Editorial
On June 26th 2003 I turned 40, as they say - notice after a certain
age, like milk, you start to "turn" - and to celebrate (celebrate?)
the occasion I thought I might amuse myself by trying to choose my
top 40 albums, or pieces of music. This dumb Desert Island Discs question
was one I used to throw at people in interviews, until I realised
it either annoyed the hell out of them or bored them rigid, but I
still like the idea of being forced to make a selection, even if it
is frustratingly difficult. How else would I have learnt that Harrison
Birtwistle likes Blossom Dearie,
or that Heiner
Goebbels thrills to Prince's Graffiti Bridge?
(I don't.) I make no apologies for the frankly self-indulgent and
Nick Hornby-like (smiley shot out to Wire editor Rob Young) nature
of the exercise, but being self-indulgent is what the Internet is
rather good at. If you don't like the idea, just scroll down the page
to the Alan Licht piece and the album reviews and consider yourself
lucky I'm not spamming you with family photos, jpgs of my 4 year old's
drawings (rather good though I think they are) and embarrassing teenage
poetry. I also make no apologies for choosing what most PTM readers
would probably consider crashingly mainstream stuff like Tom Waits
and The Smiths (no Erstwhiles? No AMM? No Polwechsel?.. sorry Jon,
Keith, Werner.. maybe you'll make the top 50 in 2013), but I'm ready
to defend "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" to the ends of the
earth. The 40 records aren't in any particular order of preference,
by the way, but in a sort of chronological order of discovery, and
I've only included actual labels and index numbers when the album
is likely to be hard to track down, which is certainly not the case
for many. After all, any record dealer that doesn't stock Rock
Bottom or Kind of Blue deserves to be taken out in the
middle of a field and beaten up. — DW
Check out the Top 40
by clicking here...
Alvin
Lucier
NAVIGATIONS FOR STRINGS; SMALL WAVES
Mode 124
STILL AND MOVING LINES OF SILENCE IN FAMILIES OF
HYPERBOLAS
Lovely Music LCD 1015 (2CD)
In recent years, Alvin Lucier (born 1931) has been increasingly
busy writing for traditional instruments, after several decades and
numerous groundbreaking works (see earlier
review of his Vespers) working with sonar dolphin echolocation
devices, long thin wires, vocoders, and all manner of sound producing
equipment designed to reveal the hitherto unexplored beauty of pure
acoustic phenomena, but the experimental rigour he brought to bear
on epochal works such as "Chambers" has nourished his work ever since.
In "Navigations", he deliberately set out to try and recreate the
beauty of the "whistlers" (atmospheric natural radio emissions from
the ionosphere caught on magnetic flux lines above the earth) he painstakingly
recorded back in 1980 on a mountaintop in Colorado. In essence the
piece is pure minimalism in the Reichian sense of the word, a gradual
process that very slowly compresses a melodic fragment spanning a
minor third until it becomes a unison. The incremental microtonal
shifts, some smaller than the human ear can detect, were notated to
the best of the composer's ability and given to the Arditti quartet
to execute. Violinist Irvine Arditti reassured Lucier that the quartet
was perfectly able to do the impossible - "it was the very difficult
they had trouble with" - and the 15'17" of their performance is glorious
proof. The resulting microtonality is light years away from the Partch
/ Maneri dogma (which divides the octave into, respectively, 43 and
72 steps, and is potentially as theoretically constricting as "normal"
equal temperament, not to mention almost impossible to execute with
any real precision, especially at speed); in Lucier's piece microtonality
becomes not a system, but a colour, a taste, even - the ear quickly
becomes sensitised to tiny shifts of pitch without being able to determine
whether they're sixteenth-tones, seventeenth-tones or whatever. (In
point of fact, especially on the cello, with its longer fingerboard,
sixteenth-tones are quite easy to pitch - even on the violin, they're
possible with some serious practice, something I discovered while
working on Radu Malfatti's "L'Instant Inconnu" two years ago, a piece
scored in sixteenth-tones throughout.)
"Small Waves" incorporates a piano into an ensemble (which also features
a string quartet and a trombone, this latter adding a certain rich
austerity to the timbre) playing along with feedback emanating from
six close-miked glass vessels. In each of the piece's 56 sections,
performers are instructed to shift their pitches incrementally upwards
or downwards to a semitone above or below the feedback tone. The piano,
unable to execute glissandos (on the keyboard, that is), plays only
the opening and closing pitches of the sections. The consistently
low dynamics and instrumentation might recall Morton Feldman, but
Lucier is neither interested in musical motives nor the subtleties
of notation. Notions of form, scale, structure and event density that
were of central importance to Feldman are of lesser importance to
Lucier. "Small Waves" is, in its own quiet and ext
raordinarily beautiful way, as experimentally uncompromising as his
1960s works. "Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas"
dates from 1972, and exists in four different versions, of which this
is the second (the others are, respectively, gallery installations
with or without sympathetically resonating percussion, and a live
version with dancers). Part II consists of twelve separate pieces
for instruments - eleven are solos, and there's one duet - playing
along with fixed oscillator tones. "In eight of the pieces," Lucier
writes, "the musicians sound sixteen long tones, separated by silences,
against one or two fixed oscillator tones. For each tone the musicians
slightly raise and lower their pitch, producing audible beats of varying
speed." (One of the clearest manifestations of the beats phenomenon
is Lucier's "In Memoriam Jon Higgins" (1985), which is available on
Timescraper's Wandelweiser Edition, EWR 9608.) Four of the "Still
and Moving Lines.." pieces though are written for pitched percussion
- marimba, xylophone, glockenspiel and vibraphone. As these instruments
are unable to execute microtonal glissandi, Lucier instead calls for
slow accelerandi and ritenuti - pitch and rhythm being, after all,
"parts of the same continuum" as Stockhausen admirably put it. The
interference patterns and aural by-products produced - illusions of
glissandi, the apparent movement of sound around the listening space
- are quite extraordinary. The reduced forces and utter simplicity
of the concept make "Still and Moving Lines.." a more austere listening
experience than the timbrally rich "Small Waves", but it's just as
worth checking out. Not on headphones either: the sharp stereo separation
of oscillator and instrument is designed to send the waves out into
the listening space, and not directly into the inner ear. Strongly
recommended. — DW
John
Cage's "Four Walls"
 John
Cage
THE WORKS FOR PIANO 5
Mode 123
Co-billing the album to Haydée Schwartz and Jack Bruce is a bit
rich, since the legendary ex-Cream bassist appears for just two and
a half minutes (and ispictured with his trusty axe even though he
doesn't play it - his contribution to Cage's "Four Walls"
is to sing the composer's brief and eloquent setting of the Merce
Cunningham poem that forms the work'sseventh section), but I suppose
if it shifts copies of the albums and gets a few tired old rockers
listening to Cage it's worthwhile enough as marketing strategies go.
Problem is, is "Four Walls" really the major work
that Don Gillespie's fine accompanying essay makes it out to be? Certainly,
this enormous piece appeared at a pivotal moment in the composer's
personal and professional life, but divorced from the dance / play
context in which it originally appeared (just once, in 1944) it's
a rather arid listen. "Four Walls" is a work to respect,
even admire, but it's hard to love. It may well foreshadow certain
developments in later so-called minimal music, but it seems more rooted
in the mind-numbingly bland late Satie scores that Cage almost single-handedly
saved from oblivion. The rhythmic intricacies of the micro and macro
structure may indeed be impressive, but do little to dispel the boredom
of stolid white note harmony and crashingly dull duple rhythms that
spin the piece way past the hour mark. The brief "Soliloquy"
(also from 1944) is refreshingly short, and the naïve juvenilia of
the "Three Easy Pieces" (1933) pleasant enough, but unless
you're a Cage completist and/or a rabid Jack Bruce fan, you might
be advised to carry lots of drinking water with you when you set out
with this one. — DW
Basil
Kirchin
QUANTUM
Trunk JBH 003
Basil Kirchin has long been hailed as a forgotten genius by the
likes of Jim O'Rourke, Alan Licht and Drew Daniel (try and hunt down
an original vinyl copy of his 1971 EMI release Worlds Within Worlds
on eBay and see how you fare), so it's cause for celebration that
the Trunk label has finally embarked on a series of releases of Kirchin's
music, of which this is but the first installment ("You have been
warned."). Quantum is, apparently, a work that uses some of
the earlier WWW sound sources, including natural field recordings,
primitive electronics, the voices of Swiss autistic children, and
the cream of the crop of late 1960s British-based free improvisers:
Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Daryl Runswick, Kenny Wheeler and Graham
Lyons (and others, not explicitly credited, it seems).
Basil Kirchin's professional career as a musician started way back
in 1941, playing drums in his father Ivor's dance band. He eventually
took over its musical direction and transformed it into one of the
most popular and sought-after outfits in England, accompanying the
likes of Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan and picking up a recording
contract with George Martin's Parlophone. At the height of his fame,
Kirchin mysteriously abandoned the band and headed off to India for
a five-month stay at the Ramakrishna Temple at Dakshineswa, taking
with him a handpicked selection of the band's more audacious recordings,
which he'd personally supervised with manic perfectionism. These were
all lost when a net containing Kirchin's luggage fell into the sea
in Sydney harbour - a shattering blow for the composer, who returned
to England in 1961 and busied himself writing film soundtracks. By
the mid 1960s the Worlds Within Worlds concept, an audacious mixture
of natural and man-made sounds, had taken shape in his mind, and armed
with a Nagra tape recorder supplied by the Arts Council of Great Britain,
he set about recording the vast library of source sounds he would
eventually use in his extended compositions. He continued to support
himself and his Swiss wife Esther by accepting film and TV work (notably
the soundtrack to the cheapo horror film The Abominable Dr Phibes),
moving to Hornsea on the deserted east coast of Yorkshire. Almost
nothing has been heard of him since the mid 1970s, though one suspects
someone will soon be tracking him down for an extended interview.
Even by today's eclectic standards, Quantum is an extraordinary
work. The juxtaposition of transformed birdsong, fuzzed-out electric
guitar and the intense vocalisations of the autistic children of Schurmatt,
growling tigers and chattering xylophones, cheap fairground synthesizers
and wild snaking soprano sax lines from Parker (on outstanding form
throughout) is unlike anything you're ever likely to have heard before.
Like Eliane Radigue's music, it's as if Kirchin's soundworld just
appeared on the scene thirty years ahead of his time: the multistylistic
montages of Zorn and O'Rourke are in there, as are the field recordings
(treated or not) of Matmos and Chris Watson, but Kirchin's extraordinary
orchestration, combining the screams of a young girl with a lugubrious
band chart worthy of Gil Evans and some awesome bassoon work from
Lyons and bowed bass from Runswick, outdoes them all, creating a feeling
of terrifying power. When Esther's child-like voice returns at the
end to intone "something special will come from me", you damn well
believe it. It's not without humour though - just seconds into the
piece Kirchin plays around with the pitches of his recordings of geese
and gets them to honk "God Save The Queen", surely a deliberate and
tongue-in-cheek reference to Stockhausen's Hymnen (where ducks
honk the Marseillaise). Was Kirchin familiar with Stockhausen's piece
at the time, or has he incorporated the reference since? Until someone
goes to interview this elusive figure, we won't know for sure - his
liner notes don't give us many clues - but there are enough levels
of mystery on this extraordinary disc to move and disturb us for years
to come. You have been warned. — DW
The
return of Meniscus
Lê Quan Ninh
LE VENTRE NEGATIF
Meniscus MNSCS 011
The Sealed Knot (Burkhard Beins, Rhodri Davies,
Mark Wastell)
SURFACE/PLANE
Meniscus MNSCS 012
These two new releases mark a welcome end to the year-and-a-half's
hiatus at Meniscus that followed the fine Butcher/van der Schyff duo
Points, Snags & Windings. If the title of Surface/Plane
suggests, like Evan Parker's Conic Sections, that "extended
technique" might be considered a form of applied topology, then it's
clear that the Sealed Knot occupies a specialist branch of the discipline:
this is, above all, a group preoccupied with surface friction in all
its forms, from clear bowed tones to chalkboard scrapings. The surfaces
they set to work on are provided by percussion (Beins), cello (Wastell)
and harp (Davies), but typically it's the musicians' physical gesture
- of bowing, rubbing, scraping and occasionally striking - that registers
most strongly for the listener, rather than the particular object
it's done to. The disc contains two extended tracks, recorded in different
(though equally reverberant) locations in September 2001. The same
methodology is at work on both occasions - the unhurried juxtaposition
of discrete blocks of sound, delicately flavoured with the occasional
one-off thwack or pling - with a few differences of emphasis: on "Surface"
the musicians leave a little cushion of silence around each internal
segment, while "Plane" has a wider dynamic range, and segments are
allowed to bleed into each other a bit. The only quibble about an
otherwise excellent release is the indifferent packaging: the insert
is a flimsy square of paper, the band name is missing from the cover,
spelling mistakes go uncorrected and nobody is credited for the location
recordings.
On Le Ventre Negatif French percussionist Lê Quan Ninh performs
solo, with what he nicely calls "surrounded bass drum", a drum set
face up on a stand to become a circular tabletop, a workspace for
the manipulation of smaller pieces of percussion and other objects.
In such resonant and confined quarters every object necessarily comes
into dialogue with all the others, by turns quarrelling or working
in harmony. Just as one senses the bedrock of silence that lies beneath
the Sealed Knot's music, behind Lê Quan's improvisations there is
always the muffled heartbeat of the bass drum, even though it is almost
never struck directly. Though he uses the bow on occasion, he avoids
the otherworldly, high-pitched sonorities that many improvising percussionists
elicit from bowed cymbals in favour of darker timbres. There's nothing
ethereal about this music, in which metal always retains its alien
rasp and tang. The album contains five equally intense but varied
improvisations, including the magnificently apocalyptic coda of "autres
distorsions élémentaires", a string of alarms going off over the crackle
of flames. Throughout the disc there's a depth of sound that will
have you double-checking the liner notes to confirm that rather than
an host of percussionists assisted by saxophone, cello and laptop
computer, you're hearing just one man hard at work at his circular
desktop. — ND
Total
Writing London, June 2003
Total Writing London, 27-29 June 2003
Camden People's Theatre
by Nate Dorward
Camden People's Theatre is a small, rather scruffy venue on London's
Hampstead Road. Its programming, directed by playwright, poet, pianist
and provocateur Chris Goode, largely focuses on experimental theatre,
but branches out into many other areas: performance art, music, poetry,
anything "live" in the widest sense of the word. CPT has regularly
featured evenings intermixing poetry and improvised music, notably
The Queen Is Deaf, a three-day anti-jubilee cabaret in 2002.
Total Writing London builds on those predecessors: even though this
was its first year, it had an incredibly ambitious program which belied
the shoestring budget, and which was sufficiently packed that even
this determined reviewer abandoned plans to attend it all in the name
of avoiding complete exhaustion. One of the program's attractions
was its decidedly noncanonical take on the experimental poetry and
music scenes: this was an excellent occasion to catch up with musicians
like Susanna Ferrar, Gail Brand and Roger Smith and poets like Andrew
Brewerton, Sean Bonney, Peter Manson, Rob MacKenzie and Helen Macdonald,
who have yet to gain wide currency even among followers of outside
music and poetry.
The festival was largely organized along the lines of a poetry event
rather than a music event, each session a variety-show turn of between
two and six performers, each given about 20 to 30 minutes. Work in
a performance art or experimental theatre vein often occupied a long
slot to itself, however. Visually, this was different from most poetry
events, with no podium or table and chair automatically provided for
readers. A few dragged such furniture into the space for specific
performance reasons, but mostly people simply stood and delivered.
Aesthetic boundaries between art forms were highly permeable throughout.
While the performances were unfolding in the theatre over TWL's three
days, the theatre lobby and outside were also scenes of a performance
staged by Things Not Worth Keeping (cris cheek and Kirsten Lavers).
Donning workmen's overalls they set to work outside, encrusting the
lobby window ever more thickly with painted letters and words; when
the overprinting became entirely opaque it was used as a screen on
which to project films, and then later incised with more lettering
and then scraped away. To decipher these words and images and activity
(its core being a set of variations on short passage beginning: "we
came home only to find there was no home"), one needed to move in
and outside the building, to see both sides of the glass. TNWK's gesture
towards the current crisis of the Iraq invasion was echoed by much
else at TWL, notably the public discussion with pianist John Tilbury
on Saturday evening.
The Friday opening night started on a high, with a standing-room-only
audience to boot. Philip Henderson created looped assemblages from
"tape and analogue sources", including a venerable portable LP player;
a projector played deliberately banal home movies of parades and ducks
in the park. One memorable sequence involved a portable metal-detector,
which sounded quite like a theremin when aimed at two batteries rotating
on a turntable. Sean Bonney was wonderfully vehement, bobbing back
and forth with hand clenched as he delivered texts characterized by
churning repetition, crossings-out, multiple overlays and sidebars
and spat-out fragments. One piece pulverized a Tony Blair speech;
another found a ragged lyricism in the figure of Tom o'Bedlam: "Rag
& wretch / The Humdrum / Watered / Lark-rock open / Senses five /
& forty days w. / Beggar's staff / By sea or land / Is cold to drink
/ The fury-glass" (from Notes on Heresy, Writers Forum 2002
- one of the last books published by Bob Cobbing). Gail Brand (trombone)
and Josefina Cupido (drum - note the singular - and voice) delivered
a playful mix of song, composition and improvisation, similar to Sylvia
Hallett and Susanna Ferrar's work than to the abstractions of Brand's
work with Lunge or SFQ. After these three fine performances the evening
made an unexpected crash-landing, with readings by Ernesto Sarazale
(author of "Hairy Penis") and a. smith (specialist in found texts
best left lost), and an ineffectual collaboration between poet Karlien
van den Beukel, a Celtic fiddler and a singer/hand-drummer (Peter
McNamara and Michael Bleach).
Saturday morning was a welcome fresh start. Chris Goode read "all
the most difficult, obnoxious stuff I could find of mine", in a virtuoso
flight through his many warring personae, from a fair approximation
of the Earnest Poet's Voice to the sustained hysteria of "Introduction
to Speed Reading," with an interlude for a Monty Python pepperpot
voice and a panicked shriek at the end as he dropped the manuscript
to the ground in fright. Peter Jaeger's reading was characterized
by a muted absurdity and doubt (cf. the line "calm is wracked with
doubt"), which slipped through a gently meandering syntax. Rob Holloway
(Resonance FM's DJ of "Up for Air") performed kneeling barefoot over
an array of pages, laid out in a large square on the floor with a
few spaces left for his feet. Moving cautiously back and forth he
composed new, hybrid texts on the spot. The raw textual material was
rather offputtingly featureless, but in recombination the material
found new life, and by the end I'd come round somewhat to the performance's
austerities.
Persian poet Ziba Karbassi delivered forthright poetry of political
protest, unfortunately too overwrought to draw me in. Stephen Watts
- sample title: "What 31 Children Said About Dreams" - was simply
appalling. Andrea Brady, a younger American poet based in the UK,
writes from a politicized sensibility veering between mourning and
anger, dignified pathos and spitting contempt, often to memorable
effect: "my whole body a hot spot"; "our lost capacity for perfect
speech"; "your head is a suspect package"; "he came on your smashed-up
cheek"; "If only we had a diaphragm to cover the cervix on our face".
A performance-piece by Emmanuelle Waeckerle and the ParaMusical Ensemble,
"Slow March in London", was hokey playacting of the worst kind - it
was (literally) a trudge - but at least provided a welcome if overlong
oasis of calm in TWL's packed schedule. Poet Elizabeth James and (rare
sighting indeed!) acoustic guitarist Roger Smith gave contrasting
but equally soft-spoken performances. The guitarist was at his most
fidgety - his beloved pillow, placed behind the instrument's body,
was ritually adjusted every few seconds - but he elicited lovely arborescences
from his instrument, yielding occasionally to runs or chords whose
very conclusiveness seemed momentarily to fluster him. James' cooler,
more programmatic work made for an effective foil.
David Berridge's noxiously twee poetry preceded an intriguingly skewed
performance by violinist Susannah Ferrar, a dumbshow where she circled
around and rearranged a mocked-up domestic scene (table, chair, vase
of flowers, mirror), her violin commentaries by turns skittish and
mordant. Her last gesture was to hang a hammer on the wall where the
mirror was before. Andrew Brewerton's poetry draws on lyric tradition
in a way recalling Peter Riley and Ric Caddel; he was so soft-spoken
that the work sometimes remained out of focus, but an elegy for the
late Douglas Oliver (incorporating a traditional Italian olive-grower's
song, a field recording of which was played at the close) was almost
unbearably moving, and one of the weekend's highpoints.
Harry Gilonis curated a public discussion with pianist John Tilbury,
occasioned by Tilbury's decision to cease performing in the USA in
response to the vicious neo-imperialism of Bush's USA, and by the
fallout from making this decision public. (Brian Olewnick wrote a
feature on Tilbury for The Wire, dealing with both his political
views and current musical activities; the magazine edited out much
of the political content, touching off an angry letter to the editor
from Tilbury and subsequent debates in its pages and elsewhere.) Tilbury
eloquently and cogently made his main point: a performance within
the USA, even if it included "protest music" or the like, would merely
be co-opted as a testament to America's tolerance for freedom of expression.
Tilbury's argument is a strong one, but I'm puzzled by his fondness
for citing with a measure of approval arguments that run counter to
his own practice: he returned several times to Cornelius Cardew's
statement that a group of workers singing the "Internationale"
was a musical event far more aesthetically complex and satisfying
than the entire musical output of the avant-garde. Tilbury acknowledged
when I asked that he'd no plans to drop his current musical practice
and take up musical agitprop as a vocation, so I take it he does not
agree with Cardew, but he failed to spell out explicitly why he disagreed.
Instead he spoke, hesitantly and movingly, of how his music's political
spirit is in its retaining "this impossible, ridiculous idea of Utopia",
which chimes in with the Frankfurt-School cast of Gilonis' own comments
during the evening. If the discussion was inconclusive, especially
in Gilonis' attempts to draw it out into a debate on what those in
the arts can do in "difficult times" (Gilonis citing Hölderlin), it
was nonetheless an honest and necessary attempt at stocktaking.
The day sputtered out unimpressively for the most part. Iris Garrelfs
fed her voice into her laptop for an improvisation that largely left
me wondering why she needed an expensive hunk of equipment for results
achievable with a couple cheap effects pedals. Tony Lopez's talk poem
was quirky and interesting, though it risked slipping over into a
promotional brochure for his own poetry (the subject of the talk).
Kit Poulson's "Conversation (Dee & Kelly)", concerning two 16th-century
figures beloved of the Peter Ackroyd/Iain Sinclair circle, minimally
involved a bass guitarist but mostly featured Poulson stalking around
reading and flinging pages about.
Sunday morning was another fresh start. American poet Susan Schultz
speaks from a position both totally wired and literally ex-centric,
having lived in Hawaii for the past decade; her magazine/press Tinfish
is a unique crossroads for international poetries and a nascent pidgin
Hawaiian poetics. Her poetry is wary ("It matters what you quote and
when") but dryly humorous: "Adobe Democrats forget their building
material is made of shit." Tim Morris seems to have absorbed and rejected
in turn everything from Cambridge neo-modernism to Wallace Stevens
to Elizabethan verse. What seemed like a rich brew was partially obscured
by his tendency to swallow the endings of poems. Helen Macdonald has
an unusual background for a poet, as a specialist in hawks and falcons
who works in avian conservation. In her poetry a native calmness and
openness comes into encounter with "something as cold and as hard
and as temporary as flight"; as that phrase suggests, it is a poetry
that can at once convey tragedy and a sense of wonder.
Geraldine Monk's reading was billed as a "Séance": she read alternately
from her own work and from a range of other poetry (with a few assists
from Alan Halsey). Her own work is at once haunted and zesty, and
a welcome foe to decorousness; the other poets she voiced might to
varying degrees be described as perpetual embarrassments to the guardians
of the canon: too close to parlour verse (Harold Monro), too vulgarly
oratorical (Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell), too darn out-there (Gertrude
Stein, Bob Cobbing, Thomas Lovell Beddoes). One highlight was Monk's
tussle with Stein's "If I Told Him---A Completed Portrait of Picasso",
reader and text locked into a battle of wits and tongue.
I skipped "Air", a performance-piece by Cathy Turner, Dorinda and
Peter Hulton, and returned for a bracing duet between Matthew Hutchinson
on sampler and violinist Phil Wachsmann, whose elegant demeanour is
a deadpan front for the subversive mischief of his playing: he loves
(literally) to rub the wrong way. Of the music at TWL, this was perhaps
the standout performance. Scottish poet Rob MacKenzie began with a
staccato C.V., which took him from Glasgow, the island of Lewis and
Edinburgh to Essex, Cambridge and Lancaster, where he works and teaches
as an atmospheric chemist specializing in the chemistry of the ozone
layer. His "mongrel" poetry (his term) traverses these particularly
rocky and divided cultural domains with a sometimes scathing ethical
seriousness and an "awkward optimism". In his work, written in a gapped
language shunted from English to Scots to Gaelic to mathematical formulae,
ungainliness is a form of truth.
Another channel-hop: I missed a session curated by Helen Slater (readings
by Marianne Morris and Jérôme Game; music by Beard Bates and Olias
Nil); for what it's worth, audience reports on Game were glowing,
but the music acts were universally reviled. Julia Lee Barclay's My
First Autograce Homeography (1973-74) was given a rehearsed reading
(rather than staging) by Signal to Noise, Chris Goode's own experimental
theatre troupe. Four speakers negotiated a text made up of (I gather)
a randomly dispersed selection from the author's old diaries, with
a curiously hesitant, deadpan delivery, full of dropped beats: for
the first 45 minutes this was about 75% terrific, hilarious and often
touching, about 25% dull; for the next 30 minutes the proportions
were reversed; for the last 15 minutes I was desperately bored.
I see that one line I copied down was "At some point I had a game
called 'Remember the Object of the Game'" - perhaps symptomatic.
The Barclay's massive overrun of the schedule pushed the last session
of TWL, scheduled for 9:15-10:30, much deeper into the night; I was
fading badly and could barely figure out what was funny about Sexton
Ming, who wielded a guitar, a gravelly voice, a squint, and a carefully
cultivated eccentricity, though I'm told he actually was, occasionally,
funny. Scottish poet Peter Manson stepped into the performance area
in a pitch-black T-shirt with the words DO NOT RESUSCITATE across
the chest, which rather pre-empts my instinctive turn to the phrase
"black humour" to describe his Adjunct: An Undigest. It's a
huge prose work compiled from the estranged details of the author's
life, activities and reading - estranged as in both "the comedy of
the ordinary" and as in that kind of estrangement marked in Frank
O'Hara's title: "A Step Away from Them". Manson proves Aristotle wrong:
it's comedy that inspires pity and fear. I've come to think of Adjunct
as one of the great, unpublished works of our time; an edition is
supposed to appear eventually from Edinburgh University Press but
in the meantime a selection is available at www.manson88.freeserve.co.uk/Adjunct.htm.
This was the last performance I saw at TWL, and a great way to end
things; the proper ending to the event was a gig by the Bohman Brothers,
but I was too pooped to go. Last thoughts? Despite some extended troughs
in the programming that had me groaning in misery, and a schedule
so packed that fitting in lunch and dinner required as much planning
and deviousness as a military campaign, TWL was a valuable and above
all different kind of event which I've been unpacking in my
mind for some time. The audience came mostly from the poetry scene
rather than the improv community, which was disappointing given my
hopes that this hybrid event would have a fully hybrid audience. In
any case, this first instance of what promises to be an annual event
is a necessary destabilizing gesture in the current scene, when many
longstanding festivals of poetry and music seem to be just going through
the motions. Assuming the kinks get worked out TWL may well become
an important testing-ground for rethinking "live" practice of whatever
genre.
Jazz
& Improv Roundup
Triage
TWENTY MINUTE CLIFF
Okkadisk OD12045
Twenty Minute Cliff is this trio's third release, following
a self-titled, self-released debut from 1999 and the 2001 Solitaire
disc Premium Plastics. Dave Rempis, who formed Triage shortly
after replacing Mars Williams as the "other sax" in the Vandermark
5, draws upon fellow Chicagoans for compositional input. Drummer Tim
Daisy, a more recent arrival to the V5, has joined Rempis in other
projects within the Vandermark orbit such as the Territory Band. Bassist
Jason Ajemian, who as a relative newcomer has few appearances on recordings,
is very active on the Chicago scene including interactions with members
of the Chicago Underground Trio.
First exposure to the new disc doesn't impress: nice post-Ornette
jazz, but nothing too arresting, though further plays bring out the
disc's strong points, especially the eventful, well-turned compositions.
There are a couple of brief, comparatively straightforward pieces
- the post-bop cooker "Mohandiseen" and the mid-tempo "River Rouge"
- but the others tend to be longer, and feature dramatic shifts of
tempo, theme and mood. The opener, "Angles of 90 Degrees", has a rip-roaring
theme, but it brackets the sparse and ethereal slow section at the
centre of the track, the net result being something like an update
on Conference of the Birds. "Lamento" starts off like Arthur
Blythe in his India Navigation tuba-and-percussion days, before shifting
to a percussion interlude shifting into a sprightly tempo that Rempis
eventually joins to conclude the song. Rempis' work on alto and tenor
throughout is gratifyingly varied - icy and biting at one moment,
almost flute-like the next. Ajemian and Daisy supply propulsive and
alert accompaniment, the bassist at times doubling as a percussionist
himself by tackling his instrument with drumsticks. As mentioned above,
it requires a little patience from the listener before it comes into
focus, but it's worth the trouble. Recommended. — SG
Werner Dafeldecker / Klaus Lang
LICHTGESCHWINDIGKEIT
Grob 541
Bassist Werner Dafeldecker's latest outing for Grob, a set of seven
duos with Klaus Lang playing a draughty pipe organ, was recorded one
winter night in a snowbound church in Southern Austria, and it sounds
like it. With the exception perhaps of one track, the fifth, it's
all continuous and slowmoving stuff (that's about the only thing it
has in common with AMM and Tony Conrad, who the press release waffles
on about), and if you've been following Dafeldecker's work over recent
years, will come as little surprise. The grainy low-end bowed work
predominates. Dafeldecker may be the Mark Rothko of European improvised
music, but it's late Rothko, all greys and browns. Even his occasional
pizzicatos sound forlorn. Lang's wheezy instrument seems peculiarly
adapted to microtonal nuances, but it too sounds as if it's ready
to give up the ghost. Like Thomas Bernhard's writing, the singularity
and austerity of the vision is unique and impressive, but it's pretty
sombre stuff. — JB
Brazleton/Naphtali
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?
Tzadik 7707
Sometimes a new album is just so hopeless that we burst out laughing,
other times it's so bad that we break out in hives. It's not that
Kitty Brazelton and Dafna Naphtali's What Is It Like To Be A Bat?
is necessarily bad (the title is the best thing about it, in fact),
but I can't help wondering if their parodies actually go so far over
the top that they assume the same characteristics and defects of the
parodied object, grating on our ears just as much as that band that
opened for our high-school prom night back in Idaho. Lots of screaming,
terminally hip artwork, and "satires" on just about everything do
nothing to redeem this disc where punk and intellectualism just don't
mix. With enough self-consciousness, a dictionary of world-music themes,
a bit of software and a smattering of rock guitar technique, you could
cook this up at home. The hard part would be getting Mr. John Zorn
to listen to it. Word has it that Tzadik's eminence grise frisbees
about 90% of the discs he receives for consideration straight into
the bin. Well, here's one that managed to climb back out.—
JB
Jack Wright
OPEN WIDE
Recorded 009
John Berndt's enthusiasm for the work of saxophonist Jack Wright
is well-known (he even once claimed Wright was, or rather one day
would be, a more important figure in the history of American improvised
music than John Zorn), and thankfully he puts his label's money where
his mouth is - Open Wide is the third Wright outing on Berndt's
Recorded imprint after That Nothing Is Known (Recorded 002)
and Mister Peabody Goes To Baltimore (Recorded 005) - though
that latter was credited to Joe McPhee, another great American original.
Open Wide finds Jack in his element, i.e. seeking out new playing
partners and putting himself in the most dangerous situations imaginable.
The result, not surprisingly, is one of the most exciting outings
of improvised music released this year, and gives one almighty finger
to those who claim Wright has evolved into some kind of reductionist
Bhob Rainey clone. "Late Open" teams him up with John Dierker (bass
clarinet and tenor sax), Jason Willett (electronics and guitar) and
drummer Dan Breen in the kind of riotous outing that overly serious
European improvisers rarely engage in, for fear of compromising their
precious aesthetic purity. Ha! Purity be damned, this is life. Maybe
the fact that it was all recorded just days after 9/11 has something
to do with it, though to read too much into that runs the risk of
relegating the extraordinary music this album contains to the status
of a footnote, so I won't bother. Wright's other partners include
Neil Feather, who plays something called a Vegas (whatever that is),
guitarists Keenan Lawler and Andrew Hayleck, violinist Katt Hernandez,
tuba player Chris Meeder and saxophonists Evan Rapport and Thomas
Ankersmit. The only gripe is that Jack's piano work is somewhat off-mic
- a shame, as it's intriguing. — DW
Contemporary
Roundup
Terre Thaemlitz
SUPER-SUPERBONUS
Comatonse C.011 LP
The best thing about this limited edition translucent piss-yellow
LP — pressed on pretty piss-poor vinyl to boot — was the
pair of 3D sunglasses that came with it, included (one presumes) so
that listeners, having found nothing much worth listening to on the
album itself, might amuse themselves by looking at Terre Thaemlitz's
inane cover art. I say "was" because I managed to lose the sunglasses
in a local park about four hours after I opened the album for the
first time - would that it had been the other way round. Terre Thaemlitz
has turned in some good work in recent years, but this isn't it. Surely
musicians of the calibre of Franz Hautzinger, Melvyn Poore, Ulrich
Krieger, Burkhard Schlothauer and Reinhold Friedl can find something
more worthwhile to do with their time than dish up such an aimless
collection of Tortoise-outtakes with silly noises. The graphics intentionally
parody the layout of the old Deutsche Grammophon label, a supposedly
ironic touch but one that inspires more than a little sadness on the
part of this reviewer, since it seems that the Zeitkratzer ensemble's
terminally hip reworkings of Lou Reed and Merzbow (not to mention
musicians of lesser talent such as John Duncan and Thaemlitz) have
now become the benchmark of so-called cutting edge contemporary music,
especially in Germany, the country (remember) that led the way in
new music for most of the latter part of the twentieth century. It's
as much as reflection on the ostrich mentality of composers of real
talent - Mathias Spahlinger, where are you?- as it is the sensationalist,
Wire-obsessed medium-is-the-message-so-we-can-dispense-with-the-message-altogether
marketing stance of performing ensembles who frankly should know better.—
JB
Christine Mennesson
SOLEM
Soupir S205
This fine disc presents the work of French composer Mennesson, who
after graduate studies in the Paris Conservatoire and with Tristan
Murail, has been refining a singular and accomplished approach to
composition by finding common ground between the medieval contrapuntal
practices and contemporary musique spectrale. "Un Sourire d'Or
sous les yeux clos du monde" confronts the problem head on, being
scored for baroque instruments, while "Solem", for six voices, sets
extracts of texts by Fulbert of Chartres (for the year 1000 AD) and
Sri Aurobindo, in a rich though simply etched polyphony perfectly
enhanced by the acoustic of Saint Pierre de Chartres where it was
recorded. "Une Lumineuse Migration Blanche dans une Douceur d'Eternité"
is as evocative as its title suggests - as well it might be: it's
scored for thirty flutes - though the music seems to be unsure as
to what direction to follow, hard-line static spectralism (those flutes
inevitably bring Horatiu Radulescu to mind) or delicate arabesque.
The influence of surely the most painterly of the spectralists, Murail,
and behind him of course Messiaen and Debussy, is especially evident
in the lush scoring and "Infinite Breathing 2".—DW
Warren Burt
HARMONIC COLOUR FIELDS
Pogus P21028-2
This album was made using a Roland Sound Canvas Synthesizer, Warren
Burt notes, "the world's best cheap solution for fine tuning microtonality
(and they're not even paying me to say this!)". Maybe so, but the
waveforms Burt chooses, especially those square waves in the final
"48=>53;53=>48", are aurally exhausting after a while. The five works
included move gradually from the tonal to the dissonant, though these
are, admittedly, emotionally loaded epithets - let's say instead from
the pure pre-Pythagorean Lambdoma tuning system of "Portrait of Erv
Wilson" to the aforementioned closer, a dense, ugly cluster of ten
pitches moving implacably forward at its own rhythmic rate. If you've
picked this up because you read the magic D-word somewhere (drone,
that is) and you're expecting either restful neo-tonal wallpaper (heaven
forbid) or a gritty, static, let's-get-right-down-in-those-goddamn-overtones
Tony Conrad fest, you're likely to be disappointed. Burt's harmonic
systems may be static and determined, but the notes that he combines
to form chords to articulate them are constantly shifting in and out
of focus. Listened to one piece at a time ("Portrait of John Chalmers"
is my favourite) the music works its charms - sitting through all
68 minutes leaves you crying out for Harry Partch's adapted viola.
So what if nobody can actually play those microtones with the same
accuracy, it still sounds like music. — DW
Electronica
Roundup
Toshiya Tsunoda
O RESPIRAR DA PAISEAGEM
Sirr 2012
Last year's Tsunoda outing on Lucky Kitchen Pieces of Air
actually ended up as my album of the year, so it was a thrill to find
this new outing waiting for me in the mailbox. Unfortunately, the
touches of magic that made the Lucky Kitchen release so enthralling
- notably the extraordinary recording of the call to prayer in Istanbul
made on a hotel balcony - are less in evidence, replaced with a penchant
for somewhat dry documentary. Tsunoda documents with meticulous detail
the circumstances of each recording (e.g. "a pair of microphones were
[sic] set near the centre of a big warehouse, in the early afternoon.
Work vehicles go in and out occasionally. Several pigeons live in
the ceiling"), and treats the sound sources with utter respect, using
EQ only sparingly to highlight acoustic phenomena that are of specific
interest, but with a few exceptions, the best being track five, where
Tsunoda's mics pick up the far-off sound of someone practising a trumpet,
it's rather arid stuff. Not without interest, though - after concentrated
listening to field recordings such as these (one might also cite similar
artists working in the field such as Kiyoshi Mizutani and Eric La
Casa) one rediscovers the acoustic reality of one's immediate surroundings
with pleasure. I never noticed how many pigeons there were outside
my bedroom window. — DW
Achim Wollscheid
60 x X
Ritornell RIT 28
60 x X is a continuously running set of sixty one-minute
tracks sourced, apparently, in the work of other composers, none of
whom are openly namechecked (but a few have, I suspect, been dead
long enough not to cause any copyright problems). That might explain
the "X" bit, though that also refers to the Frankfurt-based radio
station that originally broadcast a two-hour version of the work (Wollscheid
used every CD and tape machine available to create an instant remix
situation). The trademark stuttering glitches of contemporary laptoppery
are evident throughout - perhaps a little too evident - but
the eerie resonances that lie behind seem to refer to a bygone age
of electronic music, the dusty world of manual tape splices, objets
trouvés and analogue synthesizers. As one might expect from a
composer with a long background in gallery work and installation and
a passion for architecture, there's a strong feeling for structure
and a good ear for detail, though getting into the rhythm of the work
requires active concentration on the part of the listener. Not that
that's a bad thing. — DW
Texturizer
TEXTURIZER
Antifrost afro 2018
Greek cellist Nikos Veliotis might be best known to improv aficionados
for his recordings with the LIO and Fred Van Hove, but recent months
have seen him turn his back, as it were, on old school cut'n'thrust
improv in favour of more static drone-based work (witness "V", on
his split Absurd CD VW with PTM's own Dan Warburton). In Texturizer,
a duo with his playing partner of long standing, Coti K, Veliotis
uses his bachbow, a specially designed bow that enables him to play
all four cello strings simultaneously, to great effect, while Coti
underpins his work with beautifully crafted drones. Recorded in the
Agios Georgios Church in Athens, it's curiously reminiscent of another
fine recent slow-burner drone outing, Jason Lescalleet and John Hudak's
Figure 2 on Intransitive (also recorded in a church, as it turns
out). Most enjoyable release so far on Barcelona-based Antifrost imprint.
— JB
Copyright 2003 by Paris Transatlantic
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