A
warm PT welcome this month to new contributing journalist Wayne Spencer,
who kicks off with a bang with reviews of the Berlin Uchiage! festival
and the two latest offerings on Ernesto Rodrigues' excellent Creative
Sources label from Portugal. Thanks also go out - as ever - to all
our contributors, and to everyone out there who has sent material
in for review - for information on how to do so, please consult our
FAQs page.
As the World Wide Web continues to grow and prove itself to be at
least as effective a medium as print for new music journalism (if
not, in some respects, more so), PT readers are strongly encouraged
to check out what's happening on other related Websites. For further
animated discussion in thread format of some of the material featured
on this site, notably January 2004's review of the AMPLIFY02: balance
box on Erstwhile, go to Alan Jones' splendid site at www.bagatellen.com
(peruse the Bagarchives while you're there). My fellow Signal To Noise
journalist pal Kurt Gottschalk also edits a fine webzine at www.squidsear.com
, which is well worth checking out (as is the Squidco online store,
where many of the releases featured here are for sale). But there's
also plenty of music out there available for free download! For a
superb overview of the contemporary scene, go to:
www.tu-m.com
where you'll be able to access the TuMP3 project for new music by
a veritable Who's Who of new music curated by our Italian friends
Emilio Romanelli and Rossano Polidoro, aka Tu m'. There's also a fine
selection of new electronic music (including one of my own things
- apologies for gratuitous self-promotion) at John Kannenberg's excellent
virtual artspace, www.stasisfield.com
(already featured in these pages a year ago). On the subject of past
reviews, don't forget that the entire archives of PT are always available
for consultation, either by using the pulldown menus above or the
Search Engine on the homepage. —DW
UCHIAGE!
FESTIVAL
Villa Elizabeth, Berlin
Friday 27th - Sunday 29th February 2004
Berlin
and Tokyo have, in recent years, been loci for some of the most innovative
and interesting currents in improvised and semi-improvised music.
Sometimes referred to respectively as "Berlin Reductionism" and "Onkyo",
the musical movements in these two cities were perhaps most clearly
distinguished from their predecessors globally by bringing together
a marked degree of improvisation and microtonality, radically extended
playing techniques, pianissimo dynamics, small gestures, silence,
and unconventional sounds and timbres that blur the distinctions between
music and noise and in particular utilise for musical ends the sounds
of industrial and electronic procedures. Organised by Christof Kurzmann
and held over three days in a large upstairs room in the Villa Elizabeth
on Invalidenstrasse, the Berlin edition of the Uchiage! festival (a
second leg in Vienna in early March featured musicians from Japan
and Austria) offered an opportunity not only to immerse oneself in
the music of a number of the most prominent figures from these epicentres
of musical radicalism but also to step back and gain some sense of
the overall vitality of the music several years after its emergence.
Now that the initial shock caused by the repudiation of the loquacity
and loudness of 1960s free jazz and 1970s free improvisation is beginning
to pass, what can be said about this music in its maturity?
 left
to right: Marcus Liebig (in shadow), Andrea Neumann, Kai Fagaschinski,
Fritz Ostermayer, Sachiko M, Robin Hayward. Taku Sugimoto just visible
behind piano
The festival began with a performance of "Miira ni Naru made", a composition
by Otomo Yoshihide and novelist Shimada Masahiko of which a version
recorded at the 1999 Mottomo Otomo festival in Wels was released by
Christof Kurzmann's Charhizma imprint three years ago. The piece consists
of a narrated diary of a man who has elected to starve himself to
death (based on the actual diary of a person who committed suicide
in this way) and musical accompaniment. On this occasion, the personnel
were Burkhard Beins (drums), Nicholas Bussmann (cello), Axel Dörner
(trumpet), Kai Fagaschinski (clarinet), Robin Hayward (tuba), Kurzmann
(computer), Andrea Neumann (inside-piano), Sachiko M. (electronics),
Fritz Ostermayer (narrator), Taku Sugimoto (guitar) and Taku Unami
(computer). The performance was directed by Yoshihide from behind
an equipment case by means of a series of hand signals and a cord
attached to Ostermayer's left leg used to signal when the narration
should recommence after what appeared to be predetermined pauses.
For my part, my lack of German made it impossible for me properly
to appreciate the narrative component. Viewed simply as abstract sound,
there seemed an incongruity between the narrow rhythmic, harmonic
and timbral range of the spoken words and the more fragmentary, diverse
and abstract sounds produced by the ensemble of musical instruments.
(In this respect, the composition seemed less successful than "The
Encyclopedia of the Hong Kong Foods", an earlier piece by Yoshihide
for voice and radio that appears on OFF SITE: Composed Music Series
in 2001 (a bruit secret, 2002) and utilizes as its text a series
of isolated words.) I suspect that even for those in a position to
understand the meaning of the narrative there was little integration
of the linguistic and music aspects of the performance. I gather that
the text is entirely conventional in its syntax and relates a linear
storyline. In these circumstances, it would seem likely that the focus
of the listener's attention would generally be the meaning of the
story, with the result that the music is consigned to the background
of perception. Perhaps, however, the literary merit of the prose compensates
to some degree for this marginalization of the instrumental music.
The next set was by Tetuzi Akiyama (guitar), Boris Baltschun (sampler
and electronics), Nicholas Bussmann (cello) and Tony Buck (drums),
who seemed happiest when they fell into relatively conventional improvised
crescendi underpinned by insistent patterned playing by Bussmann.
Between these sections, there were somewhat uncertain and unfocused
searches for new directions, and towards the end of the set the quartet
seemed to run entirely out of steam. Overall, it was not, I think,
an entirely successful set, but there were interesting and engaging
moments within it that repaid the audience's attention.
The first day's final set featured Robin Hayward (tuba), Kai Fagaschinski
(clarinet), Sachiko M. (electronics), Andrea Neumann (inside-piano)
and Taku Unami (laptop), and was one of the highlights of the festival
as a whole. Sachiko M's insidious sinewaves and Hayward's breathy
tuba playing provided the foundation for the improvisation. Across
this canvass, Fagaschinski flashed a series of fervent and vivid microtonal
tendrils, while Unami initially placed bowls, clarinet ends and other
objects on a laptop-controlled oscillating pad to produce a variety
of discordant percussive sounds, before later shifting more towards
interjections of white noise and electronic clicks. For her part,
Neumann was a model of patience and attention, carefully awaiting
her moment and thereby ensuring that her infrequent interventions
on her custom-built electro-acoustic inside-piano array retained a
forceful impact. Together, these contributions provided an excellent
example of the austere yet absorbing interweaving of unconventional
sound manipulations that I would suggest is characteristic of the
best collective electro-acoustic improvisation.
The second day of the festival began with a performance by Cosmos,
a duo consisting of Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida (vocals). Sachiko M's
ultra-minimal bleeps, rustles and extended tones unobtrusively but
powerfully contribute to the heightened state of concentration and
perception and distended sense of space and time through which Cosmos
suspends the listener's quotidian state of mind, yet it is perhaps
Ami Yoshida who is the focus of attention. In the context of Cosmos,
she presents a figure of great vulnerability, standing almost completely
still, hands clasped in front of her or held against her throat or
face, and fighting under the invasive scrutiny of the audience to
produce from the recesses of her vocal apparatus the astonishingly
delicate high-pitched screeches, muted howls and distressed animalistic
utterances that make up her unique vocal style. Cosmos suggested to
me an unostentatious and faltering howl of protest against the surrounding
world, as represented in this instance by the sounds of trams, cars,
audience noise and witlessly optimistic music that percolated into
the group's soundscape on the night. This hushed drama was unfailingly
gripping and showed how the seemingly minimal can be used to maximal
effect.
The second set featured Otomo Yoshihide (turntables) and Tony Buck
(drums). Employing a standard drum-kit scattered with metallic objects,
Bucks playing moved from repetitive circular movements and percussive
cracks through to extended driving rhythmic passages, at times bringing
to mind the junkyard drumming of Paul Lovens. In response, Yoshihide
cheerfully abused his collection of turntables and electronics to
produce howling storms of sound. The results had a certain crude visceral
impact, but in the end I found the performance unsatisfying; an approach
that often amounted to little more than gradually increasing the volume
and intensity of sound so as to produce a rather undifferentiated
ferocity was just too linear, narrow and predictable to challenge
either the players or the audience. That said, the set was probably
the best received of the whole festival, suggesting that many found
much to enjoy in it.
There followed a set by Tetuzi Akiyama (guitar), Boris Hauf (tenor
saxophone and computer), Toshimaru Nakamura (electronics) and Michael
Renkel (guitar). It was my perception that the quartet struggled to
find a shared musical language and vision; once Hauf had abandoned
his perhaps inappropriately jazz-infected saxophone for computer,
the group largely settled into a deflated, uninspired drone made up
of Nakamura and Hauf's static and banal electronics and Renkel's repetitive
bowings. Akiyama extended a series of jagged notes to his fellow players
that offered some relief from the lifeless rut into which the group
had fallen, and also occasionally mimicked what Renkel was playing.
Ultimately, however, he failed to elicit any substantive response
or interaction from his partners.
 Annette
Krebs
The night closed with a performance by Axel Dörner (trumpet), Alessandro
Bosetti (soprano saxophone), Annette Krebs (table-top guitar and electronics)
and Taku Sugimoto (guitar). Krebs had returned from Australia the
day before and was suffering badly from jet lag. While setting up
her equipment she contrived to drop her instruments twice and trip
over an amplifier lead. Moreover, shortly after the group started
playing, she called a halt to proceedings, saying that her equipment
was only producing white noise. It transpired that this was an error
on her part, and the quartet quickly resumed. Once underway, the music
was not perhaps the most fluid. Nonetheless, Krebs proved attentive
and resourceful, and her battery of hisses, plucked notes, rustles,
rubbings and electronic shards worked very well in the context. Dörner
too was excellent, producing an astonishing array of modulated exhalations
from his slide-trumpet that served as an evocative component in the
emerging group sound and had me checking at times that he was not
employing electronic modifications. Bosetti perhaps succeeded less
well in finding an effective argot for the occasion on his saxophone,
yet his occasional vocal hums proved nonetheless surprisingly striking
against the background of Krebs and Dörner's playing, and his efforts
to make the session work were unstinting. Sadly, the same cannot be
said of Sugimoto, for whereas the other three members of the group
were improvising freely, he had elected to play a composition, a strategy
that palpably estranged him from the struggle to forge an effective
collective interaction transpiring around him.
 Taku
Sugimoto
In his notes to the CD OFF SITE: Composed Music Series in 2001
Sugimoto wrote: "listen to the sound as it is / there is almost no
distinction between improvisation and composition / to accept all
the space". This performance, however, demonstrated that there is
an important difference between improvisation and composition in terms
of both process or methodology and the operative conception of what
a musical work is. On the one hand, there was an extemporaneous creation
of a new and transient musical entity that proceeded by way of an
interactive, tentative and flexible engagement that, however shaped
it may have been by the players' available repertoires of responses
and broad preconceptions as to what is appropriate, was nonetheless
substantively the product of responses to the unpredictable contributions
of each player and the multiple demands and constraints of the moment.
On the other hand, there was an attempt to replicate an already conceived
musical structure by following a set of predetermined instructions
that evidently had little or no regard to the circumstances in which
they were performed or the exigencies of one's fellow performers.
In the context of an improvisation struggling to cohere and calling
for the effortful collaboration and participation of every participant,
Sugimoto's apparent decision metaphorically to turn his back on the
predicament of the group and adhere to an entirely unhelpful set of
pre-planned and banal minimalist utterances seemed contemptuous, even
musically autistic. That the session ultimately proved to be rewarding
had nothing to do with his arbitrary and impoverished contributions.
The
final day of the festival opened with Taku Sugimoto's Guitar Quartet,
consisting of Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Taku Sugimoto and
Otomo Yoshihide performing one of Sugimoto's compositions. It began
with the four members synchronising stopwatches, and continued as
a series of single notes. Each player played a small number of notes
alone, then the focus shifted to the next. Each note was separated
by around one to three minutes of silence. The silences evidently
had an effect on the audience, making them acutely aware that they
were part of an event and that even the smallest movement or utterance
on their part would affect the performance. It also sharpened at least
my senses so as to make me aware of tiny noises inside and outside
the hall. While this may be thought to be a valid and valuable outcome
in itself, the proceedings struck me as sterile and contrived. I understand
Sugimoto to be a musician who is keen to place his music in a critical
relationship not only to established and fashionable musical currents
but also to society at large. But the spectacle of four clock-watching
individuals constrained by authority (in this instance the authority
of the score) to refrain from spontaneous sound and movement and engage
instead in inane and stereotypical gestures as and when externally
required to do so would seems to replicate rather than challenge the
social conditions of alienated labour in the dominant society. Sugimoto's
music itself has also become increasingly static, rigid and eviscerated.
Whatever may have been the differences between this performance of
the Guitar Quartet and others it has made, they were dwarfed by their
similarities. Moreover, the music played by the guitar quartet in
this session was almost completely conventional in terms of instrumentation,
timbre, pitch and harmony; all that distinguished it was its slowness
of tempo and paucity of material. The notes themselves - for which
one waits in expectant, extended silence - are all too predictable,
uninteresting and interchangeable, cheating one's enhanced senses
of anything substantive to perceive in the music and provoking an
unprofitable irritation. Even the silences themselves seemed mechanistic
and even manipulative, ground out as prefabricated units of blind
quietude by a procedure that was beholden to a disembodied score and
thus indifferent to the circumstances of the performance or the audience.
Whatever the original merits of Sugimoto's ultra-minimalism in general
or his guitar quartet in particular may have been, I fear that repetition
and rigidity have served over time to extinguish them.
Fortunately, the next set proved far more interesting. The participants
were Burkhard Beins (drums), Andrea Ermke (electronics), Sabine Ercklentz
(trumpet) and Ami Yoshida (voice). The three Germans proved keen and
attentive, and the constant shifting of Beins' circular rubbings and
bowings, Ercklentz's breaths, rasps and gurgles, and Ermke's low-key
electronics challenged Yoshida if not to find wholly new responses
then at least to dig deep into her repertoire of vocalizations (she
also made good use of the cracklings of a compressed water bottle
at one stage). Although I had some reservations as to whether certain
approaches - such as Beins' rhythmic movement of a piece of polystyrene
around the circumference of one his drums - were at times being over-used,
the set displayed to very good effect the dynamic negotiations of
group improvisation. And, in singular contrast to what preceded it,
the silences introduced by the group possessed a tangible significance,
serving not only to let in the sounds of the environment but also
to promote a sense of intrinsic drama or reflection within the music.
Next on stage were Robin Hayward (tuba) and Taku Sugimoto (guitar).
Hayward possesses a wide range of techniques for moving air around
and out of his instrument without producing anything resembling a
note recognised by the standard notational systems. He began with
two lusty blasts, a clarion call to the improvisation. But if he expected
Sugimoto to respond to this invitation, he was to be sorely disappointed.
No matter what Hayward did, Sugimoto's mandatory lengthy pauses and
arbitrarily restricted set of musical materials prevented any substantive
dialogue from emerging. Sugimoto simply played in the much the same
way as he now does in every context; Hayward might as well not have
been there. In the face of his partner's unwillingness to communicate,
it appeared that Hayward at length turned to constructing a solo.
Given the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that his playing
proved less than inspired and that the set soon expired. In his notes
to the AMPLIFY2002: Balance
box set, Sugimoto pronounced the death and funeral of "Onkyo or electro-acoustic
music". I do not know whether he intended at the time to include his
own music in this category, but two years further on, his work in
contexts such as this strikes one as having about it something of
the quality of a pathological necrophiliac obsession with increasingly
skeletal remains.
After
what may well have been the nadir of the festival for me, the concluding
set by Serge Baghdassarians (table-top guitar), Toshimaru Nakamura
(electronics) and Taku Unami (laptop) - left to right in photo below
- was a pleasure. All three listened and played extremely well, weaving
together a haunting, challenging, inventive, diverse and collaborative
musical adventure from their respective abstract, distinct but mutually
supportive contributions. It was a fine end to the festival.
After
three days, what can be said about the health of the scenes in Tokyo
and Berlin? Some of the less successful performances can doubtless
be attributed to transient lack of inspiration, unfamiliar playing
partners or other uninformative factors. Looking beyond these, it
would appear that at present more attention is being devoted to exploring
terrain already discovered than to the opening of radical new departures.
In some cases the ground has been worked to a desolate exhaustion.
In others, the available musical potential, even within what might
at first glance seem to be quite narrow domains, is evidently sufficient
to support stimulating new work within existing paradigms, at least
for the time being. What happens when even the most fecund of the
resources being deployed in Berlin and Tokyo falls prey to stagnation
remains to be seen. Hopefully there will be further instalments of
this thought-provoking and promising festival to allow us to find
out.—WS
Radu
Malfatti / Taku Sugimoto
Raku
Sugifatti
FUTATSU
Improvised Music from Japan IMJ 508/509 2CD
Raku
Sugifatti, indeed. I'll bet it was notorious punster Radu Malfatti's
idea to fuse his name with that of guitarist Taku Sugimoto, in a kind
of ultimate onkyo gesture: the most notoriously near-silent improvising
musicians on the planet merge to form a single non-existent character.
Futatsu is, at least in this household, one of the most keenly
anticipated double albums of recent times; having watched Sugimoto
(watching him these days as just as important to listening to him)
gradually thin out his exquisite guitar playing from the melancholy
blues-inflected Flagments Of Paradise to the near-blank canvas
of last year's "hum" (on A Bruit Secret), and having followed Malfatti's
career from the raucous and wonderful excesses of Chris McGregor's
Brotherhood of Breath Live In Willisau through the seminal
extended techniques outings on Hat and FMP into the austerity of Polwechsel
and beyond, I'll admit to being more than a little curious to see
how much further these two musicians could go without stopping altogether
and releasing a totally silent album. Except of course, as Cage would
say, there's no such thing. If Malfatti and Sugimoto's goal in releasing
the first of these two discs, a studio performance entitled "Hitotsu"
(Sugimoto recorded his guitar in Tokyo in April 2003, and Malfatti
his trombone in Vienna three months later - he also mixed the two
together) is for listeners to focus their attention on the sounds
around them - a truly Cageian goal at that - then it can probably
be deemed a successful venture. There certainly aren't many notes
to get in the way of the "silence"; over the course of an hour and
twelve minutes, Sugimoto plays just thirteen times - all single notes
except for one four-note mini-melody at 42'40" - and Malfatti twenty
(including two leisurely glissandi, one downwards at 33'25", one upwards
at 47'05"). Allowing for the decay of the guitar sonorities, the total
duration of Sugimoto's contribution to the entire piece comes to about
40 seconds, while Malfatti, who concentrates on long sustained tones,
contributes 4'50". Autrement dit, 92.3% of "Hitotsu" is "silence",
so you have plenty of opportunity to listen attentively to the ambient
sounds of your living room, or the gentle friction of your stereo
headphones slipping down the back of your head as you wait for the
next sound. Or nod off. Of course, all this talk of percentages and
statistics is particularly dumb, not to mention mildly vulgar; nobody
would think of calculating the area of black pigment as opposed to
white primed canvas on a Franz Kline painting (as if more were better
- "the thicker the paint the greater the art"; or, returning to improvisation,
"the more notes you play the better the music".. maybe that would
explain the Evan Parker idolatry..). What makes Kline's art a moving
experience is the terrific tension between those thick black lines
and the surrounding white space, and one might argue that a similar
tension exists in the silences of "Hitotsu". It all depends, I suppose,
on how you approach the work - that applies as much to Franz Kline
as it does to Raku Sugifatti - but it's my considered view that the
balance between sound and silence in "Hitotsu" has swung too far towards
the latter.
The second disc brings together two live recordings of the duo in
(in)action, the first at Vienna's Rhiz on June 2nd 2003, the second
six months earlier at Tokyo's Appel. The most noticeable element of
the Rhiz recording is the constant chatter (from an adjacent room?)
and the occasional groan of distant traffic. Malfatti creeps in behind
the sound of a passing car after several minutes, and the gentle upward
glissando he slips in at the 28 minute mark sounds more like a departing
motor vehicle than it does a trombone. The concert was staged simultaneously
with a chess match, which finished before the music, hence the applause
that bursts out after 40 minutes and the loud clicks and clunks that
precede it. The Japanese crowd at Appel is much quieter - smaller
too, probably - but the passing traffic very much more present. One
could almost consider it as an example of environmental improv (there's
a very nice album on trente oiseaux recorded by Kuwayama Kiyoharu
and Kijima Rina on a motorway sliproad), but I'm nonetheless led to
wonder why it was released at all. Insofar as the music on Futatsu
is even more extreme in its sparseness than previous outings by both
Sugimoto and Malfatti, it can, I suppose, be said to represent an
advance, if advance is the appropriate word. It does, however, beg
the question as to how much further music can go in this direction
- if Malfatti played just ten notes instead of twenty, would that
be "twice as extreme" again? The quantum leap, one supposes, would
be to go from one note to no notes at all. —DW
KITSCH
CONCRETE
Mego 070
Viennese music journalist/broadcaster-turned-crooner Fritz Ostermayer
apparently came across the title of this, his debut album, after a
performance at the Batofar in Paris where a waitress quizzed him about
Pierre Henry, of all people. As titles go it's certainly striking,
but also elusive, like the album's cover art: this still from Ulrich
Seidl's film "Hundstage" clearly represents an orgy in full swing,
but as it's dolled up to resemble a Spanish Old Master the fact intriguingly
doesn't immediately register. In a similar manner, the ugly banality
of these twelve songs - not all of which are by Ostermayer, by the
way - is deliberately smothered under a pink fluffy Jeff Koons cushion:
everything is not what it seems. (My German's not exactly up to ordering
more than a couple of beers and a sausage at a Christmas market, but
I have come across the word "arschloch" before - don't ask where -
and therefore suspect that the lyrics to "1000 Dank" aren't quite
as nice as the beginning of the song might lead one to expect.)
Ostermayer might profess genuine affection for the tacky synths of
early 80s electro, and probably has a whole closet full of Nina Hagen
albums, but the swoony synths that swirl in the background on "Skin
Fire" are cunningly manipulated on that most up-to-date of gadgets,
the laptop. Similarly, Martin Siewert's sickly sweet bottleneck guitar
on "Alpharhythmen" is slashed apart by ProTools to become something
altogether more sinister. Another guest star from the world of contemporary
improv, trumpeter Franz Hautzinger, chooses a more direct form of
subversion in his solo on "Ave Little Maria": does anyone out there
remember Les Dawson? The late, lamented Lancastrian comic used to
close his shows by playing tacky standards Clayderman-style at the
piano, with excruciating wrong notes. Not any old wrong notes, but
the right wrong notes (to quote Robin Holloway out of context),
and not too many of them either. I seriously doubt whether Hautzinger
has ever heard of Les Dawson, but his inspired Herb Alpert take-off
(in front of a backdrop of synthetic mandolins - remember Bowie's
"Fantastic Voyage"?) manages to fuck the track up spectacularly.
Ostermayer clearly knows his pop trivia inside out, choosing juicy
samples from the likes of Procol Harum and covering two songs by that
most venerable of kitsch acts, Sparks ("Angst In My Pants" and "Fun
Bunch Of Guys", which, as I recall, was originally entitled "Fun Bunch
Of Guys From Outer Space", though I never kept the album long enough
to fall in love with it), but the cumulative effect of his vocals,
which descend alarmingly often into Leonard Cohen / Nick Cave low
register - as any American politician will confirm, there's nothing
more "sincere" than a deep voice - is as overwhelming and queasy as
a Koons retrospective. Horrifying though it is to admit it, the squeaky
clean Casio horror of the final "Dreamalleinunterhalter Dream", which
self-destructs into an anarchic and inept clarinet solo courtesy of
Karin Ankele, found me thumbing through an essay by arch-reactionary
critic Roger Scruton, "Kitsch and the Modern Predicament", where I
came across the following passage: "Having recognized that modernist
severity is no longer acceptable - for modernism begins to seem like
the same old thing and therefore not modern at all - artists began
not to shun kitsch but to embrace it, in the manner of Andy Warhol,
Alan Jones, and Jeff Koons. The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty
of producing kitsch; far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for
then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody. (The
intention to produce real kitsch is an impossible intention, like
the intention to act unintentionally.) Preemptive kitsch sets quotation
marks around actual kitsch and hopes thereby to save its artistic
credentials. The dilemma is not: kitsch or avant-garde, but: kitsch
or "kitsch." The quotation marks function like the forceps with which
a pathologist lifts some odoriferous specimen from its jar." A smellier
specimen than Kitsch Concrčte is going to be hard to find.
—DW
Ernesto
Rodrigues / Alfredo Costa Monteiro / Guilherme Rodrigues / Margarida
Garcia
CESURA
Creative Sources CS 008
No Furniture
NO FURNITURE
Creative Sources CS 009
Cesura
is the latest in a series of Creative Sources releases that feature
Portuguese violinist / violist Ernesto Rodrigues in company with various
improvisers. Rui Eduardo Paes reports Rodrigues as saying that Cesura
is his least musical work. Maybe so, but it is also one of his best.
The instruments listed as appearing include a pocket trumpet and an
accordion. No doubt these play essential parts in the group's sound,
but it is Ernesto Rodrigues's viola, Guilherme Rodrigues's cello and
Margarida Garcia's electric double bass that appear to predominate.
Bows are dragged slowly over strings and other parts of the instruments,
producing an array of slowly unfolding microtonal creaks, shrieks,
groans and howls of different pitches, timbres and textures. Instruments
are also plucked, rubbed, struck and twisted, yielding complementary
layers of sharp percussive retorts, splintering sounds, and other
plangent expressions of distressed wood and steel. At times the music
rises to an agitated hubbub, but there is no tedious Bell Curve of
intensity and activity; the musicians evidently feel under no compulsion
to play continuously, and contributions and interactions are often
quickly superseded by pensive intermissions. Repeatedly punctuated
by silence in this way, the music slowly unfolds with a claustrophobic
vividness and considerable melancholy power. If such description makes
the music sound somewhat sepulchral, so be it: "cesura" is Portuguese
for "cut", and it is not entirely fanciful to think of Rodrigues and
his companions as carving up the decayed corpse of the traditional
chamber string ensemble, replete with its putrescent inheritance of
conventional instrumental techniques and tonal repertoire, in search
of a new and unlovely revenant better suited to desperate and disillusioned
times. In so doing, they have produced an excellent recording, full
of a dark and sanguinary beauty all its own. Strongly recommended.
No
Furniture is the eponymous debut release by a Berlin-based trio
consisting of Boris Baltschun (sampler), Axel Dörner (computer and
trumpet) and Kai Fagaschinski (clarinet). The presence of Dörner and
Fagaschinski might lead one to expect the type of ultra-quiet exploration
of skeletal structures and isolated granular tones stereotypically
associated with so-called 'Berlin Reductionism'. But even expectations
better founded than this can be misleading: far from being delicate
and diaphanous, the music on No Furniture is raw, vibrant,
energetic, volatile and frequently rather loud. Baltschun and Dörner's
electronics are very much to the front. Deep subterranean pulsations,
monolithic roars, visceral scrapes, and an array of crackles, hisses,
high-pitched swarms, etc., move across the soundscape, sometimes coalescing
into extended passages of sustained and urgent intensity, often mutating
rapidly in complex involutions and collocations, and occasionally
dropping into abrupt calm. Aside from a few quieter passages, Dörner's
trumpet and Fagaschinski's clarinet tend to work from the margins
of the group's sound, curling microtonal tendrils and breathy exclamations
around and across the digital streams. Nonetheless, their contributions
are integral components of No Furniture's richly multifaceted sound.
The experience of following No Furniture's vertiginous exploration
of a multitude of different dynamics, sounds and moods is an exhilarating
one. In principle, electronics open up the possibility of stepping
far beyond the limitations of conventional musical instruments and
scales. No Furniture make effective use of this potential, harnessing
it not to a spirit of arid experimentalism but rather to an abundance
of musical ideas and enthusiasm. In general, the group's fecundity
of imagination offers a refreshing change from the paralysis and painfully
extended monomaniac exploration of single, thin ideas and sounds too
often committed to CD and mistaken for profundity. It illustrates
what can ensue when the array of advanced ideas and techniques pursued
in Berlin, Vienna, Tokyo and elsewhere are taken as elements of a
widened musical palette rather than as prescriptions for a uniform,
mandatory and quasi-sacred minimalism. In short, No Furniture
is an excellent recording, perhaps the best example of electro-acoustic
music yet to have emerged from the community of advanced musicians
in Berlin. Considered along with Cesura, it also testifies
to the expanding range and burgeoning importance of the Lisbon-based
Creative Sources label. —WS
Crescendo,
Norrköping (Sweden) 3rd February 2004
After
a background playing Dixieland trombone and a frustrating visit to
the bastion of European serialism, the Darmstadt Summer School (which
he described as "rigid and conceited"), the real epiphany for Swedish
composer Folke Rabe (born 1935) was his visit to the United States
in 1965, where encounters with luminaries such as Terry Riley, Pauline
Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Robert Erickson, Morton Subotnick and La Monte
Young exercised a decisive influence on the young composer's music.
The first part of tonight's concert, in the beautiful acoustic of
Norrköping's square-shaped wood-panelled concert hall, leaves us with
no explicit references to his American experiences, but the influence
of his erstwhile teacher Ligeti is apparent in three compositions
for brass instruments performed by members of the local Norrköping
Symphony Orchestra. A small but attentive audience filters in to hear
Rabe introduce his "Basta" for solo trombone, performed by Jimmy Olsson
who arrives onstage at high speed from an adjoining room and produces
a roaring sound from the trombone, which, coinciding with a sudden
burst of light, has an immediate and powerful effect on the nervous
system. The piece employs a wide variety of dynamics; fades in and
out, attacks and cut-offs, and as soon as it finishes the trombonist
rushes back to the room he came from. This theatrical device gives
the impression of a musician as a mere tool for the composer to control,
a performer in apposition to authority (as represented by the composer);
as if the trombonist were forced to obey and unable to accept the
applause - or any appreciation whatsoever. In short, as soon as the
piece is finished, so is the player - basta!
Olsson returns along with trumpeter Brynjar Kolbergsrud for "Tintomara"
(1992) (each piece on tonight's programme is introduced by the composer),
the idea for which comes from a novel by the Swedish writer Carl Jonas
Love Almquist, centering on the book's androgynous main character.
Sex roles are the subject dealt with and there's a parallel in Rabe's
choice of instruments, based on an observation on the part of the
composer concerning the instruments' respective characters: the trumpet
with its penetrating sound and military associations is categorised
as male but its register - soprano - is female, while the trombone
with its soft, warm tone, and "motherly associations" is female but
its register that of the male voice. The musicians play fast, repetitive
figures, but soon retreat into softer, more romantic territory, breaking
out later into marching lines when the trumpet surprises the trombone
and vice versa (illustrated theatrically by pointing the instrument
to the other musician, who jumps in fright).
Kolbergsrud and Olsson are then joined by Stefan Mattsson (trumpet),
Lennart Langer, (French horn) and Urban Stenqvist (tuba) for the brass
quintet "Escalations" (1988), whose sustained tones and restful arpeggio-like
figures, passed between the musicians, draw the listener into an inviting
idyll, until it suddenly bursts open with a demonic cackle of anxious
trumpets and trombones.
The second half of the concert, devoted to Rabe's electronic music,
opens with "ARG, NYC March 5 1965 4-5 P.M.", which dates from 1965.
Rabe's visit to the USA that year opened his ears not only to experimental
music but also to the brash, incisive radio show format, and his collage
of tunes, jingles, radio voiceovers and other pop-related sources,
despite the limitations of its two-track mix, is as ambitious as many
tape-experiments of the period. Slot machine jackpots pay out, "Downtown"
blares, Beatles fans scream hysterically and Rabe s(p)lices up pop
classics with Schaefferian glee. Though hardly as subtle as the early
Riley and Reich outings, "ARG, NYC March 5 1965 4-5 P.M." is still
a very satisfying work that deserves to be heard more often.
In 1982 Fylkingen released an LP to celebrate the 70th birthday of
John Cage, for which Rabe supplied a four-minute work called "To the
Barbender". Ostensibly based on Cage's groundbreaking philosophical
ideas, it sounds more like musique concrčte. Rabe may have had Luc
Ferrari in mind, notably his masterpiece "Presque Rien No 1", but
where Ferrari takes field recordings out of context and carefully
reassembles them to create unique and intimate landscape, Rabe's manipulations
of church bells seem somewhat gratuitous. Still, it has its moments,
and testifies to the composer's willingness to experiment.
Rabe describes "Cyclone", commissioned by the Swedish Concert Institute
in the mid 1980s, as his "dreariest, most negative piece, an unhealthy
music from the dark days when the world seemed ready to erupt into
something very horrifying. Hopefully you won't like it," he adds with
a smile. Its dismal painted space, with sustained electronics symbiotically
entwined with contrasting, carefully placed sounds and silence makes
a strong impression; the work manages to be both warm and beautiful
- even romantic - while speaking of an irremediable, dark world.
Rounding off the evening, 1967's "WHAT??" (in quadrophonic sound!),
which was reissued on Jim O'Rourke and David Grubbs' Dexter's Cigar
imprint a few years ago, takes us back to brighter times, inspired
as it was by that aforementioned US trip back in 1965 when drone music
was establishing itself in the underground (La Monte Young being the
pre-eminent guru). Though Rabe waxes lyrical about the most inspiring
experience of staying at Terry Riley's home, the stasis of "WHAT??"
clearly owes more to Young. The piece is further enriched by feedback
and references to Indian music, and at its end leaves room for meditation
in the silent dark space. All notions of time and experience are lost,
as are the words to describe such an awesome end to a splendid evening.
—KW
Steve
Swell
SUITE FOR PLAYERS, LISTENERS AND OTHER DREAMERS
CIMP 292
Odean
Pope and Khan Jamal Quartet
NOTHING IS WRONG
CIMP 294
Mark
Dresser & Ray Anderson
NINE SONGS TOGETHER
CIMP 295
 It's
a pity that trombonist Steve Swell squanders the opportunity to say
a bit about this suite in the liner notes - instead there is a page
and a half of denunciations of the Bush administration, in block capitals
as if transcribed from protesters' placards. The titles of the eight
parts (including "Calling All Travelers", "Wildflowers Grow Along
This Highway Too", "Sailing Home", even "Outside Inn") suggest a travel
narrative of sorts, maybe a musical one, given the possible allusions
to Sun Ra's "A Call for All Demons" and the Wildflowers loft sessions.
It's hard to hear this as a closely-argued large-scale composition,
since individual tracks are self-contained and usually follow familiar
head-solos-head conventions, but Swell's repeated use of favourite
devices - such as having melody and groove grind against each other
almost independently - lends the entire suite extra coherence. The
sextet includes two rarely seen veterans of the music: altoist / flutist
/ bass clarinettist Will Connell (born in 1938, largely unrecorded
though he has worked with Horace Tapscott, David Murray and others)
and violinist Charles Burnham (born 1950, best known for his work
with James Blood Ulmer and the String Trio of New York). There's a
hysterical, finger-wiggling edge to Connell's work, but when he takes
time over his phrases they're pungent and tasty. Burnham garnishes
his violin with occasional wah-wah effects and reveals a splendid
sense of humour (at one point he comes up with something uncannily
like a cartoon bimbo going "Yoo-hoo!"). In this idiosyncratic company
trumpeter Roy Campbell is almost the straight man - he plays well
but can't help sounding a bit prissy. Best of all though is Swell
himself, who turns in some marvellous flying-apart-at-the-seams work
on the trombone. With four players passing the baton around, the music
can get longwinded: had Swell taken a leaf from Barry Guy and tailored
each section around just one or two players the 72-minute running
time might have been usefully reined in. But credit is due to bassist
Franįois Grillot and drummer Kevin Norton for their brisk and alert
rhythm-section work that builds genuine drama across even the longest
tracks (check out how they accompany each soloist in an entirely different
manner on "Groove Merchants of Redwood"). This isn't a flawless disc,
but on balance it's a pretty enjoyable date anyway.
 Fans
of Odean Pope's stern, fervent tenor will be pleased to see their
man back in the studio for his first leadership date since 1999. He
seems happy to be there, to judge by his titling a Trane-inspired
blues line "The Spirit Room", of which two takes are included. The
disc offers a big helping of tough, headlong hard bop - including
a fresh revisiting of an early Pope composition, "Almost Like Me Part
II" - as well as a mighty blowout on "Nothing Is Wrong". Jamal is
busy and rhythmically insistent, sometimes too much so: take one of
"The Spirit Room" is marred by his plunky comping, and things go better
on take three when he lays out behind Pope, opening up space for a
pitched three-way battle between saxophone, bass and drums. But Jamal
brings several excellent compositions to the date, and on one of them,
"Three" (an eerie four-bar cycle recalling creepy Grachan Moncur III
pieces like "Frankenstein" and "Ghost Town") turns in a knockout solo.
The album also benefits from the sterling work of bassist Arthur Harper
and drummer Allen Nelson, who shines on the brutal climax of "Nothing
Is Wrong". Again, not a flawless disc - but one worth savouring.
 Bassist
Dresser and trombonist Anderson have been regular playing partners
since the 1970s, often working in a duet format, but Nine Songs
Together is their first duo record. It's a superb disc, whose
bittersweet flavour owes much to the personal circumstances of the
recording: "Taps for Jackie" is Anderson's memorial to his late wife,
poet and tap dancer Jackie Raven, while the closing reading of "I'm
Confessin' That I Love You" is dedicated to his new fiancée. "Taps"
is a remarkable, unsettling performance: the basic theme is a wistful
elegy whose changes and mood recall "Autumn Leaves", but Anderson
breaks the piece apart with a stricken, babbling trombone solo. A
similarly raw moment comes at the piece's end, where he holds onto
the tune's last note as long as he possibly can. Dresser's concert
appearances bear witness to how physical - visceral - his sense of
swing is: screwing up his face, he registers every beat with a sharp
intake of breath or exhalation, even as he cuts across it with a tricky
offbeat-laden line. Though he's a consummate groove player, he rarely
walks - even on Anderson's blues "Insistent," he sounds more like
Bo Diddley than Ray Brown, and he likes complex, dancing grooves that
owe something to African music. On swinging pieces such as "One Plate"
and "Slipinstyle" there's a wonderful contrast between Anderson's
easygoing, lyrical trombone and Dresser's tough, vehement bass. Anderson's
virtues shine in the spare format: his lines are slippery, wriggly
and very long - like spaghetti - but also have an extraordinary tenderness
that recalls Johnny Hodges, or (on an emotional reading of "I Wish
I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free") Albert Ayler at his gentlest.
Great stuff. —ND
Chris
McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath
BREMEN TO BRIDGEWATER
Cuneiform Rune 182-83 2CD
 A
few months ago Steve Beresford contributed a brief but wonderful piece
to PT's "Reissue This" slot, waxing lyrical about Kwela
by Gwigwi's Band (featuring Gwigwi Mrwebi and Dudu Pukwana
on alto saxophones, Ronnie Beer on tenor, Chris McGregor on piano,
Coleridge Goode on bass and Laurie Allan on drums). We're still waiting
for some enterprising soul to reissue that goody, but in the meantime
rejoice: Cuneiform's release of material recorded in 1971 and 1975
by McGregor's magnificent big band, Brotherhood of Breath, is an opportunity
to hear the South African pianist in full flight, along with a veritable
Who's Who of early 70s British (and expat South African) jazz - Pukwana's
in there, of course, along with fellow Blue Notes Mongezi Feza (trumpet)
and Louis Moholo (drums), but so are trumpeters Harry Beckett and
Marc Charig, saxophonists Elton Dean, Mike Osborne, Evan Parker, Alan
Skidmore, Gary Windo and Bruce Grant, trombonists Nick Evans, Malcolm
Griffiths and Radu Malfatti, drummer Keith Bailey and bassist Harry
Miller.
The 1971 concert, recorded on June 20th in Bremen, Germany (and therefore
predating BOB's second studio album and what was hitherto their first
live LP, 1973's Live In Willisau on Ogun) kicks off raucously
with "Funky Boots March" (credited to Windo and Evans, and one of
only two pieces in the set - the other being Pukwana's "The Bride"
not penned by McGregor), followed without a break by "Kongi's Theme",
a Brotherhood staple. It's classic BOB, powered forward by Moholo's
irresistible drumming, with Evans and Griffiths' rugged trombones
doubling Miller's bass, close harmony sax arrangements as sweet and
sweaty as a township choir, and Feza riding high above - Feza is awesome
throughout the album. The music manages to be at one and the same
time as tight as hell and as rambunctious as a pub-crawl - the good
people of Bremen had probably never heard anything like it, and probably
never will again. In his excellent liner notes, Francesco Martinelli
is on the ball comparing "Now" to Tadd Dameron (and Ellington and
Basie are obvious references throughout), but the ebullient rhythm
section cooking behind Marc Charig's poised solo belongs to another
world altogether: only the Gil Evans Orchestra ever succeeding as
well in incorporating sheer joyful exuberance into otherwise complex
arrangements. And so it rolls on - there's no point giving a blow
by blow description of what's on offer, as you'll hear it for yourself
- packed full of red hot solos (Skidmore and Windo are worthy of mention)
and driven relentlessly onward and upward by the irrepressible Moholo.
Four years later, by which time McGregor had relocated to France (yet
another sad reflection on the working situation for musicians in Britain),
the BOB line-up had changed slightly: the Blue Note hard core was
still present - though Keith Bailey is behind the drum set for the
two tracks taken from the February 26th concert - but Windo and Skidmore
had moved on, to be replaced by Elton Dean, Evan Parker and American
baritonist Bruce Grant, and Griffiths had been replaced by Radu Malfatti.
It's curious that this issue of PT should feature the latest example
of Malfatti's work - see above - as the austere emptiness of Futatsu
is about as far as you can get from the exuberance of the Brotherhood,
though I'm happy to report that Mr Malfatti's delighted - for once!
- to rediscover some of his old work (he doesn't solo here but contributes
a splendid composition "Yes, Please"). Two concerts were recorded
at the Bridgewater Arts Centre in 1975, on February 26th and November
11th; it was a venue that the band evidently enjoyed playing at, and
led to a running joke in the band "Trouble Over Bridgewater", prompted
by some excessive consumption of local beverage, which nevertheless
did nothing to detract from the performances, which are both exemplary
(the same can't be said for the sound quality on the earlier date,
but frankly, when the music's as good as this, who gives a fuck?).
Mongezi Feza died of double pneumonia barely a month after the second
Bridgewater concert, and subsequent years saw McGregor, Miller, Dyani
and Pukwana all check out too soon. Bruce Grant has dropped out of
sight, too (if anyone has any news, contact us). On listening to this
tough, rough, wondrously life-affirming music, however, dwelling on
tragedy seems singularly inappropriate. Nowadays, when jazz is dominated
by smart young men in snazzy suits spouting holier-than-thou crap
about The Tradition, and "free" improvisers take themselves so damn
seriously you're tempted to spike their drinks with LSD, bands like
the Brotherhood and musicians like Mongs, Ozzy and Dudu don't exist
anymore. So you'd better get your butt down to your local emporium
and buy up all available copies of Bremen To Bridgewater right
now. You won't regret it. —DW
Noël
Akchoté / Roland Auzet / Luc Ferrari
IMPRO-MICRO-ACOUSTIQUE
Blue Chopsticks BC12 CD
Lately
on this site and elsewhere we've been spilling a lot of ink about
the inappropriateness of the improvisation/composition binary in the
face of current musical trends. It's always nice when one's pet theories
get some extra hard evidence to back them up: Impro-Micro-Acoustique
couldn't have popped out of the mail at a better time. Happening to
see a performance by guitarist Noël Akchoté, composer Luc Ferrari
was intrigued by the musical similarities between free improv and
musique concrčte. Spurred by this discovery, Ferrari has now
(in his seventies!) taken up improvisation himself; this disc, a first-time
meeting with Akchoté and percussionist Roland Auzet, is the first
recording to document his work as an improviser. His work at the piano
is confident and strikingly different from the work of most free-improvising
pianists in its unhurried exploration of contrasts of sound-colour.
Ferrari's conception of improvisation as "real-time concrčte" is bolstered
throughout by all three musicians' use of hand-held mikes and loudspeakers
in the studio to create improvised audio collages rather than a naturalistic
audio document; the results aren't so far from a disc like Agnel/Marchetti/Noetinger's
excellent Potlatch outing Rouge Gris Bruit.
The materials and concerns of the CD's five tracks appear to have
been carefully delimited in advance, to judge by their programmatic
titles. "Sur Le Contraste" offers uneasy jolts, blats and scrapes,
sprinkled with recognizable sounds (such as touch-telephone beeps),
building to a more sustained passage at the nine-minute mark. "Sur
La Pulsation", the disc's best track, is like a half-effaced memory
of African folk music; Auzet's hand drumming suggests Hamid Drake
on tranquillizers. "Sur Le Continu" is 15 minutes of creepy bowels-of-the-earth
rumble; "Sur Le Minimum", skip-hop-and-jump improv, is faux-naīve
as a child's game but also suggests the combinatorics of a Zorn game-piece.
"Sur Le Rythme" is the disc's one misstep: cute tick-tock rhythms
building to a chug - and whose bright idea was it to throw in samples
from Star Wars' C3PO? Ignore that duff track and the disc's
clutzy portmanteau title though and you're left with a fine album
that continues to delight even after the surprise of encountering
Ferrari in this context wears off. Recommended.—ND
Warne
Marsh
ALL MUSIC
Nessa NCD-7
Even
before the advent of the CD, some jazz musicians spent their lives
creating boxed sets. Their music falls into "periods", there are "pivotal
albums" and "masterpieces", and there's an orderly progression from
record label to record label; the current stream of blockbuster Miles
Davis reissues on Columbia and the Coltrane sets on Impulse! and Atlantic
were preordained from the start. Other discographies never quite snap
into focus, and this has a lot to do with why tenor saxophonist Warne
Marsh - whose work is scattered among various, mostly small, record
labels, and doesn't divide into stylistic "periods" - remains elusive,
despite a sizeable recorded output (see Jack Goodwin's lovingly assembled
discography at www.warnemarsh.info). Despite my enthusiasm for Marsh's
work I've heard only a portion of that discography; but it's safe
to say that All Music, a quartet date recorded in 1976 for
Nessa, represents one of its highpoints.
Marsh had been involved for several years with West Coast bop big
band Supersax; for this album he drew on the Supersax rhythm section
of pianist Lou Levy, bassist Fred Atwood, drummer Jake Hanna. The
saxophonist opens proceedings with a themeless improvisation on "It's
You or No-One" called "I Have a Good One for You". The alternate takes
included at the end of the disc are (for once) actually worth hearing.
Though the basic outlines are present from the start, you can hear
the rhythm section trying different tacks with each take: they change
their minds several times about whether to use half-time or play the
head straight, gradually sort out the coda, even try it with an electric
piano at one point. Even with these sympathetic partners Marsh is
operating on a different level: his approach to the introductory cadenza
is sufficiently oblique that he finds it necessary to progressively
iron it out from take to take for their sake. The released take comes
from the second and final day of the session, by which time Marsh's
opening is more leisurely, giving little warning of the barrelling
momentum of his solo choruses. At the end of the piece, Marsh returns
for a simultaneous improvisation with Levy, a procedure repeated elsewhere
on the album - and a welcome change from the usual jazz convention
of trading fours.
The rest of the program includes the older Marsh tune "Background
Music" (marked by a hair-raising Levy solo), Konitz's "Subconscious-Lee"
and Tristano's "317 E. 32nd", a gorgeous reading of the ballad "Easy
Living", and two tunes from Levy's pen. "Lunarcy" sounds like what
would happen if Carla Bley got her hands on "How High the Moon" -
Levy has it descending in half-steps rather than whole steps - and
when it kicks into double-time it's as electrifying as any of the
classic bop records. The alternate take of Levy's "On Purpose" reveals
that it began life as a brisk two-handed blues ā la Red Garland or
Wynton Kelly; the released version is taken at an after-hours lope,
allowing Marsh more time to chew over the modified blues changes.
After Atwood's solo (his best of the album) there's no re-entry of
the band, just a single feather-light phrase from Marsh to tie things
together.
This reissue of All Music is an important addition to the roster
of Marsh CDs: up to this point little of his work except the Storyville
and Criss Cross dates of the 1970s and 1980s has consistently made
the leap from vinyl to CD. Nessa has gone to a fair bit of trouble
to get things right: the tapes have been carefully remastered, there
are fresh liner notes by Jim Sangrey and Chuck Nessa in addition to
the original notes by Lawrence Kart, and there's a generous helping
of session photographs. The music itself is outstanding, and in this
model reissue comes across clearer than ever. —ND
Various
Artists
VISIONFEST: VISIONLIVE
Thirsty Ear THI 57131.2 CD + DVD
After
a slew of tepid crossover albums it's refreshing to see Thirsty Ear's
Blue Series showcasing the wealth of talents that appears annually
at the Vision Festival instead of teaming them up with lacklustre
backbeats and overrated rappers; this CD brings together excerpts
of nine acts that appeared at Vision between May 23rd and June 2nd
2002 in St Patrick's Old Cathedral, New York, namely Muntu (Jemeel
Moondoc, Roy Campbell, William Parker and Rashid Bakr), Dave Burrell
and Tyrone Brown, the Billy Bang Trio, the Douglas Ewart Quintet,
the Matthew Shipp String Trio, the Karen Borca Quartet, the Ellen
Christi Quartet, the Kidd Jordan / Fred Anderson Quartet and, to close
the set on a poignant note, Peter Kowald, captured just before his
untimely death. It's an uneven selection, some of which could and
perhaps should have been omitted, but provides a good overall view
of the event that William and Patricia Parker have curated with love
and affection for several years now. With one exception (the contribution
from the Karen Borca Quartet) the DVD features the same cuts as the
audio CD, and, although of some value as an archive document, it's
an alarmingly low quality affair, especially compared to the quality
of the sound recording by Stefan Heger and Don Jacobs. Culled from
video footage of the event shot by Raymond Ross, its crude montage,
garish colours and (on my computer at least) synchronisation problems
between sound and image make for an altogether frustrating experience.
—DW
Denman
Maroney
FLUXATIONS
New World 80607-2
Denman
Maroney is perhaps best known to readers as a virtuoso improviser
(on "hyperpiano" - that's prepared piano to all intents and purposes),
but Fluxations reveals his considerable skills as a composer.
It's a six-part suite based on what Earl Howard calls "pulse fields",
i.e. complex cycles of overlapping polyrhythms, and perhaps the most
rigorous instance to date of improvised music turning its attention
to compositional techniques that have existed in more academic circles
since the middle of last century (Bill Shoemaker is right to cite
Ives and Nancarrow in his extensive and informative liners, but the
list of precursors should also include Elliott Carter and György Ligeti).
Recruiting a first-class band including bassist Mark Dresser, percussionist
Kevin Norton (who both have in-depth experience of notational intricacy
through their work with Anthony Braxton), clarinettist / saxophonist
Ned Rothenberg and trumpeter Dave Ballou, Maroney certainly has the
men for the job, and his scores, though obviously detailed and notated
to a high degree of precision, leave room for the occasional juicy
solo (Ballou's the guy to watch here). One slight reservation I have
about such a line-up is that it inevitably - perhaps deliberately?-
resembles the traditional jazz quintet, meaning that Dresser and Norton
are often heard more as a rhythm section (i.e. accompaniment) than
as rhythmic elements of equal importance. The other quibble is more
strictly compositional; in concentrating his attention on the pulse
field, Maroney intentionally focuses the listener's attention on the
horizontal rather than the vertical, the melodic rather than the harmonic.
The lack of strong harmonic identity in most of the music reinforces
the rather dry nature of the polyphony. Braxton, whose own GTM music
is not too far removed from Maroney's in its concept of pulse, gets
round this problem by building spaces into his compositions that allow
for abrupt changes of direction, unfettered free playing, and even
the incorporation of other Braxton pieces. One wishes that some of
these fine players would just let rip once in a while - it'd make
the return to the pulse field even more riveting.—DW [This
article was commissioned by and originally appeared on Bagatellen.com.
Thanks to Alan Jones]
BusRatch
/ Hijyokaidan
SPLIT SERIES #01
Monotype MN003
BusRatch
is a Kyoto-based turntable duo consisting of Takahiro Yamamoto and
Katsura Mouri, whose earlier outing Memorium (PARAdisc PACD010,
2002) is well worth seeking out (thanks to Aki Onda for sending that
my way). While many experimental turntablists of recent years - eRIKm
and dieb13 to name two - have moved further into the world of digital
technology (and face it, you're not likely to treat an iPod or a MiniDisc
player quite the same way as a Technics), Yamamoto and Mouri
belong very much to the Otomo school of turntablism; nasty feedback
hums, distressing crunches and all manner of machine torture abound
- it's rough, tough and makes a welcome change from the much overhyped
onkyo product currently flooding the market. Their two contributions
to this split CD last respectively just over nineteen and just under
five minutes, but are crammed with detail and noisy as hell to boot.
Just as well, as they're sharing the bill with the heavyweight champions
of the genre, Jojo, Junko, Mikawa, Kosakai and Ishida, aka Hijyokaidan,
who deliver a positively blistering half hour of insanity. There's
really nothing you can say about these guys, and even the most colourful
description of their music (if that's the word for it) fails utterly
to communicate the sheer intensity of the experience. John Peel once
coined the expression "brainfry", and that's about the best I can
come up with. Simply awe-inspiring. —DW
Rhodri
Davies and John Bisset
MALTHOUSE
2:13 CD010
Originally
released in 1999 in a small pressing, Malthouse now returns
to circulation in a larger edition. Though both harpist Rhodri Davies
and guitarist and 2:13 label owner John Bisset are part of the London
improvising scene, they chose to record the disc on holiday in Davies'
hometown of Aberystwyth, Wales; there's a lightheartedness to the
musicians' exchanges which is surely the product of the occasion.
In the booklet the musicians are pictured exhibiting instruments doctored
with just about every imaginable preparation - Bisset, for instance,
has inserted knitting needles, paintbrushes and even a postcard between
the strings of his guitar, and poses for the camera with the proud
smile of an acupuncturist showing off his favourite patient. These
improvisations are friendly tit-for-tat exchanges: more lively and
percussive than Davies' work in groups like IST and the Sealed Knot,
they nonetheless demonstrate a similarly minute attention to timbral
detail. The disc is quite short - 42 minutes - and most tracks are
jeux d'esprits of one to three minutes in length; the standout
performances, however, are the two longest pieces, "Un" and "Deg",
where Bisset comes up with some of his most surprising playing (including
hard-strummed rhythm guitar and what sounds like a mangled tape-recording
of his own playing). This is a very welcome reissue, and fans of UK
improv will want to check it out. Since its original release Bisset
has released other duets recorded in the hometowns of his playing
partners: Chapel (with Burkhard Beins, in Wietze-Wieckenberg,
Germany) and Crypt (with Alex Ward, in Grantham, England),
and they too are both worth getting hold of. —ND
Elliott Carter
QUINTETS AND VOICES
Mode 128 CD DVD
Elliott Carter can be considered as one of the United States' (and the world's)
major composers not only of the twentieth century, 92 years of which
he has already lived through, but - as he shows no sign of letting
up - of the beginning of the twenty-first. This magnificent celebration
of Carter's recent music (one hesitates to use the word "late" lest
it be misinterpreted - remember JFK and Marilyn..) is therefore a
major release. Carter is one of the last great masters - and here
the word "last" is, sadly, maybe appropriate - of a school of composition
that still believes that pitch and rhythm are of primary importance.
Any Carter score from the 1950s onwards provides rich pickings for
analysts well-versed in set theory looking for sophisticated applications
of pitch class phenomena, but his investigations into rhythm at the
micro and macro level are also hugely important, representing as they
do an attempt to transpose structural procedures derived from pitch
into the domain of tempo, an attempt as theoretically coherent (and
arguably more musical) than Milton Babbitt's time point system. Apart
from its compositional craftsmanship, Carter's music quite simply
sounds great; die-hard modernists who believe that the time-honoured
procedures of development towards and away from climax are old-hat
should think again. The earliest composition here, "Syringa", dates
back to when Carter was a sprightly youngster at age 70; the remaining
five offerings were written between 1991 and 2000. It's available
as a standard CD or a DVD, the video element of which consists of
a beautifully realised if slightly arty film document of pianist Ursula
Oppens performing the 1997 piano quintet with the Arditti Quartet,
and a 40-minute interview with Oppens, Irvine Arditti and Carter himself
conducted by the Sospeso Ensemble's Joshua Cody (who, as readers of
PT will know, was one of the founders of this organ, back in the days
when it was published in print format as the Paris New Music Review).
"Syringa", which sets fragments of Greek poetry (sung by a baritone)
simultaneously with poetry by John Ashbery (sung by a mezzo-soprano),
revisits the Orpheus myth. The spiky interjections of the accompanying
eleven-piece ensemble, notably the acoustic guitar, fleetingly recall
Boulez's celebrated "Le Marteau sans Maître", and Carter is, along
with Boulez (and Nono), one of very few composers of his generation
able to write highly complex lines for singers that are still eminently
singable and comprehensible for the listener. "Tempo E Tempi", dating
from twenty years later, reveals the same mastery. Setting a cycle
of Italian poetry, by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo and Giuseppe
Ungaretti, the work is simultaneously a song cycle for soprano and
ensemble (oboe, clarinet, violin and cello - members of the Ensemble
Sospeso, making its impressive recording debut) but also a quintet
- Carter's ear for pitch and contour is as acute as ever, and despite
the work's macro-rhythmic complexity (reminding us that "tempo" translates
as "time" and "tempo"), attentive listening reveals the myriad cross-connections
and exchanges between the five participants.
Along with Josh Cody and PT Publisher Guy Livingston, I was fortunate
enough to have attended the French premiere of the "Quintet for Piano
& Strings", and vividly remember us all leaving the Maison de la Radio
in a state of euphoria, which I'm happy to report returns with each
subsequent listening to this 1997 minor masterpiece (minor only in
that it lasts just fifteen minutes - but what glorious minutes!).
By now, the music press has practically exhausted the supply of superlatives
to describe the playing of the Arditti Quartet and pianist Oppens,
so I won't bother to try to find more here. The "Quintet for Piano
& Winds" dates from six years earlier, and continues Carter's ongoing
investigation into instruments as distinctive dramatis personae. The
composer refers to an "interplay of commentary, answer, humorous denial,
ironic, supportive or self-effacing", but the work is far from a facile
attempt to have musical instruments play out stock dramatic clichés.
It's a tough, abstract but supremely lyrical span of music, performed
with exemplary attention to detail by Oppens and a wind quartet consisting
of Steve Taylor, Charles Neidich, William Purvis and Frank Morelli.
In 2000, Carter penned a tribute to his friend Boulez on the occasion
of the latter's 75th birthday in the form a two-minute piano work
entitled "Retrouvailles" ("Rediscoveries"). Having already offered
musical birthday presents to Boulez for his 60th and 70th (both of
which are quoted in this work), one awaits the French composer's 80th
birthday celebrations next year with interest, if only to see what
Carter will do next. "Retrouvailles", like everything else on this
superb release, is proof, if any more were needed, that his skill
as a composer and mastery of both short and long forms remain undiminished.
—DW
David
Manson
BEAST
EMIT - www.emitseries.org
In
the world of music you might already know of two Mansons (Charles
and Marilyn), but trombonist David is worth checking out too. Beast
presents five works for the beast itself, i.e. the trombone, and
electronics. It's a combination that naturally brings the pioneering
work of Vinko Globokar to mind - no surprise then that the opener,
"Mambo Vinko", was originally written for that virtuoso trombonist
/ composer by Javier Alvarez back in 1993, on a commission from the
GRM in France. It's a real road-movie of a piece, recalling a truck
journey the composer took across Mexico as a hitchhiker, complete
with incessant Perez Prado on the radio and the roar of the truck
itself - another beast, as anyone who's ever seen Duel will
testify. Manson is not only adept at handling the complexities of
a score, though; he's also a gifted improviser, as the four and a
half minute tussle with guitarist Davey Williams, "All Clear Now",
amply reveals. The centrepiece of the album, however, is "Confessions
of a Virtue Addict", by Dartmouth-based Eric Lyon, who must be the
only composer to have studied with Milton Babbitt, Gordon Mumma and
written erudite articles on XTC and Aphex Twin. "My compositional
strategies favor divergence over unity in response to late 20th century
information overload," writes Lyon, and, as in his "Retirement Fund"
chamber operas with poet Erik Belgum, there's a bewildering array
of styles on offer here, from dreadfully cheesy string synth sub-Messiaen
to diseased hiphop to queasy noise, all of which Lyon plays with like
a cat torturing a mouse. Imagine a horrific laboratory-created monster,
a kind of sick cross between Hindemith, Mike Paradinas and Joseph
Schwanter. Even the nice tonal ending leaves a strange aftertaste.
Lyon's beast is a hard act to follow, but the shattered plunderphonics
of Gustavo Matamoros' "RE:DAVID" will do just fine. Plunderphonics
is maybe a misleading description, as the cutting and splicing is
here executed in real time by means of interactive gated software;
where Lyon lays the 20th century corpses side by side on a slab and
lets them rot, Matamoros chops them up. Manson's own "Freund" also
uses interactive software (that old fave AudioMulch), feeding in a
minute of raw trombone and letting the machine generate a set of canonic
patches. Multitracked trombones sound terrific (this one had me running
back to JA Deane's work on "Madison Ave." on that old 1981 Indoor
Life album); after the twin autopsies from Lyon and Matamoros, "Freund"
is the dignified graveside oration. At least the 20th century can
have a decent funeral. As for the trombone, David Manson's work is
clear proof that there's life in that beast yet. Check it out. —DW
Kamran
Ince
IN WHITE
Innova 600
The
Classes of '86 and '87 in Composition at Rochester NY's Eastman School
of Music found various ways to come to terms with the impact of former
ESM protégé Michael Torke's "Vanada", which, as far as awards go,
had fairly swept the board the year before. Torke's masterpiece -
I think the word is not inappropriate - showed that the process and
surface energy of minimalism could be harnessed to a tight classical
form and crossbred with the rhythm and harmony of funk and disco.
Faced with "Vanada", the Masters and Doctoral students in composition
had to take a stand - Bill Doerrfeld, Kamran Ince and myself tried
to follow Torke's lead, while Todd Levin, Paul Reller and Eric Lyon
teamed up to promote an aggressively avant-gardist counterblast of
noise in a short-lived but (in the little world of Eastman) notorious
electronic improv outfit called Lilacs. Torke hit the jackpot and
moved to New York City, where he continues to churn out ballets and
operas at an impressive rate of knots, Doerrfeld headed to Yale via
the Netherlands to pick up the vibes from Louis Andriessen, and Kamran
Ince (born in Montana of Turkish and American parents) moved in with
me while he finished his degree. At the time he was writing bold,
neo-tonal music, full of dramatic gesture and rhythmic panache, but
seemingly uninterested in developing musical ideas into large-scale
structures.
18 years down the road, Doerrfeld seems to have dropped off the map
(off my Google anyway) after a brief hook-up with the Bang On A Can
crowd, Levin switched camps and burnt himself out spectacularly with
the jaw-droppingly banal (but technically flawless) orchestral album
De Luxe, Reller and Lyon have retreated to safe posts in academia
(in Florida and New Hampshire respectively) and now engage in covert
operations of information overload warfare on established genres and
traditions - see above - and Kamran Ince writes, well, bold, neo-tonal
music, full of dramatic gesture and rhythmic panache, but seemingly
uninterested in developing musical ideas into large-scale structures.
Listening to In White is like stepping back through time to
when we used to thrill together to Christopher Rouse's "The Infernal
Machine" on repeat play on my cassette deck ("for orchestration this
is my Bible, man!" Kamran used to exclaim enthusiastically). Rouse's
five-minute orchestral thriller was, like John Adams' "Harmonielehre",
scarred for life by Prokofiev and Stravinsky (notably the "Symphony
in Three Movements"). Ince's music also clearly reflects the influence
of late 70s Reich (though with a short attention span) and Andriessen
(saxes, clunky keyboards and clumsy doublings), but also, lurking
behind the music's fondness for self-contained sections, Stravinsky
and Janacek. This is more apparent in the ensemble works on offer
here, "Flight Box", "In White" and "Turquoise" (given Torke's penchant
for naming pieces after his favourite colours, Ince is surely asking
for trouble with such a title). The solo offerings, "MKG Variations"
for cello, and "In Memoriam 8/17/99" for piano, reach back further
to the safety of tried and trusted classical forms - notably the chaconne;
the cello piece is rather like a romantic gloss on Michael Nyman's
"Zoo Caprices". Scratch that lowercase "r", let's call it Romantic
(Kamran is and always has been). The nagging question that remains
is to what extent music like this can be described as "contemporary",
since any one of the five compositions could have been penned at just
about any moment in the past thirty years. —DW
Scanner
DOUBLE FOLD
rxtxcd004
Laurent
Pernice & Jacques Barberi
DROSOPHILES AND DORYPHORES
rxtxcd005
www.rx-tx.org
Slovenia's
Ars Electronica 2002 prize-winner Marko Peljhan's label rx:tx follows
its excellent compilation of Eastern European electronica Progress:
The Trieste - Vladivostok CTM03.line with two new releases by
British electronician Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, and the French duo
of Jacques Barberi and Laurent Pernice.
The list of projects over recent years featuring Scanner, whose sound
art managed to make clubbers think a little (or at least laugh ironically)
by playing them recordings of other people's private telephone conversations
in concerts, is seemingly endless. His primary source of influence
here is a disturbing work by American writer Nicholson Baker, who's
found out that some American libraries, disillusioned with having
to provide extra room for new titles, have redefined the word efficiency
by scanning space-taking paperbacks on microfilm and storing them
in new digital databases (Gutenberg turns in his grave). The final
touch, a nasty example of history repeating itself, is fire: the same
devil's playground that inspired Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451".
In other words, BURN them damn Dostoevskies, BURN the Korans, BURN
Ibn this and Abu that, BURN Torahs and Bibles
you name it, we burn
it. A nice PR campaign for the waste combustion industry, perhaps,
but not for a library (or at least a library as we know it). And where
there's scanning and books burning there's fireman Scan, asking questions
on issues of civilization, progress and technology, with his mouth
shut and his Powerbook open. The musical content illustrates Baker's
context perfectly: the work is based on Scanner's private sound files
from year 1980 to 2002, centred on a steady 128 bpm pulse and organised
into one eight-part track. The first and last parts ("The Size Of
Thoughts") are identical, covers for the virtual book as it were,
and both sound like early 90s Illbient CDR compilations where melody
is bricked together but somehow floats effortlessly. The first track
oozes into "Microfilm", Deep House with high-pitched tablas in the
background, before the cheap organ-like staccato punctuations of "Brittle
Fiction" (revealing a soft spot for Soft Cell - well, we were all
young once..) quickly dissolve into loopy mantra-like dialogues. These
are supposed to psychoacoustically trigger suggestive echoes in the
minds of E-addled ravers, but on my fifth listening after barely a
minute of its 7'41'' sonic inaction I skip to the next track, the
kind of steady trance the Germans used to do better back in 1995.
Scanner's conceptual quiz raises two important questions, one about
contemporary CD spam and how we recycle lame CD material, the other
being whether primers on two last decades of electronic music as lousy
as this should remain in the archives or be distributed to the wider
world. Even if they're signed by a Guy Called ScaNNdal, works as pretentious
as this belong to trendy lo-fi electronica. Then again, we now have
Kings and Kid606-like types to reign somewhere over the rainbow.
Drosophiles and Doryphores (fruit flies and Colorado beetles,
if you're interested) features Laurent Pernice on electric piano and
Powerbook and Jacques Barberi on tenor sax and voice, reading his
own science fiction. Sounds interesting enough for fans of downtempo
jazz fusion, with Barberi's melismatic tenor resembling John Lurie's
broken cinematographic sound, but there are some squeaks and squeals
- textbook dramatic wails, rather, effective with desired depth. Pernice,
however, is hardly a French Chris Abrams, or even Marseille-based
Michael Nyman, and the reverberated chords and ambient melodies give
new meaning to the word unpretentious, as if unpretentious has become
an individual and untouchable category in its own right. The sixth
piece, "Le miroir observe", featuring Barberi's speaking voice clothed
in Pernice's electronic processing, divides the CD in two halves.
Pernice plays his electronic marbles over Barberi's decadent spoken
chill - probably spiced with pastis - murmuring as if he could see
himself trapped in a glass tank of Pernice's creation. Things settle
down in "Reverie metallique", with its ambient impressionistic electric
piano moving out front while the album's rhythmic backbone, computer
programming, lurks behind. This album's real kick is its undemanding
sound, something like Nosferatu on Prozac. —VJ
Christopher
Willits
POLLEN
Fällt F.0032.0001
Bit
of a cop-out to quote the press release, but it neatly sums up what's
on offer: "Willits plays guitar and uses a series of self-built signal
processes that fold smooth guitar lines on top and into each other,
generating patterns within patterns." Those familiar with the San
Francisco-based musician's preceding outing, Folding, and the Tea
(on 12k) - which apparently sold out within two months - know what
to expect. As with that album, once you've got used to the gently
irregular clicks that articulate Willits' folded lines, it's all too
easy to switch off and relegate the music to the background, where
it probably doesn't belong. Pollen is harmonically more adventurous
than its predecessor (particularly "Stomata" and the final "Surfacing"),
but not much more so: one wishes Willits could have applied his folding
technique to material of a somewhat more acerbic and arresting nature.
Still, high marks for sheer craftsmanship and, as ever, exquisite
packaging.—DW
Komet
ARC, LIVE @ SWR FREIBURG
AB-CD F.0018.0003
Fällt's
AB-CD series is a neat and elegantly designed solution to the problem
of how to release relatively short-duration live CDs without resorting
to pesky little three-inchers, and the music of Komet, aka Raster
Noton's Frank Bretschneider, is as pristine and cool as Fehler's maths
textbook design. Taken from a performance in Freiburg in 2000, Arc
finds Bretschneider working directly with pure sinewaves and white
noise (i.e. the simplest and most complex sounds at his disposal),
the latter giving the music's surface a slightly more textured finish
than some of his other previous outings. Bretschneider's mastery of
his sonic arsenal and impeccable sense of timing are as convincing
as they are enjoyable, and Arc covers more ground in its 22
minutes than many albums do in an hour or more. Shame they included
the applause at the end, though.—DW
Hard Sleeper
LAND, LIVE @RAUSCH
AB-CD F.0018.0004
Hard
Sleeper, aka Peter Maybury, hails from Dublin, where Land was
recorded in concert at a performing space called Rausch. Once more,
those familiar with the labels 12k, LINE, Mille Plateaux and Raster
Noton won't be surprised by the surface of Maybury's music; polished,
discreet in volume, harmonically conservative (unashamedly diatonic),
leisurely in pace and gently pockmarked with clicks'n'cuts that often
imply rather than embody a sense of pulse, it looks back almost nostalgically
to the sleek pattern work of 1970s mainstream minimalism, especially
Reich (the pulses that fade in at 11'07"). Conceived as a kind of
suite - track indexes could have been inserted at several places,
notably at 14'45", to mark out the constituent "movements" - it's
accessible and accomplished, if not exactly revolutionary. —DW
Gigi
Masin & Giuseppe Caprioli
MOLTITUDINE IN LABORINTO
Ants AG07
The
only problem with discs, apart from finding the time to listen to
them all, is knowing where to put them when one has - especially problematic,
that, with this latest outing on Ants, ostensibly a label I'd file
under "contemporary", though these nine tracks by Gigi Masin and Giuseppe
Caprioli (both credited on tapes and electronics) have more in common
with Brian Eno's Ambient music - thinking particularly of the Daniel
Lentz-like "Aften" and the closing spacious "Vertical" - than they
do with either the static dronery of composers like Phill Niblock
(though Caprioli's "First Dream" and "Ipogeo" might qualify) or the
laptop flutters of contemporary electronic improv ("Density"). Wherever
it goes though, it's pleasant and accomplished (if not exactly groundbreaking)
work, though I'm given to wonder whether the two epithets used to
market the Italian label - "a new timeless sound" - aren't somehow
contradictory. —DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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