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Jessica Pavone / Jackson Moore
SOLOS & DUOS
Peacock 02
In Greater Metropolitan New York there's a small but dedicated group of fanatics (saxophonists, for the most part) who have passed through the hands of Anthony Braxton in recent times - notably Chris Jonas, James Fei and Jackson Moore (all of whom appear on Braxton's new double CD on Leo, "Composition 169"). Moore appears here with viola-playing partner Jessica Pavone in an intelligent and thought-provoking (if rather dry, acoustically and aesthetically) set of duets and solos - two of each, interleaved. There's something of the rigor of Werner Dafeldecker's compositions for Polwechsel and the uncompromising mathematical constructivism of Xenakis: Pavone's solo consists solely of progressively accelerating descending and ascending double-stops, while the second duet defines a pitch range and explores it diligently, mapping out its boundaries using various intervals - major thirds, whole tones, semitones, quarter-tones - before Moore's solo sets out a collection of recognizable motives - an ascending chromatic flurry, a shrill high note, a vicious mid-register bark, and so forth - and proceeds to juggle with them over sixteen minutes. There's a touch of good old American Experimentalism here, a rough'n'ready aesthetic that seems to value process and system more than sounding result - a lineage extending back from Braxton through Cage to Crawford Seeger and Cowell. It's a bit like All Bran, though: you know it's (supposed to be) good for you but it's not exactly appetizing fare. Still, if it's roughage you're after, these two are certainly names to look out for.
OHMIX
Various Artists
Ohm / Avtr 022
Put it this way: if you were a musician and someone asked you for one track for a compilation album, would you send the best thing you had or keep it in reserve for your own solo project? With a few notable exceptions, most compilations (cf. IAMAPHOTOGRAPHER elsewhere), are collections of fascinating and tantalizing snapshots, tiny samples of DNA from which dedicated punters can reconstruct individual bodies of work if they have the necessary inclination (and budget). If the offerings from Martin Tetreault, Christian Calon, Terre Thaemlitz and John Oswald on this album send people out to discover those artists' work elsewhere, it's no bad thing; OHMIX is certainly worth the price of admission for Ralf Wehowsky's "Gesichte" and Diane Labrosse's "Curieux mélange pour amateurs auditifs de la jeune radio", though you should perhaps set aside money for a trip to the opticians: the near illegibility of the red-on-brown track info printing may cause eye-strain.
Hartmut Geerken & The Art Ensemble of Chicago
ZERO SUN NO POINT
Leo 2CD LR 329/330
A purely aural document of what in performance is a mixed-media work with pre-recorded speech fragments, audience participation and live interactive elements is destined to be problematic. Hartmut Geerken's "Zero Sun No Point", an exploration of and homage to the work of little-known philosopher Salomo Friedlaender and very well-known (these days) musician Sun Ra, features Geerken on numerous instruments - mostly percussion - and the Art Ensemble of Chicago in their final incarnation (Joseph Jarman having left the group to devote himself to Buddhism). Geerken invited "authorities" on Friedlaender and Ra to submit quotations from their work which pop up repeatedly during the piece, sometimes read by the musicians, sometimes by audience members and sometimes by the historical figures themselves (we hear not only Ra, but also Ezra Pound and Antonin Artaud, for reasons perhaps best known to Geerken). The snatches of Friedlaender's writings I can understand (not being fluent in the multitude of languages used in the piece) are certainly thought-provoking, but the Ra aphorisms taken out of context become increasingly irritating as the work progresses. The simple fact is that in any mixed-media work featuring music and the spoken word simultaneously, the latter will always predominate - we're biologically programmed to pay more attention to language than to music, which ultimately gets relegated to something of secondary importance, "accompaniment", if you will. Here, I end up wishing the voices would just shut up and let me enjoy the late Lester Bowie's magnificent trumpet playing. Add to this several inexplicable cuts and splices, which probably serve to illustrate something philosophically profound in Geerken's scheme of things, but to this listener are simply annoying - why can't he just let these great musicians play, damn it? The reproduction of his "score" for "No Point" recalls the megalomania of Stockhausen's lavish productions for Deutsche Grammophon in the 1970s, as does the centre spread of photos of Geerken ecstatically banging his gongs and pointing dictatorially offstage. Not only this, but Geerken had the Marstall Theatre in Munich hooked up to the Internet, so "each receiver, wherever in the world, can send an e-mail message directly to the stage.." (The use of that word "receiver", one of Stockhausen's favorite terms is significant - "listening" is evidently not enough: you have to "receive" this work.) The poor souls who got their kicks sitting in front of their computer screens following the event in cyberspace were treated to the crashing banality of Steve Lake's live report from the stage (duly reprinted here in all its glory), but obviously thought it was worthwhile, as their "detailed responses, coming from all over the world" were mixed into the piece and broadcast. All well and good if you happened to be there on October 25th and 26th 1996, but frozen for eternity on a CD and doomed to repeat itself at each playing, the novelty soon wears off. Even so, there's some magnificent music here, but if you wish to learn more about Salomo Friedlaender, all you need do is read his writings. If you want to get into Sun Ra, go listen to his albums (of which there are many fine examples on Leo) - at least they'll still be knocking you for six many years from now.
Kidd Jordan & the Elektrik Band
KIDD'S STUFF
Danjor 001
Anyone expecting a legendary free jazz monster blow-out like Kidd Jordan's recent magnificent outing on Eremite with Fred Anderson could be in for a shock. The title of the first track on "Kidd's Stuff" - "James Brown #1" - should give you a clue. This is lowdown dirty funk (lowdown dirty recording quality too), and Kidd's tenor and soprano saxes are the only horns in sight. If the youthful exuberance of the band is anything to go by, the six-piece band behind him (two guitars, keyboards, bass, drums and percussion) probably consists of his students, to whom the album is dedicated. Daryl Lavigne on synth is particularly obtrusive and high in the mix, especially when he insists on trying to outdo the Kidd in the rare moments when he takes off into free playing. Drummer Hurley Blanchard's hard swinging gogo recalls another Brown (Chuck - though Blanchard's no match for the sensational Ricky Wellman), and it seems the whole band has OD'ed on Miles - and not the 70s Miles, but the post "Man With The Horn" Miles (Lavigne's synth comping is right off "Decoy", and bassist Elton Heron has got his Marcus Miller and Foley licks down). It's a good party stomper, but won't win any prizes for subtlety (though Jordan's ballad work on "Point of You" is luscious). There's still a lot of terrain left to explore in the no man's land between free and funk, quite apart from the recent offerings from the Colemans (Ornette as well as Steve). Nobody, except perhaps David Murray on a few odd tracks, ever got round to taking up where Albert Ayler left off with "New Grass": Kidd Jordan might just be the man for the job, though he'll need to team up with musicians who can follow him into the outer reaches of free playing without drowning him out. Still, with those students in mind, I hope he's sent a copy of this to Wynton Marsalis.
Icebreaker
EXTRACTION
Between the Lines BTL 018 / EFA 10188-2
Icebreaker, an ensemble originally formed in 1989 to perform Louis Andriessen's "Hoketus" (hence its hard, funky line-up featuring pan pipes, saxes, keyboards and guitars) specializes in the kind of accessible foot-tapping new music popularized by the Bang On A Can group and released on the distinctly user-friendly Argo label (Michaels Nyman and Torke, new music for people who don't like new music, or rather for those who smoked pot at college twenty years ago listening to Eno's "Music for Airports" and still dream about it). "Extraction", recorded at the request of Franz Koglmann, who was instrumental in inviting the band to play in Vienna in 1999, features two compositions, Damian Le Gassick's "Mad Legs in a Sack" and Gordon McPherson's "The Baby Bear's Bed", plus a "remix" of the latter by Mel, an English composer (apparently) of electronic music now living in Austria. The racy tone of Icebreaker Artistic Director James Poke's liner notes (it's certainly edifying to learn that Damian Le Gassick is an anagram of "Dick Massage in LA") is in keeping with razzle dazzle of the music; Poke evidently wants you to know he's one of the lads, Brit New Music's answer to Damien Hirst, perhaps.
Dick massage aside, Le Gassick's piece is fun, as far as it goes, a "Prelude Fugue and Riffs" for the third millennium, openly flaunting its influences - the aforementioned Andriessen, early Nyman (especially his "Think Slow Act Fast", originally written for Hoketus), Torke (whose "Vanada" may well turn out to be one of the most influential pieces of the late twentieth century) and behind them all, of course, Stravinsky. The piece swings merrily along, despite its unadventurous orchestration - too much piano and wind doubling makes it sound as is the whole thing was written at the keyboard - rescore it for ARP Quadra, add a touch of fretless bass and some drums and hey presto: Weather Report! The last movement, "Jazz Piano" is a virtuoso tour de force, but either these guys have speeded up the recording to make it sound even more impressive (an old trick Nyman resorted to with "Think Slow.."), or they're positively superhuman. Gordon McPherson's piece is 26'50" of foursquare post-Hoketus wham bam, pianos crashing all over the place, ugly "rock" guitar and intrusive octapad drumming from Julian Warburton (no relation). The remix consists of little more than extra FX and adds nothing - not that there's little to add to in the first place - one hopes Mel takes advantage of his residence in Austria to learn something from the real trailblazers in laptoppery at the Mego label. As the voice intones at the end of the album: "There was a story that began once upon a time.." - for all its flounce and laddish Cool Britannia attitude, Icebreaker's music belongs back in the late 1920s.
CCMIX: New Electroacoustic Music from Paris
Various Artists
Mode 98/99
UPIC is a computer system, devised by the late Iannis Xenakis and his researchers at the CEMAMu in the late 1970s, which allows the composer literally to draw the elements of the score using an electromagnetic pen. The first work composed for the new system was Xenakis' "Mycenae Alpha", which appropriately enough kicks off this two CD set of UPIC "greatest hits" (UPIC by the way has since changed its name to CCMIX: Centre for the Composition of Music Iannis Xenakis). This ten-minute piece, originally included in one of Xenakis' mixed-media "polytopes" at the Acropolis in Mycenae is as nasty and uncompromising as you'd expect it to be; UPIC allowed Xenakis to generate his trademark glissandi with uncompromising precision, and he took full advantage of it.
The other pieces on offer are engaging but hardly as exciting: Brigitte Robindoré (born 1962) wrote "L'Autel de la Perte et de la Transformation" ("the Altar of Loss and of Transformation") in 1993, presumably under the influence of her teacher Julio Estrada's Continuum Theory (of which more later) and "Comme Etrangers et Voyageurs sur la Terre", translated curiously here as "As Strangers and Pilgrims on the Earth", a year later. This latter calls for two percussionists who play along with UPIC (use is also made of modified gamelan samples). Both works are spacious and pretty, if somewhat soporific. Jean-Clause Risset's "Saxatile" (1992) for soprano sax (Daniel Kientzy) and UPIC is also disarmingly attractive stuff, its chirping cheeky Varèse quotes (unintentional, probably) presumably designed to reassure the genteel, aging New Music audience that they have nothing to fear. Argentinean Daniel Teruggi, these days head honcho at the GRM in Paris, turns in a solid but unsurprising eleven-minute piece, entitled, somewhat unimaginatively, "Gestes de l'écrit". Takehito Shimazu's "Illusions in Desolate Fields" provides some welcome breathing space, juxtaposing hi-tech UPIC sonic scribbles with delicate work from Kazuko Takada on voice and san-gen. Californian Curtis Roads contributes two brief but effective pieces, "Purity", an austere seven-minute study in microtones, and "Sonal Atoms", a three and a half minute crunchy hit single that deserves to be heard in its full spatial glory rather than on a humble stereo CD. Gérard Pape's "Le Fleuve du Désir III" finds the Arditti Quartet drowning in the eponymous river while waves of digitized passion wash over them - it's a sincere if slightly harrowing swim. The "sonic graffiti "of Italian Nicola Cisternino's "Xöömij" for bass voice and UPIC was written in 1997, and its title (pronounce it at your peril) refers to a kind of oriental throat singing - the work is marked "homage to Bruce Chatwin", whose musings on Aboriginal oral culture are liberally quoted. It's a fascinatingly grizzly twelve minutes of threatening guttural growls, and I'd like to see how the native population of central Australia would react to Nicholas Isherwood's performance. (I don't think my downstairs neighbor appreciated it much, though that's nothing new.) Julio Estrada's "eua-on" (1980) is the Mexican-born composer's only electronic composition, but a work of key importance in his output, in that its creation led directly to the notion of a "continuous macro-timbre, a free sum of the components of frequency, amplitude and harmonic content of rhythm (duration, attack and vibrato) and sound (pitch, intensity, color) and physical space in two or three dimensions." Digitizing his own voice and working hands-on with the UPIC machine enabled Estrada to exorcise his own personal grief at the loss of his father, the resulting 7'44" proving to be one of the most powerful pieces of electronic music of recent times, and arguably the best thing to come out of UPIC. Estrada ultimately extended and "transcribed" the piece for orchestra, and "eua-on-ome" rounds off disc one in style.
It's ironic, however, that the strongest work on offer here - and it's well worth buying the album just for it - was created several years before UPIC saw the light of day, and uses good old eight-track tape and distinctly recognizable source sounds and minimal use of external electronic source sounds or systems: Xenakis' "Polytope de Cluny" (1972) is a MONSTER, twenty-five minutes of visionary sonic apocalypse, easily on a par with his legendary tape works such as "Bohor", and proof (if any were needed) that great music originates in the mind of man and even the most sophisticated technological wizardry available might facilitate its realization but will ultimately only ever be a means to end - not an end in itself.
The Cosmosamatics
Boxholder BXH 022
With a name like that it could be an Eastern European klezmer outfit but in fact the Cosmosamatics is a killer four-piece free jazz unit featuring Sonny Simmons (alto, English horn), Michael Marcus (alto, tenor and bass flute), William Parker (bass) and Jay Rosen (drums). Guest stars include tabla player Samir Chatterjee, Karen Borca - whose appearance on bassoon in "Beyond the Inner East" saves a track otherwise spoiled by (Simmons'?) rather lame oogabooga rap - and James Carter, who pops up on two tracks and blows a bass sax to pieces. Whereas some of the old lions of the 1960s free scene have lost a little lungpower, Simmons still sounds fantastic (play this back to back with his classic ESPs and see what I mean), and in Michael Marcus he has a perfect playing partner to volley his post-bop licks at. Parker is, as ever, solid and driving, and Jay Rosen's pumping hi-hat and exuberant rim shots make him sound like a freebop version of Art Blakey. Carter's presence on "Mingus Mangus" beefs up the horn section, and serves to remind us that Mingus' gutsy but exquisitely crafted compositions are as important an influence on young free players today as Ornette and Coltrane. With the exception of the aforementioned "Beyond the Inner East", the album rocks from beginning to end. Sure, Carter's paint-stripping solo on "New Line Groove" isn't exactly the subtlest thing you've ever heard, but it's good to see him dusting off his free chops once more. Along with Raphe Malik's "Looking East", this is proof that free jazz is still very much alive and kicking, and Boxholder one of the labels kicking the hardest.
Dwight Frizzell
BULLFROG DEVILDOG PRESIDENT
Sparkling Beatnik SBR 0019
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a US President (living or dead) has made it onto an album reviewed in these pages. Dwight Frizzell grew up a few blocks away from Harry S. Truman's home in Independence, Missouri, and while searching in the Truman Library for a good recording of the ex-president's legendary whistling, he came across a 1957 recording of Harry playing "Black Hawk Waltz" on the piano. This 90-second piece appears five times on "Bullfrog Devildog President", with Frizzell and his band overdubbing material at each successive return. Unlike the progressive accretion of parts in, for example, Gavin Bryars' "Jesus' Blood..", which fleshes out the orchestration layer by layer until it attains symphonic proportions, Frizzell's added tracks (an oddball metaphor for multi-culturalism, perhaps - hyperactive congas, merengue-like cowbells, jagged minimal guitar, mildly funky electric bass) serve to displace and finally replace the original (Truman in fact is only heard on "Black Hawk Waltz" 1 and 2, but is thereafter credited as "silent piano" (!)) I have accordingly suggested to the Revd. Frizzell that he contact Bill Clinton with a view to future collaboration.
Part composition, part hörspiel, Frizzell's concept of historiophony - using historic and/or field recordings to relate the history of a period or place - is in effect the logical continuation of Charles Ives' work - I'm convinced that, had Ives had DAT and MiniDisc technology a century ago, he would have incorporated actual recordings of New England landscape and popular music into his symphonic compositions. Dwight Frizzell's Missouri is like Ives' Connecticut, Faulkner's Mississippi and Harry Crews' Georgia: the local is transcended and becomes the universal. "The Irish Wilderness" uses field recordings of the "wondrous springs" of Ripley and Oregon counties, Missouri, interleaved with "traditional tunes known to Irish Catholics (circa 1859)" to document the tragic history of Irish settlers in Kansas about that time. "Appalling Heart" sets a text (originally published in the Little Review N° 7, September - December 1920) by Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, an eccentric German-born poetess who befriended Marcel Duchamp, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound (amongst others) and terrorized Greenwich Village in the 1920s, of whom Frizzell writes: "Her visionary poems and post-modern attire.. were the direct result of her experiments with interspecies communication via persistent psychotropic plant consumption." (Frizzell is credited on this track as providing "body-dubbed heartbeat and Galvanic skin response" - I wish I could have been at the recording session.) The two "Anamnesis" tracks were recorded at the Red Rose pub in London, at an "international assembly of sound artists" including Morphogenesis' Clive Graham. "Scrat" ("old German name for a spiritual being who inhabited woods") features the newEar ensemble playing along in concert with a mix of Frizzell's field recordings. Topping off the set in style, "Devildog" (the title refers to Frizzell's reading of a passage from Nostradamus as a justification of the Soviet space program sending a dog into space..) begins with recordings from an air traffic control tower (I think), before the six-piece band kicks in at 2'42" with a killer rock diminished seventh workout, followed by a wild ensemble blow-out, Prime Time meets Naked City. It's a cracking end to a wonderfully eclectic, enjoyable and thought-provoking album.
Globe Unity Orchestra
GLOBE UNITY 67 & 70
Atavistic Unheard Music Series UMS/ALP223CD
While today's Chicago scene slips gently into decline (or so it would seem if the recent pronouncements of Jim O'Rourke are to be believed), the good people at Atavistic look back over their shoulders once more to find out how it all began, as the UHM label continues its invaluable work unearthing long-forgotten or maybe never-before released treasures from the early days of free music. Pianist Alex von Schlippenbach's mythic Globe Unity Orchestra was arguably the finest European big band line-up to integrate the volcanic energy of free jazz into compositional structures more akin to contemporary composition, and the emergence of these live tapes, the first recorded at the Donaueschingen Tage für Neue Musik in October 1967, the second at the Berlin Jazz Festival three years later, is cause for celebration. Look through the list of the musicians involved, and it reads like a Who's Who of free improvisation - Brötzmann, Parker, Bailey, Bennink, Rutherford, Kowald, Lovens, Breuker, Schoof etc. etc. - and here they all are captured in their prime, roaring, angry and thirsty (the beer budget for a Globe Unity gig must have been astronomical). It's pointless to single out individual contributions (though I am particularly fond of Bailey's stinging guitar on the 1970 set), because they're all just so damn good. Go find yourself a roll-top sweater, a tight leather jacket, crack open a twelve-pack and give your neighbors hell.
Itsfromat
ITSFROMAT
Based in Hastings, and formed way back in the early 1980's by Nick Weekes (bass, sampling, voice) and Tim Willcocks (guitar, bass, voice, percussion), who met at Medway College of Design, Itsfromat released several albums in cassette form before Allan Dyas joined the band (on guitar, voice and percussion) in 1998. For this, their debut CD, they're joined by Liam Genockey on drums. There's an outdoors feel to much of this music (and a bit of birdsong thrown in for good measure!), and a track like "Garden of Pop" is as quintessentially English and batty as Syd Barrett; the polyrhythms on several tracks point back to the roots of Prog up the road in Canterbury (probably due to Genockey, who's worked with the likes of Elton Dean, Trevor Watts and Robert Wyatt), but even if Allan's voice on "Fat" sounds disarmingly like mid-70's King Crimson vocalist John Wetton, the dubby bass and grungy guitars belong to another era. "Krankadelyk" alternates snappy 7/8 riffing with apocalyptic electronic rumbles, and "Ig" and "It's" sound like what the Bhundu Boys might have done if they'd grown up listening to Can (that said, "It's" ends up somewhere else altogether with some weird jew's harp). Similarly, the dotty loops on "Toytown" eventually settle into a gently motoric ("motorik" as my worthy constituents at The Wire magazine spell it) groove. It seems these guys are as familiar with the Ralph/Recommended back catalogue (the disembodied voices of "Mistoftar" recall the Residents) as they are with punk ("Gateaublaster" glories in the crappy biscuit tin percussion of Swell Maps and early XTC) and its stranger derivatives ("Patiently waiting for more", with its cracked octave-doubled backwards/forwards vocals and gloomy bass sounds like an outtake from the first This Heat album). Attentive readers will no doubt have spotted that "Mistoftar" and "Firm Toast" are both anagrams of the band's name (I wonder if Itsfromat is itself an anagram of something else). Anagrams are what this album is all about, in a sense: these chaps evidently have excellent taste and a commendable knowledge of the past thirty years of rock and pop and make little attempt to camouflage their influences, but in so doing they've produced an album which is so diverse it's sometimes hard to locate the group's individual style itself.
But decide for yourself: the album is available directly from Tim Willcocks at office@itsfromat.com. The website at http://www.itsfromat.com with mp3s and all the necessaries is also worth a visit.
Brandon Labelle
TECHNE
A Bruit Secret 04
Call me a Neanderthal, but when it comes to choosing between a piece of music which is conceptually brilliant but sonically nondescript and one which is conceptually nondescript but sonically brilliant, I'll go for the latter every time. Without wanting to single out Brandon Labelle in person (this review could apply equally well to recent offerings by John Hudak and others), it seems this release follows on from his recent Ground Fault album in that the realization of its concept is nowhere near as interesting as the concept itself - the difference being that on that album, Labelle at least gave us some insight into his working method: here, all we are told is that "these audio tracks are derived from processes which place the body (physical presence) in direct contact with architectural space, or attempt to engage with architecture, as performative interactions.." (and so on). The tracks, entitled respectively "Chair", "Freeway", "Foot", "Façade", "Conduit" and "Hill" presumably have something to do with the objects / spaces of their titles, though trawling through the four-page booklet won't enlighten you much as to how. Again, maybe I'm just a relic of a bygone age, but I've always been firmly of the opinion that if an album is to contain liner notes at all, these should at least impart some information that may be of use or interest to the listener either before or after - not necessarily during - listening to the music itself. There is an unfortunate tendency in today's new music, especially that which gets branded (no pun intended) as "sound art", to wrap up hours of uninteresting sonic material in reams of post-Baudrillardian gobbledygook whose only purpose would seem to be to intimidate the poor uneducated listener into admitting the music must be better than it actually sounds. Evidently six years spent studying for three music degrees and a better-than-average knowledge of architecture (that's what comes of being married to an architect) isn't enough for me - I must admit I can neither understand Labelle's notes nor appreciate their relevance to the accompanying music. It's funny, but I suspect most journalists working in this field would probably pee themselves laughing if some spotty thirteen-year-old lad sent them a CDR of himself recording his very first shave in the family bathroom on a defective Walkman, but if anyone out there is thinking of releasing such a project, be sure to attach some pretentious drivel about zones of erotic psychosis and sub-cultural pandemonium and you'll be surprised how many rave reviews you'll get. Not from me though.
Joe McPhee
MISTER PEABODY GOES TO BALTIMORE
Recorded 005
While many of his contemporaries are seemingly quite content to slip into obscurity or sell out and play standards, Joe McPhee shows no sign of compromise. These performances recorded at the High Zero Festival in Baltimore last year feature McPhee's distinctive pocket trumpet and saxophones, but also his voice. "Before The Fall", clocking in at thirty-three and a half minutes, takes up more than half the album, and is essentially an extended duet between McPhee's voice/trumpet and Jack Wright on reeds (another Great American Original), gently underpinned by some discreet (thankfully) electronics from Ian Nagoski. With nobody to hurry them along and no reason why they should do so themselves, the track is a beautifully paced exploration of space and color. "Night of the Krell", featuring Sean Meehan on percussion and Michael Johnsen on soprano, electronics and musical saw, is a little more agitated, but at the ten-minute mark McPhee settles on a pitch and shifts the music deftly away from the rhetoric of improvised music and towards a rigorous investigation of tone and timbre - one great thing about McPhee is he knows when to shut up and let his partners run with the ball; here he leaves Johnsen to get on with business on the soprano, returning modestly to add several long, authoritative trumpet tones near the end. "Klatu" features some rather Evan Parker-esque tenor flutters, set against some spiky guitar from Jerry Lim and some positively animated theremin playing from James Coleman, who one the strength of this track and his own excellent "Zuihitsu" (see elsewhere) is definitely a name to watch out for. The closing "Homeless", recorded out on the Howard Street Bridge, reveals exactly why McPhee is still such an essential musician thirty years on from "Nation Time": the man's got soul - call me old-fashioned, but the test of great music is still and always will be whether those hairs on the back of the neck stand up to be counted. Power to you, Prince of Poughkeepsie.
Pauline Oliveros
NO MO
Pogus P21023-2
Following on from their release of Oliveros' "Alien Bog" and "Beautiful Soop" (P21012-2), Pogus have now unearthed three more of her pioneering works from 1966 and 1967. "No Mo" and "Something Else" were realized in the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio (using "Lafayette tone generators, noise source and tape delay"), while "Bog Road" was created at the Mills Tape Music Center, Mills College, where Oliveros worked with a Buchla Series 100 box in a studio overlooking a pond full of frogs. So much for the background - I've just quoted almost all the accompanying liner notes - what about the music? As the saying goes, what goes around comes around - the relentless electrical storm of "No Mo", which must have seemed wildly avant-garde back in 66, would be perfectly at home on a hip new label like Ground Fault. While established classics of European electronic music still sound magnificent, they are nevertheless very much documents of their time - the groundbreaking studio work from across the Atlantic by the likes of Richard Maxfield and Gordon Mumma has always sounded more extreme (due to a Cage-inspired concern more with process rather than with its eventual sounding result?). "Bog Road" is an aurally challenging 33 minutes of swoops and groans, as uncompromising in its aesthetic as the work of today's electronic music leading lights. The high spot of the disc though is "Something Else", an eerie exploration of microtonal drones with distressing bangs and crashes receding into the background of Oliveros' tape-delay. Unlike friend and former colleague Terry Riley, who uses delay to weave mandala-like magic carpets, Oliveros, in "Something Else", seems to be concerned with space and distance, and has produced an authentic and fascinating quasi-3D sound sculpture. Hats off (again) to Pogus for reissuing these three fine works.
Triage
PREMIUM PLASTICS
Solitaire SR003
"Triage" means "sorting" in French, which is probably irrelevant, though for Dave Rempis, Ken Vandermark's regular playing partner, choosing to work with a sax / bass / drums line-up in today's Chicago necessarily involves a degree of sorting, decision-taking, if you will, if only to prepare for the inevitable comparisons with Vandermark's long-standing trio projects, DKV and Tripleplay. I'll resist the temptation; suffice it to say that Rempis' alto and tenor playing go from strength to strength with each release, and his playing partners here, Jason Ajemian on bass and Tim Daisy on drums, are on top form and John McCortney's recording at Airwave is exemplary. Though things can get very animated, the overall impression I'm left with is that this is an austere project, from the opening "Lawrence of Arabia", to the cover art, sepia photographs of ugly high-rise housing projects (skyscrapers have taken on a whole new meaning since September 11th 2001). These guys take their work seriously and engage the compositions with total commitment, taking the necessary time to develop ideas to the full, and producing as a result one of the most solid and satisfying outings from Chicago I've heard this year.
Without Fear Recent Releases
Various Artists
LIVES
Without Fear
Pointless Orchestra
APPROACHING TOTALITY
Without Fear WFR 0002
Halim El-Dabh
CROSSING INTO THE ELECTRIC MAGNETIC
Without Fear WFR 0003
"Lives" and "Approaching Totality" were apparently recorded back in 1997. Both are compilations, the former featuring tracks recorded live at Joe Simon's Without Fear concerts, the latter incorporating some radio broadcasts and studio recordings. Perhaps in keeping with the "pointless" nametag, "Lives" provides no precise information regarding the dates on which the pieces were recorded and little on the musicians involved (though we're invited to contact the label for more information). The Umbilical Trio and The New Family (both now disbanded) turn in some raucous free jazz, Amy Denio's Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet provides klez-inflected swing, Siamese Twins Scott Davis and Chris Strollo offer two energetic improv outings, and Hovancsek's own Pointless Orchestra explores the sonorities of tuba, gamelan and electronics. "Approaching Totality" is a more satisfyingly acerbic collection, with fine guest appearances from John Hajeski on electronics, Matt Turner on cello, Illusion of Safety's Dan Burke and Mark Klein, and the old Industrial metal basher himself Z'ev.
Instead of telling us how he went about restoring the damaged recordings of Halim El-Dabh's pioneering electronic works, Hovancsek would have done better to provide some detailed information on the pieces themselves and El-Dabh's compositional method. Born in Egypt in 1921, El-Dabh drifted to the US on a Fulbright after World War II and ended up studying with Copland before collaborating with Ussachevsky and Luening in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Most of the works on this album date from 1959, a notable exception being "Wire Recorder Piece", which he recorded in 1944 back in Cairo (Hovancsek makes a big deal about this piece predating Pierre Schaeffer's 1948 "Concert de Bruits"). The music is refreshingly primitive, even naïve - and that's not an insult - reflecting El-Dabh's fondness for Native American music and a willingness to admit natural sounds and human speech into his music ("Venice" is simply a recording of him walking around St Mark's Basilica in Venice with a reel-to-reel recorder). The avant-garde ethnic folk of "Leiyla Variations" - more information on this piece (its history, text, instrumentation..) would have been greatly appreciated - is curiously touching and genuinely original, and with labels these days such as Pogus enthusiastically reissuing long lost treasures of early electronic music, it's good to see El-Dabh's music out there too.
Zerx Releases
J.A. Deane
NEVER NEVER LAND
Zerx 032
The Bubbadinos
YUP, WE'RE BEATING A DEAD HORSE
Zerx 034
Although I'm no big fan of plastic jewel boxes, it's a shame that Zerx have to release their albums in their customary cardboard sleeves (for budgetary reasons, I suppose): a photo of a gorgeous New Mexico skyscape would have been a nice idea for J.A. Deane's "Never Never Land". In 1999 Deane was commissioned to provide music to accompany four screenings of the 1932 silent film version of "Peter Pan". Directing his ten-piece band à la Butch Morris (whose conduction methods he knows well), Deane ended up with four different versions of the music, which he mixed together for this album. Some tracks, including the poignant and extremely beautiful "Belonging" (Alicia Ultan's viola and Courtney Smith's harp recall the pastoral world of Debussy's 1916 Sonata), use just one ensemble version, others overlay the four versions to create a dense and occasionally somewhat muddy orchestral sound. The musicians play superbly (soprano saxophonist Tom Guralnick is on smoking form throughout) and Deane's sampling and mixing is tasty. All he has to do now is sell it to Disney.
Zerx head honcho, poet, guitarist and KUNM Albuquerque DJ Mark Weber is also one of the prime movers behind the avant country of the Bubbadinos, whose fondness for oddball instrumentation (weird backwards guitars, accordions, jaw's harp, tuba and shakuhachi battle it out) inevitably recalls Tom Waits (though Weber's voice is more like Eugene Chadbourne on downers). Like Waits at his best, these songs get right under your skin: the banshee wailing guitars on "Walking Mood" give way to Mary Redhouse's fabulous vocals on Jim Lauderdale's "You Don't Seem to Miss Me". Redhouse (a better choice as guest vocalist than Gretchen Parlato on the earlier Bubbas outing "Ready As We'll Ever Be") sounds like she's been locked out of her trailer out in the desert and forced to survive on a diet of cactus. The album is packed full of fabulous moments and memorable lyrics ("it's quiet out here at night / the crow and me are having a little drink / we can hear a guitar off in the distance playing John Coltrane's 'Equinox'.."), but for my money the sumptuous sound of bass flute, accordion and tuba on "Leaving the Nest" needs some beating. 2'35" of pure perfection. Just think: if everyone reading this goes and gets a copy, Mark can invest in some classy packaging.
Copyright 2001 by Paris Transatlantic
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