| FEBRUARY
News 2006 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, David Cotner, Stephen Griffith, Vid Jeraj, Massimo
Ricci, Derek Taylor, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
Julius Eastman
Kapotte Muziek
English
On Hopscotch: Assif
Tsahar / Cooper-Moore / Hamid Drake / Tatsuya Nakatani / KJLA
Quartet / Agusti Fernandez / Peter Kowald
On DVD: Essays on
Radio: Can I Have 2 Minutes Of Your Time? / Rolex à la
Plage
Reissued: Albert Ayler
JAZZ & IMPROV: Glen
Hall, Lee Ranaldo, William Hooker / +minus / Michel Doneda /
Alessandra Rombola / Exploding Customer / John McNeil / Stephen
Riley /
Barry Guy's London
Jazz Composers Orchestra / Masen Kerbaj / Nakatani, Rawlings,
Arias / Michel Lambert / Reuben Radding / Jack Wright, Andy
Hayleck, Paul Neidhardt,
Todd Whitman
CONTEMPORARY: Walter
Zimmermann/ Alvin Lucier / John Wall / Steve Reich
ELECTRONICA: Esther
Venrooy / James Plotkin / Thomas Ankersmit / Jim O'Rourke /
Francisco Lopez, Scott Arford / Organum / Windy and Carl / Z'ev,
Duncan, Baker, Fear Falls Burning / Marc Wannabe / CM von Hausswolf
Last month
|
There's
been a lot of discussion lately over at Bagatellen about the pros
and cons of mp3 downloads and filesharing, and I'm grateful to Jeff
Gburek for pointing me in the direction of Audacity, a cool piece
of software you can download in a jiffy and convert just about everything
to everything else with. To put it to the test I downloaded the seven
or eight remaining items in Mattin's discography that I didn't have,
whacked the Ogg Vorbis files into Audacity, converted them to .wav
files and burned up a packet of discs in less than an hour. OK OK
I know, hi fi purists will cringe, and I'm the first person to recognise
that the sound quality is clearly inferior to a "real" disc,
but in order to appreciate exactly what the difference is you have
to be listening on a good system in optimum conditions. Optimum conditions
meaning quiet – no ventilation units from a nearby restaurant
humming, no washing machine upstairs in spin cycle mode, and certainly
no workmen smashing the fuck out of the inner courtyard of the building
and inadvertently leaving a ten inch hole in the toilet wall. The
temperature in the smallest room on Saturday was a crisp -5°C.
You could literally freeze your balls off. The only way to fight back,
apart from a volley of angry phone calls to the company who employs
these fearful pick-wielding brutes, is to slip the CDR of Mattin's
Tinnitus into the old hi fi and give 'em hell. Which is what
I did. Anyway, if you've missed out on Mattin's music so far, go Google
him and you'll soon find it there waiting for you. I'm not going to
get drawn into a discussion of the ethics of it all – there
are pieces up for grabs there as free downloads which are still available
as "real" records, and I'm not sure that I'd be all that
happy to see them there if I'd put up the money to pay for the release
myself, but that's something for Mattin to sort out – but I'm
certainly enjoying the music. Real records are cool as well, though,
and here's hoping that the reviews of the 48 discs below (I'm counting
double CDs as two, btw) will whet your appetite. Bonne lecture
– et bonne écoute!-DW
Julius
Eastman
UNJUST MALAISE
New World
 Until
this triple CD appeared at the end of last year, Julius Eastman's
principal claim to fame was probably his extraordinary portrayal of
King George III on the old Nonesuch recording of Peter Maxwell Davies'
Eight Songs for a Mad King. His piano playing was just as strong
and distinctive, but it's as a composer that his work has –
finally – come to our attention here, 15 years after his death
in total obscurity and abject poverty at the age of 49. The story
of how one of the most talented performers and composers of his generation,
a close associate of Lukas Foss, Morton Feldman, Yvar Mikhashoff,
Meredith Monk and Petr Kotik, missed out in life and ended up as an
alcoholic drug-addict sleeping rough in Tompkins Square Park is authentically
tragic (as Eastman, for reasons best known to himself, declined several
offers of teaching work on the grounds that they didn't pay what he
thought he deserved), and it's told concisely and affectionately by
Kyle Gann in the essay accompanying these seven hitherto unreleased
compositions. Without dwelling too much on the biographical details,
though, it's important to note that Julius Eastman was black –
and openly, even aggressively, gay (his "interpretation"
of John Cage's Songbooks at SUNY Buffalo in 1975, in which
he spoke frankly about sex and publicly undressed another man provoked
a furious reaction from the composer himself: "the freedom in
my music does not mean the freedom to be irresponsible!" he stormed,
actually banging a piano with his fist. So much for the smiling Zen
sage with his little basket of mushrooms). "Sometimes he [Eastman]
was just damned outrageous," commented a friend. Indeed, entitling
two of his pieces Evil Nigger and Crazy Nigger managed
to raise the hackles of both teachers and students (an African-American
fraternity) at Northwestern University, where those works were performed
in January 1980. The recording of that concert is included here in
its entirety, along with Eastman's own from-the-hip spoken introduction:
"What I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental [..]
and eschews that which is superficial, or could we say, elegant...
There are 99 names of Allah, and there are 52 niggers".
Sob stories apart, the claim that's being made here is quite simply
that Eastman is one of the great forgotten minimalist composers of
his generation. Kyle Gann, whose knowledge of the subject is extensive,
makes a good case for the defence – certainly the inclusion
of the 1973 premiere of Stay On It is a convincing opening
move. This catchy, pop-inflected ensemble piece scored for voice,
piano, violin, clarinet, two saxophones and two percussionists is
indeed way ahead of its time – it sounds remarkably like the
music of someone who hit post-minimalist paydirt a decade later, Michael
Torke – breaking with the conventions of the minimalism of the
time (Glass's linear additive processes, Reich's phasing and block
additive methods – remember, as Gann points out, Stay On
It predates both Einstein On The Beach and Music
for 18 Musicians) by fragmenting and looping the material, changing
the tempo and even introducing extraneous elements. It manages to
get itself bogged down on a number of occasions, but it's certainly
original, at times even inspired.
1977's If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich? (you've got
to love the track titles) is an even more extreme break with minimalism's
present-the-material-and-get-on-with-it basic method. It begins with
an ascending chromatic scale that gets immediately stuck on its top
note (one can appreciate the difficulty of the music for the principal
trumpeter but only lament the rather rough live recording from 1979)
before descending step by step into a mudbath of turgid chromatic
clusters that has more in common with the obsessive cellular minimalism
of Feldman – the ugly stuff, think Turfan Fragments
– and the nastiness of Branca (rescore this for electric guitars,
up the tempo 40 bpm, add a "rock" drummer and see if you
can spot the difference) than it does with Glass's bland I-IV-V-Is
and Reich's melt-in-the-mouth ninths and elevenths. As an exploration
of the idea of "nonhierarchical form", in which, as Gann
notes, "every part was as important as every other part"
(an idea Eastman derived from Cage, whether the older composer liked
it or not), the piece is authentically problematic, even postmodern:
its lack of structure becomes curiously significant, and its banal
ugliness – the scratchy violin obbligatos, the monotonous
plodding brass chords – almost admirable.
Eastman went on to develop the concept of "organic form",
in which "every phrase contains the information of the phrase
before it, with new material gradually added in and old material gradually
removed." The idea resembles the "people process" of
Terry Riley's In C, in which performers are given the basic
material and invited to make their own way through it at their own
pace. Eastman's scores frequently consist of little more than fragments
of melodic and harmonic information accompanied by sketchy instructions
("this is one line, one melody".. "take this as a guide
and continue in like manner.."), and orchestration is left open.
In his spoken introduction to Crazy Nigger the composer mentions
that one possible realisation of the work could be for as many as
18 instruments of the same family – for the concert at Northwestern,
Eastman had four pianos at his disposal, and it's this line-up we
hear in the versions of Gay Guerrilla (1980), Evil Nigger
(1979) and Crazy Nigger (1980). (It seems the same working
method is also being used in The Holy Presence of Joan D'Arc (1981),
heard here in a spirited if stodgy version for ten cellos conducted
by the composer, whose awesome baritone is also heard singing the
Prelude: "Joan, speak boldly, when they question you.")
The multiple piano pieces are certainly fascinating – imagine
a bar or two of mid-period Stravinsky frozen and looped, or the last
minute of Ligeti's Monument extended for over half an hour
– but often frustrating: the listener has to travel through
miles of barren and inhospitable desert before coming across an oasis.
Gann – lucky lad – is apparently in possession of a photocopied
score of Crazy Nigger, and calls for "some ambitious
musicologist" to prepare a fully restored performing version.
He could probably do the job very well himself, but I guess he's too
busy. Fortunately, another fine Downtown composer is on the case,
in the form of Mary Jane Leach, and her fine recent article on Eastman
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=4411 provides further valuable
information on the composer, and a comprehensive list of works. Comprehensive
as far as we know, that is, since many of Eastman's scores probably
ended up in the garbage when the composer was thrown out of his apartment
in Downtown Manhattan in the mid 80s (we can only hope they weren't,
and that copies survive – Leach is currently hunting down an
Eastman Symphony – watch this space). There are, after
all, some terrific new music ensembles around these days, and surely
some enterprising soul could follow this project up and release more
music by this sadly neglected composer: Unjust Malaise is
not without its problems but deserves to be the first, not the last,
word on Julius Eastman.–DW
Kapotte
Muziek
(NOT) LOST
Audiobot
 How
many items are there in the Kapotte Muziek discography? I'm looking
in awe at http://www.beequeen.nl/de_Waard/disc/kapotte_muziek_disc.htm
and trying to add them all up. There are, correct me if I'm wrong,
143 "Kapot Product" cassettes starting with 1984's untitled
track on a compilation called Katacombe 3 (I should explain
that KP numbering goes from 1 to 50, then 00A to 00Z, then 0AA to
0AZ, 0BA to 0BZ, then 0CA to 0CI, a c45 called Murmel from
1992), after which the numbering system seems to have been abandoned
(though it resumes briefly with "Kapotte Muziek on Record":
0RA, 0RB etc.). I'll take a guess at nearly 300 as a total number.
Now, the next question is – how many people other than KM founder
member Frans de Waard – and perhaps (though I seriously doubt
it) the others who joined him later, Christian Nijs, Peter Duimelinks
and Roel Meelkop – actually have them all? Does Frans
have them all? He must have a motherfucker of a collection to start
with, as he's been one of the most prolific and entertaining commentators
on new music for years now, thanks to his indispensable Vital Weekly.
The
Kapotte Muziek project is a fine example of how technology –
beginning with home taping ("..is killing music!" remember
those little stickers back in the 80s? Killing music my ass..)
and ending up with the CDR and today's various other digital interfaces
and filesharing possibilities – has completely revolutionized
the world of music (music here meaning, of course, the weird shit
we talk about on sites like this – though if you want to talk
mainstream pop much of what follows also applies). It's no longer
possible to talk about "classic" albums of new music in
the way that we talk about classic albums of jazz, rock, and even
punk, because such products only accede to "classic" status
if they've reached a significantly large listening public. More often
than not that means they've sold in huge numbers (Dark Side of
the Moon etc etc), or comparatively huge numbers (Colossal
Youth), but sometimes journalists, broadcasters and record company
bosses can talk up an album into becoming a classic (I'd
say Jon Abbey's done a particularly good job with Duos for Doris,
which doesn't for one minute imply I think the music on that double
CD set isn't absolutely sublime). It also helps if the artist in question
does something noteworthy like falling out of a fourth floor window
(Rock Bottom) or, better yet, dying in some unnatural and
violent way. I like to think that Love Will Tear Us Apart
or Unplugged In New York would still be as revered as they
are today if Curtis and Cobain were still with us, though I'm not
so sure.
I'm no crystal ball gazer but I often wonder which of the many new
CDs (and the occasional LP, hooray!) now cluttering up my living space
will "stand the test of time", i.e. be held up as examples
to future generations of what music was like back at the turn of the
21st century. And who will decide what's a classic album and what
isn't? That choice, whoever is unlucky enough to have to make it,
will be a purely subjective one, for the simple reason that it's frankly
impossible for one person to own – let alone listen to –
every recording made by today's "big names": hands up who
has the complete Keiji Haino discography, eh? And what about John
Zorn? Otomo Yoshihide? Braxton? Brötzmann? And anyone who goes
out and buys new albums on the recommendations of specialist publications
like The Wire, for example, will end up with a somewhat skewed
vision of what's going on out there too (are the albums that make
it to the annual Rewind Best Of an accurate reflection of the scenes
the magazine covers? I wouldn't say they always were, and I write
for the mag myself). It seems to me it's even more dangerous –
all right, not dangerous, let's say unbalanced – to
put one's faith in one particular journalist's recommendations, myself
definitely included (this by way of a big friendly hello to my pal
in Stockholm, Henrik!). After all, the celebrated (?) NME journalist
Paul Morley routinely used to describe just about anything he liked
as "the greatest song ever written" or "the greatest
album ever recorded"? I used to love reading Paul Morley reviews.
Actually, I still do.
Anyway, for some reason, presumably because they think a review might
help – I hope it does – the good people at Freaksendfuture
have sent me a copy of (Not) Lost, a selection of previously
unreleased Kapotte Muziek dating from about 1995 onwards and filling
not one, not two, not three but FOUR CDs. Now, as my own collection
of Kapot Products can be counted on the fingers of both hands (as
long as I stick one of them in my ear), this splendid present represents
not so much a career retrospective as a voyage of discovery. It comes
in a tastefully packaged collection of austere grey (though not plain)
covers, with a set of introductory notes provided by de Waard, and
it's the goddamn bargain of the century at 20 Euros – go to
http://www.freaksendfuture.com/shop/details.php?item_id=2797.
Kapotte
Muziek in many respects is one of the most representative outfits
to have appeared in new music over the past 20 years (see, I'm trying
to get an early answer in to the question I asked above), as their
music is a fine example of how the DIY aesthetic and self-consciously
marginal attitude of post-punk / Industrial became cross-pollinated
with "mainstream" electronic music, minimalism and techno
and evolved along with the technology used to produce it. Not surprisingly
it's music that falls neatly between the cracks – never trashed
or scuzzy enough to get beyond the fringes of alt.rock, yet too well-structured
and crafted to appeal to improv snobs (but too abrasive to cut it
on the lowercase/EAI circuit). Too obtrusive to sneak into the Lopez
/ Günter / Behrens stable but not funky or beat-driven enough
to hardstep onto techno's leftfield either. Loops and beats are to
be found, but so are horrific yelps of feedback and screes of vicious
noise, so, for better or worse, KM discs usually turn up in the "Noise"
bin in my local record emporium. This is logical enough given the
group's collaborative ventures with Merzbow, The Haters and Aube,
but in terms of both attitude and decibels de Waard's music often
seems to have little in common with the apocalyptic outings of Hijokaidan,
Masonna, et al.
Frans de Waard's accompanying notes are as amusing as they are informative;
in many cases he seems to have forgotten exactly how, why and when
these pieces of music were made, or even which label they were intended
for (the names of some of these imprints are as wild and wonderful
as the music they presumably released: Clotted Meat Portioning, Gender
Less Kibbutz, Minus Habens, Hush Hush..). Checking out the music,
then, is the listening equivalent of stumbling across a collection
of dusty tablets in an unmarked tomb somewhere in Egypt: the inscrutable
hieroglyphics might not be as exciting as a Tutankhamun sarcophagus,
but they contain a wealth of information. CD One contains 18 tracks
(but de Waard's notes only mention 17 – so you'll have to do
a bit of detective work for starters), including the magnificent "Infinity"
(sound sources: two marbles, one tin can and a sampler), "Studie
Voor Tas" (sound source: one plastic bag), "Sand" (sound
source: erm, sand), "Cease to Exist – D.O.A.", on
which de Waard does to Throbbing Gristle's "Cease to Exist"
what TG did to their own "United" on D.O.A., i.e.
speed it up by a factor of 15.18, and "The Body in Decay Part
2" (owners of Part 1 on the Anomalous compilation cassette Pathological
Resonance will rejoice).
The first four tracks on CD Two were originally intended for release
as a full-length album on RRRecords sub-label Pure – no explanation
is given as to why it never appeared – and are based on studio
improvisations de Waard and Duimelinks recorded with Randy Greif as
well as a live jam with Illusion of Safety. It's quintessentially
uncompromising stuff, underground music for underground people, after
which the spaced out swoops of "Fla Mix", sourced from a
recording of a KM concert in Herford in 1993 contrast wonderfully
with the fucked up psychedelic sludge of "Autonomix", apparently
a remix of a band called Wound (figures).
CD Three starts out more mainstream noise (mainstream noise?
Did I say that?) with "Relapse" (#1 and 2), whose basic
material is an earlier 1980s cassette Musik Ohne Ende "fed
through an endless line of effects and feedback treatments."
"Noise#1" and "Noise#2" are what they say they
are too (though de Waard has no idea why and when they were recorded),
while "Ruis Phase" and "Ruis Mix", which he notes
are "among the few studio pieces by KM made on a laptop"
are more surgically precise.
CD Four (my favourite, or at least the one I've listened too most
often) is mainly sourced in recordings subsequently used in de Waard's
Torn Tongue collaboration with Howard Stelzer on Absurd.
On "Dissected Voices" fragments of speech (the piece started
out with a tape of a woman's voice Stelzer sent de Waard in 1997)
are combined with Morse code-like hissy beeps and oppressive sub-bass
rumble in a tense and beautifully structured musical pyschodrama.
De Waard is, like Ralf Wehowsky, someone whose work also stubbornly
refuses to be pigeonholed (needless to say the two know each other's
work well), a compulsive reworker of his own and other people's improvised
material, hence the closing "KGM", cut from an extended
improvisation with Meelkop and Duimelinks. "I still like [it],
but Peter and Roel don't", de Waard admits in the liners, "so
it wasn't released at the time." And that could be the motto
for the whole (Not) Lost project. The greatest album ever
recorded and never released at the time.–DW
English
ENGLISH (full length CDR)
ENGLISH (double 3" CDR)
Copula
 "Geographically,
English is the most widespread language on Earth, second only to Mandarin
Chinese in the number of people who speak it. It is the language of
business, technology, sport and aviation. Incredibly enough, 75% of
the world's mail and 60% of the world's telephone calls are in English.
People who speak English fall into one of three groups: those who
have learned it as their native language; those who have learned it
as a second language in a society that is mainly bilingual; and those
who are forced to use it for a practical purpose – administrative,
professional or educational. One person in seven of the world's entire
population belongs to one of these three groups." Well, doesn't
that make you feel lucky, punk? English also happens to be the name
of this improvising duo featuring Baltimore-based Bonnie Jones, who
plays the exposed circuit boards of digital delay pedals, and Joe
Foster, currently resident in South Korea though formerly from Portland,
Oregon, on electronics, microphones and trumpet. The two got together
when Jones was in Korea last year, and these two offerings on Foster's
Copula imprint – one a "normal" CDR, the other a double
three-incher – are the first results of that collaboration.
The five-track CDR (whose track titles are as follows: "The Capturist",
"The Moyle", "Senator Bustamente", "A Hair
Found in an Old Book by a Bald Reader" and "Doubt")
comes in a nifty cardboard pull-out box, almost unadorned except for
a a spidery amoeba-like green fluorescent squiggle, while the double
3" set (one piece on each disc, the first entitled "No.
Upon my soul, no. Upon my soul which belongs to you, no." the
second "Oh" - !) features a captionless photo, apparently
found on the Tokyo subway, of a bloke with fly open and dick hanging
out. Sort of lo-budget Mapplethorpe. Well, needless to say you're
unlikely to find either of these little treasures in your local Virgin
Megastore, but if the outer limits of EAI are where you like to hang
out, you'd be well advised to get hold of them both post-haste, because
they're crackers.
 The
basic vocabulary of this kind of music is well-established now, thanks
to the gradual assimilation of noise and electronic instruments –
hi and lo-tech – into mainstream improv culture over the past
decade or so, notably in the multifarious projects of Otomo Yoshihide
and those who've been listening carefully to them (think Mattin, Joel
Stern, Anthony Guerra, Will Guthrie, Ferran Fages, Jean-Philippe Gross,
Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Alexandre Bellenger, Jaime Fennelly, Howard
Stelzer, Jason Talbot, Vic Rawlings.. the list goes on): hum, buzz,
glitch, screaming feedback, piercing sinewaves, all-out whitenoise
apocalypse and inscrutable urban field recordings ("Doubt"
combines the distant traffic noise of a huge city with the grainy
drizzle of electronics and ominous microphone scrapings to form a
truly arresting tone poem). In terms of actual moment-to-moment sonic
information there's probably little on offer here that you haven't
heard already, but what sets Foster and Jones' music apart is its
splendid sense of structure and timing: sounds that are by themselves
harsh, ugly, even physically painful (yep, there's plenty here to
have the family dog barking with sheer delight.. you'd better plug
its ears with wax and strap it to the mast, because here comes
the Siren Song) are combined into coherent, arresting and ultimately
highly enjoyable assemblages, all the while avoiding EAI's rather
predictable slowmotion trawl. True, the pace is generally leisurely,
but there's plenty of black ice and broken glass strewn across the
highway. If Bar Sachiko is where you like to hang out and have a quiet
cocktail (no puns intended, remembering the image that graces the
cover), "No" is definitely something you'll want to stick
on the jukebox. Just be careful you don't bite right through the glass
and rip your gums to shreds at 16'33". "Oh" is an arresting
duo of extended technique trumpet (Greg Kelley would be proud) and
strategically placed electronic rips and squeals, lucid and elegant
as a haiku but as deadly as one of those Hattori Hanzo swords David
Carradine keeps rapping on about. If you feel like having a bit of
fun by the way, try watching the House Of Blue Leaves massacre in
Kill Bill 1 at half speed with the volume off and this as the
alternative soundtrack. Damn, for once Tarantino missed out on the
best music.
There is, alas, little chance that this stuff will be as widely umm
appreciated as Quentin's movie, let alone the language that Jones
and Foster have chosen as the name of their project, but, for what
it's worth, I'm spreading the word: "A Hair Found in an Old Book
by a Bald Reader" has the dubious distinction of being the first
track played on the Paris Transatlantic Sound System in 2006 to have
provoked an angry phone call from the neighbour downstairs. The poor
bugger's still trying to sleep off a New Year hangover, it would seem.
So no prizes for guessing who's going to receive an unmarked copy
of English in their letterbox. That said, I'm rather tempted
to stick on a photocopy the cover of the No / Oh disc instead,
for obvious reasons. May it soon be hanging out in your record collection
too.–DW
Assif
Tsahar / Cooper-Moore / Hamid Drake
LOST BROTHER
Hopscotch HOP 33
 If
Assif Tsahar's earlier releases revealed the influence of Coltrane
(inevitable, and nothing to apologise for either), a quick blast of
Lost Brother's opener, "Breaking the Water" might
lead you to conclude he's been checking out Ayler and Frank Wright
recently. But Tsahar's never been all that easy to pin down stylistically,
and his distinctly melodic and understated bass clarinet work points
in other directions. There's a lot of open space in there too –
the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble comes to mind on a number of occasions,
but that's not surprising given Hamid Drake's mastery of percussion
idioms from around the world. Throughout the album the roles are clearly
defined: Tsahar can roam wherever he likes, and Drake, who can never
resist a good groove, is encouraged to find one and stick with it,
while Cooper-Moore finds himself playing bassist, his twanger and
diddley-bow often downright dirty and funky. On "Breaking the
Water" he sounds like Jaco Pastorius trying to play his way out
of a barrel of tar, while Drake carries on blithely with his Tony
Williams ca. "Shhh/Peaceful" and lets him writhe. It's catchy
stuff, but the limitations of Cooper-Moore's self-made instruments
are often felt: they sound great but don't exactly give him much room
to play with in terms of pitch, hence the tendency to stick on one
basic riff (drone, even). Though with Drake's tablas and frame drums
bubbling so nicely away in the background, you're hardly likely to
complain, and Tsahar's modal explorations are intelligent and well-structured.
If there is any noodling going on, it's probably coming from Cooper-Moore,
but the sounds he makes are so arresting you'll forgive that.
Assif
Tsahar / Tatsuya Nakatani / KJLA String Quartet
SOLITUDE
Hopscotch HOP 36
 Solitude
marks a slight return to the Ellingtonian path Assif Tsahar began
to tread with Tatsuya Nakatani on Come Sunday, and also adds
his name to what's become a rather long list of saxophonists who have
recorded with a string section, in this case a conventional quartet
line-up featuring Katt Hernandez and Jean Cook on violins, Ljova (dunno
if that's a first name or a surname but it's all we've got to go on)
on viola and Audrey Chen on cello. The opening "Love Is"
sets the tone for the whole affair, with Nakatani's bass drum thudding
gently under a carpet of Scelsi-esque drone on which Tsahar unfolds
long, melancholy lines. "Unmoving" is, curiously enough,
rather busy (though maybe the title's supposed to refer to the emotional
content, not the activity level), with the strings scattering, and
bouncing and scratching merrily away in the foreground and Tsahar
content to sketch in whatever fluffy melodic shapes result. But even
when the temperature rises towards the end of the piece, he sounds
strangely far back in the mix, as if he was trying somehow to abstract
himself from the proceedings. This feeling of forlorn alienation continues
in "Sand between a toe", in which the saxophone reverb is
offset by the strings' dry pizzicato, and on "The Epistemology
of Loss" and "Of Amazing Most Now", both of which are
dedicated to the poets their titles quote from (respectively John
Berryman – name misspelt on CD by the way – and e.e. cummings).
By the end of "Blue Sun" Tsahar's sounding distinctly down
in the mouth, and it takes Nakatani's Lovens-like fluster and a flurry
of trills and glissandi on "Falling" and a more concerted
four-girl attack in "By and by" to perk him up. To little
avail, though – the Ellington cover finally arrives with the
closing "Solitude", but as the strings are still stranded
in the droneworld they began exploring on "Love Is", the
only link to the original is the melody line itself. It's a shame
that the quartet couldn't have found some way of incorporating Ellington's
luscious harmony, but the result is at least coherent with the rest
of the album's sense of loss.
Agustí
Fernández / Peter Kowald
SEA OF LEAD
Hopscotch HOP 17
 More
than three years have passed by since bassist Peter Kowald passed
away but there's been no shortage of new Kowald product (to coin a
rather vulgar term) on the market since; Sea Of Lead is his
third appearance on Hopscotch, after Deal, Ideas and Ideals
(with Assif Tsahar and Rashied Ali) and Ma: Live at the Fundacio
Juan Miro (with Tsahar and Sunny Murray). This time Tsahar isn't
on the bill, and there's no drummer, but that doesn't mean there's
no percussion. Agustí Fernández's work both on and inside
the piano remind us that it's first and foremost a percussion instrument,
and David Casamitjana's recording made at Barcelona's Estudi 84 on
June 27th 2000 is quite superb. Goodness knows where he put his mics,
but they certainly were at the heart of the action: Fernández's
prepared piano shrieks and clangs sound dangerously close, and Kowald's
pizzicato has rarely sounded so full and rich – Charlie Haden
eat your heart out. Elsewhere, his low-register bowed work growls
like a lion (though I'll admit I've never been much of a fan of the
sub-bass Tuvan horror movie vocals). It's easy to forget that despite
his reputation for monster solo sets of extraordinary stamina –
the last time I saw him he played non-stop for 80 minutes –
Kowald was also capable of great restraint and used space and silence
to great effect, and in Fernández he found the ideal partner.
Even so, the most impressive tracks are the ones where both men go
nuts, especially "Rhizomes" (yeah, rhizomes were all the
rage back in 2000, remember?), which pits Ligeti-like ostinati against
Kowald's maniacal arco scrabbling, and "Tendrils", on which
the bassist wisely sits on a low rolling groove and lets Fernández
turn out the kind of solo pianists dream of. Shame it ends rather
abruptly. But you could say that of Peter Kowald's life, too. However,
given the man's enormous appetite for work, it's a fair bet that there
are plenty of hours of unreleased Kowald languishing on hard drives
across the world. If they're all as good as this, it looks as if the
Kowald discography is set to go on increasing for quite a while to
come.–DW
Various
Artists
ESSAYS ON RADIO: CAN I HAVE 2 MINUTES OF YOUR TIME?
Crónica
Alexandre Bellenger / Clément Froissart
ROLEX A LA PLAGE
wmo/r
 It
didn't take long for the laptoppers to realise that concertgoers quickly
get fed up of parting with hard-earned cash in return for having to
stare intently at young men and women staring intently at their screens
behind those annoyingly unavoidable luminous Apple logos. Unless,
that is, you happen to enjoy watching Christian Fennesz smoke a cigarette
or Christof Kurzmann swigging at a beer. Hence the frequent incorporation
of live video in today's electronic music, for which the DVD format
is especially appropriate. This companion DVD to the earlier CD compilation
of the same name, Essays on Radio from the Portuguese Crónica
label is a fine showcase of 28 two-minute videos – they call
them "clips" in France, and that's a rather apt description
of the short form works on offer here – ranging from grainy
home movie footage (Nuno and Pedro Tudela's "Guandong Tuning
Tone", Maximilien Jänicke and Random Industries' "Media
Corrosion") via primitive animation (Júlio Dolbeth's "AM/FM",
to music by Steinbrüchel, and Brigitte Bödenauer's video
to the DVD's title track, with sound by Miguel Carvalhais) to more
abstract visuals (Stefan Mathieu's "Radiance" is especially
touching) and accomplished psychedelic / geometric mindfucks by Tina
Frank (perfect for General Magic) and Erich Berger ("Free Radio
Azimuth", music by Pure).
Needless to say, the whole project has the feel more of a collection
of holiday snapshots, and eyes and ears are quickly saturated (but
don't feel any compunction to watch the whole disc through from beginning
to end – just dip in and out); accordingly, the tracks that
work best are those where the correspondence between sound and image
is clear. Marius Watz's "Int.15/35" with music by @c gives
General Magic and Tina Frank a run for their money, and the filtered
desert colours of Ran Slavin's "Golden Twilight Memories"
are as haunting as his music. Slavin's work throughout is impressive
and moving – his "Radiophonic Fairytale" (with The
Beautiful Schizophrenic, whoever that may be) and "Radio"
(with James Eck Rippie) are magnificent. Maybe the good people at
Crónica could release a full length feature.
 As
digital technology becomes ever more widespread and affordable, we
seem to be moving inexorably towards a culture where anyone can circulate
their writings (in the blogosphere), music (via free downloads and
file sharing) and home-made radio programmes (how long will it be
before "podcast" appears in the dictionary?). While all
this might have wide – and generally positive – implications
for creativity, not to mention democracy, it also raises rather alarming
questions about quality control. What quality control? An
indication of where we might be heading is Rolex à la Plage
(no, I don't understand the oblique reference to Eric Rohmer
either), a totally improvised home movie conceived by and "starring"
Alexandre Bellenger, enfant terrible of French improvised
music. "I wanted to make a movie, improvised, also make the soundtrack
at the same time, make it altogether at/only once, in a few hours,
with no edit at all. And we did this," he states proudly, reaffirming
the one-shot-deal-no-questions-asked-let's-release-it-NOW aesthetic
that defines his own ARR CDR label.
While I'm all in favour of a few mistakes when it comes to improvised
music – an unexpected wrong turn can after all often lead to
an exciting detour into unexplored territory – I've never found
the "warts and all" approach all that satisfying (to declare
an interest, as they say in Parliament, perhaps I should inform you
that I actually recorded a session of improvisations with Alexandre
Bellenger myself last year which he wanted to release in its entirety
but I didn't, preferring instead to edit, which he refused to.. stalemate!),
and Rolex à la Plage is a perfect example of what
the French disparagingly refer to as n'importe quoi.. CUT
from a grainy and out-of-focus pan over traffic viewed from what seems
to be an unfurnished apartment in a high-rise tower block on the outskirts
of Paris (is this what the liners refer to as "Studio Motor"?)
to Bellenger rolling around on the floor with an inflatable beach
ball, before engaging in a kind of slowmotion Butoh dance with fellow
"actor" Romaric Sobac, cavorting round the room tootling
on a toy flute, stuffing his head into a plastic bag and getting into
some strange mildly erotic cabaret routines in the bathroom before
running out of energy and sprawling on the floor watching a Coke can
revolve slowly on his turntable. The music to accompany this floor
show is as just as wild, featuring Bellenger, Froissart, Sobac and
someone who for reasons best known to him/herself prefers to be billed
simply as "P", on assorted samplers and keyboards. You can
consider the whole package as the unruly bastard child of Birgé
and Gorgé's epic art movie La Nuit du Phoque, or as
the video equivalent of the trash aesthetic so lovingly and hideously
cultivated on wmo/r label boss Mattin's own recent Song Book,
but I guarantee that once you've seen it, you'll never forget it,
even if you never see it again.–DW
Albert
Ayler
SLUGS’ SALOON
ESP
 The
number of commercially produced recordings of improvised music is,
in the scheme of things, fairly small – and even fewer of those
are particularly landmark. What is more important as a window into
the workshop is what was captured live; students of the music are
quite lucky to have as crucial a body of work as Coltrane’s
1961 Village Vanguard performances or, now Miles Davis’s 1970
Cellar Door gigs, commercially available and relatively complete –
not to mention of excellent recording quality. For sure, there are
literally tons of lesser-quality live recordings floating around,
some of them semi-commercial and others traded amongst collectors
and students, which give us a clearer picture of what artists were
really up to – say, comparing Cecil Taylor’s “Conquistador”
between the session recording (Blue Note, 1966) of the piece, and
concert and club performances that are significantly different from
around the same time.
While
1966 was the year that saw Albert Ayler move to Impulse from ESP-Disk’,
at the height of his frenetic marching-band music, he was nevertheless
continually refining the scope of that music from what seemed a slapdash
mélange (à la Bells [ESP, 1965], and probably
through a mutual influence with Don Cherry) to a tight and stately
framework for improvisation. The central ensemble then featured his
brother Don on trumpet and the dervish-like Dutch classical violinist
Michel Samson, with a rotating cast of bassists and drummers. Captured
on tape May 1, 1966 (exactly a year after the Town Hall gig that produced
Bells) at Slugs’ Saloon in New York's Lower East Side,
the workshop then featured bassist Lewis Worrell and drummer Ronald
Shannon Jackson. These performances were slated for the ESP-Disk’
catalog, though they were actually issued shortly after the label
folded by Base (and subsequently by ZYX, Get Back/Abraxas and now,
finally in a restored version by the resurgent ESP).
Though,
like the Dial recordings of Charlie Parker, these Ayler performances
are not of high recording quality, they are nevertheless a crucial
look at how the Aylers’ music took shape during this period.
It is obvious that the military-band music, as it was fleshed out
to include thicker ensemble voicings for reed, brass and strings,
required a completely different percussive approach than the loose,
chattering front-line framework Sunny Murray had lent to Bells
and Spirits Rejoice (ESP M/S 1020, 1966). Beaver Harris was
the eventual stalwart in the drum chair, a combination of the huge,
polyrhythmic swing of Elvin Jones and Murray's conversant architecture,
and his presence graced Ayler’s first “official”
Impulse side, as well as recordings that same year later released
on Hat Hut. Jackson’s interim position is fascinating because
he was in the process of working out something rather different from
the then-prevalent Murray and Milford Graves approaches, a hurtling
field of top-heavy accents that worked well to propel altoist Charles
Tyler’s groups (Charles Tyler Ensemble, ESP M/S 1029,
1966) and, later the Cecil Taylor Unit and his own Decoding Society.
At this point, he hadn’t quite matched it to the level of precision
that it would eventually attain – perhaps that was the reason
he wasn’t with the Aylers that long – but one can hear
from how much a juggernaut “Bells” is in the Slugs’
version, that Jackson is operating from a completely different, and
possibly more successful standpoint than Murray in this sonic framework.
Despite
the looseness that pervades the music here – “Truth is
Marching In” maintains a lengthy, martial soliloquy as its theme,
before Donald Ayler enters in a flurry of brass smears over Jackson’s
thrashing percussive web. The trumpeter’s solos are characteristically
brief and, despite their speed and searing intensity, are nearly unmodulated.
A thematic rejoinder later, Albert Ayler’s screaming, bent altissimo
is in throaty dialogue with the rhythm section, and though at a similar
pace and register, a vast array of inflection is obvious from Ayler’s
tenor. Rather than sonic smears, his playing offers notes –
or at least the idea of notes – as a definitive tenet. After
a year of working out these themes, which follow in segments as soloistic
references introduce one element or another (and can probably be arranged
in a few different ways – especially “Bells”), the
music is, if not rote, at least somewhat more predictable in direction
and significantly more cleanly assembled than it was in 1965. And
there are the pastoral moments – Ayler may have never sounded
as warm as he does on “Initiation,” in trio with Samson
and Worrell, which almost equals his legendary “Summertime”
in its pathos-laden beauty. For sure, clearly defined themes can (and
do) lead into intense collective freedom – as in “Our
Prayer” – but even searing and almost violent group improvisations
like this seem couched in an air of programmatic deliberateness. There
is no sense – as in Bells – that the music is
on the verge of leaving the band’s control, even as thematic
elements offer occasional signposts. For music that, in many ways
is as ‘free’ as what was played at Slugs’ that night,
this is a necessary revelation.–CA
Glen
Hall / Lee Ranaldo / William Hooker
OASIS OF WHISPERS
Alien8
 Canadian
reed virtuoso Glen Hall is one of those cats (Ned Rothenberg's another)
who doesn't release a hell of a lot of albums, which is all the more
reason to check them out when they do appear. With Sonic Youth's Lee
Ranaldo bending the strings and the muscular William Hooker behind
the kit, you wouldn't expect Oasis of Whispers, despite that
delicate lowercase title, to be anything other than a powerhouse –
and it doesn't disappoint. Recorded live in Buffalo NY (by another
monster blower we should hear more from, Steve Baczkowski), these
nine tracks find Hall playing tenor and soprano saxes (with and without
a battery of electronic transformations), piccolo, flute, bass flute,
bass clarinet and percussion. Though he's perfectly able to blast
the horns into oblivion when necessary, it's worth bearing in mind
that Hall has a solid jazz background – the fact that the set
here includes an evil swinging take on Sonny Rollins' "Blue Seven"
should come as no surprise – and there's a structural integrity
to even his wildest solos ("View from Bellevue" in particular
is a gem) that rewards repeated listening. And he's not averse to
extending his work beyond the strict confines of pure music, whatever
that is – remember his William Burroughs-inspired project Hallucinations
on Leo a few years back. Hence the convincing interplay with the ever-inventive
Hooker and his fellow member of that other multimedia improv collective,
Text Of Light, Ranaldo, who, in addition to his coruscating guitar
work, provides some of his beloved audio collages in the form of snatches
of radio and answerphone messages ("Conference Call") and
otherworldly electronic squiggles on the the title track, which is
atmospheric and evocative while remaining tense and thrilling.–DW
+minus
L'ECOUTE LIBERE
Esquilo
 One
day I'm going to have dispense with these wretched categories ("Jazz
/ Improv", "Contemporary", "Electronica"..)
altogether. Maybe organise the reviews in alphabetical order, or something.
Any suggestions? Meanwhile, take a piece of paper and draw an equilateral
triangle with J/I, C and E at each angle and a mark a cross right
at its centre: that's where this particular release on the Portuguese
Esquilo label – another great new music label from Portugal!
hot damn! – is to be found. The +minus project, mixing live
improvisation and pre-existent compositions as basis tracks, is now
extending its reach beyond the music of its three founder members
Bernhard Günter, Graham Halliwell and Mark Wastell – other
projects in the pipeline will, I'm told, feature the shakuhachi of
Clive Bell and the music of Steve Roden – but L'écoute
libéré (I guess that should be "libérée",
because listening, as John Gill will tell you, is feminine),
the group's third release, "sticks to the original line-up. Three's
the name of the game throughout: there are three pieces, credited
respectively to Wastell, Günter and Halliwell. Mark Wastell's
"Lone Star" mixes recordings he made on his trusty tam tam
(see his various Vibra projects) with Halliwell's feedback
saxophone during the sessions for the latter's Recorded Delivery
and extracts from Günter's music (it isn't specified which
Günter piece(s) are used) to create what Wastell wanted to be
"a piece that could have been something we might have played
naturally together, not a technically complex software driven remix."
Mission accomplie. It's as rich and complex as it is conceptually
straightforward, a beautifully paced exercise in virtuoso listening
and composing. For his offering, "Metis", Günter takes
a live recording of +minus' concert in Leeds on May 28th 2004 (for
more information read Wastell's tour diary included with the second
+minus album A Rainy Koran Verse) and adds Hohner Blues Harps
(yeah!) and bamboo flute. The pitch play is, as one might expect,
more evident in this piece, based as it is on a recording that also
features Günter's cellotar, but the ear and the attention to
detail is just as acute as in "Lone Star". And it gets better:
Halliwell's offering, "L'écoute réduite",
which uses Günter's Redshift (2001) as a basis track,
is dedicated to the memory of Pierre Schaeffer, and though the late
lamented Godfather of Musique Concrète probably wouldn't have
liked it (given the rather unpleasant things he said about the music
of Eliane Radigue, who also happens to be one of Graham Halliwell's
heroines), he would have recognised a damn good ear at work. Not one
damn good ear, but six, in fact. And soon, when Bell and Roden are
on board, ten. Here's to the next great +minus release. Meanwhile,
here's the next great +minus release.–DW
Michel
Doneda
SOLO LAS PLANQUES
Sillón
 In
recent years a number of French free improvisers have gone back to
church, not out of any desire (heaven forbid) to abandon the cherished
principle of laïcité established by the Revolution,
but quite simply because the spacious acoustics of churches and chapels
have proved very accommodating to post-lowercase improv's greater
use of silence and attention to detail (also because, as Jean-Luc
Guionnet will tell you, if you want to get your paws on a pipe organ,
a church is about the only place you'll find one). This particular
offering, the latest solo album by Michel Doneda on Sillón,
Norwegian-based Sofa's new spin-off label – someone somewhere
should write an essay charting Doneda's progress as a solo performer
from his 1991 debut L'élémentaire sonore (In
Situ) via Anatomie des Clefs (Potlatch, 1998) to 2003's Sopranino
/ Radio on Fringes, because it's a fascinating journey –
is in fact the second album to be recorded in the Chapelle de Las
Planques, in Tanus, near Albi, by recording engineer Pierre-Olivier
Boulant. (The first was Bertrand Gauguet's Creative Sources release
Etwa, other tracks on which were recorded in another chapel
in Concoret, Brittany). Doneda knows when he's onto a good thing,
too: this is Boulant's fourth recording with the saxophonist, after
2002's Placés dans l'air on Potlatch (with Alessandro
Bosetti and Bhob Rainey), Sopranino / Radio and last year's
Breath on the floor with Bosetti on Absinth (actually it
would appear Solo Las Planques predates that, but it's taken
time to find its way here), and I'm not sure it isn't his best yet.
None of the spit and scrabble that characterised the Absinth here:
just a patient, attentive and quite extraordinary exploration of the
straight horn. There's been a tendency in solo saxophone albums of
recent times to treat the recording process as a kind of laboratory
experiment – Stéphane Rives' Fibres (also on
Potlatch) is perhaps the most extreme and most successful example
– and Doneda is well aware of the trend. Each of the seven pieces
on this album takes a technical problem and gives it a thorough workout,
in what could be considered an extension of the old 19th century tradition
of the Etude. Michel Doneda has explored every square foot of the
No Man's Land between pitched notes and breath noise, not to mention
the nuances of fluttertonguing ("Vrilles" – awesome!),
and takes us on a truly memorable tour here. I normally steer well
clear of churches myself, but I can't keep out of this one.–DW
Alessandra
Rombolá
URUEÑA
Sillón
 Almost
a year to the day after the session with Michel Doneda reviewed above,
the Pierre-Olivier Boulant roadshow was in the Ermita de la Anunciada,
Urueña, Spain (on July 19th / 20th 2005) where the roving recordist
captured the flutes of Alessandra Rombolá. (If I've Googled
this one correctly, you can see some photographs of the 10th century
monastery at http://www.romanicozamorano.com/prov%20de%20Valladolid/Uruenna/anunciada/anunciada.htm)
As is often the case with Boulant's recordings, there's as much going
on in the air around the performer as in the music itself –
here the distant groan of the outside world (traffic, presumably,
though the building looks as if it's far away from any major roads,
and tiny flecks of birdsong) is caught as wonderfully as it was on
Mattin's Training Thoughts with Taku Sugimoto / Yasuo Totsuka.
There are far fewer free improv flute players out there than saxophonists
– and if like me you can't recall any offhand besides Jim Denley,
Scott Rosenberg and Carlos Bechegas, here's another name to add to
the list. Most people think of flutes as rather delicate little creatures,
either light, darting, twinkling will-o'-the-wisp James Galway tootle,
or languorous, sensual and silky Prélude à l'après-midi
d'un Faune. But Rombolá starts out the second track sounding
like a hippo taking a mudbath and ends up spitting in your face. More
"conventional" flutery is on offer in "Dulcamara"
(just in case you had any lingering doubts about her technical mastery),
while on "Anapola" and "Quejigo" it sounds like
she's taken the instrument to pieces and is using it to play assorted
items of small percussion. It's a mysterious and thrilling set of
pieces, and though Rombolá has been described out there on
the www as "Italian new music's best kept secret" I doubt
that'll be the case for much longer. I'm especially looking forward
at some stage to a recording of her with Rhodri Davies and Ingar Zach
in the trio Muta. Meanwhile here's another holy place for you to visit.–DW
Exploding
Customer
LIVE AT TAMPERE JAZZ HAPPENING
Ayler
 Despite
all the clutter on the Internet, it can occasionally perform a useful
function: in January 2005, a solitary poster started a thread on a
bulletin board titled “I want more Exploding Customer”,
knowing that Jan Ström, the affable head of the Ayler label,
was a frequent participant. Shortly afterwards, Ström replied
that even though the sales of the 2002 Live at Glenn Miller Café
(Ayler 030) were such a “catastrophe” that the recording
of a 2003 concert was shelved, a November 2004 tour produced music
that went “direct into the soul” and “must be released
whatever it will cost us”. Would that were the prevailing attitude
at all labels!
This music is as in-your-face as the group’s name implies, though
it’s also capable of nuance and a slower burn. The sax/trumpet/bass/drums
lineup and “break down the barriers” attitude bring Ornette’s
original quartet to mind, and when the twining trumpet and alto sax
play a Middle Eastern-flavoured theme there's also a strong hint of
Zorn's Masada project. But the players in this group have a collective
sound – call it “Scandinavian Soul” – that
sets them apart from such models. Martin Küchen’s blaring
tenor and alto sax work is in stark contrast to his work with the
more introspective Unsolicited Music Ensemble, as he dispenses with
sweet niceties and barges into the themes and solos. Trumpeter Tomas
Hallonsten supplements his prodigious chops with impressive plunger
work, and Kjell Nordeson comes with a full resumé, including
work on drums and vibes with the AALY Trio and School Days –
here he leaves his vibes behind to concentrate on dancing rhythms
in conjunction with bassist Benjamin Quigley, adeptly navigating the
twists and turns of Küchen’s compositions.
Live at Tampere Jazz Happening has more of a “rock”
feel to it than the band's debut: faster tempos, shorter songs and
more between-song patter by Küchen. The songs run the gamut of
tempos and moods, but a playful spontaneous chaos is the underlying
constant. Two pieces, “Quoting Frippe: (What’s The Name
of The Bass Player?)” and “A Broken Glass”, are
repeated from the earlier release, and it's hard to choose between
the different versions, though here “Quoting Frippe” has
a nifty surprise ending, fading out with a nice “Lonely Woman”-ish
bit. Heartfelt madcap music like this makes me smile no matter how
often I hear it. Both this album and Live at Glenn Miller Café
are highly recommended.–SG
John
McNeil
EAST COAST COOL
Omnitone 15211
 For
trumpeter and composer John McNeil’s third Omnitone release,
the modus operandi, at least according to the liner notes and press
release, is one of applying post-Ornette tendencies (harmonic/rhythmic
liberation vis-à-vis expanded or truncated song forms) to the
Gerry Mulligan-Chet Baker quartet format. McNeil is joined by baritone
saxophonist Allan Chase and the rhythm team of drummer Matt Wilson
and bassist John Hebert for nine originals and three interpretations,
including a snippet of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto.
The funny thing is, as much of a statement it is to distance oneself
from the Ornette lineage for something a bit "rounder" such
as Mulligan and Baker, the music doesn’t really sound much like
either. The "economy of expression" referred to in the liners
seems to rub up against the terse, half-valve smears of Bill Dixon,
and the quartet reminds this listener more of the Dixon-Shepp Quartet
in its tense ambiguity and measured swing. One has merely to compare
Ornette’s "Peace" to the Dixon-Shepp reading (Savoy
MG-12178, 1962) to see how different their respective senses of kinetics
are.
The quartet is at its best when it doesn’t appear to have a
modus operandi. "Delusions" has a bubbly pan-tonal theme
and seems to be running a Viennese keyboard study for all its worth,
but it’s when Chase takes off in freely oblique thematic squall
that deliberateness trumps finite schemata. “Deadline”
is another one of the "early Dixon-esque" themes, especially
in its tightly-wound second and third sections, the loose interplay
between sharp, clearly delineated baritone and the gauzy swathes of
McNeil’s trumpet breathing naturally as Hebert and Wilson pull
time apart into isolated and elongated instances of swing. “A
Time to Go” (nothing to do with James Spaulding's pensive homage
to Martin Luther King, Jr.) is a jubilant-toned ballad in steadily
cut time. “Brother Frank” recalls Dixon again (“Peace”
as well as “Quartet”) in its easy but bent swing that
appears ready to collapse at every turn, even briefly triple-timed
before falling back to a (tightrope) walk. Unlike Shepp’s bit-chomping
apparent throughout that date, however, Chase is far more subtle in
his commentary. “Bernie’s Tune,” a theme familiar
even to those not well-schooled in West Coast jazz, is a jagged free-time
romp that spreads out and slows to a crawl as the group trades fours,
turning inward from its own ebullience. East Coast Cool is
far from merely a round peg in a square hole, and highly recommended.–CA
Stephen
Riley
INSIDE OUT
Steeplechase
 If
I'm not mistaken I have the honor of being the first writer to review
Steeplechase titles in the pages of Paris Transatlantic. The Danish
label has long been a stable for individualistic American saxophonists
like Rich Perry, Ari Ambrose, Larry Schneider and host of others.
If distinctively-rendered postbop is your bag you can add Stephen
Riley to the list, and seriously consider seeking out this, his debut
album. He sounds a bit like Rollins, if he’d chosen Lester Young
as a principal influence instead of Coleman Hawkins: his tone on tenor
sax is lissome and transparent, but his phrasing has a Newk-worthy
rhythmic accuracy. He’s similarly lucid and devoid of brow-furrowing
aggression when playing alto clarinet and soprano, the latter recalling
Lucky Thompson's sweetness and salience on the straight horn. Riley
names Paul Gonsalves as his earliest jazz infatuation and there's
also a debt to Big Ben Webster in the honeyed rasp he sometimes shades
his lines with. The disc's title is a convenient shorthand for the
trio's approach, the emphasis falling on intrepid interior exploration
rather than treks to the avantgarde hinterlands. Nine standards, ranging
from well-trod to hardly tapped, spanning Strayhorn ("Chelsea
Bridge") to Shorter (cleverly tweaked versions of "Ju Ju"
and "Infant Eyes"), offer substantial opportunity to sample
Riley's understated but inquisitive improvisational approach, and
he signs off with the self-penned title piece, a loose retooling of
Trane's "Giant Steps." There’s excellent work in support
from bassist Neal Caine, who coaxes a full sound from his instrument
without the aid of amplification, and drummer Greg Hutchinson, who
favors supple brushwork and an airy touch. If you’re a free
jazz fan who has temporarily overdosed on reed-splitters like Brötzmann
and Flaherty, and are looking for mainstream jazz with real bite and
intelligence, Riley’s the perfect antidote.–DT
Barry
Guy London Jazz Composers Orchestra
STUDY II / STRINGER
Intakt
 Bassist
/ composer Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra has been a
force to be reckoned with in the world of large ensemble improvised
/ composed music since its debut release Ode way back in
1970 (originally on Incus, reissued by Intakt), and this latest package
is also something of a retrospective, bringing together 1991's "Study
II", which clocks in at just under 20 minutes, and the "Four
Pieces for Orchestra" released as Stringer on Jost Gebers'
FMP imprint in 1983 (and recorded three years prior to that for BBC
Radio 3's Music In Our Time series at the Beeb's Maida Vale
studios in London). As usual, the line-up is impeccable: saxophonists
Trevor Watts and Evan Parker and trombonist Alan Tomlinson appear
on both sessions, and the Stringer date also features (wait
for it) Kenny Wheeler, Harry Beckett, Dave Spence, Paul Rutherford,
Alan Tomlinson, Paul Nieman, Melvyn Poore, Peter Brötzmann, Larry
Stabbins, Tony Coe, Phil Wachsmann, Howard Riley, Tony Oxley, John
Stevens and Peter Kowald. Might as well run through the personnel
on the later session while we're at it: Irène Schweizer, Henry
Lowther, Marc Charig, Jon Corbett, Conrad Bauer, Radu Malfatti, Steve
Wick, Simon Picard, Paul Dunmall, Peter McPhail, Paul Lytton and Barre
Phillips. The booklet also includes some splendid photos of the Stringer
band to remind us how old we've all got in the intervening years –
but the music has aged magnificently.
I first came across Guy's work back in the – ahem – formative
years when I was acquiring Lutoslawski, Ligeti, Xenakis and Penderecki
vinyls at a ridiculous and irresponsible rate of knots (ask my bank
manager if you don't believe me), and have always associated his large
ensemble pieces more with mainstream European avant-garde as a result;
the raw intensity of the surging brass clusters, spidery strings (complete
with added electronics), Darmstadt freakout piano (courtesy Howard
Riley) and double-headed percussion assault (Oxley and Stevens –
talk about being spoilt) still have much in common with some of Penderecki's
semi-graphic scores of the 60s and 70s, though the Polish composer
would have had a hard time notating the extended technique pyrotechnics
of Messrs Parker and Brötzmann. This is music of mass effect
rather than note-to-note detail, in which pitches function more as
black holes than suns, sucking in adjacent clusters and blusters;
even the ostinato that underpins Stringer's second movement
(there are twelve notes but not all twelve notes of the chromatic
scale – it's not a series), which is gently displaced against
itself in canon to form a backdrop to a spectacular solo feature for
Kenny Wheeler, serves as a reservoir of intervals for the trumpeter
to draw on rather than a blueprint for any kind of serial development
as such.
Guy's liners astutely point out the differences between the two sessions,
specifically the fact that Peter Pfister, recording "Study II"
in Zürich in 1991, used individual close up mics as opposed to
producer Stephen Plaistow's "symphony orchestra perspective"
on Stringer. Not that it makes a huge difference, but there
are a few bright flashes of trumpet (Lowther?) and trombone (Bauer?)
in the later recording that stand out rather more than they might
have done at the Maida Vale session, in which even the apocalyptic
splutters of Brötzmann are kept at a safe distance. It's a shame
perhaps that the outstanding solo tuba and clarinet work in the third
movement isn't a little more prominent, but let's not complain: this
music has been out of print for far too long and it's great to see
it out and about again.–DW
Mazen
Kerbaj
BRT VRT ZRT KRT
Al Maslakh
 Mazen
Kerbaj and fellow Lebanese improviser Sharif Sehnaoui founded the
Al Maslakh ("Slaughterhouse") label together and have been
running the Irtijal festival in Beirut for five years now. If you're
ever passing through the Lebanese capital, you'll also learn that
Kerbaj is also a cartoonist and the son of the nation’s
greatest film star. Not surprisingly then his work cross-references
diverse artistic disciplines including installation, performance art
and music theatre. His trumpet playing is certainly unorthodox: he
sits down, holds it between his knees and even manages to play it
simultaneously with assorted percussion instruments. Circular breathing,
it goes without saying, comes naturally. Kerbaj extends the trumpet
to the point of almost abandoning it completely, going way beyond
Axel Dörner's steam engine huff and puff and the quarter-tone
exhalations of Franz Hautzinger (with whom Kerbaj has released two
albums: Abu Tarek, on Creative Sources, and Oriental
Space with Sehnaoui and Helge Hinteregger on aRtonal). Every
piece on this disc explores a different technique, and it sounds like
Kerbaj has been developing them for a long time. The opening "Vrrrt"
uses sounds from two different devices simultaneously, while on "Pshshsshsssshp"
Kerbaj prepares the horn with assorted rubber tubes (the influence
of Rajesh Mehta, or nargila?), ultimately deconstructing it altogether
and even abandoning it in favour of assorted small instruments, as
on "Cling Clang Clong (Krrrt)" – listening to the
panoply of sounds he extracts from his kit I can imagine the concert
promoter’s disbelieving grin upon receiving Kerbaj’s tech-rider..
Elsewhere, there's an almost Industrial feel to the draughty sewer
of "Ssssff" and "Flooka Brooka Clooka" and the
steam whistle of "Whoo Pf Wiz." And, in Julian Cowley’s
recent feature on the trumpeter in The Wire, Kerbaj revealed
that the Lebanese Civil War has influenced his playing as much as
musique concrète. You can hear that well in pieces
like "Piiii", whose high-pitch sounds like a siren, and
rearing its ugly head on "Brrrt". But the closing "Brotz"
is a dedication to Peter Brötzmann, and its rumbles and growls
sound like a dinosaur trapped in the bell of his mighty tenor. And
like Brötzmann, Kerbaj has little time for lowercase's beloved
silence – for all its experimental rigour, this music really
swings!–VJ
Tatsuya
Nakatani / Vic Rawlings / Ricardo Arias
N.R.A.
H&H Production
 Knowing
that Tatsuya Nakatani's last-but-one outing on his own H&H imprint
was a delicious helping of Bronx bossa nova, and seeing Vic Rawlings'
open circuit electronics and Ricardo Arias's balloons (or, as it says
here, "bass balloon kit") in the same line-up you might
be forgiven for expecting a fun-filled happy hour of red-nosed wacky
toybox improv à la Steve Beresford / Martin Klapper,
but, as Frankie Howerd used to say: don't titter. Your pre-teen
kids might get a kick out of Beresford's antics (mine does), but this
one should be played once they're safely tucked up in bed. It's uncompromising,
often nasty, stuff, full of growls, screams and things that go bump
in the night. Rawlings' work with his frequent playing partner Mike
Bullock is just as austere, but more spacious – here his electronics
are pitted against a formidable barrage of percussion and friction
from Nakatani and Arias, and it forces him on several occasions to
move into all out combat mode. All three musicians go out of their
way to put themselves in dangerous situations, and the results are
consistently compelling, sometimes downright thrilling. Check it out.–DW
Michel
Lambert
LE PASSANT
Rant
 Montreal-based
percussionist and composer Michel Lambert has assembled an impressive
line-up for this "confrontation between the worlds of through-composed
music and free improvisation". In April 2004 he recorded with
bassist Dominic Duval and violinist Malcolm Goldstein, following it
up with a session with saxophonist Ellery Eskelin a month later. Extracts
of these improvisations were then combined with Lambert's own music
for 10-piece ensemble, itself a scaled-down version of an orchestral
composition written during a hectic burst of creative activity back
in 1992, and in a final overdubbing session in June 2004 Lambert added
extra percussion. The resulting work (whose title is translated on
the disc itself as "The Wanderer" but on Lambert's website
as "The Vagrant" – interesting semantic shift there)
is an ambitious 12-movement work – the first five tracks constituting
"Le Passant" itself, the last seven collective improvisations
based on it – which tackles the composition / improvisation
question head on. Though there are passages where the classically-trained
ensemble musicians let fly, there's usually little doubt as to what's
composed and what's improvised – Goldstein of course sounds
like no other violinist on the planet, and the extraordinary noises
he conjures forth from the instrument contrast markedly with the ensemble
writing – Lambert's patchwork approach is consistently thought-provoking,
and at times frustrating. On several occasions one wishes that the
improvisations had been allowed to run their course without being
interrupted by or interleaved with the composed sections (and vice
versa) – but that's precisely the point: Le Passant
raises important questions about compositional structure and the identity
of musical material used to articulate it, and leaves it to listener
to find the answers. A challenging and rewarding listen.–DW
Reuben
Radding
INTERSECTIONS
Pine Ear Music
 This
collection of nine pieces for clarinet (Oscar Noriega), vibraphone
(Matt Moran) and bass (Reuben Radding), all Radding originals except
for two group creations ("Siren" and "Marginal Way")
and a savvy cover of Olivier Messiaen's "Danse de la fureur pour
les sept trompettes", from his Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps
(1941), is as classy and cool as its sleek blue / grey photo
cover art. Radding's compositions are understated and angular, but
the trio is crisp and sharp, exploring intervals and colours with
extraordinary grace and clarity. Radding is on the record as saying
he's "nuts about Jimmy Giuffre, and his drummerless trios"
(aren't we all?), and it shows, but he's also been casting his gaze
back across the pond towards Europe and investigating serial techniques
in his compositions. He's certainly what Robin Holloway once called
"a natural serialist", perfectly at home in a world of carefully
organised intervallic and pitch relationships, but it's a shame in
a way that he hasn't – yet – found some way to incorporate
some of the rhythmic subtlety / complexity that characterised early
Boulez, early Nono and late Wolpe. The cellular intricacy of the lines
and motives in "Bellevue, Bellevue and Bellevue" is clean
and elegant, but even without a drummer in the band one can feel the
imaginary backbeat – Gunter Schuller would have been proud of
this one. Radding's other projects, notably last year's The Branch
Will Not Break with Carrie Shull and Tara Flandreau (Umbrella)
and Blue Purge with Wally Shoup and Bob Rees show he can
get himself in and out of rhythmically hairy situations without sacrificing
that big beautiful bass sound. Still, these are minor quibbles –
Intersections is a thoroughly satisfying and warmly recommended
outing by three superb musicians.–DW
Jack
Wright / Paul Neidhardt / Andy Hayleck
WHOOSH
Jack Wright / Todd Whitman
TWIST AND THRALL
Spring Garden Music
 Fortunately,
the work of pioneering American saxophonist Jack Wright has been well
documented over recent years, but the alto and baritone playing of
Todd Whitman has until now gone unrecorded. Whitman was an important
influence on Wright himself, introducing him back in 1980 to the music
of Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker, whose raw sounds, Wright
recalls, "touched my emotions – I knew it was a door I
had to open, a kind of loss of innocence." Wright kicked that
door in with his 1982 debut Free Life, Singing, a collection
of solos and duets with drummer Marv Frank that also inaugurated his
Spring Garden Music imprint, and he and Whitman have played on and
off ever since. Though the music on offer on Twist and Thrall
was recorded relatively recently, in 1999, the same furious energy
that characterised Wright's early work is still very much in evidence.
Four of the fourteen tracks are solos, one by Wright and three by
Whitman, including a spectacular and all too brief baritone outing,
"Maul". It's bracing, muscular playing, full of strong ideas,
forceful and dynamic but never crude or vulgar. And happily, more
of Whitman's music is due out shortly on John Berndt's Recorded label.
 Several
of Jack Wright's most notable excursions in recent times have found
him playing with youngsters more at home with what used to be called
"reductionism" (which is, as Wright himself has stated,
"now past its prime"). Whoosh teams him up with
two active members of the incredibly fertile Baltimore improv scene,
percussionist Paul Neidhardt – imagine a wonderful cross between
Paul Lytton and Burkhard Beins – and Andy Hayleck, who, after
miking up a frozen reservoir on Various Recordings Involving Ice
(Heresee) and Bertoia sound sculptures on The Disappearing
Floor (Recorded), turns his attention here to musical saw. There's
plenty of draughty space for Wright's spitty furballs to roll around
in these four low-volume medium-length but high-intensity workouts.–DW
Walter
Zimmermann
THE ECHOING GREEN
Mode
 The
one thing you're likely to know about Walter Zimmermann from reading
reviews of his work (mine included) is that he edited the writings
of and has been a consistent champion of the music of Morton Feldman.
But anyone expecting to hear any direct influence of Feldman in Zimmermann's
own music will probably be disappointed; Richard Toop, in his splendid
essay accompanying these four late 1980s works by the 56-year-old
German composer (how many more wonderful pieces are there languishing
in obscurity nearly two decades after their creation?!) also draws
attention to the composer's wide reading – from Plato to Maeterlinck
via St Augustine, Nietzsche, Beckett and Blake (hence the album title)
– and his use of material derived from the folk music of his
native Franconia. The transatlantic influence is harder to discern,
but Zimmermann's rhythmic rigour and fondness for consonance –
or rather his reluctance to fall back on the harsh chromaticism beloved
of his elders – reveal a deep understanding of and affection
for early Cage. There's something of the diaphanous lucidity of the
1950 Cage String Quartet in Four Parts (not to mention and
the frozen pitches of early Wolff) in "Sala della Pazienzia",
the second movement of Geduld und Gelegenheit ("Patience
and opportunity"), for cello (Michael Bach, using his specially-designed
Bachbogen, allowing him to play on all four strings of the instrument
simultaneously) and piano (Hermann Kretzschmar), but the first movement's
sustained exploration of B flat reveals a distinctly European aesthetic
of fearsome complexity at work – even if it is dedicated to
Feldman. Don't be fooled by the fact that Zimmermann was associated
with the "New Simplicity" movement in the early 70s into
thinking this music is simple, either to listen to or to perform.
This is nowhere more apparent than in the furiously difficult Wüstenwanderung
("Wandering in the desert"), a 21-minute solo piano work
whose seven superimposed tempo layers give Kretzschmar one hell of
a run for his money. Lied im Wüstenvogelton ("Song
in the Tone of a Desert Bird"), for bass flute (Dieter Wiesner)
and piano (the indefatigable Kretzschmar) and The Echoing Green,
for violin (Peter Rundel) and piano (guess who) belong to a series
of works entitled Residua, after Samuel Beckett, which the
author described as "what is left over from larger original text
units as well as from the entirety of an earlier work." The "original
text" in Zimmermann's case being folk material in the form of
two children's songs, whose deceptive simplicity and strong melodic
identity function as a structural springboard from which the composer
launches himself into music of extraordinary subtlety – and
virtuosity. The performances by all concerned are absolutely superb,
and the disc makes a splendid companion to the earlier fine Zimmermann
release on Mode, Schatten der Ideen. Let's hope a third instalment
won't be long in coming.–DW
Alvin
Lucier
ANTHONY BURR/CHARLES CURTIS
Antiopic Sigma Editions
 This
fabulous double CD, lodged in an elegantly sober digipack complete
with intriguing booklet, confirms what many people have been thinking
for a while: Alvin Lucier is THE master of psychoacoustic minimalism,
no question about it. And when the performers are as good as clarinettist
Anthony Burr and cellist Charles Curtis, there's not even the slightest
chance of failing to appreciate these explorations of vibrating particles
and translucent matters. "In Memoriam John Higgins", for
clarinet in A and slow sweep pure wave oscillator, rises from the
marrow of the bones to the very centre of the eyes, dematerializing
the burden of silence through its gradual evolution, as Burr picks
the most luminescent spots to let his clarinet shine over the slowly
ascending oscillator, finally setting it free to get lost in the ionosphere.
"On the Carpet of Leaves Illuminated by the Moon" pits Curtis'
plucked cello against the pure wave oscillator. It's like the leakage
of mercury from a thermometer forgotten for decades in a drawer. The
breathtaking mid-air floating that any sentient being experiences
upon listening to "Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families
of Hyperbolas" (a major breakthrough in Lucier's career) is best
represented by "Part III Number 11", whose juxtaposition
of slow arco movement murmuring against the equally effective presence
of a more obscure oscillator really makes the nerves quiver. "Part
I Number 1" is almost passionless, but no less interesting, an
icy timbral microfibre in which the clarinet starts out looking for
a better place to be and ends up remaining hidden behind the flow
of the pure wave. Charles Curtis opens the second disc with the piece
that bears his name, which is probably the high point of the whole
set; against the will of the slow sweep (which itself causes an unbelievable
sense of disequilibrium between the ears depending on the position
of the listener's head), he layers plangent combinations of strings
in excruciating suspension amidst non-existent tonalities, a wonderful
emotional escalation often recalling Nikos Veliotis' rainy melancholy.
On "In Memoriam Stuart Marshall" Burr's bass clarinet (great
instrument for Lucier's impalpable structures) sounds like it's breathing
life into the moribund engine of a distant aeroplane - the resulting
powerful beating of frequencies is totally mesmerizing, its grip on
the back of the head even stronger than the sorrowful memories the
piece evokes. The closing "Music for Cello with One or More Amplified
Vases" is a call to prayer in the backyard of an abandoned country
church, with Curtis' cello responding to the slow ascending glissando
with its own lamentation to the infinite. And while our eyes look
for distant points of reference on the horizon, quiet finally returns
to put an end to the kind of thought process that could almost become
dangerous if you trusted it blindly.–MR
John
Wall
CPHON
Utterpsalm
 Composition,
as you know by now, is no longer simply a question of writing notes
on manuscript paper. If you held a gun to my head and asked me to
name the ten most important composers in today's new music (though
I hope you never do), I'd definitely include a few people who probably
can't even read music. I have no idea if John Wall can, by
the way, but his name would certainly be on the list. Wall hasn't
exactly flooded the market with product – you could quite easily
listen to everything he's released in an afternoon, and a wonderful
afternoon it would be – which is all the more reason to sit
up and pay attention each time a new release slips out on his elegant
and understated Utterpsalm label. Wall is normally described as a
"sampling composer", which as statements go is true enough
but has unfortunately led to his music being thrown in the "plunderphonics"
bag, where it's conveniently overlooked in favour of wilder and wackier
stuff by the likes of John Oswald, Vicki Bennett and Stock Hausen
and Walkman. Just as well, too – because Wall's work is deadly
serious, meticulously crafted and built to last. (Actually you could
say the same of Oswald's stuff too, but you see what I mean. Well,
I hope you do.) While his earlier work recontextualized samples of
Xenakis, Birtwistle and Penderecki (the early good stuff, not the
lousy cloth-eared post-Brahms sludge he writes these days), with more
than a passing nod to the furious energy of free jazz and improvised
music (bass bruiser John Edwards has been frequently sampled by Wall,
but the list of musicians who have provided the composer with sonic
raw material also includes Mark Wastell, Matt Davis and Axel Dörner),
Cphon marks a further step along the path the composer started
to explore with 2003's Hylic. Calling it lowercase is stretching
it a bit, and risks unfortunate comparisons with the New London Silence
brigade (there are none to be made), but it's certainly quieter, sparser
and purer. Some of the samples for the 20-minute piece come from recordings
Wall made at the piano, but you'd be hard pressed to spot many unadorned
piano notes in the final piece. Each sound has been carefully processed
and reworked with extraordinary attention to detail – it's taken
three years to put this together – and slotted into an admirably
tight, terse formal structure. I like to amuse / bemuse / annoy (delete
where appropriate) people I invite round for dinner by playing pieces
and asking them to guess whether they're improvised or composed (Stockhausen's
Aus den Sieben Tagen usually stumps them): with John Wall's
music there's not a shadow of a doubt. This is contemporary composition
of the highest order.–DW
Steve
Reich
YOU ARE (VARIATIONS)
Nonesuch
 In
little more than 38 minutes we get two recent compositions by one
of the big daddies of the M-word. You are, brilliantly performed
by Los Angeles Master Chorale conducted by Grant Gershon, is a four-movement
work setting short texts selected and adapted by Reich from the Talmud,
the Psalms and the writings of Wittgenstein. According to the composer,
he needed six months just to choose the texts, trying them out in
a multitude of combinations while keeping their particular rhythm
and meaning at the forefront of his mind to determine the overall
development of the piece. What soon becomes evident in this work is
the more varied harmonic palette; there are welcome return visits
to well-known territory (frequent echoes of The Desert Music and
Tehillim) but also more dissonant excursions, particularly
the end of "You are wherever your thoughts are", whose piano
parts suggest a monstrous cross between McCoy Tyner and Christian
Vander, and in the fourth movement "Say little and do much",
in which too many skipping changes result in a slight loss of focus.
Even so, the composition as a whole is strong, and may even become
a Reich classic. On the contrary, the final Cello Counterpoint
is a difficult listen, while being just as impressive on a technical
level. Cellist Maya Beiser plays each one of the eight lines of the
score, an intricate contrapuntal interconnection characterized by
a hurried drive which – particularly at the beginning –
recalls some of Fred Frith's string quartets. Reich's been getting
involved with denser and more variegated structures lately, and not
surprisingly believes this piece to be the hardest among his "counterpoint"
creations to date.–MR
Esther
Venrooy
TO SHAPE VOLUMES, REPEAT
Roborecords
 The
good people who've sent me music over the past twelve months will
probably spit in rage when they read that I'm reviewing a disc here
by Dutch composer Esther Venrooy that was released back at the dawn
of time (i.e. 2003), but I'm making no excuses. To Shape
Volumes, Repeat was one of a package of discs I got from Freaksendfuture
a while back (have a scout round these pages and you'll find more)
and a quick visit to their website reveals a list of no fewer than
984 currently available albums. Ever get the impression you're
missing out on something? Anyway, back to the matter in hand.. Esther
Venrooy's album is as classy as the 15x21cm packaging courtesy Roborecords.
After conventional conservatory saxophone lessons in Arnhem, Venrooy
switched over to (maybe that should read switched on to)
DSP during a residency at the European Dance Development Center, and
went on to do research at the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic
Music (IPEM) in Ghent, Belgium. It's psycho, all right – 13
of the 19 tracks on this CD clock in at under three minutes, but I'll
wager a box of Belgian chocolates that even the shortest pieces on
offer (my own favourite being "Skorpa", just 54 seconds
long) took dozens of hours of patient work. Venrooy compares her compositional
method to film editing ("juxtaposing aural images and snippets
of noise into an overall impression"), but we're talking Hans
Richter meets Spike Jonze meets Stan Brakhage here, not Andrei Tarkovsky.
The information level is consistently high, even in more leisurely
paced pieces (e.g. "Derbyshire", which I take to be a homage
to Delia – of BBC Radiophonic Workshop fame – rather than
a sonic postcard of the English county of the same name), but Venrooy's
knack for finding just the right snippets of sound is as impressive
as her feel for structure. One assumes that the "Morty"
of the final track is a reference to the mighty Feldman, who, if he
were still with us, would no doubt have something amusing to say about
being namechecked alongside telepath Friedrich Jürgenson, psychopath
Amando De Ossorio ("La Noche del Terror Ciego") and tittipath
Russ Meyer (sad to report I haven't seen Faster Pussycat! Kill!
Kill! since I was a sexually frustrated undergraduate so I can't
for the life of me say for sure if the sample Venrooy mangles in her
track of the same name comes from the soundtrack of that splendid
movie). Meanwhile, "Gooseneck Hollow" seems to be a reference
to Daniel Clowes, and there's certainly something of Clowes' disturbing,
jumpcut nightmare thrills and spills to Venrooy's work. Information
overload hasn't been as much fun since Eric Lyon's "Never Make
Fun of a Man's Cooking" and Paul Steenhuisen's "Circumnavigating
the Sea of Shit". Talking of circumnavigating, go to http://www.freaksendfuture.com/
and find yourself a copy of this before three more years go by.–DW
James
Plotkin
KURTLANMAK
Utech
 Even
if James Plotkin's two real masterpieces are his duo outings with
Mark Spybey and Brent Gutzeit (you can't afford to be without a copy
of Mosquito Dream on Kranky, one of the deepest low-frequency
explorations ever released), we've been missing a solo Plotkin recording
for some time. So Kurtlanmak, though recorded at New York's
Tonic back in December 2003, marks a welcome return. This limited
edition (200) little gem finds Jim armed with guitar, effects and
laptop in an all too brief – less than 30 minutes – showcase
of fierce angular repetition and impressively roaring subsonics mangled
and spat out, sounding at times like shards of Adrian Belew reconfigured
by Robert Hampson into a scarred image of terror-struck cybernetic
seagulls. Elsewhere, Plotkin's gracefully trembling chords aren't
as far away from David Torn as you might think, until, that is, the
vibrational power of his disfigured guitar veers off into menace and
surprise, shaking the ribcage with gravity-defying barriers of drones.
Ultimately tranquillity returns with the final arpeggios before Plotkin
signs off with a trademark blast of earth loop hum. Unique.–MR
Thomas
Ankersmit / Jim O' Rourke
WEERZIN / OSCILLATORS AND GUITARS
Tochnit Aleph
 Not
a collaboration but a split LP released last October featuring Berlin-based
saxophonist / electronician Thomas Ankersmit and Jim O'Rourke, who
Ankersmit first crossed paths with when he was an exchange student
in New York in 1999 (though they have numerous friends / playing partners
in common, including Kevin Drumm and Günter Müller). The
cover photograph by Alexandra Leykauf shows a sailor staring at a
tangle of ropes and cables dredged up on the deck of a ship, as if
wondering how he'd ever unravel them, and it's a rather appropriate
image for both the people behind the Tochnit Aleph label and Ankersmit
himself, neither being exactly forthcoming with information. Ankersmit's
"Weerzin" is 18'42" of superbly tense yet tensile electronic
music (true, saxophone is credited in the instrumentation along with
computer, Serge and EMS synthesizers, but Ankersmit's sax never sounded
like a sax in the first place), a tingle of inscrutable but rather
wonderful high frequency information gradually settling into a drone
of mounting intensity. To complement it, the deckhands at Tochnit
Aleph have landed another fine catch of hitherto unreleased O'Rourke
back catalogue (seems there's still plenty to trawl in, and if it's
all as good as this and the Headz CD reviewed here last month we're
in for a treat) in the form of "Oscillators and Guitars",
which dates from 1992. It's the kind of rock solid power drone plus
guitar shimmer that made it to Alan Licht's fabled Minimalist Top
Ten, and could sit happily on your shelves next to Licht's own Sink
The Aging Process. Needless to say, it hasn't aged a bit, either.
Excellent stuff, strongly recommended.–DW
Francisco
López / Scott Arford
SOLID STATE FLESH / SOLID STATE SEX
Low Impedance Recordings
 One
typically longish piece from López (would that Jem Finer had
not settled upon the 1000-year recording first) recorded in Montréal
in 2004, and seven shorter pieces from Arford recorded at the old
7Hz warehouse space in San Francisco in 2001 and 2002. The sound level
on the López disc is slightly more aggressive, an immediate
eardrumming rumble instead of the slow building, hissy fits of previous
outings. Impossible to identify the sound source without press release
or scorecard. It matures into what could be described as an electrical
tickle, and when you close your eyes – as López recommends
you do when listening to his records – all sorts of things pop
out from beneath the soft spots. Heat waves rising from dusty dead
lakebeds, the swishing of a gila monster’s tail in the shade
of a lightning-struck cactus, and now a sandstorm, sudden dropoff
and gentle wind pumping through the speakers from the sheer physical
force of the volume information peeling off the CD. It continues like
that for a little while, journeying into a valley made entirely of
bees that grow and mutate into towering pylons marching across your
hemispheres. When something vaguely resembling a series of musical
tones appears, it’s a beautiful shock – like getting rear-ended
on a California highway by a new Mustang when you’re driving
an old pickup. It all bottoms out in the resonance of a rusty metal
bucket before ascending again, more shortwave stations than there
are stars in heaven. Arford’s disc begins with a drone not quite
so forceful as López’s, but that changes once you realise
that it's moving from speaker to speaker AND WE’RE OFF! THEY’RE
RUNNING! Static Effect moving ahead of the pack in the second lane
from the inside followed by Bolshevik Hum in lane three and Getmethefuckoutofhere
Wisconsin in lane four it’s Static Effect leading the pack Static
Effect in the lead… It races on like that for a bit. Each of
the six tracks has its own identity and style of movement: mysterious
whispers, cooking bacon in the nude, the purring of a robot cat, your
daily grind, and YES it sounds like someone’s breaking into
your house. Better run and check.–DC
Organum
DIE HENNEN ZAHNE
Die Stadt
 Once
upon a time you had to fork out large denomination banknotes to get
one of David Jackman's rare vinyls and tapes, so the fact that many
of them can now be enjoyed in digital format is good news. Jackman's
Organum has been and still is a huge influence on many contemporary
sound/noise artists, and the almost ritualistic nature of his releases,
enriched by his astute choice of sonic events, distances Organum's
work from the surface-only gloss of second division imitators. Four
majestic pieces are contained in this mini-CD, on which Jackman is
joined by Alan Jones, Emma O'Bong and Michael Prime. "Die Kralle"
is a short lo-fi manipulation of noisy tapes over a repetitive rhythm
and makes for a perfect introduction to the title track, a ceremonial
pastiche where broken objects, thundering metal and what sounds like
Middle Eastern reed instruments carry us straight into a fogbank of
emotional instability. On "Kazi" the rolling of unidentified
objects over metal fuses with disturbing slams and rumbles, while
"Maus" is classic Organum, a hell of distortion and droning
fear before which any pretenders should prostrate themselves in adoration.
Short duration notwithstanding, Die Hennen Zahne contains
all the power necessary to wipe the brain clean.–MR
Windy
and Carl
THE DREAM HOUSE / DEDICATIONS TO FLEA
Kranky
 This
is the review-proof record of last year. Not a perjorative
statement in the slightest: it’s two CDs full of fairly unwavering
guitar drones of the gentlest order, one of which is a field recording
of doggie walks dedicated to Flea, their German shepherd / Alaskan
malamute mix of over 14 years, the other concerning Windy’s
late mom and her desire to somehow connect with her again. Both recordings
are in the vein of Popol Vuh and The Durutti Column at their keenest
and quietest; the dog pants and walks incessantly, clicki-clicking
nails on pavement as traffic passes behind him and the guitar plays
gracefully on. What, like this was going to be a bad review?
Windy’s mom died and so did their dog. I feel like I’m
on the payroll. There’s definitely a sense of a journey to both
of the Flea-related tracks, from the dogs he passes who bark in either
camaraderie or condemnation to the airliner passing overhead. This
is one of the few records that justifies the existence of the infinite-repeat
button on a CD player and is a "total package in and of itself":
heartbreaking, bracing liner notes, beautiful, vaguely humming fuck
music and a cute pup onna cover. Few are the things that everyone
agrees on – Mozart, clouds, It’s a Wonderful Life
– The Dream House enters the pantheon.–DC
Z'ev/John
Duncan/Aidan Baker/Fear Falls Burning
UNTITLED
Die Stadt
 On
October 2nd 2005, the four above mentioned names performed at Bremen's
Lagerhaus in a concert curated by Die Stadt's Jochen Schwarz who,
in customary fashion, released a commemorative double 7-inch of the
proceedings, one track for each artist. No surprises as to what we
get: Z'ev's "Elementonal" is a crashing pandemonium of metal
and irregular rhythm, John Duncan's "Offffffff" sounds like
treated white noise (but it could be heavily processed breath or something),
Aidan Baker's "Drone Four (Excerpt)" explores different
approaches to guitar looping in what is the deepest music on offer,
while the flat repetition of Fear Falls Burning (aka Vidna Obmana)'s
"The Beautiful Decline (Excerpt)" is the shallowest. What
counts more is the double CD that comes with the limited mail order
edition, which finds the four manipulating and reworking each other's
sounds in settings that allow the mind better to adapt to the sonic
circumstances. Z'ev transforms a short field recording by Duncan into
a violent grey uncertainty of haunting voices and concrete rumbles
saturating the listening space with oppressive power. Duncan's response
in "BKG" is to attack tweeters with nails and teeth and
send the listener into a maze of intoxicating distorted sibilance.
Disc 2 finds Fear Falls Burning and Aidan Baker at work on each other's
trance-fusion: Baker's "Drone Four" is re-looped and progressively
degraded with effects and slow beats into something curiously reminiscent
of sections of Genesis' "White Mountain", while Baker's
remix of "The Beautiful Decline" adds some much-needed inner
movement, transforming it into a Frippertronic forest fire with hopelessly
screaming guitars heard from every treetop.–MR
Marc
Wannabe
THINGS DON’T LAST VERY LONG
Moloko Plus & 90% Wasser
 …before
they’re cut up and collaged in modern post-modernism, that is.
Wannabe, aka Marek Wantzéck, plunges into the swamp formerly
wallowed in by REVO and Dummy Run, coming back up with rhythmic slaps
and sighs, little girls crank calling with screams and hang-ups, and
plenty of amusing gruntiness. It’s as if Restless Leg Syndrome
had its own one-man benefit compilation album. Fellow 90% Wasser labelmates
Column One make an appearance on “Soft & Sweet”, the
most aggressively musical track on the album – with more samples
of bodily sounds than popculture samples from the usual plunderphonic
suspects, this is a slightly more intense exercise in personal, difficult
music. It's like measured and danceable sound poetry more than anything
else, even as the 0s and 1s flit about the room, pushing all normal
sounds out by firm negotiation rather than brutal bullying. The sleeve
art is a deft metaphor – happy times in a life like wheat-pasted
posters on a subway wall, some covered over, some peeling and faded
into near-oblivion, barely recognized but somehow still there. What
remains of those days blends into these days, speaking to the now
from the tattered ruins of the past. Not for every dancefloor in Creation
but specially for those moments you want to knock them off their feet
and turn them on their heads. Yes, breakdancers, too.–DC
Carl
Michael von Hausswolff
THERE ARE NO CROWS FLYING AROUND THE HANCOCK BUILDING/RED EMPTY
Lampo/Whitewalls
 Swedish
sound artist and installation builder CM Von Hausswolff recorded the
material for this album in 2003, capturing "building vibrations,
passing breezes and overheard speeches from tourists" at the
top of Chicago's John Hancock Center, later adding repeated cycles
of rotating feedback "to suggest crows encircling the conceptual
tower". The resulting sound resembles the incessant throb of
a giant mechanical heart being gradually eaten away by acidic humidity,
but its inherent ferocity, masked by the pummeling vibration, never
seems to reach real saturation, the sonic elements fusing instead
into a single corpulent entity that sounds like a cross between an
ocean wash and a distant train. Von Hausswolff has collaborated frequently
with the likes of Leif Elggren and John Duncan, and this project corresponds
well to their aesthetic of working around the thresholds of genres,
since the disc comes along with Red Empty, a collection of
photos by Von Hausswolf taken in various abandoned sites (churches,
factories, even hot dog restaurants..) specially floodlit by 1000-watt
red spotlights. These pictures are the only documentary evidence of
a series of events that, to quote Anthony Elms, "search for the
monochromatic that banishes purity as a senseless utopian drive".
Gazing at them as the record ends, silence encroaching on the last
sputters of feedback, one concludes that managing to lead a normal
life is utopian enough itself.–MR
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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