There's
a such a mad rush these days to be the first to review new albums
that, from time to time, several fine offerings that arrive here at
PTHQ are shunted around from the VERY URGENT to the URGENT to the
REVIEW WITH OTHER ALBUMS BY SAME ARTIST to the REVIEW WITH OTHER ALBUMS
ON SAME LABEL pile. And back again. Franz Hautzinger and Manon Liu
Winter's superb Brospa being
a case in point (as you'll see below, it finally ended up in the "same
label" pile with two other splendid Grobs). Sometimes albums drop
out of sight - literally: Goh Lee Kwang's, for example (see
below) - to reappear at a later date. So there are several reviews
here of material that came out towards the end of last year, at a
time when I was preoccupied with the Erstwhile box set (the repercussions
of that review are still bouncing
around, especially on Al Jones' excellent Bagatellen site - go
visit!). And this month's lead feature, an extended interview
with bernhard
günter, was originally recorded back in September (and
has been updated by bg in places, for which many thanks). But, as
he himself points out, the good stuff stands the test of time. We
hope you'll find it's been worth waiting for. Bonne lecture.
—DW
Förklädd
Gud
FÖRKLÄDD GUD
Caprice CAP 1125 LP
There
weren't many active improvising groups in Sweden during the 1970s.
One name that frequently turns up is ISKRA, whose debut release appeared
in 1975 on Caprice as part of the "Jazz i Sverige" series. Two years
later the same opportunity befell an unknown sextet called Förklädd
Gud ("God in Disguise"), who, the record sleeve states, had been around
since the early 1970s - though not with the same line-up as on this
album - and whose members came from diverse backgrounds ranging from
jazz and rock to art music. Though they seem never to have achieved
wide popularity when they were active, later generations have been
able to track them down through their associations with ISKRA, and
internationally the name has circulated thanks to its appearance on
the legendary Nurse With Wound list, accompanying the first Nurse
record Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine
and an Umbrella.
"Suite Birth" is the first track on this self-titled Förklädd Gud
album, and takes up the whole A-side. A quiet drum produces a quasi-regular
beat sounding similar to a prepared piano, and the overall lightness
of touch recalls Morton Feldman. In the context of today's improvised
music, the way these musicians approached their instruments (flute,
piano, violin, guitar, trombone, various saxophones and percussion)
back in 1977 was certainly ahead of its time. The intensity level
occasionally rises but is forced back, and even if the piece closes
with playing more reminiscent of free jazz, it's a kind of climax
arrived at via silence, curiously, rather than via the classic crescendo.
The distinctive, playful and experimental approach to improvisation
recalls German bands such as Anima and Limbus 3 and 4. The B-side's
five pieces concentrate more on solo improvisation, which is admittedly
less successful. It's not bad as much as pointless: it is as
a group that Förklädd Gud produces fantastic results, not as
individuals seemingly out to get as many weird sounds as possible.
Though the B-side never quite achieves the same heights as "Suite
Birth", it's not without its moments.
One might wonder if this group's obscurity testifies to a failure
to pass on something of greater value for future generations, but
by any standards, Förklädd Gud is an extraordinary release
in that it shows the importance of working with (and in) silence.
Not being part of a scene can itself be a force for creativity; the
less one feels restrained by the conventions of the surrounding scene,
the further one pushes into new territory. Dare we hope for a reissue?
—KW
Cooper-Moore
/ Tom Abbs / Chad Taylor
TRIPTYCH MYTH
Hopscotch 14
Cooper-Moore
/ Assif Tsahar
AMERICA
Hopscotch 18
Assif
Tsahar / Mat Maneri / Jim Black
JAM
Hopscotch 21
Assif
Tsahar / Tatsuya Nakatani
COME SUNDAY
Hopscotch 24
Triptych
Myth is a trio outing for pianist Cooper-Moore, bassist Tom Abbs
and drummer Chad Taylor, and well worth the price of admission for
tracks like the opening "Stem Cell", which showcases Cooper-Moore's
pianism - well-grounded in Tayloresque rapid-fire alternation of the
hands and Pullen-like fist rolls - to great effect. Tracks like "The
Fox", which descends into cod reggae, are less convincing though,
and the album as a whole seems somewhat uneven, and is marred by several
clumsy errors: the track timings and titles of four pieces on the
disc do not correspond to the booklet (two pairs of tracks are inversed),
the piano on several tracks is woefully out of tune (presumably not
the ones recorded by Jim Staley at Roolette [sic], though even that
is not made clear), and there are marked differences in sound between
tracks (Abbs' bass solo "Raising Knox" is wonderfully meaty but elsewhere
he's too far back in the mix). A bit of proof reading and some extra
mastering wouldn't have gone amiss.
America, especially the heavy African groove of its title track,
finds Cooper-Moore and saxophonist / bass clarinettist Assif Tsahar
pitching for the Thirsty Ear / AUM Fidelity crossover market. Recorded
during August 2003, these ten tracks are eminently accessible (the
two versions of Cooper-Moore's ballad "Lament for Trees" are particularly
touching) but both musicians seem to have succumbed to a bout of William
Parkeritis, i.e. can't resist trying their hand at other instruments
instead of sticking to the ones they're best at - as well as piano,
Cooper-Moore contributes diddley-bo, banjo, mouth bow (?), drum-skins,
cymbal and flute (not credited, but maybe that's what he means by
"mouth bow"), while Tsahar throws in a bit of classical guitar. "Back
Porch Chill" is nice enough, and it's worth bearing in mind that Cooper-Moore
hails from the Blue Ridge Mountains, but for American Primitive finger
picking I'd be more inclined to go for John Fahey instead. Not surprisingly,
the tracks that feature piano and reeds are the most successful, and
the album closes on a high with the magnificent "Wounded Knee".
Though Hopscotch releases stick to black and red graphics on a white
card sleeve, poet Steve Dalachinsky (name also misspelled in the booklet,
dearie me) adds some colour with his liners to Jam, a trio
date featuring Tsahar, Mat Maneri on electric 5-string violin and
Jim Black on percussion. Black is as insanely inventive as ever, wisely
not getting in the way of the elaborate pitch play between Maneri
and Tsahar. Dalachinsky waxes lyrical about the trio's appearances
at Tonic, and it's perhaps a shame that one of those couldn't have
been released as well as this studio date, for the simple reason that
Maneri is (at least in my experience) considerably more exciting live
than he is in the studio. Even so, Jam is strong and convincing
stuff, and each of its nine tracks (named simply Parts 1 - 9, which
would seem to invite listeners to play the album through from beginning
to end) contains enough elegant creativity to richly reward repeated
listening.
Also dating from August 2003 - things were certainly busy at Hopscotch
HQ last summer - is Tsahar's duo outing Come Sunday with percussionist
Tatsuya Nakatani. Though Nakatani's been playing in recent times with
some veritable bruisers (including the late Peter Kowald), he's lost
none of the finesse that characterised his appearance five years ago
on the first nmperign album with Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley. For
his part, Tsahar has been making steady progress on both tenor sax
and bass clarinet for a while now, with a terse, rubbery sound on
the former (Von Freeman comes to mind at times) and a rich, velvety
lyricism on the latter. He's a strong player, but not a vein-burster
like Brötzmann or Perelman: the strength lies in the musical ideas
themselves and his skill at developing them. On Come Sunday,
the more lyrical tracks work best, especially those featuring the
bass clarinet, a notable exception being the Ellington cover title
track on which Nakatani's pointillist chimes counterpoint Tsahar's
lonely midnight railway station platform tenor to perfection. —DW
China
- The Sonic Avant-Garde
Various
Artists
CHINA THE SONIC AVANT-GARDE
Post-Concrete 005 (2CD)
This
double CD compilation slipped out towards the end of last year, when
most journalists were occupied with the time-consuming and probably
futile task of deciding what the year's best albums were, and therefore
didn't get the attention it so richly deserves. It's an ambitious
collection of 33 tracks by a dozen or so sound artists (or collectives
thereof) and a fascinating glimpse into the world of state-of-the-art
electronica as seen (downloaded, rather) from the other side of what
used to be called the bamboo curtain.
The French verb démerder (meaning "making do with what you've
got", even "scuffling" as they used to say in early 70s soul) comes
to mind quite often on listening to this extraordinarily diverse collection:
Jia Haiqing and Fu Yü, collectively known as the 8GG Interactive Studio
(BaGuGe) use demo versions of audio software, making do with their
inability to save processed sounds (users are limited to a five-second
loop). Their three tracks entitled "Fish Cooking", all recorded in
real time, have a refreshing roughness all too often lacking in much
Western electronica, fussed over to death in ProTools and MAX/MSP;
what they lack in finesse ("Fish Cooking 3" could have been dispensed
with) they more than make up for in inventiveness. Likewise the music
of Zhou Pei, who describes himself as a "boring, small-minded accountant
who indulges himself in office sex jokes all day long." Maybe, when
he's not sticking stereo audio cable into various parts of his body,
customizing effects pedals and mixing boards and AudioMulching the
resulting noise into outrageous sound sculptures. Wang Changcun's
"Unhearable" is a fizzing cut'n'splice collage of "various files found
in the Windows operating system", while his "k1973 poem" was constructed
from several lines of poetry read out in mechanical Mandarin by Chinese
text-to-speech software. "Dfaonocle", on the other hand, is an almost
nostalgic nod to primitive late 80s home studio techno. 26 year old
Jiang Yühui, currently a grad student here in Paris, offers a more
subtle recontextualisation of lowercase electronica and techno in
his tracks "Dark Crystal" and "Ghost In Another Night" (maybe this
latter is actually called "Ghost in Another Nightmare", as the accompanying
notes (available only on the Post-Concrete website) seem to indicate.
Sampling is evidently the rage: Zhong Minjie's "SXF003" takes vocal
grunts and squeals culled from a porno movie and processes them into
a claustrophobic game of aural ping pong, while in his "X-rate" Zhang
Jün'gang uses a sample of "a well-known improvising pianist" (I'll
leave you to figure out who) to generate all the material. Intelligent
Shanghai Mono University's "Mail Works m4" is sourced from a karaoke
disc sampled to death. ISMU is a collective based in Shanghai whose
members include Lou Nanli (aka B6), who contributes the disturbingly
original "In The Room With Snow", Ding Dawen (Cy) Su Xin (Susuxx),
Zhang Jü (Zoojoo) and Xiang Fei (Yoyofaye). "This piece of mine is
artificial and affected, that is, pretentious and an attempt at covering
up," writes Cy of his "K.L.P.L." (I wonder who'd dare say that in
the West..). Be that as it may, Cy's ear for sound and his ability
to organise it into something coherent and intriguing is remarkable.
Several recordings provide tantalizing (and, for the most part, ironic)
glimpses into the world of everyday life. Beijing Sound Unit's "Minibus
Pimps" is an unadulterated field (street) recording of cabbies hustling
for business, while "After Dinner" was recorded one summer evening
in 1997 by Yao Dajün, "whose relatives at this table are all loyal
Chinese Communist Party members, hence this now unfashionable revolutionary
song. The lead singer/accordionist is the owner of the snake specialty
restaurant where this family banquet was held. After expounding on
the health benefits of the snake meal, the exemplarily virile restaurant
owner spiced up the family entertainment with his singing and accordion."
Dajün also snuck his mics into a Shanghai auction room ("hilarious
because the bidding starts sky-high and drops down to ultra-low prices",
he notes) and into a local park one cold winter morning to catch an
amateur singing club's rendition of "Green Army Uniform," a song popular
with the Chinese military. Elsewhere, Zhang Jün'gang, who describes
himself as an "unemployed alcoholic ruffian" recorded some children
singing the Chinese national anthem along with a hilariously out-of-tune
cassette, and Shanghai Sound Unit's "Leili Fengxing" takes a po-faced
Chinese government propaganda text and articulates it with "lower-class
colloquial diction" (I suppose a Western equivalent would be a Bronx
B-boy reading the Gettysburg address).
Hu Mage's two offerings, entitled "Chai-Mi-You-Yan-Jiang-Cu-Tang"
(firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy, vinegar & sugar, the seven elements
of cooking), raid various styles including Chinese opera and hiphop
to cook up a joyful if not exactly subtle plunderphonic soup. Continuing
the food idea, Wang Changcun's comments on his working method are
worth quoting: "I usually start out by picking different sound fragments,
just like choosing material for cooking. I then put them into different
pots and pans (i.e. software) to stir-fry, stew, and steam." If European
and American electronica has adopted the image of the laboratory (the
pharmaceutical transparency of Raster Noton, the austere white graphics
of 12k and Line..), the metaphor for what's happening in China would
appear to be a loud, noisy kitchen. And what they're serving up is
delicious - go check it out. —DW
Volcano
the Bear
THE MOUNTAINS AMONG US
Beta Lactam Ring LP mt045b
GUESS THE BIRDS
Beta Lactam Ring 10"LP mt028
VOLEVEN
Beta Lactam Ring CDR (included with mt045a)
The
music of Leicester-based Volcano the Bear might be described as an
attempt to weave simple - naïve, even - fragments of all kinds of
contemporary music into a complex, intriguing and stunningly surrealistic
form. The quartet, which consists of Aaron Moore, Nick Mott, Daniel
Padden and Laurence Coleman playing instruments too numerous and diverse
to mention, inhabits in a world of its own; This Heat, The Residents
or Faust are (too) often cited as references, but ultimately the only
thing VTB has in common with them is that they all ride roughshod
over questions of genre.
The Mountains Among Us is released in two editions, the first
of which in an edition of 100 copies (mt045a - this includes the CD-R
entitled Voleven), the second in an even more limited run of
just 50 (mt045b). It may be VTB's most laidback recording to date
(sidestepping the tongue-in-cheek and absurdity of earlier outings),
presenting a variation on the idea of drone whose strength lies in
its inclusion of other extraneous sounds, thereby focussing interest
by challenging the dynamic, while bowed cymbals and strings still
provide the ground. Voleven is a collection of tracks by VTB
and other group members' side-projects, a pleasant enough listen with
hints of everything from European improv to disarmingly analogue synthesizer
melody.
On Guess the Birds VTB have succeeded in integrating suitable
contrasting elements into a musical flow, whose oriental sequences
accentuate the tranquillity that pervades the record as whole. The
motive on the album cover shows two odd figures with human features
in a dark, grey landscape, setting up a surrealistic set of associations
(the snoring and beautifully echoed piano even evokes Their Satanic
Majesties Request..). On "There in the House on the Moon" rhythmic
patterns are produced through gently touching a kettledrum; voices
rise, pause, stagger, and reach intense levels, playing brilliantly
with the idea of depth within the mix. The B-side is more rhythmically
active, until a pause introduces"All the paint I can breathe", whose
cinematic qualities are reinforced by a spoken text and dramatically
panned blasts of strings and brass. The final "Volcano the Bear" features
some grinding bowed violin work before a moaning vocal drone breaks
free; we're waiting for a climax of sorts, but the record suddenly
ends. The perceptual process throughout for the listener is akin to
peering into a cloud, or like trying to access something that lies
behind a wall. Once that wall is breached, allowing distinctive sounds
to pass through, a meditative state has already been established and
incidents that would normally be striking don't register. It's another
fascinating outing from a highly original band. —KW
Adam Lane Quartet
FO(U)R BEING(S)µ
CIMP 263
Adam
Lane and John Tchicai
DOS
CIMP 281
John
Tchicai, Pierre Dørge, Lou Grassi
HOPE IS BRIGHT GREEN UP NORTH
CIMP 278
Many
critics have been grumbling (in and out of print) that 2003 wasn't
a terribly good year for jazz, some even claiming that the best "new"
releases were of freshly unearthed music from the archives, such as
Andrew Hill's Passing Ships or Stan Getz's Bossas and Ballads:
The Lost Session. It all depends where you're looking - to my
eye there was plenty last year to celebrate, just not always in the
obvious places or from high-profile players. Consider, for instance,
that in 2003 CIMP released three consistently strong discs featuring
veteran saxophonist John Tchicai - a burst of productivity that in
a more just world would have been widely heralded. Not that Tchicai's
been reclusive in the past decade, but his discography is rather patchy
and largely confined to out-of-the-way labels. After bringing Tchicai
into the fold, CIMP as usual immediately set about documenting him
systematically in a variety of groupings, and he was in the label's
Spirit Room recording-studio no less than four times during 2002:
once as a guest with Lou Grassi's PoBand, twice as sideman with Adam
Lane, and once as co-leader of a trio with Grassi and Danish guitarist
Pierre Dørge.
Lane is a young bassist/composer who obviously has plenty of talent
and chutzpah to boot: it takes guts to surround yourself with a band
like this. The front line of Tchicai and CIMP's resident trumpet whiz
Paul Smoker is beautifully balanced, in sound and approach: Smoker
plays with a wheeling expressiveness recalling Ted Curson, while Tchicai
remains as enigmatic as ever, accumulating solos doggedly from bite
size motifs, each permitted to pass only after several rounds of inspection.
But the eyebrow-raiser here is Lane's recruitment of Barry Altschul,
one of the great free jazz drummers - arguably the drummer
of the 1970s - who has been inexplicably absent from the recording
studios for the better part of two decades. Altschul's invisibility
is all the more baffling given that on Fo(u)r Being(s) his
powers are entirely undimmed. His drumming is impressively seamless
- the usual distinctions between time playing and freedom are slippery
or just beside the point in connection with Altschul - and geared
above all towards the elucidation of long-range form. That the six,
often very long, pieces on Fo(u)r Being(s) pass by as if they
were far briefer (the opening "Intonations for Being" is 14 minutes
yet feels as direct as if it were half the length) is due in large
part to Altschul's expert steering.
None of which detracts from Lane's own contributions to the date.
He likes to keep things simple, both in his tough, admirably unclichéd
approach to the bass, and in his compositions, which work from taut,
blues-soaked grooves (the debt to Mingus is unmistakable) and ask
the improvisers to do a lot of the work in building long-form structures
out of a minimum of material. Themes are sparse and stretched out,
sometimes to extraordinary lengths: a briskly stated head, for instance,
may later return in almost unrecognizably drawn-out form. Lane's procedures
carry him through the five long, rich and varied tracks that are the
meat of the album - including the 19-minute avant-blues epic "Without
Being" - and it's telling that the album's one comparative failure
is the shortest piece on the disc, the coda "The Band Is", a cock-eyed
march serving as backdrop to a spoken-word performance by Tchicai.
Perhaps it's best to leave this sort of thing to folks like Peter
Riley or Yusef Komunyakaa, but who can blame Tchicai for wanting to
put his enthusiasm for this quartet on record?
The saxophonist returned to the Spirit Room several months later to
record his first CIMP album as a leader, Hope Is Bright Green Up
North. Whereas the disc with Lane reflected the bassist's carefully
delimited aesthetic, Tchicai's disc is marked by his own stubborn
eclecticism and globe-spanning musical interests. On Hope Is Bright
Green his long-standing associate, Danish guitarist Pierre Dørge,
is on hand, as well as drummer Lou Grassi. Set a genuinely difficult
assignment - by the time the album's done he's had to play everything
from hambone rhythms to marches to diverse shadings of free time -
Grassi turns in some of his best work on disc, and even makes his
debut here as a composer with "Ballad of 9/11" (not bad, either).
The saxophonist's three tunes on the date each seize on the component
tone row and rhythms of Grassi's ballad, and wrench them into striking
new shape - the blistering feature for Dørge, "Claira to Claremont",
is especially pleasing. The guitarist contributes two pieces informed
by his musical and physical travels: "Bicyclo", a snapshot of Hanoi
nightlife, and "Sumolle", based on his experiences in Brikama Town
in the Gambia. The album is rounded out by three collective improvisations,
including a thoughtful "Farewell" to the late bassist Wilber Morris.
The recording schedule at the Spirit Room gets ever busier: the last
session of Hope Is Bright Green and the first session of DOS,
a set of Lane/Tchicai duets, fell on the same day. One immediately
misses the tickle of interplay with a larger group on DOS,
but it's nonetheless a worthy follow-up to Fo(u)r Being(s).
Except for a reading of the traditional Japanese melody "Goro Tokimune",
all the compositions are Lane's, and are again strongly coloured by
the blues (when Tchicai smuggles a bit of "Parker's Mood" into his
solo on "Birthday Song" it makes perfect sense). The music's twilit
melancholy is conveyed with a profound tactfulness: with a mere inflexion
of timbre or timing Tchicai says more than any amount of saxophone
oratory could accomplish - check out, for instance, his wistful, slightly
hesitant delivery on the calypso "John and Johnny Riding the Clouds
Over Big Sur". At 70 minutes the album feels overlong - it's a pity
Lane didn't have Tchicai contribute some tunes, simply as a change
of mood and pace - but there's no reason you need listen to it straight
through, of course. Indeed, it's best to encounter it gradually: like
most CIMP discs, this is a slow-release capsule rather than a quick
fix. —ND
Franz Hautzinger / Manon Liu Winter
BROSPA
Grob 544
Extended techniques trumpeter Franz Hautzinger's fifth outing for
Grob is perhaps his most impressive yet. It's certainly his most dramatic;
accompanied by pianist Manon Liu Winter (a name to watch, if the future
of improv pianism means producing something that hardly sounds like
a piano at all), this is dense, heaving stuff, the perfect soundtrack
to a remake of Scott of the Antarctic if anybody wanted to
attempt one. Hautzinger's trumpet is miked so intensely that the slightest
puff of air he sends through the instrument comes out sounding like
a strong Wind Chill Factor minus 30 headwind, and Winter's eerie investigations
into the metallic bowels of her instrument complement it to perfection
(hats off to recording engineer Marcus Waibel). Tracks like "The Respiration",
a heavy breathing nightmare cum chainsaw massacre, are about as far
away from the austere near-void of Hautzinger's earlier Dachte
Musik (with Radu Malfatti, Burkhard Stangl and Gunter Schneider)
as one could hope to get - I challenge anyone who claims contemporary
improvised music is "emotionless" and "cerebral" to try this at full
volume. After such intensity, the following "Strudelhofstiege" is
a strategic retreat into microsound, the combination of Hautzinger's
amplified key-pops and Winter's prepared piano sounding like Hans
Reichel's daxophone jamming with John Cage ca.1948. Though extended
techniques abound, both musicians remain acutely sensitive to pitch,
and the album creates a harmonic universe of great coherence. —DW
The
BSC
GOOD
Grob 543
BSC
is an ensemble curated by soprano saxophonist Bhob Rainey and features
his nmperign sparring partner Greg Kelley (trumpet), as well as stalwarts
of the thriving Boston improv scene: James Coleman (theremin), Howard
Stelzer (tapes), Elizabeth Tonne (voice), Mike Bullock (bass), Vic
Rawlings (cello and electronics) and Chris Cooper (guitar and electronics),
augmented for the occasion by visiting Berliners Axel Dörner on trumpet
and Andrea Neumann on (in?) her customized inside piano. Recorded
live in Boston's Church of the Advent on August 28th 2001, Good
is a single extended group improvisation lasting just over 37
minutes. Though I'm never one to advocate pushing the CD format to
its maximum 79-minute limit, another half hour of music as fine as
this wouldn't have gone amiss - then again, the Bostonians have rarely
gone beyond 45'. Maybe they all still drive around listening to C90
cassette tapes (nothing wrong with that, either). The last Boston-based
improv big band outing that came my way was Masashi Harada's Condanction
Ensemble on Emanem (which also featured Rainey, Kelley and Bullock),
but Good could hardly be more different. A more pertinent comparison
would be with the debut album of the Berlin-based Phosphor octet (Potlatch
P501, which also includes Dörner and Neumann), but both in terms of
overall structural coherence and pristine mixing, Good gets
my vote. It is also more traditional in its willingness to follow
tried and trusted rise-and-fall structures, a consequence perhaps
of working with a large ensemble: smaller Boston combos (Bullock and
Rawlings, Stelzer and Jason Talbot, and of course nmperign) are more
extreme in their use of silence. The climactic passages, when they
arrive, are intense without ever being bombastic; the first (at roughly
11'30") subsides into an exquisite exploration of isolated upper register
sustained tones at the 14-minute mark (recalling James Coleman's outstanding
Zuihitsu outing on Sedimental), in which Tonne is particularly
effective. Elsewhere, Kelley's guttural gurgles and Rainey's breathy
rustles are instantly recognisable (there's some splendid interplay
with Cooper's guitar after about 28 minutes), but solo voices, however
distinctive they may be, remained firmly anchored in an ensemble texture
of remarkable cohesion. Good indeed it is. —DW
Weasel
Walter / Kevin Drumm / Fred Lonberg-Holm
ERUPTION
Grob 546
A
cursory glance at the track titles ("Erupting with Pus", "Please chop
off your penis (now)", "Feel / smell / taste / hear / touch the shit",
"I take my hangovers like a real man".. and that's only four of them)
and you know what you're in for. Eruption is a 62'40" minute
brain-fry of the first order, forty invigorating blasts of earwax-melting
noise courtesy of Flying Luttenbachers' percussionist Weasel Walter,
Kevin "Sheer Hellish Miasma" Drumm on guitar and electronics and Fred
Lonberg-Holm on cello. Walter, who recently upped sticks and headed
west to California from Chicago, keeps the No Wave flame alive with
the kind of no-holds-barred power drumming that Han Bennink used to
indulge in thirty years ago in the early days of FMP and Incus. Drumm,
whose aforementioned Mego outing and its association with Nordic Death
Metal has left permanent scars if his subsequent releases are anything
to go by, is on characteristically blistering form, but the real revelation
here is Lonberg-Holm, whose cello sounds like a diabolical cross between
Keiji Haino and Sonny Sharrock. This is one of those rare and wonderful
albums that, if played at sufficient volume, could transform the most
civilised of dinner parties into a Sam Peckinpah bloodbath. Walter
is a past master when it comes to translating genuine anger into thrilling
music: the track entitled "I made a phony 'tribute album' to make
fun of self-righteous know-it-alls (and it worked)" is presumably
a raised middle finger to the Wire journalist (Alan Cummings, if my
memory serves me correctly) who reacted with snotty indignation to
Weasel's earlier Grob outing with Lonberg-Holm and Jim O'Rourke, Tribute
to Masayuki Takayanagi. Another track is entitled "In 20 years
I'll probably like your music, but right now I think you're a total
dick" - but don't wait 20 years to check this one out: if you dug
the Luttenbachers' Trauma (2000) and Drumm's Mego offerings,
this one is for you, right now. —DW
RADIAL
Confront 13
Confront's
beautifully chaste digipak design is bare of anything but the basic
recording information and track timings, so you need to go to Nikos
Veliotis's website to find his brief statement: "Radial was recorded
on the first of June 2003 on acoustic cello without overdubs or editing.
Radial is a piece in three parts, a structure of continuous sound
and/or silence. Random order of the parts is encouraged." Forty-seven
minutes in length, Radial comprises three untitled tracks,
each offering a massively rich, multilayered, always-the-same-never-the-same
drone. Silences of between one and four minutes act as (entirely appropriate)
buffers between the tracks. Despite the disc's title and the circular
tracings that adorn the packaging, I can't help thinking of the three
vertical stripes of Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire, the painting
whose 1990 purchase by the National Gallery of Canada touched off
a huge "Ya call that art?" outcry. Not that Veliotis's music is ever
going to prompt "My kid could do that" responses like Voice of
Fire got: when I played the second track the other day for a bassist
friend - it's my favourite of the three, rather like being purred
at by a lion for 20 minutes on end - he was left gasping in disbelief.
Visual-arts analogies have become banal in discussions of lowercase
music, but in this case the correspondence is exact. Listening to
Radial, one experiences a dissolution of aural perspective
akin to the nonperspectival flatness of an abstract painting: it's
peculiarly hard to tell whether these three pieces were performed
loudly or quietly, so the listener is free to listen back to them
at whatever volume he or she likes and get an entirely different listening
experience. A similar desire to explore the potentials for divergent
musical experience that reside within even simple, clearly outlined
materials lies behind Veliotis's invitation to use the shuffle-play
feature, though with only three, widely-spaced index points the results
are more like a leisurely game of rock-paper-scissors than the kind
of scrambling invited by a disc like Rabbit Run (Erstwhile
027 - forty-two index points!).
It's worth turning back to Veliotis's statement from the website,
which on reinspection is significant for its nonchalance over questions
of whether this is "improvised" or "composed" music - Radial
is simply denoted a "structure of continuous sound and/or silence".
So which is it, improvisation or composition? For an earlier generation
this was a crucial question, and the answer to it carried a lot of
ideological freight (see Derek Bailey's pungent manifesto Improvisation),
but increasingly I'm inclined to think that neither term can be meaningfully
applied to so-called lowercase music. Consider, for instance, the
distance between the implicit stance of Bailey's kind of improviser
- the agent of point-by-point, moment-by-moment renewal and change
- and that of the lowercase improviser, whose actions might often
better be described as "adjustment" or "maintenance". The latter role
can be quite literal, when the performer becomes an overseer of technologies
which can operate continuously on their own - turntables, feedback,
electronic loops, radios, motorized fans, etc - but Veliotis occupies
much the same, somewhat elevated position on Radial even though
he's working with something as traditional as unamplified cello. Am
I the only person who finds himself less and less confident in using
words like "improvisation" and "composition" under these circumstances?
I spoke recently to a friend of how this kind of playing might represent
a "third way" - the term's ugly Blairite connotations don't carry
across the water to Canada, but even so it's not a term I like much.
We are probably still waiting for a terminology that really feels
right - that seems in accord with what it's like to make this music,
to listen to it, or to witness it in performance. —ND
Bobby Bradford
LOVE'S DREAM
Emanem 4096
"Praise Bobby Bradford. He is a major artist."
So wrote Stanley Crouch in the original liner notes to the LP version
of this album (which featured only three of the six tracks included
on this CD), released by Martin Davidson back in 1974. As Davidson
wryly observes in a footnote, Mr Crouch has since become "immersed
in writing about more conservative areas of jazz." (And how..) Crouch
was on the ball though, even if the edited version of his liners that
appears here makes no mention whatsoever of altoist Trevor Watts,
bassist Kent Carter and drummer John Stevens, who accompanied Bradford
on a trip across the Channel to record this set live in Paris at Le
Chat qui Pêche (situated on what is in fact the shortest street in
the French capital, though you're probably not interested) in November
1973. A shame, perhaps, as Watts is on top form here, and the Carter
/ Stevens rhythm section swings as hard and clean as any of Ornette
Coleman's classic quartet rhythm sections. In point of fact, Crouch's
liners begin with a quotation from Ornette himself ("Bobby Bradford
is one of the greatest trumpet players alive"), and, inevitably any
sax / trumpet / bass / drums line-up is automatically compared to
Coleman's pioneering outfits of the early 1960s. Love's Dream clearly
breathes the same air; both Watts and Bradford are especially melodic,
but there are as many traces of Dolphy in Watts' playing as there
are of Ornette, and Bradford has a tougher edge than Don Cherry (Crouch
is also right to namecheck Fats Navarro and Booker Little).
It's amazing to think that Stevens and Watts recorded the Spontaneous
Music Ensemble's classic Face to Face just days later (as Davidson,
good PR man for his own label as ever, reminds us); we've become so
used to the compartmentalisation of musical genres these days (so
and so plays "jazz", so and so is a "free improviser" and ne'er the
twain shall meet) that's it's refreshing to hear how damn good Stevens
was as a "jazz" drummer. On "Coming On" he propels the music forward
with unparalleled energy, though never descends to simple thrashing
the hell out of the kit - careful listening to this and any SME outing
reveals the same hands at work. And he's as quick at spotting and
picking up a rhythmic cell from the horn players as Edward Blackwell,
Dannie Richmond or the rest of them. Wonderful stuff. —DW
Sex Mob
DIME GRIND PALACE
Ropeadope 0-7567-93187-2
Sex Mob's mission in artistic life seems clearly
to make challenging music as fun and accessible as possible. Band
leader and slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein's aesthetic can be summarized
by stating that if somebody in the audience calls out for "Free Bird"
(as he's been apt to do at others' concerts) the band may damn well
play it. The quartet, which includes alto and baritone saxophonist
Briggan Krauss, bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen, first
attracted attention in the mid 90s when they played every Friday midnight
at the Knitting Factory. This served to tighten the outfit and spread
the word: their debut release Din of Inequity was eagerly awaited
and successfully captured the essence of the band with a mix of originals
(including the prescient "Roswell"), blues standards ("House of the
Rising Sun"), obsessive James Bond themes and the odd ditty "Macarena"
("if it has a catchy melody that we can deconstruct, we'll play it").
Subsequent releases have continued that stylistic mix while adding
musicians on individual tracks. In 2002, veteran jazz trombonist Roswell
Rudd began gigging with Sex Mob (a natural melding of sensitivities),
and on Dime Grind Palace he's joined by collaborators from
other Bernstein groupings: guitarist David Tronzo and Haitian trumpeter
Marcus Rojas from Spanish Fly; saxophonist / organist Peter Apfelbaum
and pianist Brian Mitchell from Diaspora Soul. Rudd's brash trombone
is featured prominently but Bernstein and Krauss still receive the
largest amount of solo space, the other guests mainly adding color
and texture. It's a very good "state of the Mob" document, with its
blend of standards (Basie's "Blue and Sentimental", Professor Longhair's
"Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand", plus a crazed "Blue Danube" tacked on
to "Exit Music") and originals, including the odd "Norbert's Weiner"
by Rudd. The Bond themes have been at least temporarily expunged,
and tracks, more often than not, meld into the following ones as if
you're at one of their concerts.
A couple of years ago I was given the daunting task of providing music
for a gathering at a friend's that included teenagers to senior citizens.
Sex Mob's second album Solid Sender turned out to be a hit,
with a number of people of all ages coming up to ask who it was. (Brimming
with confidence I then put on William Parker's O'Neal's Porch,
which pretty much cleared out the room..) What worked for Solid
Sender also works for Dime Grind Palace. Don't pass up
any opportunity to see this group.—SG
Kaoru
Abe
THE LAST RECORDING
DIW 458
I'm reminded once more of those pages in John Berger's trendy if lightweight
"Ways of Seeing"; the first shows a nice painting of a cornfield with
some birds flying above it, the second (overleaf) reproduces the same
image with the caption "This is the last painting Van Gogh completed
before he killed himself." The point being, of course, that what you
know about a work of art in advance of actually experiencing it inevitably
and irredeemably colours your judgement. Most readers of this publication
will by now know something about the live hard die young life and
times of alto saxophonist Kaoru Abe (if not, you're strongly encouraged
to read Eugene Chadbourne's mini-biography of the man on the All Music
Guide site), and might therefore be tempted to listen for signs of
his impending doom in this recording made on August 29th 1978 in Hokkaido.
The problem is that there's not much music to listen to: 14'27" of
actual playing preceded by 1'41" of "rehearsal" (i.e. a couple of
arpeggio flourishes, some shuffling of feet and the sound of Abe clearing
his throat). The music, once it gets going, is as good as might be
expected - Abe was a tempestuous blower indeed, and a saxophonist
whose influence has stretched far and wide - but selling this album
at full Japanese import price when the music it contains could fit
on a 7" single is frankly nothing short of highway robbery. —DW
Joseph
Suchy
CALABI.YAU
Staubgold 43
Guitarist
Joseph Suchy hasn't exactly been prolific since his remarkable Smile
on Grob three years ago (he was one the founders of the Cologne-based
label), but each of his outings has been highly distinctive, and Calabi.Yau
is no exception. Influences on Suchy's music are discernible -
leftfield guitar, abstract sampladelica and dub are all in there (hardly
surprising for a musician who's collaborated with David Grubbs, Ekkehard
Ehlers and Burnt Friedmann) - but are carefully interwoven into a
continuous nine-movement suite. One hesitates to use the word "ambient",
which has acquired so many connotations in recent times as to become
hopelessly vague, even pejorative, but this is by no means difficult
to listen to. It's refreshingly direct without ever being simplistic;
Suchy plays with the interpenetration of foreground and background
events ("Ka-asam" is a wonderful digital cascade buried deep in a
pentatonic rainforest - imagine Fripp & Eno remixed by Fennesz), revealing
both an acute ear for detail and a fondness for gently minimal guitar
figures ("su-um", "kaalay"). Stephanie Tiersch contributes some rather
anaemic (though in the context effective) vocalisms to "by-baa" and
there's some atmospheric percussion work from Stephan Bamickel, and
even if things get decidedly more atonal, even nasty, on "soan-ne"
when Suchy passes his twangs through the digital mincer, the music
soon opens out once more into kosmiche territory, ending with some
deliciously intimate finger picking on the final "kao-on". —DW
Gerry
Hemingway Quartet
DEVIL'S PARADISE
Clean Feed CF010CD
Those
who know Gerry Hemingway primarily from his many years of excellent
work with the Anthony Braxton Quartet or for his contributions to
the trio including Georg Graewe and Ernst Reijseger may be under the
impression that he's a daunting, "cerebral" percussionist. That this
is only one facet of his personality can be seen from Devil's Paradise
with a quartet in which he is joined by Ray Anderson on trombone,
Ellery Eskelin on tenor and Mark Dresser on bass. I've not heard his
Johnny's Corner Song, a recording of a live performance with
a similar group (Robin Eubanks in place of Anderson), so I don't know
if it's a similar outing, but this studio session is a funky, sometimes
boppish release, with the accent on fun rather than on grappling with
new approaches to the deepest level of the beauteous. Some of his
tunes ("Devil's Paradise," "If you Like," "Johnny's Corner Song,"
"Full Off," "Back Again Some Time," "Toombow," "Gentle Ben," and "Tom
Skwella") will be familiar to Hemingway followers, but they receive
excellent treatment here-bouncy and exuberant. None seem to me as
intrinsically interesting as, say, Eskelin's pieces for his Parkins/Black
trio, but, again, "intrinsic interest" isn't really what Hemingway
is shooting for here. He wants you up off your comfy chair. The tunes
are solid and the solos rip. What else could do you really need? —WH
Frank
Gratkowski Quartet
SPECTRAL REFLECTIONS
Leo LR 374
Gerry
Hemingway's often pointillistic contributions to Frank Gratkowski's
Spectral Reflections are a different beast entirely from his Devil's
Paradise (see above). Walter Wierbos takes the trombonist's chair
for this group, and Dieter Manderscheid takes over for Dresser. The
approach is much more mannered and "classical," with the leader turning
to members of the clarinet family as well as his customary alto sax.
The writing is nothing short of brilliant throughout (though I could
have maybe stood a few less sforzando splats at the opening of "Zoom.")
In fact, Gratkowski has showed so much compositional skill in his
recordings over the past few years, that one wonders what he might
produce with a large ensemble. The counterpoint, the strange harmonic
choices, the timbral choices are all very quirky and compelling. Some
of these pieces are rhythmically very tricky, but Hemingway and company
seem to handle all the complexities with ease. "Fenster" reminded
me of an elaborate Japanese garden with some amazing flora provided
by each player, particularly Manderscheid whose delicate microtones
are gently enveloping. "Annaherungen III" is a Tim Bernian blowing
vehicle, while the scary thirteen-minute title tune has a phenomenal
Gratkowski turn on contrabass clarinet and some wonderful bowing work
on cymbals by Hemingway. Hell, all the pieces are great. —WH
Tod
Dockstader
EIGHT ELECTRONIC PIECES
Locust 36
Jason
Ankeny, writing in the liners, is spot on: Tod Dockstader's Eight
Electronic Pieces is a masterpiece, and it's bravo once again
to Locust's Dawson Prater for pulling off yet another raid on the
Folkways archives to reissue it. Copies of the original 1961 vinyl
are rare as hen's teeth and astronomically expensive these days, but
only a diehard collector would pay big bucks for the original artefact
in preference to Ernst Karel's superbly remastered work on this CD.
Not only is the music outstanding, but Ankeny's accompanying interview
with the composer is illuminating and highly entertaining to boot
(you can't help admiring lines like "the Army would have driven me
nuts if I hadn't already been nuts"). Unlike the other venerable pioneers
of electronic music on both sides of the Atlantic, Tod Dockstader
didn't arrive in the studio with his head stuffed of highfalutin'
serial rhetoric or music conservatory dogma. His background as a cartoonist
and sound engineer (which followed studies at university in Art, Literature
and Abnormal Psychology) provided him with a refreshingly unpretentious
hands-on attitude to sound and sound-producing equipment, a curious
and playful ear and a knack for making do with whatever was at hand.
One can't imagine Tod doing a Varèse and ceremoniously announcing
his retirement from composition for the simple reason that the technology
did not yet exist to realise his creative visions; instead he dropped
out of sight after the ambitious collaborative work "Omniphony 1"
(also recently reissued on ReR) for more mundane reasons: "It was
a lousy experience. I just walked away. I guess I'd done what I wanted
to do." That said, Varèse is the big name that Dockstader's music
most closely resembles, in terms of its drama and honest incorporation
of recognisable sounds, and any one of these eight little gems can
hold its head up high in the company of established classics by Schaeffer,
Henry, Stockhausen, Ferrari, Parmegiani et al. They're fresh, unpretentious,
superbly realised and haven't aged a bit. Hats off.—DW
Scott Rosenberg
CREATIVE ORCHESTRA MUSIC CHICAGO 2001
New World 80572-2
Not sure if "creative" is the name of Scott
Rosenberg's 26-strong ensemble or a simple adjective (in which case
it would seem to be rather redundant, as it's highly unlikely a label
as consistently excellent as New World would ever release music that
wasn't creative). Assuming it to be the former, the implied reference
to Anthony Braxton's Creative Construction Company is presumably intentional:
Rosenberg has after all studied and recorded with Braxton, and his
music often reveals his influence, notably in its notational intricacy
("Toys", the final cut on this album, requires no fewer than five
conductors) and the resulting density of the arrangements. The orchestra
Rosenberg has assembled for this ambitious project includes several
of Chicago's finest young improvisers (Kyle Bruckmann, Matt Bauder,
Aram Shelton, Jeb Bishop, Tim Daisy, Jim Baker..) but soloing is not
the name of the game here. Rosenberg, whose volcanic horn work dynamised
the 4CD Six Compositions (GTM) on Rastascan into becoming the
best Braxton outing of the past five years, here restricts himself
to conducting. The musicians' extensive background in jazz / improv
inevitably shows through (notably in the occasional flurries of deliciously
scratchy guitar from Rosenberg's West Coast buddy John Shiurba), but
the music also references the wider world of American and European
contemporary composition, from Ives, Brown and Feldman to the mid
70s Ligeti-like stasis of "Wash" (shades also of Rosenberg's excellent
earlier ensemble outing, IE) and the Pierrot-esque vocalisms
of Carol Genetti. The tone throughout is unremittingly serious, at
times even dour (the grey octave doublings on "7x / Sttm"), and the
orchestration dark bordering on muddy, but there's a tough integrity
to the music that demands - and rewards - repeated listening. —DW
Morton Feldman
EARLY AND UNKNOWN PIANO WORKS
OgreOgress
The only good reason for digging up and releasing
what can be described as juvenilia is that it might in some way hint
at an artist's mature work to come, and with the best will in the
world that can't be said of Morton Feldman's "First Piano Sonata (To
Bela Bartók)", written in 1943 when the composer was just seventeen,
"Preludio" and "Self Portrait" (dating from the two following years),
all of which have been unearthed from the Paul Sacher Foundation's
collection of Feldman manuscripts. Surely this music's apparent unwillingness
to develop its ideas - Feldman acknowledges as much himself - was
more a reflection of teenage fervour and reluctance to submit to discipline
than it was a sign of the composer's stubborn originality, which only
emerged several years later. Even in 1950's "Three Dances", with its
bare rhythmics and additional percussion, the voice we hear most clearly
is that of Cage, under whose spell the composer had fallen at the
time. The tiny undated "For Cynthia" is so slight one wonders why
it was included at all. The only work that is unquestionably Feldman
on offer here is the "Two Pieces for Three Pianos", dating from 1966
and available on record for the first time (it says here, though looking
at the sheer volume of Feldman product appearing on the market these
days, by the time you read this I wouldn't be surprised if there were
a competing version available). Pianist Debora Petrina plays all three
parts herself, and also makes some astute if not very original observations
on the vagaries of Feldman's notation. Describing the work as a masterpiece,
however (as does Veniero Rizzardi in his liners), is pushing it a
bit, but it's certainly good to see it out and about. Feldman completists,
poor penniless wretches that they are, won't want to do without it.
—DW
Noah Creshevsky
HYPERREALISM
Mutable 17516-2
Noah Creshevsky was born in 1945 and was one
of the last wave of composition students to pass through the hands
of Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He also studied under Luciano Berio at
New York's Juilliard School, and the famous collage of Berio's "Sinfonia"
comes to mind on listening to Hyperrealism, a virtuoso piece
of sampladelica if ever there was one. Donna Summer's This Needs
To Be Your Style comes to mind, but whereas Jason Forrest pillaged
the back catalogue of The Cure, Hall & Oates and Earth Wind & Fire,
Creshevsky turns his attention to the classical repertoire. Snippets
of piano concerti, virtuoso cello and violin music (the composer namechecks
Paganini, so I assume it's his stuff - though samples rarely last
long enough to allow positive ID), motets, opera and Indian sitar
music are collaged together at breakneck speed along with guitar (courtesy
of Marco Oppedisano) and vocal samples (from Mutable label boss Thomas
Buckner). It's all very impressive stuff, and hundreds of hours obviously
went into it, but the cumulative effect of 56 minutes of cut'n'paste
is exhausting. Moreover, unlike the work of the Creshevsky's most
famous shake'n'bake precursor John Zorn, it's hard to detect the composer's
real personality in the midst of it all. Creshevsky also mentions
Nancarrow in his liners, and the madcap glissandi that pepper the
surface of much of the music inevitably recall his work, but whereas
Nancarrow's music was often about the superimposition of rhythmic
/ melodic strata, Creshevsky tends to limit himself to juxtaposition.
The samples are ravishing (was that a bit of the Grieg concerto? hey,
was that from "Daphnis and Chloë"?.. hours of endless party fun here
if you have time for it), but it might have been nice to hear them
placed on top of each other more often instead of side by side.—DW
Various
Artists
THE AUDIBLE STILL-LIFE: SONIC PLANAR ANALYSIS 02
Stasisfield SF-CD201
www.stasisfield.com
Released
as a companion document to the online exhibition Stasis_Space, The
Audible Still-Life is what it bills itself to be, a powerful document
of early 21st century cross-disciplinary art. Released in a limited
edition of 250 (move fast!), the CDR features contributions from 17
sound artists - the longest clocking in at 4'45", the shortest 2'10"
- including Stasisfield founder and curator John Kannenberg. "Still-life"
probably conjures up images of rotting apples and half-empty wine
carafes in dark, musty Victorian parlours, and while some of the tracks
are suitably claustrophobic (the sound-producing material itself becoming
the object of attention on Jeremy Boyle's "White Noise Generator Circuit",
Neil Jendon's "VT-37" preamp, and Ethan Koehler's "Stella Remembers",
sourced from an old Atari 2600 VCS..), many use field recordings to
open up the listening space. Sometimes the sound sources are recognisable
("Okuru" by Koura, aka Chicago's Brian Labycz, was partially recorded
in a Japanese post office; Glenn Bach's "Phye", a sound picture -
both interior and exterior - of the artist's home base in Long Beach,
CA, comes complete with traffic noise and seagulls; Milwaukee's Jon
Mueller finds much to wonder at in his domestic furnace and Germany's
Malte Steiner has as much fun with his radiator) - others remain tantalisingly
mysterious, notably the track by Plank (whose title I won't attempt
to type out), and Hal Rammel's "Highway Construction (in action)",
which certainly sounds nothing like what its title would lead you
to expect. For his own still-life, Kannenberg set up a Heath Robinson-like
experiment in which water dripped onto three different surfaces, a
bowl of sand, a heated pan, and a bowl of Pop-Rocks candy, though
if he didn't tell you you'd never guess. Cavernous reverb is orchestrated
into almost technoid volleys of activity, which sadly fade out all
too quickly at the 4'14" mark. Funkier still is Trace Reddell's "Eliot's
Magic Lantern", which orchestrates a reading of poet T.S. Eliot and
a MIDI-transformed text culled from De Quincey's "Confessions of an
Opium Eater" (it says here). Several pieces not surprisingly zoom
in on the microscopic world of sound: James Schoenecker submits a
grainy drop-by-drop dissolution of a sugar cube, and John Hudak concentrates
his attention on a patch of grass in his garden (though, like Morphogenesis'
Michael Prime he processes sounds beyond all recognition), and much
of the music is hauntingly evocative: the found film soundtrack of
i+o's "The Dead Air Spaces", Sawako's "DD (Dream of the Dog)" and
Emanuela de Angelis and Andrea Gabriele (aka Mou, lips!)'s "5 Arance
su Tavolo da Gioco", which is apparently based on the theme of food
but sounds more like Rosicrutian-period Satie as remixed by Pimmon.
Steve Roden, something of a past master when it comes to audible still-life,
closes the set with a mysterious intonation of titles from his bookshelf,
and processed recordings of the ambient sound surrounding it. It's
a mysterious and beautiful conclusion to a superb and highly recommended
compilation. —DW
Goh
Lee Kwang
NERVE CENTER
goh_lee_kwang@hotmail.com
First
up apologies are due to Goh Lee Kwang for the late appearance of this
review, due to the fact that the CD (in a slim paper cover) had slipped
behind a bookcase sometime last year and has only just been rediscovered
in a bout of frenzied New Year housecleaning. In a way though, it's
appropriate that it features in this month's PT along with Post Concrete's
China Sonic Avant-Garde compilation (see above), as it's just
as strikingly original. The opening "A Lie to Liar" especially so,
with its disarmingly simple and effective delicate synth tootles popping
up out of nowhere in front of a backdrop of laptop shudders. Whereas
much recent European and American electroacoustic improv seems to
have taken its cue from Keith Rowe (the "Erstwhile effect"), preferring
stasis to activity, granularity to angularity, Kwang is not averse
to the occasional surprise move, be it a fragment of melody (yes,
melody) or a clearly identifiable sound source. The title track works
with rougher surfaces, layering Chie Mukai-like psychedelic string
squiggles over tortured mulched drones, and things get more fragmented
as the album progresses. One wonders how much cutting-edge electronica
has managed to find its way to Malaysia (bit of a stupid observation,
that, considering the omnipresence of the internet), but I'll hazard
a bet much of it has ended up in Kwang's personal collection. Whatever
his influences or working methods, the resulting music is absolutely
engrossing. Risky, dangerous even, but most definitely worth checking
out. Contact Mr Kwang at the email address above (hope it still works
- you should have seen the dust balls this CD had managed to accumulate
during its exile behind my bookcase) or write to the following address:
Goh Lee Kwang, 2-4-7 Jalan 3/91, Taman Shamelin Perkasa, 56100 Cheras,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. —DW
Frédéric
Nogray
PANOTII
N-Rec 00001
If
Fred Nogray's debut release a!meushi?! on La Belle du Quai
four years ago was a spectacularly enjoyable train wreck of digital
misadventures, Panotii seems to be more under control, but
still packs a few entertaining surprises for the family pets. The
earlier album was closer to the hit'n'miss aesthetic of Kevin Drumm,
but the eight tracks on this new outing have more in common with the
work of Toshimaru Nakamura (with whom Nogray recently performed in
a mega no-input mixing board fest in Metz), in that the music tends
to follow a more linear path. It's close in spirit to Steve Reich's
early minimal doctrine ("once the process is set up and loaded it
runs by itself); Nogray sets his equipment going and waits to see
(hear) what happens. The results are sometimes intriguing, sometimes
mildly soporific, but certainly worth checking out. —DW
The Nordic Miracle
WE SHALL PROVIDE
Humbug 009
Beware of albums that come with gold letters
on a black background: the last one that came my way was Kevin Drumm's
Sheer Hellish Miasma, and we all know what that was
like. The Nordic Miracle is a Norwegian noise double act starring
Lasse Marhaug and Tore Bøe, snazzily dressed in the liner notes to
look like characters from Reservoir Dogs (Mr Gold and Mr Black, presumably),
and if having your ear sliced off is your thing these three tracks
will do just as nicely as Quentin's celebrated debut. Funnily enough
(and unlike the aforementioned Drumm outing), it all sounds quite
acceptable once you get over the initial shock. It's a bit like that
very first cigarette that sent you gagging and retching until you
came back (fool) for another hit and ended up a pathetic quivering
addict. Personally I prefer Marhaug's other outings, notably the fabulous
split LP he released with Brutum Fulmen on Gameboy a while back, but
if you have to spend several hours each week travelling around a busy
city on public transport with only a Walkman to keep you company,
We Shall Provide is the perfect travelling companion. Nasty
but nice. —DW
Autodigest
A COMPRESSED HISTORY OF EVERYTHING EVER RECORDED, VOL.1
Cronica 006
There
can be only two possible outcomes of releasing an album with such
a title and accompanying it with a press release referencing Jean
Baudrillard's Theory of Hyperconformism and David Harvey's concepts
of time-space compression: either you get yourself signed up on the
spot with Asphodel and end up winning the Prix Arse Electronica or
you disappear without a trace. Autodigest give no clues as to they
really are (though my sources in the field point to Heitor Alveolos,
a luminary of the Portuguese electronica scene) and their music seeks
to partake of the same anonymity. It's not bad, full of cavernous
reverb and ultra-high speed digital junk, but it's certainly not exceptional,
and dolling it up with a pile of pretentious waffle (by Baudrillard,
of all people, to whom, in a feat of hyperreality only JB could comprehend,
"The Emperor's New Clothes" was probably referring) only serves to
remind me how overdue a reissue of Stockhausen's "Telemusik" is.—DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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