Editorial
- Luc Ferrari RIP
As
you get older, obituaries gather around as death closes in on every
side, until the day comes when the bell tolls for you – though
you won't be there to see it. (Not unless you fake your own death
Reginald Perrin style or believe in reincarnation or something. Damn,
been reading too much of that Harry Potter. And still a couple
of years to wait before Volume 7.. shit.) I tend to avoid
obituaries – reading them as much as writing them – for
the simple reason I have a hard time believing people are actually
dead when I'm listening to their music. Dumb, but true. Every time
I spin Out To Lunch I half expect to turn round and see Eric
Dolphy standing behind me.
Luc Ferrari died in Arezzo, Italy, on August 22nd, aged 76, from pneumonia.
Over the past few years he'd been pretty busy, travelling frequently
to the States and Japan to work with the bright-eyed youngsters he
affectionately described as "les nouveaux concrets". The
interview he gave me back
in July 1998 still remains one of the most entertaining (and most
visited) pages on this site, and I like to think that it, along with
the article I wrote on Luc for The Wire that it led to, helped generate
a bit of interest in his music. Please read it (you can do so in English
and French, by the way),
if you haven't already – it's fun. And humour was essential
for Luc Ferrari. If you want to read a really good obituary of the
man read what David Grubbs wrote at http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/08/luc_ferrari_192.html.
I'm off to play Music Promenade at cow rending volume. Bonne
lecture. – DW
Simon
Reynolds
RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN
Post-punk 1978 – 1984
Faber & Faber 577pp ISBN 0-571-21569-6
 Simon
Reynolds, described rather glowingly by The Independent as [Britain's]
"finest and most intellectually engaging music journalist"
(they may just have a point there), begins this magnificent book with
a personal confession: "Punk bypassed me almost completely. [..]
When I got into the Pistols and the rest, around the middle of 1978,
I'd no idea that this was all officially 'dead'." Well, that
strikes a chord with me. By the time I started getting into the music
that Reynolds discusses here with such infectious passion, the period
under discussion (the author's timeline extends as far as October
1985 but the book effectively ends with the "appalling bombast"
of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Welcome To The Pleasuredome)
was coming to an end. Sure, when punk broke, I remember seeing strange
fluorescent snot-green posters plastered across Manchester advertising
the now legendary July 76 debut of the Buzzcocks (supporting the Pistols)
at the Free Trade Hall, and three years later found myself in a pub
near Hulme playing darts with a group of lads who turned out to be
Joy Division, though I hadn't heard a note of their music at the time
and only knew Tony Wilson as the smarmy git who presented programmes
on Granada TV. (I later found out he was the smarmy git who ran Factory
Records.) Ah, happy bygone days..
Anyway, back to the matter in hand.. Reynolds' book falls into two
parts, "Post-punk" and "New Pop and New Rock",
each further divided into chapters devoted to individual groups (PiL,
The Pop Group, Devo, Scritti Politti..), scenes (No Wave, 2-Tone,
Mutant Disco..) or cities (Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds, Cleveland..).
It's a logical and intelligent move, but confusing in terms of chronology,
so the author provides that nine-page timeline by way of an Appendix.
Just skimming through it is a powerful reminder of just how absurdly
creative and influential the period was: for instance, the first six
months of 1979 alone saw the release of classic debut albums by The
B-52s, The Fall (Live At The Witch Trials), and Joy Division
(Unknown Pleasures), as well as lesser known but influential
first outings such as Alternative TV's Vibing Up The Senile Man,
Swell Maps' A Trip To Marineville and Stiff Little Fingers'
Inflammable Material, debut singles by The Specials (Gangsters),
The Pop Group (She Is Beyond Good and Evil), A Certain Ratio
(All Night Party) and The Raincoats (Fairytale in the
Supermarket), not forgetting other landmark releases including
The Human League's Dignity of Labour EP, Cabaret Voltaire's
Nag Nag Nag and PiL's Death Disco. Phew.
"Ever
get the feeling you've been cheated?" sneered Johnny Rotten at
the audience at the Sex Pistols' infamous last gig at Winterland,
San Francisco, on January 14th 1978. Reynolds' first chapter focuses
on the singer's subsequent project PiL (for which he reverted to his
real name John Lydon to avoid legal complications with the Pistols'
svengali manager Malcolm McLaren, who'd copyrighted the Rotten moniker
himself) with bassist Jah Wobble and guitarist Keith Levene (correctly
identified as post punk's first bona fide guitar hero). Reynolds charts
PiL's influence across the scarred post-industrial landscape of pre-Thatcher
Britain and beyond, and their subsequent split after the departure
of Wobble and, later, Levene (the acrimonious tale of the group's
swansong album Flowers of Romance makes for gripping reading)
concludes the first half of the book with admirable if somewhat depressing
symmetry.
What emerges most forcefully from the opening chapters is how consciously
artistic the whole post-punk scene was: musicians pilfered
group and individual names, song titles and whole concepts from 19th
and 20th century art history, from Romantic poetry (the Buzzcocks'
Pete Shelley) via design and architecture (Bauhaus), Dada
(Cabaret Voltaire), Futurism (Zang Tuum Tumb) to nouvelle vague
French cinema (Subway Sect's Vic Godard), with heavy
doses of existentialism (The Fall took their name from Camus's novel)
and Burgess, Ballard and Dick thrown in for good measure. Reynolds
explores certain groups' fascination with the imagery and ideology
of totalitarianism (both left and right, from Gang of Four's Maoist
moniker to more suspect appellations such as Joy Division and the
March Violets) with sensitivity and care, and his discussion of how
maverick early punk icons such as Howard Devoto and Vic Godard quickly
distanced themselves from punk is both informative and entertaining.
The chapters devoted to the nascent post-punk across the Atlantic
in Ohio ("Uncontrollable Urge: the Industrial Grotesquerie of
Pere Ubu and Devo") and New York ("Contort Yourself: No
Wave New York") are superb, notably his descriptions of the environment
the groups grew up in, from the glaring blast furnaces of Cleveland
to Manhattan's drug-infested Lower East Side. As well as providing
concise potted biographies of key groups (the Contortions story is
especially good, and I love the description of Pere Ubu's David Thomas,
sounding "like Beefheart if his balls had never dropped"),
he also pinpoints key influences on the scenes, notably Suicide, Bowie
and Eno, whose role as a key player and producer cannot be underestimated.
Similar attention to detail is to be found in the chapters on local
scenes back in Britain, from the "militant entertainment"
of Gang of Four and the Mekons in Leeds, to the dub and funk driven
manifestos of The Pop Group and the benign anarchy of Alternative
TV and The Slits. "Autonomy In The UK: Independent Labels and
the DIY Movement" charts the rise of key indie labels Rough Trade,
Fast Product (the importance of the former's Geoff Travis has never
been in question, but it's good to see the latter's Bob Last being
acknowledged), Factory and Mute. Inevitably, given a scene that was
exploding into life all over the place, some names get overlooked:
it's wonderful to be reminded of how influential the DIY aesthetic
of the Desperate Bicycles was (hands up if you remember them),
and great to see Fatal Microbes, Notsensibles and Spizzenergi namechecked,
but surely a little more space could and should have been devoted
to Crass.
In focusing his discussion of the well-documented Manchester scene
on its two most influential personalities, Joy Division's Ian Curtis
and The Fall's Mark E. Smith, Reynolds neatly sidesteps the morbid
idolatry that has typified numerous books written on the former (Smith's
jibe "there are two kinds of factory in Manchester: the kind
that makes dead man and the kind that lives off a dead man" is
telling), but still discusses Curtis's songwriting and Martin Hannett's
hugely influential production with precision and understanding. "Living
For The Future: Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League and the Sheffield
Scene" is a collection of clear thumbnails of cultural life in
that city (for the seven million pixel big picture, readers can always
check out Martin Lilleker's recent Beats Working For A Living:
Sheffield Popular Music 1973 - 1984), and it's a more affectionate
portrait than "Industrial Devolution: Throbbing Gristle's Music
from the Death Factory". Reynolds is correct to pinpoint Genesis
P-Orridge's origins in the hippy era (his description of TG's "Slug
Bait" and "Hamburger Lady" as "a corroded, ailing
Tangerine Dream" is spot on), and tells the tale of their infamous
"Prostitution" show at the ICA and the group's subsequent
work with American noise terrorist Monte Cazazza with admirable concision,
but it's clear he has little time for the likes of Whitehouse. A later
chapter in Part Two, "Conform to Deform: The Second-Wave Industrial
Infiltrators", which discusses, amongst others, Psychic TV, Coil
and Foetus, is equally efficient, but it could be argued that more
space should have been devoted to Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound
– though hardcore fans of English esoterica by now will probably
have well-thumbed copies of David Keenan's more comprehensive study
of NWW, Current 93 and Coil, England's Hidden Reverse.
Other notable omissions include XTC (1978's Go2 surely deserves
a mention, even if later more arty projects don't), the Cocteau Twins
(summarily dismissed as "Goth-lite".. wonder what John Peel
would make of that) and The Cure, who Reynolds witheringly describes
as having produced "the most neurasthenic rock music ever committed
to vinyl", all of which prompts the question as to what qualifies
as post-punk in the first place. The further Reynolds moves away from
the English heartland (and let's be clear, the JR of punk for him
is Johnny Rotten, not Joey Ramone..) the more difficult it is to work
out exactly what he means by the term post-punk. The two chapters
on developments in California, "Freak Scene: Cabaret Noir and
Theatre of Cruelty in Post-punk San Francisco" and the later
"The Blasting Concept: Progressive Punk from SST Records to Mission
of Burma" are informative as one would expect, but one wonders
why so much space is devoted to bands such as Chrome and Factrix (even
though the stories of Mark Pauline's Piggly Wiggly, a macabre robot
with pig's feet and cowhide are hilarious), and questions to what
extent post-My War Black Flag doesn't qualify as straight
up in yer face rock. Then again, it's all too easy to quibble –
there are, after all, several more specialised books on the market
that document developments across the Atlantic in more detail (Steven
Blush's American Hardcore: A Tribal History and Joe Carducci's
Rock and the Pop Narcotic are both mentioned in Reynolds'
excellent bibliography) – though it would have been nice to
have a little more factual detail on early 80s Tuxedomoon instead
of the somewhat uninteresting anecdotes about songwriting credits
on Talking Heads' Remain In Light.
But what the hell, there's no such thing as objective rock journalism
in the first place, and Reynolds makes no attempt to hide his love
for Scritti Politti, from the descriptions of Green Gartside's squalid
Camden squat that adorns the 4 A Sides EP to the sugary trash
of "The 'Sweetest' Girl" (and I agree with Julian Cope that
those inverted commas around 'Sweetest' are fucking annoying). Then
again, Scritti's evolution from well-intentioned if scruffy Marxist
idealism to post-structuralist quasi-intellectual wank cop-out (c'mon
Simon, you gotta admit that Cupid and Psyche 85 has aged
veeery badly) is very much the story of the times, and Part Two of
the book documents with depressing precision the return of bloated
stadium rock and Top 40 pap. There are concise and cogent discussions
of the careers of The Specials, Dexy's Midnight Runners (good to see
them included) and Situationist puppeteer Malcolm McLaren, as well
as a refreshing glass of Orange Juice in "Postcard and the Sound
of Young Scotland" (and while I might disagree with Reynolds
about Scritti, I'm with him all the way on The Associates), but for
some reason the chapter on "Mutant Disco and Punk-Funk: Crosstown
Traffic in Early Eighties New York (and Beyond...)" is merely
a collection of choice quotations from the people involved, several
of them culled directly from Ian Penman's liner notes to the Mutant
Disco compilation, rather than a direct commentary by Reynolds
himself. And while "Dark Things: Goth and the Return of Rock"
manages to squash bands as diverse in aesthetic as Killing Joke, the
Birthday Party and Bauhaus into just 19 pages (for more detail readers
should check out Mick Mercer's Hex Files: The Goth Bible),
"Glory Boys: Liverpool, New Psychedelia and the Big Music"
gets bogged down in irrelevant anecdotes from Julian Cope's Liverpool
Explodes about members of the Nova Mob – who never even
played a gig in the first place – nattering in a café
instead of actually rehearsing. At least Reynolds is on the one when
he writes that Cope's The Teardrop Explodes went "from the next
big thing to has-been with incredible speed".. Appropriately
enough, the story ends in Liverpool with the extraordinary hype of
Frankie Goes To Hollywood: "On another deeper structural level,
Frankie were a taste of pop to come – the return of the boy
band," concludes Reynolds. "Perhaps that accounts for the
curious hollowness, even at the very height of Frankiemania, to the
phenomenon. In the end, both the consumers, left clutching the lavishly-appointed
bombast of Pleasuredome, and the band, bemused by the faint
trickle of royalties coming through and humiliated by the general
perception of them as ZTT's creations, might justifiably feel an ancient
plaint rising in their throats. Ever get the feeling you've been
cheated?"
When all's said and done, what differentiates good rock journalism
from amateurish scribbling as far as I'm concerned is its ability
to get me scurrying back to my shelves of dusty vinyls or even off
to the local record emporium (to pick up a new copy of Gang Of Four's
Entertainment! in this case). Reading this 550 page tome
(three times) has been a rich and rewarding experience, and a timely
reminder of just what an extraordinary period of music history 1978
to 1984 really was. Check it out – the music and the book. -DW
Great
Fences Of Australia
 The
Wall may have come down in 1989, but The Fence is still very much
in evidence. And for British-born violinist Jon Rose, it's not merely
a potent symbol of what separates men from their environment (and
each other): it's a musical instrument in its own right. For over
two decades, Rose has been travelling the world, recently with his
partner and fellow fiddler Hollis Taylor, recording the music of fences
wherever he goes. His website (a veritable treasure trove of information
for violinists and non-violinists alike) features chilling photography
of fences from around the world, from political hotspots – Cyprus,
Israel, Korea – to the great sprawling fences that span his
country of adoption, Australia. These are the fences that Rose and
Taylor have documented in Great Fences of Australia, a huge
project first embarked upon in 2002, since when the two violinists
have travelled 24,000 kilometres playing and recording the unique
sounds of hundreds of fences in every state and territory of the fifth
continent (including the well-known Dingo Fence, whose 5,309 kilometres
make it the longest man made object on the planet, twice as long as
the Great Wall of China), and documenting the lives and histories
of the people who build, look after or use them.
Great Fences was first hosted by The Melbourne Festival 2002
under the title Bowing Fences. Over 9000 people heard 60
performances on the specially constructed fence, since when the project
has featured in festivals in Barcelona, Madrid, Porto, Sydney, Adelaide,
Darwin and, appropriately enough, the ghost town of Malparinka in
Sturt National Park. In accordance with Rose's fascination with tuning
systems (if you're not already familiar with his astonishing double
CD on Emanem with Veryan Weston, Temperament, you ought to
be), a project is underway to construct a specially-designed Fence
based on the principles of Just Intonation and the Fibonacci series.
"With financial support, its construction should take place in
Western Australia in 2005. It is designed to remain in situ
after the initial performances and be powered (Aeolian-style) by the
strong winds of the outback." The Fences project has already
been documented in the form of a radiophonic hörspiele for
ABC, Voices from the Fence, and a CD on Melbourne's Dynamo
House label. In May this year Rose and Taylor presented Great
Fences in the newly-converted Art Nouveau splendour of Brussels'
Musical Instruments Museum. Video footage of the pair in action in
the Australian outback was projected as a backdrop to a specially
constructed fence which Rose and Taylor played live in several concert
presentations of Bowing Fences, a carefully constructed partly
improvised suite of movements showcasing the enormous variety of sounds
that can be summoned forth from the fence, both by friction and percussion.
 "Fences
can be seen as analogies for the old battle between our species and
nature," writes Rose, "for the desire of exploration, control,
and exploitation of resources; they indicate a frontier history of
extreme hardship. They also mark the close physical association of
man with his environment, the notion of belonging, the boundaries
of cultures and political systems, a sense of the private and public,
a statement that says I exist." In Australia, fences
are a relatively recent addition to the environment. They started
going up within months of white settlement, and their construction
clearly interfered with, if not helped destroy, the Indigenous Australian's
nomadic way of life. Rose quotes Dr. John Pickard ("Australia's
leading fence-ologist"), who estimated that by 1892 there were
over 2.7 million kilometres of fences in New South Wales alone, using
up to 20 million cut down trees with an estimated value of $5.6 billion
in today's money. Pickard is currently working on an estimation of
total fencing kilometres for the entire country at the beginning of
the new millennium. "The numbers will be serious," comments
Rose. "Fences are by far the most visible artefacts that we have
made on this continent."
Since Alvin Lucier's Music On A Long Thin Wire, long string
instruments have exerted a strange fascination over composers, performers
and listeners alike. Rose's Great Fences belongs alongside
the highly acclaimed work of Paul Panhuysen and Ellen Fullman as one
of the most significant explorations of the phenomenon. "On straight
stretches of a simple five-wire fence, the sound travels down the
wires for hundreds of metres. The music is ethereal and elemental,
incorporating an extended harmonic series (the structure of all sound);
the longer the wire, the more harmonics become available. The rhythms
of violin bows and drum sticks uncover a fundamental sonic world.
The fence music encapsulates the vastness of the place. Music of distance,
boundaries and borders."
"From the Great Wall of China to Israel's latest attempt to imprison
the Palestinian people through building a brand new security fence,
the species never seems to learn that (in the long run) fences, walls,
barriers always fail - the foreigner, the refugee, the enemy, the
stranger, or simply the other is part of us. All fences are in fact
transitory, finite. Even the longest fence in the world, the so-called
Dingo Fence of Australia, will eventually succumb to nature despite
the efforts of those who painstakingly and regularly repair it. The
geography will survive the history." Great Fences of Australia
is as musically rich and fascinating as it is symbolically potent.
If by any chance you have the opportunity to see the work live, don't
miss it. In the meantime, do your best to get hold of the Dynamo House
CD, which comes complete with specimen of rusty barbed wire. Just
be careful when you're putting the disc back in the box, OK?–DW
Yukijurushi
MOTT HAVEN
H&H Production HH-5
Nakatani-Chen
Duo
LIMN
H&H Production HH-6
 The New
York City borough of Bronx isn't exactly somewhere you'd expect to
find tanned curvaceous beach volleyballers sipping batida de coco,
so a Bronx-based Bossa Nova band isn't exactly something you're likely
to forget about in a hurry – especially since none of the musicians
is Brazilian. Bassist Todd Nicholson is American, but California's
a long way from the Bronx. And Japan's even further away; guitarist
Eiji Obata hails from Kyoto, percussionist (and vocalist) Tatsuya
Nakatani comes from Kobe. They got together to form Yukijurushi in
2001, and Mott Haven is the follow-up to last year's eponymous
debut. Reviews of that disc described it as "surprisingly unsurprising",
but there are a few odd postmodern twists and turns on this one. For
a start, Nicholson pens three compositions, Obata one, and the standards
are interspersed with field recordings for local colour (Mott Haven,
by the way, is the South Bronx neighbourhood where Nakatani set up
his H&H – that stands for "Heaven & Hell"
– music and dance studio in 2003). Compared to the meringue-light
classic Joao Gilberto version, Dorival Caymmi's "Doralice"
here sounds rather torpid, though the trio's take on Vinicius de Moraes'
"So Danso Samba" (the reason I'm giving you all this composer
info is that it's not on the disc, and it should be), complete with
thumping bass drum offbeats, is more authentically samba than the
version you probably know on Getz - Gilberto. The reading
of the old chestnut "The Girl From Ipanema" is more skewed,
starting half way across the bridge and never really getting to the
other side, while the other Jobim tune on the disc, "If You Never
Come To Me" (which also goes by the title "Useless Landscape"
and if anyone can tell me the name of the album where Ella Fitzgerald
sings the song I'll be eternally grateful because I've lost my old
cassette copy and love it to death), is played straighter, but Nakatani's
percussion still sticks out rather wonderfully.
 As it
does on Limn, definitely one of the freshest and most rewarding
improv discs of the year so far, featuring Nakatani and cellist /
vocalist Audrey Chen in an exquisite collection of studio recordings
made at Nakatani's former home base in the Bronx and seven live tracks
culled from the duo's tour in early April this year (in Atlanta, New
Orleans and Chapel Hill, North Carolina). While Nakatani's work with
the likes of nmperign, Peter Kowald, Jack Wright and Michel Doneda
will be familiar to many readers, Audrey Chen maybe needs some introduction.
After stints at the New England Conservatory, Manhattan School of
Music and Columbia University she moved to Baltimore to study at Peabody
with the celebrated new music soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson. That might
explain what my colleague Mike Parker in a characteristically sprawling
feature in the columns of Bagatellen (http://www.bagatellen.com/archives/frontpage/000962.html)
describes as a "reliance on cliched patterns of post-European
expressivity", though I have to disagree with him when he describes
such forays into the world of "classical" vocal technique
as an "Achilles heel". If all the pieces on the disc were
as typical improv bubbly gabby as "Liplash" and "Sprawl"
it'd be a pretty exhausting set; what makes Limn so rich
is precisely its variety, beautifully highlighted by the expertly
thought out sequencing of the tracks. There's an up in the air feel
to it all, reflected not only in Chen's avian twitters and squawks,
but also in the track titles ("Owl Monkey", "Finch",
"Kestrel Beating"..), and pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn
guesting on the opening and closing tracks is icing on the cake.-DW
Lauri
Bortz/Elliott Sharp
A MODICUM OF PASSION - THE OPERA
Abaton 013
 Jersey
City's Lauri Bortz is a well known playwright and the founder of Abaton,
the book and music publishing imprint on which this short opera is
released. Set in a future urban America where women have lost most
of their power, the plot finds a male couple waiting for their first
heir, whose blissful relationship undergoes "complications"
with the arrival of Minette, a female infant at first rejected by
one of the men. Things change, until the finale.. well I won't reveal
the plot here (unfortunately, the libretto is not included in the
CD, but it is available from Abaton). Elliott Sharp's score calls
for the Yellin string quartet and singers Devorah Day, Ben Miller,
Eric Mingus and Joan Wasser, and its harmonies are less strident than
usual, though you wouldn't say that while listening to Miller and
Mingus's hopeless, oblique river of symbolic fake grief, the concluding
"Here today, gone tomorrow". Elsewhere, like in the magnificent
interlude "Blue by who?", the New Yorker's lines are played
by the Yellin quartet with sapient sensitivity, a kind of cross between
Bela Bartók and post-Schoenbergian bitter indulgence, very
pleasant to the ears and not too heavy for the data storage capacity
of the brain.–MR
Elliott
Sharp
WHAT SEBASTIAN DREAMT
ZOAR Portal Series ZPO-02
 This
soundtrack for "What Sebastian dreamt", a film by Rodrigo
Rey-Rosa set in the Guatemalan rainforest, consists of 20 short pieces
containing some of Sharp's most "accessible" music, including
the Spanish-sung "Fugarse" and the almost Easy Listening
"Casa Rosa", whose accordion and clean guitar dance on an
incredibly economic drum machine pattern. But besides the nice'n'easy
commentaries, there are several deeper moments featuring Sharp's gorgeous
fretwork on his array of acoustic guitars (including tenor and baritone
models) and more exotic instruments like zither, baglama and hammer
dulcimer. The masterly command of shimmering chords and bright harmonics
is as in evidence here as it is on the recent Emanem solo release
The Velocity of Hue and Quadrature (see below).
Other sections include field recordings of birds, insects and frogs,
alone, enhanced by computers ("Denser"), or in the form
of a distant prayer ("Insect Gamelan"). All in all, this
album could be an excellent toe-dip into Sharp's bath of surprise
for any unlucky ones out there who still don't know his work.–MR
Elliott
Sharp
COMMUNE - FREE LAND FOR FREE PEOPLE
ZOAR 025
 Referring
to his "suburban New York 70's roots", director Jonathan
Berman asked Elliott Sharp to "quote an era, riff on a feeling,
steal a dream". The result is a soundtrack that transports the
listener right into that period, with fast-footed psychedelia, quicksilver
turnarounds in standard rock format and acoustic blues on a fingerpicked
dobro. Sharp's chameleon-like attitude could be misconstrued as overindulgence,
yet he remains so proficiently sober that one forgets about the role
of certain "lookin' back" movie atmospheres and learns to
enjoy the sheer musicality of these nuggets (it's worth hunting out
the CD for "Panic"'s harmonized guitar line alone) performed
by Sharp with Michelle Casillas on vocals, Dave Hofstra on acoustic
bass and Sim Cain managing all drum duties.–MR
Elliott
Sharp/Ronny Someck
A SHORT HISTORY OF VODKA
Zuta Music 1010
 This
CD is pretty rare, so do yourself a favour and get your copy soon,
because it's a real underground gem. Following the path traced on
their two previous albums, Revenge of the Stuttering Child and
Poverty Line, Sharp and Israeli poet Ronny Someck once again
reveal ample evidence of their respective skills in about 43 minutes
of authoritative acoustic guitar improvisations alternating with the
grave voice of Someck reciting his poetry. Although the English translation
probably loses something of the original idiom, the texts are all
permeated with a beautiful sense of silent anguish which allows them
to be appreciated even by a non-expert. Someck's timbre always remains
melancholically incisive even in short bursts, which, coupled with
Sharp's expressive fingerpicking and intelligent harmonic textures,
generate a peculiar state of mind in the listener, who is led to imagine
a cross between bionic flamenco and avant-blues under the inquisitive
supervision of a serious teacher who's seen many days of sorrow yet
is still able to transform his suffering into strengthened identity.–MR
Elliott
Sharp
RADIO HYPER-YAHOO
ZOAR 024
 A
postmodern multi-act rap play? An abstract representation of intelligent
America's unrepressed rage against the desperate idiocy of power?
You could call Radio Hyper-Yahoo this and a hundred other
things but I'll use just the word confirmation. Confirmation
of our hope to keep finding brains that work – just listen to
the great Eric Bogosian on his green-smiling lucid rant in "No
Crime" – confirmation of the assumption that corrosive
irony is better than a bullet – check out Lisa Lowell singing
"In the Country", a nightmare of songwriting cliches whose
lyrics are the nails in the coffin of many mediocre ideals –
and above all, confirmation of Elliott Sharp as maybe the most gifted
assembler of nuclear-powered sounds in today's roster of new music
composers. Where else you will find techno, blues and computer music,
sometimes mashed together into a single track, like the final "Ask
Me", without feeling a nauseating sense of excess of ingredients?
Sharp has the talent and the attributes to undermine the commonplace
while maintaining complete control over the outcome of each and every
one of his records. Third in the "Yahoo" trilogy (the first
two were In the Land of the Yahoos and the fabulous Beneath
the Valley of the Ultra-Yahoos), this stunner is the direct consequence
of the world disintegrating; before you return to your PlayStations
or switch over to the Hallmark Channel, stick this pin of truth in
some vein of your resigned body to see if you've still got the urge
to get up and take the right direction, for once in your life.–MR
Usui
Yasuhiro/Elliott Sharp
VOLCANIC ISLAND
Bakamo
BKM 003
 Strangely
enough for the slinger that he is, the things I like least in Sharp's
oeuvre are his efforts with other guitarists – I still remember
a double whammy of disappointment from the GTR OBLQ trio with David
Torn and Vernon Reid, firstly on the CD and then in concert. Unfortunately,
Volcanic Island confirms this theory with a series of electric
duets (not too well recorded either, with an unpleasantly muffled
/ distorted sound) that consist of little more than tentative accumulations
of tension which never seem to find a target to explode on. The excessive
stereo separation between the instrumentalists accents the lack of
coherent interplay, as if each player was intent on noodling with
his back turned to the other, trying without success to find something
of interest. It sounds at times like some cheap cassette made by youngsters
and, not having heard Usui until now, I can safely declare that Sharp
should try to keep stuff like this off the market and keep his higher
profile immaculate. If you really want to appreciate Elliott Sharp's
six-string mastery, go instead for Quadrature.–MR
Natsuki
Tamura/Elliott Sharp/Takayuki Kato/Sakoto Fujii
IN THE TANK
Libra 104-011
 The
unsettling nature of this quartet keeps our attention riveted for
the entire 68-plus minute duration. Atmospheres verging on the mysteriously
nervous are punctuated by serpentine movements and animated exchanges
between Tamura's trumpet and Sharp's soprano sax, while Fujii is often
almost imperceptible, John Tilbury style, yet her piano can become
obstinately percussive – as on "Crowing Crab"'s most
intense pulses. It's not always easy distinguishing Sharp's guitar
sound from Kato's timbral shades, as both guitars are mostly used
as a background colour and rarely come out into the foreground. In
"Flying Jellyfish" we're treated to a fusion of post-Industrial
and sound narration from a B horror movie whose incomprehensible plot
is balanced by the pretty face of the monster lurking behind the door.
Once more it's Sakoto Fujii's piano sound, so strangely reminiscent
of long-gone past eras, that gives the ensemble a fascinating old-style
experimental vibe. And that's how the record ends, with Tamura taking
a slow, sad trumpet solo while Fujii's sparse chords and the guitarists'
silent string-breathing measure space for the thoughts to walk away
from our mind.–MR
Elliott
Sharp
QUADRATURE
ZOAR Portal Series ZPO-01
 A
limited edition of 200 autographed copies, Quadrature is
a fantastically dynamic solo guitar release performed on a modified
Godin Duet Multiac and a Turner Renaissance Baritone, with the addition
of a Powerbook G4 in the final track, "Lissajous". "Escape
of Velocity" opens the album with an active reflection about
electroacoustic energy, where slide and eBow characterize a well-tempered,
painkilling modern blues. "Angularus" finds Sharp pinching,
scraping and tapping the baritone, until majestic harmonics spring
out of the soundhole, conjuring images and noises of an enormous helicopter
overhead. The cicadas outside my house, an overwhelming chorale this
torrid Sunday, seem to mix perfectly with "Paracentric",
whose eBow treatments and percussive fingerings join the entomological
mantras in a chiaroscuro world of resonance and countenance which
once more shows Sharp's total command of his improvising skills in
an almost shamanic, hypnotizing allure spiced by dissonant impulses.
"Lamina" is a post-Paris Texas desert soundscape,
its breathless patterns alternating among converging horizons and
phosphorescent sunsets, while the Max/MSP software used in "Lissajous"
transforms the guitar into a polymorphous fusion of alien studies,
a half-detached slide towards an uncertain tomorrow. A masterpiece.–MR
Brian
Ferneyhough
SHADOWTIME
Lincoln Center, New York July 22nd
 Shadowtime,
a “thought-opera” composed by Brian Ferneyhough to a libretto
by Charles Bernstein, received its North American première
at the Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater on July 21st, followed
by a second performance the day after (the one reviewed here). As
a static opera charting the life of a thinker, it's tempting to compare
it to Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise,
and if that work was an apotheosis of early modernist techniques anticipating
an early modernist revival, Shadowtime is an apotheosis of
later modernist techniques which may perhaps anticipate a later modernist
revival – if Rihm’s New Simplicity yields to Ferneyhough’s
New Complexity, or Seamus Heaney gives way to Bernstein, that is.
The subject in question is the suicide of the German Jewish philosopher
Walter Benjamin during his flight from the Nazis in 1940, which Ferneyhough
treats in a manner similar to the 17th century rappresentazione.
“Representation” is a key concept in Benjamin’s
thoughts on philosophy and Baroque drama, which the rappresentazione
aimed to fuse. Perhaps the closest parallel would be with one of Ferneyhough’s
favorite operas, Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea,
where Seneca is ordered by the tyrannical Nero to commit suicide.
It's a concept balanced by Bernstein’s references to German
lyric poets, including Heinrich Heine (Benjamin’s supposed relative)
as well as his beloved Friedrich Hölderlin.
The first scene begins just before midnight on the border between
France and Spain, where Benjamin and his companion Henny Gurland are
told by an innkeeper that their visas are invalid and that they cannot
leave occupied territory. The innkeeper’s polite forms of address
counterpoint the terrible news which he bears, creating a verbal effect
not dissimilar to a fugue; Bernstein has pointed out that the whole
opera is “like a death fugue”, in a reference to the famous
Holocaust poem by Paul Celan. Director Frédéric Fisbach
mirrored the effect by placing the interlocutors behind impersonal
mannequins, while Ferneyhough’s teeming, dissonant lines accentuated
Benjamin and Gurland’s panic. The dialogue even acquired a Heideggerian
twist: a lecturer introduced the scene with comments on Being, while
Benjamin sat in a Bauhaus chair meditating on Time. Benjamin starts
having conversations with figures from the past, including his future
wife Dora, his closest friend Gershom Scholem – a great historian
of Jewish mysticism – and Hölderlin. With Dora, he discusses
the relationship between Eros and Culture, so crucial to the Frankfurt
School as well as to Freud and his successors, and the hopes and despairs
of Marxist students. With Scholem, he discusses the need to hear as
many voices as possible to produce a balanced critique of reality;
as Bernstein says, “mourning is a kind of listening/Where the
dead sing to us/And even the living tell their stories”. Benjamin
puts it even more bluntly to Hölderlin: “What is alive/Can
be perceived/Only by means/Of what is not”.
Such quotes serve as the perfect introduction to the next two scenes,
inspired by Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which Benjamin
bought in 1921. The second is an interlude for solo guitar and instrumentalists
entitled “The Beating of Gabriel’s Wings”, during
which train timetables and burning books flickered on the back wall
of the stage. The reference to Nazi book-burning was obvious, but
the timetables were more ambiguous, suggesting the social mechanisms
and movements Benjamin documented throughout his career. The third
is sung by the “angels of history”, a reference to Benjamin’s
“On the Concept of History”, in which he says: “There
is a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus…This
is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the
past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees
one single catastrophe”. The scene consists of thirteen canons,
which illustrate Benjamin’s doctrine of similarity, or our understanding
of interconnections in historical time. Full of word-games and allusions
to darkness, they accompany Benjamin on his descent into the underworld.
The fourth scene is set in a Las Vegas casino, reminding us of the
sleazy clubs and bars that dominated Berlin nightlife between the
wars. That said, Kurt Weill and Benjamin’s associate Brecht
have little to do with this interlude for speaker-pianist, which,
like the Klavierstücke in Stockhausen’s Licht,
deserves its own life in the concert hall – it's one of Ferneyhough’s
most powerful contributions: despite its similarity to the piano works
of Xenakis, its hell-raising individuality is absolutely unquestionable.
The speaker-pianist is the philosophy lecturer who appears in the
first scene; in Nicolas Hodge’s remarkable interpretation, he
whirled around the stage like a malfunctioning robot, opining anarchically
and shouting out nonsense rhymes. By the fifth scene, which consists
of 11 philosophical interrogations, several members of the audience
had quietly walked out, and after Marx, Hitler and Einstein had tested
Benjamin’s intellectual prowess the opera reached its two final
scenes, featuring texts by Heine and Benjamin’s contemporaries.
The last scene consists of a magical chorus, set partly to a language
invented by Ferneyhough, in which the ethereal singing of “the
angels of history” fades out in a “spiral” of electro-acoustic
effects.
Aesthetically, Shadowtime has few parallels. The soundworld
is close to Boulez, Xenakis and Stockhausen, but Ferneyhough's “quick
run-through of the entire history of Western music from the year 1000
up to about 1825” in the fifth scene only vaguely resembles
its models, unlike Wozzeck or Le Grand Macabre.
Bernstein’s libretto is a mixture of dialectics and outright
formalist experiment, creating a discourse which seems abstract and
surreal but is in fact concerned with the hallucinations of experience.
Like Benjamin, Ferneyhough and Bernstein avoid conclusions, because,
for the librettist, they "would be sentimental and wrong…resolution
is exactly the Fascist problem”. Not that this huge effort is
an attempt to totalize: although it runs uninterrupted for over two
hours, Bernstein prefers to refer to the opera as a “constellation”.
Fisbach’s direction was sensible, providing little more than
a frame which helped give the libretto and the music a context, while
Jurjen Hempel and the Nieuw Ensemble Amsterdam hung on every note
with breathtaking stamina. The singers were faced with an uphill struggle,
especially Ekkehard Abele as Benjamin, but all of them emerged victorious,
with some remarkable singing from the chorus of the Neue Vocalsolisten
Stuttgart. Overall, a magnificent performance of one of the major
contributions to post-war opera. –NR
Spontaneous
Music Ensemble
A NEW DISTANCE
Emanem 4115
John
Stevens Quartet
NEW COOL
Emanem 4117
 Back
in the early 1990s when I was living in Nova Scotia and getting hooked
on improvised music, John Stevens and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble
were mostly just alluring names: the music itself was frustratingly
inaccessible. Konnex and Chronoscope had released a few items from
the back-catalogue – the 1993 reissue of Karyobin (1968)
was a revelation – but until the assiduous Emanem reissue program
got under way there wasn’t a lot around beyond A New Distance,
the band’s last recorded statement. Brought out originally by
the Acta label, it has now joined the rest of Emanem’s Stevens
holdings in a spiffy new edition that includes extra tracks, interview
material, and tweaked sound (the opening track “Stig”
in particular gets a welcome boost). The original album contained
a pair of live trio performances from 1994 by a group consisting of
Stevens, guitarist Roger Smith, and saxophonist John Butcher. Butcher’s
presence seems virtually symbolic, marking him out as being as central
to his generation of free-improv saxophonists as Evan Parker and Trevor
Watts (central figures in SME history) were to the first generation.
The new edition’s bonus tracks backtrack to 1993 for a brief
studio date featuring flute player Neil Metcalfe in addition to Stevens,
Smith, and Butcher; Emanem's Martin Davidson has interspersed the
pieces with relevant fragments from an interview with Stevens.
This is music I learned to listen to free improvisation by. Listening
to it again, it still seems to me a textbook example of the genre’s
virtues, even though in many ways it has qualities that make it sound
unlike anyone else’s style of improvisation. Free improvisation
(improvisation of any kind) inevitably involves a fair bit of chance
overlap; there are some notable players who minimize overt interaction
(the Derek Bailey style), while there are of course countless lesser
players who just roar along optimistically. But on A New Distance
there’s a rare, exhilarating feeling that every sound is significant,
and that every member of the trio instantly grasps all that significance
and acts on it – all the time. Though there are few of the “who’s
playing what?” puzzles that turn up in other forms of improvisation,
there’s nonetheless a radical parity between the (similarly
high-pitched) instruments, so that sounds become a form of currency,
freely and rapidly exchangeable. In one of the interview segments,
Stevens describes his piece “Peripheral Vision” (“more
like a discipline than a composition,” he remarks), which requires
players to pair off and focus intently on each other’s playing,
yet remain aware of the entire group’s activity: “To be
honest, what we’ve been doing today is really demanding and
really hard work; but I am excited about the fact that we were all
together, doing that together, from beginning to end. And the manifestation
of that commitment is the sound of the music that we made.”
(That resonant last sentence is one to treasure!) Plenty of musicians
have emphasized close listening as the key to music making, but I
don’t know of any other music that takes that particular idea
so far: every gesture on A New Distance seems charged with
anticipation of an immediate counter response. It’s as satisfying
an example of improvised music as any I’ve encountered; if you
haven’t yet heard the album, now is definitely the time to check
it out.
 Hard
on the heels of A New Distance comes another reissue, New
Cool, a freeboppish set recorded live in 1992 and originally
issued on Danny Thompson’s The Jazz Label. As usual with Stevens
there’s a strong sense of his role as mentor here, leading a
young, hot band – trumpeter Byron Wallen, tenor/soprano saxophonist
Ed Jones, and bassist Gary Crosby – through a masterclass in
Getting Inside The Jazz Tradition While Keeping It Alive: dedications
to Dudu Pukwana and Johnny Dyani, pieces referencing Ornette and Trane,
and the rhythmically slippery “2 Free 1”, a piece designed
to free up “the relation with the ONE in the music”. Stevens’
drumming is marked by his love of Blackwell, Higgins and Elvin, but
is unmistakable for anyone else’s; it's springy, relaxed, flowing
from his exemplary cymbal work, attentive to nuances of sound and
melody, never kicking the soloists along bluntly but nonetheless excitable
and responsive. This disc may be less of a milestone than A New
Distance, but it’s still cracking good music that deserves
the widest circulation, especially in this new edition featuring an
extra take of “Dudu’s Gone”: the pure, visceral
joy of Jones and Stevens’ exchanges on that track matches anything
on the original album.–ND
Punctual
Trio
GRAMMAR
Rossbin rs019
 I
don't want to imply that violinist Carlos Zingaro and cellist Fred
Lonberg-Holm are ready to be wheeled into a retirement home, so I'd
better not describe them as "veterans" of their respective
improv scenes on both sides of the Atlantic – let's say "seasoned
performers" instead – but between them they've notched
up well over a hundred releases of outstanding improvisation with
artists as diverse as Ken Vandermark, Weasel Walter, Voice Crack,
Peter Brötzmann, Daunik Lazro and Kevin Drumm, signing extraordinary
solo albums along the way (the cavernous reverb of Zingaro's 1989
Solo on In Situ makes for a fine contrast with the frantic
claustrophobic scrabble of Lonberg-Holm's magnificent recent Dialogs
on Emanem). But this outing with turntablist Lou Mallozzi could be
their finest outing yet. Mallozzi's the new kid on the block here
(though he has made some notable appearances already: a couple of
outings on Penumbra and a couple of tracks each on Guillermo Gregorio's
Faktura and Cardew's Material, both on hatART),
and adds a healthy dose of swooping whizzing madness, as fresh and
spicy as a kilo of chili peppers. The album and track titles invite
us to meditate on the old idea of music as a language.. not a subject
I want to get into here, as it happens, but whatever tongue these
guys are speaking in is full of irregular verbs, subjunctives and
conditionals. And all three, needless to say, speak it fluently. The
music can and does go in many different directions (often at once),
from post-reductionist deconstruction ("Predicate") via
the ferocious Xenakis-like glissandi ("Direct Object") to
the superb gritty lyricism of "Indirect Object". Zingaro
and Lonberg-Holm's thrilling work is expertly counterpointed by Mallozzi's
often hilarious interjections.. at the end of the opening "Subject"
he throws in a snatch of a TV evangelist (presumably) intoning the
words: "Jesus Christ! Now!" And that could be the motto
for the whole adventure.–DW
Tony
Bevan, Orphy Robinson, John Edwards, Ashley Wales, Mark Sanders
BRUISED
Foghorn FOGCD005
I’ve
always admired Tony Bevan’s music. Compared to most free-improvising
saxophonists he has a surprisingly handsome, even mainstream sound,
but likes to wrench it around (there’s a moment here on “Leviathan”
where he makes it sound like his bass sax is playing backwards), and
his curt, syncopated riffing style is like no-one else’s. Bruised
puts him in an unexpected context, a quintet featuring vibraphonist/steel
drum player Orphy Robinson, the ubiquitous rhythm-section of John
Edwards and Mark Sanders, and Ashley Wales’ “soundscapes
& electronics”. The centrepiece is the 17-minute-long “Leviathan”,
which builds very slowly indeed – for quite some time it’s
little more than discreet elaborations on a brief loop of humming
and clicking, but halfway through Robinson’s steel drums get
looped back on themselves, swinging back and forth like a censer,
and the whole thing turns into an epic essay in wavering ambiguity.
There’s some soul-satisfying free blowing on “Tempranillo”,
but most of the tracks are stylistically harder to pin down: “Sunhouse”
is a slow descent into the maelstrom, hazily ringed round with steel
drums and electronics, while “Rhinocrat” starts off like
one of Zorn’s slashing string quartet pieces before ending up
as pattering Africanized percussion, and “Bruised” is
buzzsaw riffing and a heavyweight groove from Edwards and Sanders,
plus an uncanny hall-of-mirrors coda. Bruised is an exemplary
improv-meets-electronics project, and though Wales’ presence
makes comparisons to Spring Heel Jack’s recent projects inevitable,
its soundworld is very much its own, and the results are often more
successful.-ND
Stan
Tracey, Evan Parker
CREVULATIONS
psi 05.04
 Stan
Tracey plays free, or Evan Parker plays jazz? I’ll sidestep
that question for now, thank you very much, except to remark that
other traditions (classical, choral, gospel) are just as important
here, perhaps reflecting the ambience of the 17th-century church where
this concert performance took place last year. I’ve always loved
those moments of pale, drooping lyricism that turn up even on Parker’s
more tumultuous albums, especially when he plays tenor sax, and it’s
a side of his music that comes to the fore on Crevulations.
Parker’s drifting melancholy gives this dark, rather delicate
music much of its flavour and power, including some of his best tenor
oratory on record. Tracey, the shrewdest and most sparing of accompanists,
responds with sparse lines and tremolos that often uncannily mimic
Parker’s playing; the pianist’s dry wit is also occasionally
in evidence – at the start of “Babazuf” he even
throws in a little dismantled bebop. The first track is a little too
stop-start and sombre, but the rest of the album is beautifully judged,
the general reflectiveness broken up by moments of intensity and even
some Africanized grooves. Like the psi catalogue itself, which includes
jazz recordings by Kenny Wheeler and Gerd Dudek alongside free-improvised
outings, Crevulations is a stimulating meeting-place for
two different strands of British improvised music.-ND
Chris
Abrahams
THROWN
Room 40 RM409
Erik Griswold
ALTONA SKETCHES
Room 40 RM407
Rod Cooper
FRICTION
Room 40 RM406
 OK
I'll be honest with you – I don't like organs. Well, pipe
organs, anyway. Hammond B3s are all right with me, but the sounds
that come from those great beasts that lurk in churches and cathedrals
just don't light my fire (three exceptions: Ligeti's Volumina,
Charlemagne Palestine's Schlingen-Blängen and a couple
of tracks on Jean-Luc Guionnet's Pentes). Even worse are
those weedy, wheezy little positive organs. Not only do they have
the misfortune of sounding like an organ, they can't stay on pitch
either. Maybe that's supposed to be their particular charm. Anyway,
the old heart sank a little when I saw that Chris Abrahams, best known
perhaps as the pianist in the Australian improv trio The Necks, had
given the positive organ pride of place among the instruments he uses
in the nine tracks that make up Thrown, which also include
piano, fortepiano and DX-7. And true to form its anaemic, pitch-unstable
clusters are all over tracks like "Bellicose", "Hung
Door" and "Car Park Land". When it's accompanied by
strange piano rattles ("Coins in Vinegar") or the extreme
registers of the synth ("Them Hitting") it's just about
bearable, but the most satisfying tracks on offer here for my money
are the inside piano workout of "Can of Faces" and the shimmering
fortepiano drone of "Remembrancer".
Brisbane-based Erik Griswold opts for a more recent keyboard invention,
the prepared piano, for three extended improvisations ("Wednesday",
"Thursday" and "Friday") interspersed with "short
and sweet" (his words, not mine, and he's right) excursions for
music boxes and prepared toy piano. The spectre of Cage is never far
away when prepared pianos are concerned – he invented the thing
in the first place, after all – but the tight cellular rhythmic
and tonal procedures of gamelan are also present in Griswold's colourful
and refreshingly unpretentious work, which apparently originated in
music he improvised to accompany a juggler with a circus company –
hence perhaps its Satiesque playfulness and fondness for identifiable
tonal centres.
Not content with existing instruments, or transformations thereof,
Rod Cooper builds his own, which is not surprising given his background
in sculpture and furniture design. Friction consists of four
extended tracks featuring Cooper's predominantly metallic instruments.
"Estuary Nocturne" is plangent and touching, while "Stratum"
is, apart from a brief calm spell just before the end, a dense, noisy
affair, a grinding rumbling factory of a piece. "Mandrel"
and "Pearlite" are engaging enough, but, to quote Cooper,
as "most of the tracks are pieces composed specifically for each
instrument and are just recorded as one take," repeated listening
doesn't exactly reveal much in the way of deep structure.–DW
Philip
Gayle
THE MOMMY ROW
Family Vineyard FV 38
 Not sure
whether the "row" in the album title is "row"
(as in line, a row of objects) or "row" (as in heated argument),
but I rather suspect the latter, as there's something slightly disturbing
about the cover art, a beautiful photograph of a heavily pregnant
woman by Kanako Sasaki which has been partially scribbled over in
the sensitive places by Sasaki and Philip Gayle himself. This same
frantic calligraphy is evident throughout the 11 colourful, often
multi-tracked, adventures on which Gayle plays, in addition to guitars
(12-string, 6-string, classical, 5-string cowboy model, Chinese double-neck
toy model, even a one-string guitar), aluminium egg bar, mandolin,
Chinese flat gong, kwengari baritone ukelele, tin shaws, wine glasses,
violin, circular bars, hand held cymbals and prepared toy piano, and
jings, whatever they are. Stylistically, Gayle's music is all over
the map, too, from the Mike Cooper and Keith Rowe perform Harry Partch
of "Kanojo no pan" via "The Payphone" (imagine
Eugene Chadbourne playing John Fahey along with Fahey himself playing
Cage's Suite for Toy Piano) to the strange gongs and fiddles
of "Zoomly Zoomly" (think Polly Bradfield jamming with Jerry
Hunt and the Court Musicians of the Kingdom of Bhutan) and the Robert
Ashley ping pong of the closing "Yagamo". I'm sure whatever
has since burst forth from the womb of the cover star will soon be
digging this one as much as my six year old is. Haven't shown him
the cover yet, though.–DW
Bruce
Arnold/Tom Hamilton
DISKLAIMER
Muse-Eek MSK 123
This strange
mix of vintage electric guitar timbres, computer and electronics has
its moments, even if it sometimes sounds like a kid's first bedroom
guitar-to-MIDI experiments (no disrespect intended - good things often
come from bedrooms). Bruce Arnold sends his instrument through a network
of processors, pedals, SuperCollider software and 1957 Fender amps
(for that "old school" vibe), while Hamilton's atonal flights
on the Kurzweil synth (via G4) ensure there are many moments where
it's difficult to make out who's playing what, as everything circles
round an ever changing confusion of shooting stars and dissonant alien
entities confronted by a jazz-rock guitarist launched into a distant
galaxy by mistake. Space creatures look on curiously, but they must
have a hard time understanding those power chords and post-bop fingerings.
Ursel
Schlicht/Bruce Arnold
STRING THEORY
Muse-Eek MSK 124
Steering
well clear of emotional detours, pianist and "sometime musical
feminist" Schlicht and Arnold on SuperCollider guitar display
great restraint as they develop a sonic choreography of sophisticated
circumspection with echoes of 20th century avant-garde and somewhat
dusty free-form abstraction. An adept of the "exploration of
twelve tone applications to jazz improvisation", Arnold tries
several alternatives to the commonly known use of multiprocessed guitar,
and his volatile lines and volume pedal swells reveal excellent technique
even if they sometimes lack staying power, probably due to the abundant
use of the abovementioned software which tends to flatten his personal
touch. Schlicht's influence on the music is pretty heavy: post-Schweizerian
digital juggling and obscure, sparse chords à la Joachim Kuhn
(circa Dark) contribute decisively to the impressionistic aura of
the enterprise. The two tasty ingredients don't quite mix, but String
Theory is certainly more palatable than Disklaimer.-MR
Adam
Lane
ZERO DEGREE MUSIC
CIMP 325
Bassist
Adam Lane’s third release on CIMP (following the much-lauded
Fo(u)r Being(s) and DOS with John Tchicai, Paul
Smoker and Barry Altschul) features a hard-rocking free-jazz trio,
with West Coast renaissance man Vinny Golia on saxes and the little-known
Vijay Anderson on drums. Lane writes great one-chord riff tunes: he
seems to have an endless stock of catchy, tailchasing melodies and
taut basslines. On the face of it it’s something of a formula,
perhaps, but Lane and Anderson discover a tumbling world of possibilities
in every tune, meanwhile building up some of the most hypnotic, deepset
grooves ever to grace the Spirit Room. Golia, forgoing the more exotic
instruments in his arsenal, is swirling and passionate on soprano
and tenor sax, wheeling around like Rivers or Coltrane and occasionally
adding a welcome dash of old-fashioned blues holler. I take it from
the title that Lane’s a fan of Roland Barthes – but he’s
picked the wrong Barthes to celebrate: if you want to hear jouissance
in action, just give Zero Degree Music a spin.-ND
CONTEMPORARY
Tristan
Murail
COMPLETE PIANO MUSIC
Metier MSV CD 92097 (2CD)
 Tristan
Murail, now 58 and still Professor of Composition at New York's
Columbia University, is best known as one of the principal exponents
of so-called musique spectrale, a reaction of sorts against
the dogma of total serialism (though by the time spectralists such
as Murail, Gérard Grisey and Horatiu Radulescu arrived on
the scene nobody was really writing hardcore Darmstadt-style all
parameter serial music any more) in the form of a return to music
based on its acoustic "roots" in the harmonic series.
Murail has always been the most traditional of the spectralists
– neither as uncompromisingly hardcore as Grisey nor as wacky
and cosmic as Radulescu – and this fine double CD collection
of his complete piano music, expertly performed by Marilyn Nonken
(who also commissioned the single work that occupies the second
disc, Les Travaux et les Jours) reveals ample traces of
a typically French conservatoire background, steeped in Debussy,
Ravel and, inevitably, Messiaen, with whom he studied before the
obligatory Prix de Rome in 1971. Curiously, there's just as much
Messiaen to be found in Les Travaux et les Jours, harmonically
speaking, as there is in the two works that open disc one, 1967's
Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe... (title culled
from a poem written by the composer's father) and the two-movement
Estuaire, dating from five years later. Messiaen's celebrated
"modes of limited transposition" (aka the octatonic scale,
dividing the octave into alternating tones and semitones) are never
far away, and the music retains – or regains – an almost
Romantic harmonic sense of gravity. Murail is a fine pianist himself,
and his writing taps into the tradition of virtuoso pianism stretching
back from Catalogue des Oiseaux via Gaspard de la Nuit
(referenced obliquely in Murail's 1993 tribute to Ravel, La
Mandragore) to Liszt, a figure of considerable importance in
Murail's music.
The central pillar of the first disc is the monumental 28-minute
Territoires de l'Oubli, written in 1977 and strongly influenced
by the composer's investigations into electronic timbral synthesis.
It's a bugger to perform, since, as Marilyn Nonken notes in her
liners, it explores "landscapes of pianistic impossibility
and auditory illusion: notes heard but never played (sympathetic
vibrations), microtones (resulting from the interaction of the harmonics)
and sonorities that emerge seemingly without attack or decay."
Nonken notes elsewhere that "it is not unusual for strings
to break during performance", but her reading of the work,
though forceful, is never brutal, and makes for an interesting comparison
with the other available version of the piece, Dominique My's 1990
reading on Accord (200842).
In comparison, the rather prosaically titled (even if it is a quotation,
from Hesiod this time) Les Travaux et les Jours sounds
much less iconoclastic, but it's abundantly clear that the same
magnificent pair of ears is at work throughout. The juxtaposition
of upper register pyrotechnics and crashing block chords once more
recalls Messiaen, but the central sonority of the opening movement
is also close to the harmony of late Skryabin. The composer makes
it clear that there are numerous points in common with Territoires,
but the later work's division into nine separate movements refers
us back to the grand unifying principles of the Romantic sonata.
It's a monumental, superbly proportioned and moving work, and one
that deserves to get as much exposure in years to come as the Ligeti
Etudes have in recent times. "Can one still write
for the piano today?" muses Murail. The answer is a resounding
yes, and anyone who doubts it is invited to check this recording
out at the earliest opportunity.–DW
Steve
Reich and Musicians
LIVE 1977 (FROM THE KITCHEN ARCHIVES NO.2)
Orange Mountain Music OMM 0018
 "The
audio tapes in the Kitchen's archive," writes Stephen Vitiello
in his liner notes, "were all found in a number of dust-covered
boxes three years ago, nearly lost to memory". The historical
value of these performances may indeed be important, but I didn't
find much to make me quiver with emotion in these live segments by
Steve Reich's Musicians. If continuous annoying external street noise
doesn't spoil the music (I tried to enjoy Shem Guibbory's fabulous
reading of Violin Phase - the record's high spot - by attempting
to imagine the traffic outside as an Organum-like active environmental
complement to the composition, but failed), audience noise does, a
case in point being the transition to the second movement of Six
Pianos, one of my favourite moments in all minimalism, ruined
by one of many classic coughs. Putting antisocial prejudices to one
side, I enjoyed the rendition of Pendulum Music, where microphones
swinging above loudspeakers generate clouds of feedback (predating
future manipulations of the same matter by the likes of David Lee
Myers and Asmus Tietchens), but Music for Pieces of Wood
remains, like Clapping Music, more of an experiment than
a real step forward, and hasn't aged well, unlike many of Reich's
older pieces, which still maintain their fascinating aura, overquoted
though they may be. The final excerpt from the fourth part of Drumming
is well executed, yet the sound quality on this piece and on the disc
as a whole is comparable to a well refined bootleg, which Live
1977 definitely is. For completists only. Nostalgia be damned.–MR
Philip
Glass
EARLY VOICE
Orange Mountain Music OMM 0004
 After
two decades of disappointment culminating in La Belle et la Bête,
I'd finally decided to give up on Philip Glass. And yet, back in the
days before CDs I once spent a fortune on a vinyl copy of Music
with Changing Parts, so on glancing at the track listing on Early
Voice I knew there was still a chance of hearing something good
– and I was right. From 1972 comes the opening Music for
Voices, performed by Mabou Mines at the Paula Cooper Gallery
in New York (yes, there's extraneous background noise again but it's
not as annoying as on the Reich reviewed above), eight people facing
each other in a circle, led by Glass's handclaps in a spiritual moment
where silence and dynamics play a fundamental role. David Hykes' Harmonic
Choir comes to mind initially, until the music evolves in a series
of typically Glass interlocking patterns (with a touch of imperfection
that makes one appreciate it even more). Glass's compositions from
the first half of the 70s revealed him to be a visionary architect
of geometrical repetition, and this is particularly evident in Another
Look at Harmony Part 4, for chorus (Western Wind) and organ (Michael
Riesman), a majestic 50-minute marathon in which vocal and instrumental
material is carefully distributed across a complex illuminated tapestry.
Think of a cross between Einstein on the Beach's slower sections
and Koyaanisqatsi's more sober moments and you'll get an
idea of what unique bright contrapuntal discipline sounded like before
the crass symphonic bulimia took over.–MR
Maurice
Ravel / Elliott Carter
GASPARD DE LA NUIT
Warner Classics 564 62160-2 DDD LC 04281
 Pierre-Laurent
Aimard is one of the world’s most remarkable pianists, yet,
as this disc reminds us, one of the most puzzling. At its best, his
light, graceful style can dart over any technical or interpretative
obstacles; not a note is left inaudible or devoid of phrasing and
colour, which, in a selection containing some of the twentieth century’s
most difficult repertoire, is in itself impressive. However, whereas
his performances of Carter are rhythmically dashing, his performances
of Ravel, inexplicably, aren't. Playing Carter’s Night Fantasies
(1980) is like trying to reproduce a de Kooning by hand: without
nervous agility, the painting will lose all its vigour. Aimard is
an old hand at this type of repertoire: the Fantasies, minus
their chorale figurations, are after all modelled on the piano writing
of Pierre Boulez, who made the nineteen-year-old virtuoso the first
solo pianist of his Ensemble InterContemporain. By contrast, Aimard's
reading of Gaspard de la nuit, Ravel’s major night
piece, is plodding and blunted. There are superb moments – unexpected
accents in Scarbo, and exquisitely floated diminuendi at
the beginning and end of Ondine – but in general the
phrasing is excessively fastidious and almost devoid of fluctuation
in tempo and attack. The only time it seems to work to his advantage
is towards the end of Scarbo, where sustaining the slow tempo
enables him to savour the mysterious consecutive seconds and hold
back the interlocking chords at the climax. It's just as well then
that there's more Carter than Ravel on the disc, including the quirky
Diversions (1999) and 90+ (1994), written for Goffredo
Petrassi’s ninetieth birthday. Aimard’s renditions are
as illuminating as his thoughts on the pieces, recorded on a bonus
disc with musical examples.-NR
Roger
Doyle
PASSADES – Volume 2
BVHaast, BVHaast 0505
 Using
the concept of the equestrian passade – that of a horse
moving back and forth in the same space – Irish composer Roger
Doyle (remember An Afflicted Man's MusICA Box and Ohren
Des Kaiser Hirohito?) takes four-second increments of his past
work (30 years of it) and the transmogrified voices of Mary Doyle,
Olwen Fouere, and Paul Dutton and mutilates them lovingly beyond all
comprehension or comparison – although the legions of people
listening for uncleared samples at record pressing plants throughout
the land might give him a run for his grant money. The extracts are,
he explains, “fed into the software which would freeze them,
and by mouse manipulation I would slowly move the material backwards
and forwards on screen to see if there was potential for keeping those
particular extracts. On a trial-and-error basis I collected almost
three hours of material in this way. Each successful passade or passing
over the material (real-time hand to eye to ear co-ordination –
I felt almost like a calligrapher) lasted about two to four minutes
before it began to lose its charm.” Difficult to be objective
when examining one’s own discography so carefully for re-presentation;
there's a dichotomy in this work – banging like a shutter in
an angry wind – between what sounds organic and what seems to
be little more than a spry finger on the fast-forward and reverse
buttons on the CD player. It’s the difference between a mouse
and a mouse, or a hand in the dark feeling spaghetti or lower intestines.
But the end result is beauty you should treat yourself to, and with
no existential dithering to constrain its vast spaces it finds its
beginning, middle and end – triumphantly so. Must we really
imagine Sisyphus as happy?-DC
Jason
Talbot
A LOVE SO BRIGHT IT SHINES A HOLE THROUGH MY HEART
C.I.P. CD 014
 Jason
Talbot belongs to that illustrious group of Boston-based improvisers
who are taking live electronics to the next level. Next level of difficulty,
that is (think video games): if you've picked this up on a whim on
the strength of the title expecting another sweet, white île
flottante of dreamy ambient glitch, you picked the wrong label.
This is C.I.P., not 12k (nowt wrong with 12k, I hasten to add), and
that C.I. stands for "Crippled Intellect".. Which doesn't
mean you have to be intellectually crippled to get off on Talbot's
helter skelter of ferocious turntablism, but you do have
to give it your undivided attention and several concentrated listenings
before it yields up its many delights. Shouldn't be too hard –
it's just under 21 minutes long and there's some deliciously gloomy
electric piano about halfway through (think Portishead on downers
sans voice remixed by Jason Lescalleet) to tell you you're
on the home stretch. Play it nice and loud and your neighbours will
soon be banging on your door to shine a hole through your heart too.–DW
Daniel
Menche
SCATHER
Taalem Alm 23
Neon
lamps flicker in the acrid gas surrounding them while rain pours down
on bare wires that would like to melt in a plastic fusion but are
instead forced to let electricity inside scream its burning blind
fury.. A thunderous vibration seems to come directly from the ground,
but it's just another corpse mangled and thrown into an incinerator
where iron ants will eat its remnants. Daniel Menche keeps shocking
our senses with releases that can be subtly menacing or extremely
violent but are consistently high quality; the care the man from Oregon
puts into the assemblage and perennially lucid orientation of his
work carries with it the sick fragrance of death as definitive liberation
from the futility of the stupid things of life. But it's that very
end that becomes refreshed blood pumping in our veins, restarting
the cycle all over again.–MR
Nullkommajosefh
INFIDEL PART 2
Taalem Alm 24
This
is the first time I've encountered Nullkommajosefh, a German dark
ambient artist who floats around low-frequency domains to create his
isolationist soundscapes. This 3-inch contains two tracks –
"Panacea" is a well-assembled and operational if rather
calm meeting between distantly Jackmanesque metallic entities (not
to mention the circular flanging harmonics typical of Paul Bradley/Twenty
Hertz or Colin Potter), while "Peninsula" could be described
as Pink Floyd opening up live at Pompeii without noticing Vesuvius
has silently restarted its activity. Everything remains looped ad
infinitum while concrete reality is inexorably lost, becoming a mass
of ashes in a desolate sunset.–MR
Pholde
IN THE SUBSET OF ALL ELEMENTS
Taalem Alm 25
Canadian
Pholde, aka Alan Bloor, plays wonderful metal sculptures (you can
see them at pholde.com) that give birth to fantastic droning creatures
which will have your windowpanes trembling at sufficient volume, while
Bloor drags and scrapes more metal – shades of Z'ev –
to offset his obscure sensual rapture with solemn flurries and shifting
fragments of invention. His Taalem 3" consists of three blurred
snapshots of his creative urge, surreal upsets and corkscrew staircases
leading to what could be the antechambers of hell, were it not for
a few touches of gentle inhumanity. Titles like "According to
what is deserved" or "From a Place of Concealment"
define the music's psychological attitude perfectly.–MR
Compest
BENU
Taalem Alm 26
Sometimes
in the world of lo-fi noise terror one can find something interesting,
like this well-crafted piece by Martin Steinebach (aka Compest), who
also releases works under the monikers Monoid, StillStand and Conscientia
Peccati. This disc opens with what sounds like a sweet being thrown
away, captured by contact microphones and put into a distortion unit
until it develops into a late-80s, ritual/Industrial low-budget symphony
with repeated drum patterns, sci-fi synth patches and other crunchy
sources. Don't know exactly why, but it reminded me of the Dutch project
Het Zweet (anybody remember that?).. listener expectation is sufficiently
stimulated and rewarded throughout this naive but effective soundscape.–MR
Nihilist
Assault Group
NAG ANTI-RECORD
7” + cassette box (RRR, RRR/NAG)
Yet
another apparently unplayable artifact in the arsenal of Richard Rupenus,
this box set in an edition of 50 features a 7” spray-painted
gold-and-black and ending in a loop groove of crackling static, a
similarly decorated cassette, and various inserts of absurdly styled,
hand-painted collage (Frank Sinatra, John Cage and a celebrated quote
from Charles Ives: “You goddam sissy! When you hear strong masculine
music like this – get up and use your ears like a man!”).
The three members of the Group, Rupenus, RRR’s Ron Lessard and
Prurient / Hospital Productions’ Dominick Fernow, appear nattily
dressed in black business suits and stocking-masks with Xs over their
faces, two of them attacking turntable and soundmaking devices while
the other sits down and enjoys a fine red wine amidst the din. The
7” throws other wreckers into the hungry hopper of a recycling
machine to be chewed up and recast into new vinyl on which the old
dead records make haunting, fleeting appearances, while the cassette
seems to be a recording of the record heard on first blush, with attendant
layers of spraypaint hiss removed to reveal squeaky casters, squealing
squalor and the harsh laughter of machines just realizing that humans
don’t like them that way.-DC
Andrew
Chalk
SHADOWS FROM THE ALBUM SKIES
Faraway Press No Number CD
Previously
released on Three Poplars, the first part of this composition by Andrew
Chalk is here completed by a much longer second instalment, a welcome
extension bringing the total duration to almost 75 minutes. The music
flows with the timelessness typical of the Englishman's work, both
solo and in the oneiric therapy of his late lamented Mirror project
with Christoph Heemann. The immobile mass of formless harmony that
opens Part One draws out those feelings of silent sorrow we try (in
vain) to fight, a blurred reflection of consciousness in the precious
dream state where images and memories drift slowly across the mind
without ever finding definitive resting places. Part Two is even foggier,
rewinding the film back to an image of a child in the back of daddy's
car, gazing out through an ever-changing mosaic of droplets of gentle
rain forming small water courses on the windows, as surrounding fields
and dark grey asphalt merge in a slow ceremonial of hypnotic succession,
something to be relived later in adulthood, after too many wrong turns
taken down the road to normality, where we inevitably return, crestfallen,
after each weak attempt to flutter alone.-MR
VVV
RESURRECTION RIVER
Mego, Mego 075
Recordings
from May 2002 by Mika Vainio, Ilpo Väisänen, and Alan Vega,
who does his Suicide vocals (a bit more subdued but no less delayed
and echoed) while Panasonic does the dance thing behind them. The
surface of the CD case is embossed with moons and stars, which must
be a pain when the plastic cracks. It’s not like you can just
go down to the record store and order more. Grr. Jimi Tenor plays
organ on “11:52 PM”, a prom anthem for more erudite schools,
with Vega crooning and sighing his obsessed street anthems. This is
the guy who jumped on Kraftwerk when they came to a Suicide concert
because they looked “square”.. wouldn’t you like
to see Suicide open for Kraftwerk? Like Ginsberg’s “Howl”
or the roadkill robots of Survival Research Laboratories, Vega’s
projections and phrasings are an acquired taste – but nobody
else is doing this kind of poetry and music act these days, so we're
better off for it. If rap is the black man’s CNN, this is the
adventurous man’s CNBC.-DC
The
Hafler Trio
AN UTTERANCE OF THE SUPREME VENTRILOQUIST
Soleilmoon
Behind
the gauzy, dura-translucent cover art and the dense, thoughtful phraseology
lies the core of something strangely hollow, something quite chilling
and fearless. Andrew McKenzie, now officially a citizen (?) of the
Icelandic Republic, stands alone on another universally obscure and
transcendent release whose focused drones and meandering spotlights
of synchronized discord are nothing short of astounding. Recorded
back in 1996, and dedicated to Hildur Rún Hauksdóttir,
this was previously available exclusively in a limited edition of
451 hand-numbered vinyls, but now we Technics-less folk can gather
round in ecstasy to witness the ultimate act of homage, as McKenzie's
gyrating, joyful bumper car rides into the solitude of a howling wind.
He may have made a courageous recovery, but the rest of us are, obsessively,
still ill for the stunted planes of atmosphere he travels with or
without us. It's a dramatic listen, something almost too sacred to
find critical words to ink properly.-TJN
Autechre
& The Hafler Trio
AEO3/3HAE
Die Stadt, DS82
The
Hafler Trio’s Andrew McKenzie once remarked that he was aggrieved
at the Mute reissues of his earlier Touch albums because they excised
the care and detail he put into the packaging of their original incarnations.
These 82 minutes would, in those days, have been a triple LP, with
golden band and gold-embossed words on textured paper stock. Talking
of words, liner notes have always been an integral part of Hafler
Trio releases, so we might as well quote these: "The deformation
of light entering several lives is simply a prismatic event and depending
where the bottle spins, you're it. the acclaimed and cajoled, fussed
over and clutched to multifarious bosoms is about to tread no water
and several grapes, the resulting liquid pours off and conserved,
but never leaving the family, in its way, that is, at least for some
of us, and not very all others. be that as it may, and that is probable,
it approaches with a glint in its eye, and full boots, not needing
a high horse or even a fence to jump over. maybe a candlestick. tell
us the time. are you in blue little boy? or are you grown up into
what you always thought you would someday be? just asking. name? what's
in any of them is out of the bag. The second part of the award winning
and chart-topping confluence of the entities known sometimes as autechre
and the hafler trio. or something very like it. longer, uncut, 50%
less fat, and free house with every copy. that last part *may* not
be entirely true." Gives you a reasonably good idea of what to
expect. Why does anyone bother reviewing Hafler Trio records anymore?
Like Korla Pandit, Joy Division and Ridley Scott, it goes without
saying they are almost without fail some of the most challenging and
satisfying examples of art one can encounter in life.-DC
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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