| APRIL
News 2006 |
Reviews
by Marcelo Aguirre, Clifford Allen, David Cotner, Nate Dorward,
Vid Jeraj, Nicholas Rice, Massimo Ricci, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial;
Interview with HARRIS EISENSTADT
Splinched:
Pascal Battus / Ferran Fages
'Pataphysics
On Charhizma: Serge
Baghdassarians & Boris Baltschun / Kai Fagaschinski &
Bernhard Gal / Michael Thieke
In Concert:
Six Months in New York
Reissue This: Mirror
Stefan Wolpe
JAZZ & IMPROV: Available
Jelly / Out of Context / Josephson, Léandre, Smith &
Blume / Malcolm Goldstein & Masashi Harada / From Between
/ The Same Girl /
Freedom Of The City
2005 / Mike Cooper / Braam, DeJoode, Vatcher / Hal Singer /
Chas Smith / John Tilbury & Marcus Schmickler
CONTEMPORARY: Thanos
Chrysakis / Tony Conrad & Faust / Bruno Canino / Richard
Trythall
ELECTRONICA: Le Dépeupleur
/ KK.Null / Luigi Archetti / Yannick Dauby /
Joe Colley & Jason Lescalleet / Andre Goncalves & Kenneth
Kirschner / Mouthus / Gart & Seekatze
Last month
|
 I
get a lot of emails asking me to advertise things - festivals,
individual concerts, and especially albums - all of which I politely
decline (well, almost all of which, as you'll see). Since this magazine
went online nearly a decade ago now, there has, as we all know, been
something of a revolution in new media - back then the words "blog"
and "podcast" certainly weren't in the dictionary (dunno
if "podcast" has made it to the latest edition of the OED
yet, either, but if it hasn't it can't be long in coming) - and the
whole idea of using the Internet to advertise has really taken off.
I keep getting bemused looks from the business types I meet in the
course of my normal working day at the dreary job (teaching English
as a foreign language, if you must know) when I tell them that I have
no interest whatsoever in carrying advertising. "But you could
be making ze moneeey!" they croon. Well, maybe. To be honest
I know practically sod all about how internet advertising works on
niche market sites like this one, but I do know that I find it bloody
irritating when I'm surfing around elsewhere. I've managed to configure
the old browser to block as many pop-ups as possible, but there are
still a few that slip through the net. In any case, I like to think
my own prose is sufficiently annoying without having to bombard readers
with flashing banner ads. So no advertising, thank you.
Having said that, a little bit of self-promotion never goes amiss
(heh heh): by now you'll probably have read about Blocks of Consciousness
and the Unbroken Continuum, a collection of essays and interviews
curated by Mark Wastell and Brian Marley of London's Sound323 record
shop. It's a lavishly produced 345 page document designed by Damien
Beaton featuring essays on, amongst other things, Cage's 4'33",
The Necks, Richard Chartier, Sachiko M, John Wall, written by various
Wire magazine alumni - David Toop, Brian Marley, Clive Bell,
Will Montgomery, Andy Hamilton and myself, along with extracts from
interviews with improvisers compiled by Rhodri Davies, Bertrand Denzler
and Jean-Luc Guionnet and a DVD containing David Reid's concert footage
of Keith Rowe, Evan Parker, Birdyak, John Tilbury, Eddie Prévost,
Anton Lukoszevieze, Broken Consort, Jérôme Noetinger,
John Butcher, Tetuzi Akiyama and nmperign, all of whom should be familiar
to readers of this magazine. Further information on this indispensable
document of today's music is available from info@sound323.com.
Right, now that the advertising's out of the way, back to business.
A warm welcome goes out this month to our new Berlin correspondent
Marcelo Aguire (even though he's writing about music that comes from
several thousand miles away from the German capital), and thanks to
Nate Dorward for re-editing and reworking an interview
with the brilliant young Canadian percussionist Harris
Eisenstadt. Another action-packed, fun-filled, pop-up free issue
of PT for your delectation and delight. Well, hopefully. Bonne
lecture. - DW
Splinched
Pascal
Battus
PICK-UP
Amor Fati
Fagus
(Pascal Battus / Ferran Fages)
DANS L'INVOLUCRE ENTRE OUVERT
A Question of Reentry
 Splinching,
as anyone who's read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
will tell you, is what happens when you move – apparate
is J.K. Rowling's word – from one place to another but end
up leaving a bit of your body behind where you came from. (To quote
the Ministry of Magic's Wilkie Twycross: "Splinching, or the
separation of random body parts occurs when the mind is insufficiently
determined. You must concentrate continually upon your
destination, and move, without haste, but with deliberation.")
It's a rather apt metaphor for the world I find myself living in
these days, where the increasing use of mobile phones – and
not just as phones either, but as cameras, even tiny TVs –
and portable DVD players is slowly but surely (and maybe not all
that slowly) redefining the whole notion of public and private space.
Though I'm an implacable enemy of the cellphone myself, my beef
here isn't about the poor pathetic sods who use the bloody thing
at every available opportunity (like calling up the wife from halfway
down the supermarket aisle – "they haven't got any Findus
will Birds Eye do?"), it's about the impact that this is all
having on our ability actually to concentrate on one thing, to be
in one place and one place only. Of course, splinching has been
around for a long time – if you read a novel on the train
to work you're dividing your attention between two things, and most
people manage to do it quite well. I don't see many missing their
stop because they get so carried away with the book. And if I didn't
spend several hours each week listening to music on the way to and
from the day job, there wouldn't as be much for you to read every
month. (A blessing, perhaps.) Very rare indeed are the occasions
nowadays when I can find time, space and quiet enough for a serious
no-distractions listen, complete with blindfold à la
Francisco López. Are we reaching a point in human history
then when undivided attention and total concentration are becoming
things of the past?
Interestingly enough, the subject came up in a recent discussion
I had with architect and Shiiin label manager Stéphane Roux,
and composer Eliane Radigue (whose L'île re-sonante
inaugurated the Shiiin imprint last year, you will recall). While
Stéphane and I remained sceptical on the subject, Eliane
– who, by the way, has no mobile phone to the best of my knowledge
and is only now beginning to toy with the idea of getting a computer
– wondered if today's youngsters, growing up with a whole
range of virtual universes to explore, might be developing some
kind of superior brain power as a result of increased sensory stimulation.
Even if that is the case – and, watching a whole Métro
load of teenagers taking leering snapshots of themselves and swapping
Mariah Carey ringtones, I have my doubts – they won't get
much out of Eliane's music.
"While
I enjoy listening to it, I find it best when it is playing in the
background while I do other things. Strangely enough, when I concentrate
on it, I don't get as much enjoyment. Unfortunately, people coming
to review the CD will more than likely listen to it intently."
- John Hudak, on his Sotto Voce, reviewed here last month
The
idea of Ambient has been with us for over a quarter of a century
now (much longer, if you drag the starting line back in time from
Eno to Satie), and it's subtly but radically changed the aesthetics
of a whole generation of composers, performers and listeners. You
could call it the late twentieth century's seal of approval of splinching.
But although some composers, like Hudak above, actively advocate
such a way of listening, it definitely doesn't work for everyone's
music. Certainly not Radigue's, which depends on concentration and
a certain volume level to achieve the desired effect. And what about
improvised music? Surely music that's being created in the moment,
right before your very ears, is more arresting? Well, yes and no.
 Pascal
Battus plays table guitar. (He has been known to call it guitare
environée – "surrounded guitar" –
and here it's billed as "pick-up and prepared amplifier",
but don't let that worry you: a lot of table guitarists in recent
years have dreamt up different names for their instrumental set-ups,
from Annette Krebs' "electroacoustic guitar" to Hans Tammen's
"endangered guitar".) The instrument is laid flat and
Battus works directly near or on its pick-ups with a whole range
of objects, both electronic (e-bows, Walkmen, hand-held fans and
various food mixers) and acoustic (springs, rulers, tubes and straws).
Playing for him is a process of exploration, sonic research –
and so, for us, is listening. The sounds Battus makes are at times
quite extraordinary, and I'm often left scratching my head as to
how they're produced (this from someone who has played and recorded
several times with him), so much so that I become more concerned
with the "how" than the "why". And yet Pick-Up,
Battus' second solo outing after Massages Sonores #2 (Pink,
2003) consists of two extended tracks, "Lent de mains"
(33'46") and "Pousse hier à demain" (39'26")
which would seem to imply I'm to approach them as large-scale structures,
i.e. try to determine and judge an overriding sense of musical logic
that articulates the overall form of each piece. But I'm not sure
there is one. And if there isn't, does it matter? In short, I'm
splinched – at one level the album works beautifully, its
moments enthrall me, but at another it fails to keep my attention.
From one moment to the next I can be concentrating intently or switched
off and elsewhere. "If your mind wanders, let it.." goes
the old quotation from Cage, but though such approbation might be
reassuring it doesn't somehow justify my drifting off. I know
how carefully Pascal selects, works and sequences his sounds, and
I feel distinctly uneasy and not a little guilty when I realise
I'm not paying full attention. Why is my mind wandering? Is it me,
or the music? I'd say it's both.
As an improvising musician of sorts myself, I'm often aware of a
kind of temporal splinching during the performance, a sensation
of being at one and the same time in the moment, reacting to the
input of my fellow musicians, shaping the music from one instant
to another, and yet also curiously outside the piece, thinking of
where it came from and how (and when) it might finish. In addition
to such purely musical considerations, there's a whole lot of sensory
input from elsewhere to contend with: who's that asshole talking
loud at the bar (it's not me this time)? Who forgot to turn off
their bloody mobile phone? True, there must be many improvisers
who are more or less sensitive to events around them than I am –
remember the apocryphal story of the laptopper who was checking
his email during a gig (how about that for a splinch?) – but
even if I am functioning in a state of heightened awareness when
I play I'm not able to exclude the world around me. Why should listening
be any different?
On Dans l'Involucre Entre Ouvert (Battus' fondness for
word play and untranslatable puns and contrepèteries
is well known, but before you ask I haven't figured out what the
title means either) he trades the guitar for an "acoustic Walkman".
If you're wondering what the hell that is, it might help to know
he's playing with Barcelona's Ferran Fages, who's released a whole
slew of fine albums on which he plays "acoustic turntable",
i.e. a standard turntable used as a motor to excite and be excited
by various objects placed on or near it, the results amplified and
treated in real time. Where Fages uses a turntable, Battus turns
his attention to the inner workings of the humble portable stereo.
The six tracks were recorded in real time at Battus' home in Bagnolet
in November 2004, and the only editing as such consists of fades
in and out.
Where this all ties in with the splinching idea is not the disc
itself but a review I read of it recently by my friend Brian Olewnick
over at Bagatellen, a slightly edited version of which runs as follows:
"I imagine each of us has some defined point at which, more
or less, we determine that the aural input we’re receiving
changes from 'music' into 'noise'. Or enjoyable noise into disagreeable
noise. Not that this is necessarily the correct way to view things
and perhaps some of you have succeeded in freeing yourselves to
the extent that this is no longer a concern. But probably not, else
why are you wasting your time reading about discs? In any case,
Dans l’Involucre Entre Ouvert damn near straddles
that line for me. It’s not just that it’s loud and obnoxious
(or quiet and obnoxious). Hardly a concern, after all. It’s
just that much of the disc seems pointlessly loud/quiet and obnoxious.
I know, I know, I shouldn’t be worried about such an archaic
concept as 'pointlessness' but curse me for an old fart, those thoughts
do creep in. Somewhere, I distinguish between what I perceive to
be just screwing around and noise I enjoy listening to and a good
half of this disc, sad to say, fell on the side of the former."
I'm not here to take issue with Brian's review at all – he
says things I agree with and others I don't – but I'm led
to wonder if he would have written what he did if he had listened
to it as many times as he has the Erstwhile catalogue that he reviews
so assiduously for All Music Guide (old story this.. as any journalist
will tell you, Erstwhile's Jon Abbey insists that anyone reviewing
his releases listens to them carefully several times before committing
pen to paper – and rightly so). I'm also curious to know exactly
how he distinguishes between what he perceives to be screwing around
and noise he enjoys listening to, but maybe he'll be able to write
in and tell us. Of course, I'm guessing Brian hasn't listened
to the Fagus outing as often as he has the recent series of ErstLive
releases, but I may be wrong. Assuming I'm not, it prompts (yet
again) the question of how many times one should listen to an album
before attempting to write a review of it, but also – what's
more interesting here – whether familiarity with an album
reduces splinching, i.e. the more you listen, the closer you listen,
the better you listen and the more you find. I'm not sure it does.
I think it depends on the music.
Last night I listened to Ravel's Mallarmé songs for the first
time in about 20 years and was utterly captivated from beginning
to end. Each tiny detail of the harmony and the orchestration, not
to mention the nuances of soprano Jill Gomez's interpretation, totally
imposed itself on me. My concentration was absolute. Now before
you fling a pot of tea at the screen and wail that it's not fair
to compare through-composed and totally improvised music, I should
add the same thing happened last week with the Emanem reissue of
News From The Shed (John Butcher / Phil Durrant / Paul
Lovens / Radu Malfatti / John Russell, reviewed here last month).
I've become aware that one of the consequences of electroacoustic
improvised music's recent shift towards the slowmoving, the laminal,
as opposed to the high-speed in-the-moment cut-and-thrust that characterised
both the first and second "generations" of improvisers
– in terms of vocabulary Karyobin and My Favourite
Animals are worlds apart but as far as overall event density
goes they're strikingly similar – is that it's become easier
to drift off. Put another way, you can, if you so desire, listen
to Efzeg or the Four Gentlemen of the Guitar at "ambient"
volume and still enjoy them. (Whether you should or not
is a different question, but ultimately how you choose to listen
to music is your business – personally I rather like listening
to Merzbow at threshold-of-audibility level and Bernhard Günter
at volume level 9, but that's just me.) But other albums just don't
work like that: Derek Bailey's music has a knack of impinging on
whatever you're doing, even at low volume. So does the Spontaneous
Music Ensemble. Excuse me while I take my old warhorse for a trot
round the track here, but I think, in my case, it comes down to
a concern for pitch and rhythm. Old habits die hard, and I'm particularly
sensitive to aspects of music that, as an instrumentalist and composer,
I've spent a lot of time trying to understand and master. Maybe
we should ask someone who's grown up in a different musical environment
– no formal musical education, with as many Hafler Trio albums
as I have Misha Mengelbergs – and see how s/he reacts to Drop
Me Off At 96th or Hot And Cold Heroes.
Let's be clear about one thing: I'm not being judgemental here,
either by implying that Bailey or Stevens' music is somehow better
because it manages to retain my attention more than a lot of recent
EAI. All I'm saying is that by evolving away from certain time-honoured
principles and parameters, improvised music invites different ways
of listening, some of which are less concentrated and focused. And
that shift in concentration and focus is something that applies
both to performers and listeners, musicians and journalists. We
live in interesting – if troubled – times, and it's
only natural that today's art reflects that; these two albums by
Pascal Battus and Ferran Fages are fine, representative examples
of everything I find positive and exciting in today's improvised
music. But do try, hard though it may be, not to get yourself splinched:
remember Ron Weasley failed his Apparition Test because he left
half an eyebrow behind.-DW
Various
Artists
'PATAPHYSICS
Sonic Arts Network (CD + book)
 "The
most serious of all the sciences and the end of all ends, 'pataphysics
is the science of imaginary solutions. Although unknowingly practised
by everybody at all times, it took the pistol toting, expert fencer,
literary madman, maniac midget and designer of the time machine, Alfred
Jarry, to recognise it and give it a name. In this CD, travel overland
by sea in your skiff, following Dr Faustroll by the light of a green
candle, along the gidouille that is the history of 'pataphysics in
sound." So runs the blurb that accompanies this tribute to 'pataphysics
and its influence on artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Harpo Marx,
Boris Vian, Robert Wyatt and Gavin Bryars, in the form of this beautifully
produced book + CD offering from the Sonic Arts Network (just in case
you wanted to know what The Arts Council of Great Britain was doing
with all that money), though if you invest in this handsome package
thinking that you're going to find out exactly what 'pataphysics is,
be warned that you'll end up more confused than ever. Your money won't
have been wasted, though – as far as fun goes, this is the compilation
of the year (so far).
Before we go any further, a word about that strange apostrophe. To
quote the curator of this project, Professor Andrew Hugill, Director
of Creative Technologies and the Music, Technology and Innovation
Research Centre at Leicester's De Montfort University: "The apostrophe
at the start of the word 'pataphysics indicates that a prefix, perhaps
the pataphysical prefix, is missing. The word is frequently seen these
days without the apostrophe, and in this sense is generally understood
to signify unconscious pataphysics. We are all pataphysicians
– it's just that some people know they are."
Right, now that we've cleared that one up, on to the music. Wait a
minute, the first track on the disc is completely silent! Yes kids,
predating John Cage's 4'33" by 68 years, here is Alphonse
Allais' "Marche Funèbre composée pour les Funérailles
d'un Grand Homme Sourd" ("Funeral March composed for the
interment of an Illustrious deaf man"), whose score – three
staves containing nine beautifully drawn bars mercifully unspoiled
by the slightest note – is printed here. As well as nicking
the ideas of Cage - "pataphysicians call this process plagiarism
by anticipation," Hugill helpfully informs us - Allais also
owes some heavy duty royalties to Rauschenberg for painting the first
white canvas, entitled "Anaemic Young Girls Taking their First
Communion in the Snow".
From here on, it's downhill all the way. The next two tracks are archive
recordings made in 1946 and 1951 by the Collège de 'Pataphysique
of two songs from Jarry's Ubu Roi, the "Chanson du Décervelage"
(which roughly translated means "the song of de-braining",
just in case you can't get your tongue round Dan Clore's rather laboured
translations) and the "Hymne des Palotins". A working knowledge
of French might not be essential for these, and the original version
of Boris Vian's celebrated anti-war song "Le Déserteur"
(and here there are some serious problems with the French
text: come on lads, it's not "je ne veux pas l'affaire"
it's "je ne veux pas la faire" for Chrissakes! Likewise
"refusez de l'affaire"..), but to appreciate Luc Etienne's
magnificent "L'après-midi d'un Magnétophone: Palindromes
Phonétiques", it would certainly help. God knows how long
it took Etienne to write a story that would sound identical if played
backwards, but his convoluted story of Anna and her two ski instructors
Jules and Yvan is, as the notes inform us, worthy of David Lynch for
its sheer weirdness.
Other oddities include Stephane Ginsburgh's realisation of Marcel
Duchamp's "Erratum Musical" (the 88 notes of the piano played
in a random order), a deliciously scored little treat from Harpo Marx's
1958 album Harpo At Work! (which one Internet site I've visited
hilariously credits to Slim Harpo – howzat for pataphysics,
eh?), a 41-second curiosity for "Kangaroo-Pouch Machine"
by Percy Grainger (who, the notes inform us, "was not a 'pataphysician
nor, probably, would he have liked 'pataphysics" – but,
hey, as they say down under where Percy came from, who gives a flying
fuck?) and a previously unpublished mix of Soft Machine's "A
Pataphysical Introduction" and "The British Alphabet"
entitled "Patasoft". Softs completists sit up and take note.
Also included are two vintage slabs of English Experimental Esoterica,
the first being Gavin Bryars' hilariously limp "Ponukelian Melody",
in an archive recording from 1975 featuring the composer on cello,
John White on tuba, Christopher Hobbs on organ and somebody else on
tubular bells (not to mention a couple of barely suppressed audience
guffaws). It's the musical equivalent of eating a sponge soaked in
custard. The other is Hobbs' "L'auteur se retire", in which
"the letters of a composer's name which correspond to musical
notes (using the German convention in which S represents Eb and so
on) are removed from a chosen example of the composer's work",
the work in question here being the Andante from Schubert's Ab major
Sonata (1817). I'd have liked to hear Hobbs apply the same technique
to the Alphonse Allais piece mentioned above, but instead we get "The
Man With The Axe", an absolutely fucking hideous rap by Jarry
(and Zappa) biographer Nigey Lennon, about which the less said the
better.
Then we get to the weird stuff: Andrew Hugill's own "Nicholas
Through The Mist", inspired by the theories of Jean-Pierre Brisset,
who believed that man is descended from the frog (I am NOT making
this up! Go to: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Brisset),
consists, logically enough, of the call of the Australian Mist Frog
gradually transforming itself into the name of the piece's dedicatee,
Nicholas Zurbrugg. Frédéric Inigo's "D'un jet"
sounds like someone playing an obscure Satie piano piece at the bottom
of a well. Inigo claims Jarry heard his piece and described it very
precisely in Chapter XXXI of Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll,
so if you've got a copy of that lying around, you can check for yourself
– meanwhile, you can practise your French at http://www.inigo.cc/textes/beaucoup.htm.
Heh heh. The inscrutable blast of data processing entitled "Einsiedler"
by Gullibloon (alias Berthold, Wernfried Lackner and Andreas Pieper)
is nowhere near as much fun as John Levack Drever's three "Pataphonic
Studies", the first of which is a recording of an electromagnetic
field of an overhead pylon in an arable field, the second, "woof-woofing",
a mind-bending experiment involving nine puppies separated from their
owners who were subsequently contacted by mobile phone (the composer
assures us that "no animals were harmed in the making of this
study", but he doesn't mention any possible impact on the mental
health of listeners), the third a mysterious recording of a beach
in Devon. Neil Salley blinds you with science on "Interior /
Interior" ("a quantum bio-resonance amplifier that allows
the bio-organism (the human body) to induce condensed phase vibratory
energy into his / her nervous tissues", right?), while Ramuntcho
Matta's "Just To Be Clear" is an irresistibly sensuous collage
of silky Getzy sax, slinky guitar plucking and various sexy vocal
noises. After Marc Battier's "Bam_Haha", which is what happens
when a 'pataphysician is let loose in IRCAM, the disc ends with Hugill's
"To End, Caruso Sang Figure 1", an anagram of "Desargue's
Configuration" (try Googling that one and fucking good luck to
you) which "imagines Caruso attempting to sing the configuration
as a kind of graphic score etched on glass in mirror silver, like
the Occultist Witnesses. What you hear is actually Caruso, attempting
what was described as an 'unwise' high note. The repeating sound is
the single piano chord that accompanied him." Simply awesome.–DW
Baghdassarians
& Baltschun
13:46 \ 11:04 \ 25:09
Fagaschinski & Gal
GOING ROUND IN SERPENTINES
Michael
Thieke
UNUNUNIUM
When
someone gets round to writing the history of the Berlin / Vienna new
music scene at the turn of the 21st century, Christof Kurzmann's Charhizma
label will be one of the principal reference sources. Though he's
most often associated with minimal laptoppery, Kurzmann, who's divided
his time more or less equally between the two cities, is well-versed
in other musics – who else would dare to cover a Prince song
at an Erstwhile festival? – and also a talented clarinettist
and instigator of the eclectic and unconventional big band Orchester
33 1/3. The Charhizma label website homepage features the slogan "fuck
dance let's art", but the last time CK was in Paris he ran off
early from a gig at the Instants Chavirés to catch another
one by Techno Animal.. It's perhaps significant that Charhizma's first
release was B. Fleischmann's crafty, dancefloor-friendly Pop Loops
For Breakfast – the second was the so-called orange album,
an indispensable snapshot of late 90s EAI featuring Werner Dafeldecker,
Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke, Kevin Drumm, Martin Siewert and Kurzmann
himself. The companion green album from four years later is less exciting,
but still worth checking out. Meanwhile, Labor CD, a CD /
CDROM package from 2003, remains perhaps the best overall summary
of the Berlin scene available, featuring, in addition to some wild
video footage of live performances, Phosphor, the ensemble that gathers
together the city's most notable lowercase improvisers, as well as
Olaf Rupp, Martin Brandlmayr, Nicholas Bussmann, Margareth Kammerer,
Andrea Ermke, Sabine Ercklentz, Asi Föcker, Tony Buck, Alessandro
Bosetti, Kai Fagaschinski, Michael Thieke, Merle Ehlers, Dave Bennett,
Antoine Chessex, Serge Baghdassarians and Boris Baltschun.
 Baghdassarians
and Baltschun have been performing together for a while now. (You
may be familiar with their Potlatch release Strom with saxophonists
Alessandro Bosetti and Michel Doneda.) The former is usually credited
on "guitar and mixing desk" and the latter "sampler",
and I assume that's what they're playing here, but it's hard to tell,
as there's surprisingly little information on the music itself on
the album cover – which Frans de Waard in Vital Weekly rather
amusingly described as a combination of Letraset and an IKEA catalogue
– other than "recorded and mixed in Berlin and Paris, 2004".
The album title is as spartan and functional as the music, being nothing
more than the durations of the three tracks. The message is clear:
we're making no concessions here: if you want to get anything out
of this you'd better be prepared to put some time in. Some of the
sounds B&B create are loud, abrasive and industrial (lowercase
i), but most of them, especially on the second track, are discreet
sprinkles of crackles, pops, flutters and even what sounds like a
sampled alarm clock. Devotees of Albert Camus' La Chute will
recall Jean-Baptiste Clamence's enthusiasm for the idea of the malconfort,
or little-ease, a cell in which the prisoner could neither sit, stand,
nor lie, but was compelled to serve his sentence in a crouching position.
13:46 \ 11:04 \ 25:09 could well be the musical equivalent
– it constantly confounds expectations, inserting tense silences
where you least expect them and extending certain passages far longer
than you think they ought to go on. It's curiously frustrating at
first but if you stick with it you'll find much to appreciate. And
come back to.
 If
13:46 \ 11:04 \ 25:09 is machine-honed, claustrophobic and
distinctly urban, Going Round In Serpentines, clarinettist
Kai Fagaschinski's second full-length release on Charhizma after 2003's
Rebecca with Michael Renkel is very much an open-air affair,
thanks to the input of Viennese sound artist Bernhard Gal, who's best
known for his exquisite field recording montages and installations.
It's the second volume in a trilogy of Fagaschinski duos that began
with last year's Stand Clear on Creative Sources with Klaus
Filip (the third, with Kurzmann, is in the pipeline), and Gal's colourful
– yet discreet – work makes for a fine contrast with Fagaschinski's
Lucier-like exploration of sustained clarinet tones. I'd have to go
back and check, but I'm wondering if some of the clangs and jingles
on the opening track aren't culled from the same recordings of a Las
Vegas casino that Gal used on his splendid Intransitive outing Relisten
a while back, but unless someone's dreamt up an irrigation scheme
for southern Nevada as ambitious as Noah Cross's in Chinatown,
I seriously doubt the cowbells and crickets were recorded in or near
Vegas. The most prominent element of the second track is a recording
of a game of billiards – you can even hear cues being chalked
– the clack of ball on ball cunningly captured and sent into
caverns of reverb, while Fagaschinski flutters and hisses in and out
of view. It's a nice conceit – a recording of somebody playing,
indeed, but who said anything about playing a musical instrument?
– and a welcome touch of humanity. Having finished their game,
Gal and Fagaschinski head outside again on track three, back to the
cowbells. A light rain seems to be falling, and a rather annoying
and distinctly electronic sequencer drifts in and out, along with
a swarm of bees – or is it a cavalcade of passing motorbikes
on a distant highway? – while Fagaschinski continues his introvert
explorations. Purists who like their improv resolutely abstract might
baulk at the incorporation of twittering birds and church bells (albeit
heavily filtered), but they'd do well to put their prejudices aside
and follow the advice printed on the tray card under the CD: "Shut
up and listen, dumb ass!"
 Joined
by bassist Derek Shirley, drummer Eric Schaefer and Luca Venitucci
on accordion and prepared piano, clarinettist and alto saxophonist
Michael Thieke's latest offering, Unununium, marks something
of a move away from the lowercase extended techniques of his recent
outings on Creative Sources, Leuchten, Kreis and
Schwimmer back to – gulp – jazz. (Not that this
will come as a surprise to those familiar with his work in Nickendes
Perlgras and Demontage, both of which also feature Schaefer). But
jazz is just one of many languages spoken here: "Portnoy"
explores territory familiar to devotees of Berlin / Vienna micro improv,
with ghostly clanging gongs, growling low register bass (shades of
Werner Dafeldecker) and Thieke's delicate wisps of breath, but it's
bookended by "Funf Treppen", which alternates walking bass
ostinatos and trucking 4/4 metrics with sections of rapid fire fluttery
free jazz deftly illuminated by flurries of accordion clusters from
Venitucci, and the Cage-like sonorities of the prepared piano on "Der
Idiot". Thieke's terrific alto clarinet work on "Nach Aussen
Gewölbte Mönche" is a timely reminder that many of
Berlin's most daring instrumental innovators – trumpeter Axel
Dörner most notably – are just as good at playing straight
and swinging hard if they put their mind to it. The Shirley / Schaefer
rhythm team is outstanding here, laying down a spiky free funk groove
on top of which Venitucci and Thieke really get cooking. Surprises
abound throughout this album, from the laidback lope of "Der
Verfolger" to the exquisite microdrones and tingling glockenspiels
of the tiny, perfect "Element 110" and the pointillism of
the closing "Einen Käfer Werfen". All in all, Unununium
is a magnificent piece of work by four musicians at the height
of their powers in a vibrant new music scene documented by an essential
label.–DW
IN
CONCERT: SIX MONTHS IN NEW YORK
 Two
concerts in the autumn provided two radically different perspectives
on the post 9/11 musical relationship between East and West. The first,
Diamanda Galás’s Defixiones on September 8th
and 10th at Pace University, mourned the genocide of Greeks, Armenians
and Assyrians in Turkey from 1914 to 1923, but many of its texts were
written much later and could be read as statements about conflict
in the Middle East in general. First performed on September 11th,
1999, it supported her contention in an interview just over two years
later that "what is truly horrible is to create work that very
few people understand…and then feel the prescience of it."
Horrible is perhaps the key word: Galás, a Greek-American singer,
composer, pianist, lyricist and performance artist, has spent the
last 25 years shocking audiences worldwide with her artistic diatribes
on sociopolitical issues including imprisonment, torture, mental illness
and AIDS. After spells in free jazz and the classical avant-garde,
she emerged during the 1980s as a free-wheeling songwriter who embraced
the campy darkness of Goth, but preferred to go it alone both in her
shows and in her individual artistic inclinations. The title Defixiones
refers to an ancient Middle Eastern tradition of fixing curses on
graves to ward off the enemies of the dead. The staging was almost
identical to a black mass, with the exception of a piano which Galás
strummed menacingly to accompany her mixture of rants and regional
poetry. What set her performance apart was its vocal range, which
encompassed guttural growls, high-pitched screeches and mid-range
murmuring forced into a traditionally religious musical structure,
featuring strict plainsong alongside freer responses. The show combined
a minimalist austerity with continual variation in its unfolding horror,
enhanced by the use of tape and other electroacoustic effects, its
evocation of genocide focussing not only on racial hatred but also
on the repetitious ritualism of the slaughter and the way its memory
is perpetuated or repressed.
By contrast, the second event, Musicians for Harmony’s performance
on Sept. 13th at Merkin Hall, was more of a celebration of peaceful
interaction between cultures than an attempt to portray conflicts
and grievances. This was the group’s fourth concert commemorating
the anniversary of 9/11, and, choosing from the combined repertoire
of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and Daniel Barenboim’s
East-West Divan Orchestra, they programmed the works of contemporary
Middle Eastern composers alongside Western chamber music masterpieces.
Several performers, including violinist Colin Jacobsen and Siamak
Jahangiri, a virtuoso on the Iranian flute known as the ney, were
Silk Road regulars. His interpretations of Iranian folk music received
sturdy support from the Knights, a small string orchestra, and from
Iranian composer Hossein Ali-Zadeh’s arrangements, but he could
perhaps have played a more prominent role in the "Musique sans
frontières" chamber ensemble, which in the event was largely
dominated by Avram Pengas, a mercurial specialist in Mediterranean
guitars.
 Elsewhere,
many of the highlights of the Autumn 2005 contemporary music schedule
were at Columbia University’s Miller Theater, whose traditional
appearance belies its innovations in programming. On November 4th
it celebrated Giacinto Scelsi’s centenary with a rare performance
of all five of his string quartets. Born in 1905 into an aristocratic
Italian family, Scelsi (photo, left) became fascinated by non-European
branches of mysticism and went through a lengthy crisis, after which
his compositions focused on how the sound of a note can alter over
the course of its duration. Back in 1964 few would have dared write
an extended piece consisting of a single pitch, but this is exactly
what Scelsi did in his Fourth Quartet, a whining, buzzing
crescendo with fluctuations in tuning, rhythm and dynamics. In the
two preceding quartets, dating from the same period, he calls for
the strings to be prepared with metal objects, while his final contribution
to the genre, completed a few years before his death in 1988, is a
wintry, one-movement apotheosis of his style. The Flux Quartet captured
the raw wildness of the last four, but failed to rein in the expressionism
of the First Quartet (1944), a five-movement work with a
Messiaen-like scherzo also bearing traces of Berg’s Lyric
Suite and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht.
The theatre had already hosted another major retrospective on October
29th when Christopher Taylor devoted an evening recital to György
Ligeti’s complete Etudes. In addition to winning the
bronze medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in
1993, Taylor is a summa cum laude graduate in Mathematics
from Harvard, which should give him a headstart on the Etudes’
manic fractals. He hammered out the obsessive patterning with more
weight than Ligeti’s favoured interpreter, Pierre-Laurent Aimard,
and left himself time for greater rhythmic flirtatiousness. These
pieces cry out for graphic variations in color, and Taylor rarely
missed a chance to transform an innocent melodic line into a folk
singer’s plangent lament or a strain murmured by a parent to
a sleeping child. Remarkably for a recital of this length and difficulty,
he also seemed barely to tire before the end. With his mock-Gouldian
mannerisms and theatrical presence, Taylor promises to be an artist
of major stature.
Another rising star in the contemporary pianistic firmament is Marilyn
Nonken, who presented music by the Polish-American composer Frederic
Rzewski at the Miller on October 20th. Rzewski has been influenced
not only by and politics and pop music but also by electronica and
free jazz, giving his works an inclusive, eclectic sensibility in
which forearm clusters mingle freely with music from the street. In
a slightly exhausted reading of his gargantuan variations on the Chilean
revolutionary song The People United Will Never Be Defeated,
Nonken deliberately veered from crystalline preciousness to choppier
approximations, culminating in a brilliant rendition of a cadenza
composed for the occasion by indie jazz pianist Ethan Iverson. Despite
the piece’s length and diversity, her narration encompassed
the character of each individual episode, daring to be both classical
and casual. Ursula Oppens, who originally commissioned the work to
complement Beethoven’s equally enormous Diabelli Variations,
joined Nonken and percussionists Tom Kolor and Dominic Donato for
the other piece on the program, Bring Them Home, a thigh-slapping
reworking of an Irish folksong in which Rzewski demands the performers
explore a whole host of percussive worlds that lie outside the capabilities
of their instruments. Such improvisational tendencies make his compositions
long-winded, but often they drive him to the heights of whimsy that
Nonken seems determined to scale.
 The
winter produced two events that explored similar ends of this theatrical
spectrum. The first, an 80th birthday tribute to Austrian atonalist
Friedrich Cerha at the Austrian Cultural Forum on February 17th, was
dominated by the U.S. première of Elfi und Andi by
Olga Neuwirth (photo, left), which followed Cerha’s lyrical
musings on Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Neuwirth, the latest
in a long line of Austrian musical wunderkinds, has already
converted David Lynch’s film Lost Highway into an opera
in collaboration with librettist Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian Nobel
Prize winner infamous for her explorations of sadomasochistic psychology.
Elfi und Andi, in turn, is based on a modified version of
Jelinek’s drama Ein Sportstück, which juxtaposes
a taped female narration about a murderous wife with a live male voice
recreating the lead-up to a bodybuilder’s overdose on steroids.
Tenor Virgil Hartinger successfully camped up his bodybuilder to the
point of hysteria, despite a very audible false entry early in the
piece, and the female tape narrator provided a suitably butch complement,
although, given the absence of any translated materials or theatrical
staging it was almost impossible for non-German speakers to understand
the plot, or even whether there was one. The Argento Chamber Ensemble
conducted by Michel Galante gave the singers a backing worthy of Lynch,
with surreal, quasi-Mahlerian marches and jazz solos interrupting
an undercurrent of dark electroacoustics. Beethoven provided a more
obvious model in Cerha’s responses to Hölderlin, some encapsulated
in pieces for string sextet, others in the form of choral settings
of his poetry, performed by the Columbia University’s Collegium
Musicum choir. Cerha saved some of his best effects in these works
for their endings, particularly in the eighth and final piece for
sextet, a late Beethoven piano sonata drifting off into a visionary
microtonal haze.
The second event of the pair was a concert of minimalist works given
by rock-classical crossover band The Fireworks Ensemble at the Tenri
Cultural Institute on March 18th. After an opening piece by the ensemble’s
bassist, Brian Coughlin, inspired by a Far Side cartoon featuring
two elephants playing the piano, by the end of which the pachyderms
were stomping about in forearm clusters all over the keyboard, the
audience was braced for an evening of good clean fun. Lois V. Vierk’s
Io used detuned guitar glissandi and Chinese pentatonic effects
on the marimba to recreate conditions on one of the more volcanic
moons of the planet Jupiter, but the highlight of the evening was
undoubtedly Grab It!, a music-theater piece by Jacob Ter
Veldhuis, in which saxophonist Michael Ibrahim played vigorous figurations
in order to block out a series of noises coming from a boombox (mainly
prisoners shouting and swearing on a documentary about Death Row).
Although musically blunt, the piece provided a witty political comment
on the clash of high-class entertainment and desperate impoverishment,
and sounded suitably self-mocking in performance. Ibrahim’s
attire was particularly ironic: dressed in a blue, red and white New
York sports shirt and dark green Army camouflage cap, he strutted
around the stage as if it were Times Square in a pair of shades, with
his boombox slung over his shoulder. A problem with the batteries
meant that he had to start the piece again, but the effect was barely
spoiled for the audience, who seemed enthusiastic for more. And the
ensemble delivered; with such energy in fact that what had been touted
as the evening’s masterpiece, Louis Andriessen’s Hout,
felt too relaxed a work to take the heat.–NR
REISSUE
THIS!
Mirror
FRONT ROW CENTRE
Die Stadt
 It
happens very rarely, but there comes a time in life when you encounter
something that rewrites most of the rules you've been following
until then, pointing you in a different direction and sending you
down a whole new existential path. In 1999, after many years of
listening to and writing about drone-based music, Die Stadt boss
Jochen Schwarz introduced me to the first two LPs by Mirror, Eye
of The Storm (Streamline 1999) and Ringstones (Some
Fine Legacy 1999) which instantly flipped the switch of a completely
new light, arriving as they did in my life at a time when noise
– unbearable noise – was predominant. Mirror began when
Christoph Heemann and Andrew Chalk decided to join forces after
being active on the experimental/drone/avant scene for many years.
Heemann was the leader of HNAS, one of the best post-Faust ensembles
to come out of Germany, whose music is chock full of geniality and
the kind of corrosive quirks you'd never associate with what he
ended up doing, but the first intimations of what would become Mirror
can be detected in his many collaborative projects – among
them, with Seclusion, John Duncan, Organum, Current 93, Mimir –
but above all in his wonderful solo albums Invisible Barrier
(Extreme 1993), Aftersolstice (Barooni 1994) and Days
Of The Eclipse (Barooni 1997). Andrew Chalk started his path
with Ferial Confine, but his first glories came for his participation
in the Ora project, which included many collaborators, the most
important being Colin Potter, Darren Tate and Jonathan Coleclough;
he too had been involved with Organum and already worked with a
lot of illustrious companions like Daisuke Suzuki, Michael Northam,
Ralf Wehowsky, Eric Lanzillotta and The New Blockaders, while also
releasing the gorgeous Over The Edges (Streamline 1999).
Though thoroughly taken with the first two steps into the sacred
temple of inner resonance these artists had built after years of
unconventional meditations, I was nevertheless not prepared for
the ear-opening lesson of Front Row Centre (Die Stadt 2000),
another limited edition vinyl complete with (as usual) handmade
artwork insert signed by the artists. I instantly realized that
this music was a revelation in my understanding of frequency colours
and codes, and that a good 80 per cent of what I had previously
described as "Deep Listening" music was just a fad –
which I still believe is the case. Mirror have since released a
lot of fantastic albums, as a duo or with illustrious guests (Jim
O’Rourke, to name one), all worth of a place in your memory
and in your collection – but this is The One. And it’s
all the more important that people know Front Row Centre as
the fulcrum of a constantly inspired collaboration that’s
now sadly come to an end, since Heemann and Chalk unexpectedly severed
relations in 2005.
It begins in complete silence. Very gradually a mass of harmonic
stillness, what could be a hundred-note chord, fades in, unhurried
movements of internal particles and shifting vibrations revealing
a multitude of layers which the ear associates with the bowed strings
of many guitars, reverberation from inside a piano, a church organ,
or a gently caressed gong. Or so I believe, since Heemann and Chalk
make a point of never revealing their sources. This majestic infinite
chord grows its intensity VERY slowly, its muffled clangour becoming
the sum of many voices of invisible creatures that until then had
been forgotten in anonymity, now finally able to see the light after
years of existence under the surface. When the music reaches the
highest grade on the Richter scale of emotional tension, Mirror
suddenly bring the mix down abruptly, lowering the overall volume
until the hypnotic tapestry is barely perceived. And it all starts
again. The lights of an imaginary periphery are seen from afar,
like the flickering of a million fireflies, and a deep pain, coming
from the realization of something so beautiful that it can’t
be put into words, firmly grips the stomach. We're left alone to
contemplate the conscious alteration of our mind. The first time
I played this I remained completely still, except for a moment when
I wandered over to the window to watch a passing aeroplane whose
fabulous rumble had captured my attention, before realizing it was
one of the drones coming from the speakers. A simple event that
made me feel, for lack of a better word, inadequate. Heemann
and Chalk's fantastic agglomerates of pure subterranean vibe, filtered
by frequency cutoffs and flanging, undulate in breathtaking glissandos
before finally reaching their apex in emotional "Oms"
which infiltrate our very essence, on and on, an infinite loop of
awareness. It could be a nightmare for those who think that a didjeridoo,
a rain stick and some spacky Tibetan sample can fulfil the spirit
while fattening a bank account, but for those few who still believe
in the basic principles of development for the functional human
being, Front Row Centre belongs on the famous desert island.
And since the vinyl edition is now long out of print and crackles
under the weight and intensity of Mirror's prayer – nearly
an hour's worth of music compressed into two sides stresses the
grooves a bit – I've been reciting my own little mantra for
years now. Front Row Centre on CD. Front Row Centre
on CD. –MR
WOLPE IN JERUSALEM
Mode
 The
history of Western classical music, like the history of anything else
you care to mention, doesn't advance in a neat straight line (from
Beethoven to Boulez via Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg and Webern), but
it seems to reassure many people to think that it does. If composer
Stefan Wolpe (1902 – 72) hadn't emigrated to the USA and become
associated with the post-war New York School – he was a prominent
member of the Eighth Street Club, director at Black Mountain College
from 1952 to 1956 and taught, amongst others, the young Morton Feldman
– one wonders whether his music would have attracted the attention
it has over recent years. Not that Wolpe is exactly a household name
(though he is in this particular household) – but the works
he produced during the final years of his life were enthusiastically
championed by a younger generation of composers and performers who
recognised an approach to serialism that navigated a path between
the dry dogma of Schoenbergian dodecaphony and the crippling strictures
of Darmstadt-style total serialism. There are several fine discs of
late Wolpe out and about, including the Ensemble Recherche's For
Stefan Wolpe (Audivis Montaigne), which juxtaposes his work with
music by Feldman, Cage, Carter and Schöllhorn, the historic 1954
recordings of the Violin Sonata (1949) Passacaglia for
Piano (1936) and Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor Saxophone, Percussion
and Piano (1954) on hatART (Passacaglia), the Juilliard
Quartet's reading of his late String Quartet and, if you
can hunt down a copy, there's a disc on Bridge with the Piece
in 3 Parts (1961), the Quintet with Voice (1957) and
the Hexachord Suite (1936). If you can't find this one, help
is at hand – the Suite is also available on this fine new outing
from Mode, which concentrates on the music Wolpe wrote while he was
living in Palestine between 1934 and 1938. The story of how the composer
fled Nazi Germany after the burning of the Reichstag along with a
detailed account of his activities in Jerusalem over the next four
years is told in Austin Clarkson and Yuval Shaked's magnificent accompanying
essay – once more Mode is setting the standard for excellent
and informative liner notes – translated into French, German
and, not surprisingly, Hebrew. The disc contains five works, the Passacaglia
Op 23, an orchestration of the 1936 piano piece namechecked above,
the Incidental Music to Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire
(1934), the Three Smaller Canons Op 24a, the Hexachord
Suite (also mentioned above) and the Concerto for Nine Instruments
Op 22 (1933 – 37).
Before
disembarking at Jaffa in May 1934, Stefan Wolpe had been moving around
Europe, from Czechoslovakia to Romania, via Vienna, where he studied
briefly with Anton Webern (those fond of the "straight line"
history can, then, chart a direct line from Schoenberg to Feldman,
via Webern and Wolpe, if they so wish). Yet, as Clarkson points out
in his notes, Wolpe's take on twelve tone writing has more in common
with Josef Mathias Hauer than it does Schoenberg. Traditional Schoenbergian
practice sets down strict rules regarding how the series it is to
be used (which if followed to the letter can all too easily result
in the earnest grey plodding stuff that Schoenberg himself turned
out in the last two decades of his life), whereas what Hauer postulated
by way of alternative was an idea of serialism more closely related
to the idea of scale, or more specifically mode, which allowed certain
intervals to be repeated, thereby establishing if not a sense of tonality
at least an idea of gravitational pull within the pitch universe,
which allowed musical ideas to establish themselves in a more direct
manner, thereby enabling attentive listeners to follow their development
more easily. This is evident in the Passacaglia (and the
motivic development is made even clearer by Wolpe's orchestration),
in which Wolpe devised 11 "counter-sets", each based on
an interval from the semitone to the minor seventh, which would "rotate
like planets around the main subject," to quote Clarkson. Though
the work was originally scheduled for performance at the time under
the baton of William Steinberg, the members of the newly founded Palestine
Symphony found it too difficult (presumably technically, though one
suspects the real reasons were musical) and the piece wasn't heard
in public until as late as 1983, when it was finally premiered by
Charles Wuorinen and the American Composers Orchestra. This debut
recording – at last – should help establish the Passacaglia
as one of the major early orchestral twelve-tone works, one worthy
of taking its place alongside Berg's Der Wein and Schoenberg's
Variations.
Wolpe
is best known for his serial explorations, but it shouldn't be forgotten
that he was, prior to his sudden departure from his native Germany,
an active Communist and composer of a number of agitprop anthems for
trade unions and theatre companies. Though the names of Weill and
Eisler spring more naturally to mind as composers of "music for
the people", Wolpe's music didn't go unnoticed – when he
arrived in Palestine he was surprised to learn that many people he
met there were familiar with his marching song Es wird die neue
Welt gebored. Proof that he was equally at home writing more
harmonically and rhythmically straightforward music comes in the six
pieces he wrote in 1934 as incidental music for Molière's
Le Malade Imaginaire, brilliantly scored for flute, clarinet,
violin, viola and double bass. Accessible they might be, but there's
no question of a dumbing down in terms of language – the Schlafmusik
is another passacaglia based on a theme from Schoenberg's String
Quartet, op 10. The canons and the suite may already be familiar
to readers, having appeared before on disc, but this version by the
Ensemble Recherche is the best that's appeared to date. Wolpe's contrapuntal
mastery is clear throughout: this is set theory in action (I shan't
bore you with talk of hexachords – why tell you how it works
when you can hear how it works?) and terrific music to boot,
comparable with Webern and late Stravinsky in its combination of formal
complexity and lucidity of line and texture.
The album's third scoop is the first recording of the Concerto
for Nine Instruments, a work Wolpe had begun while studying with
Webern and returned to four years later. It's scored for near-identical
forces as Webern's well-known piece of the same name – the only
difference being that Wolpe calls for bassoon and cello where Webern
uses oboe and viola – but there the similarities end. Wolpe's
work is considerably more substantial in scope; calling it a chamber
symphony might have been more appropriate, and comparing it to Schoenberg's
two chamber symphonies might make more sense. Where Webern seems to
be looking forward to the second half of the twentieth century, and
the pointillism of Nono, Boulez and Stockhausen, Wolpe, like Schoenberg,
often glances affectionately back at the latter part of the nineteenth,
with its octave doublings and rather dense scoring. That said, what
we hear on the disc is not exactly what Wolpe wrote, unfortunately:
both the full score and the violin part have been lost, and the work
has been reconstructed by Johannes Schöllhorn from the other
existing parts, with only a few written cues to hint at what the violin
was to have played. Rather than attempt to write a violin part, Schöllhorn
decided (wisely) to leave the work as is, with eight complete parts
and fragments of a ninth. Even so, its appearance at last is cause
for celebration, and another feather in Mode's cap. It's an impressive
and rousing – if challenging – conclusion to an excellent
and highly recommended disc.–DW
Available
Jelly
BILBAO SONG
Ramboy
 Available
Jelly was originally a trio of American jazz musicians – Gregg
Moore, Stuart Curtis and Jimmy Sernesky – who came to Amsterdam
from Salt Lake City in the late 70s accompanying a mime troupe, and
decided to stay there. Moore subsequently invited his brother, saxophonist
/ clarinettist Michael (who, besides the name, has little in common
with the unlikeable fatso who shoots "controversial" documentaries)
to join them, since when the band has been the major outlet for his
superb work on saxophone and clarinet. The line-up has remained constant
since 1995: it's a pianoless sextet also featuring trumpeter Eric
Boeren, tenor saxophonist Tobias Delius, trombonist Wolter Wierbos,
bassist Ernst Glerum and percussionist Michael Vatcher.
Although the album title refers to Bilbao, as in the Brecht / Weill
song from Happy End which closes proceedings, it's just as much a
journey along the shores of nostalgia in multicultural and liberal
Amsterdam. In the light of today’s many prohibitions and divisions,
Brecht's lines have much to say about that fair city: "Now they've
cleaned it up and made it middle class / With potted palms and aspree
/ Very bourgeois, very bourgeois [..] They've cleaned up all the pools
of broken glass / On parquet floors you can't grow grass." So
appropriate – it's almost a shame the Jelly's version is purely
instrumental. As usual, the album (their sixth, not counting reissues)
presents an eclectic mix of material. Two tracks are based on the
folk music of Myanmar and Indonesia: on "Selat Sunda" the
brasses pump away like an approaching locomotive (recalling at times
Masada's debut album), while on "Bulan/Khek Borates", based
on Siamese folk music, bassist Ernst Glerum strums chords as if he
were playing an acoustic guitar. When it comes to straight jazz the
most impressive soloist throughout is Wierbos, a fine example of the
"avant-garde brass improviser as defender of jazz tradition",
who shines on from the opening "Lovelock", through Hoagy
Carmichael's "Baltimore Oriole", Boeren's "Wolliè",
and "Colima". The twelve compositions are so beautifully
arranged that they almost deserve filing away in the Classical section
alongside the Brecht / Weill opera, but despite the playfulness –
Burt Bacharach's "Little French Boy" and "Mad"
(subtitled “A Fake Madagascar tune") are so loose and child-like
they're virtually careless – the overriding impression, established
early on in the Mingus-like "Facade", developed by Toby
Delius’ tenor work on “In the Secret Garden” and
confirmed by the closing title track, is one of gentle melancholy.–VJ
Out
Of Context
ONE INCH EQUALS 25 MILES
Burning Books / High Mayhem
 Out
Of Context is another project from the incredibly fertile mind of
composer and improviser J.A. Deane. The band features Deane on sampler
and uniflute (whatever that is), vocalists John Flax and Molly Sturges,
Jon Baldwin (cornet), C.K. Barlow (sampler), Stefan Dill (oud, electronics),
Katie Harlow (cello), Sam Rhodes (bassoon), Alicia Ultan (viola) and
Jefferson Voorhees (percussion), plus vocal contributions from 38
others reading extracts from Melody Sumner Carnahan's One Inch
Equals Twenty-Five Miles (2000), in an inspired follow-up to
her highly acclaimed 1998 outing The Time Is Now (Frog Peak).
Carnahan is no stranger to mixed media interpretations of her writing:
she began working with composers while she was studying under Robert
Ashley at Mills College, and has been active in radio as well as film
and video installations for nearly a couple of decades. Deane is best
known for his work with Butch Morris, whose conduction techniques
he uses here to sculpt his performers' live material in this concert
recording made at Albuquerque New Mexico's Outpost Performance Space.
The texts themselves, though more or less omnipresent, are rarely
in the foreground – no question of this being a simple question
of instrumental accompaniment – but their imagery works into
the music at a deeper level, as the eleven tracks run together to
form a continuous whole (suite? opera?). The individual performances
are impressive – Harlow and Ultan's strings are characteristically
melodic, every bit as plaintive as Rhodes' bassoon and Dill's oud
– and Deane's handling of the ensemble is nothing short of masterly.
Despite the density of the voices – sung, spoken, sampled and
treated – the texture remains rich and luminous, rather than
dense and claggy, and the work as a whole is suffused with an authentic
freshness and lyricism.–DW
Aurora
Josephson / Joëlle Léandre / Damon Smith / Martin Blume
CRUXES
Balance Point Acoustics
 This
latest offering on Damon Smith's Balance Point Acoustics imprint,
like its immediate predecessor Sperrgut, features the Bay
Area bassist in the company of German percussionist Martin Blume.
They're joined by Aurora Josephson on vocals – her linocuts
also grace the album's back tray and booklet – and French bassist
(and occasional manic vocalist herself) Joëlle Léandre,
who was paying a return visit to Oakland's Mills College when this
was recorded in October 2004. Léandre's background in contemporary
classical music, which included notable friendships with Giacinto
Scelsi and John Cage, will be familiar to readers of these pages,
and, in conjunction with Josephson's occasional well-rounded soprano,
it adds a touch of conservatory gravitas to Cruxes,
notably on the drone that opens the closing "Hodie Mihi, Cras
Tibi!", one of four tracks recorded live at the Berkeley Art
Centre. Three of the eight studio takes recorded the day before are
duets – the Smith / Léandre bass battle on "Siberia
of the Mind" is particularly exciting – and Blume sits
out the trio, "Scriabin the Derailer", which begins with
Smith and Léandre slashing out into space with their bows.
A fitting metaphor for the two bass jousts that characterise the album
as a whole. It's a subtle, supple set of pieces, but despite the fact
she has a pretty voice I'm not entirely convinced by what Josephson
is doing when things really get swinging on "Tanglefoot Flypaper".
She sounds more at ease on the live cuts, which also feature some
splendid arco interplay between the bassists – and don't fall
for that dumb old line that Léandre's the "classical"
player and Smith the "jazzman", because it doesn't work
like that – as ever tastefully accompanied by Blume's meticulous
pointillism.–DW
Malcolm
Goldstein / Masashi Harada
SOIL
Emanem
 In
a long and illustrious career as both an interpreter of contemporary
music, through his close association with the Judson Dance Theater
and the Tone Roads Ensemble, and improviser, violinist Malcolm Goldstein
hasn't released all that many albums. The (incomplete) discography
entry over at All Music Guide, in accordance with AMG's practice of
providing a list of adjectives under the rubric "Moods"
(always good for a chuckle if you're feeling down in the dumps), describes
Goldstein's work as "provocative, cerebral and intense".
Don't know about that "cerebral" – it's clear from
the get go that this isn't Babbitt or Carter – but intense certainly,
and provocative if your idea of what a violin should sound like is
based on Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin and Maxim Vengerov (or, if
you prefer, Joe Venuti, Stéphane Grappelli and, umm, Didier
Lockwood). Most of the extraordinary sounds Goldstein wrenches forth
from the highly strung wooden box are the kinds of noises that would
make any conservatory violin teacher's toes curl up: variable bow
pressure producing all kinds of irregular partials, sometimes fluty,
sometimes scratchy; playing at rakish angles across the fingerboard
instead of keeping the bow righteously parallel to the bridge; a whole
range of unconventional pizzicato sounds; and a fondness for –
or rather unwillingness to avoid – twangy open strings. But
you stick a fiddle in the hands of a total beginner (I tried) and
see if s/he comes up with anything like this, and you'll find out
it's harder than it looks (sounds). In pianist Masashi Harada, Goldstein
has found the perfect partner: like Goldstein, he's all over his instrument
– and especially fond of extreme registers (a shrewd move, freeing
up the mid register frequency zone for the violinist to operate in)
– and able to change direction within milliseconds. The interplay
between the two men is dazzling, and Harada's ear for pitch is even
more impressive than it was on his magnificent Leo release of a few
years ago, Obliteration At The End Of Multiplication, with
Mat Maneri and Philip Tomasic. In the midst of what sounds like total
pandemonium, he pulls notes out of Goldstein's seemingly chaotic scrabbling
like rabbits out of a conjuror's hat. In the hands of lesser musicians,
such enthusiastic scratching and clonking might be mildly exciting
first time round, but would not stand up to repeated listening. This,
however, will be around as long as the trees, gardens, cliffs, ravines
and rocks its track titles immortalize. Not an album that will grow
on you as much as one that you will grow in. Soil.–DW
From
Between
NO STRANGER TO AIR
Sprout
 from
between was the inaugural release on Daniel Yang's elegantly
austere SOS Editions imprint, but it's since become the name of the
group by default. It's a trio consisting of saxophonists Jack Wright
and Michel Doneda and percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, and this second
outing – also a label-launching release, the label in question
this time being Michael Anton Parker's Sprout – was recorded
live on March 1st last year at Pied Nu in Le Havre, France. Le Havre
isn't your average Frenchperson's dream town: it's a grey, rainy windswept
port at the mouth of the Seine that was mercilessly bombed to bits
by the Allies in World War II and subsequently rebuilt more or less
from scratch. Though the rectilinear, imposing concrete architecture
of Auguste Perret might not be to everyone's taste, the city was recently
(to the considerable surprise of many of its inhabitants) designated
as UNESCO World Heritage. This album should be, too. Wright and Doneda
have been active on the improv scene for over twenty years, but their
playing has evolved considerably over the past five in response to
the drastic overhaul of vocabulary prompted by the music's recent
flirtation with ultra-minimalism (lowercase, reductionism.. take your
pick). Percussionist Nakatani was also briefly associated with Boston
lowercase pioneers nmperign, appearing on their debut album 44'38"/5
back in 1998, and has continued to explore the quieter end of the
dynamic spectrum in his excellent Blue Collar trio with Steve Swell
and Nate Wooley. But there's nothing lowercase about any of the playing
here, least of all Nakatani's. He's a one man percussion ensemble,
extending his kit with assorted metallic bric-a-brac which he drags,
scrapes, rubs, sings into and moves around, creating such a racket
you could swear he has six arms. Wright and Doneda are just as impressive,
sounding like anything from a hive of angry bees to a litter of panic-stricken
kittens trying to escape from a hefty bag. The music is complex and
dense, demanding but fascinating, and never chatty and nervous. In
that respect it's learned its lowercase lesson well. These men find
beauty in the kinds of sounds your mum told you never to make at the
dinner table, just as those far-sighted folks from UNESCO found beauty
in the streets of Le Havre as the cold rain blew in from the sea.–DW
The
Same Girl
SPARE PARTS & THE IDEOLOGY TOOLKIT
Schraum
 In
case you're expecting a rock group – there are after all plenty
of girls out there, from Taxi Girl to Airport Girl to Chopper Girl
to Gangsta Girl, not forgetting Bikini Girl, Apache Girl, Gutter Girl
(I kid you not) and of course Everything But The Girl – fear
not: The Same Girl is an improv duo consisting of Berlin-based laptopper
Gilles Aubry and percussionist Nicholas Field, currently resident
in Geneva. The two blokes apparently met up ten years ago when they
were trying to pick up the same girl, the Schraum press release helpfully
informs us. We don't know, however, if either of them succeeded, though
if the young lady in question wasn't a diehard improvised music freak,
I doubt Aubry and Field could have wooed her with a selection of their
own greatest hits (though if it's any consolation I was pretty seduced
by the last Field outing that came my way, the duo with Jaime Fennelly,
Le Doigt de Galilee, one of Locust Music's Object series).
The seven improvised "Spare Parts" tracks are as tough and
dry as the album title. For the most part they're impressively tight,
gritty workouts – hats off to Aubry for being particularly responsive
– and it's just as well they're interleaved with the relative
light relief of the "Ideology Toolkit", a set of four field
recordings (it says here, though "Recours à la peur"
seems to be a field recording of the duo in action.. go figure). Choice
cut: the ominous low end groan of "Tombstone Zigzag". No
wonder the final track "Dress Rehearsal" is (almost) completely
silent.. I hope they kept the young lady's address and sent her a
copy of this for Valentine's Day. Now that's what I call romantic.–DW
Various
Artists
FREEDOM OF THE CITY 2005
Emanem 4216
 The
vagaries of funding and scheduling meant that last year’s edition
of Freedom of the City, the London-based free-improv festival curated
by Emanem (Martin Davidson), Matchless (Eddie Prévost) and
Evan Parker, was just a single-day event, and virtually all the music
played that day is now released on this two-disc set. On this occasion
the musicians, all familiar faces from past Emanem releases and FOTC
events, chose to work in impromptu ensembles rather than already-established
groupings. This is one of the less “abstract” FOTCs, perhaps
because of the temporary absence of Matchless as a co-producer. There’s
plenty of free jazz in the mix, and the bassists and drummers go for
momentum rather than free-floating colour; the one bit of laptoppery,
from Phil Durrant, comes as part of a power-trio with Alan Wilkinson
and Mark Sanders.
There are four trio performances on the set, and it’s instructive
how different the dynamic is in each of them. The opening trio pits
the slippery Paul Rutherford with / against / at an angle to the well-attested
John Edwards / Mark Sanders rhythm section: the trombonist’s
multidirectional and superbly deadpan lines engage only selectively
with the scuttling activity of a rhythm section that insists on chasing
down every idea right now. With Wilkinson / Durrant / Sanders the
saxophonist is the lynchpin, hooking up in traditional free jazz fashion
with Sanders but also matching up the graininess of overblown sax
to Durrant’s buzzes and shrills. It’s an intriguing insection
of tear-the-house-down free jazz with laptop electronics, even if
the contradiction between freely pulsed drums and pulseless (or neurotically
vibrating) electronics tends to be highlighted rather than resolved.
The performance by Sylvia Hallett, Caroline Kraabel and Veryan Weston
(on violin, saxophone and piano, respectively, and all three also
sing) has a dappled, teasing quality, the notes darting around like
minnows; voices and instruments swap places or double each other so
often you can hardly tell where one begins and the other ends. My
favourite trio, though, is Steve Beresford, Joe Williamson and Roger
Turner, who turn in what’s unmistakably a jazz performance,
marked by crisp, quickwitted volleys between Turner and Beresford
(who at times sounds like a pared-down, lightning-fast Paul Bley)
and Williamson’s oblique bass work, which flips back and forth
rapidly between patient, broken walking bass and roiling, near-directionless
masses of bowing.
There are three tracks from the London Improvisers Orchestra: Caroline
Kraabel’s “Hearing Reproduction” is a conceptual
piece in which the entire orchestra repeatedly “rewinds”
itself like a tape-machine – not really a particularly satisfying
piece of music in itself, but I don’t think that was the point
– while the others are impromptu conductions by Simon Fell and
Dave Tucker. Fell’s adheres to the traditional orchestral section
divisions of strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion in order to
bring them into rather ominous dialogue, while Tucker’s is more
concerned with setting up sharply varied backgrounds behind featured
soloists. The remaining tracks on the album are duo performances.
A soprano sax / flute duet between Lol Coxhill and Neil Metcalfe has
a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t flavour: ideas are discarded
almost as rapidly as they surface, at least until halfway into “A
Right in Phoenica,” when Coxhill switches from wry snippets
to reeling lyricism and the music finds a groove that carries them
almost to the piece’s end. Only one side of the interaction
between violinist Phil Wachsmann and video artist Kjell Bjorgeengen
is directly audible on CD, though Wachsmann’s clear-cut juxtapositions
of mood and texture are audibly the result of an unheard audio/visual
dialogue. The opening minutes are a superb display of the violinist’s
wit and balletic grace, an essay of sorts in mixed-messages improvisation:
a conventionally beautiful, silken tone, for instance, may be applied
to a hopelessly out of tune phrase. The closing sections are something
else again: meticulously constructed passages of tenuous beauty or
scrabbling density, the electronics overlays at various times suggesting
Reichian minimalism, Hardanger fiddle, or even a quiet church organ.–ND
Mike
Cooper
SPIRIT SONGS
Hipshot
 Any
album that reminds me of Björk, Robert Wyatt, Mayo Thompson and
Lol Coxhill can't be all that bad. The Coxhill connection is easy
to explain: guitarist / vocalist / laptopper Mike Cooper was (is?),
with Coxhill and percussionist Roger Turner, a member of The Recedents,
one of British improv's wilder and more eccentric outfits (as you
might be able to guess from the title of their 1988 Nato release Zombie
Bloodbath On The Isle Of Dogs), and his singing, with its gentle,
slightly-wider-than-usual crooner vibrato, often recalls Coxhill's
touching vocals. But where Lol is at his best scraping the mold off
crusty old standards, the tracks on offer here are all originals.
Spirit Songs is the first complete album of Cooper's songs
since 1974's Life And Death In Paradise, a long out of print
but soon to be reissued – hooray – album also featuring
Mike Osborne, Harry Miller and drummer Louis Moholo. But, as Cooper
writes on his website, "I like to think of these pieces as sung
text rather than songs. Some of them have been around a long time,
laying [sic] between the pages of a small book of postcard sized collages.
I have been experimenting with singing these texts live in gigs, sometimes
with the same backing tracks on mini disc, but also improvising and
building new backing tracks on the fly and even swapping the texts
and backing tracks around, resulting in a different version each time."
Which takes us to the Red Krayola's Mayo Thompson, who, even before
his pioneering albums with Art & Language, was the first to prove
convincingly that "any text could go with any piece of music",
to quote David Grubbs. Similarly, Cooper's lyrics deal with issues
as diverse and "unmusical" as industrial pollution and law
and order. But where Thompson's Corrected Slogans and Kangaroo?
still sound a little standoffish and affected, there's something curiously
moving about Cooper's close-miked fragility (that's where Wyatt comes
to mind), accompanied by the melancholy twang of his blues-inflected
guitar and all the strangely disturbing clicks, pops and stochastic
clatters. It's also a reminder that some of the most poignant albums
of recent times have been recorded in the intimacy of the artist's
own home – from guitarist Roger Smith's nocturnal adventures
in his kitchen to Red's emotionally bruised debut on Rectangle. And
even if Björk had a whole choir at her disposal, the most effective
tracks on her Vespertine are the ones "about being on
your own in your house with your laptop and whispering for a year
and just writing a very peaceful song that tiptoes."–DW
Braam
/ De Joode / Vatcher
CHANGE THIS SONG
Bik Bent Braam
 Nine
of the ten tracks on this album were recorded live on October 26th
last year at Amsterdam's Bimhuis, and the choice of the venue as well
as the line-up speaks for itself: pianist Michiel Braam is yet another
superb performer who perfectly encapsulates everything that's made
New Dutch Swing one of the most consistently lively and enjoyable
scenes in contemporary jazz. Solid technique, a thorough grounding
in both the hard bop and big band repertoire (recognised by the Dutch
establishment in the form of the Podium Prize in 1988 and the Boy
Edgar Prize nine years later) but also an openness to accident and
experimentation within the confines of carefully crafted composition:
there's as much Mengelberg and Taylor in there as Ellington, Monk,
Mingus. Partnered by powerhouse bassist Wilbert de Joode (Ab Baars
Trio, Ig Henneman Tentet, JC Tans Orchestra..) and drummer extraordinaire
Michael Vatcher (4 Walls, Available Jelly, Frankie Douglas..), Braam
delivers the goods in what is the most exciting and enjoyable piano
trio to emerge from the Netherlands since Cor Fuhler's (with Han Bennink
and de Joode). Those who like their jazz deadly serious might groan
at the choice of track titles (all anagrams of the album title, including
some pretty damn awkward ones: "Can Ghosts Neigh?" "Gosh,
Ethnics Gan", "Hotch As Ginseng"..) but they'd do well
to ignore the verbal frivolity and get down to some serious listening.
True, there's not much angst on offer, except in the title of the
first track, but despite the quintessentially Dutch let's-see-if-I-can-pull-it-apart-and-put-it-back-together
aesthetic – Misha Mengelberg would love the spectacular collapse
of "Songs Each Night" – the foundations of the music
are solid as a rock. De Joode is especially meaty, and Vatcher's deceptively
light touch belies some seriously impressive rhythmic underpinning.
With these two behind him all the way it's no wonder Braam delivers
some of the most confident and enjoyable piano work I've heard in
recent years. Check it out.–DW
Hal
Singer
BLUES AND NEWS
Futura Swing-01
 The
first of six titles in the Swing Collector catalogue of landmark French
jazz and avant-garde label Futura was this outing by expatriate tenorman
Hal Singer, best known for his work in the Jay McShann band of the
40s, who relocated to Paris in 1965. Singer’s first session
cut overseas was the orchestra side Paris Soul Food (Polydor,
1969, released in the States by King) with Michel Sardaby and vocalist
Robin Hemingway. Just over two years after that date, with fellow
journeyman drummer Art Taylor, Singer recorded Blues and News
for Gerard Terrones’s iconoclastic imprint with label regulars
Siegfried Kessler (piano, flute, Hammond organ), bassist Patrice Caratini,
guitarist Jean-Claude André, trombonist Jacques Bolognesi and
percussionist Alain "Paco" Charlery. Where Paris Soul
Food was prompt and radio-ready with short, funky numbers that
rarely crested the three-minute mark, Blues and News is significantly
more lengthy and explorative, a nuanced set of small group improvisations
on buoyant, groove-oriented tunes that seems more like a club date
than a primed-for-airplay studio session. Though only one of the seven
tracks – six penned by the leader and one by Kessler –
is over seven minutes long and there's some lingering slickness to
some of the arrangements, Singer’s electric tone and Art Taylor’s
spare, loose swing contribute to a very open environment.
The set opens with "It’s My Thing," with steamrolling
gospel chords and a Lee Morganesque arrangement, its first several
bars a static minor flash that quickly turns into a catchy boogaloo
à la Morgan’s "Cornbread" (the irony
isn’t lost – this was also the title of Singer’s
gutbucket 1948 Savoy hit). Bolognesi’s trombone is fluid, fat
and glassy, very much in Curtis Fuller mode – Jazz Messengers
comparisons are appropriate – and Singer’s buzzing and
metallic tone, more piercing than other swing-era tenormen like Quebec
and Webster, contrasts interestingly with the rhythm section’s
loping groove. Indeed, Taylor is the other star of the session, and
anyone familiar with his multilayered, loose bop drumming or even
his frantic free chatter with Frank Wright or Dizzy Reece (cf From
In to Out, Futura, 1970) would do well to hear this dry, open
funk juggernaut. There is a yeh-yeh rave-up in “Malcolm X”
(which appeared as a vocal number on Paris Soul Food), whose
stately minor head sits atop a ridiculously infectious Caratini-Taylor
vamp, one of the most in-your-craw themes since the Art Ensemble’s
"Theme de Yo-Yo." A bit of tailgate creeps into Bolognesi
as he takes the reins, and while André’s guitar is sunny
in demeanor, it never tips the music into hokiness, and makes for
an interesting contrast with Kessler’s classicism and Singer’s
gutsy behind-the-beat tenor oration. Kessler’s prowess on flute
is rarely heard, and his deft James Newton-like flights (albeit overdubbed)
lead off “Pour Stéphanie,” before André
takes a full, woody chomp at the lithe, easy-swing of the funky minor
rondo. “Du Bois” is a call-and-response number similar
to “It’s My Thing” that wouldn't have sounded out
of place in the Blue Note catalogue, on which Singer breaks out the
fine cognac tone, and one can just hear the rhythm section’s
delight at being able to contribute to this small group recording
by one of the unheralded tenor gurus.–CA
Chas
Smith
DESCENT
Cold Blue
 During
a sunny Californian winter day past January, galactic hobo Chas Smith
plays Descent from start to finish in the environment it
was created in, and the earth begins to rotate backwards. His crowded
hi-tech state of the art studio in Encino, Los Angeles, knocks you
out with its welding and metalwork machinery, vintage guitar amps,
handmade, colourful cowboy boots, walls adorned with “Girl on
The Billboard” voluptuous female figures – and Paul McCarthy
drawings. Madly sweet. His sometimes kinetic, Harry Bertoia-related
sound sculptures – check out Nikko Wolverine’s
booklet – are a by-product of his job as a welder, and they're
specifically conceived for and fully integrated into his own compositions.
His pedal steel guitars, sumptuous instruments of elegiac desolation,
from a vintage Bigsby (1950s model, only 47 made) to his titanium
custom-made Guitarzilla (heavy as hell but beautiful as heaven) dominate
the view in their metallic splendour. Aside from his compositional
work, Smith plays dance music too, swinging his pedal steel sequences
in rockabilly, Country & Western, or liquor-drenched truckin’
songs – try Chris “Sugarballs” Sprague’s Hammer
Down! for a smile. "A solitary genius," as Susan Alcorn
describes him, Chas follows no particular school of composition but
his own, modelling sophisticated structures of layered complex harmonics
to reach organ-like intensity. After experiments in the 70s with Serge
and Buchla 200 modular synths and studies at CalArts with mavericks
Morton Subotnick, James Tenney and Harold Budd, you wouldn't expect
his minimalism to be less than top-notch hardcore Ambient. Descent
is constructed around the Doppler effect of the pedal steel’s
modified pitches, the flawless shift of its sonorities into pure sound
manipulation, and its desert grandeur is perversely seductive. The
18-minute title track recedes inexorably, contrary motion fretted
string superpositions gradually merging its harmonic long tones with
a Gothic downpour of a bowed stainless steel sheet metal. "Endless
Mardi Gras" is 20 minutes of liquid sky travel, notch filters,
flutes, zither, Guitarzilla and Copper Box and steel guitar in a hallucinatory
rich fountain of overtones, while the closing "False Clarity"
is all pink mountains and lost moments of worship, decaying with the
subtlety and colour of a shakuhachi. Deep as an abyss, Descent's
slow resonant orchestration evolves relentlessly, entrancing, angelical
choirs riveted in aural alchemy.–MA
Marcus
Schmickler/John Tilbury
VARIETY
A-Musik
 Listening
to Variety gives you the impression of being suspended between
two kinds of fastidiousness, one Tilbury's intense attention to the
piano and its innards, the other the meticulous halogenous resonances
and snippets of extraneous voices and electric crackles Schmickler
conjures forth from his computer. The music maintains a Feldmanesque
aura of resounding interiority throughout, a peculiar dust of harmonics
brewed into a torpid infusion of nostalgic dissonance only rarely
broken by short telluric outbursts after the half hour mark. Towards
the end of the piece Tilbury becomes more extrovert, his chords briefly
becoming slightly punchier, more fully inhabiting the mysterious electrostatic
world evoked by his companion, but for the most part he tends to privilege
angular, irregular patterns and scales in a sort of "enriched
minimalism" that prevents the music from breaking free of its
slightly repetitive structure. As a result, Variety remains
just a tad under the level of excellence, but one looks forward to
more collaborations by artists so diverse in their backgrounds yet
both driven by a desire to fast-forward music to the next level of
evolution.–MR
Thanos
Chrysakis
INSCAPES
Conv
ENCHANTED MOUNTAINS
Stasisfield
 Not
to be confused with Aaron Copland's magnificent, craggy orchestral
work of the same name from 1967, "Inscape" is the title
London-based sound artist Thanos Chrysakis has chosen for his electronic
works. On the Conv CDR, also available as a free download at http://www.con-v.org/cnv16.htm,
you'll find numbers 1-2, 3 and 9, and the Stasisfield release, also
available at http://www.stasisfield.com/releases/year04/sf-4004.html
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