyman chooses to remind us, he was a composer and performer closely associated with the Fluxus movement long before he turned to video. While his most notorious composition, Danger Music #5 (often erroneously credited to Dick Higgins), which instructs the performer to crawl up the vagina of a living female whale (!) awaits its first performance - let alone its first recording - we'll just have to make do with this new album (Paik's first in fact) on Sub Rosa. "Prepared Piano for Merce Cunningham" (1977) is a rather fetching 29-minute doodle on a very out-of-tune piano, complete with quotations from Gershwin's "Summertime" and barely-stifled chuckles from the "composer" himself. The "Duett" with sculptor Takis, recorded two years later in a watery and reverberant gallery space, sees Paik broaden his classical repertoire to include Chopin and Bach, his extemporizations punctuated at irregular intervals by deafening and hilarious CLANGS on the metal sculpture. It's amusing enough first time round, but trying to pass it off as a composition is, well, stretching it a bit. The album is probably worth the price of admission - depending on your purchasing power, I suppose - for the three early works, "Hommage à John Cage" (1959) for piano and tape, "Etude for Pianoforte" (1960) and "Simple" (1961). These are fine examples of those anything-goes mixalls that late 50s experimental music was renowned for - Cage's "Fontana Mix" evidently comes to mind, but so does the old Everest recording of his "Variations IV", with its total disregard for hallowed masterpieces. Paik splices together anything that comes to hand, from pop music to screaming babies to Beethoven's 5th and 9th to Stravinsky's "Petrushka". I suppose that in its daring vinyl vandalism you could say it foreshadows Christian Marclay and Otomo Yoshihide, but I leave it up to you to decide if it's worth paying full price for.

Copyright 2001 by Paris Transatlantic