As
I was putting the finishing touches to this issue, news came through
of the death of John Peel (on holiday in Peru, of all places), at
the relatively young age - these days - of 65. To those of you reading
this mag outside the UK (which I guess means most of you, if I have
correctly understood my site statistics report) this might not mean
much, but to my generation (haha, showing your age there..) who grew
up listening to Peel's nighttime Radio One shows, often with headphones
clamped on under the bedsheets with the lights out, it's as if yet
another part of our life has been chipped away. OK so I didn't hear
that fateful Peel show where he came on the mic and said "Bad
news lads, Ian Curtis of Joy Division is dead", and I certainly
wasn't listening in when he introduced a then unknown band called,
what was it, The Pink Floyd, but as I cast my eyes over the shelves
around me almost every record I see in the so-called "rock"
section of the collection (let's be frank, Peelie probably never dug
Taku Sugimoto and Mathias Spahlinger, so we'd better leave the improv
and avant-garde sections out of this) has some kind of connection
to John Peel. I still have a huge archive of dusty and decaying cassettes
of Peel shows taped back in the 80s, plus a copy somewhere of the
My Top Ten he did with Andy Peebles. The list included, trying to
recall off the top of my head (because it'd take ages to find the
tape) The Undertones' "Teenage Kicks" (no surprises there),
Stanley Winston "No More Ghettoes in America", Beefheart's
"Big Eyed Beans from Venus", Cocteau Twins' "Over The
Pavements", something by The Mighty Wah (of course), Misty In
Roots "Man kind", Otis Redding "Ole Man Trouble",
The Faces "Maybe I'm Amazed", one more I can't recall and
the Anfield Kop singing "You'll Never Walk Alone." (Well,
nobody's perfect..) If anyone can remember what number ten was please
let me know. Meanwhile, bonne lecture.—DW
HOLY GHOST
Revenant 9CD
 Well,
here it is at last. After months of feverish marketing build-up with
black, dramatic full-page ads in all the major new music publications,
the long awaited Spirit Box is out, containing, according to Revenant's
blurb, nine CDs of "rare and unissued recordings" of saxophonist
Albert Ayler (1936 – 1970) recorded throughout his all-too-brief
career, from 1962 to 1970. In point of fact the ornate black box (10
x 10 x 2 inches) contains ten compact discs, since it also
includes a two-track CD containing recordings of the 76th Army Band
(featuring PFC Ayler on tenor) playing "Tenderly" and "Leap
Frog" in a rehearsal on September 14th 1960. Nor is all the material
unissued, as we'll see later: tracks 6 to 8 on Disc 1, and tracks
1 to 3 on Disc 2 were previously released on Albert Smiles With
Sunny (In Respect IR 39501), tracks 4 to 9 on Disc 2 on The
Copenhagen Tapes (Ayler Records aylCD-033), tracks 5, 7, 8 on
Disc 2 and tracks 2 to 4 on Disc 5 on Albert Ayler (Philology
W 88). Tracks 2 to 5 on Disc 5 also appear on Albert Ayler Live
In Europe 1964-66 (Landscape LS2-902) and yet again on The
Berlin Concerts (Relyable 001). In addition to the CDs and a
superbly produced 208 page hardback book, the Spirit Box also contains
facsimile reproductions of the Paul Haines pamphlet originally released
with the ESP album Spiritual Unity, a handful of articles
extracted from The Cricket magazine, including Ayler’s
own harrowing "To Mr. Jones - I Had A Vision", a copy of
a flier for a show at Slug's, a handwritten note from Ayler to Paul
Karting, and, wait for it, a photo of Ayler aged 12, complete with
faked ballpoint pen marks to give the impression it was swiped from
someone's wallet. Oh yes, and – fetishism bordering on the kitsch
– a dried dogwood flower. As rumour has it that 15,000 boxes
have been prepared, it's just as well they chose that instead of a
lock of Albert's hair.
The book is a veritable treasure trove of information for Aylerologists.
Val Wilmer's "Spiritual Unity" is an updated and slightly
extended version of the chapter on Ayler from her 1977 indispensable
survey of the free jazz scene "As Serious As Your Life".
Newark NJ Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka, who lost touch with Ayler by
the time the saxophonist released the controversial crossover project
New Grass, contributes a rambling essay entitled "You
Think This Is About You?" Perhaps significant, that, as he ends
up spending more time discussing his Black Arts project than he does
Ayler's late work; "centerless fluff" is how he describes
New Grass, though it's a pretty apt description of Baraka's contribution
itself. Fortunately, Ben Young's "Whence", an essay on the
supposed influences on Ayler's playing, and Marc Chaloin's "Albert
Ayler in Europe: 1959–62" are more informative, especially
the latter, in which Chaloin makes it his business to seek out and
interview Ayler's ex-Army friends and a whole host of French and Scandinavian
musicians who came into contact with the saxophonist prior to his
first recording session under his name. Daniel Caux's recollections
of Ayler's appearance at Saint-Paul-de-Vence is followed by a string
of eyewitness anecdotes, compiled by Ben Young, whose involvement
with the Holy Ghost project at every level has been central.
His eyewitnesses are for the most part Ayler's former playing partners,
including, surprisingly perhaps, Harold Budd, who jammed with Ayler
in California in 1961. One notable omission is Sunny Murray –
one imagines due to the slightly strained relations between him and
the curators of this project – but there are plenty of Murray
anecdotes about Ayler to be found in his Paris
Transatlantic interview. The meat of the book is to be found in
Young's documentation of and commentary on the sessions themselves,
and the collated biographical information on Ayler's various sidemen.
Two appendixes also make for fascinating reading for Ayler enthusiasts:
Carl Woideck's discussion of Ayler's saxophones and mouthpieces in
"Close Encounter with Holy Ghost (and Horn)" and the impressive
"Sightings" sessionography.
 The
three pieces that open Disc 1, recorded for Finnish Radio on June
30th 1962, are a find indeed. They predate what was previously released
as The First Recordings, a trio session in Stockholm with
Torbjörn Hultcrantz and Sune Spångberg, by nearly four
months. Sitting in with a straight ahead, hard swinging guitar quartet
led by Herbert Katz, Ayler delivers beautifully executed and –
for once – well recorded versions of Sonny Rollins' "Sonnymoon
for Two", Gershwin's "Summertime" and, another Ayler
favourite, "On Green Dolphin Street". The brief set provides
ample evidence of the saxophonist's solid technique – a raised
middle finger to those who say the man couldn't play – and of
the influence of Rollins, Coltrane and possibly Eric Dolphy. Whether
Ayler had already heard Dolphy's Prestige albums (including his own
reading of "On Green Dolphin Street") isn't clear, but his
tendency to improvise in keys based on degrees of the scale normally
avoided by blues and bop, notably the second and the sixth, is remarkably
similar to Dolphy's. All the more reason to regret Eric's early death
in 1964, which scuppered plans of a Dolphy / Ayler / Cherry / Peacock
/ Murray dream team quintet that, according to Sunny Murray were in
the offing.
There's no shortage of hyperbole in Holy Ghost's accompanying
book, but Mats Gustafsson's description of "Four", recorded
at a Danish radio session in November 1962 and featuring Ayler sitting
in with the legendary Cecil Taylor trio with Jimmy Lyons on alto and
Murray on drums, as "the missing link" is probably not too
far from the truth. "Historically speaking," writes Young
(who's not immune to a bit of hyperbole himself), "this 23-minute
performance is the first recording from anywhere in the jazz spectrum
of a long-form improvisation with no overt synchronization –
of time, structural harmony, or song." Quite a claim, but, important
though "Four" is as a historical document, it doesn't find
Murray at his best. Especially when compared to his drumming on the
other CT trio recordings made around this time, and to the music which
follows here: the last three tracks on Disc 1 and the first three
on Disc 2 feature Ayler's trio with Murray and bassist Gary Peacock,
and were recorded (in stereo) by Paul Haines at the Cellar Café
on West 91st St New York on June 14th 1964. Five tracks from the first
set were released by ESP as Prophecy, and the entire concert
(including the Prophecy material) surfaced a decade ago as a double
CD Albert Smiles With Sunny on the German In Respect label
in what Ben Young describes as "a nefarious and misleading issue"
sourced from an out-of-phase mono cassette in Murray's possession.
Ayler junkies will no doubt be familiar with the In Respect release,
but the improvement in sound quality on the Revenant version is noteworthy.
Quibbles about ownership and talk of lawsuits should be put aside
– these six tracks are, for this writer at least, the highlight
of Holy Ghost. All three musicians are on awesome form, especially
Peacock, and Young's discussion and analysis of the music is exemplary.
All in all, it's easily on a par with what the trio went on to record
on the ESP classic Spiritual Unity, an album whose subsequent
influence over generations of free improvising musicians – Steve
Lacy, Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann, John Stevens..– cannot
be overstated. One can only regret that Haines wasn't in the Cellar
Café a few months earlier to catch the same group with pianist
Paul Bley and tenor saxophonist John Gilmore.
Two years ago I was contacted by Ayler Records' Jan Ström to
write liners for The Copenhagen Tapes, recordings of the
Ayler / Peacock / Murray / Don Cherry quartet made in Copenhagen's
Montmartre club on September 3rd 1964 and a week later for Danish
radio. It's certainly surprising to see the same music appearing on
a different label so soon after that album's critical success, but
there seems to be no foul play or piracy involved. The duplication
is explained by the fact that Ayler and Revenant each apparently received
permission from different parties representing the Ayler Estate. Revenant
have apparently negotiated with Curtis D. Roundtree, son of Carrie
Roundtree Lucas, who dated Ayler in 1957 and had a son by him in 1958,
while Ström signed a four-year lease deal with Desiree Ayler,
daughter of Ayler's wife Arlene (the two married in 1964). Once more,
it would be nothing short of catastrophic if this messy business ended
up in a sordid protracted court case, as the bone of contention –
the music itself – is such an extraordinary affirmation of the
most noble and uplifting aspects of human creativity. Those who can't
afford to spring for the Spirit Box can at least enjoy the music on
The Copenhagen Tapes, though hi-fi buffs might moan at Per
Ruthström's rather heavy-handed beefing up of Peacock's bass
on the Ayler version (personally I don't mind: it's a minor quibble
compared to the blatant sonic revisionism of ECM's Jimmy Giuffre reissues).
After the Copenhagen session, the Holy Ghost chronology jumps
forward a year and a half. Sadly, no more Ayler recordings from 1965
have been unearthed, though the sessionography mentions some mouth-watering
encounters that took place at Amiri Baraka's loft space at 27 Cooper
Square, including the first recordings of Ayler with his brother Don,
not to mention other luminaries such as Pharoah Sanders, Roswell Rudd
and John Tchicai. Disc 2 finishes off instead with a very rough and
ready recording made at Slugs in February 1966 of a group led by pianist
Burton Greene including Frank Smith on tenor, Steve Tintweiss on bass,
Rashied Ali on drums and, apparently, yodelling ecstatically from
the audience, Leon Thomas. The brutal fade just seconds into Rashied
Ali's solo begs the question as to what happened to the rest of the
recording – what it lacks in hi-fi sophistication it certainly
makes up for in raw energy, and it's also valuable as documentation
of the work of Frank Smith. "The only thing that worked against
Frank was that he looked like an Irish cop," recalls Burton
Greene. "When he walked into Slugs the cats used to say 'Put
your shit away, the Man's here!'"
 While
we wait for someone to root around (under Alice Coltrane's bed, presumably),
find and release the tapes of the Titans Of The Tenor concert at the
Lincoln Center on February 19th 1966 (John Coltrane, Don and Albert
Ayler, Carlos Ward, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Jimmy Garrison,
Rashied Ali and J.C. Moses), discs 3, 4, 5 and the beginning of 6
in the Spirit Box document the Ayler brothers' quintet with Dutch
violinist Michel Samson, which stayed together from April 1966 until
the end of June 1967. Though the rhythm section changed (bassist Clyde
Shy was soon replaced by Ayler's old Army buddy Lewis Worrell and
later Bill Folwell, while the drumstool was occupied by Ronald Shannon
Jackson, Beaver Harris and finally Milford Graves) the repertoire
of the quintet remained relatively stable, and the recordings presented
here, which include two full nights recorded at Cleveland's La Cave
on April 16th and 17th 1966, two concerts from George Wein's touring
Newport Festival, recorded in Berlin and Rotterdam in November 1966,
and the incendiary set recorded at Newport itself the following June,
are a fascinating document of how the music evolved during a period
usually described by Ayler fans as "stable". The April 16th
set was recorded the day after Samson sat in with the band for the
first time – he was in Cleveland at the time to play at the
opening of a furniture store, of all things – which explains
why the band tended to drop out behind his solos; by the time they
recorded at Slugs just two weeks later, the violinist had settled
in and was more familiar with the arrangements. Samson's arrival incidentally
prompted the departure from the band of Charles Tyler, who refused
to share the bandstand with whitey (nothing like a good bit of racism,
eh, Charles? Happily for us Albert didn't subscribe to the same Nation
of Islam bullshit dogma back then). To be honest though, Samson can't
really be described as a jazz violinist – he should be compared
not to the likes of Leroy Jenkins and Billy Bang but rather to Mark
Feldman (check out the classical technique!) – but his tendency
to shadow the Ayler brothers and reinforce the prevailing harmony
was essential for the music's stability. After his departure it's
notable that Ayler sought to retain a sense of harmonic simplicity
and constancy, by recruiting more mainstream pianists such as Cal
Cobbs and Bobby Few, not to mention taking up the bagpipes himself.
The April 17th set on Disc 4 is the only known recording of Ayler
with tenor saxophonist Frank Wright, described by Ben Young as Ayler's
"most renowned disciple", though he was in fact several
months older than Albert. Not conversant with the repertoire, Wright
rides roughshod over the changes (Samson gets out of the firing line
double quick) and takes great pleasure in blowing wild in someone
else's band, just as Ayler himself does on the Burton Greene Slugs
date and later on the Pharoah Sanders session on Disc 6. It's a fun
set, if a little scrappy, and clear proof that despite the so-called
influence, Wright's playing, particularly in the upper registers,
sounds nothing at all like Ayler's. Behind it all bassist Clyde Shy
is true to his name (he eventually changed it to Mutawef Shaheed),
and Ronald Shannon Jackson is forceful but nowhere near as volcanic
an Ayler drummer as Murray before and Graves after him. The monster
driving the Decoding Society forward is still several years away.
By the time George Wein took the Ayler quintet across the pond to
Europe as part of a touring Newport Festival that also included Stan
Getz, Illinois Jacquet, Max Roach and Sonny Rollins (I wonder what
they talked about backstage..), Jackson had moved on and had been
replaced by Beaver Harris, who is unfortunately a little off mic in
the concert recorded on November 3rd in Berlin's Philharmonic Hall
– surely the largest venue Ayler ever performed in? Happily,
bassist Bill Folwell is clearly audible, even if Samson's muscular
and apparently tireless double stops take centre stage. Don Ayler,
who also remembers the Berlin event as a career highlight, is also
on fine form. Four days later, in the less resonant acoustic of Rotterdam's
De Doelen, Harris's contribution is easier to appreciate, though Samson
once more (happy to be back home?) is bursting with energy. Comparing
the Rotterdam set with the three tracks recorded seven months later
after midnight on a rainy June night in Newport Rhode Island is most
illuminating. The only difference is the presence of Milford Graves
behind the kit, but what a difference it makes (no disrespect to Harris).
"We went out there and we BURNED," recalls Graves. "All
those people who were leaving were running back in, and we burned
that night, and we burned and we burned and we burned." The discovery
and release of those tapes is cause for celebration indeed, especially
because they feature a rare and superbly recorded example of Ayler
on soprano sax. In contrast, the mythic performance of the Ayler /
Ayler / Graves / Richard Davis quartet at John Coltrane's funeral
just three weeks later on July 21st 1967 is a letdown. Graves' contributions
are mere background roars, and bassist Davis might well not have been
there. Ayler's wild vocalisations towards the end of the six minute
track are still spine tingling, but, well.. I guess you had to be
there.
The fifth track on Disc 6 is what Young describes as "the fabled
pairing of Ayler and Pharoah Sanders that was to have been released
on Amiri Baraka's label Jihad." Recorded – very well too
– at a political rally at Harlem's Renaissance Ballroom on January
21st 1968, it features Ayler guesting and blowing wild with a group
featuring Sanders, pianist Dave
Burrell, trumpeter Chris Capers, Sirone on bass, Roger Blank on
drums and one or maybe two unknown saxophonists, one on tenor, one
on alto (the jury's still out whether it's not Ayler on alto). It's
certainly curious that, given the fact that the recording was originally
supposed to have been released, and that many of the participating
musicians are alive and well, nobody, as in NOBODY can remember the
names of the other two musicians.. Surely a bit of hardboiled private
dick snooping on the part of Revenant could have unearthed the missing
information? Be that as it may, it's very much Pharoah's gig. Nice
to have it on the shelves, but on perusing that sessionography, Ayler
and Sanders played together on several other occasions, and (I know,
I know, I shouldn't moan, but..) I would have preferred hearing the
two men with Coltrane at the Vanguard in May 1966 instead.
The rest of Disc 6 fast forwards several months and is taken up with
outtakes from the New Grass sessions, kicking off with a
real, hard swingin' 12 bar blues, the only example of the genre in
Ayler's discography apart from an early version of "Billie's
Bounce" in 1962. Eventually dropped from the album, perhaps in
favour of the funkier "Sun Watcher", it is, as Young says,
a veritable "Rosetta Stone in sheep's clothing." The demo
fragments of "New Ghosts" could, on the other hand, have
been dispensed with, and "Thank God for Women", though a
fine example of Ayler's singing, sounds boxy and unpolished. New
Grass has always been the most controversial album in the Ayler
discography and after its release was soon spat on by activists like
Baraka as a sell-out. These raw outtakes give us an idea of what the
album might have sounded like if producer Bob Thiele hadn't recommissioned
arrangements from Bert DeCoteaux and redone Mary Maria Parks' lyrics.
It would, however, have been nice to have some eyewitness testimony
from someone on Impulse's side of the fence to respond to the allegations
of corporate whitewash.
If musically unfinished, at least Disc 6 was well recorded. Disc 7
plunges into murky lo-fi with two live sessions, one from New York
Town Hall (January 11th 1969) featuring a sextet led by Don Ayler
and featuring his brother along with Sam Rivers on tenor, Richard
Johnson on piano, Richard Davis and Ibrahim Wahen on basses and Muhammad
Ali on drums. At least so it says here.. both Aylers are recognisable,
but the rest of the band comes across as nothing more than an apocalyptic
angry blur. The recording is of historical interest, as it documents
Ayler's last appearance with his brother, but the reputation of Donald
Ayler, currently resident at Cleveland's Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare
Center pending a hearing on charges of gross sexual imposition and
sexual battery, could be better helped, one imagines, by Baraka finally
releasing the album he apparently recorded for Jihad. The final four
tracks on Disc 7 were recorded by Steve Tintweiss on a cassette recorder
in a campsite outside Saint-Paul-de-Vence after Ayler's appearance
at the Nuits de la Fondation Maeght on July 27th 1970. These feature
Ayler's last group, with Tintweiss on bass, Call Cobbs on piano and
Allen Blairman on drums, probably with some tambourine and handclapping
from Parks, but apart from some astounding upper register blowing
from Ayler, add little to the currently available and much better
sounding reissues of the Maeght gigs. On the second (untitled) track
Cobbs' cheesy cocktail piano is mercifully cut short in its prime
by Tintweiss' hitting the pause button, and when the music returns
Ayler is in full flight. It's a shame that Holy Ghost has
to end with a roughly recorded jam session. In its own way it's as
inconclusive and unsatisfying as the story surrounding Ayler's own
death several months later.
Wait a minute? End? We're only on disc 7, right? Right, but the last
two CDs two contain no music at all. Instead they're given over to
interviews with the saxophonist, two with Danish journalist Birger
Jørgensen, (one from December 1964, another from November 1966),
and two recorded during Ayler's stay in the south of France, one for
Swing Journal with Kiyoshi Koyama and another two days later
for French radio with Daniel and Jacqueline Caux. Disc 9 closes with
a brief extract from an interview with Don and Mocqui Cherry. Though
it's nice to hear Ayler's voice, none of the interviews really imparts
any information of monumental significance, and his strange biblical
ranting in the 1966 is as unsettling as his tract in The Cricket.
All could quite easily have been transcribed – the text of the
Caux interview has after all been around for some time – cleaned
up and included either in the book or on one single disc in .pdf format
(it works just fine for Bernhard Günter's trente oiseaux releases),
with the audio versions as mp3 files. As for the voyeuristic soundbites
of Ayler negotiating a gig over the phone, or haggling with airport
customs officers over baggage (included – horreurs
– as a ghost track).. they should have been left in the bottom
of the box along with the dried flowers.
 To
summarise in two words: mixed feelings. While the discovery of hitherto
unreleased Ayler material as good as the Helsinki 1962 and Newport
1967 sets is certainly cause for celebration, one wonders whether
Revenant's energies might not have been better spent burying the hatchet
and working with Bernard Stollman on a definitive and correctly mastered
box set of Ayler's ESP recordings. Ayler may be gone, but many other
musicians who recorded for Stollman's label in the 1960s and who have
seen their work reappear time and again without seeing a penny in
remuneration are still around, and growing old. More than three quarters
of all the extant recordings of Albert Ayler appeared in shoddily
packaged, badly recorded and at best legally dubious issues and reissues,
and there is as much work to be done remastering the existing master
recordings of landmark albums like Spiritual Unity, New
York Eye and Ear Control and Bells as there is unearthing
new recordings of even worse sound quality. If there is anything to
be dug up, it should be the real story, the true story of Ayler's
death, but I imagine the Spirit Box will have to sit on my shelves
and gather dust for many moons before we ever find out what really
happened.—DW (black & white photos by Val Wilmer)
Akira
Rabelais
SPELLEWAUERYNSHERDE
Samadhi Sound ss003
In case you're wondering how that title should
be pronounced, try "spell wavering shard" – Texas-born
laptop whizkid Akira Rabelais' fondness for Middle English is also
apparent in the titles of the album's seven tracks, each of which
originates in definitions culled from the Oxford English Dictionary,
which he describes as one of his favourite books. "1382 Wyclif.
Gen. ii.7" (track one) refers to the year in which John Wyclif,
who was responsible for the first complete version of both Old and
New Testament in English, was excommunicated, and its full title incorporates
a quotation from the Book of Genesis. The "Glower" of track
two (as printed on the CD sleeve: "1390 Glower Conf. II.20")
should in fact be "Gower", referring as it does to the poet
John Gower, whose Confessio Amantis was one of the first
epic poems in Middle English. "Promp. Parv." (track three,
"1440 Promp. Parv. 518/20) is the standard abbreviation for Promptorium
parvulorum sive clericorum, lexicon Anglo-latinum princeps, one
of the first important Latin / English lexicons dating from, yes,
1440. 1483 (track four, "1483 Caxton Golden Leg. 208b/2")
was the year printer William Caxton published the first English version
of Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend or The Lives of
the Saints. 1559 was the year of publication of William Cuningham's
The Cosmographical Glasse, a treatise on mathematical methods
for depicting the universe, hence "1559 W. Cuningham Cosmogr.
Glasse 125". After the sixth track, which revels in the name
"(Gorgeous curves lovely fragments labyrinthed on occasions entwined
charms, a few stories at any longer swrn to gathered from a guileless
angel and the hilt edges of old hearts, if they do in the guilt of
deep despondency)" – actually a pretty good description
of what goes on in the piece –, the final "1671 Milton
Samson 1122" refers to Milton's Samson Agonistes, published
in 1671 in a volume also containing the four books of Paradise
Regain'd. The quotation "add thy Spear / A Weavers beam,
and seven-times-folded shield" indeed comes from line 1122.
Intrigued? Wait until you visit Akira Rabelais' wonderful website
(go to: akirarabelais.com), a veritable treasure trove of similar
semantic puzzles, including sizeable extracts from works by Galway
Kinnell, Petronius Arbiter, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Bruno Schulz, Jorge Luis Borges, Shinmen Musashi and, of course, a
couple of chapters by the original Rabelais, François (1483
– 1553). In an introductory commentary on this album available
for consultation on the Samadhi Sound website, his younger American
namesake writes: "It's interesting how words and meaning evolve
over time. It's like a secret natural history of human thought."
The same could be said of Rabelais' work both as a poet, musician
and software designer – his Argeïphontes Lyre has been
enthusiastically taken up by several notable figures in the electronica
world, including Robin Rimbaud and Terre Thaemlitz. While on Eisoptrophobia
(2001), Rabelais used his self-designed filters to rework piano
music, and ...benediction, draw two years later was sourced
in his electric guitar, the raw material here is a collection of forlorn,
windswept archive recordings of a cappella Icelandic folk
music he came across in a closet in Valencia CA. "I didn't want
to abstract it so much that it lost its essential quality," wrote
Rabelais of the source material: "I didn't want to damage the
fabric of the original language, I wanted to set it, cast it in a
certain light." The resulting music is quite extraordinary: a
curious and compelling mixture of the medieval and the modern, which,
as one critic puts it rather memorably, "despite its resonating
sadness [..] grows on you like moss."
On the opening track a single vocal line slips gently into a kind
of canonic imitation of itself as a cloud of reverberant resonance
drifts in from afar. It's alarmingly simple and direct, yet headscratchingly
complex at the same time – try humming along and see if you
can manage it. "1390 Glower Conf. II. 20" is, at least at
the outset, more straightforward, but Rabelais' filters work in mysterious
ways, giving the illusion that time is slowing down, and erasing memory
along the way. This curious and unnerving sensation continues in the
third track "1440 Promp. Parv. 518/20", and on the centrepiece
of the album, the 21-minute "1483 Caxton Golden Leg. 208b/2",
time seems to grind to a halt altogether, the voices gathering into
an eerie microtonal cloud that recalls the Ligeti choral music ("Requiem"
and "Lux Aeterna") used to such memorable effect in 2001
– and Rabelais' music is every bit as mysterious and beautiful
as Kubrick's inscrutable black obelisk. After this, the simplicity
of the brief (44 second) "1559 W. Cuningham Cosmogr. Glasse 125"
is a masterly touch, clearing the air perfectly for track six, the
most melodically and harmonically daring of Rabelais' "seven
sisters", in which his treatments dimple the surface of the music
with wider, more expressive intervals. The closing "1671 Milton
Samson 1122", apart from a brief reprise of the song that had
featured in track two (transposed a semitone down, and not the same
recording, apparently), floats inside the reverb cloud.
"I try to connect to something ineffable and then transmit it
in some way," writes Akira Rabelais. As his titles and texts
reference a period of human history when developments in human thought
and language were inextricably linked with liturgical practice, it's
not surprising perhaps to find a Russian icon adorning the CD cover,
though in Lia Nalbantidou's photograph – which predates the
album and which was specifically selected for it by Samadhi Sound's
David Sylvian – it hangs above dowdy wallpaper in a room full
of drab furniture. "Organic is what I go for," said Rabelais
in an earlier interview. "I don't like sanitized, too-clean sound;
it doesn't seem real to me." Real or imaginary, clear or confusing,
mundane or ethereal, ancient nightmare or modern dream, Spellwauerynsherde
is one of the most original and beautiful musical works of recent
times.—DW
Noël Akchoté
ADULT GUITAR
Blue Chopsticks BC13
SONNY II
Winter & Winter Music Edition 910 108-2
 Though
it's perhaps a bit early to talk about a career retrospective when
it comes to French guitarist Noël Akchoté – born
in 1968 – it's a fact that his recording career began 21 years
ago with a rough and ready demo made with several unknown (thankfully)
musicians in the sleazy HBS rehearsal studios about five minutes walk
along the street from where I'm writing this, on the rue des Petites
Ecuries in Paris. "First demo" is one of twenty tracks handpicked
by Blue Chopsticks' David Grubbs from ten hours of archive recordings.
Eight of them were recorded by the guitarist in his adopted home town
of Vienna, where he moved after getting married to photographer Magda
Blaszczuk (whose work adorns the CD's back cover); with the exception
of "Framus Swing 1917", which finds Akchoté at his
most Baileyesque, alternating resonant harmonics and tight clusters
of notes, these are all standards, ranging from a straight and touching
reading of Bechet's "Petite Fleur" to a delightfully self-destructing
"Woody 'n You", a rough, meaty take on Paul Chambers' "Whims
of Chambers" and a splendidly concise version of Cole Porter's
"I Love You", in which Akchoté allows himself to
get tangled up in the chromatic curves of the melody, revealing a
subtle and distinctly musical sense of humour.
Like the guitarists he's had the great good fortune to play and record
with, including Derek Bailey, Fred Frith, Marc Ribot and Eugene Chadbourne,
Akchoté's hopelessly head over heels in love with the guitar,
meaning the sound of guitar, all of it, not just the notes
it produces but its extraneous twangs, tweaks, buzzes and crackles.
The live tracks from Marseille in 1998 ("Catalogue 67",
"Modèle 63" and "Antenne 62") and Nantes
2000 ("Montée 74") are tantalising glimpses of the
world he explored in the trilogy of albums recorded between 1999 and
2001 and released on his (now defunct? if not, certainly damn quiet)
Rectangle label, Alike Joseph, Simple Joseph and
Perpetual Joseph. Akchoté's idea of laying the guitar
flat is closer to Hendrix's – prostrate victim on the ground
awaiting lighter fuel – than Keith Rowe's patient etherized
upon a table, and any resemblances to the world of eai / lowercase
are superficial (play back to back with Rowe's Harsh and
listen to the difference). "Numéro 122" was recorded
live in 2001 by the indefatigable Jean-Marc Foussat (a raid into whose
archives would yield literally hundreds of hours of music recorded
live in the French capital since the glory days of the early 1980s)
at L'Atmosphère in Paris. For those of you who are –
mercifully – unfamiliar with the venue, it's about the size
of three phone boxes, hence the very prominent audience noise, though
Akchoté seems to be doing his best to send the clientele running
out of the café and headlong into the nearby canal.
The set also includes a 1989 home recording on a 4 track Tascam of
Ornette's "Macho Woman" (Noël becoming a one man Prime
Time Band, Tacuma, Nix and Ellerbee rock 'n' rolled into one), a rather
forlorn droopy ballad culled from a Didier Levallet masterclass, a
26 second snatch of "Autumn Leaves" prefaced by Dave Liebman
telling the guitarist to "just do it, don't worry about what
it is," a New Wave-inflected soundtrack called "L'arrivée
des", and the spiky, spunky "Profile Bas", recorded
in Toby Robinson's Moat Studios in London during the 1997 sessions
that yielded My Chelsea, Akchoté's album with Lol Coxhill and
Phil Minton. If your French isn't quite up to understanding the nuances
of the extract of an interview Akchoté conducted in 1996 with
legendary drummer Jacques Thollot (on whose Nato comeback Tenga
Niña he also plays), I wouldn't worry about it: Noël
does most of the talking, and as anyone can verify who's traded fours
with him in his capacity as a journalist – he writes for the
Austrian mag Skug – he's quite a talker, Thollot's contribution
consisting of filling up a glass with something, grunting a little
and finally coming out with a not exactly earthshakingly profound
aphorism like "there are fewer limitations these days" (this
in response to a remark from Akchoté to the effect that there's
no difference between Louis Armstrong and Don Cherry). Amusing, but
hardly essential. But coming from a man who once spoke of his desire
to create disposable albums – play once and throw away –
in character nevertheless.
 Sonny
II is the latest in a string of Akchoté releases on the
Winter & Winter label, and once more he takes full advantage of
W&W's fondness for quality packaging (quite a contrast from the
flimsy all white sleeves of the old Rectangle LPs, eh?) to incorporate
some beautiful archive (1937 – 42) photography by Dorothea Lange,
and a choice quotation from the Pensées of Pascal
("Let no one tell me that I have said nothing new.. I will also
be content to hear that I used words employed before.") Quite
what it all has to do with the life and work of Warren "Sonny"
Sharrock isn't immediately clear, but musically at least Sonny
II is about as direct and affectionate a homage as you're likely
to get to the man Akchoté describes as "the only free
jazz guitarist". In addition to nine Sharrock originals, including
all four that appeared on Sharrock's legendary 1969 Black Woman
album (plus "Bialero", an arrangement of a traditional French
folk song from the Auvergne), there's his wife Linda's "Soon"
(memorably performed on the BYG Actuel classic Monkey Pockie Boo),
along with five Akchoté compositions, and music by Daniel Humair,
Donovan Leitch and the Hague / Horwitt chestnut "Young and Foolish,"
apparently recorded in a bar in front of a public completely oblivious
to the fact.
Though he's got the crazed strumming down to a tee, Akchoté
is actually at his most Sharrockish on his own "Number one free".
There's also a rough, tough reading of Sharrock's "Dick Dogs",
whose frantic scrabble to the finishing line is perfectly in character
with Sharrock's own gnarly recordings of the song. (If you'll allow
me the luxury of an anecdote by way of digression, a story told me
by Sharrock's keyboard player during the 1980s, Mitch Rothschild:
in rehearsal, Mitch was surprised to hear Sonny jamming on and around
F natural in a piece that vamps solidly in E major. When the band
paused to take a breath, he said: "Sharrock what you doing?"
"Harmolodics, man," came the reply..) Elsewhere,
multi-tracking himself and soloing over his own energetic rhythm,
Akchoté gives a choppy reading of Leitch's "There is a
Mountain", which Sharrock aficionados will recognise as the opening
cut from the Herbie Mann Windows Opened album. Sharrock's
stint in the otherwise conservative and distinctly commercially-minded
Mann's band is one of jazz's great mismatches – the guitarist's
utterly insane solo in "Hold On I'm Comin'" on Memphis
Underground has to be one of the most wildly incongruous yet
utterly thrilling moments in recorded music history – but it's
the kind of extreme juxtaposition of styles and aesthetics that Akchoté
goes out of his way to explore. Who else in the rarefied stick-up-the-ass
world of improvised music would dare to release a piece of pop fluff
like æ's Love Your Smile? (the answer to that question
is probably Oren Ambarchi, but never mind, you get the point). The
closing "Long Tale" finds the guitarist fingerpicking his
way gently through a cloud of fuzzy distortion into a clear blue F
major sky. More Fahey than Sharrock, it fades out just when it seems
to be moving away into pastures new, an enigmatic but curiously haunting
end to an exquisitely paced and poised album.—DW
Roel Meelkop
onkyo ok
cmr 5
John Grzinich
INTIMATIONS
cmr 7
 The
six tracks on onkyo ok by Dutch sound artist Roel Meelkop
(THU20, Kapotte Muziek, GOEM..) were sourced in field recordings he
made with Hitoko Sakai and Frans de Waard during a Japanese tour in
2001. As ever, that world "field" is misleading –
unlike Kyoshi Mizutani's exquisite Yokosawa-iri,
which launched New Zealand-based Richard Francis' CMR label has a
couple of years ago, Meelkop's sonic raw material is predominantly,
though not exclusively, urban in origin. Meelkop is not the first
Western sound artist to be seduced by infernal clatter of the slot
machine (Jonathan Coleclough, Janek Schaefer and Bernhard Gal have
been too), but his pachinko parlour processing is more abstract and
complex, with filters and effects teasing out subtle ghostly frequency
strata. Though obviously drawn to the acoustics of the teeming, information-overloaded
media-saturated Japan we all think we knows, Meelkop also documents
the sound world outside the city, where the blabber and smoke of human
life is replaced by the bleak cawing of crows in a windswept field.
The final track's draughty rumbles – rolling thunder, an advancing
subway train? inside or outside? urban or rural? – are progressively
and disconcertingly intercut with snatches of conversation until the
roaring suddenly ceases just before the six minute mark, leaving us
adrift on what sounds like a desolate station platform, just like
the discarded empty cigarette packets that adorn the CD insert.
 Where
Meelkop keeps the secrets of his locations and his processes very
much to himself, the long essay accompanying John Grzinich's Intimations
goes into a little (though not much) detail about how some of the
source recordings of a grand piano were recorded in an unheated and
unlit chapel. But it's a long way from the raw recordings of attackless
piano clusters, birdsong and footsteps to the dense, rich tapestry
of sound that Grzinich weaves from them. Like his friend and occasional
collaborators Seth Nehil and Michael Northam, Grzinich works slowly,
building a labyrinth so irresistibly beautiful (the end of "Kinetic
Sense") we walk inside ("Sinking Tides") without a
second thought. "Lying in complete darkness with the locus of
a stereo sound field positioned in the direct center of the head,
the music sinks in deeply to saturate the senses," he writes.
"In time the body settles into a stasis somewhere between being
awake and asleep. Hearing takes over in its totality as touch, taste
smell and sight manifest through a complete 'listening' body. A conscious
being, immobilized in a quantum reality, is left without doubt as
to the singular inseparable relation of time and space." It's
the kind of writing that will have the Ben Watsons of this world reaching
for their well-thumbed copies of Adorno, but if you ain't tried it,
don't knock it. Whether or not you consider such so-called deep listening
as some trippy, hippy cop-out, the fact remains that the only way
to engage with music such as this – not to mention much latter-day
sound art and electro acoustic improvisation – is by getting
inside the sound, either by clamping a set of headphones on (a shame
in this case, as Grzinich's sounds need space to breathe) or by finding
a time and place where the sensory stimuli of the rest of the world
can be filtered out as far as possible. If approached in the wrong
frame of mind, the slow, shifting drones of "Sun in hand, stone
in water" would likely as not come over as mere soporific ambient
fluff, but pay attention and you'll find they reveal a sense of timing
and structure as impressive and moving as Eliane Radigue's.—DW
In
Concert: Keiji Haino
Fylkingen, Stockholm (Sweden) 8th August
 A
silent, dark room with three dimmed lights, nothing in particular
to focus on, really – a sparse environment like the set of
a Beckett play. A small Japanese man, dressed from head to toe in
black, creeps into the hall like a possessed Artaud figure, banging
a wooden log hard on the ground. It’s an introduction to Keiji
Haino's take on the notion of ma – the empty spaces
or electric silences between the sounds – one of the cornerstones
of the complex philosophy behind Haino's work, though the audience
was obviously more concerned with the sound itself and the magic
surrounding the theatrical spectacle. Multi-instrumentalist Haino,
who claims to be able to play more than 30 instruments, from traditional
Japanese instruments to oscillators, is, after all, a key figure
in new music, maybe even a one-man avant-garde. In Stockholm he
used his many talents to maximum effect, moving between a wide variety
of expressions, tempting the listeners in with lovely, inviting
lullabies and then shaking them awake with a display of ultra-rapid
string bending, black-guru-beast evoking an intense, distorted,
psychedelic landscape. Maybe the oddest occurrence was his occasional
use of a drum machine, one of those models produced during the 1990s
complete with terrible, cheesy sound. Despite its limitations Haino
succeeds in using this plastic, dated machine to build some impressive
abstract beats, and when he joins in singing it actually gets pretty
catchy, like some futuristic pub music for demented Arts students.
Haino's sound sculptures are abstract for much of the time, but
always honestly and rewardingly reference rock. Apart from his own
compositions the concert included covers of chestnuts such as “Satisfaction”
and “Purple Haze”, but Haino certainly didn't interpret
them in a traditional manner, instead letting his own creativity
reign. Long-gone country blues legend Blind Lemon Jefferson was
also on the menu, with Haino performing a dignified and respectful
selection of his work, all the while proving how much he values
originality when it comes to artistic expression. His take on “Satisfaction”
is over the top in its intensity, with spastic guitar playing that
transcends any Western concept of possible structure. Upon entering
Haino's music the listener is liberated from consciousness and steps
out of time. When he returns to his more fragile, melodic pieces
we get to hear Haino's incredibly beautiful, clean voice –
no trace of cigarettes, booze or the United States of America. Instead
a concept of Beauty more concerned with the Beast, Xenakis's “Persepolis”
meets Hendrix in the spirit of Artaud. The Audience sits silently
– polite, well behaved and remarkably patient. Only a few
people leave the battlefield to recover, in silence.—KW
(photo by Marten Sahlen)
Ran Slavin / Ran Slavin
PRODUCT
Crónica 009-2004
@c
V3
Crónica 010-2004
o.blaat
TWO NOVELS: GAZE / IN THE COCHLEA
Crónica 012-2004
Björgúlfsson
/ Pimmon / Thorsson
STILL IMPORTANT SOMEKIND NOT NORMALLY SEEN (ALWAYS NOT UNFINISHED)
Crónica 014-2004
 Crónica
's "Product" series was launched last year, the idea being
(not a terrifically original one at that) to juxtapose works by two
different artists on the same disc. The first outing featured work
by Sumugan Sivanesan and Duran Vazquez. For some inexplicable reason,
for the second chapter of the saga the good folks at Crónica
have invited Israeli sound artist Ran Slavin to share the CD with
himself. The disc contains two works, "Tropical Agent",
a nine-movement composition, and "Ears In Water", separated
by thirty seconds of "Product Silence". There's something
smooth and seductive about Slavin's work, which manages obliquely
to reference ambient techno – the terraced mix, the nearly regular
click backbeat, the lush string carpet (check out "Search for
Compassion") – without ever jumping across the fence into
em:t territory. His samples are exquisitely selected and skilfully
combined (I especially like the snatch of the Brahms Violin Concerto
that drifts in and out of "Silent Siren") and it's all as
sleek, streamlined and suggestive as the accompanying photography
by Jewboy Co. The only reservation, if it is one, is that "Ears
in Water" isn't all that different from "Tropical Agent".
A little frostier, perhaps, especially the treated vocals of Lin Chazolin
Dovrat on "Girl In Water" but just as finely tuned and well-crafted.
 @c (try
Googling that one and you won't get very far.. go to at-c.org instead)
is the duo Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais, and v3 is,
as you might guess, their third album. Or perhaps the "3"
refers to the fact that these nine tracks were sourced from three
different performances in Palmela, London and Huddersfield, in which
the duo was joined by Manuel Mota, João Hora, Vitor Joaquim,
Andy Gangadeen and video artist Lia – for details of who played
what where go to cronicaelectronica.org. It's an odd mixture of laptop
electronica (think early Pan Sonic, when they used to have that "a"
in the middle of their name) and lowercase improv. Not unsuccessful
but rather subject to the kind of concept-heavy information overload
that's dogged previous Crónica releases. The Quicktime movie
(Lia's v3/G.S.I.L.XXIX) is fun though.
 There's
a Quicktime movie on Two Novels too, an evocative hand-held
camera night ride on the BMT Jamaica elevated subway. Brooklyn-based
o.blaat, real name Keiko Uenishi, is best known for her interactive
audio environments (including the reasonably self-explanatory "beat
piece (with Ping-Pong game)" and "audio coat check")
but has laptopped her way throughout North America and Europe in the
company of, to name but a few, Kaffe Matthews, Toshio Kajiwara, DJ
Olive, Aki Onda, Akio Mokuno, Ikue Mori and Eyvind Kang. These seven
make cameo appearances in the nine-movement "Gaze", a varied
and inventive survey of the electronica landscape, from field recordings
to the cut'n'splice of "egg salad sandwich" (as chopped
up and scrambled as its title suggests), from de rigueur crackles
and crunches to booming drones and explosions of vicious noise. All
very listenable, even if it is hard to detect Uenishi's own personal
signature. That said, stylistic plurality has long been a hallmark
of the so-called Downtown scene; Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins and Marina
Rosenfeld are just as eclectic. "In the Cochlea", the second
so-called novel, is, as its title suggests, more intimate. In fact,
it's best appreciated on headphones, though if you think that means
you're in for nice long stretch of onkyo pianissimo, you haven't heard
"eight-o" yet, heh heh. Though there are plenty examples
of par-for-the-course low-volume whispers, crackles and whooses ("miminohome"),
Uneishi does come up with some real and very beautiful surprises.
"nightvision" is particularly haunting. Like the video.
 Björgúlfsson
/ Pimmon / Thorsson sounds like a bit of a mouthful, and so does the
title of their album Still Important Somekind Not Normally Seen
(Always Not Unfinished). Heimir Björgúlfsson and
Helgi Thorsson, formerly of the group Stilluppsteypa (whatever happened
to Stilluppsteypa?) teamed up with Australia's Paul Gough, aka Pimmon
(whatever happened to Pimmon?) for a couple of live dates at De Melkfabriek
in Den Bosch (Netherlands) on October 5th and 6th 2002, the recordings
of which were subsequently reconfigured and mixed a couple of months
later by Main's Robert Hampson in his Thirst studios. Not that the
result sounds anything like Main, though. It's a strange Cageian soup
kitchen of an album, as colourful and confusing as the lollipops,
stripy ties and drooling tigers of Thorsson's artwork, and similarly
haunting. Track seven has been locked on repeat play here for the
past half hour and it's still grooving. We might know where these
characters are coming from, but it's hard to figure out where they're
heading. Tag along for the ride, though. One thing is for sure: "when
in Den Bosch, Björgúlfsson / Pimmon / Thorsson ALWAYS
stay at the Golden Tulip." It says here. So now you know.—DW
Sam Rivers / Adam Rudolph
/ Harris Eisenstadt
VISTA
Meta 009
It recently came to light that saxophonist
/ flautist / pianist Sam Rivers was born not in 1930, as has often
been stated, but seven years earlier. Which means he was
a sprightly 80-year-old when this fabulous session was cut in September
2003. Now I doubt whether many 80 year olds of my acquaintance could
even summon forth a squeak from a tenor saxophone, but Rivers not
only knows how to blow, he blows the bloody thing way up into Arthur
Doyle country, i.e. the stratosphere. Even overlooking the Elliott
Carter factor, Vista is an extraordinary album documenting
the encounter between the man who once famously said “I listened
to everyone I could to make sure I didn’t sound like any of
them” (one of my all time favourite quotations, that) and not
one but two power percussionists, in the form of Adam Rudolph
and Harris Eisenstadt. Rivers fans may moan that their man has been
somewhat overlooked in recent times, now that once obscure figures
of free jazz history have been picked up, dusted off and given a bit
of long overdue attention. Too far out to swing with Miles but too
technically proficient to be claimed as an authentic wild man (à
la Frank Wright, Arthur Doyle), and seemingly untouched –
though most definitely not uninvolved – by the political turmoil
of the times, Rivers, like that other great loner original Steve Lacy,
continued to tend to his own isolated yet fertile patch of land throughout
the 70s and 80s. Though perhaps best known for his tenor work, the
opening “Susurration” and the later “Plumaseria”
are timely reminders that he is arguably the best flute player since
Eric Dolphy, with a strong tone throughout the entire register of
the instrument. His soprano playing’s pretty jawdropping too.
Rudolph and Eisenstadt complement each other magnificently and accompany
Rivers to perfection throughout. Listen to how the soprano sax snake
wiggles on “Motivity” are picked up and developed on the
unpitched percussion, and how Rivers takes off when Eisenstadt suddenly
starts swinging furiously. An even more spectacular groove kicks in
towards the end of “Plumaseria”, on which, with no bass
to anchor the music and no piano to thicken the stew (shame though
there isn’t an example here of Sam’s own terse, muscular
piano playing), Rivers’ working methods are clearly audible.
Like Lacy, he’s a bloodhound of a horn player, pursuing musical
material, be it a melodic cell or a mere interval, relentlessly across
the landscape until he’s able to corner it and rip it to pieces.
It’s a thrilling ride, and I look forward to the next chapter;
damn it, if the Queen Mum could clock up the century, I’m sure
Sam Rivers can carry on blowing us all away until his 120th –
or 127th – birthday.—DW
Ellery Eskelin
FORMS
hatOLOGY 592
Forms, tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin's
second disc as a leader, recorded back in 1990 for Open Minds with
bassist Drew Gress and drummer Phil Haynes, is now seeing the light
of day again as the latest in a string of releases for HatOLOGY. The
track titles are as bare and self-explanatory as the album title:
“Blues”, “In Three”, “Ballad”,
“Latin” and, after two standards, Ellington’s “Fleurette
Africaine” and Gillespie’s “Bebop”, a closing
original "Vignettes". Given the nature of these pieces,
it would be easy to dismiss them in advance as dry formal exercises
primarily of interest for how they anticipate Eskelin's subsequent
explorations. But not to worry: this band is hot, and Eskelin, Gress
and Haynes just cut loose when the tape starts rolling. A blindfold-tested
listener might well mistake it for something along the lines of Joe
Henderson’s State of the Tenor recordings. It’s
that good.
Given the constant stream of new releases in the jazz market, many
may wonder whether revisiting a fourteen-year-old session is worth
the trouble. Well, despite how far Coltrane traveled into Interstellar
Space, I still gravitate back to Giant Steps (despite
Tommy Flanagan’s flailing around on the title track). Eskelin’s
originals on Forms, like Coltrane’s on Giant Steps,
have surprisingly catchy heads and feature interesting alternative
harmonic structures for improvisation. They haven't subsequently turned
up in the repertoire of Eskelin's other amalgamations either, though
“Vignettes” provides a tantalizing early view of the compositional
style that has characterized his subsequent work. The standards meanwhile
provide interesting interpretations without overtly playing the “tradition”
card. The only downside to this release is that it doesn’t include
the trio’s only other recording, the long out-of-print Setting
the Standard. But even so it's another fascinating and highly
enjoyable glimpse of Ellery Eskelin's music.—SG
Gary Windo
ANGLO AMERICAN
Cuneiform Rune 189
This fourteen-track compilation, lovingly
assembled by Michael King as was the earlier His Masters Bones,
documents the work of tenor saxophonist Gary Windo from 1971 in London
with his early Symbiosis sextet – the dream line-up of Windo,
Mongezi Feza on trumpet, Nick Evans on trombone, Steve Florence on
guitar, Roy Babbington on bass and Robert Wyatt on drums – to
1981 in New York, where he played with the Carla Bley Band and NRBQ
(Windo's last gig before his untimely death in 1992 was with NRBQ).
Anglo-American is the title of a song written by Gary's partner
Pam, suffering from homesickness for Blighty after following the saxophonist
across the big pond, but also a good name for the album as a whole:
the contrast between the sprawling free jazz jams of the Soft Machine
/ Brotherhood of Breath personnel and the dry, tight rhythm section
of Windo's US quartet (also the Carla Bley Band’s: Steve Swallow
on bass and D. Sharpe on drums) is clear. Windo’s playing is
impressive throughout, from the gritty blowouts of “Carmus”
and “Spiderman”, recorded with Ron Mathewson, Dave MacCrae
and Wyatt in 1973 to the punchy cocktail jazz of “Baxter”.
This and the penultimate “Lassie Breaks Out”, culled from
the Hal Willner-produced 1981 outing on Europa Records, Dogface,
are at one and the same time perfect illustrations of Windo’s
strengths and possible explanations for his music being unfairly neglected
since his death: he tapped into that rich source of energy that bursts
forth when hard honking rhythm’n’blues goes over the edge
into free screaming, but his work was often dismissed out of hand
due to its zany sense of humour. Like the magnificent Lol Coxhill
compilation Spectral Soprano that came out on Emanem back
in 2002, Anglo-American is good solid proof that free music
can also be great fun to play and listen to.—DW
Noel Mcghie And Space Spies
TRAPEZE
Esperance / Jazz’in
In some ways, it might be surprising for the
connoisseur of expatriate jazz to hear Trapeze, the only
LP (to my knowledge) led by drummer Noel McGhie, the Jamaica-born
percussionist who occupied that chair in Steve Lacy’s European
quintet of the early 70s. McGhie drove those classic Lacy (not to
mention Mal Waldron and Clifford Thornton) sides on America, Victor
and other labels, and was also in at least one incarnation of Alan
Silva’s Celestrial Communications Orchestra. But Trapeze
is a highly creative excursion into funky jazz-R&B fusion,
which might seem like a bit of an anomaly unless one considers the
fact that McGhie (and his successor in the Lacy group, Oliver Johnson)
displayed a fairly overt funk in his contributions to the Lacy band,
driving such off-kilter compositions as “Jump for Victor”
(cf. Mal Waldron with the Steve Lacy Quintet, America 6124)
with not only pulse but backbeats and breaks galore. McGhie’s
drumming was a major contributor to the ever-present tension between
structure and freedom in that context.
Originally recorded in 1975 for the rather obscure French label Disques
Esperance, which also released a pair of uncommon "spiritual"
jazz sides by trumpeter Ray Stephen Oche, McGhie is joined by Georges
Edouard Nouel (electric piano), Louis Wavier (electric bass), Brazilian
saxophonist George Joao and Japanese trumpeter Itaru Oki, who would
later become somewhat of a staple in the FMP studios. Far from being
typical funk, the head arrangements, all composed by McGhie, offer
all the subtle harmonic nuance of early 70s Keith Tippett or Soft
Machine, or for that matter, any of the complex modal groovers that
Lee Morgan was recording later in his career (check Oki’s tone
on “Ubet,” introduced by a wonderfully involved percussion
solo). The title track, after a somewhat hesitant and disorganized
introduction, settles into a stately horn arrangement over a wonderfully
infectious Mike Ratledge-esque piano riff. Like the disparities between
McGhie’s free-time funk and the Monkish, singsongy heads of
Lacy’s compositions, there is a similar off-kilter nature present
between the movement of these pieces and the rhythms that drive them
– until one realizes that a real Afro-European synthesis just
might have been achieved.—CA
Mario Pavone
BOOM
Playscape PSR#J091003
Boom features bassist Pavone and his regular
accomplice, pianist Peter Madsen, plus the ubiquitous Tony Malaby
and Matt Wilson, who’ve become first-call players for this kind
of inside/out gig. The disc opens quietly with “Julian”,
which sports a slinky odd-metered groove but comes off as fragile,
almost fearful – full of spiderweb piano and whistles and ghostly
murmurs. (There’s a slight – but violent – return
to this piece later on, a 20-second soundbite called “Po”.)
The rest of the album is punchier stuff, mostly – it doesn’t
so much swing as stomp. Pavone is dark and pungent and a bit ominous,
preferring knotty, assymetrical lines to anything resembling walking
bass. Surprisingly averse to giving himself solos, he instead throws
a lot of the weight on the underrated Madsen (who makes sure Monk
is on the agenda), and the polymorphous, almost monstrously adept
Malaby (who does the same for Ornette). Pavone’s originals are
a well-turned lot, but the knockout performance is a scorching cover
of “Bad Birdie”, one of two previously unrecorded Thomas
Chapin tunes included in the program. (Well, that's what it says here:
wasn't "Bad Birdie" on Chapin's Menagerie Dreams?) I’m
not sure the rest of the album quite lives up to that track, but no
matter: it’s still plenty tasty.—ND
IMPROV
Various Artists
XING-WU
Xing-wu XWU5001CD
Xing-wu is a new experimental-music label from Malaysia – the
name means “insight”. They’re off to a cracking
start with their first release, a two-disc compilation of tracks by
a shrewdly chosen cast of international contributors and a sprinkling
of Malaysian musicians, all of the latter new names to me. The emphasis
is on solo work, drawn from a range of interrelated musics: e.a.i./lowercase
improv, electroacoustic composition and collage, environmental recordings
– plus a hair-raising track from Reynols that sticks out like
a sore thumb (but so what). What links there are between the tracks
have to do with the musicians’ interest in the sonic equivalent
of “found objects”, whether the sound-source is a dobro
(Tetuzi Akiyama), a patch of script lichen (Loren Chasse), a flock
of grackles (Jeph Jerman), a gutted piano (Andrea Neumann), a deserted
train station (Eric La Casa, Jean-Luc Guionnet and PT’s own
Dan Warburton). It’s often hard to tell the difference between
human and natural sources: Yannick Dauby’s “Formless Walking”
and Lee Kwang’s “Stormy Weather”, for instance,
seem to be studio manipulations of environmental recordings, but that’s
just a guess. In this context the occasional plunderphonic collage
seems as comfortingly humane and old-fashioned as a quilt, offering
a good old blast of sonic referentiality (quotation!): indeed, Volcano
the Bear’s handsome “Clayslaps” contains more identifiable
“music” – snippets of free jazz, chanting monks,
fiddles, &c – than the rest of the entire album. (Less satisfactorily,
Matt Shoemaker’s “Pantai Ayu” contains the most
annoying cut-up of a lecture since the Kronos Quartet recorded that
awful I. F. Stone setting...) There’s fine work here by the
usual suspects: Axel Dörner’s solo piece “Marchlai”
is a typically intense little sonata for valves and escaping air;
Neumann’s “Innenklavier” is a small collection of
sonic dust-bunnies; Oren Ambarchi’s “Freeze Out”
is basically five minutes of Star Wars light-sabres; Toshimaru Nakamura’s
“Preset #4 (nimb#28)” (like Neumann, Toshi approaches
titles like a scientist labelling test-tubes) starts off briskly,
with a dollop of crackle’n’whistle noise, before turning
strangely soft and languorous; Akiyama contributes the gorgeous and
searing “Sword” (dobro-playing from the inner circles
of Hell). Taku Sugimoto’s sterile “Bells 2” is the
disc’s one big disappointment, but otherwise the quality is
pretty consistently high, and the Malaysians turn in some of the strongest
and most unusual work here – aside from Lee Kwang’s fine
piece, there’s also Yin Pin’s eruptive “Psalm 3:4”,
full of buffetings and body-blows (the text in question runs: “I
cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy
hill” – make of that what you will!); a notably ugly live
performance by the quartet Zai De; Yandsen’s “Jargon”,
which resembles a collision between a troupe of road workers and a
classical pianist; and Tham Kar Mun’s patient encounter with
“wood, glass, pen, pencil, container, paper”. I won’t
do more than enumerate the rest – in addition to the tracks
already mentioned, there are also contributions by the Climax Golden
Twins, Thuja, Carl Stone, Eric La Casa, Anthony Pateras/David Brown,
Janek Schaefer and mnortham – but suffice it to say the album
comes strongly recommended. Let’s hope Xing-wu (the label) follows
it up with full-length releases by some of the Malaysian players sampled
here.—ND
Brett Larner / Toshimaru Nakamura
AFTER SCHOOL ACTIVITY
Impermanent Recordings ire005
Since he began studying the koto at Wesleyan
University in 1992, Brett Larner has been extensively involved with
contemporary Japanese composed and improvised music, both as a player
and as a director of the Deluxe Improvisation Series and Deluxe Improvisation
Festival in Tokyo, a city in which he lived for several years. One
of the many Japanese musicians with whom Larner has worked over the
years is Toshimaru Nakamura, though previously the record of their
work together was rather desultory, being restricted to single tracks
as members of Yoshihide Otomo's Portable Orchestra on the Deluxe
Improvisation Festival 2001: Day Two CD-R (ASE /MP3.com) and
a quartet with Tetuzi Akiyama and Ami Yoshida on Meeting at Off
Site Vol. 1 (Improvised Music from Japan). Now, however, after
school activity provides us with 44 minutes of the two playing
as a duo. The disc contains three tracks, each recorded in a different
setting in Oakland, California. The first, "your naif",
is a studio cut that consists of single plucked notes or chords from
Larner on koto every 15 or so seconds plus an array of generally quite
quiet high-pitched tones, crackles and throbs from Nakamura’s
no-input mixing desk and what might be the quiet rumble of environmental
sound or recording noise in the background. The music is not uninteresting
in the way it combines a humanised transformation of some of the electrical
and electronic sounds that increasingly preponderate in the oppressive
contemporary soundscape with the very different timbre, rhythm, attack
and decay of the koto, thereby creating a delicate sonic alternative
that demands a focus and attention all too often lost in our habituation
to the noise and frenzy of capitalist society. Ultimately, however,
it is rather routine. One particular disappointment is Larner’s
playing; traditional Japanese music contains a number of what in Western
terms would be called extended playing techniques – such as
the suritsumi (scraping a pick along two adjacent strings)
and soetsumi (plucking a string under which a fingernail
has been placed) – and modern Japanese composers have devised
many more. It seems a pity then that Larner chooses to restrict himself
to a focus on "pure" tones reminiscent of Western art music's
fetishistic approach to pitch and timbre. Fortunately, Larner’s
exploration of the possibilities of the koto is slightly wider on
the rest of the album. The second track, "knuckle", is a
composition by Nakamura and was recorded live at the Thursday Night
Special. It is a relatively short and slight work featuring scattered
notes and runs on the koto and a few crackles of static. The recording
also captures quite a lot of sounds of movement and more distant background
noise. But this is as nothing to the final title track, which was
recorded on the deck of the Artship, a 491-foot long ship that has
in its career served as a cruise liner, troop transport, and training
ship and is now a floating arts centre that regularly hosts improvised
and experimental music performances. Larner and Nakamura’s exposed
position ensures that the roar of traffic, planes and boats is forcefully
present. From the outset, the two musicians seem hampered by this:
their playing appears rather disconnected and perfunctory and Nakamura’s
sounds in particular are partly masked by the lo-fi sonic smog, robbing
them of nuance and discrimination. Things only get worse, for some
16 minutes in a party of teenagers puts in an appearance, adding their
ceaseless babble to the urban cacophony. The duo makes some rather
ineffectual attempts to be heard over the top of the maelstrom but
in the end they sink beneath the enveloping acoustic waves. The music
itself may not be inspiring, but its fragility in the face of the
sonic pollution that assails it is a poignant demonstration of the
fate of delicate and distinctive sound in the contemporary industrialised
and commodified soundscape, and of the inhumanity of contemporary
social conditions from which such an alienated sonic world emanates.—WS
Sakada
NEVER GIVE UP ON THE MARGINS OF LOGIC
Antiopic AN006/LS002
BILBAO RESISTE, RESISTE BILBAO
Fargone FAR-008
During a recent performance by Sakada in London,
Mattin periodically abandoned his laptop in order to attack the fixtures
and fittings of the squatted venue with metal bolts, a wooden plank
and an iron bar. The appearances recorded on these two new CDs were
evidently somewhat more sedate occasions. The 17-minute mini-CD Never
Give up on the Margins of Logic documents the appearance at London’s
2003 Freedom of the City festival of an expanded version of the group
that featured Rhodri Davies (harp), Margarida Garcia (double bass)
and Mark Wastell (amplified textures) alongside the core duo of Mattin
(computer feedback) and Eddie Prévost (percussion). From where
I was sitting, the group’s sounds on the day were somewhat lost
in the cavernous space of Conway Hall; it is something of a revelation,
therefore, to have the benefit of this beautifully clear, intimate
and vivid recording courtesy (I presume) of the BBC’s engineers
who were present throughout the festival and Tim Barnes, who mastered
it. What can now be heard is a rich improvisation in which the bowings
of Davies, Garcia and Prévost (the latter mainly on tam-tam)
combine with the resonant clunks and subtler rustles and tones of
the amplified textures and electronics in a captivating and diverse
sequence of transient configurations and subdued moments. It is very
much a recording for those who enjoy following labile, transparent
and collective cooperation in the moment and are content to let form
be merely a function of a fluidly extemporized content. It will doubtless
not appeal to listeners who prefer music to exhibit neat structural
principles.
Bilbao resiste, resiste Bilbao is
a limited edition (75 copies) CD-R that comes in a jewel-case to which
crudely printed texts and pictures have been attached by black masking
tape. The music is derived from a live performance in Mattin's hometown
in August 2003. On this occasion, he and Prévost were joined
by Xabier Erkizia on computer and accordion. For around the first
quarter of the 44-minute session, the group presents a sometimes quite
dense texture of scrapes and clatters from Prévost and rumbles
and fairly harsh electronic tones from Mattin and Erkizia. Thereafter,
the music becomes generally quieter and more spacious, as the group
gives itself over to evolving collective constructions erected out
of a multiplicity of pulses, sustained tones, clatters, taps and rubbings,
and occasional eruptions of more violent sound from one or more members.
Although there are passages where electronics are deployed in such
a way as to leave the acoustic instruments little room to contribute,
this is nonetheless another improvisation that it is engrossing to
follow in its unwinding. There is a very real sense of musical negotiation
between the participants – albeit one that may not always be
entirely amicable – and of the music as a collective journey
and struggle that dispenses with the aid of a map and fashions its
own interesting terrain as it proceeds.—WS
Tim Olive / Fritz Welch
SUN REVERSE THE FOOTPEDAL
Evolving Ear / Human Sacrifice EE009 / HS 007
Described as "tightly wound non-maximalism
combining borrowed electric guitar, percussion, and snow", this
intriguingly-titled set of six duets featuring guitarist Olive and
percussionist Welch was recorded in an old barn in the middle of winter
(though the album says Brooklyn.. are there any old barns in Brooklyn?).
Anyway, that probably accounts for the snow. Tightly wound it is,
too: despite the musicians' marked preference for tiny sounds and
gestures, the music they make – provided you give it the time
and attention it demands – creates and sustains a sense of tension
often absent from lowercase improv. Which explains the reference to
non-maximalism – not the same as minimalism. Not having seen
Olive perform, and being familiar only with his two track 3"
CD on Infrequency with Jeffrey Allport, I suspect the gritty energy
of Sun Reverse comes more from Welch's unconventional and
at times hilarious percussion work (imagine Burkhard Beins with Han
Bennink's sense of theatre). Whether that's the case or not, it's
another compelling and uncompromising outing from the Evolving Ear
label.—DW
Black Forest / Black Sea
RADIANT SYMMETRY
Last Visible Dog LVD 065
Black Forest / Black Sea is a duo consisting
of Miriam Goldberg on cello and voice and Jeffrey Alexander on guitar
and banjo (both also play omnichords too). On all but three of these
nine tracks they're joined by musicians they met and worked with on
the road across Europe earlier this year. The opening track, recorded
at Glasgow's Tchai-Ovna Tearoom, features Alex Neilson on percussion,
Christoph Hladowski on bouzouki and Daniel Padden on clarinet. Tracks
2 and 6 feature a Finnish incarnation of BF/BS+ with Markus Mäki
on guitar, Jan Anderzén on keyboards and Merja Kokkonen on
xylophone, clarinet and musical saw. In Bologna Goldberg and Alexander
are joined by guitarist Stefano Pilia, in Bristol by Nick Talbot,
also on guitar, and on the extended final track (and highlight of
the album), recorded in the Talbot Hotel Stoke-on-Trent, by Harry
Sumnall on electric tamboura, harmonium and percussion.
If your idea of improvised music is either rapid-fire ultra nervous
musical kung fu (Phil Minton, Roger Turner, Mats Gustafsson, Tom Lehn
and others too numerous to mention) or super minimal lowercase near-nothingness
(Radu Malfatti, Taku Sugimoto et al.) you're likely to be disappointed
by Radiant Symmetry. If, like me, you still harbour fond
memories of the folksier end of English Experimental Music and wonder
whatever happened to the Penguin Café Orchestra, this is probably
for you. Coming at improv from the spaced-out post-folk end –
this is on Last Visible Dog, after all – Goldberg and Alexander
have no a prioris about what should or should not be allowed through
the door. Hence the appearance of recognisable tonality, regular repetition
and – gulp – singable melodies. Some of the tracks, notably
the opener, are vague and unfocussed, but when the vibe is right,
BF/BS produce music of great lyricism and beauty.—DW..
Somei Satoh
FROM THE DEPTH OF SILENCE
Mode 135
Though Somei Satoh was born in 1947 and started
working with music in mixed media back in the early 1970s (in one
of his more intriguing projects he positioned eight loudspeakers on
mountain tops a kilometre apart in Tochigi Prefecture and used music
in conjunction with laser beams apparently to influence the movement
of fog rising from the valley below), he didn’t complete his
first composition for orchestra, “From the Depth of Silence”
until just four years ago. Much has been made of the influence on
Satoh’s work of Zen and Shintoism, but comparing him to the
late great Toru Takemitsu is hardly a wise move. Unlike Takemitsu,
Satoh is largely self-taught (and it sounds like it: a crash course
in orchestration wouldn’t go amiss), and while Takemitsu’s
luscious harmonies and impeccable orchestration revealed a clear debt
to late Debussy and early Messiaen, Satoh’s claggy textures
sound more like one of those ECM New Series composers with unpronounceable
names born in a snowstorm in the middle of a potato field in some
bleak Baltic republic. If you’ve had enough of Gorecki and your
copy of Barber’s “Adagio” is now too worn to play,
this one will suit you fine, but if you think the tempo is slow on
“Burning Meditation” (a setting of a poem by Kazuko Shiraishi
originally scored for baritone – the indefatigable Thomas Buckner
– and string quartet, but here fleshed out for string orchestra,
harp and tubular bells), wait until you get to “Kyokoku”.
This was also commissioned by Buckner, featured here intoning the
words of Lao Tzu as translated by Ursula K. Le Guin – hey, didn’t
she write “A Wizard of Earthsea”? I read that when I was
a kid, it was fun. Oops, sorry, nodded off there, where was I? Oh
yes, “Kisetsu”, with its “universal message of hope
to the people of the world” seems destined to become New Tonal
Music’s Next Big Thing, though personally if I have a quarter
of an hour to spare, I prefer a quick fix of Elliott Carter’s
“Piano Quintet”. I wouldn’t want readers to come
away with the impression I’m a 100% cynical hardboiled motherfucker
(95% maybe) – after all, one feels slightly ill at ease criticising
music that is so evidently sincere in its intentions – but let’s
just say I hope a copy of this doesn’t end up on Oliver Stone’s
stereo system.—DW
Daniel Kientzy / Tom Johnson
KIENTZY PLAYS JOHNSON
Pogus 21033-2
Now that the big names from the first generation
of minimalists have abandoned the mathematical rigour of their earlier
work in favour of activities as diverse as ripping off mid 70s Bowie
albums and providing dull soundtracks to ham fisted home movies about
zeppelins and cloned sheep, it’s comforting to know there’s
still someone out there willing to get stuck in the rut of an eight-note
self-replicating melody. Which is what Tom Johnson, born in Colorado
in 1939 and resident in Paris since 1983, does in his “Kientzy
Loops”, written for and performed by French sax virtuoso Daniel
Kientzy and assisted by Reina Portuondo. It’s also gratifying
to report that the piece won Johnson an award at the French music
biz showcase Victoires de la Musique in 2000 (about time they found
something decent to award a prize to). “Kientzy Loops”
is joined on this album by “Tortue de Mer (Sea Turtle)”,
a translation into music of the geometrical drawing of the aforementioned
creature by the inhabitants of the South Pacific island of Vanuatu,
“Narayana’s Cows”, another additive process musical
representation of a mathematical conundrum devised by a 14th century
Indian mathematician, and four of Johnson’s “Infinite
Melodies”, which, as their titles suggest, would go on forever
if an instrument with an infinitely large range could be found to
perform them. Kientzy’s contrabass sax sounds as ugly and ungainly
as it looks, but the saxophonist’s performances of these uncompromisingly
minimal works is precise and impressive, even if about three quarters
of the way through “Narayana’s Cows” you find yourself
praying for an epidemic of foot and mouth to reduce the size of the
herd to more manageable proportions.—DW
Roger Reynolds
PROCESS AND PASSION
Pogus 21032-2
Process and Passion presents two
versions each of three compositions on two discs – one in conventional
stereo, and the other using binaural encoding to produce sound spatialization,
and requiring headphones. Two of the pieces have been recorded previously
– "Kokoro" for solo violin, and "Focus
a beam, emptied of thinking, outward…" for solo cello.
These were written for Irvine Arditti and Rohan de Saram of the Arditti
Quartet, and can be found on the Coconino 2-disc Reynolds
set on Montaigne. The title track is a violin and cello duet that
builds on material from the earlier solo works. According to Reynolds,
this takes the "assertive and unpredictable" nature of "Kokoro"
(based on Arditti’s character) and the more "meditative"
nature of "Focus" (de Saram's) and pits them against one
another, until they are ultimately reconciled. The violin, then, is
passion, the voice of The Furies, and the cello process, the voice
of Reason. Reynolds sees this as representing concepts from Greek
tragedy, the development of an understanding of justice capable of
overcoming endless cycles of violence and retribution, an idea he
has addressed in his recent yet-to-be-recorded opera "The Red
Act Project". The relevance in today’s world seems self-evident.
The performers are Mark Menzies on violin and Hugh Livingston on cello,
joined on the title track by computer, programmed by Reynolds. Menzies
and Livingston studied with the composer at the University of California
– San Diego (UCSD), and are masters of their respective instruments.
They clearly spent more time with the compositions than Arditti and
de Saram before recording, as the new recordings are more decisive
than the originals. As it turns out, Reynolds asked Menzies and Livingston
to edit the scores, and they are now credited as co-composers (I wonder
if Brian Ferneyhough has ever considered this..?) The binaural technique
is quite impressive (if it catches on, people might one day not comprehend
the idea that music was ever anything BUT spatially encoded), and
further proof that Reynolds, now into his 70s, is still interested
in applying cutting edge technology to his music. The disc includes
12 pages of notes with plenty of valuable information for musicians
and astute listeners. These are works that reward multiple encounters
– works for and by virtuosos. Recordings by Roger Reynolds are
far too scarce, and this is a welcome addition to his small but high-quality
oeuvre. We eagerly await the release of his unrecorded orchestral
works, not to mention "The Red Act Project".—RH
irr.app.(ext.)
OZEANISCHE GEFÜHLE
Helen Scarsdale HMS 002
The good people at Helen Scarsdale may well
have a point when they rate this album (only the third by Matt Waldron
after 1997’s An Uncertain Animal, Ruptured; Tissue Expanding
in Conversation on Fire, Inc. and last year’s Dust
Pincher Appliances on Crouton) as highly as The Hafler Trio's
Kill The King and Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith,
but instead of bemoaning the lack of Waldron product on the market
– and don’t tell me the name “irr.app.(ext.)”
has nothing to do with it – they should be standing at the top
of Mount Tamalpais or whatever the nearest mountain is to San Francisco
and blasting it out over a 60,000W PA because it’s awesome.
“Ozeanische Gefühle”, which roughly translates as
“oceanic feelings”, was a term coined by Sigmund Freud
to refer to a specific psychological state of well-being and connection
to the world. According to an interview with Waldron on the Helen
Scarsdale website, Wilhelm Reich, who Waldron lists among his “big
five” influences (along with Robert Fripp, Steven Stapleton,
Kurt Schwitters and Jim Woodring) “used the term to describe
the natural state of every healthy organism: connected to and engaged
with the world around it, with its energies flowing from the center
outwards. This is in direct contradiction to the prevailing state
in most societies: closed, anxious, and rigid, with energies directed
inward.” How Reich’s work interfaces with Waldron’s
as a sound artist (he is also a talented writer and visual artist)
is a subject as complex and rich as the music itself, a stupendous
montage of processed recordings of acoustic and electronic instruments
and field recordings. More impressive still than the sheer beauty
of Waldron’s sounds is the way he weaves them together into
a coherent span of music lasting as long as a Beethoven symphony,
building to a terrific climax just before the 25 minute mark, before
subsiding into an eerie subaquatic Wurlitzer organ, and ultimately
the delicate yet penetrating chime of prayer bowls and crotales, the
creak of nocturnal insects and distant voices. Plus about a thousand
other things – as is often the case, merely describing what’s
going on in the piece (not that it’s all that easy to do) totally
fails to prepare you for the listening experience. Nurse With Wound
fans familiar with Waldron’s skewed remix of NWW’s mythic
Chance Meeting album and keen to apply Steven Stapleton’s
description of his music as “surrealist” to Waldron’s
own work ought to read his comments on the subject first: “I
think surrealism as a movement was a failure because it became Surrealism
[..], another worthless dogma - and how could it have turned out otherwise?”
Adding later: “What I do share with many Surrealists is the
willingness to let intuition and accident play an active role in what
I create.” Maybe so, but don’t be fooled into thinking
this piece, and the shorter but no less impressive “The Demiurge’s
Presumption” that follows it, was cobbled together in an afternoon.
It’s the result of many hours of painstaking and loving work,
and richly repays repeated listening. Buy up all available stocks
as soon as you can and give the folks at Helen Scarsdale something
to really trumpet about.—DW
Taylor Deupree / Christopher
Willits
MUJO
Plop PLIP 3011
On this, their second album together but their
first real extended collaboration, Taylor Deupree and Christopher
Willits join a growing number of laptoppers – Sogar, Anderegg,
Minamo, Hervé Boghossian, Sébastien Roux – whose
work steers away from the bleak wasteland of eai’s snap crackle
and plop and instead openly embraces tonality (or, to be more precise,
diatonicism, as it’s concerned more with local detail than with
large-scale harmonic rhythm). Mujo’s piled-up seventh
and eleventh chords recall Reich, Riley and especially Daniel Lentz
– hey, whatever happened to Daniel Lentz? – whose fondness
for fragmenting a sung text into its constituent syllables predated
Willits’ sensuous folding glitches by well over a decade. It
goes without saying that all twelve tracks are executed with consummate
precision, beautifully mixed and elegantly packaged, but the album’s
unrelenting prettiness can become mildly soporific; this makes the
more abstract tracks stand out, particularly the all-too brief “Marathon
Vowel Shift”, the harmonically ambiguous “Ended”
and the closing “Newspaper”, with its oneiric fragments
of recorded telephone conversations. All in all, listening to Mujo
is like spending a sunny afternoon in a shopping mall in San Rafael,
CA – everything’s bright, colourful and clean with shiny,
happy people in Esprit T shirts – but about as likely to change
your life as a Godiva truffle. But maybe music doesn’t have
to change your life. Godiva truffles are fine by me.—DW
Alexander Rishaug
POSSIBLE LANDSCAPE
Asphodel ASP 2024
If Lentz’s The Crack In The Bell
came to mind on listening to Deupree and Willits (see above),
Possible Landscape, the second outing by Oslo-based Rishaug,
had me scurrying back to my copy of Shri Camel. Not that
the Norwegian’s work reveals many traces of the turn-on-tune-in-and-don’t-bogart-the-joint
attitude that (I’m told) leads to a greater enjoyment of Mr
Riley’s music, but it does seem to enjoy getting busy doin’
nothing, to quote Brian Wilson, i.e. sitting on one or two chords
and noodling. But where Riley threads long self-similar modal lines
together, Rishaug fills up the space with what the press release revealingly
describes as “classic clicks and cuts” (italics
mine). Hmm, when something that’s been around for barely a decade
(what is Year Zero for clicks and cuts? The first Oval album?) gets
branded with that “classic” tag, it’s a sure sign
that stagnation has set in. No amount of bleeps, bloops, crunches,
crackles or whatever the latest plug’n’play configuration
throws your way can disguise the fact that this stuff is, as an old
English teacher of mine used to say, deeply superficial. And unlike
the Deupree / Willits outing, there’s not much to tap your feet
to either.—DW
Leticia Castaneda
ON THE VERGE OF REDUNDANCE
C.I.P. CIPCD011
"Inspired by Sirrus, sarcasm and Santa
Barbara," it says inside the sleeve – and that's not the
only inscrutable thing about this outing from California-based sound
artist Castaneda. A brief Google reveals evidence of activity in several
domains associated with contemporary sound art, notably installations
and site-specific events, but there's a richness and warmth to Castaneda's
work that recalls an earlier generation of analogue pioneers; the
hard-panned gurgles and swoops of "Crayon Salad and a Glass of
Wine" bring to mind the pioneering works of Maxfield, Sender,
Subotnick and Oliveros. In the splendidly-titled "Memories of
Being Lost", source sounds – some purely electronic, some
field recordings, some more easily identifiable than others, but all
fascinating – emerge, are looped, and recede into the background.
There's not a glitch in sight; unlike much contemporary electronica,
which makes little or no effort to cover up traces of the software
used to produce it, Castaneda is more interested in the what than
in the how. The predominantly serious tone set by the opening "A
Dot Concoction" is retained and intensified during the album,
especially in the sombre Radigue-like (again) "Statue".
Even behind the machine-like bustle of activity of the closing "Untitled
1", a discreet but ever-present drone anchors the music. An impressive
debut.—DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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