| AUGUST
News 2005 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, David Cotner, Nate Dorward, Stephen Griffith,
Nicholas Rice, Massimo Ricci, Wayne Spencer, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial:
Return of the New Thing
In concert: Vision Festival 2005
Aidan Baker
The Free Design
On Sirr: Untitled
Songs
On Clean Feed: Whit
Dickey / Dennis Gonzalez's Spirit Meridian
In Concert in New York: Pärt, Kancheli, Schnittke,
Adams, de Mare, Silk Road Ensemble
JAZZ & IMPROV: Leroy
Vinnegar / Vijay Iyer / Baczkowski, Corsano & Flaherty /
Akiyama & Müller / Günter & Friedl / psi /
David Gross
Natto Quartet / Cortet
/ Trio Sowari / Los Glissandinos / Küchen & Stackenäs
/ Dubost, Matthews, Rives, Zach / Mike Cooper / Koji Asano
CONTEMPORARY: Fred
Frith / Rich Woodson / Niccolo Castiglioni
ELECTRONICA: Greg
Davis & Steven Hess / Brendan Murray / Autodigest
/ Disinformation / Evol / Ellen Band & David Lee Myers Vagina
Dentata Organ / Daniel
Menche / Zbigniew
Karkowski
Last month
|
Forgive
the self publicity, but after all this is our site and we do what
we want here (yeah!).. Back in the dying days of 1999 I released an
album on Leo Records called Return Of The New Thing, with
Jean-Luc Guionnet (alto saxophone), François Fuchs (bass) and
Edward Perraud (drums). You can read all about it here,
if you haven't done so already. You won't however be able
to find the slightest reference to it on Leo Records' website any
more (so I won't even bother giving you the URL..), for the simple
reason that Leo Feigin has withdrawn the album from his catalogue,
following an argument with ys. truly over (yawn) royalties, amongst
other things. I won't bore you with the details, but I would like
to take the opportunity to urge budding musicians out there in search
of labels to release their work to think very carefully before signing
a contract (or not, as the case may be).. In principle I have nothing
against the idea of paying something towards the release of an album,
but financial participation in the project should always go hand in
hand with consultation on questions of promotional strategy. Anyway,
that's enough of that.. the reason I'm mentioning this is quite simple:
the only way you're ever going to get a copy of Return Of The
New Thing now is.. from me! I have recovered all the remaining
copies of the album from the French distributor Orkhestra (though
the few copies that were cluttering up Mr. Feigin's storeroom have
not, contrary to what Mr. Feigin promised, been returned to me –
you draw your own conclusions), SO if you want to get hold of one
all you have to do is contact me at PTEditor@aol.com and we'll take
it from there. If you want I'll even autograph the thing for you –
and I guarantee it'll cost you less than what you would have paid
if you'd bought it from Leo Records, or in a record store.
MEANWHILE summer is icumen in and rolling in on the surf from Californ-eye-ay
is our new correspondent David Cotner (see Electronica below), whose
purple prose (Iannis "Scarface" Xenakis, indeed) is as entertaining
as his hertz-lion.com website is informative. I'll just take the opportunity
once again to remind y'all about the nifty little search engine on
the Home Page too, which will find buried treasure at the click of
a mouse. Well, if it doesn't, mail me. Bonnes vacances.–
DW
Vision
Festival 2005
New York Orensanz Arts Center, New York
June 16th – 19th
The
Vision Festival is something of an annual tribute to the spirit of
free jazz of the 60s and 70s. Though centered on New York players,
it always brings in outside influences from Europe and, this year,
Chicago. This tenth edition of Vision was not without its problems
in getting underway. In past years it’s been held around the
Memorial Day weekend but this year was moved back to mid June, presumably
because of the availability of Clemente Solo Velez, which offered
two performing areas. Unfortunately that plan fell through owing to
fire regulations and the festival was moved to the Orensanz Arts Center,
a former synagogue whose acoustic created problems that were, in some
cases, insurmountable, especially since the beleaguered sound crew
had to hustle to set up quickly as two performing areas became one.
Apologies
to those who played on June 14th and 15th (including Henry Grimes,
Sam Rivers, Charles Gayle, Roy Campbell's Pyramid Trio, to name but
a few), but the first night I managed to attend was that of the 16th,
the so-called Fred Anderson Lifetime Recognition Day, in honor of
the venerable tenor player and founder member of the Association for
the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Things got underway
with his “1960s Quartet” featuring AACM veterans Joseph
Jarman on alto sax (Anderson contributed “Little Fox Run”
on Jarman's landmark Delmark release Song For in 1966), and
Alvin Fielder on drums, with latter-day Chicago import Tatsu Aoki
on bass. Their short set primarily served as a warm-up for things
to come, with Fred assuming his characteristic crouch and exploring
the dark tenor motives he’s been mining for years and Jarman
throwing in shards of alto fills while Aoki and Fielder provided sturdy,
if unspectacular, support. Not a bad start to the evening, but things
took a turn for the worse when Jarman’s own Ensemble took the
stage. Veterans (Douglas Ewart on reeds, Thurman Barker on marimbas
and Jessica Jones on tenor sax) and Jarman students teamed up in a
performance marred by Jarman’s New Age lyrics, which were sung
so off key it was hard to imagine them as the work of one of the former
firebrands of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The band performed as well
as they could – Ewart was particularly good on flute –
but the songs were lackluster vehicles for whatever universal (the
word was overused) sentiment Mr. Jarman was trying to get across.
Things bounced back quickly with the surprise set of the night, a
trio led by flautist Nicole Mitchell. Nobody seemed to know what to
expect but Mitchell grabbed everyone’s attention with a spirited
set of strong original compositions and a gorgeously deep tone enhanced
by effective vocalizing. Isaiah Spencer provided solid (if a little
heavy-handed) drum support, but especially striking was the bass playing
of Harrison Bankhead, who turned a few heads around at Vision two
years ago in a duet with Fred Anderson. His always expressive lines
captivated the public, who gave a deservedly enthusiastic response
to the surprise hit of the night.
 Next
came the set that most of the crowd had come to see, the rematch of
2 Days in April, recorded on Eremite in 1999 and featuring
two extended live performances of Anderson dueling with Edward "Kidd"
Jordan on tenor, with William Parker on bass and Hamid Drake on drums.
Like the recording, this was an all out free jazz meltdown, with Anderson
blasting off in the lower range and Kidd shrieking in tongues in the
stratosphere. Parker and particularly Drake did an admirable job imposing
form on the joyful chaos, driving the music towards common ground
with Drake latching onto a groove and drawing the others into it before
they blasted off into the unknown once again. I felt bad about missing
Thurman Barker’s Strike Force (reports said it was very good)
but it had been a long day and despite the noble intentions of the
sound crew things were running well behind schedule.
On Friday 17th,
the tail end of the Other Dimensions in Music meets Sound Vision Orchestra
set suffered badly in the resonant acoustic, but the set that followed
by the Whit Dickey Quartet – the enigmatic Dickey on drums,
Rob Brown on alto sax, Roy Campbell on trumpets and Joe Morris on
bass – was tasty. Accompanying visuals were projected onto what
appeared to be a giant bed sheet (I’m sure the planned venue
would have been more appropriate for this), and were inoffensive enough,
but the music was as impressive as Dickey is elusive – he tends
to disappear between Vision festivals – with thoughtful compositions
bolstered by Dickey's habitually bracing drumming. Joe Morris has
made the transition from accomplished guitarist to proficient bassist
very well, but his sound wasn’t well served by the acoustic.
Longtime associate Rob Brown’s biting Jimmy Lyons tone has come
a long way since I first heard it in 1999, and trumpeter Roy Campbell
played particularly well, supporting the other players with effective
flugelhorn growls.
Friday’s unexpected hit was reedist Oluyemi Thomas and his poet/vocalist
wife Ijeoma performing under the name of Positive Knowledge. They
were joined by Kidd Jordan, Harrison Bankhead and drummer Michael
Wimberly, with Ijeoma’s occasional wordless vocals also serving
as an additional improvising instrument. Even in a high-energy festival
such as this, the performance was exceptional, though once more the
bass was poorly miked. Luckily Wimberly could hear it just fine and
he and Bankhead teamed up to give the band some ferocious underpinning.
Jordan picked up where he'd left off the previous day, but the real
surprise was Oluyemi, who coaxed some incredible sounds from the C-melody
sax and the lower registers of the bass clarinet. At one point Jordan
put his tenor down and smiled broadly at the whirlwind he'd helped
create before regrouping to face off with Wimberly. A rousing experience
for all concerned.
Sadly it was followed by one of the bigger disappointments of the
festival, the Bill Dixon Quartet. Despite the best sound setup I'd
heard so far and Thurman Barker's marimba and tympani, there was nothing
of interest. Dixon's heavily echoed splats of sound never managed
to cohere into anything comprehensible, and while many people (including
several musicians) left early, with the flooring of the ancient structure
creaking loudly to accompany their exit, I stayed out of respect for
Dixon. A very dispiriting experience to end the day.
Saturday
afternoon's “Emerging Artists” concert, featuring lesser
known individuals, attracted no more than two dozen punters, which
was a shame for those who didn't turn up, because they missed one
of the best performances of the festival: Tyshawn Sorey on solo piano.
 Prior
to this I knew of Sorey as a drummer (and subsequently discovered
his first instrument is trombone!) but he is truly an outstanding
pianist, alternating Tayloresque fists and forearms poundings with
gentle, placid interludes, all executed to perfection. But just as
striking was his performance inside the piano, plucking, strumming
and striking the strings with drumsticks, partially damping them with
paper and producing amazing resonances. It was a staggering performance
both in terms of conception and execution. Bassist Todd Nicholson’s
Otic Band, featuring Steve Swell on trombone, trumpeter Nate Wooley
and percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani followed with a very smart set
of interesting originals, but though Swell and Wooley are both impressive
soloists and Nakatani's playing was solid and innovative, Sorey's
overpowering performance was a tall order to follow.
Proceedings on
Saturday evening started with Patricia Nicholson’s PaNic, a
company of four dancers backed up by Rob Brown, William Parker and
Alvin Fielder. The dance performances clearly suffered the most from
the change of the festival location: while the seating at Clemente
Solo Velez had been set up to afford good viewing from all positions,
Orensanz Art Center offered no such facilities. It would have been
a painful decision to scrap the work that had already gone into the
choreography and rehearsal, but the setting was simply not appropriate.
The music was quite good, however, and effectively dispelled my hypothesis
that Brown plays best when there’s another wind player with
him.
Nasheet Waits was late for his duet with Peter Brötzmann so Joe
McPhee and Lori Freedman went on in their place for a well-received
set of duets with McPhee on alto clarinet and tenor sax and Freedman
on a bass clarinet that appeared as big as she was. No reflection
on her ability to project through the instrument though, as she and
Joe went down many varied paths with nary a stumble. It was an atypical
performance amidst all the firebreathers, but a true meeting of nimble
minds.
In the meantime Waits had arrived and duly squared off with Herr Brötz
in a pairing that probably wouldn’t have occurred to many observers.
Waits sparred valiantly with the irrepressible reedman as he varied
his attack on the tenor and tarogato from the full-bore attack to
some truly poignant moments. A satisfying end to the evening, if not
exactly really unexpected.
The
final evening for me started in excellent fashion with violinist India
Cooke and bassist Jöelle Léandre. I don’t know if
they’ve been performing regularly since their set in Guelph
in September 2004 (captured on Red Toucan’s excellent Firedance)
but their playing at Vision was very different, and very good indeed.
They never identified any of the songs but I assume they weren't totally
improvised: the themes were strong and the playing telepathic, with
both players adding wordless vocals that enhanced their instrumental
prowess with passion. Two solo performances were thrown in for good
measure – it was a very strong start of the evening.
The Rob Brown Ensemble followed, featuring dancers and projected images
of the art of Jo Wood Brown (I wonder how she got the gig), which,
despite the folds in the screen, were interesting enough to look at,
at least when the dancers weren’t skittering in front of them.
The music was impressive as Brown joined forces with cellist Daniel
Levin and drummer Satoshi Takeishi, but things were already running
very late and the group's decision to play an additional song was
questionable, as was their annoying request for money from the public.
I fully understand that the festival is run on a shoestring, and that
the change of venue had no doubt put it in a further financial bind,
but I’d have preferred to pay extra for admission beforehand
than have to listen to pleas for cash throughout the event. (While
we're on the subject of irritation, if anybody in a position of responsibility
is reading this, please don't let that guy who introduced the groups
near the stage in the future, OK? Thanks.)
I mention the lateness of the performances because after three days
of nonstop free jazz onslaughts, I was less than able to appreciate
one of the most intriguing combinations of the festival: pianist Matthew
Shipp, bassist William Parker, reedist Sabir Mateen and drummer Han
Bennink.  Vision
Festival meets New Dutch Swing, as it were. Bennink was a madman from
the outset, forsaking his usual antics to take energy drumming to
the highest level. (The only time he resorted to any tomfoolery was
when he left to change his sweat-soaked T-shirt and delivered a well-aimed
kick to hi-hat on his return – in perfect time, of course.)
Shipp at first appeared surprised by the sheer power of Bennink's
attack but gradually amped up his playing to meet it head on. Mateen
was at times hard to hear on tenor, alto and clarinet, but Parker
was tight with Han and kept up the onslaught in fine fashion. And
yet at some point the relentless attack just became oppressive, though
for their part the musicians looked like they were having a very enjoyable
time. The festival ended with trumpeter Dennis Gonzalez’s Yells
at Eels, featuring Oliver Lake and Dennis’s sons Aaron on bass
and Stefan on drums. Their set finally started at 1.45 am –
nearly two hours late – but Gonzalez's warm soothing tone and
Lake’s superb playing made the late hour bearable and brought
the festival to a very welcome close.
The Vision Festival can tend to lend itself to parody as the true
believers in the audience show up each year with expanded waistlines
and holes in their graying manes – a movie mockumentary such
as "A Mighty Wind" which concentrated on the free jazz movement
would confuse rather than entertain – but it still serves as
an effective forum for the continued development of a music that never
had a large number of adherents and is increasingly marginalized.
The high points greatly outweighed the few unsatisfying performances,
and the post-concert camraderie between Parker, Mateen, Shipp and
Bennink was genuine and heartfelt. And where else can I shake hands
with Kidd Jordan and wish Dennis Gonzalez a happy Father's Day? —SG
 In recent
times, many people have invested in digital delay units and built
whole careers around nothing, selling the results as some sort of
meditation. Not so Canadian musician and writer Aidan Baker, one of
the very few artists in the past decade whose discography has grown
hand in hand with his compositional skills. His loop stratification
technique features the guitar as the primary sound source, though
voices, violin, flute and found sounds all have their place in a deceptive
pulsating complexity of evocative siren calls, beguiling fears and
hypnotic malady. Percussion is often looped too to create a peculiar
variety of drum'n'bass in evidence on the albums Eye of Day (Foreign
Lands) and Butterfly Bones (Between Existence). Trained in
classical piano and flute, Toronto-based Baker is a self-taught guitarist,
drummer and saxophonist, and also the author of several books of poetry
(I recommend you get hold of a copy of Fingerspelling) and
a regular contributor to various international journals, providing
not only poetry but also criticism and works of fiction. Over the
past seven years he's released well over 20 albums, solo or in collaboration
with other artists, many of which are among the most intense and beautiful
loop-based listening experiences you could have the good fortune to
discover, because, as is often the case, quality comes in small doses:
you might have a hard time locating many of these limited-edition
raw jewels. Baker's website (aidanbaker.org) offers a comprehensive
series of helpful links in his abundant discography, which also includes
his work with the collective ARC, a more percussive / ritualistic
combo in which he also explores fuzzy Frippertronics – their
best release to date is Eyes in the Back of our Heads (Worthy)
with metal soundscaper Alan Bloor, aka Pholde. Other Baker projects
include the spacey trio Mnemosyne and Nadja, originally a solo affair
but now a duo with bassist Leah Buckareff. This is the "acid"
side of the guitarist, a slow distorted molasses of non-songs and
mammoth riffs recalling James Plotkin's trippier excursions, especially
on the recent Bodycage (Nothingness).
 There
are several milestones in the Baker discography not to be missed out
on. At the Fountain of Thirst (Mystery Sea) contains four
mesmerizing still ballets dedicated to water nymphs, the second of
which, "Rusalka", is so delicately plangent and harmonically
gratifying no sentient being could fail to be profoundly moved by
its grace and levity. Skein of Veins (Phoniq) is an mp3-only
release where Baker's proficiency at superimposing repeating figures
is at its very best, especially on the title track, in which lulling
chants and sweet death kisses put the mind in an altered state where
torment is nullified by an almost desperate sense of pleasure. The
self-explanatory Loop Studies One (Laub) features maybe the
best "deep ambient" music since Eno: the Toronto six-string
charmer generates clouds of heavenly vapours through silent walks
and motionless timbral hallucinations. The aptly titled Field
of Drones (Arcolepsy) vies for the title of finest record in
Baker's oeuvre, if sheer beauty counts for anything. It's hard to
find words to describe this music; its inexplicable intensity is a
close encounter with the crux of our own sensibility, a definitive
travel guide to the world of therapeutic vibration. It's also a slap
in the face for those low-budget merchants of mediocre post-postness
stasis. Baker's recent output has brought several pleasant surprises,
first of all a collaborative long-distance relationship with American
Matt Borghi on Undercurrents (Zenapolae), on which the pair
remix, rework and re-layer their droning materials, including some
very beautiful piano improvisations, into a contemplation of a melancholy
subaquatic world, a latter-day version of Roedelius in a never-ending
drift to nowhere. Another epistolary collaboration with the French
duo Ultra Milkmaids, At home with...(Infraction), freezes
the listener in icy cages of electronic sound into which Baker's guitars
occasionally shine sunlight from afar, holding out hope of a thaw
that never comes. Another mp3 release, out this summer, is Songs
of Flowers & Skin (Zunior), the first proper collection of
"songs" by Baker, whose more structured forms nevertheless
don't detract from the beauty of the music – listen to "Second
Selves". Baker's soft voice is featured in different arrangements,
including trumpet and violin, his dreams transfigured into brilliant
pearls of dew that reflect a little of everything from Pink Floyd
to Dif Juz. The future looks bright for Aidan Baker: his first European
tour is scheduled for this autumn, and a double CD release on Jochen
Schwarz's Die Stadt label is due out early next year. I'll be waiting
by the window.—MR
The
Free Design
KITES ARE FUN
Light In The Attic LITA 004
STARS / TIME / BUBBLES / LOVE
Light In The Attic LITA 007
Various
Artists
THE FREE DESIGN: THE NOW SOUND REDESIGNED
Light In The Attic 016
 One
of the nicest surprises I've had recently on opening the mailbox was
a copy of The Now Sound Redesigned, an album of remixes by
a list of contemporary notables (Peanut Butter Wolf, Kid Koala, Stereolab,
Danger Mouse and Murs, et al.) of a late 60s soft psych pop group
I'd never heard of called The Free Design. This was a family affair,
a three-piece vocal harmony group featuring brothers Chris, Bruce
and Sandy Dedrick, who recorded no fewer than seven albums for Enoch
Light's obscure (even then) Project 3 label between 1967 and 1972.
All seven have been lovingly reissued on CD and 180g vinyl by the
Seattle-based Light In The Attic label, along with two EPs of remixes
which have been gathered together on the abovementioned compilation
CD. The Now Sound Redesigned is terrific, by the way (and
worth the price of admission just for Peanut Butter Wolf's version
of "Umbrellas"), but on reading the copious press blurb,
with its glowing praise for The Free Design from the likes of Cornelius
– shame he couldn't have taken part in the remix project, but
never mind – my curiosity was aroused and LITA head honcho Matt
Sullivan kindly obliged by sending me his two favourite FD albums,
their 1967 debut Kites Are Fun and 1970's funk-tinged
Stars / Time / Bubbles / Love.
 It's
certainly not hard to see why the kings of squeaky-clean fluorescent
J-Pop dig The Free Design: Chris Dedrick's arrangements are every
bit as intricate and colourfully orchestrated as more celebrated big
production jobs by likes of Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, and the
contributions of the session musicians involved (who include Jay Berliner,
Gene Bertoncini, Richard Davis, Paul Griffin and Dick Hyman) consistently
impressive, but if you're a diabetic you might just want to line up
half a dozen syringes of insulin before you press play. This was certainly
Pop For All The Family (hence perhaps the group's decision to sign
to a label that was apparently easier to get hold of in Singer sewing
machine dealerships than normal record stores..); while kids at the
end of the 60s were rolling around half naked in muddy fields and
catching strange diseases, not to mention experimenting with all sorts
of mind-altering substances, one gets the impression that the only
thing the Dedricks did to get their kicks was fly kites and blow bubbles.
OK, so Wilson's stuff for the Beach Boys played pretty safe too, but
at least Brian occasionally weirded out – think of those fucked
up vocals on "She's Going Bald", the carrot crunching on
"Vegetables"..  Not
that the prevailing zeitgeist was all about dropping acid or dropping
your pants onstage – there was room for genuinely innovative
songwriting and arranging that refused to play the pop game (what
could be more oddball than Mayo Thompson's Corky's Debt To His
Father or more deliciously laconic than Van Dyke Parks's Song
Cycle?) – but even so, the Free Design's covers of Burt
Bacharach ("Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", on Stars),
the Beatles ("Michelle" on Kites) and Paul Simon
("59th Street Bridge Song", also on Kites) sound,
well, a little too nice. The Beatles, as we all know, had
their dark side, and Bacharach's masterpieces owed as much to the
sheer individuality of the vocalists who recorded them, both good
(Dionne Warwick, Lou Johnson) and bad (Herb Alpert, B.J.Thomas), as
they did to Burt's arrangements. As for Paul Simon, here's where I
play my joker.. The variety of instrumental colour on the Free Design
outings often recalls the Tropicalismo orchestrations of the Brazilians,
especially Os Mutantes, but there's not the slightest hint of the
madness (listen to how they totally fuck up the Françoise Hardy
chestnut "Le Premier Bonheur du Jour" with judiciously placed
wrong notes Misha Mengelberg would be proud of..). Still, don't want
to bitch here: I've had more fun with these two albums these past
three weeks than I've had with any others that have come my way recently
– it's just that listening to them all the way through is rather
like scoffing a 1 kg box of Belgian chocolates and washing it down
with a vanilla malted.—DW
Various
Artists
UNTITLED SONGS
Sirr 0020 (2CD)
 The adjective
"seminal" gets bandied about quite a lot these days, but
it surely applies to Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge
("Song of the Youths"), a 13-minute work for five-channel
electronic tape based on texts from the book of Daniel sung by a boy
soprano. Nearly half a century after its premiere in Cologne's West
German Radio on May 30th 1956, Sirr's Paulo Raposo has compiled Untitled
Songs as a kind of 49th anniversary tribute, but is quick to
point out in the accompanying press release that "the works on
this CD are not plain homage [sic], nor are they sampled
from the original. They are rather a survey of the current state of
electronic / electroacoustic music that exists half outside academic
music life. The composers, musicians and artists on this CD are interested
in locating themselves within their own history by further exploring
the topics of sound spatialization and / or use of human voice with
electronics, or they undertake a transformation of the original concept
towards a personal approach to the sound, or to the original's biblical
words." Raposo also situates the Stockhausen work in a wider
non-academic context, referring to Sonic Youth (surprise) and the
Beatles, whose (Sir) Paul McCartney described "Gesang" as
his favourite Stockhausen piece (Karlheinz can, of course, be seen
lurking on the back row of the guests invited to appear on the cover
of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band).
The brief, then, seems relatively clear; instead of simply "remixing"
the Stockhausen (which these days more often than not means loading
it up onto the computer and diddling around for an afternoon with
ProTools or SoundForge or some other fancy software package), the
21 featured sound artists present their own reflections on the issues
raised by Gesang, as described by Raposo above. Several refer
obliquely to the original's textual content – the story of the
burning fiery furnace – by sourcing their work in field recordings
of the elements, notably fire (Rui Costa, Marc Behrens, Derek Holzer,
Stephen Vitiello..), others explore the sheer physicality of the human
voice, which, along with the spatial element, has always been the
most striking aspect of the Stockhausen original. Janek Schaefer recorded
the word "love" sung at seven different pitches by seven
different women (including his wife and mother-in-law.. that's love
for ya) and built a ravishing seven-minute composition from the results.
André Gonçalves recorded his own voice in the naturally
resonant acoustic of his bathroom and mixed it with sinewaves in a
sensitive exploration of difference tones and interference patterns
that probably has more to do with Alvin Lucier than it does Stockhausen.
Vocal fragments also appear towards the end of John Grzinich's offering
(is the title "[synthetic voice]"? It's not clear in the
pdf liner notes if those square brackets are used solely to indicate
track titles or not..) but the track is notable for its shimmering
haze of distant percussion. As is often the case with jgrzinich's
music, what seems simple is in fact deceptively complex, a micropolyphonic
tapestry woven of tiny sounds. Stephen Vitiello's contribution, sourced
in a recording of a campfire in upstate NY, is intriguingly dense,
despite the composer's admission that it's the result of a single
processing pass. Not too far away from Vitiello's roaring flames,
Andrew Deutsch's work is closer in feel to the original Stockhausen
– there's no need for the composer to sound so apologetic, as
it's a fine piece of work, and I'll bet Karlheinz would say so too.
Heitor Alvelos returns to the idea of childhood by basing his piece
on archive recordings of himself as a (from the sound of it, very
young) kid, in a touching if rather cavernously reverberant three-and-a-half
minute self portrait. Cavernous is also the word that comes to mind
on listening to Latvian sound artist Maksim Shentelev's piece, recorded
in a disused and leaky military bunker in the middle of a pine forest.
Treating and overlaying his recordings to create an evocative soundscape
of ominous lo-fi buzzes and drips, Shentelev comes up with something
far more appetising than his accompanying text ("these endosonic
elements build non-informative relations filling a meta-environment
with the shifting vibration of chaotic motion.." umm, yeah).
Marc Behrens contributes a typically elegant if austere re-examination
of field recordings previously used in his "Keyholes" installation
(a version appears on the 1999 trente oiseaux release Four Installations),
which is beautifully juxtaposed with Rui Costa's delicate treatment
of water and fire sounds recorded in a Portuguese village. After this
– and hats off to Raposo for sequencing the tracks into an overall
form that's every bit as satisfying as the individual pieces themselves
– Anthony Pateras and Robin Fox turn in a typically energetic
montage of gargles, gurgles and, appropriately enough for these men
at work from the land down under where women throw and men chunder,
finger-down-the-throat dry heaves, all Max/MSPed to death. Great fun,
but you might not want to play this one while you're having dinner.
In comparison, the rather nondescript rumble served up by the enigmatically
named yoko.lennon is nowhere near as exciting – in fact it's
a rather subdued way to end the first disc of the set – but
is unlikely to interfere with your digestion.
The second disc starts off oddly, with a four-minute sound poem featuring
Anna Homler on vocals, pocket theremin and wooden boxes and cellist
Michael Intriere (formerly of the wonderfully-named Fat & Fucked-Up
ensemble), with Mark Wheaton adding electronics to their rather Berioesque
offering. Achim Wollscheid's curiously disembodied narrative recounting
how he first heard Stockhausen's Gesang at school (or at
least he thinks it was that piece) is followed by Dale Lloyd's
subtle erasing of all but the consonants of a story of unknown origin
told by Japanese woman, which prepares the listener perfectly for
the elusive montage of field recordings (could those be fire alarms?)
and spoken text courtesy of Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela, aka
@c, and Steve Roden's "between vowels and consonants", based
on his own vocal improvisations recorded while listening to the Stockhausen
original on headphones. Karlheinz would probably have a hard time
spotting Roden's voice, let alone any direct reference to his own
music, but he'd have no difficulty identifying the trusty ring modulator
Roden has used to transform his source material.
Asmus Tietchens contributes a splendidly uncompromising and typically
inscrutable five minutes. Shame my German isn't up to understanding
his spoken text, but at least you know where you stand with the liners:
"I tried to achieve a religious ceremony's travesty [sic],
because – besides its undoubted musical value – Gesang
der Jünglinge is a deeply religious piece and Stockhausen
a superstitious human being. Therefore I pity him." Nuff said.
Derek Holzer also uses a six-track recording of a wood-burning furnace
(seems the biblical imagery of Gesang's text has been as
influential in this project as Stockhausen's music) and a Chinese-language
shortwave broadcast (shades of Kurzwellen, perhaps?). The
furnace was recorded in Latvia, by the way, as was the text used in
Paulo Raposo's own contribution, though it describes Raposo's experiences
in the Chihuahua desert of northern Mexico. There are plenty of references
to the planet Sirius and visiting aliens, which Stockhausen would
probably enjoy (Asmus Tietchens presumably wouldn't), though I wonder
what he'd make of Raposo's distinctly concrète assemblage of
cooing pigeons, lapping waves and distant traffic noises. Houston
Texas based turntablist James Eck Rippie's seven minutes and twenty
seconds of heavily processed choral music are as beautiful and evanescent
as they are simple, but it falls to the self-styled citizen of the
kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland (shades of Hymunion, Harmondie and Pluramon
in Stockhausen's Hymnen), Carl Michael von Hausswolff, to
close proceedings with a characteristically frosty and forbidding
thirteen minutes of arid, throbbing drone. I'd have preferred the
Rippie myself, but never mind.
So, quite apart from trying to guess what Stockhausen himself would
make of it all (though I do hope a copy has been sent to Stockhausen
HQ in Kürten, and that Paulo Raposo will in due course report
back to us at PT with his reactions to it), how will this collection
of pieces sound in 49 years' time? My own favourite memory of Gesang
der Jünglinge is of my former professor of Music Theory,
Bob Morris (now Head of the Composition Department at the Eastman
School of Music) actually singing along with the boy soprano.
It recalls Anton Webern's wildly optimistic prediction that one day
the milkman would whistle his music.. well, maybe we'll have to wait
another century or so before that happens, but anyone with a good
ear for pitch and bit of musical training can indeed, on repeated
listening, follow the serial pitch logic of Stockhausen's vocal writing
without too much difficulty. (And if you're ever hear about a concert
performance near you of the work in its original five-track spatialized
form, make sure you get to it.) But even Bob Morris would have a job
singing along to most of the music on offer on Untitled Songs.
It's not that these pieces lack identity (though there are three or
four I would have left off if I'd been curating the project myself)
– far from it: the Schaefer, Rippie, Roden and Raposo tracks,
to name but four, are spectacularly good examples of contemporary
electronica's ability to create rich and unique sonic ecosystems in
a few minutes with a limited amount of material. But ecosystems are
fragile things, and tiny meteorological changes can damage them irreparably,
while your average Gothic cathedral has been standing for centuries,
and, unless we're really unlucky and a bloody great asteroid smashes
the planet to smithereens or some fucking idiot crashes a 747 into
it, it'll still be standing there several centuries from now. These
21 Untitled Songs are exquisite photographs of a beautiful
landscape, but Gesang der Jünglinge is still the mighty
cathedral towering above it.—DW
Whit
Dickey
IN A HEARTBEAT
Clean Feed 037
Dennis
González’s Spirit Meridian
IDLE WILD
Clean Feed 035
“[The
reviewer] claims that free jazz is 'long aligned with the liberal
left' (this only makes sense - is this arrogance or what) and 'is
(thus) marginalized.' He also goes on to claim that 'funding' is evidently
been reduced. What is this thing with funding? Oh, I see, nobody will
buy this music (you have to ask why?) so it should be supported by
the taxpayer… Mr. Dickey (like all leftists) evidently know[s]
what's best for everybody. I guess that the sad thing is that those
of us who don't fall into that category (but are free jazz listeners)
will stop buying free jazz CDs and stop attending concerts. Good luck
with your career, Mr. Dickey.” – from a comment in Bagatellen
on a recent review of In A Heartbeat.
Improvising is necessarily political, as it is social, spiritual,
aesthetic and behaviorist. Conversing sonically with one’s peers,
not to mention with the entire history of a music, engenders a dialogue
and critique of both artistic action and thought in a way that encompasses
all preceding history when one plays. It is a heavy weight to bear
for the player, for sure, but such criticism is implicit in the desire
to move forward in one’s art. If it were not implicitly political,
this music would not engender so many factional arguments about its
purpose and resolve, not to mention its place in the aesthetic continuum.
To paraphrase trumpeter / composer Bill Dixon, the confusion about
its place as either aesthetic mantra or toe-tapping diversion is both
what causes the argument for its soul, and what gives it its resolve.
After all, a truly democratic music should have as its ideals
equality, justice, and virtue – directed outward or inward.
Not surprisingly, there is a long train of improvisers who have been
resolutely political and active in social change: Max Roach, Charles
Mingus, Archie Shepp, Clifford Thornton are just a few of those names.
 Those,
however, who think the political nature of the music died out with
the dissolution of the Black Panther Party in the early 70s should
listen up to the current crop of American improvisers using their
art to speak out socially as well as aesthetically. There's much to
be said for the fact that improvisers are taking on the current US
administration and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – though
this is not to say that 2001 was the first time in thirty years that
jazzmen have been political; to wit, bassist William Parker’s
In Order to Survive and Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra. Drummer
Whit Dickey, who has worked extensively with Parker and reedman David
S. Ware (who, you will recall, recently revisited Sonny Rollins’
Freedom Suite), has made an overt statement against the Bush
administration with his latest quintet offering, his second for Clean
Feed, In a Heartbeat. Joined by usual suspects bassist Chris
Lightcap, altoist Rob Brown, guitarist Joe Morris and trumpeter Roy
Campbell Jr, the quintet run through four protest-themed Dickey originals
and Carla Bley’s “Calls", which first appeared to
my knowledge on Turning Point, Paul Bley’s quartet
recording with tenorman John Gilmore, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer
Paul Motian, originally slated in 1964 for Savoy but issued by Improvising
Artists in the mid-70s. The theme recalls Steve Lacy, with whom Carla
Bley collaborated in the mid-60s, Dickey here providing a Sunny Murray-like
wash underneath the horns before the band settles into a bright freebop
dialogue. The title track is a lengthy, additive romp through traded
comments and barbs, its brief theme both jagged and relaxed and reliant
on collective interplay. Morris, Lightcap and Dickey provide a broken,
loose swing that despite the fracture remains surprisingly consonant,
leaving the dissonance to the horns. “Dubya’s Flying Lesson”
sparks a cool whimsy, a lilting theme that segues into a series of
solos, duets and trios – sounds darting about one another like
birds in conference, often with Dickey’s absence creating a
spacious void or his presence an equally circular flight. Brown is
soulfully ebullient as usual, his first solo full of the contrasts
of fiery salvos, calling to mind Kenyatta, Osborne, Byron Allen and
a slew of post-Dolphy alto-men. Campbell’s soliloquy is poised
but full of colorful smears, a few Dixon-esque phrases betraying the
fact that he is indebted to that school of brassy sound production
(Campbell is curating this year’s Festival of the New Trumpet
in New York, which opens with Dixon’s music). The title references
something about the democratic process of adding and subtracting elements
not by trial of fire, but by the ebb and flow of group consensus,
which can change, yes, in a heartbeat.
 Idle
Wild is trumpeter Dennis González’s second outing
for Clean Feed, and features bassist Ken Filiano, drummer Michael
T.A. Thompson and reedman Oliver Lake. In keeping with the political
theme, González has included the clarion call of “Bush
Medicine,” apparently a staple in his live performances (González:
“If you are sick with a cold, you take cold medicine. If your
country is sick with Bush, you give it Bush medicine"). The tune
is based on a calypso theme, recalling Rollins by way of south Texas,
and displays the easy rapport between all four members of the quartet
– González and Lake in particular, whose poise and surefootedness
are both a perfect match and help to make the front line seem as though
it had been together for years. “Dust” features a Latin-based
theme as well, run through Ornette and Bobby Bradford and filled out
by constant, dense activity from Filiano and Thompson. González’s
solo takes its time, building deftly and airily in an Alan Shorter
bag, with Filiano’s massive strums girding it with dissonant
weight. Lake seems rather comfortable in what might be old shoes for
him (not to mention a rare sideman appearance); with a refreshing
energetic squall, his curved soprano starts off the collective composition
“Idle Wild,” a loose group improvisation that builds rhythmically
into an earthy, fractured funk over which a careful and spacious González
solo emerges. Thompson provides a subtle, constant activity, his distracted
timekeeping a major contributor to the openness of the set, and which
formulates an interesting march-like statement at the end of the piece,
arco flakes from Filiano’s bass providing the drive. “Song”
is a jouncy rondo, González’s trumpet taking on a more
"classical" air as the rhythm section stews around unison
statements by the horns; “Document for Toshinori Kondo”
is a knotty, driving theme that originally cropped up in performance
with the leader’s sons in the electric band Yells At Eels. Here,
the drive is carried by Thompson at his most rocking, before opening
up into the collective expansion and contraction of sonic exploration.
Whether titled in protest at current government and societal trends
or not, Dennis González and Whit Dickey have hit upon something
that nevertheless speaks to the inherent improvement and refinement
of humanity. Democracy is, after all, a collective rule by the people
– the healthier and more educated, the more truthful to its
aims. And so it is with improvisation, a collective consensus sometimes
reached through struggle, an art therefore directed at the betterment
of society.—CA
In
Concert in New York, part 2
A
recurring theme in recent contemporary music events in New York City
has been the relationship between East and West. One thinks not only
of James MacMillan’s Third Symphony, based on contrasts between
Japanese religions and Christianity, but also of concerts dominated
by musicians from America and the former Soviet Union. Although the
contribution from the ex-USSR has been limited to the older generation,
it has been no less “contemporary” than the American one.
Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
(1977, rev. 1980) was one of the first examples of the post-minimalist
aesthetic that still preoccupies many American composers, and even
today sounds far less long-winded than similar offerings from overseas.
Giya Kancheli’s Lonesome (2003), a piece for violin
and orchestra written for Rostropovich’s 75th birthday concert
at the London Barbican, is even more obsessed with repeated phrases,
interspersed in Kancheli’s case by long silences which filled
the cavernous Stern Hall (the concert was held in Carnegie Hall on
April 29th). Kancheli uses a melodic device favoured by Tchaikovsky
and Shostakovich in their violin concerti – a sustained note
followed by a short semitone rise and descent – which for Shostakovich
symbolized grief, belying Alexander Ivashkin’s claim in the
program notes: “For many years we weren’t allowed to speak
or show what we thought…An interval, sound or rhythm became
a symbol that the listener could identify. Music became the bridge
to a thought”. Gidon Kremer, who gave the première of
the work, performed it with his characteristic “heartbroken”
tone, adding countless wrinkles, stains and calluses, and Yuri Temirkanov
and the Baltimore Symphony fully indulged Kancheli’s pregnant
pauses. Riccardo Chailly’s reading of the Pärt Cantus
with the New York Philharmonic in Avery Fisher Hall (February 18th)
was equally unsentimental and, if anything, more sumptuous. The only
piece of Russian music to receive a less-than-excellent performance
was Alfred Schnittke’s 1992 score for Vsevolod Pudovkin’s
film The End of St. Petersburg. The film itself dates from
1927, and now comes across as outdated Expressionist agitprop, focusing
on the turmoil before the October Revolution, with workers supporting
factions of numerous types, but with the emotional and political complexity
of the situation reduced to crude ciphers. Schnittke’s score
is appropriately Neo-Expressionist, but his polystylism lapses at
times into straightforward pastiche of composers from Mahler and Shostakovich
to the Minimalists. Some of the synthesizer passages sound hilariously
80s, and the use of electronics in general is naïve (the composer’s
son Andrei produced the parts and is perhaps to blame for some blatant
errors). Stefan Asbury’s advocacy was also lukewarm, with some
imprecise phrasing from the Asko Ensemble, particularly in the overture.
Full marks though to Lincoln Center for staging this event in the
excellent Rose Theater (on May 4th) at least giving Pudovkin an attempt
to prove himself with the aid of live accompaniment.
In comparison, the three John Adams events I attended were shop-worn.
Not even an incisive performance of Century Rolls (1997)
by conductor David Robertson with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
and his pianist wife Orli Shaham (Stern Hall on April 16th) could
hide the fact that this neo-tonal homage to Conlon Nancarrow totally
fails to match its dedicatee’s rhythmic inventiveness. Its repeated
figurations and juxtapositions thereof are desperately unoriginal.
Much the same could be said for The Dharma at Big Sur (2003),
the other Adams concerto on offer (Avery Fisher Hall with the Los
Angeles Philharmonic, June 5th). This opened with spacious tonic triads
in the orchestra from which dissonant strands emerged gradually until
a solo electric violin entered with a series of huge reverberations,
creating an impression of a gigantic expanse. As openings go, admittedly
superb, but it was followed by a slow movement that was far too long
and bordered on kitsch, with its imitation of Indian raga.
The second and final movement was a helter-skelter piledriver free-for-all
which, despite excellent dynamic build-ups from conductor Esa-Pekka
Salonen and rock-star antics from soloist Tracy Silverman, failed
to provide any sense of surprise. Non-classical musicians invent fresh
figurations on electric instruments all the time - why can’t
Adams? In an interview with British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy at Carnegie
Hall on February 20th, he expressed his delight that all of a sudden
it has become fashionable to write beautiful music. The Violin Concerto
he wrote for Gidon Kremer was a key piece in this respect, but why
have his other concerti been so disappointing?
One possible answer to that question was the sentimentality that lay
behind Anthony de Mare’s recital at Carnegie Hall on March 15th.
De Mare is one of the few classical pianists who actively explore
their gay identity, so it was unfortunate that the works by gay composers
he featured that evening did little to break down stereotypes. David
del Tredici’s Gotham Glory (2004) is a wildly camped-up
neo-Romantic romp featuring near-quotes from Beethoven, Schumann and
Franck as well as a finale inspired by Waldteufel’s Skater’s
Waltz. Packed with passages of Godowskian unplayability, it defeated
even the dexterous fingers of de Mare, especially in the flirtatious
phrases of the final movement. Fred Hersch’s Saloon Songs
(2004) were also largely uninspired, while Meredith Monk’s Gotham
Lullaby (1973) was pretty, but pretty unrevealing. Fast-fading
memories of world premières by Jason Robert Brown (Mr.
Broadway, 2004) and Paul Moravec (Isle of the Manhattoes,
2004) were obliterated by an extraordinary incident five minutes into
Frederic Rzewski’s De Profundis (1992), a theatrical
masterpiece which requires the pianist to play music of great seductive
beauty while reciting excerpts from one of Oscar Wilde’s letters
to Lord Alfred Douglas (sent from the jail he'd been sent to for loving
him). The piece is dedicated to de Mare, who's played it on countless
occasions, but after a few minutes the pianist lost his way, apologized
and walked offstage. On his return he sounded lazy and exhausted,
especially in the voicing of the central fugue. A case of a musician
trying to do too much, or becoming sentimental about routine musicianship?
One solution for the performer is to transform the composition to
such an extent that it becomes indivisible from the artist performing
it, Yo-Yo Ma’s Stern Hall concert with the Silk Road Ensemble
on April 10th being a case in point. The music they performed originated
in Iran, China, Armenia, Azerbaijan, India, France and Romania, and
much of it is not notated or requires some form of improvisation,
so it was inspiring to see a conservatory-trained musician actively
engage with such traditions in a way which made his classical virtues
even more relevant. Ma even succeeded in adding a restraint which
complemented the expansiveness of the other performers. Perhaps the
most impressive contribution came from the Azerbaijani singer Alim
Qasimov, winner of the IMC-UNESCO Music Prize (fellow laureates include
Yehudi Menuhin, Ravi Shankar, Olivier Messiaen, Daniel Barenboim,
Claudio Arrau and Herbert von Karajan), whose vocal effects derive
from a dramatic conversational style which is more flexible than notated
avant-garde Sprechstimme. His rendition of songs from the
oral mugham tradition would have made even Cathy Berberian
sound naïve. Other stars included tabla player Sandeep Das and
composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, who writes in a microtonal idiom tinged
with Shostakovich. All of these artists acknowledge the interdependence
of composer and performer, in such a way that the performer can edit
the work without detracting from its virtues and the composer can
give the performer more interesting parameters. Ma’s willingness
to engage with this tradition has already led to a greater spaciousness
in his performances of Bach, and one wonders how much further he intends
to take it. Hopefully, like the musicians of the 18th and 19th centuries,
it will lead him to improvise a little, for, in losing the art of
improvisation, classical musicians are limiting not only their performances
but also the potential of the works they perform. - NR
Leroy
Vinnegar
THE KID
Q-TAPE QT 011 CD
 Just
in case you were thinking that everyone here at PT spends their time
listening exclusively to tough stuff on hardcore imprints like Erstwhile
and Creative Sources, here's a welcome reissue of some tasty collectors'
funk from 1974. Bassist Leroy Vinnegar's The Kid was originally
released on an obscure label called PBR, and presumably the master
tapes have disappeared, as this reissue, the debut release of the
new French Q-Tape imprint, has been lovingly remastered from vinyl
by Jonathan Fitoussi. The sound quality is good, if far from perfect,
but the music more than makes up for it. There's some superb keyboard
work from Dwight Dickerson, and all manner of strange sonorities,
from squelchy Moogs to electric banjos (courtesy Barry Zweig), but
one wonders if the album might have lain dormant for another quarter
of a century if DL Shadow hadn't sampled "Reservation" for
one his own overhyped productions. But the hordes of kids out there
just itching to dig up some obscure grooves to sample will find plenty
of other delicious snippets to pillage.—DW
Vijay
Iyer
REIMAGINING
Savoy Jazz SVY 17475
 Vijay
Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa’s quartet albums often seem like
different sides of a single project, which takes as its starting-point
a combination of post-Greg Osby / Steve Coleman “metrics”
and Indian musics, but with each album gets richer and more distinctive,
less and less “like” any musical reference-point outside
itself. For a jazz-oriented listener, it’s a compelling yet
slightly disorienting experience. Metrical overlays have often been
important in jazz as a way of slipping a more elusive, suspensive
time-feel into the metrical framework – a way of playing “in
time” while simultaneously giving the feeling of breaking away
from meter. They don’t function that way in Iyer: the rhythms
are complexly layered but emphatic and precisely calibrated (bassist
Stephan Crump sets out the metrical framework as if he’s driving
stakes into the ground), with a time-feel where (as Francis Davis
remarks) “as in hip-hop, there are no weak beats.” On
Simulated Architecture, Iyer’s new disc with his trio
Fieldwork, the results are often shockingly harsh; but on Reimagining
the textures are far richer and more approachable: Iyer’s cascading
piano sometimes even introduces a classical influence into the mix
– on “Inertia,” for instance, there’s an unmistakable
touch of Messiaen. This is intensely worked music: there’s barely
a detachable melodic phrase to be found in Iyer’s solos, just
a relentlessly kneaded stream of notes shooting across like a stream
of meteors, and the quartet’s shifts of texture and intensity
feel at times positively orchestral in their careful staging of multiple
interlocking climaxes. Mahanthappa comes across in this music like
Eric Dolphy did in so many 1960s bands, as an arrestingly human voice
standing out somewhat from the musical fabric: he also has something
of Dolphy’s ear-grabbing tendency to construct solos out of
dramatic plummets and cries, though Mahanthappa uses tight, corkscrewing
phrases rather than Dolphy’s airy leaps. But the most striking
presence here is newcomer Marcus Gilmore, not yet out of his teens
but already nailing these twitching, off-balance grooves without a
hitch. Like all of Iyer’s work Reimagining is sometimes
fearfully intense – “Phalanx” is nearly overpowering
– but among all the fury there’s a buried lyricism that
Iyer every so often (as on “Cardio”) lets rise to the
surface. There’s a guarded optimism here that sets the album
apart from the darker Blood Sutra, and makes it perhaps Iyer’s
most fully-rounded statement to date.—ND
Steve
Baczkowski / Chris Corsano / Paul Flaherty
THE DIM BULB
Wet Paint Music 3003
 There are
no liners accompanying this latest release on Paul Flaherty's Wet
Paint label, but the press release is a text by the inimitable Byron
Coley, which I'd dearly like to quote in its entirety, because it
is, as he would say, "totally choice." But so is the music,
a quintessentially titanic paint-stripping blow-out from Flaherty,
on alto and tenor saxophones, frequent sparring partner and human
drum kit Chris Corsano (thanks for that one, Byron) and, making his
official recording debut, Steve Baczkowski on baritone sax. Though
Baczkowski is little known outside Buffalo NY, where he apparently
cycles to gigs with the bari strapped to his back, The Dim Bulb
should really put him on the map. While there's a lot of what Coley
calls "destroying the universe" on offer, there's also a
finesse and subtlety in the work of these three musicians that gives
the lie to the old cliché that free jazz blow-outs are little
more than communal power wanks (though offhand I can think of several
that could fit that description..). Just because it's as serious as
your life doesn't mean it can't be fun either: Baczkowski even manages
to throw in an Ayler-scarred version of "When The Red Red Robin
Goes Bob Bob Bobbing Along" just a minute or so into "Soaking
in Gravel and Shale", but within a couple of minutes he's blasted
the cute little birdie to bits and Corsano drums what's left of it
into dust just in time for Flaherty to sail in and administer the
last rites. And you don't even have to go all the way to Buffalo NY
to check it out, either. Buy now or cry later.—DW
Tetuzi
Akiyama / Günter Müller
POINTS AND SLASHES
Erstwhile 044
 While
Taku Sugimoto's output since Italia has, to quote La Monte
Young, "drawn a straight line and followed it" - though,
given the extraordinary sparsity of his recent releases, "erased"
might be more appropriate than "drawn" - it's no easy business
guessing the next move of his erstwhile (no pun intended) playing
partner Tetuzi Akiyama. Akiyama's music is sometimes uncompromisingly
minimal (Foldings on Confront), sometimes rugged and noisy
(Résophonie, on A Bruit Secret), sometimes lyrical
and blues-inflected (Relator, on Slub, or Proletarian
Drift, on BV Haast) and sometimes downright rock'n'roll (Don't
Forget To Boogie, on Idea, or the recent Route 13 to the
Gates of Hell, on Headz). On the other hand, Günter Müller's
music over the past decade has been consistent in its refined, precise
and patient exploration of gradually evolving textures drawn from
his iPod, MiniDiscs and selected percussion. Teaming him up with Akiyama
was a bright idea - the crinkles and spasms of Akiyama's electric
guitar add relief and contour to Müller's work, gently nudging
the Swissman to shift up gears. Not that Points and Slashes
is exactly speed metal: the pace remains leisurely throughout, but
there are plenty of twists and turns in the plot in this superb and
satisfying offering from two master musicians. - DW
Bernhard
Günter/Heribert Friedl
ATARAXIA
trente oiseaux TOC053
 This
is a world where silence is scary, since it forces people to confront
themselves - and no one understands that better than Bernhard Günter,
whose trente oiseaux label specialises in the essential naked beauty
of sound verging on the unsustainable. In line with his recent tendency
to use his electric cellotar both in improvisational and more determined
contexts, Günter joins forces here with Austrian sound artist
Heribert Friedl (check out his discography at www.con-v.org), who
will issue a further chapter of this collaboration, Transformer,
on his new Non Visual Objects label. Adding two shakuhachi and a hackbrett
(cymbalom) to the cellotar, Günter and Friedl maintain a composed
attitude in music that pays an undisguised homage to those Zen masters
who play each note as if it's the single meaningful gesture in a lifetime.
Each subtle nuance of harmonics and breath is exalted by an intelligent
mix where instruments are allowed to bathe in their own aura without
the slightest hint of the shallowness that could poison the enchantment
of this sacred trance. A little more "present" than Günter's
+minus recordings, Ataraxia is nevertheless another moment
of intense reflection by two craftsmen of the untold, who look into
the void without fear as they extrapolate a concrete, painful purification
from the shadows of incorporeality.-MR
PSI
/ Pee-Ess-Eye
ARTIFICIALLY RETARDED SOUL CARE OPERATORS
Evolving Ear EE12
 The press
release accompanying this disc, which is as colourful as Fritz Welch
and Stephen O'Malley's cover art, begins with the immortal lines "like
a golden goose stewed in its own piss". If your toes are curling
up just thinking about what that might possibly taste like, it might
be of interest to you to learn that in times of yore, in certain parts
of Northern England, urine – they called it "lant"
back then – was added to beer to give it more, ahem, flavour.
Can't say I relish the prospect myself, but.. anyway, back to the
music. PSI (suppose that should be lowercase, even if the music isn't,
and I guess they've added the "pee-ess-eye" bit to differentiate
themselves from the record label of the same name curated by Evan
Parker) is a trio consisting of Welch on percussion, Jaime Fennelly
on electronics and Chris Forsyth on guitar, and in the past few years
they've been patiently marking out their own patch of territory in
the improv jungle (maybe like tigers do, by peeing on trees, and..
oops, there we go again), not far from the noisy post-Cremaster stuff
often featured here. This album is the group's strongest outing so
far – not to mention the nicest looking, in its oversize Japanese-style
gatefold packaging – and consists of eight excavations into
the gritty and at first sight seemingly barren topsoil of post-reductionist
noise. As always there's more there than meets the ear, even in the
decidedly vicious moments – the end of "Golden Showers",
the beginning of "Permanent War" – though some of
my worthy constituents in the world of journalism who've taken it
upon themselves to be the arbiters of Good Taste and Defenders of
The Tradition would be well-advised to leave this one alone. By way
of light relief, the album also includes snippets of phone calls,
chitchat and deliciously rowdy heckling. "Steve says we're in
big trouble and we're gonna get killed for playing such ugly music.."
Not by me, mate. I'll raise a pint to you next time in England. (No
lant though, thanks.) —DW
David
Gross
THINGS I FOUND TO BE TRUE
Sedimental SEDCD 040
 There's
been no shortage of great solo sax albums in recent times –
think of Stéphane Rives' Fibres on Potlatch, Bertrand
Gauguet's Etwa on Creative Sources and Martin Küchen's
Music From One Of The Provinces In The Empire on Confront,
each quite extreme in its methodical exploration of extended technique.
Boston-based altoist David Gross is no stranger to controversy either
– witness the furore provoked by his Fetish in the
columns of Bagatellen recently – and Things is sure
to raise as many eyebrows and hackles as it does questions. Throughout
the album a distant high-pitched whine is clearly audible, forming
a backdrop to an extraordinary display of gurgles, rustles, clicks,
grunts, growls, pops, squeaks and even the occasional note (just about
the only thing that could possibly identify the source of these sounds
as a saxophone). Several tracks sound alarmingly like what might have
resulted if David Lynch had stuck a contact mic inside Dennis Hopper's
gasmask in Blue Velvet. Though the vocabulary itself is that
usually associated with lowercase micro-improv (now the stock-in-trade
of saxophonists the world over, from Bhob Rainey to Alessandro Bosetti
to Christine Sehnaoui to.. the list goes on), the sheer density of
events has little in common with reductionism, which, as Jack Wright
recently pointed out, has now "run its course". One can
easily imagine this saxophonist hooking up with his French namesake
Jean-Philippe and other neo-noise practitioners (Ferran Fages, Will
Guthrie et al.), but the fact that this is a solo offering –
that and the title – makes it uniquely personal vision of a
musical language whose phonetics, syntax and semantics have been completely
redefined.—DW
Natto
Quartet
THOUSAND OAKS
482 Music 482-1036
 This
East/West improv session offers a delicate balance between shakuhachi
(Philip Gelb), koto (Shoko Hikage), piano (Chris Brown) and electronics
(Tim Perkis). In many ways it's closer to Feldman than to free improv:
a hushed, nocturnal music where each sound is like a separate brushstroke
offered up for contemplation. It tends to work through microtonal
variations on carefully selected handfuls of notes, so that a single
pitch may appear once with the water drop purity of Brown’s
piano, then be immediate echoed by the bent notes of koto or shakuhachi,
or by Perkis’s wriggly electronics. There are a few glimpses
of a more abrasive, quick-moving approach, especially on the closing
“Shochu”, but mostly it’s a gentle drift downriver.
The rapt moment-to-moment pointillism can be a little frustrating:
it would be nice if every so often one of the musicians threw a wrench
in the works (surely one of the joys of improv as a genre?). It’s
less far-ranging, for example, than another recent release exploring
similar cross-cultural ground, Sawai / Doneda / Imai / Lê Quan
/ Saitoh's Une chance pour l’ombre (recently
reviewed in these pages). Both discs, though, are good examples
of how diverse instruments and musical traditions can be brought together
by musicians who are virtuoso listeners as well as performers. Natto,
by the way, is a variety of fermented beans that tends to faze even
the most avid Western fans of Japanese cuisine – see Anthony
Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour for an up-close-and-personal
encounter with the substance. Thousand Oaks is a much more
appetising prospect.—ND
Cortet
HHHH
Unsounds 10
 Everything
that's appeared on Yannis Kyriakides' Unsounds label has been excellent,
and the same can be said of this fine release by this quartet consisting
of Cor Fuhler (piano), Thomas Lehn (analog synth), Rhodri Davies (harp)
and John Butcher (saxophones) – another great ego trip title
for Fuhler too.. after Corkestra and Cortet, what
next? A Cor-ncerto? It's been my experience that the musicians
who pull off the restrained stuff best are those who don't necessarily
spend all their lives playing it; readers of these pages will be familiar
with the extraordinary diversity of the recorded outputs of Messrs
Fuhler, Lehn and Butcher, and it would also be a mistake to associate
Davies exclusively with the so-called New London Silence scene he
helped instigate (check out Vortices & Angels, or the
first Cranc album). What also sets these guys apart from many other
tootlers and flutterers out there is that they have at their disposal
an awesome command of conventional instrumental technique that allows
them to respond in a split second to nuances of pitch and timbre that
less technically adept players would otherwise miss. Wait a sec, did
he say "pitch"? What's pitch doing in the brave new world
of post-onkyo improv, you might ask? Well check out the pitch play
on "TH" and "HN" if you don't believe finding
and playing the right note is important anymore. Fuhler's tiny chordal
cells – the influence of Feldman, via Tilbury?– intersect
with Butcher's characteristically pristine multiphonics to perfection.
Davies is the model of discretion throughout, and Lehn proves once
again that his trusty old EMS is capable of far more than the explosive
splats of noise it's best known for (Tom and Gerry, Bart,
both on Erstwhile..). HHHH is an album of great maturity
and fantastic musicality – here's hoping there's more to come
from these particular line-up before too long.—DW
Trio
Sowari
THREE DANCES
Potlatch P105
 Three
Dances is the debut release by Trio Sowari, a group made up of
three experienced European improvisers: Phil Durrant (software sampler,
synthesizer and treatments), Bertrand Denzler (tenor saxophone) and
Burkhard Beins (percussion and objects). Recorded at La Muse en Circuit
outside Paris on November 21st 2004, the disc contains three fairly
lengthy tracks. In the first, “Rondo”, the group’s
soundworld of hisses, gurgles, crackles, reverberations, stridulations
and extended tones is fashioned into an engagingly episodic sequence
of fleet consecutive responses and entwined passages of sinewy enfoldings
and uncouplings. Along the way, the music explores a wide range of
densities and volumes (including silence), and, unlike the more uniformly
high-pitched electro-acoustic improvisations common today, often possesses
quite a punch in the lower register. The improvising is generally
excellent – attentive, adept and creative – although a
few passages are marked by rather fixed or obvious responses. The
second track, “Bolero”, is quieter, beginning with a bubbling
surface of small gestures, later replaced by more persistent rumblings
and extended tones from Durrant’s electronics and punctuating
bursts of drag and flutter from Beins and Denzler. Once again, there
is much of interest but not quite the same intensity of connection
that possessed the musicians on “Rondo”. The final track,
“Tumble” opens strongly with some gripping exchanges and
concatenations built out of single sounds, both short and extended,
from each player. As the improvisation proceeds, the trio’s
approach diversifies, taking in everything from furtive low volume
exchanges to huge electronic surges, metallic episodes and undulating
fields of electronic and acoustic sound. There are moments, especially
towards the end of the track, when the groups falls into uniformly
agitated playing or orthodox arcs of tension and release, but what
is more prominent is the collective willingness to allow the music
to mutate creatively and an ability to fashion fresh and stimulating
contributions moment by moment.
Trio Sowari’s search for combinations and sequences of sounds
that establish meaning without submitting to conventional aesthetic
theories and responses is a fine illustration of what Cornelius Cardew
referred to in his sleeve notes to AMM’s 1968 The Crypt
- 12th June : "searching for sounds and for the responses
that attach to them". But can you dance to it? Would you want
to, even if you could? The social institution of dance typically serves
as a process of physical entrainment (“muscular bonding”
in the words of dance historian William McNeill) whereby the individual
is imbued with an unreflective and mobilizable identity as a member
of an existing group and inculcated into the values of the group’s
dominant powers and ideologies. Are there other approaches to dance
that go beyond idiot spasms in the service of tribe, nation, state,
sub-culture or commodity, that act in contemporary conditions other
than by dressing oblivious social submission in the tattered rags
of simulated ecstasy or conventional elegance? If nothing else, perhaps
Trio Sowari’s provocative title and alluringly caliginous cavorting
invite us to explore these questions in mind and body.—WS
Los
Glissandinos
STAND CLEAR
Creative Sources CS 029
 If
pushed to choose just half a dozen releases on Creative Sources to
take to the fabled desert island (tough call, as any present shortlist
would include as least twice that many, and I'll be modest enough
to exclude my own outing on the label, very proud of it though I am),
Kai Fagaschinski's No Furniture, with Boris Baltschun and
Axel Dörner (CS 009) would definitely be in the suitcase. One
of the disadvantages of such an ambitious release programme –
Ernesto Rodrigues has truly flooded the market in the past year with
over 20 new titles – is that punters (and journalists) are often
spoilt for choice and tend to skip over things that they might normally
devote more attention to. Such was the case, it seems, with No
Furniture – though heaven knows I tried to push the album
as hard as a could – and let's hope history doesn't repeat itself
with Los Glissandinos, clarinettist Fagaschinski's duo with laptopper
Klaus Filip. While I fully respect those cats who like their album
covers abstract and almost entirely devoid of information, I've always
had a soft spot for cover art, believing, misguidedly perhaps, that
if the artists hadn't intended it to complement in the music in some
way, they wouldn't have chosen it. The photographs that adorn Stand
Clear show a fine summer's day on the banks of an inviting river,
a campfire that looks just about ready for a barbecue, and, behind
the disc itself, the muzzle of large sandy coloured hound close to
the camera (dangerously close perhaps, though it looks to all intents
and purposes as if it's about to give it a friendly lick). I wonder,
if the cover art had been as austere as No Furniture's hand
drawn tables, chairs and sofas, whether Fagaschinski and Filip's music
might sound less inviting than it actually does. As it is, Filip's
glowing, spacious sustained sinewaves and Fagaschinski's breathy purrs
are eminently listenable, almost soothing, even in the strident upper
register workouts of "History of the Animals". A lot of
this kind of music comes across as chilly – is there anything
more glacial than the icy blasts of Franz Hautzinger on Brospa?
– but there's a warmth and richness to Los Glissandinos' microtonal
meanderings and Lucier-like investigations of difference tones that's
instantly appealing. Well, the family dog might take a bite out of
you if it hears it, but I think it's splendid.—DW
Martin
Küchen / David Stackenäs
AGAPE
Creative Sources CS 035
 Hot on
the heels of his Confront solo album, alto saxophonist Martin Küchen
is back in action on this rugged set of duets with guitarist David
Stackenäs. By way of accompaniment, the booklet and tray are
adorned with old photographs from the Küchen and Stackenäs
family archives, one showing an elderly gentleman with a set of headphones
clamped tightly to his head. His expression is hard to read –
a faint smile, but there's maybe a slight twinge of pain there too.
From the look of the machine he's plugged into, he's not listening
to Agape, but you should be, as it's a splendidly recorded
and executed set of sensitive and patient investigations into the
world of extended instrumental techniques. That said, it's a world
we're becoming increasingly familiar with: a quarter of a century
ago the old cliché went that you could tell where an improviser
came from just by listening to his / her music (you remember, English
"insect music", German balls and bluster, Dutch pottiness
and all that). If that was ever the case, and I have my doubts, it
isn't anymore. Musicians all over the world – Berlin, Boston,
Barcelona, Zürich, Tokyo, Paris, Lisbon, Vienna and London –
are exploring the same territory as Küchen and Stackenäs
here. In one sense this is rather gratifying, as it testifies to the
emergence of a network of musicians who are, thanks to new technology
as much as to the efforts of labels like Creative Sources, in regular
contact and creating opportunities to play and record together. On
the other hand, it does seem that a clearly defined set of rules has
emerged. High speed action "gabby" (to quote Malfatti) improv
is generally avoided, consensus has replaced conflict, regular repeating
rhythms are frowned upon and any sense of pitch play remotely related
to tonal centres sounds as rare and surprising today as a breathy
multiphonic or spitty gurgle would have done back in 1960. Stackenäs
and Küchen are versatile players who have made strong statements
in other musical idioms, and yet for Agape it's as if they've
deliberately restricted the vocabulary to standard 2005 post-reductionism.
I like to think that in the near future this generation of free improvisers
will feel comfortable enough to welcome words and idioms from other
languages once again, but that's because I happen to believe that
improvisation isn't only about making beautiful wheels – it's
also about sticking spokes into them and seeing what happens.—DW
Quentin
Dubost / Wade Matthews / Stéphane Rives / Ingar Zach
DINING ROOM MUSIC
Creative Sources CS 039
 Dining
Room Music, eh? Correct me if I'm wrong but there seems to be
some sort of allusion to Erik Satie's musique d'ameublement
– furniture music – the celebrated precursor of Brian
Eno's concept of ambient music. But that's as far as the analogy goes
– even at low volume there's nothing remotely ambient about
this gritty, challenging set of three improvisations by Quentin Dubost
(guitar), Wade Matthews (bass clarinet and alto flute), Stéphane
Rives (soprano sax) and Ingar Zach (percussion), recorded in the dining
room – aha, that's why – of the Maison Bustros
in Beirut on August 21st last year. On paper, Rives and Matthews might
seem an odd pairing: the former is well known for his uncompromising
sonic research into extreme registers and feedback (Fibres,
on Potlatch), while Matthews is a more voluble player (witness his
own recent Creative Sources solo outing, Aspirations and Inspirations).
But the two prove to be eminently compatible, thanks to the skilful
mediation of Zach, who's equally capable of playing the fast, clattery
stuff as well as stripped down lowercase, and Dubost, whose guitar
work throughout is most impressive. It's a solid, satisfying outing,
which you could, I suppose, play during dinner – though I doubt
whether any of the musicians would want to be held responsible for
subsequent gastric disorders. Great stuff.—DW
Mike
Cooper
METAL BOX
Rossbin RS 020
 In case
you thought there was only one album called Metal Box worth
having, here comes Rome-based Hawaiian shirt sporting British expat
guitarist Mike Cooper to prove you wrong – but don't throw the
Public Image away, cos it still rocks. The album is dedicated to the
memory of John Fahey, but don't be fooled into thinking it's just
another one of those pale folksy noodling affairs (mentioning no names).
Nor, despite Cooper's well-known enthusiasm for Hawaiian exotica,
is it remotely easy listening: the Martin Denny LPs have been chucked
into the trash compactor and squashed into six slabs of strange clattering
madness. Cooper's music is chaotic, entropic and often hard to follow,
even without the electronic manipulations. "The Rusty Chain Tango
Mambo" sounds like a small but ferocious mammal with contact
mics attached trying to escape from inside an upright piano. It's
still trapped in there on "A Big Wave Event", but the lap
steel and laptop do their best to drown it out. "Intuitive Acoustic
Archaeology" is the closest we get to Fahey – is it my
imagination or is there even a snatch of "Dance of Death"
in there? – while "Last Chants and Dance for Blind Joe
Death" combines Cooderesque bottleneck licks with disconcerting
rattles and reversed soundfile whooshes in a fitting yet nevertheless
elusive conclusion to a thought-provoking album.—DW
Koji
Asano
TAKOYAKIKUN
Solstice 037
Quite
a story, this Asano. He releases CDs by the dozen, jumping genres
and situations like a grasshopper, fathering virtually unsung quasi-masterpieces
(The Last Shade of Evening Falls, a truly engaging piece
of irregular minimalism, or the graceful The End of August,
an exercise in peripheral urban memories) and was all the rage for
a while in the hip avant magazines, which described him as the second
coming of Jim O'Rourke. Then, all of a sudden we lost track of him,
except for sporadic ads for his new records, of which this is the
latest, a "dissonant power trio" from 1997 (!) with Asano
on guitar, Isao Otake on keyboards and Hisashi Nagata on drums that
was already featured on 1996's Gravity, Asano's third album.
It's a cross of free-rockish improvisation and difficult charts which
are executed (not without flaws) with almost King Crimson-ish energy
in a series of pieces which flee linearity at every turn, except for
short thematic fragments. There's also a strange semi-acoustic, more
hypnotic reflection where Asano seems to be noodling on an uncredited
mandolin. I certainly prefer this stuff to many overhyped fellow Japanese
"icons" whose black glasses and long hair and beards look
better than their music sounds, yet I know for sure Koji Asano can
do much better. -MR
Fred
Frith
ELEVENTH HOUR
Winter & Winter 910 103-2
 Though
Irvine Arditti reportedly had qualms about tackling Fred Frith's scores,
his Arditti String Quartet is on top form on this 2-CD set, which
comes with the usual elegant packaging we're accustomed to with Winter
& Winter. "Lelekovice", which already featured on the
Yorkshireman's Quartets, was originally written for Iva Bittova
and throughout its nine movements the clarity of Frith's lines never
gets blurred, maintaining the cohesion among the parts in the more
Eastern-sounding sections and figuring as an analytical link to the
harmonic purity to which the music invariably gravitates. "Tense
Serenity", for string trio and trombone (Uwe Dierksen), alternates
pressure and calm by contrasting the sheer simplicity of melodic fragments.
The ghost of a voice peeps at the musicians from behind the mysterious
scented veil of the third movement, in which Rohan De Saram's wait-for-it
cello adds a scary touch to the mix, ironically underlined by the
sounds of a radio in the silence. The second disc features Frith and
William Winant's guitars in three engrossing arrangements; the third
part of "Allegory" is probably the most nostalgically charged
moment of the whole set, its harmonic relationships establishing a
direct connection with impressive emotional accents. "Stick Figures"
for six guitars is a percussive and pretty minimal piece in which
a misty mass of drones is punctuated by repeated hits in an increasingly
intense pulsation brimming with unforeseen violence. The final "Fell"
spirals down into the depression of a confused mind, its precipitating
pseudo-canonic counterpoint blemished by Frith's cries of desperation
on the guitar. It's a haunting conclusion to a rather dark record,
like watching the Titanic orchestra re-emerge from the depths to play
again, note heads and staves completely deformed by salt water.
-MR
Rich
Woodson's Ellipsis
THE NAIL THAT STANDS UP GETS POUNDED DOWN
N/Twirp 001
 How
many of you heard Control and Resistance, Rich Woodson's
2000 debut on Cuneiform? Not too many raised hands seen from here..
well, here's a second chance to enjoy the work of one of America's
most talented young composers. Woodson's band Ellipsis has been around
since 1997, primarily as a recording entity - not surprisingly so,
given the extreme complexity of the music, a mixture of genres in
perennial mutability: imagine a Charles Ives-approved melange of Dolphy,
Zappa, Henry Cow, 5UU's and Motor Totemist Guild - no I'm not exaggerating.
Every one of the countless intricacies is notated, too: "no improvisation
in this recording", writes guitarist Woodson proudly of these
pieces written between 1998 and 2003 and performed by a first-class
ensemble consisting of clarinettist Anthony Burr (replacing soprano
saxophonist Peter Epstein), percussionist John Hollenbeck, tenor saxophonist
Aaron Stewart (no stranger to compositional complexity himself, having
worked with Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams and Butch Morris)
and the excellent bassist Mat Fieldes.
Rich Woodson's "more-is-more" aesthetic is, according to
the composer, about "cerebral exploration" in order to "document
one man's struggle to create meaning in a world where there's none
save for what we create that lasts beyond our own lifetime".
The disc opens in style with "Looking For The Right Reflection",
a collision between Curlew and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic arriving
at the same platform from opposite directions. This is followed by
"Let's Talk About Virtue", a sort of latter-day "Igor's
Boogie" in which, pinched by oblique, clean guitar lines, each
part follows its own logic. "It Came From Above" presents
beautiful guitar/reed unisons and contrasts, as Burr's clarinet sings
of introvert serenity while Fieldes's obstinate pumping bass rattles
the bars of his contrapuntal cage. After the brief respite of fantastic
drumming and dialogue in "Cerebral Love", "Flames From
An Unlikely Source" is what happens when a bunch of top-notch
Juilliard students get lost on their way to school and end up in a
blind alley with an architect and a drunkard. When musicians with
this technical prowess put their body, mind and soul into a ferociously
complex marathon fusion of RIO styles such as "Vagueness",
or the contorted hell of instrumental precision that is "Animal
Magnetism", I'm taken back to the happy days of my own musical
studies, when we still naïvely assumed intelligence would be
rewarded. The wonderfully-titled "Ambivalence Saves The Day"
is the systematization of chaos through the acceptability of dissonance,
lightening the whole structure and ending - idiosyncratically as usual
- with Hollenbeck all alone. Yes, you have to appreciate Woodson,
an endangered species of musician capable of truly looking
forward while maintaining the utmost respect for his roots and influences
(he cites Alain Resnais, Samuel Beckett, Morton Feldman, Henri Dutilleux,
Ned Rorem, Valentin Silvestrov and Stephen Sondheim among them). This
music is at one and the same time beautiful, groundbreaking, inquisitive
and hard-headed: if you missed Control and Resistance make
sure you don't miss this.-MR
Niccolò
Castiglioni
MUSIC FOR PIANO
Metier MSV CD92089
 Niccolò
Castiglioni was born in Milan in 1932 and died there in 1996. Between
1958 and 1965 he was a regular visitor to the fabled Darmstadt summer
school, and from 1966 to 1970 a visiting professor of composition
in the USA, where he taught in Ann Arbor, Seattle and San Diego. The
first piece on offer in this fine representative selection of his
piano music, splendidly played by Sarah Nicolls, Cangianti,
dates from 1959. Vintage Darmstadt, you might guess – and you
wouldn't be far off the mark, but it's hardly a frosty exercise in
total serialism à la Boulez's Structures.
On the contrary, it's closer to some of Luc Ferrari's piano music
of the mid 50s, a personal take on serialism filtered through the
whole history of the repertoire, tracing a line back from the hysterical
virtuosity of the Stockhausen Klavierstücke via Webern
to expressionistic Schoenberg to Beethoven to the baroque masters
the composer apparently enjoyed so much. No traces of neoclassicism,
though (which can't always be said of Ferrari). There's a bit of a
gap between Cangianti and the Tre Pezzi –
nearly twenty years, to be precise, during which time Castiglioni,
rather like Donatoni, was moving towards his own personal and utterly
irony-free version of postmodernism. The "Kinderlied ohne Worte"
is, as Michael Finnissy rightly points out in his liners, distinctly
Webernian, but lest you get the impression it's all getting heavy
and Germanic, the busy figuration and fondness for upper register
arabesques also point towards Messiaen and Ravel. Four years later,
and the ten little miniatures that make up Como io passo l'estate
("How I spend the summer") look even further afield,
to ragtime ("Arrivo a Tires") and Gershwin ("La Fossa
del Lupo"), via Satie, Debussy and Scriabin. If the major seventh
and minor ninth were the intervals of choice for the Darmstadt avant-garde,
Castiglioni does his level best here to bring back the good old schmaltzy
third, and pianist Nicolls is right to recommend this to kids learning
the piano: it's entertaining stuff, technically challenging but rewarding
and beautifully heard (check out the ravishing chords on
"Antonio Ballista dorme in casa dei Carabinieri"). In 1984's
Dulce Refrigerium (Sechs Geistliche Lieder) the composer
seems to be looking even further back, to Beethoven's famous Lebewohl
horn calls (Ligeti's Horn Trio, written just a couple of
years earlier, not surprisingly also explores the reference) –
material of great significance for the composer, it would appear,
since it also reappears in the distinctly late Beethovenian Sonatina
written that same year. By this time the postmodernism seemed to be
kicking in with a vengeance, though: where the Tre Pezzi
fused diverse stylistic influences to perfection and the tiny vignettes
of Come io passo approached them with simplicity and respect,
it's harder to pinpoint the composer's real personality in the 1984
works (maybe that's intentional – mid 80s Donatoni is, after
all, also good at playing "Will The Real Composer Please Stand
Up?"). Happily, the Beethovenian soul searching is dispensed
with in the toccata-like flourishes of the disc's closer, HE (1990),
which goes back to the Darmstadt major seventh and its inversion,
the noble semitone and gives them a workout both Bartók and
Reich would have been proud of. There's not enough Castiglioni out
on disc, so this one comes warmly recommended.-DW
Greg
Davis / Steven Hess
DECISIONS
Longbox LBT 033
Greg Davis is attracting quite a bit of well-deserved attention lately,
which bodes well for this splendid release on Adam Sonderberg's cutting
edge bijou Longbox imprint. Joined by his frequent sparring partner
Steven Hess, Davis has cooked up nine exquisitely crafted tracks for
laptop and percussion, recorded direct to minidisc (except one taken
from a live set at the Empty Bottle) chez Hess. With its
concern for detail and attentive mixing of electronic and acoustic
sonorities – and various treatments thereof – Decisions
recalls another fine percussion / computer collaboration of recent
times, Jon Mueller and Asmus Tietchens' excellent 7 Stücke
(Aufabwegen, 2002). It's appropriate that Mueller should pop
up in the discussion, as relations between his Crouton imprint up
the road in Milwaukee and Sonderberg's Longbox have been close for
a while – Sonderberg contributed a track to Crouton's Folktales
3, and Mueller is due to release an outing on Longbox shortly.
Plus Hess plays in the Hat Melter quartet (Crouton 17). Small world..
anyway, back to Decisions. Both Hess and Davis are comfortable
in the fertile plains that separate the desert landscapes of drone
and the rocky mountains of, erm, rock (Davis even covered a Christopher
Cross song recently on a compilation album on Tu m'-curated Mr Mutt
label.. does that count as rock?), and though there are no foot-tapping
grooves to speak of on Decisions, it's clear these guys know
their Thrill Jockeys as well as their Erstwhiles. Don't be put off
by the austere black packaging (that's probably just Adam being intimidating
again): this is as colourful as it is uncompromising.—DW
Brendan
Murray
RESTING PLACES
Sedimental SEDCD 039
 It's
2.30pm and I'm sitting on an old granite millstone on the banks of
the Marne just outside Paris on what must be the hottest day of the
year so far – it can't be far off 40°C – with the
river flowing sluggishly by, clogged with dirty green weeds, home
to squadrons of three-inch-long menacing dragonflies. There's not
a breath of wind. Beads of sweat evaporate gently to leave tiny rings
of salt on the skin. No doubt a few brave heat-resistant bugs are
crawling in the long grass at my feet, but I can't hear them. The
mp3 player is burning a hole in my pocket and Brendan Murray's music
is burning another one inside my head. Perhaps this set of four medium-length
electronic soundscapes is intended for nocturnal (or even, considering
the title, post-funereal) listening, but there's something singularly
appropriate about experiencing it here and now in the dry heat of
early summer. Firstly because it gives the lie to the assumption that
predominantly static electronic music is somehow "cool"
(ambient, easygoing..) – Resting Places is hot, sometimes
frighteningly intense – and secondly because, like my immediate
surroundings, the apparent lack of discernable activity is but an
illusion. Myriad tiny organisms are busy in the waters of the river,
just as Murray's music is positively teeming with life behind its
curtain of sustained tones. I have to admit to being slightly bemused
by my colleague Jim Haynes's take on the work in the July Wire
(to the effect that it lacks "a bit of polish to buff out
the uneven moments that mar an otherwise fine effort"): it's
precisely those occasional rough edges and sharp corners that give
the album its definition.—DW
Autodigest
A COMPRESSED HISTORY OF EVERYTHING EVER RECORDED, VOL. 2: UBIQUITOUS
ETERNAL LIVE
Ash International (RIP) / Crónica, Ash 6.1 / Crónica
016
 An
interesting throwback to the days of the “statement” or
“manifesto”, this curio containing one hour of audience
applause and cheers culled from various popular music live actions,
with lush photography by Heitor Alvelos and design by Jon Wozencroft,
is perfect for annoying noisy neighbors: “Just try to imagine
what a concert would mean to an audience before sound could be recorded…”
Nicely arch sentiment, that, but just try to imagine if you could
only listen to a song once and never again. Try it, I fucking dare
you! “The aim of Autodigest’s statements is to illustrate
the collapse of music as we know it – codified, copied, digitized,
burned, compressed, freely and readily available, all of this at a
time when we can download music much faster than we can listen to
it, all of this at a time when a soda drink offers one hundred million
songs for free.” Apart from the nice bonus of word-count padding
herein – hey, look / at least / I don’t / quote song lyrics
– one should always have the chance to read a group’s
“statements” beyond the odd broadside found buried in
aging LP jackets. However, with all this blah-zey lowing over the
state of modern music, it must always be emphasized that any such
“collapse” of music is a Western phenomenon and doesn’t
apply to recordings like these and other grassroots groups only a
very few people give a shit about.—DC
Disinformation
SENSE DATA & PERCEPTION
Iris Light i-Light 031 CD EP
 On
Disinformation's R&D 2 back in 1998 – the second
in a purportedly long-running “Research & Development”
series – Joe Banks dealt with recordings of solar radio emissions,
live electricity, magnetospheric reflections and local/artificial
lightning, faintly reminiscent of the 2001 Turner Prize winner Martin
Creed’s “Lights Going Off and On In an Empty Room”.
The CD cover: black wires, tangled and piled and representative of
a great “something else”. That’s pretty much how
this album comes across, too: unmixed VLF magnetic-field noise recordings
(“Bexleyheath to Dartford (2002)” and “London Underground
(2002)”) sit alongside references to touchstones of civilization
that obviously mean something but it’s unclear precisely what;
in “Kwaidan (2002), parts 1 & 3”, a sudden rush of
harsh sound is followed by a prickling, receding nothing, like the
story in the Lafcaido Hearn anthology in which a great musician has
his ear ripped off by ghosts when he fails to tattoo it with the necessary
sigils. Is recording the sky above and the earth below just a question
of documentary, of sheer objectivity? At what point do one’s
own sense and sensibilities project themselves on the finished CD?
An outwardly difficult record – in the same way that learning
to swim is outwardly difficult.—DC
Evol
MAGIA POTAGIA
Mego 038
 Barcelona
duo Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Anna Ramos deliver songs (?)
similar in nature to their pet chinchilla, Perkele – hyperactive,
slithy and hairy with promise. From the world of algorithmic composition
– meaning “constant nano-changes in pitch, velocity or
general structure” – it is as if they had given the chinchilla
(lots are available for sale, along with pea-hens, guinea pigs and
other truculent animals, in the tourist area of Barcelona, Las Ramblas)
free reign over their computer, or at least the circuit-bent Kaoss
Pad. Termed “anti-climax” tracks, these seem more like
the arcane stage directions to a traveling flea circus or the sound
of files doing back-flips during a hard-drive defragmentation. The
three tracks – “Punani Potagia”, “Pus pus
pus” and “Walpurgis” – date from 2001 and
are for “solo computer”, which prompts the question: if
in thirty years we've trumped the Mayans and are all still here, will
modern glitchgore be performed in much the same manner as Feldman
or Cage today? Completely unpredictable from top to bottom –
and avoidance of pattern-making in music is exceptionally difficult
thing to bring off – Carl Stalling would have loved it.—DC
Ellen
Band & David Lee Myers
TWO SHIPS
Pogus 21035-2
 We
need more collaborations like this. David Lee Myers, aka Arcane Device,
has worked with the likes of Asmus Tietchens and Tod Dockstader using
feedback machines that recall the kinetic sculpture of Yaacov Agam
and Scott Konzelmann, while Ellen Band, from the more academic world
of Mills College, got a write-up in Playboy for 90% Post-Consumer
Sound (XI) and was commissioned to do an installation at Logan
International Airport in Boston. Given the track record of Arcane
Device one might expect this to be an overpowering slab of sound,
but it's far more measured, nearly polite. In his frank and informative
liners, Myers mentions the “aquatic” nature of the recordings,
which are, as he puts it, “an interplay between blending and
contrast”. Shortwave crackles morph into swarms of annoying
summer nits or hiccuping butterflies; life changes as one constantly-cracking
ice-floe is exchanged for an increasingly smaller one; attenuated
kettle whistles meet repetitive harpsichord figurations, birdsong,
cochlea-tickling bass tones, locomotives and bad-acid-trip tinklings.
A surprisingly gentle album. Cover star: the south shore of the East
Siberian Sea.—DC
Vagina
Dentata Organ
THE GREAT MASTURBATOR
W.S.N.S., 003 CD VDO
 Looking
hale and hearty and just a little bit like Charles Grodin (or L.A.F.M.S.
member Fredrik Nilsen, depending), Jordi Valls returns with renewed
creative vigor – understandable because his entire oeuvre deals
with obsession and focus, things which are difficult to maintain over
long periods of time. Fifty minutes and eight seconds of a bell tolling
across the backdrop of the works of Salvador Dalí, with the
attendant stretching of the rope that pulls the clapper and a quote
from St. John of the Cross on the inner sleeve: “Death, come
hidden lest I hear you come; the pleasure of dying might give me life.”
The VDO oeuvre, you'll recall, includes the manipulated album-length
animal snarls of the Music for Hashishins LP, a fortuitously
recorded Jonestown murder-suicide on the The Reverend Jim Jones
In Person – The Last Supper picture disk (an edition of
912 copies, one for each victim), and the Harley-Davidson-driven mania
of the Un Chien Catalan CD, all released on Valls's World
Satanic Network System label. His work as an early advocate of Throbbing
Gristle, his narration on the Whitehouse Psychopathia Sexualis
LP, the Cold Meat picture disk showing Marilyn and Elvis
on the slab and in the coffin, boasting two long suites of manipulated
sighs signifying marriage, hence the subtitle “Eros and Thanatos”
– it all adds up to an artist who aggrieves the Protestant work
ethic, pokes the Realist in the eye, and takes the Fundamentalist
to task for not admitting such things could be the work of a beneficent
Deity. Valls is the living embodiment of Cage’s dictum “if
something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring,
then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers
that it is not boring at all.”—DC
Daniel
Menche
DRUNK GODS
Lapilli Recordings, lapcd2
 Daniel
Menche started out as a skater (he showed up in a couple of issues
of Thrasher) and then worked as a chef in Oregon, cooking up what
were reportedly very spicy meals and sauces, one of which was named
“Hey, Menche!” Then you heard all about his “somatic”
recordings where he’d swallow a contact mic and the very thought
of that was enough to perk you up. In person he’s equally intense,
and intensely self-effacing to boot. Drunk Gods is one long
piece of subdued, scribbly static on top of a seemingly lo-fi beat
and variations thereof, along with some spidery moodlings on synths
or keyboards. It builds to a buzzing, hectoring, confounding climax
– at which point the pounding returns, accompanied by a tinkling
not unlike the part in the River City Ransom videogame in which you
kick the guys who promptly drop all their pocket change and yell “Barf!”
The whole thing lasts roughly about 20 minutes – that's twenty
individual minutes, each comprised of sixty seconds and countless
nanoseconds, some of which hop out the pocket watch and come to life
as sound on this complex and textured slab of rot.—DC
Zbigniew
Karkowski
ONE AND MANY
Sub Rosa, SR214
 Okay,
look. We dig this stuff enough to write about it – we really
want to like it – but if you’re writing a press
release, don’t give us shit like “an ode to loudspeakers
– these life conditions lead to a radical conclusion: the traditional
definitions of music are irrelevant and music theories and music as
a cultural concept must be destroyed.” Fuck you! You might as
well come on Stevie Wonder’s face and tell him it’s a
gentle May rainfall. It didn’t work for Pierre “All Art
Of The Past Must Be Destroyed” Boulez, and it didn’t work
for Edgard “The Modern-day Composer Refuses To Die” Varèse.
If Karkowski thinks “music as a cultural concept must be destroyed”,
why in Christ Jesus’ name does he want you to pay $15+ for this
CD? Just tell us shit we didn’t know about the record or the
composer and leave us alone to write our impenetrable-but-brilliant
paragraphs. To wit: Zbiggy rips it up, cold chillin’ in full
effect, makin' with the tasty horns and illin’ metal bangin’
like his gangsta homies Olivier “Masta Killa” Messiaen
and Iannis “Scarface” Xenakis. He be wipin’ the
floors wid Opiez on account of the listener bein’ so def after
listenin’ to ocean sounds ‘n’ shit rollin’
up in ya like a ball of motherfuckin’ fire ants.—DC
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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