Various
Artists
AMPLIFY02: balance
Erstwhile 033-040 (7CD + DVD)
When the music history textbooks documenting the first years of the
third millennium finally come to be written, musicologists will have
to address the phenomenon of electroacoustic improvised music, especially
given the relative decline in importance in recent years of traditional
notated composition and the ensembles associated with it, notably
the symphony orchestra. While improvisation itself is as old as the
hills, electronic music has been with us for barely half a century,
and live electronic music - as opposed to the pristine elegance of
the early works of the genre, often the results of hundreds of hours
of studio time meticulously cutting and splicing magnetic tape - is
even more recent. In this respect, the pioneering work of the British
improvising group AMM, and particularly guitarist Keith Rowe's adoption
of the table guitar and incorporation of the radio as a musical instrument,
represents something of a milestone in musical history. It is fair
to assume that AMM's The Crypt June 12th 1968 (Matchless MRCD05)
will come to be regarded by future generations as a landmark work
as important as Stockhausen's epic Hymnen of the preceding
year.
In the early part of its career, AMM was relatively well-known (a
brief association with The Pink Floyd and other luminaries of the
London scene at the time helped matters), but from the mid 1970s through
until the early 1990s the group continued to plough its lonely uncompromising
furrow in near obscurity, and considerable hardship - Rowe recalls
that there was a time during the Thatcher years when he was playing
in public barely once a year, a fact that might in part have prompted
his decision to leave England altogether and relocate to France, where
he lives to this day. In the mid 1990s, happily, the tide began to
turn, not only for Rowe, who today is very much in demand as a performer,
but also for AMM percussionist Eddie Prévost, whose Matchless label
is now beginning to rival Martin Davidson's Emanem imprint in importance
as invaluable documentation of the English free improv scene, and
pianist John Tilbury, whose work as an improviser is increasingly
being mentioned in the same breath as his landmark interpretations
of contemporary piano music, notably that of Cage, Feldman and Cardew.
 In an
extended article for the Wire magazine in early 2001 (Wire 206, also
available in interview form
here), Keith Rowe acknowledged the considerable influence AMM has
had on a younger generation of performers ("when I go to festivals
now I hear much more of AMM in the music than I do free jazz"). Not
only performers, either: Erstwhile head honcho Jon Abbey's admiration
for Rowe's work is well documented, and seemingly limitless. Though
AMM as such - with Prévost - has not appeared on Erstwhile, Rowe and
Tilbury in early 2003 recorded the magnificent double CD Duos For
Doris (Erstwhile 030-2), and Rowe has appeared on no fewer than
four other Erstwhile releases: The World Turned Upside Down
(with Taku Sugimoto and Günter Müller, Erstwhile 005), Weather
Sky (with Toshimaru Nakamura, Erstwhile 018), The Hands Of
Caravaggio (with MIMEO and John Tilbury, Erstwhile 021) and Rabbit
Run (with Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler, Erstwhile 027). Moreover,
albums featuring members of MIMEO, the all-electronic improvisers'
orchestra Rowe has "led from the rear" since 1997, account for fifty
per cent of the Erstwhile catalogue to date.
In the above-mentioned interview Rowe described his approach to the
guitar as follows: "I don't rehearse. I never practise. I never take
the guitar from the case. I only ever touch the guitar in the context
of performances, unless I rewire the pick-ups. I can honestly say
that after forty years I still look at the guitar with absolute terror."
This typically self-effacing admission seems open to potentially dangerous
misunderstanding, in that it both marginalizes Rowe's experience and
expertise on his chosen instrument and seems to have led a whole slew
of untrained youngsters to think they can lay any old guitar flat,
twiddle around with some contact mics and release an album - or ten.
Rowe acknowledges that AMM's groundbreaking approach to repertoire
has effectively become the aesthetic benchmark for much improvised
music at the turn of the new century, as represented by the Erstwhile
oeuvre: "I don't think I know of any other group that set out to work
without a repertoire before AMM. That is a very significant part of
what we are about. AMM has always been about searching for the
sound in the performance. A seismic shift in mentality in music."
Old-style rapid-fire acoustic improv, which consciously or not recalls
its ancestry in the Dionysian excesses of free jazz, is of little
interest either to Rowe or to Erstwhile's Jon Abbey. On the other
hand, the stripped-to-the-bone style of improvising known for better
or worse as "onkyo" that arose in Japan partially out of the ashes
of Otomo Yoshihide's Ground Zero (the empty sampler of Sachiko M,
the inputless mixing board of Toshi Nakamura, not to mention the unadorned
turntable of Otomo himself) and similarly lowercase developments in
Europe (the part-composed, part-improvised strategies of Werner Dafeldecker's
Polwechsel and Boris Hauf's Efzeg in Vienna, and the work of a group
of Berlin-based musicians known collectively as Phosphor, including
Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann and Burkhard Beins) reveal clear antecedents
in the AMM aesthetic, and have not surprisingly featured prominently
in the Erstwhile catalogue.
When Abbey came to put the finishing touches to the programming for
the second Erstwhile AMPLIFY festival, which took place in Tokyo's
Star Pine's Café between October 18th and 20th 2002, he naturally
chose musicians whose work reflected the abovementioned stance: in
addition to Keith Rowe, from the host country came Otomo, Nakamura
and Sachiko M, along with guitarists Taku Sugimoto and Tetuzi Akiyama,
vocalist Ami Yoshida and her occasional synth sparring partner Utah
Kawasaki; from Germany, laptops in hand, came Marcus Schmickler and
Christof Kurzmann (originally from Vienna, now resident in Berlin),
along with Thomas Lehn and his analogue synthesizer; from Switzerland
and Austria respectively came Günter Müller (with Minidiscs, iPod
and small items of percussion) and Burkhard Stangl (guitars). Guitarist
Oren Ambarchi tagged along en route back home to Australia and played
at some of the off-festival events. All the performers with the exception
of Akiyama, Kawasaki and Ambarchi had previously appeared on Erstwhile
releases, and this was reflected by the programming: on the first
evening Sachiko M and Yoshida performed as Cosmos (cf Tears,
Erstwhile 024), followed by the Rowe / Lehn / Schmickler trio (Rabbit
Run, Erstwhile 027) and the Stangl / Kurzmann duo (Schnee,
Erstwhile 008). (The only group that night that had not featured on
Abbey's label - and is probably unlikely to do so again - was Taku
Sugimoto's Guitar Quartet.) The second day's running order was as
follows: a duo between Müller and Otomo (their first public appearance
as a duo, though they had recorded what was eventually released as
Time Travel, Erstwhile 029, two days prior to this), Lehn and
Schmickler (cf Bart, Erstwhile 012), Sugimoto / Stangl / Kurzmann
(who had not recorded as a trio for Erstwhile but had already performed
at Tokyo's Off Site in 2001 and released the result on the Polish
label Musica Genera) and finally Rowe and Nakamura (reprising their
collaboration that resulted in Weather Sky, Erstwhile 018).
The third day began with Yoshida's Astro Twin duo with Kawasaki, continued
with a premiere collaboration between Stangl and Müller, and a Nakamura
/ Sachiko M duo (cf do, Erstwhile 013), proceedings coming
to a close with the Sugimoto / Rowe / Müller trio that had recorded
The World Turned Upside Down almost three years to the day
earlier in Paris.
Jon Abbey presumably had the idea of the AMPLIFY02 box in mind
long before he boarded his flight for Tokyo; rumours that a box set
was in the offing began circulating even before half the musicians
had made it back home after the festival. (An even more spectacular
example of Erstwhile advance planning was his decision to release
a recording of the concert in Bologna featuring pianist John Tilbury
and MIMEO, the "concerto for piano and electronic orchestra" eventually
entitled The Hands Of Caravaggio (Erstwhile 021), an intention
made clear to the press well before the concert itself actually occurred
- the story of that event and the subsequent album has been documented
elsewhere). Producing
such a document - selecting material, mixing, mastering, preparing
text, graphics and packaging, not to mention promoting the thing when
it hits the streets - would be a huge undertaking even for a major
record label; for what is essentially a one-man outfit such as Erstwhile
it's nothing short of noble. Apart from Abbey's seemingly limitless
energy (Werner Dafeldecker once described him as "the fastest man
on Earth": try sending Jon an email at 4am local time and you'll be
surprised how fast he replies), special mention ought to be made of
the contributions of Erstwhile house designer Friederike Paetzold,
Yuko Zama (photography), Earl Howard and Toshimaru Nakamura (mastering)
and filmmaker Jonas Leddington, of whom more later.
The AMPLIFY02 box includes no fewer than seven CDs of music
recorded in and around the festival, plus Leddington's specially commissioned
DVD documentary on the proceedings, balance beams. CD 1 features
four cuts from outside shows; two of these were recorded at Gendai
Heights on October 16th and feature Thomas Lehn and Toshimaru Nakamura
(Taku Sugimoto sits in on the second), one four days earlier at Off
Site (with Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama and Günter Müller) and one after
the festival on October 23rd at Appel, featuring Christof Kurzmann
and Nakamura. The second disc, tint, is a studio recording
from October 13th featuring the omnipresent Nakamura and Günter Müller.
Disc 3 features music recorded on the first evening of the festival
proper, the sets by Cosmos (Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida) and the Rowe
/ Lehn / Schmickler trio; disc 4 comes from the second night's proceedings,
and includes Müller's set with Otomo and the Lehn / Schmickler duo.
Disc 5 features the Sugimoto / Stangl / Kurzmann trio and the Rowe
/ Nakamura duo, also from the festival's second night, while disc
6 includes Stangl and Müller's set from the third evening, and ends
with Nakamura and Sachiko M. The final disc was recorded on October
21st and features the full seven guitar line-up - Rowe, Akiyama, Ambarchi,
Nakamura, Yoshihide, Stangl and Sugimoto - in two extended pieces,
the first a reading of pages 82 - 84 from Cornelius Cardew's "Treatise"
(Keith Rowe's bedside reading for the past thirty odd years), the
second a 31-minute improvisation.
Erstwhile productions have hitherto been refreshingly free of accompanying
liner notes (additional essays were prepared to accompany The Hands
Of Caravaggio but these were not included with the disc itself,
remaining instead on the label's website); the AMPLIFY02 box,
however, comes with a 52-page booklet, 33 pages of which feature texts
by no fewer than 20 people, including most of the musicians and Abbey
himself. Some of these are eloquent and poetic - I particularly like
Utah Kawasaki's: "I am very curious about what kind of music these
festival musicians (including myself) will be playing 5 or 10 years
later, or what kind of music they will not be playing by then" - but
many could quite easily have been dispensed with, from Oren Ambarchi's
raving about local restaurants to Kurzmann's heartfelt but hardly
relevant anti-war slogans.
As for the music, the word that comes to mind upon listening, and
one I often find myself using in connection with recent improvisation,
is austere - even, at times, dour. There's little evidence
of a sense of humour, though these musicians, many of whom I'm fortunate
enough to have spent some time with myself, certainly aren't bereft
of one (the footage of the performers laughing their heads off over
dinner on the DVD is refreshing proof of the fact). When it comes
to performing, though, it's strictly business: the Erstwhile stable
has yet to include a musician as impishly perverse as Misha Mengelberg
or as deadpan hilarious as Lol Coxhill (the closest the label has
come so far to outright hilarity, albeit tinged with sarcasm, is the
anarchic deconstruction of tacky French pop on eRIKm and Jérôme Noetinger's
What a Wonderful World). The recollections of another Erstwhile
artist, trombonist Radu Malfatti,
on his involvement with the improvised music scene in London in the
1970s come to mind: "Gradually it became more and more a status quo:
improvisers had to act and react in a precise way in order to be accepted
as improvisers. "Rules" emerged and certain ways of playing were "forbidden"
and became unacceptable - stagnation took place and a pure, idiomatic
way of playing was born." Indeed, there's a revealing moment on the
DVD showing the Sugimoto Guitar Quartet in between sets merrily jamming
away, but when show time rolls round it's time to play by the book:
i.e. one note every minute - a kind of negative image, as it were,
of a "normal" performance situation where the musician tunes his/her
instrument as discreetly as possible and studiously avoids playing
too much until the concert actually begins.
Igor Stravinsky's famous definition of music as a "jeu de notes" no
longer applies here; the only players here who reveal any apparent
concern for pitch as a parameter worth exploring are Stangl and Sugimoto
(who, although he plays precious few notes, still has a knack for
finding the right ones). The developments of post-war serialism on
the one hand and Cageian experimentalism on the other have effectively
put paid to the notion that music (Western music particularly) is
still dominated by the two principal parameters of pitch - either
stated horizontally as melody, or vertically as harmony - and rhythm
- the idea of pulse, regular or otherwise. The complexity of Darmstadt-style
total serialism rendered the perception of what was going on at a
structural level in both domains so difficult as to be well-nigh impossible
(for performer and listener alike), while the loosening of constraints
and welcoming of indeterminacy on the part of the American experimentalists
(a much misunderstood move, often erroneously interpreted as "anything
goes") threw the doors and windows open to extraneous noise, accident
and (apparent) formlessness. The pioneering work of the New York School
with regard to notation was, in the early 1960s, a huge influence
on the British composer Cornelius Cardew, whose monumental "Treatise"
remains perhaps the nec plus ultra of graphic notation. Cardew's
subsequent involvement as an improvising cellist with AMM led to contacts
being established between that group and pioneering American experimental
composers Cage and Wolff, and while Cage, Earle Brown and Morton Feldman
are no longer with us and Wolff has returned to (semi) traditional
notation in his scores, Keith Rowe's enthusiastic championship of
Cardew and his "Treatise" ensures that the issues raised by the late
composer and his work remain at the forefront of musical thought.
The inclusion of several pages of "Treatise" on disc seven of the
AMPLIFY02 box should come then as no surprise, but one wonders
what Cardew - especially the militant socialist Cardew who repudiated
much of his earlier avant-garde experimentation in favour of writing
banal (and frankly hideous) folk-based music to be sung by the oppressed
workers of the world - would have made of the guitar septet version
on offer here.
In a revealing extract from the 2001 interview, Keith Rowe described
his highly acclaimed solo album on Grob, Harsh, as "something
that's very important to me. I wanted to make something that was not
very liked, [..] not obviously a well-rounded performance, something
which wasn't aesthetic, [..] wasn't that satisfying." In a similar
aside featured on the DVD, he speaks of a desire to make the music
"quite flat, encouraging people to come towards the performance.."
The use of that word "flat" is significant, in that it points clearly
back to Rowe's formative experiences as a visual artist - we're talking
flat in terms of a canvas, not in terms of a soda that's lost its
fizz - but it also raises the crucial question of value judgement
with respect to (this and, for that matter, any other) music. Rowe's
doggedly individual pursuit of the sound in performance, and his steadfast
refusal to rest on his laurels, is to be applauded as a sure sign
of his artistic integrity, but prompts the question as to what he
(or Abbey) considers to be performances worthy of release as opposed
to those he'd happily consign to the trashcan. Most musicians have
a clear preference for the well-rounded, balanced performance (those
epithets being broadly synonymous with "successful"), the one that
"takes off" - improvisers in particular are extremely aware of the
moments in the music that "work", and speak quite openly of one performance
being quite clearly "better" than another. (Nor should readers have
any illusions: many improvising musicians are more than happy to use
the latest available software to edit live recordings and remove the
bits they don't like - very few "warts'n'all" performances make it
to disc..) On closer analysis it seems that the criteria that are
brought to bear on such decisions are none other than the age-old
questions of form and content; not that a piece should slavishly adhere
to the noble architectural structures (strictures?) of sonata form,
rondo, theme and variations (delete as appropriate), but that there
remains - both in the music at a deep formal level and on
its surface at local level - a sense of progression from one point
to another, a vestige of the idea of development, of taking a musical
idea (be it a pitch, melody, chord, timbre, noise or whatever) and
subjecting it to some form of transformation (extension, transposition,
intensification, distortion and so forth). Keith Rowe is as uncompromisingly
self-critical as a John Butcher or a Bhob Rainey, but the question
remains as how he defines "good" and "bad", given that the music he
makes seems for the most part to be completely unconcerned with such
questions of development. He describes Harsh as not being rounded,
not aesthetic, not satisfying but he presumably deemed it sufficiently
successful to warrant its release. When and how can a "bad"
(or "rough" or "unbalanced") piece be considered a "good" one? Taku
Sugimoto's typically enigmatic comments in his contribution to the
booklet of liner notes here would seem to indicate that he, at least,
was not entirely convinced that the performances at AMPLIFY02 were
all that successful: "The festival was worth much to me as a funeral
of Onkyo or electro-acoustic music. [..] What we need is a grave after
the funeral service. The music is not so great but the grave looks
so gorgeous!" Such observations probably reveal more about Sugimoto
and his present preoccupations than they do the music itself, though
I am tempted to wonder - if some unknown young laptopper / table guitarist
had sent some of these selfsame recordings to Abbey, would he have
accepted them for release?
While unwanted moments, blasts of noise, software glitches and other
happy (for Rowe) accidents are part and parcel of live performance,
the advantage of a studio session (and subsequent hours of mixing
and mastering) is obviously that the musicians and the producer can
select and edit material more rigorously. The odd man out disc in
the AMPLIFY02 box is just such an example, a studio recording
featuring Günter Müller and Toshimaru Nakamura made five days before
the festival proper. The five tracks, all entitled "tint" (in fact
".tint", "..tint", "...tint", etc. - you get the picture), are fine
examples of the finesse that comes from careful post-production. It's
perhaps a shame that this excellent piece of work comes as part and
parcel of the box, rather than being available separately (as is Müller's
duo album with Otomo, Time Travel, also recorded in Tokyo at
this time), since it's one of the best studio releases on the label
so far.
The meat of the AMPLIFY02 box is to be found on the two double
CDs that document the three days of the festival itself. Disc 3 kicks
off with the 24-minute set by Cosmos, which is slightly less acerbic
than the duo's previous Erstwhile outing Tears, but no less
enthralling (providing, of course, you enjoy Sachiko M's distinctive
empty sampler sinewaves - admittedly an acquired taste). Ami Yoshida
is, fortunately, as fascinating to listen to as she is to look at
- not having had the pleasure of seeing her perform live, I find the
images of her in action on the DVD especially captivating. Along with
the venerable Phil Minton she must be the most original vocal improviser
around at the moment, but whereas he lurches, grimaces, gargles and
bellows, Yoshida produces her sounds with the strict minimum of movement
and expression - and phenomenal mic technique.
 Thomas
Lehn and Marcus Schmickler's Bart (Erstwhile 012) remains to
date the noisiest and most energetic release on the label; Abbey,
seduced by a numerology of his own invention, originally intended
Erstwhile 024 - two times twelve - to be a trio sequel, with Lehn
and Schmickler being joined by Keith Rowe. As things turned out, their
recording Rabbit Run was released as Erst 027, but its cut
and thrust remained nonetheless true to the spirit of Bart
(the optional playback of the disc on random shuffle further emphasising
the fragmentary, work-in-progress aesthetic). When the trio came to
perform live in Tokyo, however, things became more sedate. Their music
has, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot in common with the Cosmos set that
immediately preceded it - small but significant events are set against
a stable backdrop, tiny fragments of sound flit in and out of focus,
like nocturnal insects circling a fluorescent light. Old school language-based
models of free improvisation, ideas of motivic exchange and development
originating in the music's free jazz past (and, going further back,
the traditional call-response structure of earlier African musics)
have gone out of the window - Lehn, Schmickler and Rowe are engaged
here in collaborative tone painting rather than dialogue. Insofar
as Rowe's intention, through creating that above-mentioned flatness,
is to draw the listener in to the work, this 39 minute set is a total
success, perhaps more so than Rabbit Run. Several years ago
John Zorn reissued his early Parachute recordings in a box set before
subsequently releasing them as individual Tzadik albums - it's to
be hoped Abbey might, at some stage, follow suit and issue separately
some of the recordings included in the AMPLIFY02 box. He could
do well to start with this one (and tint, as suggested above).
 Günter
Müller's set with Otomo Yoshihide on Disc 4 clearly inhabits the same
world, but starts out following a more traditional formal trajectory,
building ominously and steadily over the first eight minutes before
stepping back from the abyss and fading progressively towards the
14'30" mark - there's a case to be made for adding an index point
here. The second movement, as it were, becomes more animated - Müller's
background as a percussionist makes itself felt on a number of occasions:
this is one of the few recordings in the box that plays with an element
of pulse. Erstwhile productions usually studiously avoid loop-based
material, which makes its brief appearance here even more exciting.
Unfortunately it doesn't go far enough, and by the 27-minute mark
things have settled down into a growling drone that ultimately settles
on a rich low C# nine minutes later.
The last time I saw Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler perform live,
at the Instants Chavirés in Paris, Lehn wasn't entirely satisfied
with the performance (the fact that Schmickler had to reboot his Mac
halfway through probably didn't help matters much), but the duo's
set at Amplify 2002 doesn't disappoint. When it gets going it's very
much Bart live, with all the high-octane spluttering and frequent
changes of direction that implies, and it's a shame there isn't more
music of a similar energy and madness to be found in the box. It's
Erstwhile business as usual on disc 5, which opens with a trio set
featuring guitarists Sugimoto and Stangl, accompanied by Christof
Kurzmann on Powerbook and clarinet. Those familiar with Stangl and
Sugimoto's An Old Fashioned Duet on Sugimoto's Slub Music imprint,
or the trio's Musica Genera release In Tokyo: First Concert Second
Take (Musica Genera mg 002) will know the rules of the game. Often
broadly tonal - diatonic, rather - in its choice of pitch, the music
advances slowly and steadily like a game of chess. Stangl seems conscious
of his fellow guitarist's apparent propensity to play fewer notes
with each successive concert (though Sugimoto's quite chattery here
by his recent standards), and compensates with some gently percussive
work on the body of the instrument. Kurzmann is the model of discretion
throughout, either on clarinet (breathy flutters) or on computer,
painting the de rigueur drizzle'n'hum backdrop in front of
which the guitarists perform their delicate manoeuvres. The activity
level remains relatively constant, and dynamics never rise above a
gentle piano until proceedings end somewhat enigmatically;
was the recording faded out or did the set really end with that questioning
rising seventh? One imagines Morton Feldman would have approved.
In contrast - not in terms of its dynamics, which remain ever muted
- Keith Rowe's set with Toshimaru Nakamura is unremittingly intense.
By comparison, the pair's earlier Weather Sky sounds almost
relaxed. The earlier post-Industrial loops of Nakamura's solo albums,
particularly No-Input Mixing Board2 (A Bruit Secret) and the
gentle minimalism of his recent outing on Cubic, Vehicle, are
still there, but seem to have receded into the distance. Nakamura
is a highly attentive musician who responds to the input of his playing
partners - witness his excellent and often overlooked duo outing with
Bruno Meillier, Siphono, on SMI - but when those partners are
seemingly content to sit on a drone he's not averse to taking the
initiative himself: the grainy loop he slips in after about nine minutes
finally coerces Rowe into abandoning his trademark stasis and retaliating
with several well-aimed thuds. Working with feedback loops is a dangerous
business though, and Nakamura often has to break out of the cycle
by stopping the loop altogether, which is what he does here at the
14-minute mark. This has the effect of almost capsizing the boat -
there's a terrific feedback howl at 15'05" that forces both musicians
to retreat uphill into Sachiko M territory: it's the kind of moment
of outright danger that Rowe evidently enjoys, and one that most improvisers
would probably wince at, but it's absolutely riveting. One suspects
that had such a moment occurred in a studio session the pair might
not have selected it for release, but this was a concert situation
- and proof that live improvised music doesn't have to be voluble
and virtuoso to be breathtakingly dangerous. Even so, Rowe and Nakamura
never quite recover from the trauma; Nakamura inserts a few brief
looped motives but they never manage to break through the electric
fence of amp buzz.
 Disc
6 opens with one of the festival's "world premiere" collaborations
(these used to be called "meetings" or "encounters", but this is Erstwhile..),
between guitarist Burkhard Stangl and Günter Müller. Stangl is once
again quite active at the outset, twanging away on his acoustic until
Müller's refusal to get busy gradually leads him towards the more
sustained sonorities of the electric instruments. It all becomes very
consensual: the kind of friction that a guitarist like Derek Bailey
thrives on (witness his duo collaborations as diverse as Outcome
with Steve Lacy (Potlatch) or the notorious Guitar Drums 'n' Bass
with DJ Ninj (Avant)) is conspicuous in its absence; instead, individual
contributions eventually fuse into a kind of meta-identity, that of
the group itself. This is directly in line with the AMM aesthetic
(recalling this eloquent passage from Rowe's interview: "In AMM philosophy
three is four: the three players plus the group itself makes four.
It's like the Chinese story of the man drinking a glass of wine in
moonlight whose shadow becomes the third member of the company. AMM's
a quartet with an invisible member"). However, towards the end of
the set the glue seems to come somewhat unstuck; Stangl sits on his
arpeggiated chords while Müller's bowed gongs are brutally interrupted
by a volley of abrasive disc-skipping clicks, which ultimately stop
the drone in its tracks. An intriguing end to a problematic half hour
of music.
 In
the same way that their Erstwhile release do is arguably the
label's most challenging release to date, the brief set featuring
Sachiko M and Nakamura (I'm assuming this is the entire piece - both
artists have after all been known to play for relatively short durations)
is perhaps the most extreme offering in the AMPLIFY02 box.
Avoiding his customary pick-up-a-loop-and-run-with-it technique, Nakamura's
interjections here consist of decidedly rough, sporadic bursts of
harsh - I choose the word deliberately - digital noise, interfacing
more with the tense silence than with Sachiko's static sinewaves.
Audience members throughout the festival and specifically during this
set deserve a complimentary box of discs themselves - presumably transfixed
by the performance, there's not the slightest sound of shuffling in
seats, squeaks, ambient nattering from outside and barely half a dozen
coughs throughout (I hereby advise Mr Abbey not to organise
a future edition of AMPLIFY in Paris' Instants Chavirés - not, that
is, if he has any intention of recording it). If the duty of the musician
today is, as Rowe defines his own work, to confront "difficult knowledge"
then these 21 and a half minutes represent noble work. Whether they
can be deemed "successful" or "good" seems somewhat beside the point;
this is music certainly worthy of admiration, though it is difficult
to love.
The first half of disc 7 is given over to a reading by the Erstwhile
All Stars Guitar Septet of three pages from Cornelius Cardew's "Treatise".
Of the many graphic and verbal scores of experimental music that appeared
in the 1950s and 1960s, "Treatise" is the work that seems to have
attracted the most attention in recent years, at least on the part
of improvising musicians (for which we have Mr Rowe to thank, though
it'd be nice to hear some of today's improvisers tackle works of the
same period by Wolff, Ashley, Bussotti and Haubenstock-Ramati one
day). It's also one of the less difficult, or rather more easily realisable,
scores, being open to a remarkable number of possible interpretations.
Cardew deliberately left questions of interpretation up to the performers,
hence Rowe's remarks on the work: "I try to approach it like a landscape.
There are lots of different ways of reading it; you can read the actual
symbols and shapes, or you can read between the symbols and
shapes, which would be more of a Marxist way of doing it, or you can
do a perverse reading of it, like [British composer] John White would..".
His pre-concert pep talk-cum-lecture to the six other guitarists,
which appears with the performance as an extra on the DVD, makes it
clear that there are no rules, and stresses the responsibility of
each musician to create his own personal system of interpretation
of Cardew's graphics (it's somewhat surprising, then, that Rowe recently
took offence at another French improvising guitarist's recent "interpretation"
of the work..). It's a shame that Abbey couldn't have dispensed with
a few pages of anecdotal liner notes and fuzzy arty photos in order
to reproduce the pages of Cardew's score in question (though they
do appear briefly in the video). The performance by Messrs Rowe, Ambarchi,
Akiyama, Nakamura, Sugimoto, Stangl and Otomo, and the subsequent
38-minute improvisation (which sounds alarmingly similar in places
to the Cardew - must be a moral in there..), are pleasant enough but
hardly as intense and exciting as the material recorded at the festival
proper. Put more than one guitarist in a room together and you're
more or less guaranteed to end up with semi-aimless noodling (remember
Stangl and Sugimoto's outing with Martin Siewert and Werner Dafeldecker
on Grob, SSSD?); nobody wants to step on anyone else's toes
or showboat, so it ends up as a pretty but rather inconsequential
patchwork quilt of trademark licks. You'll be surprised how easy it
is to recognise the individual guitarists here. Disc 7 would be just
fine if it had appeared on a second division label such as Bottrop
Boy, but it doesn't meet the same high standards as the recordings
from Star Pine's Café.
 If,
like me, you live with someone who can appreciate a concert of improvised
music but who has a hard time listening to it on disc, you'll appreciate
Jonas Leddington's outstanding balance beams DVD (even more
so if you're a devotee of Surround Sound audio, as the Rowe / Lehn
/ Schmickler and Müller / Otomo sets are both included as audio extras:
good choice). Leddington's stunning montage gives the lie to the oft-stated
rumour that there's little of interest to look at in today's improv
concerts, especially when laptops are involved. True, watching Keith
Rowe weave a tiny coiled spring between the strings of his guitar
isn't exactly as thrilling as seeing the veins on Peter Brötzmann's
forehead burst and spatter the audience with blood, but the visual
element is certainly appreciated when it comes to Taku Sugimoto's
performance, most of which these days is visual anyway (watch out..
he moved!). Indeed, the footage of the Sugimoto Guitar Quartet is
amusing, in that the camera tends to pan away from a musician just
at the moment when he's about to play one of the all-too-rare notes.
Elsewhere, interspersing the concerts with shots of Tokyo - notably
its public transport system and architecture - provides both depth,
context and welcome relief (and for those of us who haven't yet travelled
that far and who would probably bankrupt themselves buying out-of-print
vinyl if they ever did, space to dream..). The featured comments of
the musicians themselves are of varying degrees of relevance: Rowe's
reminiscences of his art school background and Müller's views on the
non-linearity of the music are informative and illustrative, but Marcus
Schmickler's gushing appreciation of Thomas Lehn and his somewhat
unclear retelling of the famous John Cage story about the Harvard
anechoic chamber could easily have been dispensed with. Likewise,
I'm not convinced that the DVD's final image, one of Mr Abbey himself
sitting contentedly in the audience after being acclaimed for his
bravery from the stage by Keith Rowe, is the best way to go out, though
one might argue that having invested so much time and money in the
event and the documentation thereof, he was entitled to have his picture
taken - personally I prefer record producers, festival promoters and
especially journalists to stay out of sight as far as possible.
All things considered, it's fair to assume that the limited edition
run of the AMPLIFY02 box will sell out fast - it undoubtedly
merits inclusion in any self-respecting reference collection. University,
music school and college record librarians throughout the world will
no doubt have already added it to the shopping list, and though it
is obviously too early for it to claim the kind of mythic status associated
with AMM's The Crypt, I'm prepared to wager a small sum that
it will eventually find a place in the history books. Happily though
- and here I'll disagree with Taku Sugimoto - the story is not over
yet: as I write, the indefatigable Abbey is in Vienna recording another
chapter of the Erstwhile saga with Axel Dörner, Franz Hautzinger and
- yes, you guessed right - Keith Rowe. AMPLIFY02 is, then,
not so much a gravestone as a milestone. I do, however, agree with
Sugimoto's assessment of the music; Rowe's quest for the inherently
problematic may be laudable but should not be used as a convenient
excuse to release material that is not consistently first-rate. If
you're going to invest $150 in something as ambitious as this, you
have a perfect right to expect the music to be absolutely astounding,
and in my humble opinion the absolutely astounding music on the Erstwhile
label is to be found on albums like The World Turned Upside Down,
Schnee and Duos for Doris, and occasionally - but not
often enough - in the AMPLIFY02 box. —DW
[Thanks to Yuko Zama for photographs and Nate Dorward for additional
help proofreading]
Tu
m'
TU M' AND THE MAGICAL MYSTERY ORCHESTRA
Aesova AE5CD01A
Nathan
Michel
TREBLY
Mr Mutt Mlive 04
Piana
SNOWBIRD
Happy HAP001
The
title of Tu m''s 2002 outing on Fällt, Pop Involved, says it
all. At a time when most youngsters seem to be huddled in front of
their laptops producing grey sheets of unremittingly dull TV static
drizzle, burning it on CDRs, putting it under their pillows at bedtime
and dreaming of Erstwhile, Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli
are having the time of their lives sampling old Steve Reich albums
on top of a mountain in central Italy. Exactly who the Magical
Mystery Orchestra is isn't clear, though its members seem to include
several old minimalists from bygone days, crunched up in the Tu m'
glitch machine and reformatted for the post-Fennesz generation. It's
mildly irreverent, fun, and decidedly pop (if a bit on the long side).
Not content with making music themselves, the Italians are enthusiastic
champions of other people's, and their excellent Mr Mutt CDR label
(limited edition of 200 only - hurry!) has already released exquisite
work by Minamo and Sogar. Nathan Michel's Trebly
is a pure pop delight, recalling those happy days of yore spent
twiddling around with sequencers on old Casios and Rolands, except
this is all done live on Mr Michel's computer. It's all there: the
tinny drum machine sounds, the crappy DIY Phil Glass arpeggios, cunningly
intercut with state of the art bloops, cracks and splats. Defiantly
tonal, damn near danceable, it's pop for the third millennium par
excellence.
Across the Atlantic, even Taylor Deupree, manager of the 12k label,
has been infected by the pop virus, though from another direction:
inaugurating his new Happy imprint is Snowbird
by Piana, aka Naoko Sasami, who skilfully ruffles the pink, fluffy
surface of Japanese pop with subtle (for once) glitchnology. Cornelius
would be proud; so would Erik Satie and the Penguin Café Orchestra.
And what's more there are vocals on this one, though not being
able to speak a word of Japanese I can't tell you what they're about.
But since when did the words matter in pop music anyway? —JB
In
Concert: Aki Onda / Jac Berrocal
Paris,
Sentier des Halles
26th October 2003
The
room is half-moon shaped, small and intimate, with light fixtures
on the ceiling. Four small, round red lights hang on the wall behind
the stage, facing the audience. It's like being in a Métro tunnel,
in between stations. I'm in a crowd of people waiting to be electronically
stimulated, Paris-style, as part of the third annual Tokyozone festival.
Japanese electronic wizard Aki Onda appears nonchalantly in a cream-colored
blazer (without acknowledging the public) and right away sets about
putting his noise-making system into effect: samplers, tape loops
and other electronic boxes are set out neatly on an L-shaped table
in front of him, along with a couple dozen cassettes. A mere flick
of a switch unleashes a barrage of screeches, hums, drones and voices,
a psychedelic wall of sound. It's fascinating to watch Onda operate;
with a small cassette player in both hands, he changes tapes often,
moving around quietly, yet nervously, pushing buttons and looking
back and forth along the tables as if looking for bugs to zap with
his cassette player.
After a half hour of tunnel space sounds, France's veteran enfant
terrible, trumpeter Jac Berrocal, appears in dark sunglasses and
outfit, looking the part. Working with two mics, each with its own
degree of echo and delay, he immediately adds quite a dimension, at
first using his trumpet to augment Onda's soundworld, but playing
actual music, just enough to take the experience to another
level, one of mystery, apprehension - and sheer madness. He keeps
us wondering what's going to come next - this is what true experimental
music is all about.
Berrocal uses other horns too, as well as a flute, and seems at first
quite content to add his spontaneous, dark textures to the proceedings
rather than dominate the stage, but before long he can't resist becoming
the focal point. Putting horns aside, he steps up to the mic and takes
the audience by surprise with a veritable rant: speaking, growling,
screaming, he sounds at times as if he's fronting a death metal band.
Onda's sounds take on menacing new meaning. Intense as well as comical
(at least to this spectator), Berrocal has everyone's attention. Perhaps
conscious of the fact, he graciously acknowledges his playing partner
on several occasions during the hour-long show and thanks the crowd
with "arigato beaucoup", while Onda himself remains cool and unassuming,
seemingly comfortable with letting Berrocal have the spotlight - not
that he has any say in the matter.. —DG
LOSING
EVERY DAY
Kissy kis001
This
splendid outing from TV Pow's Brent Gutzeit was "recorded in my apartment
except track 8 which was at the Fireside Bowl, Chicago. I used an
old Knight tube audio generator, "the Fisher" tube amplifier (model
90c), handmade 20 string steel bass. Pianos recorded at Odum and Tim
Kinsella's place." It's something of a trend for today's improvisers
and sound artists to list their equipment and sound sources (Jeff
Wrench, aka Brutum Fulmen, is also fond of doing it), and not always
of great importance to listeners (cf. Nate Dorward's review of Ernesto
Diaz-Infante in last month's PT). Though it may be of minor interest
to know that Mr Kinsella has a piano (and, we suppose, Mr Gutzeit
doesn't), what matters more in this music is how sonic raw material
of an often-banal nature is transformed into something musically satisfying.
In this respect, Losing Every Day is a veritable triumph. The
one piece of equipment Gutzeit doesn't mention in his inventory is
his computer, but those who have been following his innovative work
with TV Pow over the past few years will testify to his considerable
chops on the instrument. That last bit will probably sound funny to
jazz aficionados, but the laptop has undoubtedly established itself
over recent years as an instrument in its own right, and Gutzeit belongs
to a group of virtuoso operators - Christian Fennesz, Florian Hecker,
Peter Rehberg, Phil Durrant, Christof Kurzmann, and a whole host of
others - who can certainly be said to possess "chops" (though watching
these guys do it live isn't always exactly, erm, interesting). Face
it, kids, there are a lot of Powerbooks out there, and thousands of
would-be Fenneszes squiggling and clicking away as we speak, but when
all's said and done it still comes back to having an inherent feel
not only for the sound material itself but for a structural framework
that incorporates it intelligently to its best advantage. The eight
tracks on Losing Every Day, which range from the twelve minute
opener "the latest flint narrative"
('scuse me for sticking with lowercase, I don't know if that's supposed
to be "flint" as in Stone Age tool or "Flint" as in James Coburn)
to the fifty-second finale, and excerpt from "composition #30: for
turntable, cigarette and computer (chicago loves you)" are all impressively
coherent - and refreshingly extreme.
The opening track is a teaser, an almost Day-Glo soft minor ninth
chord drifting into near silence (what, so soon?) until a blast of
digital terror rips the speakers off the wall, to be followed by a
queasy pitch-shifting chord. By now we're on our guard: the second
explosion isn't exactly a surprise, but the ensuing action is unremittingly
tense, moving from a cloud of bell-like sonorities into a tense montage
of tiny noises, any of which could fly off the handle at any moment.
Gutzeit's evidently got a great sense of pacing and structure, and
one that stems from familiarity with the best late twentieth century
music (and arguably a fascination with the shock tactics of the best
horror movies). We're on the edge of the seat, and we're only eight
minutes into the album; who gives a damn if it was a model 90c tube
amp? "perpetuating the lost cause" begins with the kind of flurry
of nastiness Kevin Drumm's quite good at, before settling (?) into
a dull, domestic appliance-like murky hum. Teeth-grinding high frequencies
soon come screaming in, but the whole edifice soon comes crashing
back to Drummland. In contrast, "caught staring at the sun again"
disappears after a couple minutes into a near-inaudible haze of tiny
clicks, resurfacing a while later to dwell in a frequency range that
will have sensitive domestic animals dancing in delight; "schweebur"
mixes distant traffic noise and birdsong (Gutzeit must have been recording
from his open window) with a multitude of tiny clicks and whooshes,
presumably household objects placed in dangerous proximity to the
mic. Following without a break, "So… why don't you just get a job?"
(nice title, that) sounds like a concert performance of Xenakis' "Kraanerg"
inside a steel factory - if this is what your apartment sounds like,
Brent, you must have a great technique for dealing with your neighbours:
send me mail, I need some advice - after which "before the fall of
the American empire" (the capital A my idea this time, though some
might not think it's deserved) is a distressingly near-empty assemblage
of pops and bangs. In "sterile grey" a raw microtonal cluster drone
holds centre stage while some unsettling creaks and scrapes try and
break through to the sonic foreground, until the drone plunges into
extreme low frequency register, leaving only sporadic hocketing interference
patterns in its wake. Not exactly cheery stuff, to be sure (though
with a title like that, what did you expect?) but superbly effective:
its sombre resonances create a kind of sonic Zen garden, a predominantly
static sound environment that invites us to meditate on what has gone
before. This is where composition comes in - had this track been placed
near the beginning of the disc, the architecture of the album as a
whole would be perceived as being profoundly different. When the high
drone and creaks reappear, there's a sense of closure, but Gutzeit's
got a nasty surprise in store: the final track, which sounds like
what's left of the Fireside Bowl being mercilessly trashed. I hope
to goodness they didn't get their hands on your computer, Brent. —DW
On
Incus
Will Gaines and Derek Bailey
RAPPIN AND TAPPIN
Incus CD 55
Limescale
LIMESCALE
Incus CD 56
Incus's
formal CD catalogue grew at a modest pace in 2003, with the addition
of these two, very different but equally offbeat discs (though this
is only part of the story: many of the label's releases nowadays are
CD-Rs that are only available direct from Derek Bailey). Rappin
and Tappin features Bailey and the American tap dancer Will Gaines,
a veteran of the swing era who has been resident in Britain for many
years. Their musical relationship has been documented several times
before, on the video Will (an English concert from 1995) and
on the CD Company in Marseille (from 1999); Rappin and Tappin
is actually earlier than either of these, being drawn from a 1994
concert in Holland. The first part features Gaines alone, reminiscing
about his life and about great tap dancers from Bill Robinson to Baby
Laurence while his feet put on a furious, non-stop show. On occasion
he breaks into demonstrations of the stylistic changes in tap dance's
history or shows off his uncanny ability to convey a tune with just
his footwork; more often, though, he works in his own intricate, scatterbomb
style, which is sometimes almost beyond the ear's capacity to follow.
Gaines' voice should have been miked more precisely - it shoots back
and forth between the speakers and snaps in and out of focus - but
this is a small quibble about a beguiling, ultimately rather moving
performance. Bailey enters for the second set, playing electric guitar.
His rhythmic precision is brought to the fore in this situation: his
sense of placement is so exact that it can give you the illusion of
hearing off-beats even in free-time. All the familiar Bailey devices
are present - the mouth-puckering chords that twist suspended in the
air or sink in like a stain, the use of the swell pedal to elude rather
than come after the listener, the curtly chopped chords, the busily
detailed picking kept at the edge of clear audibility by a drop in
amplification - while, as always, subtly recast in response to the
unusual musical context. This is one of Bailey's most purely sympathetic
partnerships on record in recent years (it feels odd to say that of
a man who's recorded some memorably cussed duet albums), and it's
an album emphatically not to be dismissed as a curiosity.
The instrumentation of the Limescale quintet comes across as half
Dada cabaret, half 1920s novelty music - Bailey on guitar, Alex Ward
on clarinet, Tony Bevan on bass saxophone, and the pseudonymous pair
of THF Drenching and Sonic Pleasure wielding (respectively) dictaphone
and bricks - but the results are less anarchic than one might expect.
The general garrulousness and consistency of approach (the first four
tracks, ranging from 6 to 17 minutes in length, are virtually indistinguishable
in terms of pace and aural palette) end up almost normalizing the
music for all its initial appearance of bizarreness; there's almost
no sign here of the dangerously mercurial swings of direction or downright
lunacy of your average Chadbourne or Bennink album. (That may be a
plus or a minus, depending on your point of view.) Playing acoustic
guitar for the duration, Bailey keeps to the hiding-in-plain-sight
tactic he favours in large ensembles. It's Ward's highly varied clarinet
lines that stand out most prominently; they have an ironized elegance
that's still audible even when he drops a conventionally demure clarinet
tone for some ferocious and impressively controlled high-register
work. Ms Pleasure chips in (sometimes literally: she uses a chisel
on occasion) with taps and clinks that suggest a bored child at a
restaurant banging a knife on plates and glasses; Bevan roots around
assiduously for truffles; Drenching contributes burbling fast-forward/rewind
dictaphone interjections whose disgusting lability resembles the sounds
of mouth-cavity and saliva rather than voice per se. The results are
entertaining in small doses, but this is a very large dose - over
an hour's music - and ultimately it's a bit of a one-joke album. I'm
also skeptical about the dictaphone and bricks, however appealingly
ludicrous they are in principle. Many players in the current improv
scene have turned to uncommon or downright improbable instruments,
as a way of staking out fresh musical territory and minimizing reliance
on the aesthetics and musical solutions of previous generations of
improvising saxophonists, pianists, bassists, &c. Hence the prevalence
of contact-mics, harp, laptops, no-input mixing board and empty sampler
in the (so-called) lowercase-improv scene. But the dictaphone playing
and brick banging on Limescale don't open up unexplored sonic
worlds: they work amusing but painfully limited variations on the
familiar roles of improvising vocalist and pots-and-pans percussion.
For the record, Limescale has its serious proponents, and The
Wire has even announced it as among the most important releases
of 2003, in its December "Rewind" feature. In the same issue Bailey
biographer Ben Watson listed it as his favourite disc of the year.
(Hardly surprisingly: it's tempting to think of Limescale as
nearly as much a Watson disc as a Bailey disc, not because Ben necessarily
had any part in its creation, but because it so closely fulfills his
aesthetic ideals and polemical claims, which revolve around seeing
free improvising as part of an avant-garde tradition of performance
art and anti-art going back to Dada and Merz. Watson's Frankfurt-School-derived
defence of the continued pertinence of avant-garde aesthetics even
receives an echo in the title of the track "Bürger Plus" - presumably
a nose-thumbing at the author of The Theory of the Avant-Garde,
a book which argues that the avant-garde project lost its viability
after the early 20th century.) While I'm intrigued by the many detailed
critical testimonies that discover in the album an enormous wealth
of sound and colour (who knows, maybe it's actually there if
you have a patient and sympathetic ear, though I draw the line at
the guy who wrote that Sonic Pleasure's brickwork was "uncannily like
Sunny Murray" - like hell it is), why this modestly entertaining divertissement
needs to be blown up to the proportions of a masterwork remains a
mystery to me.—ND
Elio
Martusciello
AESTHETICS OF THE MACHINE
bowindo 01
Valerio
Tricoli
DID THEY? DID I?
bowindo 02
Alessandro
Bosetti / Antje Vowinckel
CHARLEMAGNE, LA VUE ATTACHEE SUR SON LAC DE CONSTANCE, AMOUREUX DE
L'ABIME CACHEE
bowindo 03
Domenico
Sciajno / Gert-Jan Prins
THE D&B ALBUM
bowindo 04
Having
been inundated with requests for Best Of lists for 2003, I eventually
got tired of the idea, though if anyone had asked me to name the new
label of the year (as opposed to album) I would have nominated
Bowindo without a moment's hesitation. Bowindo is, along with Giuseppe
Ielasi's Fringes imprint that distributes it, arguably the best thing
to come out of Italy since Luigi Nono. Each of the first four releases
on the label is superbly recorded, beautifully packaged, and full
to the brim with daring and accomplished new music.
 Lest
you be in any doubt about the label's radical credentials, Elio Martusciello's
Aesthetics Of The Machine comes with the following warning:
"These recordings are very, very loud. They are dangerous to the ears
and for hi-fi systems. Listen with caution. Moderate the volume control."
All right! The last album that came with a health warning was
Zorn's Kristallnacht, and this one's even more fun. Working
with ultrasounds (up to 20,000Hz) and infrasounds (down to 16Hz),
all that we perceive, writes Martusciello, is "the result of what
has been discarded, the driftage, the limits of technology and our
auditory apparatus." Accordingly, the opening "Out of our mind" starts
with a god almighty crack (the music, or the loudspeakers already
registering disapproval?), and within less than a minute the sub-basses
set the entire room shaking. I have a friend with a $30,000 hifi system
and electrostatic speakers as tall as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but I'm
somehow reluctant to ask him to try this album out, not wishing to
be held legally responsible for any structural damage to his property
that might result. Remember, as Stockhausen once said, "sounds can
kill". Despite the rather scientific nature of the composer's accompanying
notes, this is as much music for the body (literally) as it is for
the mind; it might not be something one can be said to enjoy, but
there is certainly a hell of a lot to feel.
 Did
I? Did They?, by Bologna-based Valerio Tricoli, whose only
released work prior to this was an untitled cassette outing with Ielasi
on Freedom From, is a fascinating if enigmatic piece that, like its
cover photography, plays with the idea of inside / outside. Or rather,
foreground / background - Tricoli explores the idea of distance and
depth (real, in the form of sounds occurring far from the mics - a
distant police car siren - or illusory - sporadic and intentionally
heavy of use of reverb) in a beautifully executed and constantly thought-provoking
piece of work. The piece itself lasts 19'09", but the album displays
a total duration of 41'08". At 20'21" a ghost track appears, in the
form of a recording that has also apparently provided some source
material for the preceding piece. It sounds as if Tricoli has hidden
a Minidisc recorder inside a cupboard in somebody's apartment: fragments
of conversation, the clang of pots and pans, passing traffic noise
and various other acoustic ejectamenta of everyday life appear and
disappear. Once more, the sounds are recognisably interior (crying
children, flushing toilets..) and exterior (passing motorcycles, dogs..)
in origin, but their coexistence as musical elements in a work of
sound art has blurred the difference. Similarly, the seemingly untreated
field recording raises the eternal question, is this life or is it
art? That's for you to decide (I'd argue it's both). In its way, Tricoli's
work is as aesthetically challenging as Martusciello's, the difference
being you probably won't be evicted or have to replace your speakers
if you play it loud.
 Devotees
of lowercase improvisation will no doubt already be familiar with
the saxophone work of Alessandro Bosetti (now based in Berlin) through
his appearances on notable albums of the genre on Potlatch and Grob.
The intriguingly titled Charlemagne, la vue attachée sur son lac
de Constance, amoureux de L'âbime [sic] caché, features
two of his electroacoustic works, "Sardinia and Japan are Islands"
and "Kitchen Piece", as well as a brief work, "NIPPS" by German experimental
writer Antje Vowinckel. Bosetti's ear for detail is as acute as one
would expect, though his two offerings may surprise listeners accustomed
to the micro-inflections of his soprano sax or familiar with the austere
electronics on his contribution to last year's Berlin Reeds
on Absinth: there's a huge variety of sounds here, from (as you might
expect from the title "Kitchen Music") domestic utensils to the spoken
word ("Sardinia.." contains, at one point, a text about islands).
Silence, though, plays an important structural role, and the nuances
of Bosetti's mix are best appreciated in a quiet listening environment,
or through headphones (quasi-obligatory these days in this apartment).
Vowinckel's work - one might question whether its inclusion is necessary
or not - is closer to traditional (whatever that means) models, but
well crafted and interesting nonetheless.
 For
The D&B Album Domenico Sciajno (pictured opposite) and Gert-Jan
Prins bill themselves in time-honoured DJ style as "Do shine'o" and
"Prinsjan", and indeed there are plenty of real woofer-fucking grooves
on the opening "Cascocity",
though they're often buried under piles of digital clutter. The outstanding
recording, made at Amsterdam's STEIM in 2002, contains plenty of par-for-the-course
ultra high frequencies, white noise screes and the like, plus Prins'
trademark mangled TV and radio manipulations, but is remarkably listenable
(for me at least). The five pieces each have a strong sense of structure
and direction, from the serpentine anti-dub of "Diamonds will do"
via the thudding motoric pulsing (high and low) of "Tablerock" to
the vicious, rumbling roughing-up of snatches of FM radio on "Vinexology".
Unlike the Bosetti album discussed above, listening to this one through
headphones is a dumb idea; this one's for all the family. Unless Santa
gave it you for Christmas, you'll have to get it as a New Year present,
if such a thing exists. Great way to start the year, too. Happy New
2004 to everyone at Bowindo: I can't wait for the next instalment.
—DW
Spider
Compass Good Crime Band
THE CARRION LUGGAGE ORGAN
C.I.P. 013 (7")
After
several self-produced CDRs, San Francisco's Spider Compass Good Crime
Band has finally released their official debut on Blake Edwards' Chicago-based
Crippled Intellect Productions label. It's a delightfully potty and
all too brief (just fourteen minutes - dare we hope for a full-length
SCGCB release some time soon?) chance encounter between 60s exotica
and the Sun City Girls, full of cheesy organs and strange electronic
doodles, which starts nowhere and makes a fantastic detour all over
the place to end nowhere. The two tracks are entitled, respectively,
"Calliopian Fallopian Cotter Tube Organ" and "Pharynx Choral Organs
Play The Muscle Waltz", and come with note inviting listeners to "please
enjoy this document during your next operation or autopsy". To quote
Groucho Marx, "come on in and leave all hope behind." —JB
Z'Ev
Live 5.14.93
C.I.P. CD010 (3"CD)
Z'ev
has been bashing bits of metal together rhythmically since the heady
days of Industrial Records, and this offering (in fact a previously
unreleased extract of his performance "The Accident" at New York's
Performing Garage in 1993, so not exactly new stuff) is just as interesting
as what he was doing way back when he appeared in the long out-of-print
RE/SEARCH Industrial Culture Handbook. Which is to say, not very,
at least on disc - though that depends how loud you're prepared to
play it: presumably this is the kind of music that cannot be transferred
to CD, especially a puny little three-incher (what a detestable format)
- a friend of mine is still waxing lyrical about the legendary Industrial
Fetish Night twenty-odd years after the fact, and recalls Z'ev's clangourous
vomit-inducing set with particular relish ("I couldn't hear anything
for three days!"). As far as I'm concerned, Z'ev's more interesting
to read about than listen to (on the subject, there's a good article
on the man by Ken Hollings in the December 2003 Wire (238), and that
old RE/SEARCH book is still worth seeking out), though if CIP's Blake
Edwards is actively hunting down old Industrial legends, we live in
hope he might release some new (or even old and long-deleted) work
by Monte Cazazza. —JB
Jason
Ajemian / Matt Bauder
OBJECT 3
Locust 38
Bassist
Ajemian and tenor saxophonist Bauder set up their mics one night on
the back porch and played a half hour's worth of quiet sustained tones
(along with various nearby insects). Meanwhile some friends (it says
here) recorded the first half of the proceedings on two MiniDiscs,
inserting index markers here and there and then playing the resulting
tracks on random shuffle, so that what starts out as a duo becomes
a quartet. While the players presumably chose their pitches as they
went along, rather than following any predetermined score or plan
of action, and the shuffle playback of the MDs adds something of an
element of surprise, at least in the pitch domain, it's perhaps open
to question whether Object 3 should be classified as improvised
music as such; sonically, and to a lesser extent procedurally, it
has more in common with certain pieces of late Cage. Not always gripping
stuff, but certainly pleasantly relaxing. Like sitting out on the
back porch. —DW
Kazuhisa
Uchihashi / Gene Coleman
STOROBO IMP.
False Walls fw04
Gene
Coleman's work as a bass clarinettist and as a tireless promoter
of genre-defying music (he's championed the music of Luc Ferrari and
Mathias Spahlinger) is exemplary, and this set of seven improvised
duos with Kazuhisa Uchihashi is superb. Uchihashi has been unfairly
overlooked in recent times - other Japanese guitarists (of the onkyo
persuasion) have tended to dominate the alt.music press - but he's
been quietly perfecting not only his use of electronics but also the
daxophone, a wild and wonderful instrument invented by Hans Reichel
that sounds like a couple of walruses fucking in a plastic bathtub.
(PT regulars will recall Kazu's appearance on the recent Spool trio
date with Brett Larner and Joëlle Léandre, No
Day Rising.) Together with Coleman's fruity bass clarinet,
it sounds magnificent. Silly descriptions aside, there's a great sense
of integrity to this music, and fabulous playing and listening throughout.
While many guitarists these days seem to spend much of their time
deciding which note to play next (or even whether to play at all),
Uchihashi gets down to business, and it's a joy. —DW
Tiny
Hairs
COLDLESS
False Walls fw03
Tiny
Hairs, a Chicago-based sextet consisting of Mark Booth and Jonathan
Liss on guitars, Peter Rosenbloom on violin, John Devylder on bass,
Charles King on electronics and Jim Lutes on drums, could win a prize
for silly titles ("Asparagus and aspirin", "From scallop to shapeless"),
but someone might like to remind them that the last Gastr del Sol
album is already nearly six years old and that the average lifespan
of drone / grind / yawn bands like Jackie-O-Motherfucker is about
half as long. This material, which dates back to 2001 ("Three-part
diagram for making tea" and "Halo of talking horses", originally used
in a film by Sandra Binion), seems tailor-made to garner enthusiastic
reviews from the likes of David Keenan, and contains all the essential
ingredients - mid-to-downtempo binary drumming and dreary two-note
ostinati wrapped in a thick blanket of electronic squiggles. Would
the last person leaving Chicago please turn out the lights. —JB
DREAM
SEQUENCE
Psi 03.04
It's
a slight surprise to see a Wheeler release away from ECM, and one
would like to know a little more about the winding history of this
album's making. The individual sessions range in date from 1995 to
2003, though all were recorded at London's Gateway Studios by Steve
Lowe, which fortunately minimizes sonic discrepancies between tracks.
The mood is also consistent - echt Wheeler in fact: a slow-burning
melancholy, the compositions designed to encourage both soloist and
listener to ponder reflectively over each chord and its emotive content.
"Kind Folks", recorded September 1995, is the only piece to feature
the whole band: Ray Warleigh on flute and alto sax, Stan Sulzmann
on tenor, John Parricelli on guitar, Chris Laurence on bass, Tony
Levin on drums; as throughout the album, Wheeler plays flugelhorn
rather than trumpet. The piece's slow-gathering grandeur (it is 12
minutes in duration) is slightly different in feel from the rest of
the album, which is more intimate in scale, and it is fittingly placed
last on the disc. In January 1996, the same group minus Sulzmann reconvened
and set down four more tracks. "Unti" is the album's most forceful
and varied piece, the divisions of its elegantly terraced structure
marked by gradually more urgent tempos and restless shifts of key
centres; while "Nonetheless" is more predictably bittersweet. Two
excellent ballads feature just Wheeler and rhythm section: "Cousin
Marie" and - rare in his recorded output - a standard, Billy Strayhorn's
"A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing".
Although by this point there was enough material for a respectable
(50-minute) CD release, Wheeler instead rerecorded much of the material
(three of the five pieces) for ECM in February 1996 with a quartet
comprising Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell and Dave Holland, a session released
in 1997 as Angel Song. Whether it was that Wheeler was dissatisfied
with the earlier sessions or simply wanted to avoid releasing very
similar material at the same time, the Gateway sessions remained in
the can. Over the intervening years they were gradually added to.
In 1999, "Dream Sequence", a trio performance by Wheeler, Sulzmann
and Parricelli, was recorded; in 2003 the album reached its final
form with the recording of "Hearken", a Wheeler solo (which actually
sounds like two separate pieces, with a distinct break after the 3-minute
mark), and "Drum Sequence", a Wheeler/Levin duet. "Dream Sequence"
is a particularly fine performance, delicately hinting at both the
expressive inflexions of Jewish music and also the fragile balladry
of Miles' mid-1960s quintet (Sulzmann even quotes Wayne Shorter's
"Witch Hunt" at one point).
One wonders if the original 1995 recording was made with the intention
of an ECM release - the session photos included in the booklet are
certainly the kind of cheerless black and white shots that are de
rigueur for ECM discs. But in the end, it's fallen to Evan Parker's
Psi label to release the disc. Wheeler's preferred expressive range
is very specialized - if you don't go in for bittersweet poignancy,
this isn't the disc for you - but within that range he's a master,
and fans of his music will be delighted that this project, so long
in the gestation, has finally seen the light. —ND
JAZZ
/ IMPROV
Andrea
Neumann, Michael Renkel, Olaf Rupp, Serge Baghdassarians
BERLIN
STRINGS
Absinth Records 002
The
format's the same as the first Absinth release, Berlin Reeds:
four solo performances of about 20 minutes' duration, each apportioned
to a 3" CD, the lot being enclosed in a nifty hand-painted album sleeve.
Berlin Reeds had compiled sessions recorded some years apart;
the pieces on Strings by contrast were all recorded in August
2003. The one real disappointment here is the offering from Serge
Baghdassarians, who plays (fiddles with, rather) electric guitar and
the current instrument du jour, mixing desk, taking his sweet time
to get from motorboat putt-putting to a high whistle; there's then
a minute of (blissful) silence, and then, in case you missed it the
first time, he recapitulates the whole thing almost exactly. Andrea
Neumann's disc also has a lot of mixing-desk twiddling (the source
material here is the disembowelled innards of a piano), but the results
are feistier and more pointed. The snappily titled "~~" and "``" are
heavy on fuzz and crackle, "*" goes in for juddering din, and the
disc ends with the accurately titled "End of a Motor Noticed by Five
Pick Ups". The best stuff on Berlin Strings though is the acoustic
guitar work. Michael Renkel's "Tranz Aronez" starts out as a sequence
of hushed, graceful miniatures, separated by bands of silence. Renkel
patiently refines his materials until there's little more than two
or three intervals left.. then there's just one.. Meanwhile other
sounds come to the fore and retire - a held organ tone, some harmonica;
at the end there's the eerie sound of what sounds like bowed guitar
(or zither? the sleeve notes don't say much). Olaf Rupp's "Metal
Peace" is a set of nine brief improvisations each taken at more
or less the same demented clip. This is not "abstract" music: Rupp
takes familiar guitar idioms and pushes them - louder, faster - until
they're buried under their own distortions; he loves to half-obscure
quite conventional turns of phrase with dense thickets of string noise.
Hardcore lowercase improv addicts will probably hate Rupp's demonic
virtuosity and speed, but to these ears this is easily the standout
performance on Berlin Strings. —ND
Grace
& Delete
GRACE & DELETE
Ochre Records OCH045LCD
Contact: ochre@talbot.force9.co.uk
This
intriguingly named duo consists of bass clarinettist Chris Cundy and
James Dunn on electronics, and they recorded these nine tracks in
Cheltenham's Pittville Pump Room in January 2003. Maybe it's the resonant
acoustic of that splendid place, or something in the local water (Cheltenham
has long been known as an upmarket spa town), but there's a leisurely
feel to this music, as Cundy and Dunn take the time necessary to explore
their instruments. Dunn's equipment isn't specified, but it's abundantly
clear that a keyboard is part of it, as he has a sensitive ear for
pitch (rare these days, especially amongst electronicians) and picks
up on Cundy's virtuosic lines and angles with considerable dexterity.
Dexterity, but no rush; compare this to another celebrated reeds-meets-electronics
outing of recent times, John Butcher and Phil Durrant's Requests
and Antisongs on Erstwhile (also their Secret Measures
on Wobbly Rail) - an unfair comparison, perhaps, as Durrant's work
on those two albums involved live treatment of Butcher's saxophone,
whereas Dunn leaves Cundy's bass clarinet well alone, but be that
as it may - while the Londoners swarm all over the stereo space, the
good folks out in Cheltenham are content to let their gently resonant
acoustic participate in the proceedings. This doesn't mean things
can't get acerbic and difficult - there are numerous thorny passages,
particularly on the closing "Belly of Sums" (leave the toughest bit
till the end), but the measured approach of the instrumentalists leads
listeners into the music rather than driving them away. The result
is a convincing and original (if a little long) album, and though
Cundy and Dunn might not like the idea of heading to "the smoke",
it'd be great to see some of their work out on a premium London-based
label soon. Emanem, for instance. Nice work. —DW
Pago
Libre
PHOENIX: LIVE IN SALZBURG AND ZURICH
Leo CD LR 377
Pago
Libre has been around since 1989, the core being pianist John Wolf
Brennan and bassist Daniele Patumi; the horn/violin front-line has
settled down after a few personnel changes, with Tscho Theissing as
the violinist and Arkady Shilkloper drawing on a wide range of instruments:
horn, flugelhorn, alphorn and even something called the alperidoo.
Phoenix is drawn from two February 2003 concerts in Salzburg,
with the title-track (the sole free improvisation on the disc) the
solitary inclusion from an earlier date in Brennan's hometown of Zurich.
A lot of different styles and musics go into the mix - jazz, a little
free-improv, European classical music, a variety of folk traditions
- but no matter what the sources are, the results always turn out
as spirited, emphatic and colourful as a folk dance. It's a very entertaining
disc, and unlike many live concerts it survives the transfer from
the live situation to CD quite convincingly. I'd quibble slightly
with the good but very bright recording and mix - the violin and piano
can come across overpoweringly on the hottest numbers. But turn the
volume knob down a notch, and, voilà!, problem solved. The best pieces
here are perhaps those that hide their inner heat inside a superficially
elegant exterior, rather than the more fiery tracks like "Folk Song"
and "Synopsis". The closing sequence is particularly strong: Shilkloper's
charming series of vignettes "Alpine Trail", Brennan's airy "Suonatina",
and the curiously unsettling "Tikkettitakkitakk", named after the
percussive phrase the musicians cry out during the piece's strange
little rhythmic interludes. Brennan has been taken up by Leo in a
big way in recent years - this is his twelfth release on the label,
by my count - and he continues to repay Leo Feigin's generosity with
discs that fulfil the label's slogan admirably: "Music for the Inquiring
Mind and the Passionate Heart." Not quite my favourite of Brennan's
discs, but still a fine, highly individual document. —ND
Jack
Wright & Bob Marsh
BIRDS IN THE HAND
Public Eyesore 69
Reedman
Jack Wright and cellist, violinist and vocalist Bob Marsh have enjoyed
a working relationship going back to when they met in 1986 while Wright
was playing in Detroit. Since then they've maintained an ongoing musical
relationship during breaks in Jack's almost nonstop touring schedule.
Wright has currently just finished a series of November dates with
Phil Durrant; past tours have found him in the company of Bhob Rainey,
John Butcher, Lê Quan Ninh, Tony Wren and Michel Doneda (to name but
a few). Marsh is the leader of the Emergency String Quartet, the Robot
Martians and the Illuminated Orchestra, and is a member of Fred Lonberg-Holm's
Phenomenal String Quartet. In May 2000 these hyperactive musicians
toured together in the Northwest; their stops at the SFalt Festival
in Oakland, California and the Polestar Gallery in Seattle, Washington,
plus a 2000 studio cut from Chicago, provide the music for this disc.
Anybody expecting the fire-breathing Jack Wright would be advised
to look elsewhere - whether it's the ornithological titles ("Plight
of the Mocking Birds", "Magpie Pie", etc.) of these six improvised
pieces or the situation of playing with a cello or violin, this is
very understated music, which makes effective use of space. Which
is not to impugn the quality; when Wright plays alto with Marsh's
cello, it harkens back tonally to Julius Hemphill's duets with Abdul
Wadud, albeit playing much less conventionally structured compositions.
Likewise his soprano playing recalls, alternately, Steve Lacy or Larry
Ochs. Such comparisons, however, provide merely elementary points
of reference; both players have their own unique styles and highly
original approaches to improvisation that reflect fully formed, if
inadequately appreciated, musical personae. The unusual timbre of
Marsh's processed vocals is somewhat disarming at first, but attentive
listening reveals how they enhance the experience by expanding the
aural palette, alternately mimicking the cello and providing counterpoint
to it. Marsh and Wright's longstanding relationship reveals itself
in the coherent ways that they respond to the series of ideas that
are thrown out and subsequently developed. Birds In The Hand
is strongly recommended to aficionados of duet music who are looking
for unique approaches and fresh voices. —SG
Kyle
Bruckmann
WRACK
Red Toucan RT 9323
"Rather
Dour" is the title of the first of seven pieces featuring a quintet
led by oboist Bruckmann and featuring trombonist Jeb Bishop, violist
Jen Clare Paulson, bassist Kurt Johnson and percussionist Tim Daisy,
and dour is an appropriate epithet: apart from the melancholy timbres
of Bruckmann's double reeds, the plaintive sonorities of the viola
(Mat Maneri inevitably springs to mind) and Bishop's lugubrious trombone,
the theme itself sounds as if it could have been penned by Arvo Pärt.
"Elegy for a Boiled Frog" also reveals a fondness for sustained tones,
but Tim Daisy's drums provide the necessary forward motion throughout
this track and the album as a whole. Bruckmann, who recently moved
away from Chicago to San Francisco, is as at home fronting his wild
rock outfit Lozenge as he is exploring the furthest reaches of extended
technique (notably in his duo with Ernst Karel), but throughout Wrack
he plays it straight, with full tone and vibrato on oboe and English
horn worthy of Heinz Holliger. As a result, there's a distinct sense
of nostalgia for the old Third Stream fusion of contemporary classical
and jazz idioms, from the fugal workout of "Extenuating Circumstances"
to the final arrangement of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman", which
one imagines Gunther Schuller might have been proud of. —DW
Itaru
Oki
PARIS - OHRAÏ
Ohraï 1009
Itaru
Oki's trumpet playing led him to leave Osaka, Japan for the more challenging
jazz setting of Tokyo in 1964, before upping the ante ten years later
by moving to Paris, where he resides today. He has made sporadic appearances
with European improvisers, and has appeared on several of Alan Silva's
recordings. This quartet of free jazz veterans (Oki on trumpet and
wood flutes, Silva on bass and piano, Michel Pilz on bass clarinet,
and Sunny Murray on drums) was recorded in Abdelhaï Bennani's basement
in Paris on May 12, 2001 - hence the cavernous sound quality. Everybody
is in reasonably good form and there is strong playing by all concerned,
with the possible exception of Silva, whose bass (poorly miked or
badly mixed?) is at times barely audible. The session consists of
Oki compositions, which are interesting enough from a melodic standpoint
but have a certain bothersome meandering quality in performance. The
first three cuts on the disc go nowhere at all despite interesting
heads; only midway through the fourth song, "Sakura", does Pilz's
bass clarinet finally catch fire, and along with Murray (and Silva,
who I assume is somewhere in there) the song is propelled forward
forcefully. This spontaneous combustion continues onto the next song,
"Un peu de gout d'aïl", an early Ornettish type tune similar in tempo
and sound to "Ramblin", on which everybody is on the same page. This,
alas, is the high point; the following "Soon" starts promisingly but
then falls apart into aimlessness. The last two songs are mere fragments
of duets that both fade in and out rather quickly, the first featuring
Pilz and Murray, the second Silva (on piano, audible at last) and
Oki. —SG
Various
Artists
THE COMPLETE 10-INCH SERIES FROM COLD BLUE
Cold Blue CB0014 (3CD)
This
3CD reissue regroups the seven 10" LPs released by California's Cold
Blue label in the early 1980s - one each from composers Peter Garland,
Michael Jon Fink, Barney Childs, Read Miller, Chas Smith, Rick Cox
and Daniel Lentz. Those familiar with recent Cold Blue releases won't
be all that surprised by the music on offer, as it is (and always
has been) in a curious way out of time: neither postmodern (not a
hint of irony) nor retro (maladroit nostalgia), it's remained seemingly
oblivious of notable developments in Western Art Music since World
War II, as if the fanatical serialism of Darmstadt and the experimentalism
of the New York School both died of dehydration en route across the
desert like some unfortunate early wagon train. On Disc One, Garland's
"Matachin Dances" are deceptively simple movements for two violins
and Mexican gourd rattles that are clearly twentieth century but reveal
little discernible influence of any Western predecessor (with the
possible of exception of late 1940s Cage), while Michael Jon Fink's
piano music, though frequently - and misleadingly - compared to Feldman,
is disarmingly naïve (not in the pejorative sense of the word) and
unashamedly diatonic. Disc Two leans away from music somewhat towards
poetry: Barney Childs, who died three years ago aged 74, did after
all study English Lit at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and Read
Miller was last heard of ensconced in the backwoods of Virginia, writing.
Childs' "Clay Music" is scored for handmade clay ocarinas, and Miller's
"Mile Zero Hotel" and "The Blueprint of a Promise" are spoken voice
works. On Disc Three, Chas Smith's pedal steel and 12 string dobro
are as evocative and quintessentially American as a crackling neon
light outside a desert motel at sunset, and the prepared slide guitar
of Rick Cox's "These things stop breathing" atmospheric, eerie even.
Though the reissue of each of these mini-albums is welcome, it's particularly
so in the case of Daniel Lentz's After
Images; back in the 1980s Lentz was being hailed as the Next
Great Minimalist (and never quite lived up to the title - instead
we ended up with John "Opera" Adams), and rediscovering his exquisite
textual deconstructions is a joy. Here was a peculiarly Californian
minimalism, refreshingly free from the systemic dogma of Reich and
the bombast of post-Satyagraha Glass, beautifully scored and modest
in scope, as fresh and clear as the air of the high Sierra. Indeed,
if this and much of the other music on these discs has stepped out
of time, it has nonetheless retained a distinct sense of place,
and in these times of ever-increasing uniformity of language and aesthetic
in new music (who today can identify a piece as being distinctly French,
English or Italian?), that's not something to be derided. There may
be some mildly soporific stuff here, but it's all beautifully performed
and recorded, and genuinely touching in its simplicity. And that's
not something you find very often anymore in contemporary composition.—DW
irr.app.(ext.)
DUST PINCHER APPLIANCES
Crouton Crou021
Don't let the unpronounceable name of the group put you off: Dust
Pincher Appliances is the work of Matt Waldron, whose remix
(that's definitely not the word, but never mind) of Nurse With Wound's
first album last year attracted a fair bit of attention. One can only
hope this does too, as it's by far the most original electronic work
I've come across in a long time. Even if you're not familiar with
the Nurse connection, the ghoulish cover art should be a clue (Waldron
also signed the cover art of the NWW Automating albums), along
with track titles like "a body rendered disjecta membra through the
application of dust pincher appliances" and the added information
that Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson originally released the above-mentioned
track in Iceland on a 10" in 1998 - we're orbiting that strange planet
peopled by Nurse's Steve Stapleton, Current 93's David Tibet and Coil
(with whom Waldron has also worked). Waldron's music inscribes itself
solidly in the tradition of what Stapleton described as "surrealist":
familiar sound sources and (relatively) normal musical material recontextualised
into something rich and strange. Unlike much contemporary electronica,
whose fondness for stasis and/or a limited palette of trusted software
FX (belying its origins in AMM-style improvisation and the far reaches
of techno), Waldron likes the bold gesture, the broad brushstroke.
Using samples culled from diverse sources - post-war contemporary
classical, music boxes, field recordings - and presenting them in
surprising contexts - sounds of a playground and a disembodied Spanish
guitar float over strangely disturbing thuds and crunches in "a distended
particular" - with an occasional healthy dose of reverb and panning,
he creates the kind of sonic tableaux that follow their own highly
original narrative logic. Aficionados of Nurse With Wound and anyone
else interested in the cutting edge of electronic music owe it to
themselves to check this album out. Another fabulous release from
Jon Mueller's Crouton label. —DW
Richard
Chartier
ARCHIVAL1991
Crouton crou024
Archival1991
is Richard Chartier's reworking (in 2003) of two early synthesizer
compositions originally recorded when he was just 20. It's a seamless
slow-motion trawl through a cavernous space, reminiscent at times
of Thomas Köner's Arctic soundscapes Nuuk and Permafrost
(Chartier's original compositions were roughly contemporary with
the latter), though somewhat more intense - one senses an element
of pulse somewhere in there, though it's buried under layers of rich
and reverberant sound. Those accustomed to the pristine clarity of
Chartier's recent work may be surprised at the lush texture, though
the aesthetic is just as uncompromising. Put this one on if your air
conditioning breaks down during a heat wave - it'll cool you down.
—JB
Copyright 2003 by Paris Transatlantic
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