May News 2002 Reviews by Dan Warburton and Alicia Austin: Wacky Track of the Month: Chosen Voices On Ambiances Magnetiques: MUSIQUE D’HIVER / Plinc! Plonc! L’Hôtel du bout de la Terre On Grob: Derek Bailey / Franz Hautzinger On Intransitive: Nerve Net Noise Scott Smallwood - DESERT WINDS Jack Wright / Bob Falesch - CLANG On AUM Fidelity: BLACK CHERRY On Sirr: SECRET SLEEPING BIRDS On Erstwhile: THE HANDS OF CARAVAGGIO Last Month Next Month

Track of the Month

Jeffrey Schanzer, prepared guitar & Bernadette Speech, toy piano
“Chosen Voices”
Listen to the Real Audio clip! Chosen Voices, from Reflections

(first minute from Mode CD 105, track number 3)
Mode Records

MUSIQUE D’HIVER

Joanne Hétu

Ambiances Magnétique 091

Recorded as part of 1999-2000 “L’année des quatres saisons” series, this album was finally released at the close of 2001. Alto saxophonist / vocalist Joanne Hétu, pianist Guillaume Dostaler, accordionist / vocalist Diane Labrosse, percussionist Pierre Tanguay, and player of a multitude of wind instruments, Jean Derome, have been performing together since the early eighties. Musique D’Hiver is made up of four pieces chronicling the winter’s passage. The first song, La Chute (The Fall) , describes the joy and anxiety of December’s first snow. Hétu personifies January’s northwest wind with her dynamic vocal improvisation in On s’les Gèle (Frozen Stiff). In Lumière de Février (February Light) , Hétu admires the peacefulness of the winter sunlight. The last song, Perdu l’Nord (Losing the Way), is giddy with anticipation of winter’s end. Brilliantly spare and mystically chilling, this album is a fitting tribute to the delirium of a Québecois winter. Hétu’s vocal improvisation runs the gamet of screamin’ soprano snow fairy to growling northwest wind mistress. The lyrics, sung in Hétu’s signature style, are enchanting in their description of the icy Canadian landscape. In fact, I can still hear them ringing in my ear. The album recalls something of a folklore past with Derome’s lingering flute tones, Labrosse’s lively, angst-ridden accordion, and Tanguay’s percussive dialogue. In Musique D’Hiver, Hétu’s taps the primal with both her musical concept and her vocal improvisation, proving that language doesn’t always have to rely on words to get its point across.
by Alicia AUSTIN

Plinc! Plonc!

Derome / Tanguay

Ambiance Magnétiques 092

Plinc! Plonc!- v. to improvise on the tip of your toes; to play as if you were being chased by the devil himself; a combination of oddly pleasing sounds.
For those of us who were unfortunate enough to have missed this live show in 1997, the newly released album will have to do. Although I must admit I’m bitter at having missed out- it must’ve been a hell of a show. After all, seeing Jean Derome and Pierre Tanguay perform is half the fun. Playful and spontaneous, Derome uses what he calls a “team of diverse little wind instruments” to great effect. He performs surrounded by trays piled high with rubber ducks, penny whistles, rattles, and babies toys. You name it. He can make it sing. As for Tanguay, not only is he a great percussionist, his vocal improv is insanely entertaining. Jean and Pierre have a history that goes back to 1984 when they first collaborated. It shows in their ability to turn on a dime, seamlessly shifting textures on the slightest cue. They take it way out there but somehow still manage to remain locked together rhythmically. If you’re a fan of outlandish improvisation, this album is the one you’ve been waiting for.
by Alicia AUSTIN

L’Hôtel du bout de la Terre

Babin / Huot / Montpetit / St-Jak

Monsieur fauteux m’entendez-vous? 02

Like its title, this album hovers somewhere between fantasy and the everyday. Pierre St-Jak directs this collection of songs written in collaboration with Marie-Hélène Montpetit, Lou Babin, and Dominique Huot. This album reflects the distinguishing mix of styles that is Montreal’s music scene. Listening to the result, I’m reminded once again of why this city is such an incredible place to create music. With its ever more incestuous circle of musicians who find each other time and again in different projects, each musician brings to the table a distinct style influenced by others in the music community. Both the text and music of L’Hôtel juxtapose styles with dramatic flair. I have to say that I really wasn’t expecting St-Jak’s jazz piano to accompany Guido Del Fabbro’s Eastern European violin ditties. Nor did it strike me as the kind of album that would plunge into a monumental electric guitar solo in the midst of an otherwise acoustic set. These parings were surprising at best. Following the career of percussionist Pierre Tanguay, I was a little disappointed to find him venturing out of the world of improvisation into a project with such a composed approach. All in all, L’Hôtel is beautiful if a bit predictable. Nonetheless, you’ll enjoy this album for the same reason I did-its contagious charisma.
by Alicia AUSTIN

Derek Bailey / Franz Hautzinger

GROB 425

Franz Hautzinger belongs, with Axel Dörner and Greg Kelley, to the Triumvirate of Extended Technique Trumpeters; his previous outings on Grob include the extraordinary solo album "Gomberg" and the weird quartet desert landscape of "Dachte Musik" (with Radu Malfatti, Burkhard Stangl and Günter Schneider). For this album he's teamed up with the Godfather of Free Improvisation himself, the indefatigable guitarist Derek Bailey, and the eleven tracks were recorded in London (hence the endearingly British track titles like "Tea", "Cricket" and "Weather"). Though Hautzinger is credited as playing a custom-built "quartertone trumpet", there's little evidence of microtonal play on offer here: for the most part he sounds more like an airlock in a plumbing system. He can play the hell out of the trumpet when he wants to, and it's perhaps a shame he chose to concentrate on the extended techniques bag instead of engaging Bailey on the pitch playing field. The guitarist is as amazingly resourceful as ever, and quite content to do his own thing while Hautzinger gurgles and plops merrily away (if it's strange guitar noises you're after, you'd be better off checking out Annette Krebs). When Hautzinger finds himself locked into a clicking groove like a scratched vinyl at the end of "Cricket", Bailey imperturbably continues his explorations into arpeggiated harmonics, while on "Talk" he's almost swinging (recalling Lol Coxhill's celebrated description of him as "one of the masters of bebop guitar"). For his part, Hautzinger won't be drawn into a battle with Bailey's gritty fuzz on "Weather", nor does he let himself be intimidated by Bailey's gorgeous "Details". It's a satisfying and rewarding example of mature improvised musical cohabitation - as we know two people can live quite happily together without necessarily having to engage in deep conversation all the time. With music as original and demanding as this though, I'm inclined once again to wonder if all eleven tracks are necessary, though I'd be hard put to choose which ones I'd like to get rid of.
by Dan WARBURTON

Nerve Net Noise

METEOR CIRCUIT
Intransitive 020

"If, in your life, you are only able to own one piece of recorded media, PLEASE make it [..] 'Meteor Circuit'", writes Greg Kelley in the press blurb. Maybe I should know better by now than to swallow the hype that record labels spin out to ensnare casehardened journalists, but I am inclined to take him seriously on this one. While acoustic instruments are notoriously imperfect (and master performers such as Kelley know just how to push them to the limit), there is - or should be - something reassuringly dependable about synthesizers and especially computers; outfits like Oval and the pathetically over-hyped Pole may pay lip service to the glitch, but their use of surface imperfections as sound sources takes no risks whatsoever - plops and bleeps nowadays sound just as tired as the crackly vinyl samples in Trip hop. NNN's Tsuyoshi Nakamaru and Hiroshi Kumakiri come at the idea of glitch from another angle: by building imperfection into the instruments themselves, pressing play and accepting the result with Zen detachment (imagine how interesting life could be if the office computer suddenly decided, without any apparent warning, to replace all words containing the letter 'e' with the phrase FUCK YOU ASSHOLE). Though others have explored "cracked" electronics, notably Switzerland's venerable Voice Crack and Greg Kelley's frequent playing partner Jason Lescalleet, NNN do so with such brutal rigour they make Lescalleet and Kelley's recent Erstwhile masterpiece "Forlorn Green" seem about as lyrical as Sibelius. "Meteor Circuit", on the other hand, sounds rather like dysfunctional Ryoji Ikeda: there's nothing wrong with Ryoji Ikeda, of course, but even its abrasive repetition can, if played at sufficiently low volume, disappear into the background, whereas there's no way in the world "Meteor Circuit" could ever be listened to as "ambient" music. Compelled to follow the irregular (and irrational) mutations of deceptively simple patterns, our awareness both of minute detail and global structure is heightened - "Meteor Circuit" grabs you by the hair and jams its fingernails into your ears. It's certainly my idea of fun, and Greg Kelley's too. What about you?
by Dan WARBURTON

Scott Smallwood

DESERT WINDS: 6 WINDBLOWN SOUND PIECES and OTHER WORKS
Deep Listening DL 17-2002

"6 Windblown Pieces" is what it says, a set of works sourced in recordings made in Utah's Great Salt Lake desert, not so much of its pure ambient sound but rather of various man-made objects to be found there, either items of debris strewn randomly about (old furniture, scrap metal..) or on-site art installations (by Nancy Holt and James Harbison). "Rusted Womb of Bomber" was recorded inside a huge dilapidated aircraft hangar in Wendover, Utah (once home to Enola Gay, if you feel like meditating on the horrors of nuclear war while you listen - I don't); Smallwood piles up his source sounds to form a massive reverberant polyrhythm, a vast cloud of whooshes, rattles and crashes, almost Xenakis-like in its complexity. In "Chest & Chair" the composer loops his recordings to weave a complex tapestry of irregularly cycling rhythms, while "Wind Tunnels" finds Smallwood's mics inside the concrete pipes of Nancy Holt's "Sun Tunnels" sculpture, turning it into a giant windblown organ. The inclusion of three extra pieces somewhat detracts from the austerity of the windblown works ("Lucin" is so slight one wonders why it's there at all, and the disembodied voices of "Trojan Chant" seem out of place), but serve to shed some light on Smallwood's compositional procedures - the nod to Pierre Henry in "Variations on a Door (no sigh)", sourced (thanks for telling us) from the door of a men's restroom in Berlin, is perhaps significant.
by Dan WARBURTON

Jack Wright / Bob Falesch

CLANG
ZeroEggzie 0x-2bdf

The inclusion, by way of liner notes, of two emails exchanged between Chicago-based pianist Bob Falesch and Boulder Colorado's Jack Wright on saxophones dating respectively from September 22nd and 25th last year may invite some post 9/11 "interpretation" of Clang's eight tracks (sixty-five minutes of music), but as the music was recorded at least nine months before those events, any speculation as to what extent these thorny, challenging duos might be taken as a metaphor for anything extra-musical is probably useless, if not unwise (the dedication of the closing "Clang 2" "to all whose lives changed on September 11th 2001" includes us all anyway). Finding himself inside the rigid pitch world of Falesch's metaPiano, Jack Wright's horn playing here is less inclined to explore nuances of timbre and multiphonics, opting instead for a more idiomatic play on pitch, rhythm and contour. Falesch's spiky piano playing sounds more like Babbitt and Wolpe than Beresford or Van Hove (i.e. closer to contemporary classical music - consciously so, it would seem from track titles like "2nd School in Vienna"), and Wright's agile soprano flurries are the perfect foil to his darting volleys on "Prelude and Fluke". Falesch relates how he "explored registral extremes by breaking phrases into pieces, with consecutive fragments played on opposite ends of the keyboard. After ignoring the middle register for the first half of the piece, I decided to collapse toward the center and give exceptional attention to the middle octaves."
"A Quarter Tone Past the Outstretched Muscle" features both men on pianos, tuned a quartertone apart. Though normally not convinced by improvised music's excursions into microtonality, especially the rather arid recent offerings from Maneri père et fils and Steven Lantner, there's an attractive sense of space to this piece; you can hear the musicians deciding which notes to play next, in a kind of quartertone musical chess match. "Clang 1" and "Clang 2" originated in an idea of Falesch's to "play a simple ostinato and keep the pattern, or some derivative of it, going for at least the first half of a piece then maybe return to it at the end for a sort of recapitulation and symmetry." (Further evidence of a kind of compositional approach to improvising in keeping with the above remarks). The closing "Clang 2" is the perfect end to one of the most rich and satisfying improv albums for a long time.
by Dan WARBURTON

Black Cherry

BLACK CHERRY
Aum Fidelity AUM 021

Acid Jazz guru Gilles Peterson said he always dreamed of seeing a Pharoah Sanders album at number one in the Top 40 one day, and it would seem that Aum Fidelity's Steven Joerg has similar aspirations for William Parker and Hamid Drake; "Black Cherry" is a "club remix" by Sasha Crnobrnja of grooves culled from Parker and Drake's "Piercing the Veil" (AUM 017), with extra instruments and programming by a trio of characters going by the names of Zeb, Gregory and Takuya. It's an innocuous and lightweight compendium of mid-tempo tracks that no doubt sounds grand cruising around the streets of Brooklyn in a convertible sports car, but whose linearity and predictability fails to keep hold of the listener's attention for more than a couple of minutes. Of course, the purists who spat venom at Aum for releasing David S. Ware's much-maligned "Corridors & Parallels" last year will be crying "sellout" all the way back to the record store to trade in their copies, but if you don't have anything against the concept of ambient music, this is perfectly agreeable coffee-table stuff to sip cocktails over. Hard to believe that most of what you hear comes from two guys who tear shit up with Peter Brötzmann, though.
by Dan WARBURTON

SECRET SLEEPING BIRDS

Pimmon
Sirr 2005

The sleeping birds of the album title are presumably Paul "Pimmon" Gough's kids Zac and Ben (who also provided the illustrations), and each of the eleven tracks is suffused with that kind of naiveté and directness that children accept without questioning (while adults have to scrabble around for pompous and indigestible quotations from pretentious philosophers to justify their emotions). "Bird Cage Circus", for example, cycles round and round a trite little sixteen-beat B flat tune while distant glissandi, bloops and stutters hover above; it's alarmingly simple and yet perfectly self-contained, an aural ecosystem inhabited by a multitude of strange sonic microorganisms which coexist without any apparent need to interfere with each other. The dreamy aquatic string samples on "Amarelo palido, quase branco" swirl gently behind a strange high-pitched metallic drone, creating a unique and rather disturbing effect. "By 5's [for 27]" is effectively a remix, using source material by Kim Cascone, whose sounds are Pimmonised into sonic dust and scattered through the listening space. Gough is quite happy to include source material of a broadly diatonic, even tonal, nature (the sunny glow of Fennesz's "Endless Summer" comes to mind..); "Signal is Red" finds an A major scale trying to extricate itself from a web of buzzes and drones, while "Peck Spectre" finds a shimmering major chord adrift in sea of spacey swoops and glitches. None of these pieces actually goes anywhere as such, but as there's so much to hear while standing still, who needs to move? Best release so far on Paolo Raposo's Sirr imprint from Portugal.
by Dan WARBURTON

THE HANDS OF CARAVAGGIO

MIMEO
Erstwhile 021

Keith Rowe's choice of album title and cover art referencing the great Italian painter Caravaggio (1573 - 1610), his stated intention that this concert (recorded in Bologna on May 20th 2001) could be considered as "a concerto for piano and electronic orchestra with John Tilbury", and the inclusion on the Erstwhile website of articles by Tilbury himself and Michael Graubart on the history of the concerto all invite us to come at these 49 minutes of music more from the direction of (contemporary) classical music than with any predetermined assumptions relating to the culture of improvised music. Pianist Tilbury is, after all, one of the world's finest performers of new music, having released benchmark recordings of major works by Cage, Cardew and Feldman, and the sensibility he brings to his improvised work with AMM has more in common with British and American Experimental music than it does with a "tradition" of free improv piano playing deriving essentially from free jazz.
At the heart of the concept of the classical and Romantic concerto is the idea of creative friction between soloist and orchestra, on a macro (formal) or micro (motivic) level, in conjunction with the idea that the work should be a showcase of sorts for the soloist's virtuosity (hence the tradition of incorporating a cadenza). Tilbury's mastery of the piano may be evidence, but there are several lengthy passages where his contributions are subsumed into the surrounding sonic plasma rather than engaging the other musicians in contrapuntal dialogue. As such, "The Hands of Caravaggio" has less to do with the piano concerto as we know it from Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Chopin and more in common with the baroque concerto grosso. A second pianist, Cor Fuhler, plays a kind of continuo (on inside piano), while the remaining eleven members of the Music In Movement Electronic Orchestra (a veritable Who's Who of electroacoustic improvisation: Keith Rowe, Thomas Lehn, Phil Durrant, Kaffe Mathews, Peter Rehberg, Kevin Drumm, Markus Wettstein, Marcus Schmickler, Gert-Jan Prins, Rafael Toral and Jérôme Noetinger) cocoon the pianists in a dense weave of electronic sound. Despite the considerable thickness of texture (Tilbury joked with the other musicians before the performance: "In one second you guys can eliminate me once and for all," to which Jérôme Noetinger responded: "Less than a second.."), the 49-minute span of music is eminently listennable and, from a formal point of view, surprisingly traditional: a slow crescendo and accumulation of material leads to climactic passages starting at about 13' and gently subsiding (after around 27') into an elegiac coda (about 40'30") and slow fadeout. Of course, apart from Tilbury's florid virtuosity and crystalline arpeggios, it's almost impossible to tell who's doing what: the concert itself was apparently fraught with technical problems (with the sound system and Tilbury's piano), and several of the participants expressed reservations about the performance at the time. However, as Erstwhile had already slated the project for release even before the concert ever took place (a rather risky strategy in my opinion, but one perfectly in accord with Jon Abbey's daring vision of his own label), it fell to Marcus Schmickler to go through the tapes and mix and master the final product. The fact that "The Hands of Caravaggio" is MIMEO's most coherent and impressive album to date is due in no small part to his ten days of painstaking work.
by Dan WARBURTON

Copyright 2002 by Paris Transatlantic