No
apologies this month for reprinting Walter Horn's fine review of Eddie
Prévost's book (see below), which appeared just a few weeks
ago on Scott Hreha's excellent One Final Note site, but one of the
disadvantages of running "old" pieces ("old" here
meaning three weeks) is that news travels fast - so readers are also
encouraged to read Eddie's reply at http://www.onefinalnote.com/mail/.
Thanks also to Philippe Simon and Richard Hutchinson for catching
up on a couple of things that slipped out from under the radar —
but in the case of Philippe's review, if it's late it's all his fault
:) I've been nagging him about it for ages. Those who frequent the
discussions on Bagatellen will also recognise my ECM review, which
I've decided to include here a) because reviews on Bags come so thick
and fast they often get buried and b) I like it. Seasoned PT readers
by now will know that anything that's appeared on the site over the
past 12 months is directly linked to the homepage, and anything (everything)
else is accessible either by the pull-down menus or the inbuilt search
engine. Finally and most importantly, big thanks to Jason
Kahn for providing us with another fine interview to add to the
PT Archives. Bonne lecture.—DW
Eddie
Prévost
MINUTE PARTICULARS
Copula ISBN 0-9525492-1-2
 A
few years back, AMM, the venerable English improvising ensemble of
Keith Rowe, John Tilbury, and Eddie Prévost, played a concert in Krakow,
Poland. At drinks after the gig, a colleague of Tilbury's son Jasper
told the trio how moved she had been by their performance. But when
this woman learned that, contrary to her belief, the group hadn't
memorized a score, but had improvised the entire piece out of whole
cloth, the value of the music was destroyed for her. According to
Prévost, "She not only doubted our artistic and intellectual integrity,
but she had been forced to question her own powers of discrimination.
How had it been possible for her to enjoy and admire such work when
its practice had been so…primitive?" Had AMM "perpetrated some kind
of artistic fraud"? Not at all, says the author/musician. The "abiding
impression upon us (that is AMM) was that this person could not trust
her own sensibilities and that she had chosen a wholly inappropriate
paradigm of cultural confirmation to help guide her tastes and aesthetic...disposition."
Unfortunately, either this "abiding impression" occasionally faded
as Prévost worked out the thought-provoking series of essays that
constitute the main body of Minute Particulars, or else he
failed to understand its most important implications. It would seem
that if the music that AMM performed that night was indeed good, it
could not have been made less so by having been improvised. But Prévost
expresses the apparently conflicting contention throughout his book
that, although the performance had most certainly produced excellent
music, this creation could have been made distinctly worse by having
been previously composed…or, for that matter, by having been put together
by a collagist, produced with the aid of pre-recorded samples, or
even informed to any degree by the tossing of the I Ching. This apparent
asymmetry results from Prévost's conception of music's most important
role: to reflect and foster communitarianism.
While disdainful of religion, Prévost often sounds like nothing so
much as a country sermonizer in this book. Music that is louder than
he likes it is derided as "oppressive," "dehumanizing," even "pornographic."
Music that is too quiet is "reductionist," "facile," and "doomy."
Through-composed music betrays tendencies toward "possessive individualism"
and/or autocracy; use of electronics reflects consumerism; both traditional
jazz and klezmer music are "tribalistic" parts of the "cultural marketplace";
new age music is a soothing palliative for the "psychologically threatened
or enfeebled." All, it seems, except Prévost's own favored style of
free improvisation are impolitic, immoral, sinful, wrong. While Minute
Particulars also includes a handful of previously disseminated
occasional writings (liner notes, reviews, etc.), its main interest
undoubtedly resides in the opening 110-page manifesto wherein the
author's politico-religious principles are set forth and defended.
The main tenet of Prévost's unified-if not entirely self-consistent-faith
is that what makes any contribution to art worthwhile is its positive
effect on society at large.
As might be surmised, there are a number of human, as well as ideological,
targets of Prévost's ire: Cage, Marsalis, Zorn, Stockhausen, members
of the Ganelin Trio (particularly Chekasin, who takes a pounding for
being too demonstrative on stage), the producers of the Hands of
Caravaggio project, even certain incarnations of Cardew. All draw
the percussionist's fire. But no one is so frequently skewered as
Prévost's longtime collaborator, Keith Rowe. The table-top guitarist
is chided for being "reductionist," for offering vicarious (if actually
unpleasant) experiences of real, non-symbolic suffering, for not listening
to others during performances while "paying close attention to what
[he himself] is doing," for emulating an object on a shelf rather
than an intelligent conversationalist, and, perhaps worst of all,
for having declared Prévost's favored style of "dialogic" improvisation
to be a species of "visceral chic." When in his quite favorable
review of the Tilbury-Rowe recording Duos for Doris, Prévost
even goes so far as to seem to suggest that that the disc's value
is largely attributable to the work of Tilbury and occurs despite
Rowe's contributions rather than because of them, one can hardly fail
to wonder whether there's something of a personal nature lurking behind
the barrage of what are superficially theoretical complaints.
Before we get too lost in the bullets of Prévost's arsenal, however,
it will be well to step back and have a more panoramic look at the
ideology behind his massive build-up of WMDs. Is his battle cry a
just one? And, if not, where did he go off the rails? These, of course,
are difficult, even threshold, questions, but let us see what we can
do to answer them without attempting a book-length analysis. I take
it that these are his two most important premises:
(1) The community (village, rural pub) is preferable both to the individual
(crass capitalist, autocrat) and the city (large-scale consumer culture,
multi-national mega-brewery). The ascendancy of this principle in
the political sphere is called "communitarianism."
(2) Unconstrained (as well as truth-seeking and dialogic) improv made
with acoustic instruments both reflects and moves us toward communitarianism
more predictably and effectively than other music. In fact, all other
musics either reflect or move us toward something worse (or both).
With these in hand, Prévost is ready to infer that the best music
is free, acoustic improv. The fact that he takes such music to be
ennobling, empowering, anti-hierarchic, liberty enhancing, and, in
general, morally and politically superior in every way to all other
types of music is, he asserts, sufficient reason to conclude that
everyone ought both to hear it and play it. Before turning to the
question of whether this conclusion actually follows from Prévost's
premises, let's take a brief look at these supports themselves and
the reasons provided for them. That communitarianism is an unalloyed
good, at least in this book (and I've read nothing else by the author)
exists as a sort of article of faith. Like Ayn Rand's individualism,
it is trumpeted as the cure to many evils, from consumerism (which
has allegedly turned local pubs into chain fern bars and intimate
football clubs into impersonal stadia), to the hostile imperialism
of world super-powers. These leanings often seem merely to reflect
a rampant Luddism on Prévost's part, however. Acoustic instruments
are better than electronic ones, he claims, because they must be practiced-worked
with in ways that give musicians calluses and sore lips. Like the
spinning wheel and handloom, they keep us connected to our natural
environment, and our mastery of such tools changes us for the better.
Members of a small, freely improvising ensemble are seen to have something
like the advantages of a town meeting over a countrywide referendum.
And just as a massive conglomerate is inferior to a family-owned neighborhood
restaurant, so too must a G3 be embarrassed by a bamboo flute. I admit
that I share many of Prévost's preferences, but I understand that
it is quite difficult to defend them on utilitarian, natural-rights,
or, really, any other sort of rational grounds, without at least mentioning
some of the obvious virtues of the encroaching evils. Prévost is considerably
less diffident, but provides almost nothing in the way of proof. One
must just see. Perhaps he is right to yearn for numerous cooperative
village utopias. But his many pronouncements to the effect that a
human activity is good just in case it is conducive to communitarianism
are little more than liturgical chants to which parishioners will
nod and non-believers will smile.
The second premise, which claims that certain types of music are more
productive of communitarianism, is purely empirical, but again, though
it is repeated numerous times, not much actual support is provided
for it. It is easy to see how an unconstrained improvising ensemble
might be taken to be more reflective of a town meeting or the ancient
Greek democratic ideal than a symphony orchestra can ever be. After
all, an orchestra would seem to consist of hapless, voteless mannequins
ordered around not only by an autocratic conductor, but also by an
absentee composer/puppeteer. But even if such an observation were
valid, what would follow from it? Does like always flow from like?
Isn't it possible that we could learn that communitarianism has sprung
up in response to autocratic or "possessive-individualistic" art all
over the globe, or that in those pockets where free improv has flourished,
it is Randian individualism that been the norm? Prévost often slides
from the fact that a certain piece of art is aleatoric or too loud
or insufficiently free to the claim that it must "support" various
cultural evils. But is mirroring (or depicting) always a form of support?
And even if it were, can it really be seriously supposed that there
is a positive correlation between the number of people who enjoy a
harsh, assaultive piece of music and the number of voters that will
support a harsh, assaultive government? Has the "alienation from self"
allegedly engendered by either using or listening to a no-input mixing
board on a concert stage actually encouraged a single person's fascist
tendencies, or is this merely an unsupported Prévostian nightmare?
If someone from a slightly earlier era were to claim that use of machine-made
or mass-produced instruments is a sign of submission to crass consumerism,
or that the striking of a defenseless drumhead with a wooden stick
is hostile, desensitizing, and supportive of colonialism, wouldn't
the younger Prévost have just smiled and shook his head? Wouldn't
he ask, as I do now, "Where's the evidence for any of this?"
But let's suppose for a moment that Prévost is completely correct
in both of his premises. Let's assume, that is, that additional music
of precisely that type that Prévost himself has long created (with
great distinction) is just the sort of thing to bring about the flourishing
of a million communitarian points of light. Would it follow that this
music was "best"? It would seem that one could ask of a particular
piece, in spite of these conceded virtues, "Is it beautiful?"-and
that the answer to this question might be relevant here. But in Prévost's
world, this would simply be a reductivist error. He writes, "I think
that it is difficult to support the idea that somehow art and politics
are separate areas of discourse…. The ethical, and thence political,
priority surely should have an all-embracing dynamic…. Economic and
cultural values are not separate things." He supports Cardew's contention
that one "would never want to" divorce any object's aesthetic qualities
from "what it stands for." Admittedly, it is often hard to deny the
relatedness of these matters: think of Nazi propaganda movies or Soviet
structuralist art. But is it true that they're entirely inseparable?
Remember, if they are, the members of AMM must have been mistaken
in their "abiding impression" that one ought to trust one's own "sensibilities"
when hearing music and not confuse such reactions with "inappropriate
paradigms of cultural confirmation."
It is of paramount importance when thinking about philosophical issues
to remember that "everything is what it is and not another thing."
This may seem obvious, but the repetitive confounding of "this is
beautiful" with "this is virtuous" in works such as Prévost's shows
how easy it is to forget it. I agree that music (or any art or technology)
may be evaluated from a number of standpoints. Consider a pair of
sneakers. (I thank saxophonist and occasional Prévost collaborator
Nat Catchpole for this example, though he likely won't agree with
the use I make of it.) We may wonder of these items: Will they hold
up? Are they comfortable? Are they cheap? Were children exploited
in their production? etc. Each of these questions may be quite important
to us, but each is also clearly distinguishable from all the others.
And each needs to be approached and resolved separately if our answers
are not to devolve into gibberish. If, at the end of the day, Prévost
concludes that the determination should be made that sneakers are
"good" if and only if they get at least a B- on all, say, fifteen
criteria, I will have no quarrel with the basic operative theory,
though I may, of course, disagree with his conclusions. What must
not be forgotten, however, is that we can also focus on just one of
these fifteen criteria (e.g., "Are they nice looking?") and consider
it alone, in isolation from all the others. It doesn't matter either
that the sneakers were produced by such and such culture or that I
was. Though both of those claims are certainly true, neither one prevents
me from pondering this aesthetic question in isolation from all the
other considerations, and, what's more, I very often do. That is,
I, with all my history, linguistic limitations, background, education,
conceptual scheme, economic precursors, etc., have a concept of what
I call "beauty" (which has been molded, of course, by all that history),
and I am capable of ascribing it or withholding it to this or that
piece of music (with all its own various and sundry history). No doubt,
the fact that I decide to ascribe or withhold this characteristic
in a particular instance is, in large part, a function of my background,
education, the prevailing economic system, etc. That may be undeniable,
but it is also irrelevant to the point at issue here. What is important
is that I can make this attribution in isolation from any consideration
of (not "history involving") economics, politics or the like. In fact,
to think about economics or politics or consumer culture is to think
about things that are fundamentally different from "aesthetic" issues.
And each branch of discourse has its own language, its own appropriate
style of argumentation/support. We could call each a different "evaluative
category."
Now, it's not that I believe that these politico-moral categories
should never enter into any discussion of music, it's that I disagree
with the view that they cannot or may not ever be excluded. When Prévost
says these distinct items are inseparable, he's either wrong, or he
means not that they are conceptually inseparable but something
quite different, like that we're all a product of our histories, or
that our social class has profound effects on our aesthetic judgments.
Those sorts of claim aren't terribly controversial these days, and,
at any rate, seem fairly obvious to me. But, involved or not as causes,
politico-economic considerations are far from being part of any indivisible
conceptual whole. In fact, they are usually not weighed
at all in discussions of artistic merit. This is so whether or not
it's the case that a vast amount of history must in some sense be
"assumed" regarding the reader, writer and musicians in order for
communication to occur.
Of course, Prévost might concede this point as an unimportant sophism
and simply reply, "Well, even if you're right that what you're calling
'aesthetic judgments' may be made without strict reference to
economics or politics, they ought not to be. In fact, that's much
of the point of my book: to clearly show that such divorcement is
immoral and ought not to be continued." This, of course, is an explicitly
moral claim, and should be adjudged accordingly. If he were to take
this tack, Prévost's theory might be formulated to rest upon something
like: Isolated considerations of "beauty" are bourgeois relics
of an earlier, more naïve era. Such considerations ought to be strictly
excluded from any determinations regarding what art is and is not
"good." But is this right? (And does Prévost himself consistently
adhere to it?) I think the answer to both of these questions is No.
That Prévost is not unambiguously behind the assertion that attributions
of beauty don't matter can be seen from the purely aesthetic attacks
he scatters around his book. According to the above manifesto, if
some music is conducive of communitarianism, nothing else should really
matter. Morality is all. But he can't seem to stick to that precept.
In discussing a certain type of "presence" or "is-ness," he points
out, "An attempt to make an unmediated connection with the world-presentness
or is-ness-is very powerful in the best of [modern abstract expressionist]
works. But it is not there in all of them." In fact, damningly, "it
is often not present in the avant-garde musics of the electro kind."
Again, Cageian music is derided as "dull" or "tediously similar";
other music is panned as "harsh" "assaultive" or otherwise unpleasant.
On the other hand, Duos for Doris is described in turn as "fragile,"
"optimistic," "sinister," "compelling," "sublime." But why should
anybody care about these bourgeois considerations if the music in
question is or is not a spur to communitarianism? In the passage that
is, perhaps, the most symptomatic of Prévost's ambivalence on this
matter of what counts as success in music-making we are given this:
"An authentic improvisational setting is... a place where a real sense
of creative cooperation and interaction can occur, with all its inherent
frustrations and potential for failure. Yet despite whatever sounds
and complexities of sounds emerge, it can never be a failure if musicians
seek to use this medium openly and with creativity." But what is this
"potential for failure" in an activity that "can never be a failure"?
Haven't we already agreed that, in Prévost's favored settings, even
if what is produced may fail as music, it will always succeed
as reflection or spur. As Prévost says, "Whatever else, it becomes
a chosen symbol of communitarianism." Presumably, this must be so
even if the music is tedious, amateurish, puerile, even unlistenable.
The thing is, whether preachers, political reformers, or parents like
it or not, what listeners generally care most about (and what critics
mostly write about) is, precisely, the first sort of success or failure
mentioned above. That is, the focus of listeners usually stays largely
on whether the music is dull, sad, harsh, sinister, touching, or sublime.
And this, in my view, must also be the telos for creators of
art-or their work will likely be discarded quite quickly. It is beauty
that listeners are interested in and that has made AMM (as well as
Keith Rowe's recent non-AMM collaborations) succeed where so many
other ensembles have not. Very few purchasers of recordings or tickets
should ever be expected to care too much about whether what they've
bought is conduciveness to any particular political utopia. But should
they care? It is my view that they need not: partly because there's
so little agreement on just what constitutes utopia, and partly because
there's almost no evidence at all that styles of music-making have
changed a damn thing on the heaven-on-earth front since the fall of
Jericho. Musical methods have been much more affected by political
power than effective in changing it. Finally, the enjoyment of beauty,
like most types of enjoyment, is itself a good, so the burden remains
on the school marms to prove why it must be bad both for listeners
and the world at large when it occurs, e.g., at a big, loud concert
hall.
If Prévost is correct, and I think he may well be, that a certain
type of heuristic/conversational improvisation produces more rewarding,
deeper and more likely to be repeated aesthetic responses than other
types of music, he's on to something profound and important. That
the best collaborative creations must have an intentional dimension-be
more like dialogue than birdsong-is a controversial, and, I think,
fascinating contention. And his argument that heuristic, conversational
spontaneity in music, like the use of language in conversation, is
"non-specific," is extremely significant. It implies not only that
musical conversation need not be limited to call-and-response, but
also that this approach need never be dispensed with over time-the
apparent fate of several other methods of music-making. Free improv
as an aesthetic methodology would be, in an important sense, timeless.
If Prévost can thus show that intelligent discourse among its creators
in the process of making music (rather than at other times) is essential
to a certain sort of consummate beauty, he will have achieved a great
deal more than the vast majority of theorists in this arena. His insights
and discussion of such topics are valuable, and, alone, make this
book worth buying. One can only wish he'd spent more time elucidating
and supporting these illuminating assertions. Because much of the
rest of Minute Particulars is, like so many country sermons,
muddled, platitudinous, and wrongheaded.—WH
MAERZMUSIK
2004
Berlin, Various Venues
18th-28th March 2004
Only
in its third edition, MaerzMusik has already established itself as
one of the leading European festivals of "contemporary music" (or
"aktuelle Musik" as the German organisers, Berliner Festspiele, call
it), though that appellation seems hardly adequate to define the identity
of a festival that presented in under two weeks almost 50 performances
of a wide variety of new music - free improvised, partially improvised
or fully notated orchestral or chamber music, electronic or acoustic
(even multimedia arts and club culture are present) - in more than
a dozen different venues around Berlin, including no fewer than 31
world premieres and 10 works commissioned by the festival itself.
Unfortunately, but perhaps understandably, I couldn't attend all the
performances, and missed the Ensemble Intercontemporain performing
new works by Aperghis and Murail (as well as Berio's "Laborintus II")
and a very rare performance of Charles Ives' Fourth Symphony in Philharmonic
Hall, played by the SWR Orchestra conducted by Sylvain Cambreling.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of this very singular
figure, several concerts were devoted to Ives' music under the heading
"Ives and Consequences". Sunday March 21st was entirely dedicated
to him, and started at 3 p.m. with a boat journey on the Spree, with
Malcolm Goldstein performing, in his inimitable semi-structured improvised
style, his own "Soundings (in the spirit of Ives and Thoreau)" for
solo violin. The boat dropped us off near the former broadcasting
studios of East German state radio in the Nalepastrasse, the wonderful
acoustics of whose sadly unused halls played host to the rest of the
day's Ives marathon. Goldstein distinguished himself once again by
performing his "A sick eagle can you see" (after Ives' "Like a sick
eagle") and the young Canadian Bozzini String Quartet performed Ives'
"String Quartet No. 2" in a programme that also included Gloria Coates'
String Quartet No. 5 (a wearisome piece exclusively based on her "structure-glissandi-technique"
- I couldn't tell whether the headache that beset was due to the music
or the party I'd attended the night before), and Tom Johnson's "Combinations"
(this just sounded like bad Philip Glass). American pianist Heather
O'Donnell gave an intense and elegant reading of the "Concord Sonata"
- quite a feat after the long recital of new works she'd given that
same morning, "A contemporary response to Charles Ives".
The 90-strong Janácek Philharmonic Orchestra Ostrava performed a series
of works for three orchestras (split into three groups, each with
a conductor standing back to the wall and facing the audience) including
Olga Neuwirth's "Locus...doublure...solus" and Phill Niblock's "Three
Orchids", a 23-minute long microtonal drone around the four central
notes E, G, B flat and B. Such an ambitious celebration of Charles
Ives' music and heritage was indeed welcome, though maybe it would
have been more appropriate to split the huge one-day event, well organized
though it was, into two or three smaller ones - it must have been
almost impossible for most of the audience to remain focused on the
music from beginning to end.
Another performance in the "Ives and Consequences" series took place
next day, in the form of a new piece by La Monte Young and Marian
Zazeela entitled "Just Charles and Cello in the Romantic Chord", performed
by the American cellist Charles Curtis, with the technical help of
Stefan Tiedje from the Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis
(CCMIX) just outside Paris, where the piece had already been premiered
a few months before at the Maison de la Poésie. Using three sustain
pedals, monitored live through a computer, Curtis played very long
and pure tones, held for minutes on end thanks to the computer-assisted
system, and then improvised freely in Dorian mode over the resulting
chords. The performance lasted over three hours without interruption
and the audience, judging from the silence at the end of the performance,
was literally mesmerised by Young's pure yet radical music and Zazeela's
light design and visuals.
Rounding off the "Ives and Consequences" series was John Zorn, directing
a group of twelve local and international musicians in a performance
of the most celebrated of his game pieces, "Cobra". Zorn's game pieces
allow musicians the freedom to play and improvise but within a structure
provided by the "composition", in which Zorn is credited as "prompter".
If the goal was to make free improvisation sound fun, it was certainly
achieved during this performance; Antje Greye-Fuchs on laptop and
violinist Jon Rose were especially active and imaginative. Rose's
playing in "Cobra" was more interesting than his set the previous
night with keyboardist Veryan Weston (who was also recruited for the
"Cobra" band), which was overly demonstrative, even caricatural -
though watching Rose playing simultaneously with two bows on a 10-string
double violin is fun.
One of the highlights of the festival was the "Sonic Arts Lounge"
concert series, dedicated to promoting the new electronic music scene.
This was a good opportunity to see the Norwegian noise duo Fe-mail
perform live, having thrilled to their debut album Syklubb fra
Haelvete -"Sewing Club from Hell" (recently reissued on CD on
Important: grab one now!). Misses Ratjke and Tafjord from Fe-mail
in evening dress and impeccable make-up came across as the divas of
today's noise music scene, but as their skills go well beyond that
particular music genre to take in free improv in the quartet Spunk,
and electronics - cf Maja Ratjke's outstanding Voice on Rune
Grammophon in 2002 - their lively set featured not surprisingly featured
voice, theremin and even French horn.
On the same bill, the Finnish duo Pan Sonic performed their by now
somewhat conventional blend of techno, noise and industrial, accompanied
by a simple video installation consisting of a signal waving and oscillating
in correlation to the sounds produced. Their tribute a few days later
to Finnish computer music and synthesizer pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi
(born in 1941) proved to be much more original. Performing on some
of Kurenniemi's original, restored instruments, with the help of Carl
Michael von Hausswolff and Kurenniemi himself, they were preceded
by a screening of Mika Taanila's excellent 2002 documentary "Future
is not what it used to be", which features excerpts of Kurenniemi's
experimental short films and documents his manic efforts to archive
his own life and his visions of a man-machine future.
That same night also saw "Battling Siki #3 - Not an Opera on Boxing"
by composer Kasper Toeplitz and video artist Jean-Michel Bruyère at
the Hebbel Theater. This piece combines music, theatre and video in
an unusual and heterodox way, with the audience standing on stage
and the "action" (a man boxing against his own shadow and a pack of
fight dogs barking like crazy) taking place in the stalls with gloomy
videos projected around the stage on about ten or twelve giant screens.
Toeplitz's music sounded like the roaring machinery of a boat, with
occasional percussion and a double string quartet, plus the random
barking of the dogs. It must have been one of the biggest and most
expensive productions of the whole festival, and I was lucky to have
caught it, as the performance the following day was cancelled when
the dog handler thought the performance might harm his dogs, and Toeplitz
refused to go on without them. He was right: they were the main attraction.
Despite the fact that Berlin is the poorest Land in Germany, and subsidies
for the cultural sector have been cut drastically over there in the
last couple of years, MaerzMusik - and I've only reviewed part of
it (you may be pleased to learn) - should be an admirable model for
anyone daring enough to stage a similar event in France. Come on,
brothers! Even with our miserable means, we can make it happen!—PS
The
Montgomery Express
PARTY FEVER
IKEF 06
East New York Ensemble de Music
AT THE HELM
IKEF 07
Brother
Ah & The Sounds of Awareness
KEY TO NOWHERE
IKEF 08
 A
while back IKEF reissued the first two albums by Brother Ah (aka Robert
Northern, ex-Sun Ra French horn player, flutist, music therapist and
educator), the extraordinary Sound Awareness, originally on
Strata East and notable for an extended rap (no less) from none other
than Max Roach, and 1975's Move Ever Onwards, which like Key
to Nowhere was issued on Ah's own Divine Records imprint. Key
To Nowhere dates from 1983, and features Ah on flute, horn, harmonica,
nayamka and shell horn leading an octet that also includes Jeff Majors
on harp and thumb piano and some superb vocals from Nataska (should
that be Natasha? dunno..) Hasan Yousef - if you enjoy the work of
Leena Conquest and Ijeoma Thomas, Yousef is right up your street.
Majors' harp glissandi inevitably recall Alice Coltrane and his mbira
flourishes (on the pentatonic 12/8 jam "Sekou") Maurice White, and
there's a good splash of "Wade In The Water" on "Hanifah" (the Ramsey
Lewis revival is long overdue), but the album wears its heart on its
sleeve well and never comes across as maudlin. In fact, the odd ham-fisted
lyric notwithstanding, it's a damn sight more touching than William
Parker's much-trumpeted recent offerings featuring Ms Conquest, Raining
On The Moon (Thirsty Ear) and Raincoat In The River (Eremite).
 Attentive
punters will no doubt have noticed that the eminence grise
behind IKEF is none other than Locust's Dawson Prater, whose guerrilla
raids on the Folkways back catalogue are fast becoming the stuff of
legend. With At The Helm and Party Fever he's pulled
off another glorious coup. The East New York Ensemble de Music - dontcha
just love the "de"? - was the brainchild of saxophonist Bilal Abdurahman
and vibraphonist Ameen Nuraldeen, but the album features "guest artists"
Qasim Ubaindullah (drums) and James Smith (bass) along with three
other percussionists. Google as I might I can't come up with any hard
bio info on Nuraldeen, but Abdurahman's pedigree in Afro Jazz is quite
clear, having appeared on Sudanese bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik's little-known
but worth checking out crossover projects Jazz Sahara and Jazz
Sounds of Africa. He's also credited as appearing on an album
with Ghanian panafricanist Kwame Nkrumah entitled The Ninth Son
and also featuring Ron Carter, Billy Cobham and Ray Barretto (which
I've only heard about.. you can imagine how much copies of that
one must be circulating for). Despite the heavy African connection,
there's a strong Middle Eastern feel to 1974's At The Helm
(as you might imagine with titles like "Bent-El-Jerusalem" and "Mevlana",
but the standout track is the superb thirteen-minute reading of Freddie
Hubbard's "Sun Flower", on which Abdurahman puts a Korean hojok (I
think it is) through its paces. Released at a time when free jazz
had more or less boxed itself into the corner of a loft and cheesy
crossover projects were garnering the attention of major record labels,
At The Helm probably sank without trace, but thanks to the good
offices of IKEF it's back on the streets and you could do yourself
a favour and check it out.
 Unlike
The Ninth Son, I did once see a copy of The Montgomery Express'
one and only album (probably Folkways 33868, though as this was in
a specialist soul shop in Manchester, home of Northern Soul, I wonder
if it wasn't an original pressing on Dove, the tiny Orlando Florida-based
label that released it in 1974), selling for more than it would have
cost me to actually fly to Florida and see these guys in the flesh.
The group was led by two blind vocalists, Charles Atkins and Paul
Montgomery (who punters might recognise as one of the Five Blind Boys
of Alabama). Unfortunately the gentleman responsible for the awesomely
laidback drumming isn't credited, but anyone reading this who might
happen to know the complete line-up of this magnificent band is earnestly
invited to write in to the site and let us know. This is the tastiest
helping of Southern soul since the Charly's epic early 1980s compilations
Stan's Soul Shop, Sehorn's Soul Farm, Southern Soul
Belles and SSS Soul Survey, all of which are now presumably
out of print too. Once more hats off to Dawson Prater for digging
this up (we'll even forgive him for putting "Fotta" instead of "Gotta
Make A Comeback") - maybe he could even go one further and get reconvene
what's left of these superb groups for an IKEF festival.—DW
ENERGARIUMS
NURNICHTNUR Berslton 103 01 26
Jeff
Gburek is an improviser and composer, currently based in New Mexico
but soon to move to Amsterdam, who has pursued many different projects
including solo work for guitar, violin and short-wave radio and collaborations
such as Djalma Primordial Science (with Butoh dancer Ephia) and Zygoma
(with the Berlin musicians Michael Vorfeld and Michael Walz), some
of which have been documented on his own Orphan Sounds label. Energarium
is his first release on one of the more prominent labels dedicated
to experimental and improvised music, and takes its title from Gburek's
neologism for the sonic "eco-spheres" of mutually coexisting sounds
he seeks to create. The opening "Energarium I" and "Energarium II"
feature Gburek on prepared and embellished tabletop guitar in multi-layered
and evolving soundscapes captivatingly and distinctively improvised
from extended tones of various frequencies, pulses, motor sounds,
metallic scrapes, rustles and percussive reports. At the end of "Energarium
II", a sound resembling that of a large aircraft in flight can be
heard, which serves to introduce the third track, "Oum Kas'r, Mother
of All Ports", a swirling compound of multi-tracked abstract vocals
(sometimes threatening, sometimes anguished, sometimes despairing),
high-pitched tones and intermittent fuzz-box guitar sounds intended
by Gburek to serve as a protest against the American-led invasion
of Iraq and "a magical spell to fortify the Iraqi people" (to quote
a posting by Gburek to Bagatellen). There is undoubtedly some force
in this heartfelt piece, but for me the effects of the magical utterances
depend too heavily on emulating the ordinary conventions of human
emotional vocalizations, a mimetic strategy that increases the probability
that listeners will decode Gburek's affective intentions but at the
cost of a certain musical obviousness. Moreover, the fuzz-box guitar
feels not only uncomfortably close to the superannuated clichés of
rock music but also ironic in view of the news reports in May 2003
that Metal is being used by military interrogators to break down the
resistance of uncooperative captives in the now notorious American
detention centres in Iraq. Perhaps also the cause of a questioning
and critical music is little served by being associated by antiquated
notions of magical action for which there is no sufficient evidential
support.
For "Vitrines", Gburek started by recording an improvisation that
now comprises the left channel of the track. Allowing himself time
to forget what he had played, he then improvised what appears on the
right channel while listening to the initial recording. In the light
of this information (which was provided by Gburek and does not appear
in the CD notes), I found the music itself left me cold; an improvisation
in which one player listens only to himself and a second merely adds
unilateral comments and embellishments would generally be accounted
a failure, yet this is what Gburek has in effect created here. His
purpose in doing so is to pose questions about both the grounds on
which connections are perceived between musical contributions and
the adequacy of the concepts of conversation and dialogue as descriptions
of the nature of musical communication. To the extent, however, that
one seeks to find in music some species of human interaction between
players, Gburek's rather artificial construct appears too musically
arid and uninteresting to support the philosophical issues he wishes
to put upon it. In addition, most listeners who hear this track without
the benefit of any background knowledge on its construction will presume
it is a single solo improvisation and therefore miss the very matters
Gburek seeks to raise.
Following the 45 seconds of "Detail", and before the final "Afghanopsis"
(a relatively short improvisation infused with the idioms of North
African music), Gburek presents three improvisations played on an
electric guitar held in the usual upright position, on which his phrasing
and timbre here are more conventional than on the opening tracks.
These can be thought off as psycho-musical dérives through
the desolate landscape of decayed idioms that defines popular music,
the music incorporating along the way not just the sounds of older
currents of free improvisation but also elements of rock, blues and
jazz. Aided by adept use of pedal-controlled amplification to accentuate
the attack and decay of his phrases, Gburek's approach is sometimes
jagged and unstable, and his rapid switches within and between idioms
both militate to some extent against his settling comfortably into
narrow musical niches and produce along the way an engaging flow of
contingent musical choices to follow. Nonetheless, there are passages,
such as an extended jazz-inflected one at the end of "Improvisation
I", where his playing becomes strongly defined by arbitrary idiomatic
prescriptions. More generally, it is disappointing that in these improvisations
Gburek has stepped away from a creative and radical negation of the
constraints on musical possibility bequeathed by habit and tradition
and chosen instead to fashion his musical creations to a large extent
from musical elements whose salience and seductiveness is founded
on nothing more than their infinite repetition in the ubiquitous sonic
pollution of the culture industries. No matter how well done, this
is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on a ship already rusting on
the ocean floor.
In summary, the most interesting elements of this CD are the opening
two tracks on tabletop guitar, which suggest that Gburek has much
to contribute to the most advanced currents of contemporary improvised
music. His interests, however, are broader than this, and those who
share them should seriously consider investigating this release; for
my part, I feel that in the course of exploring other dimensions of
his personal aesthetic he has burdened the CD with material that speaks
with far less vitality to the social and musical circumstances in
which we find ourselves.—WS
Tomasz
Stanko Quartet
SUSPENDED NIGHT
ECM 1868
Marilyn Crispell Trio
STORYTELLER
ECM 1847
 Once
upon a time ECM cover art had a thing about photographs of gaily coloured
sheets blowing in the wind on washing lines - my own favourites were
Miroslav Vitous' First Meeting (ECM 1145) and the Art Ensemble's
Full Force (ECM 1137) - but nowadays, since the label started
protecting their jewel boxes in cardboard outer sleeves (who the hell
would want to protect something as bloody dull and functional as a
jewel box?), they favour predominantly dark, slightly blurred arty
photos: the one used for Suspended Night is a still from Godard's
"Histoire(s) du cinéma", and I can't imagine anything more blurred
and arty than that. On this, his seventh outing on ECM, Stanko is
joined once more by pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz
and drummer Michal Miskiewicz, and, apart from the opening elegiac
"Song for Sarah", it consists of ten pieces grouped together under
the name "Suspended Variations."
ECM albums, as you probably know by now, are like comfortable, dependable
air-conditioned BMW cars, and leave about as much room for the imagination.
One snorking blast of earthy vulgarity à la Lester Bowie would
probably set off the airbags. Long gone are the days when the label
could come up with surprises by the likes of the Art Ensemble or Sam
Rivers - play Suspended Night back to back with Stanko's first
ECM release, Balladyna, and you'll be surprised how much fresher
the older album sounds (though it's probably not very fair to bassist
Kurkiewicz to compare him to Dave Holland). Yep, since Balladyna
was recorded back in 1975 - and that feels like a long time ago
- Manfred Eicher's imprint has really got its act together, in terms
of "product" (the use of record industry jargon is not inappropriate)
and marketing strategy. Jack DeJohnette and Jon Christensen, working
in conjunction with the label's star engineers, Jan Erik Kongshaug
and Martin Wieland, defined a veritable ECM drum sound dominated by
light skittery snare work and topped off with pristine long-pinging
cymbals, with hardly a kick drum in sight and toms used more for colour
(like timpani in the classical symphony orchestra) than rhythm. Even
the Great Black Pulse of the Art Ensemble's Don Moye was washed as
clean as the sheets blowing on the album cover. Similarly, Keith Jarrett
and especially Kenny Kirkland paved the way for the distinctively
melodic and seriously close-miked piano sound that has become a hallmark
of the label (though a quick flick through Herbie's 1960s Blue Notes
will make it clear where it all originally started). It goes without
saying that Wasilewski has got his Hancock, Jarrett and Kirkland chops
down to a tee, and Miskiewicz was probably listening to Jon Christensen
in infant school. As for Stanko, well, the photograph of his upper
lip on the last page of the booklet isn't exactly endearing, but his
trumpet playing won't make him any enemies. All in all, it's a prime
cut of ECM music, which, you will no doubt recall, has been described
variously as "jazz for people who don't like jazz", or (thanks to
Ben Watson for this one) "the sound of the middle classes falling
asleep" - all very beautiful and accomplished but about as interesting
as listening to two middle-aged businessmen sitting in a pub talking
about car accessories. No disrespect to any middle-aged businessmen
reading this who actually find discussions of power assisted steering
and engine capacity interesting - many do.
 You might
also trace the ECM drum sound back to Paul Motian's work in the mythic
trio with Bill Evans and Scott Lafaro (now that's one group
Manfred Eicher would surely have snaffled up had ECM been in operation
in NYC in the early 1960s), so it's no surprise to see him in action
again on the label, again in the company of Marilyn Crispell, on whose
celebrated (overhyped, rather) Annette Peacock covers album Nothing
Ever Was, Anyway he also appeared. The bassist on that date was
Gary Peacock (suppose you could make a case for an ECM bass sound
too: take equal measures of Peacock and Eberhard Weber, add a dash
of Arild Andersen and.. oh never mind), but here it's - wait a
minute, is that really the same bassist (Mark Helias) who tore
shit up with my pals Edward Perraud and Jean-Luc Guionnet on Joe Rosenberg's
Do What We Must Do (CIMP)? Dearie me, he does sound tired.
In these days of political correctness, you can't describe people
as deaf, dumb and blind anymore - fuck knows what they'd do if they
had to do a PC remake of Tommy - so I suppose dull and boring are
out too. Let's just say that Storyteller is harmonically and rhythmically
challenged. Well, never mind, it certainly looks like it was a pleasant,
even cosy, session. Don't you just love album booklets that include
shots of the musicians in the studio itself, that kind of wish-you-were-here-well-now-you-can-be
voyeurism and they do look really nice people don't they Betty
and would you like some more tea and some cake too it is tasty isn't
it remind me to give you recipe of sorry pardon? oh yes the music
oh it's one of those ECM records George bought when he was in New
York last week for the middle managers' symposium yes it is nice isn't
it and the nice thing is you can carry on a conversation at the same
time I can tell you some of the stuff George used to listen to was
so loud and nasty I wouldn't even let him play it when I was in the
house one lump or two well we all change don't we dear I know I used
to listen to oh what were they called you know they used to use their
thing on Top Of The Pops Led Zeppelin that's right it's true yeah
can you believe it can you imagine me dancing to stuff like that today
well George had all these strange free jazz records when he was younger
but when we moved to Dulwich I made him throw them all out they were
those vinyl things they were just sitting in the garage going mouldy
it wasn't nice music like this zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz—DW
Pascal
Battus / Thierry Madiot / Seijiro Murayama
LO
Ektic EKT005
Fabrice
Eglin & Jérôme Noetinger
PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS & LIGHTNIN' RAG
A Bruit Secret ABSblue01
Jean-Luc
Guionnet
TIRETS
Hibari 05
Hervé Gudin / Xavier Charles / Jean-Sébastien Mariage / Michel Deltruc
WIWILI
Vand'œuvre VDO 0427
Apart
from their respective contributions to the Pink label's Massages
Sonores project, trombonist Thierry Madiot and table guitarist
(he calls it "surrounded guitar" but it amounts to the same thing)
Pascal Battus haven't exactly been prolific recording artists in recent
years, which is something of a shame as they're both distinctive and
highly original performers. Battus' work with the group Pheromone
(with Eric Cordier and Jean-Luc Guionnet, documented on the Corpus
Hermeticum release Disparlure) was praised by Keith Rowe, and
though Madiot's solid trombone technique has graced albums by musicians
as diverse as Ramon Lopez and David Grubbs, his own innovative work
as an improviser has gone largely undocumented. So the release of
this trio with Seijiro Murayama (Fushitsusha, Absolut Null Punkt..)
on percussion is most welcome. Despite those impressive noise credentials,
Murayama proves to be a surprisingly delicate and nuance-sensitive
player who leaves plenty of room for Madiot to manoeuvre his arsenal
of tubes, pipes and balloons (a Madiot show is something to behold,
kids) and Battus to excite his guitar with objects too numerous to
mention. Indeed, listening to this is as much fun as reading the Rorschach
test of the spotty album cover: you'll be surprised how many of the
sounds you're sure came from the trombone actually originated in Battus'
guitar - and vice versa, not to mention Murayama. Nine tracks of innovative
and thought provoking - without being forbidding - improvised music
worth checking out.
After several legendary lowercase solo releases in austere white (shame
there wasn't one from Thierry Madiot), Michel Henritzi's A Bruit Secret
label went Keiji Haino black in 2002 for its Japopsych subsidiary
Turtle's Dream and has now launched the Blue Series (I wonder why:
can't imagine Henritzi wanting to compete directly with Thirsty Ear,
and if he ever starts releasing the kind of flaccid crossover muck
that TE now specialises in I might have to buy back my introduction
to him - anyway this a darker shade of blue, a Joni Mitchell
blue in fact) with Psychotic Reactions & Lightnin' Rag,
duo between Fabrice Eglin on guitars and Jérôme Noetinger on his trusty
Revox. Noetinger's love of analogue equipment is well known, as the
following quote from an interview with the writer for The Wire last
year makes clear. "I still haven't exhausted the possibilities of
the tape recorder. I discover things every time. I like that physical
dimension, that relation between image and sound. Not long ago, everybody
dreamt of having a Revox! It was the Rolls Royce!" There's an air
of the rough and ready early turntablists, especially Christian Marclay,
about Noetinger's playing, which is refreshing and enjoyable in small
doses, but by about halfway through the 32 minutes of the third and
final track the attention starts to wander, and one wishes Eglin would
take the initiative a little and introduce some more diverse material
- though, as on his duo appearance with Kazushige Kinoshita on last
year's from:/to: he seems quite happy to keep a low profile.
Noetinger's most satisfying appearances on disc remain those on which
he's partnered by his close friend Lionel Marchetti, who provides
the sense of structure that this one seems to lack. Still, there's
enough here to make you want to come back for more (watch out for
the ending), and plenty of unsolved mysteries, most notably the album
title itself - a homage to Count Five, or to Lester Bangs?—DW
 The
organ has an ancient provenance, its origin being traceable to the
development of a keyboard-based water organ, the hydraulus,
not later than the third century BC. Over the course of its long history,
it has from time to time been an important instrument of improvisation,
not least in the nineteenth century when church organ music was one
of the few areas of western music to avoid the pernicious influence
of a newly hegemonic ideology that conceived of a musical work as
an entity produced by genius composers and existing in finished form
prior to performance. More recently, the organ has ceased to occupy
a prominent place in improvised music, but there are still intermittent
uses of it by contemporary improvisers. One musician who has shown
a serious interest in the improvisatory possibilities of the instrument
is Jean-Luc Guionnet, most notably to date on Pentes, a 2002
release on A Bruit Secret of recordings made in Notre Dame des Champs
in Paris in April 2001. Now Hibari have released Tirets, a
second set of recordings of improvisations performed during the same
sessions. The newly available material finds Guionnet again eliciting
a broad spectrum of unorthodox sounds from the organ, including seismic
eruptions in the bass register, quiet strangulated whistles, drones,
and unbroken atonal sequences of notes separated by stimulatingly
large intervals. Refreshingly, the music avoids all temptations to
indulge in sonic spirituality, pursuing instead a series of fascinating,
resolutely godless and even desacralizing divagations through the
contingencies of imagination, equipment and place. Evidently, there
is still life left in the organ as a vehicle for freethinking improvisation,
and it is to be hoped that as the processes of secularisation continue,
at least in Europe and Scandinavia, to undermine religion as both
a guiding ideology of social institutions and a meaningful belief
system at the level of the individual, the opportunities for radical
improvisers to utilize the instrument will increase. At length, perhaps,
the ever more deserted churches will be filled not with delusional
paeans to the glory of imagined transcendental perfection but the
sounds of a tentative and fallible investigation of sublunary possibilities.—WS
 Not
just another abstruse name for a French improvising group - Jean-Luc
Guionnet is good at cooking them up!- Wiwili is (it says here)
a town in Nicaragua - latitude 13°37' longitude 85°49' - where three
European communist activists were killed by the Reagan-financed Contra
on July 28th 1986. Odd to see that event commemorated 18 years later
by a quartet of Frenchmen (how old were these lads when Ollie North
was selling arms to the Ayatollah to fund the Contra thugs?), but
commitment to leftist causes and red geometrical constructivist cover
art are nothing new in French improvised music. Nor should we surprised
to hear the odd thumping groove from drummer Michel Deltruc, whose
hi hat flails like Al Foster's on the early 70s electric Miles outings
but whose snare sounds decidedly wimpy - Shannon Jackson this is not.
On the opening "Bonnard! Monsieur Ponard" (go figure) guitarist Hervé
Gudin runs up and down the fretboard like Buckethead, but what should
come across as scorching hot lines seem to be half-buried in a moss
of fuzzy drone coming from Xavier Charles' "dispositif" (a collection
of close-miked upturned speakers rumbling away at low frequencies
into which Charles throws various vibrating objects) and second guitarist
Jean-Sébastien Mariage. It's rather odd to find Mariage, a guitarist
of extraordinary delicacy and nuance, in such a context, and not surprisingly
the pieces which come across best are the quiet ones where his input
is more in evidence, notably "Le silence des pantoufles". Elsewhere,
Deltruc's binary banging brings "Un chinois dans l'éspace" crashing
back to earth, and the atmospheric opening of Camille is soon forgotten
when he and Gudin let fly after barely a minute. It's curiously reminiscent
of The Ex's forays into free improvisation - too anchored in rock
rhythmics and dynamics to really float free, but too wild and woolly
to rock out. Talking of The Ex, the last track here is called "No
pasaran" (ah, at least I know where that one comes from), and if you
really want to hear agit rock that blows your face off, try The Ex's
"They Shall Not Pass" from 1936.—DW
Guus
Janssen
HOLLYWOOD O.K. PIECES
Geestgronden GGCD 08
ICP
Orchestra
AAN & UIT
ICP 042
Yannis
Kyriakides / Andy Moor
RED V GREEN
Unsounds 08
Rasp
/ Hasp
MIX YOUR LANGUAGES
Ramboy 19
 The
eight tracks that make up Hollywood O.K. Pieces feature pianist Guus
Janssen leading a sextet featuring Peter Van Bergen (clarinet), Vincent
Chancey (French horn), Michael Rabinovitch (bassoon), Ernst Glerum
(bass) and Wim Janssen (drums) and were recorded live at Amsterdam's
BIMhuis and Nijmegen's Luxtheater in April 2001. It's an eminently
accessible and highly entertaining set, featuring some impressive
work (notably from the horns) and riding a hard-swinging rhythm section.
Janssen seems to have turned his back on the extrovert nuttiness of
previous releases - punters are invited to check out the Xenakis-like
piano plus three trombones extravaganza of "Et on t'a fait douter"
on Vol. 1 of October Meeting 87 (Bimhuis 001) and his wild
piano duet with Steve Beresford, "Steel Pans" on October Meeting
1991 Anatomy Of A Meeting (Bimhuis 004) - but there's plenty of
what Kevin Whitehead memorably described as New Dutch Swing lurking
under the surface of these polished compositions.
 Mention
Dutch pianists to most new music buffs and the name of Misha Mengelberg
invariably springs to mind. Now 69, Mengelberg is as delightfully
potty (and intensely musical) as ever, and the ICP Orchestra he has
"led" for over a quarter of a century has been performing and recording
more of late. Aan & Uit features the usual suspects - Mary
Oliver (violin and viola), Tristan Honsinger (cello), Ernst Glerum
(bass), plus the awesome horn section of Ab Baars, Michael Moore,
Toby Delius, Thomas Heberer and Wolter Wierbos, all powered forward
by the inimitable Han Bennink, who can make more noise with a pair
of wire brushes than most Metal drummers can with ten pairs of sticks
- and is a typically off-the-wall selection of Mengelberg originals,
plus a couple from Honsinger and Heberer and Hoagy Carmichael's "Barbaric".
The album kicks off proper with track two, a hilarious reading of
Mengelberg's Monkish ballad "De Sprong, O Romantiek der Hazen" ("Romantic
Leap of Hares" to you), in which Misha does his utmost to sabotage
his own smooth arrangements with anarchic scat singing and decidedly
nasty clusters. Thereafter, the album follows the classic ICP recipe
of Mengelberg's potty montages and hard-swinging Dutch-style bop,
and any ICP completist won't want to be without it, but at 70'11"
it does, sad to say, outstay its welcome somewhat, and never manages
to scale the heights of previous recent ICP releases, notably 1999's
Jubilee Varia (Hatology). That said, it's a damn sight more
fun to listen to than most albums you're likely to hear this year.
 Though
there's still plenty of New Dutch Swing around, a lot of it is performed
by chaps well into their fifties, so it's good to know the younger
generation of Dutch improvisers - which also included expats based
in the Netherlands - is beginning to make a name for itself. The Unsounds
label, curated by composer / electronician Yannis Kyriakides and British
guitarist Andy Moor (of The Ex), recently issued a fine survey of
the scene on the Kraakgeluiden Document 1 compilation album
(reviewed here last month), and on Red v Green they go head
to head in a set of 15 crunchy duets recorded live at the Zaal 100
squat and mixed and edited by Moor's former sparring partner in Dog
Faced Hermans, Colin McLean. Moor, like his American near-namesake
(just add "e", no drugs reference intended) Thurston, comes at improvised
music armed with screwdrivers rather than Real Books, and is quite
content to pursue the kind of mindless repetition - mindless not being
a put-down, by the way: go read Lester Bangs - more associated with
his punk roots. It certainly makes a welcome change from guitarists
who lay the venerable axe flat and auscultate it as if it was nine
months pregnant and those (precious few) who still know how to pick
out a tune. Kyriakides' electronics are similarly direct, and he doesn't
shy away from a groove as if afraid that PT's own Wayne Spencer was
going to hop a ferry over to Amsterdam and beat him on the head with
a copy of Eddie Prevost's complete writings. It's not exactly what
Whitehead would qualify as New Dutch Swing, but it certainly makes
for an entertaining and rewarding listen. 
After Bark and Toot, here come two more improv outfits that sound
like their names. Rasp was originally a trio of improvisers consisting
of vocalist Jodi Gilbert, bassist Wilbert de Joode and Richard Barrett
on laptop and electronics. Here they're joined by flutist and electronician
Anne La Berge and the inimitable Paul Lovens on percussion and saw.
Parallel to this, Hasp is another trio featuring Gilbert, de Joode
and La Berge, and this album alternates material by Rasp (live at
the BIM once more in April 2002) with studio sessions by Hasp recorded
a month and a half later. Though de Joode can't resist swinging just
a little bit from time to time (and Lovens is more than happy to join
him), the languages being mixed here are far more abstract. Gilbert
in particular is hard to pin down stylistically, alternating (reasonably)
straight spoken narrative ("How to spot a tourist" must have been
amusing for the Amsterdam locals) with mildly melodramatic soprano,
she also actually sings - pretty rare for an improvising vocalist
these days - while Barrett and La Berge steer the music more into
the jungle of contemporary classical New Complexity from which Barrett
emerged a few years ago. Lovens, for his part, sounds good whether
he's flying all over the place ("Map") or quietly bustling in the
background. The Rasp and Hasp material is carefully interleaved and
the album well structured to pivot around a central wistful multitracked
solo vocal from Gilbert, "Servile Smile".—DW
Spring
Heel Jack
THE SWEETNESS OF THE WATER
Thirsty Ear Blue Series THI 57146.2
Those
nice people who send me Thirsty Ear Blue Series releases must be getting
pretty pissed off with me for dissing almost everything on the label
that comes this way. Thankfully, The Sweetness Of The Water isn't
as tacky as the recent tepid rap crossover projects and grotty home
movie DVDs, but it's still a curious release. For anyone who fell
into a coma about six years ago and has regained consciousness to
find that SHJ are no longer doing drum'n'bass, it'll come as a shock,
but to those familiar with the three preceding TE releases, Masses,
Amassed and Live, the curious mixture of vintage free
improvisation from the likes of Evan Parker and the strange haphazard
electronic inventions of Coxon and Wales is, well, more of the same.
The difference here is that Han Bennink has been replaced behind the
kit by London's Hardest Working Percussionist Mark Sanders, and Parker
and bassist John Edwards are joined by Wadada Leo Smith (further proof
of SHJ's good taste when it comes to picking trumpeters, though I
still prefer Kenny Wheeler on Amassed).
Without Coxon and Wales it could be a perfect Emanem line-up - I assume
Martin Davidson wouldn't mind Wadada guesting on one of his releases
- but with their contributions (on organ, electric guitar, electronics,
samples, harmonica, trumpet, congas, piano insides and, um, lift cage)
it becomes something else, the possible exception being "Inlet", on
which C&W follow their playing partners into thornier improv territory
(Coxon's guitar work is also refreshingly adventurous in the "Duo"
with Sanders). Would that the improvisers made similar concessions
to Coxon and Wales, as Wheeler and Mat Maneri did on previous SHJ
outings: true, Parker puts the horn aside on "Track Two" and inserts
some decidedly tonal faux-naïve Grade IV piano, but just when a pretty
ECM groove gets moving, the piece fizzles out. Elsewhere his distinctive
saxophone lines sound curiously out of place in the laidback tonal
meanderings of "Lata" and "Track One". It's not the first time Parker
has popped up where you'd least expect him (remember his guest spots
with Robert Wyatt and Scott Walker, and his breathtakingly incongruous
- deliberately so - sonic scribblings over Michael Nyman's "Waltz"),
but when he tries to engage with Coxon's bland harmony on "Track One",
he soon finds there's very little to engage with. Smith, for his part,
just sails above it all, and his arching lines manage to adapt to
their surroundings with relative ease, even on the final rather stodgy
"Autumn". This is presumably meant to border on the sublime, but just
sounds pompous (Sanders' half-hearted cymbal flutters sound like Sunny
Murray on a bad day): all concerned should have taken a break and
listened to a few old Terje Rypdal album instead. Compared to previous
SHJ outings, which tended to concentrate their emotional weight about
one or two central tracks, The Sweetness Of The Water sounds
strangely half-finished. One good solid groove could have saved the
day (bring back the New Yorkers who put the sweat and drive into Masses),
but I guess we'll have to wait for the next album to see if it turns
up. If the nice people send me a copy.—DW
Martin
Siewert
NO NEED TO BE LONESOME
Mosz 002
No need indeed, with all those Plug-Ins to keep you company, not to
mention the friends who drop in on the session - Patrick Pulsinger,
Werner Dafeldecker, Martin Brandlmayr and Tony Buck. It's funny how
some of the Viennese cats are softening up these days - even Dafeldecker,
whose outing with Siewert, "Stendec", on that List compilation was
positively pretty - do yourself a favour and go back to Siewert's
Komfort 2000 (appropriately enough on Charhizma, a label that
has, like its owner Christof Kurzmann, stubbornly refused to associate
itself with just one kind of music) to reacquaint yourself with what
Siewert was doing five years ago. How much more challenging it was
than this. I'm reminded of Alan Licht's memorable line in An Emotional
Memoir Of Martha Quinn - "I knew grunge was over when I heard
the first Tortoise album" - it seems as if the arrival of groups like
Radian and Trapist has signalled a strategic retreat from some of
the more "difficult listening" stuff, of which Komfort 2000 was
a great example. (Music For A Long Suffering Wire Subscriber? You
like AMM and Sextant-period Herbie? You can have 'em
both! Ladies and gentlemen, Martin Brandlmayr and Martin Siewert!
They used to call Tortoise "post-rock" - a dumb appellation, but at
least it's better than "avant rock", which is just plain fucking stupid
- so what are we supposed to call clearly post-Tortoise product like
this?) As David Toop eloquently points out in Haunted Weather,
the sheer processing power of today's laptops is awesome, and one
gets the impression that Martin Siewert has let himself get carried
away with it all, and had great fun in the process, but the result
is that where Komfort 2000 was rich and dense, No Need To
Be Lonesome sounds claggy and overproduced. The rhythm programming
is squeaky clean and gels well with the input of Brandlmayr and Buck,
but Siewert deserves the Golden Camembert Award for the Most Hideous
Synth Patch Since Wayne Horvitz On The First Naked City Album, which
pops up at 6'18" in the opening "Just When We Thought It Was Safe".
Yuk. And instead of dicking around with those rotating speakers on
his old Hammond (or maybe it's just a Hammond Plug-In, for as John-Boy
said "Nothing Is Real"), he might have done well to study some of
the horn arrangements on Steely Dan's Aja. Scoff if you will,
but "Black Cow" and "Deacon Blues", once listened to, go into Inner
Ear Repeat Play Mode all day long (annoying sometimes, I know), while
all five tracks on No Need To Be Lonesome, despite being sumptuously
produced, remain eminently forgettable - five minutes after the end
of the album see if you can recall one of its melodies. It's rhythmic
enough to sound cool on the car stereo without being sufficiently
high profile to distract you at the wheel, just about interesting
enough in its surface details to hold your attention if you want to
listen carefully, but harmonically and rhythmically bland bordering
on the banal (Satie used to get away with voice leading like this,
but he was about the only one who could). What you get out of No
Need To Be Lonesome will depend on where, when and how you choose
to listen to it; it isn't so much a text itself as a machine capable
of producing a text, which probably explains why the image adorning
the CD is a beautiful bright red Olivetti typewriter.—DW
Paul
Dunmall & Paul Rogers
AWARENESS RESPONSE
Emanem 4101
Paul
Dunmall, Paul Rogers & Kevin Norton
GO FORTH DUCK
CIMP 296
These
two releases, recorded within a couple of months of each other, effectively
answer the question: "What have Dunmall and Rogers been up to?" The
interplay between the two men on Awareness Response is stunningly
telepathic. Dunmall can sometimes be an unrelentingly forceful player,
but his playing here is nuanced and variable in mood, pulling back
into subtler regions when the improvisational whim dictates. In addition
to his tenor and soprano saxes Dunmall brought his Border bagpipes
(from the south of Scotland, which have a much softer sound than the
Highland pipes with which most listeners are familiar), and those
skeptical about the instrument should listen to the excellent opening
cut, on which he alternates bending notes during melodic runs and
employing the instrument's drone, with Rogers blending in or skittering
away on a separate melodic line. He is now, we're told, playing a
bass built by Antoine Leducq, a significantly smaller instrument than
the standard double bass, which expands the tonal range of the instrument
to include that of a cello. Monsieur Leducq should be very happy with
how his instrument is being employed, as Rogers' work on Awareness
Response is a tour de force, and represents a further step
on from his excellent 1999 solo recording Listen (Emanem 4078).
Recommended.
Go Forth Duck finds our duo joined by drummer and vibraphonist
Kevin Norton, who has performed with them since the 2002 Vision Festival,
and this is a second set of songs from the marathon session that produced
the earlier Rylickolum: For Your Pleasure (CIMP 289), the liner
notes of which are confusingly replicated here. The three improvisations
are quite varied in mood and sound: Norton switches from drums to
vibes and back during the session, and often one instrumentalist sits
out while the two others develop a motif, before the trio regroups
to head down a new path. Go Forth Duck is recommended listening
for Dunmall fans - even if the Border bagpipes unfortunately receive
only limited exposure, on the short and strangely titled "Come Back
Weirdness Day" - though if forced to choose between the two I'd opt
for the excellent duo disc.—SG
John Butcher
THIRTEEN FRIENDLY NUMBERS
Unsounds 07
Thirteen
Friendly Numbers was originally released in 1992 on saxophonist
John Butcher's own Acta label (an imprint that has more or less gone
into hibernation over recent years, since Butcher's modus operandi
with Acta has always been to release things on the label that for
whatever reason can't find a home elsewhere - hardly the case for
the saxophonist's own recent work). Rediscovering it today in the
light of more recent Butcher solo outings (2001's Fixations
on Emanem, and last year's Invisible Ear on Fringes) is a source
of great pleasure. The devastating precision of his multiphonic work
on the Fringes disc is already present on "A Leap in the Light" and
"The Brittle Chance", and the saliva-rattling gurgles, slaps, clicks
and clunks that have become par for the course in post-Gustafsson
saxophone playing are all here in embryonic form (check the opening
of "A Sense of Occasion"). It's not that Butcher's playing hasn't
evolved over the past twelve years (even though the quartet of overdubbed
tenor saxophones on "Bells and Clappers" does sound a little brash
in comparison with some of the multitrack offerings on Invisible
Ear), but rather that the others have taken their time catching
on to what he's doing. Butcher is fond of quoting Derek Bailey's definition
of improvisation as the search for "material which is endlessly transformable",
and Thirteen Friendly Numbers is a splendid example of it in
action. What makes these performances stand the test of time, though,
unlike much of the kind of dry sonic research for its own sake currently
in vogue, is Butcher's sheer musicality, broad knowledge of his instruments'
history and repertoire, and most importantly, rock solid technique.—DW
Kyle
Bruckmann
GASPS & FISSURES
482 Music 482-1027
It's
been several years since Kyle Bruckmann's debut solo album Entymology
appeared on the Barely Auditable imprint he co-runs with fellow
reed virtuoso Scott Rosenberg, though a careful reading of the liners
here reveals that these six tracks were recorded back in 2001. Not
that Bruckmann's music has somehow gone "out of date" in the meantime,
but he has been continuing to perfect his technique on the double
reed instruments - oboe, cor anglais, suona and mijwiz - and has also
moved from Chicago out to the Bay Area (though you're probably not
very interested in this). Strictly speaking, Gasps & Fissures
isn't a solo album, as he calls on the services of bassist Kurt Johnson
in the sublime monster drone that kicks in after 4'22" of the final
"Elsewhere", and Bruckmann has no qualms about using technology to
enhance and overdub his playing. As he writes in the notes, it's "an
improviser's response to the paradoxes and absurdities of recording
improvised music, and an attempt to inhabit gray areas and straddle
facile dichotomies [..] sounds are grotesquely magnified and manipulated
in time and space to sculpt music of claustrophobic intimacy and impossible
physicality". As such, Gasps & Fissures takes its place alongside
John Butcher's Invisible Ear (see abpve) and Stéphane Rives'
Fibres as one of the recent landmarks of the "extended solo"
genre. Quite apart from producing the par for the course key click
thuds, whooshes and flutters, Bruckmann can play the hell out of the
oboe and cor, and has a repertoire of multiphonics that would be the
envy of any oboist - not to mention saxophonist - the world over (next
time John Butcher blows into Chicago to touch bases with Michael Zerang
and Fred Lonberg-Holm, somebody put an extra chair in the studio for
Bruckmann.. oops, forgot, he doesn't live there anymore). Kyle Bruckmann
has never been content to sit still and concentrate on just one genre
- witness his bloodcurdling performances as lead singer of the post-punk
power group Lozenge - and the stochastic accumulation of overdubs
in "Exponential" sounds more like Xenakis than it does "standard"
improv. Similarly the minute pitch fluctuations of "Gaps & Fictions"
and the cavernous drone of "Elsewhere" belong more to the world of
Alvin Lucier and Phill Niblock. Whichever bag you want to put it in
though, Gasps & Fissures is a worthy addition to your record
collection, however you choose to organise it.—DW
Harris
Eisenstadt
JALOLU
CIMP 300
The
avant-jazz scene in Toronto (my current city of residence) has always
been spotty, so I can only curse my luck that drummer Harris Eisenstadt,
originally a Toronto native, has left these parts. A student of both
Leo Smith and Adam Rudolph, he now lives in L.A., often working with
Vinny Golia and other musicians associated with the 9Winds label.
Eisenstadt's previous recording was the enigmatic chamber-improv disc
Fight or Flight (Newsonic), which demonstrated among other things
a love of offbeat instrumentation: in addition to his lightly pulsed
drums, it featured two flutes, trombone, tuba, bass, and tuned percussion
(vibraphone, marimba and crotales). Jalolu is no less idiosyncratic.
The ensemble this time is just drums and four horns: two trumpets
(Paul Smoker and Roy Campbell), cornet (Taylor Ho Bynum) and baritone
saxophone and clarinet (Andy Laster). Prior to the session Eisenstadt
spent two months studying with kora master Jali Foday Musa Suso in
the Gambia, and the album's one-of-kind horn charts demonstrate his
fascination with the use of hocketing in African music. The horns
are often allotted a single note, pecking away at it in neurotic cross-rhythms
like a distress-signal transmission or like the Mingus of "Tensions"
(on Blues & Roots). Occasional songs or chorales come wafting in,
transcriptions of Mandinka Kutiro songs which the horn players incorporate
into the pieces at their discretion. Good luck keeping track of the
jittery interplay among the brass - the liner notes unfortunately
don't list who's playing what when - but in any case this isn't a
Trumpet Kings cutting-contest: it's the ensemble sound that counts,
the brass wheeling about like agitated seagulls, the baritone pumping
out spare, funky bass lines, Eisenstadt himself drumming like a wayward
Bobby Previte, stopping and starting and pummelling away. The music's
enormous forward drive can be a bit exhausting over the length of
the album, not least because of the inclusion of two alternate takes
- like Emanem, CIMP has a policy of releasing only brimful CDs. But
this relentlessness is a small price to pay for genuinely original
music making. The disc is (symbolically?) CIMP's 200th release, and
it's among the label's strongest recent offerings.—ND
bject
OBJECT 4
Locust L56
Let
me correct a few misunderstandings (on my own part): 1) I used to
think "bject" was the name of an album - the debut outing of this
trio on Hibari recorded at Off Site in 2002 - but it seems it's become
the name of the group. 2) The booklet accompanying the Improvised
Music From Japan box stated that analog synthesizer player Utah
Kawasaki was planning to change his name to Uro Kawasaki, but
it seems he hasn't (rather glad about that, actually, as "uro" has
its own specific connotations as an English prefix - and I always
liked the name "Utah Kawasaki".. sort conjured up images of a Mormon
motorcycle grand prix.. anyway, enough of that). 3) I thought all
the releases in Locust's Object series were originally intended to
be duos, but this one (and Object 6) is a trio. 4) The music
these lads used to make - bject also features Tetuzi Akiyama on turntable,
contact mic and electric guitar and Masahiko Okura on alto sax and
tubes - used to be called "onkyo", but as the "o" seems to have disappeared
from "object", maybe we should call this music "nky". After all, a
man on a galloping horse wouldn't notice the difference between O
and 0, and the degree zero reductionism that characterised the early
Hibari releases has more or less gone out of the window - people,
this album is noisy. Not loud noisy like Masonna and Merzbow,
but noisy nevertheless (I'll pinch my pal Eric Cordier's term "soft
noise" again, if I may), full of disturbing scratches, crackles, rasps,
rumbles and other acoustic rough edges. Kawasaki, who also "plays"
cell phone and contact mic is especially boisterous at times, and
the music is often brought up with a dull contact-miked thud (not
so much onkyo as thunkyo) or squeals like a stuck pig (not
so much onkyo as oinkyo). Unlike the two pieces that made up
the Hibari debut album, which were rather charmingly titled "Business
Jump" and "Big Comic", these four tracks, recorded and mixed at a
place called Tanker (studio or venue? No matter, it sounds very live
to me) remain untitled, in keeping with the austere black and white
- mainly white - look of the Object series. It's tough stuff but certainly
worth paying attention to.—DW
Yo
Miles!
SKY GARDEN
Cuneiform Rune 191/2 2CD
Somehow
I want to like this more than I actually do. As the name of
Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith's band unambiguously proclaims,
the work of Yo Miles! is a straight-up tribute to the work of Mr Davis
(ca. 1968 - 75), and the music - most of it by Miles - is beautifully
played by great musicians (including Tom Coster on keyboards, Michael
Manring on bass, Steve Smith on drums, Chris Muir on guitar, Karl
Perazzo on percussion, plus saxophonists Greg Osby and John Tchicai
- yo! - and guest spots from, amongst others, Zakir Hussain on tablas
and the ROVA quartet) but, for some reason, to quote Jean-François
Pauvros, ça me fait pas bander (and if you're not French I'll
leave you to figure out what that means). True, it's fabulously recorded
(Kaiser waxes so lyrical about Super Audio CD technology that I'm
half inclined to invest in the stuff myself) - in fact maybe too
well recorded. One of the distinctive features of electric Miles
was its sweat, its grit: Coster's got his Corea / Hancock / Zawinul
/ Jarrett (delete where appropriate) licks down to a tee, but the
keyboards here never sound as rough and dirty as Teo Macero made them
sound on those old CBS albums. As an exercise in style, Sky Garden
is musicologically faultless, but in reproducing ever so faithfully
all the riffs, tics and hooks of the period, Coster, Manring, and
Smith seem to be more interested in emulating their idols than revealing
any distinctive personalities of their own. On the other hand, Kaiser,
as one might expect, sounds more like Kaiser (hell, nobody ever sounded
like Pete Cosey after all), and Smith, with that distinctive creamy
tone, could in no way be mistaken for Miles, but I'm still led to
wonder who this music is for. Well, one answer to that is:
for the musicians themselves, of course! The album trucks along irresistibly
like the world's number one jam band, and I'd just love to sit in
on keyboards and throw a few Hancock licks into the soup myself -
but now that most of Miles' electric stuff is remastered and back
in print in swanky deluxe editions documenting every sneeze, growl
and false start the Prince of Darkness committed to mag tape, why
would you reach for this when you can blast your neighbours to kingdom
come with Dark Magus? Which, by the way, is what I did after
listening to Sky Garden.—DW
psi
BLACK AMERICAN FLAG
Evolving Ear
The
last album by psi - not to be confused with the wonderful label of
the same name curated by Evan Parker - went by the unwieldy title
of The ___ Who Had Begun His Career As A Useful ___ Of The ___
Court Later Became The ___ Of ___ And The ___ Of ___. Fortunately
(for me at least) Black American Flag is easier both to remember
and to type, and it's more satisfying musically. If this trio consisting
of Chris Forsyth on guitar, Jaime Fennelly on electronics and Fritz
Welch on drums, cymbals and objects (having seen and enjoyed the band
in concert let me assure you that the objects are as important as
the drums) were based in Europe instead of Brooklyn, I'm prepared
to wager a small sum they'd already have released work on leading
European improv imprints such as Grob, Charhizma and Durian (by the
way, what's happened to Durian?). Whether Messrs Klopotek, Kurzmann
and Dafeldecker would have accepted Fritz Welch's wacky hand-drawn
cartoon artwork, though, is a moot point.. Featuring two pieces lasting
respectively 12'46" and 29'47", Black American Flag comes at
trademark eai droning guitars and gritty buzz from another direction,
namely the anarchic scrabbling Welch gets up to behind his kit, which
pushes his two otherwise reticent playing partners over the edge into
the kind of noise one associates more these days from Metal-scarred
bruisers like Kevin Drumm. Take it from me, psi are as much fun to
watch as they are to listen to, so if they show up in your neighbourhood
make sure you check them out.—DW
Christian
Wolff
PERCUSSIONIST SONGS
Matchless MRCD59
If
you buy solo percussion albums expecting to have your mind blown by
consummate instrumental virtuosity ("how does s/he do that?" "is it
overdubbed?" "how many arms has s/he got?") you'd better leave this
one in the rack. As percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky notes in her brief
liners, Christian Wolff "does not compose percussion music." (Erm,
wait a minute, well, let's read on..) "His percussion pieces are about
as far away from the usual percussion techniques as I have travelled."
I would suggest that what Schulkowsky considers to be "usual percussion
techniques" are themselves far away from what most folk would imagine
to be percussion music - the simple act of making sound by striking
things (sticks, stones and wands swishing through the air are just
as acceptable as marimbas, gongs and cymbals) - and that Wolff's music
is, as a result, some of the most natural and listenable you're likely
to encounter. The seven-movement cycle "Percussionist Songs" was written
specifically for Schulkowsky, and completed in 1995, and it ranges
from free transcriptions and adaptations of the medieval English song
"The Westron Winde" and a Josquin Desprez chanson to a polyphonic
exploration of resonance and decay. The three "Percussionist Dances"
are more extended affairs, their delicate rhythmic intricacies recalling
the percussion music of John Cage that Wolff encountered back in his
teens. Wolff's music, like that of his friend and former associate
Howard Skempton, is deceptively straightforward, and far from naïve.
But it is intimate: "Dear Robyn" belongs to the realm of personal
correspondence - Wolff actually faxed the piece to the percussionist
- and even a piece bearing a distinctly public title, "Peace March"
is modest in scale and scope. The mood of the album is perhaps best
summed up by Bertolt Brecht in his poem "Vergnügungen" ("Pleasures"),
which Schulkowsky reads while playing a simple marimba melody: "Old
music / Comfortable shoes / Understanding / New music / Writing, planting
/ Taking trips / Singing / Being friendly."—DW
Iannis
Xenakis
KRANERG
Col Legno 20217
Composer
Roger Reynolds once said of the music of Xenakis: "To my ear, his
music is radiant and lean, remarkably clear of traditional allegiances
to harmonic substance and melodic gesture. His works are compelling
examples of previously unknown event-worlds. One can objectify them
by virtue of their image-making, formative strength. They stand not
on arguments made but on materials revealed. They are above pleading."
One such is the epic electro-acoustic work Kraanerg, a quintessential
example of "stochastic music," the term the composer used for his
innovative compositional theory. Over 74 minutes long, Kraanerg
alternates live orchestral sections and electronic tape sections using
electronically altered orchestral material. Xenakis' orchestral writing
features rapid staccato outbursts from trumpets, trombones and woodwinds,
and the string glissandi associated with his music ever since
the revolutionary Metastaseis. The tape sections utilize various
levels of sound alteration, with some passages only slightly distorted
and others without a trace of the original instruments, resulting
in a fascinating range of textures and mysterious sheets of sound.
Listening to the overall effect of this continuous transformation
is like witnessing the awe-inspiring organic processes of nature majestically
unfold, or watching time-lapse photography of clouds in motion. Xenakis'
use of algorithms seems to capture that organic transformation, intensified
by time compression. Kraanerg was originally commissioned as
a ballet score for the opening of the National Art Center in Ottawa,
Canada in June, 1969, and Xenakis took as his theme the youth rebellion
that swept the globe the year before - the literal translation of
"kraanerg" being "youth-energy" - and the ferocity of those events
is somehow distilled into his music's continuous transformation. This
recording is of a performance in 2001 by the Sinfonieorchester Basel,
with Alexander Winterson conducting, and is worth comparing to the
1996 Asphodel recording by ST-X Ensemble, with Charles Bornstein.
Both are excellent - the ST-X version is slightly more vivid, while
the new Basel Symphony version is perhaps richer - but one advantage
of the Asphodel recording is that it is broken into 41 separate tracks,
while the Col Legno disc presents the work as one unbroken 74-minute
track. Though Xenakis did not write the piece in separate movements,
the alternation of live and taped sections makes the insertion of
indexes relatively simple - and these are convenient if you're interrupted
over the course of an hour and a quarter. Try to make sure you're
not, though.—RH
Michael
Wertmüller
DIE ZEIT, EINE GEBRAUCHSANWEISUNG
Grob 545
The
title translates as "Time, a User's Manual", and as one hell of a
drummer - you may recall his work with Peter Brötzmann on Nothung
- Michael Wertmüller knows a bit about the subject. Like Richard Barrett,
Wertmüller divides his time between improvisation and composition,
of the New Complexity persuasion. He's also been known to divide it
into 512th notes (or what I suppose should be called hemidemisemihemidemisemiquavers)
- from the descriptions of some of his pieces offered by Dieter Schnebel
in the accompanying essay, Wertmüller's scores must make some of Brian
Ferneyhough's look like child's play. The title track is scored for
fifteen piece ensemble, computer (Mark Trayle) and guitar (Stephan
Wittwer), and for this version recorded live at Donaueschingen in
2001, the score was projected in front of the musicians on screens
coordinated by a central computer, or "a fifteen armed conductor".
Computer technology was also used in postprod, to introduce dizzying
pans and splices worthy of Mego and even deconstruct the boos and
cheers of the Donaueschingen crowd. Nice to see the good old Alienation
Effect is still popular. The rather brief disc (34 minutes) closes
with Parts 1 and 3 of "Entleibung" ("Decorporeal"), a triptych after
Francis Bacon - all the more reason to ask why Part 2 couldn't have
been included - in Part 3 of which the European String Quartet is
aided and abetted by Alex Buess on electronics, who manages to bury
their intricate lines under a black, sweaty digital peat bog. For
all its appeals to New Complexity and its attendant aesthetic of failure
(described with nothing less than glee by Schnebel), Wertmüller's
music sounds more like the plodding horror grunge of 1960s Penderecki.
Pretty scary huh? Don't worry: another blast of digitized applause
at the end makes it clear it was just a concert.—DW
Keith
Berry
THE GOLDEN BOAT
trente oiseaux TOC 034
It
starts with silence, as well it might, released on bernhard günter's
trente oiseaux label, but the four tracks - movements might be more
accurate, as the album is best experienced played through from beginning
to end - that make up Keith Berry's The Golden Boat, while
evidently influenced by günter's aesthetic (perhaps more so than his
music), represent an intriguing synthesis of several areas of lowercase
sound. From the world of static and predominantly tonal drone (think
JLIAT ca.1996) via fractured laptop glitch to inside piano and - inevitably,
one supposes - field recordings of water, Berry's music proceeds as
a set of discrete events interspersed with silences of varying lengths.
As is often the case with trente oiseaux music, you won't get much
out of it unless you stop everything else you're doing, breathe deeply
and listen intently, but The Golden Boat is no turn-on-tune-in-and-switch-off
affair; the digital shudders and reverberant thuds are as unsettling
as his sense of pitch and timing is astute, and despite the warmth
of günter's mastering, Berry's creaking, scuffed surfaces, coloured
by extremely delicate ultra-high frequencies, are cool and enigmatic.
Along with Matt Waldron (aka irr.app.(ext.))'s Dust Pincher Appliances,
this is one of the past year's most original and rewarding pieces
of electronic music.—DW
John
Kannenberg
GELIDUS
Retinascan RE 35
John
Kannenberg's work curating the virtual artspace www.stasisfield.com
will be familiar to PT readers, but anyone who hasn't yet heard his
music (there are several pieces on free download at his site) should
make it their business to hunt down a copy of Gelidus forthwith,
because unless Eliane Radigue graces us with a new release, it's right
up there with Jason Kahn's Miramar as slowmotion masterpiece
of the year. Though recorded in a single take on the morning of Christmas
Day 2002, the six continuously-running movements that make up Gelidus,
which the composer describes as "a sonic interpretation of extreme
cold", were sourced from processed field recordings made outside Kannenberg's
house "after a snowfall", a sinewave test tone and cassette tape hiss
manipulated with an analogue equalizer. Though the work's global structure
was loosely mapped out, Kannenberg deliberately recorded in real time:
"Most of my audio work tends to be hybrid of composition and improvisation,"
he writes, adding that the forthcoming "soundtrack" to the novel "A
Canticle For Leibowitz" for the Sine Fiction label is more composed
than improvised. In keeping with the meticulous concern for visual
detail that characterises his website, Kannenberg has, in a twelve-page
accompanying booklet, also included photographs (by himself and his
wife) to "enhance the feeling of extreme cold I was trying to produce
in the music", using them as source material for his original artwork
and manipulating them in Photoshop using some of the same principles
he applied to the sound material, including repetition, reduction,
phasing, fading and reverberation. Chilly and austere it is, but also
compelling and moving too. Well worth checking out: go to www.retinascan.de
and wrap up well.—DW
Earzumba
HERMOSO MOVIMENTO / FLORECE ESCONDIDO
Dialsinfin
CD (Christian Dergarabedian)
UN PIANO EN LA GARGANTA
Drone DR63 7"EP
Earzumba
PLAYBACK EMOTIVO
Locus of Assemblage 3" CD
http://yovibro.tripod.com.ar
Earzumba
is the work of one Christian Dergarabedian, originally from Argentina
(and apparently a founder member of Reynols, it says here) but now
based in Barcelona. Though he may have chosen to make his home in
old Europe, the music of Dergarabedian's native Latin America permeates
the earlier work (the earliest material on Hermoso Movimento
dates from October 1998, while Florece Escondido seems to be
more recent, dating from between August 2000 and November 2001), from
the mad mariachi mulch of the opening "Mendigando Amor" to the urban
field recordings of Buenos Aires on "Alrededor de las manos". It's
entertaining stuff - imagine a John Oswald version of an Orb remix
of Herb Alpert and Sergio Mendes, or, as the composer describes Florece
Escondido, "a blurred music of psychodelic [sic] blues, tango,
and valseado shaking hands in between real slow dub & rock pieces".
Dergarabedian doesn't like the term "plunderphonics", preferring instead
"audiocollage", but admits that many of the pieces were sourced exclusively
from samples of existing music. He's probably right to make the distinction,
because although Oswald's pioneering work inevitably comes to mind,
Dergarabedian's approach is far less rigorous and conceptual, and
he's quite happy to wallow in cavernous dub. Appearing as it does
on Drone Records, Un piano en la garganta is, as one might
expect, more sedate. "File under Monumental Slow-Wave Drones", the
press release recommends, but compared to monster slowburners by the
likes of Eliane Radigue and Phill Niblock, Dergarabedian's six brief
tracks are but snapshots, albeit wonderfully precise and detailed
ones. A full-length release of material like this would be most welcome.
Instead, the six track 3" CD Playback Emotivo (the most recent
offering here - it was recorded in March and April of last year) starts
out as a more boisterous affair, but soon slides into a downtempo
groove. Goodness knows why Beethoven's hoary old chestnut "Für Elise"
(ring-modulated almost beyond recognition) is called "Mozart's Koala
Concerto No.4", and nor do I have any idea what kind of musical instrument
a koala is (I know about the eucalyptus-gobbling Australian bear),
but Dergarabedian is credited as playing one. It's one of many entertaining
mysteries of this mini album from a composer I look forward to hearing
more from in the months to come.—DW
Antmanuv
MAGNETIC FIELD
antma0104
antmanuv.net
Antmanuv,
aka Tomane V., hails from Portugal but currently lives and works in
Canada, where Magnetic Field was recorded "during a severe
thunderstorm" in April 2003. The bad weather certainly left its mark;
it's a seething mass of ugly synth clusters ("analog modular synth"
it says, though it sounds like the murk I used to get out of my Juno
6), grain and grit. Tomane V also apparently works as a DJ, and it's
maybe a shame that he couldn't have dropped a few beats into the mix.
It might have ended up sounding like something from Sheffield (Cabaret
Voltaire period). Instead, with its unremittingly user-unfriendly
pitches, the whole thing drags uncomfortably and ends up as something
to sit through. Like a severe thunderstorm.—DW
Plastic
Violence
IMMATERIAL
Death Paradise Autoproductions DPA 01
IMMATERIAL 2
Death Paradise Autoproductions DPA 02
www.deathparadise.it
Inscribing
itself solidly in the relatively recent tradition of Italian experimental
electronica (Elio Martusciello, z_e_l_l_e, et al.), the work of Plastic
Violence, a duo consisting of Fabrizio Paolillo and Francesca Materazzi,
is well worth seeking out, especially if you're getting bored with
Raster Noton and its various spin-off projects. Both volumes of Immaterial
(the first dates from 2002) come in unassuming and not particularly
attractive grey and white card sleeves, complete with manifesto in
Italian (which reads better in its original Italian in the garbled
translation on PV's press release) and user-unfriendly track titles
like "Materialism", "Product", "Pseudo Use" and "Contempling [sic]
The Effect", but don't be put off: PV's sense of timing and structure
is impeccable, and their sound material strong and well-defined. It's
a project very much in line with the old minimalist "Music as a Gradual
Process" aesthetic: events are introduced into the mix one by one
and the music follows its inexorable path until the plug is pulled.
Whether Steve Reich would have opted for the queasy drones and disturbing
alarm clock bleeps of pieces like "E.R.T." is doubtful, but he would
certainly recognise the aesthetic. Substitute claves for clicks on
"Insistence" and you're not far away from "Music for Pieces of Wood",
but the strange nauseous swooping clouds lurking behind the pulse
is altogether more menacing. I suspect that if this had Carsten Nicolai's
or Ryoji Ikeda's name on it, you'd have heard about it before now.
Check it out.—DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
|
|