| MAY
News 2006 |
Reviews
by Marcelo Aguirre, Clifford Allen, Jon Dale, Nate Dorward, Vid
Jeraj, Massimo Ricci, Derek Taylor, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
Rune Lindblad
Reissue this: John
Tchicai
Maurizio Bianchi
In Print: Resonance
Vol.10 No.2
In Concert: Burkhard
Beins, Lucio Capece & Rhodri Davies
JAZZ & IMPROV: Dom
Minasi / Reuben Radding / Rudi Mahall / Chiesa, Guionnet, La
Casa & Petit / Agnès Palier & Olivier Toulemonde
/ Tom Djll
Terry Day / Paul Hood
& Michael Rodgers / Pascale Labbé & Jean Morières
/ Mattin & Cremaster / Stern & Guerra / Eugene Chadbourne
CONTEMPORARY: Vinko
Globokar / Phill Niblock / Roland Kayn
ELECTRONICA: Anthony
Pateras & Robin Fox / Howard Stelzer & Giuseppe Ielasi
/ Sébastien Roux / Fhievel
Last month
|
Such
is the pressue to be the first out with a review of a fantastic new
disc, it's all too easy round these parts for CDs to drop off the
radar, or, to be more accurate, end up towards the bottom of a huge
pile. Not so much an in-tray as an in-bin. On my visit to Sweden last
year with Aki Onda and Jac
Berrocal I was given no fewer than 15 CDs by Mats Lindstrom at
Fylkingen, including the magnificent 5CD box reissuing the old Fylkingen
poésie sonore LPs (this was written up in The
Wire, so you won't find a review of it here). As you can well
imagine, it took several months to work slowly through the pile, but
when I finally got round to spinning Rune Lindblad's Die Stille
Liebe, I was, as they say, blown away. This spectacular 2CD compilation
was released a while ago but seems to have received nowhere near enough
attention, so I'm making no apologies whatsoever for leading off this
month's issue with a review of it. Another
splendid work that came to my attention was the latest (?) issue of
Resonance magazine, also reviewed below. Seems to be rather hard to
track down on the Internet, though (the sites I went looking for it
at need a bit of an update, but I'm in no position to talk - about
time I did some spring cleaning here), but well worth getting hold
of. Meanwhile, a warm welcome goes out this month to new PT contributor
Jon Dale, whose writing I've been enjoying for a while in Signal
To Noise and The Wire, and thanks to our man in Berlin
Marcelo Aguirre for his splendid overview of eleven (!) albums worth
of music by Maurizio Bianchi, a major figure who for some reason has
never featured in these pages. Nor has the work of saxophonists Jim
Sauter and Don Dietrich and guitarist Donald Miller, collectively
known as Borbetomagus.
Byron Coley's description of the trio as "balls on the line improvisation
with enough energy to flatten buildings" is pretty much on the
one, as anyone who's ever seen this awesome threesome in the flesh
will confirm. So I'm especially delighted to feature an exlusive no-holds-barred
call-a-spade-a-fuckin-shovel interview
with these free music warriors this month, along with some terrific
photos of the group courtesy of Seth Tisue. So out with your copies
of Barbed Wire Maggots and Snuff Jazz and give those
neighbours HELL. Yee-haw. Bonne lecture.. - DW
Rune
Lindblad
DIE STILLE LIEBE
Elektron 2CD
 A
while back I was tempted to apologise profusely for reviewing an album
that came out back in 2003 (Esther Venrooy's To Shape Volumes,
Repeat), and I'm tempted to do so again now – but I won't.
Die Stille Liebe, a 2CD compilation of music by Rune Lindblad
on the Elektron label, Swedish electronic music's showcase imprint,
slipped out quietly nearly three years ago but only came into my hands
when Mats Lindstrom gave me a copy during my recent tour in Sweden
with Jac Berrocal and Aki Onda (documented elsewhere).
It took more than three months before I finally got round to listening
to it, but it's been blowing my mind ever since. As a brief websearch
will reveal, it's still very much available, and it deserves to be
on the shelves of every self-respecting devotee of new music, electronic
or otherwise. It's quite simply extraordinary.
Rune Lindblad was born into a working class family in Gothenburg in
1923. After a largely uneventful childhood dogged by health problems,
he began to paint seriously at the age of 20 (the artwork in Die
Stille Liebe is his, and there are many more of his artworks
around on the net if you have a look - there's one of his pieces below
too), but only drifted into electronic music in the mid 1950s. His
first work, Party, happily available on Pogus, who have released
two albums of Lindblad's music, was – especially for 1954 –
a veritable UFO of a piece, predating the emergence of sound art /
field recording by nearly two decades. Lindblad concealed a tape recorder
on a trolley he pushed around a party, surreptitiously taping conversations,
radios and ambient noise, subsequently editing the result down into
one of the strangest and most original works of electronic music you're
ever likely to come across.
It was clear from the outset that Lindblad was something of a marginal,
not by choice, necessarily – no self-consciously avant-garde
posturing "I am the underground" here – but quite
simply because he was either unaware of or possibly uninterested in
the ideological spats taking place in the world of electronic music
at the time. Daniel Rozenhall writes in the liners to Die Stille
Liebe that "Lindblad had no trouble unifying the two opposing
schools of experimental tape music of the time," namely the musique
concrète people in Paris, "who worked exclusively
with sounds recorded from the environment" and the folks in Cologne,
who "used exclusively electronic sources for musical material."
Much has been made of the significance of the factional infighting
between the two ideologically-opposed camps, but ultimately both musique
concrète and Elektronisches Musik shared a common
concern with how and why the sounds were produced, often more so than
what they actually sounded like. In terms of column inches of dense
print explaining the whys and wherefores of their various methods,
there's little to choose between Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Meanwhile, working in almost total isolation in the grey, windswept
port of Gothenburg, Rune Lindblad had little time for such ideological
fol-di-rol; he was too busy actually making music. And he made quite
a lot of it too.
 While
researching this article, I came across Ingvar Loco Nordin's huge
and hugely informative review of Die Stille Liebe at http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco6/Elektron/elektronfr.html,
which I strongly recommend you check out, as it contains numerous
quotations from the composer's own letters as well as extracts of
the hysterical press reaction to Lindblad's first concert of his music
in Gothenburg on February 14th 1957 (he shared the bill with Bruno
Epstein and Sven-Eric Johansson). "Truly bizarre!" wrote
Carl Tillius in the Göteborgsposten: "Such manifestations
will want to be avoided by most regular, normal people. They have
enough noise from streets and squares. Guido Vecchi called the concrete
music a perfect kind of torture, which becomes unbearable in ten or
fifteen minutes." Nordin also points out that the selection of
pieces included on Die Stille Liebe, by Mattias Petersson,
Kent Tankred and Berndt Berndtsson, though astounding in its variety,
is just the tip of the iceberg: "The producers have had to restrain
[sic] themselves to the archives of EMS and Fylkingen in Stockholm,
leaving out all the fantastic material stored at the Department of
Musical Sciences in Gothenburg," he writes.
Things start off discreetly enough with Opus 131 (1976) –
there are more than 200 works in Lindblad's oeuvre, and many ended
up with no titles other than their opus number – a patient and
sensitive exploration of the delicate microtonal nuances of analogue
synthesizers, perhaps the two Putney VCS-3 machines Lindblad acquired
for the SÄMUS (Special Subject Training in Music) Studio in Gothenburg
where he worked (the Putneys were supposedly previously owned by Pink
Floyd). The sound might recall vintage outings by the likes of Koenig
or Babbitt, but it's immediately clear that Lindblad's not in the
least interested in serialism. He has an intuitive almost improvisational
feel for pitches, allowing them to flow freely wherever they like
until they coagulate in repetition or stasis. Similarly, when the
instrumental palette broadens over three quarters of the way through
the piece, it does so without warning and for no apparent reason.
The piece makes up its own rules as it goes along.
If Opus 131 sounds very much of its time, the opening seconds
of Nocturne 72-2 could, at a pinch, fool you into thinking
they were Otomo Yoshihide, back in his old guitar whacking days. Eventually
the music settles – though settle is not the word – into
a brutal, grinding and heavily distorted workout of two or three irregularly
repeating notes and ideas. It's obsessive, jarring and thoroughly
nasty. The title must be one of Lindblad's little jokes. Opus
172 (Decree) is more varied and elusive. It starts out exploring
the recesses of a dark reverberant cavern, complete with watery drips
and a forlorn synth melody. A babble of voices drifts in and drifts
out again, taking the melody with it. Snatches of voices, sometimes
processed, appear later from time to time, as if the composer was
tuning in Stockhausen's cosmic transistor radio, but the music remains
slow, its timbres evolving slowly. It's as beautiful as it is inscrutable,
even if the rather flabby, square wavy old synths parping and farting
about towards the end sound rather dated. In the final minute, a snare
drum roll appears, as if opening a window onto a passing military
funeral. It's an arresting moment, the first easily recognisable sound
signifier in the piece, but it lasts only seconds. What could it possibly
mean?
Förort (Suburb) (1974) takes us back to the nagging
repetitions of Nocturne, the first six minutes of the piece
stuck fast to a semitone, which Lindblad dissects with the grim determination
of a Home Office pathologist, finally setting its constituent tones
against each other in a web of polyrhythms. If it were rescored for
conventional instruments and percussion it might just pass as Ligeti,
but on Lindblad's grainy, user-unfriendly synths it sounds as strange
and otherworldly as a Sun Ra Moog solo. If the music is intended to
be some kind of commentary on suburban life, we can only include Lindblad
thinks it must be hell.
The earliest work on offer in Die Stille Liebe is Samtal
("Conversation"), which dates from 1961. It's also one of
the most extreme, beginning with five minutes of truly odd rattling
sludge. Imagine you've been buried alive in asphalt and they're digging
you out with pneumatic drills. Eventually human voices appear, but
it's hard to make out if they're fighting or fucking. The drills eventually
disappear, but not for long. It's a unique experience, at times erotically
charged, at times terrifyingly claustrophobic. When Lindblad's first
full-length album Predestination was finally released when
the composer was already 52, his friend and mentor, Gothenburg-based
musicologist Jan Ling, provided the following introduction: "Rune
Lindblad is a musical materialist. Natural phenomena, political situations,
are shaped with a razor-sharp sense for the perceptive qualities of
sound; a time flow, often so invading and intense and extended that
you feel provoked, get pissed, happy, irritated, sad – but never
indifferent. He depicts the horrors of war, the power of nature, the
relentlessness of life. When his humor sometimes shines through, it
is a bizarre, bitter distorting mirror image of a grotesque, evil
world. Perhaps Lindblad’s interest in the sounds of nature is
his sole positive and optimistic side; the strength, the beauty of
nature’s sounds is reproduced in artistic concentration in electronic
sound worlds. Lindblad describes our world from an underdog view:
it is the sound world of the oppressed."
Pedagogik ("Pedagogics") (1972) is probably best
described as sound poetry, consisting as it does of superimposed monologues
which present a long list of behavioural problems, which Nordin describes
as "a bitter criticism on the school environment and the way
children are taken care of in school and society" (I'm taking
his word for it, because my Swedish is non-existent). Lindblad was
politically active throughout his life, and clearly saw his music
as a way of tackling distinct social problems. Varv-72 ("Shipyard-72"),
not included here, unfortunately, is an unadorned recording of the
shipyard worker’s sound environment. Another piece Nordin mentions
consists of a heartbreaking recording of an old lady in a retirement
home, 1974's Op. 97, Jag Vill Hem ("I Want To Go Home").
Lindblad's mixture of sound art and social documentary often recalls
Luc Ferrari, but the Frenchman would never have dared release music
as raw and brutal as this. Lindblad's interest in the human vulnerability
in life and death is as evident in his art and film work as it is
in his music. Årstiderna (DVD release, anyone?) features
disturbing close-ups of German police archive photographs of car crash
victims on the Autobahn, intercut with chocolate box landscapes and
accompanied by a surreal and utterly horrid plastic faux-Baroque music.
But if you think Pedagogik is a bit hard-going, wait till
you hear Die Stille Liebe ("The Calm Love"). By
now you should be taking those titles with more than a pinch of salt;
calm love, indeed – this amazing ten-minute apocalypse is as
noisy and uncompromising as Merzbow. Blind test anyone you like and
see if they get the date within fifteen years. Vicious distorted keyboards
are brutally intercut with what sounds suspiciously like one of Hitler's
more memorable orations.
The second disc begins with Orgel 3 (Medeltida borg) ("Organ
3 Medieval Castle"), and for once the title pretty much sums
up what the piece is about: it's classic medieval dungeon torture
chamber stuff, with ugly thick clusters and ghostly ghastly wheezes
and peeps – shades of Ligeti's use of the vacuum cleaner-powered
organ blower – and, unless there's some kind of ultra-subtle
transformation going on that I'm not aware of, the piece isn't electronic
at all. Or it's electronic music in the sense that Milton Babbitt
once amusingly described a gramophone recording of Tchaikowsky as
electronic music. Once again, the barriers that fellow composers and
musicologists like to erect between genres mean sod all to Rune Lindblad.
Associationer ("Associations") (1973) is perhaps
the most exciting piece of the whole set. A gritty montage of lo-fi
bleeps and analogue synth wails is eventually joined by what seems
to be the soundtrack recording of a film, or maybe several films,
as snatches of dialogue – in public school-style British English,
either from a war movie ("Left right left right left right leeeft!")
or a detective story ("No-one could possibly have had time to
take a bath after him..") – are superimposed on Lindblad's
strange science fiction soundworld. The contrast between the abstract,
cool electronics and the at times distressingly emotional human voices
is quite extraordinary. Associationer belongs up there with
Öyvind Fahlström's Faglar i Sverige and Åke
Hodell's U.S.S. Pacific Ocean as one of Swedish electronic
music's most original offerings.
Opus 133 (1976), which is more austere, its rubbery, treacly
Buchla lines alternating with reverberant thuds, like Subotnick having
a night out at the Noh theatre, is followed by Glaciär
("Glacier") (1971), the only piece in the collection that
has been released before, on the long out of print Predestination
LP released back in 1975. "About glaciers: If the glacier gets
the opportunity to spread, its icy layer produces a flat, trough-shaped
depression," Lindblad wrote for the liners of that album. "If
the glacier is hampered by rocks, the ice layers are bent in the shapes
of fans, waves or zigzag patterns. The glacier fills the valleys down
which it flows, and it is in constant motion, albeit a slow one. At
the occurrence of sudden precipices, the whole ice mass breaks up
into large and small slabs and crushes in on itself." It's a
nice description of what's going on in the piece, as huge slabs of
thunderous drone shift slowly through a landscape of gnarly trees
and spiky rock formations.
If Glaciär is arguably the most accessible piece of
the set – though that doesn't make it easy listening by any
means – it's not the most haunting. That distinction must go
to Opus 161 (1976), which presents an exquisitely transformed
female voice speaking in Swedish, half whispered, half superimposed
over a smooth synthesizer melody, while a bass thuds in the background.
It could be Alternative TV, or Cabaret Voltaire. "I have a feeling
that this text is a matter-of-fact description of something,"
writes Nordin in his review, "but the way Lindblad has treated
the voice renders it sacral, mystical." Musikundervisning
("Musical Tuition") (1972) returns to the world of Associationer
in its combination of recognisable elements (extracts from what seems
to be a speech about Civil Rights in America, and a male voice intoning
the names of musical instruments and technical terms in German –
"das Schlagzeug, die Synkope, der Takt, die Triangel, das Akkordeon"
etc.) with abstract, complex and sometimes violent electronic music.
The set ends with Gryning (Dawn) (1973), another blast of
raw noise for KK Null lovers everywhere.
 The
accompanying booklet, rather annoyingly, contains no information on
how Lindblad created these works, but makes up for it with an informative
essay on the composer by Daniel Rozenhall, and two conversations about
Lindblad's work with between Rozenhall and, respectively, Carl-Michael
von Hausswolff and Sten Hanson, all expertly translated into English
by Paul Pignon. But I can do no better than to finish off here by
quoting Åke Parmerud's splendid obituary of the composer, The
Unaccommodating Pioneer, published in 1992, a year after Lindlad
died, and now happily available online (Google "Rune Lindblad"
and you'll find it on the first page): "Rune Lindblad’s
greatest contribution to the Swedish music history is that through
his entire artistically active life he proved the idea that the world
has to be conquered and rediscovered, over and over again, and that
it is each artist’s primary duty to be unwaveringly loyal to
the world he or she has made their own. And, with apologies to Ralph
Lundsten, it is Rune Lindblad who should be written into the history
books as the number one pioneer of Swedish electro-acoustic music."–DW
John
Tchicai
CADENTIA NOVA DANICA
Polydor
 There's
certainly something to the idea that moving to another country can
change an artist greatly, sometimes so much that the tension between
the work and "home" produces a need to stay abroad indefinitely.
Steve Lacy was one of many American jazz musicians who couldn't find
enough work in New York, and it was the fertile and permissive climate
of France – where he remained for all but the last years of
his life – that allowed him and his groups to craft a unique
approach to composition and improvisation. There are also those who
use a brief period of life abroad as something to inform and refine
their art, so that they can go home with a newfound sense of self
(perhaps). Clifford Thornton is one example: his time in Algiers (via
Paris) in 1969-1970 gave him the opportunity to study African music
and play with African musicians in an unmediated environment. As a
result he became not just a brass player but a creative fulcrum, returning
to the States – and a teaching post at Wesleyan – as a
genuine synthesizer of ideas.
So much is made of American expatriates that it's easy to forget about
the rarer example of a European musician moving the other way, to
the States. Danish reedman and composer John Tchicai is a case in
point. Encouraged by Bill Dixon and Archie Shepp, who saw him playing
alto at the World Youth Festival in Helsinki in 1962, Tchicai relocated
to New York later that year and stayed until 1965. During his time
there, he cemented his own ideas of melodic invention and rhythmic
freedom in groups with Dixon, Shepp (particularly the New York Contemporary
Five, with Don Cherry, bassist Don Moore and drummer J.C. Moses),
Albert Ayler, and the New York Art Quartet (a cooperative with Roswell
Rudd, Milford Graves and an assortment of bassists), as well as participating
in John Coltrane’s Ascension.
When
Tchicai left for the States in 1962, Denmark wasn't exactly a hotbed
of free playing. Even his own group at the time with saxophonist and
pianist Max Bruel generally stuck to standards and bebop. But Ayler
and Cecil Taylor worked in Copenhagen that year, and musicians like
altoist Karsten Vogel and trumpeter Hugh Steinmetz (cf. Nu!,
Danish Debut, 1966) were among the Danish musicians stepping "out."
Of particular importance were the Contemporary Jazz Quartet and Quintet
– with Steinmetz, reedmen Niels Harrit and Franz Beckerlee,
bassist Steffen Andersen and drummer Bo Thrige Andersen and, on one
occasion, Sunny Murray – but the mark they made on Danish new
jazz isn't exactly visible from their scant and ultra-rare documentation
on Fona Club and Danish Debut (Action and TCJQ,
reissued by Steeplechase) as well as tracks uncovered by Atavistic/UMS.
Even so, this group and a few others provided a fertile, if small
scene in which Tchicai could operate upon returning.
While the braying wide vibrato of Ayler was a huge sonic influence
on reedmen like Harrit and Beckerlee, Tchicai’s approach was
always cooler, with a bubbly yet acrid lyricism, occasionally shot
through with staccato shards as though in self dialogue, and making
strong use of quasi-minimalist repetition / elaboration. Though these
characteristics soon became evident in his early 60s work, especially
with the NYC5, it was the New York Art Quartet that brought them to
fruition. There’s a clear, almost geographical independence
between the queries and soliloquies of Tchicai, Rudd, Graves and bassist
Louis Worrell on the group's ESP debut, which was honed only slightly
for Mohawk (Fontana, 1965, with Reggie Workman replacing
Worrell). One might have expected Tchicai to continue such small group
subversion to continue upon his return to Europe. He eventually did,
in groups with Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, Derek Bailey and John
Stevens, but his first recording upon returning to Denmark was of
a decidedly different ilk.
Tchicai’s work with percussionists like Graves, Moses, Murray,
Elvin Jones and Louis Moholo had to have an effect on his rhythmic
concepts, which are based on a complex dynamic of repetition, elaboration
and subversion. But to develop them in an orchestral context was extraordinarily
ambitious and without precedent in his discography, and the results
pretty mind-bending. Tchicai formed Cadentia Nova Danica in 1967-68,
thanks to an opportunity given him by Danish Radio in response to
a demand to put together weekly programs of Danish new music. In its
initial incarnation, the group included Steinmetz, Harrit, Vogel,
Bruel, Steffen Andersen, trombonist Kim Menzer and percussionists
Giorgio Musoni and Ivan Krill. Recorded in Aarhus on October 27, 1968
at one of these Danish Radio concerts, Cadentia Nova Danica
was released in Germany and England as Polydor 583.770 and reissued
on Intercord/Freedom (FLP 40137) in the mid 70s, with its most recent
appearance on Japanese Trio (PA-9716) – but it has never come
out on CD. The record features most of the above band, minus Harrit
and adding a stellar conguero of unknown origin by the name
of Robidoo, on six original compositions, four by the leader and two
by Vogel. The group released one more recording, 1969’s expanded
effort Afrodisiaca (on MPS, with Steinmetz, Harrit, Andersen,
Musoni, J.C. Moses, Willem Breuker and others), but tapes apparently
exist of an unissued session featuring Cadentia Nova Danica and Musica
Elettronica Viva.
Vogel’s "Inside Thule" opens the set, tensely balanced
between a spare, rustling funereal dirge and hushed Ligeti-like soundmasses,
as a call from the altos sets off the trio of drummers into a loose
processional, horns diving, slashing, yodelling and shouting in drunken
revelry. Menzer’s plunger tailgate recalls Roswell Rudd's standout
bravado in a brief solo statement before the group rights itself for
a quick thematic rejoinder. Tchicai’s penchant for Danish folk
songs and popular melodies is present in his lilting "Lilanto
Del Indio" – it's childlike in its schmaltzy innocence,
yet the weight of what has preceded it imbues the tune with an inherent
sombreness. Bruel takes a colourful, dense and impressionistic piano
solo over orchestral pedal tones, and there's a brief conga-piano
conversation before the piece abruptly fades. "Kirsten",
also a Tchicai original, is an infectious swagger, mostly for brass,
bass, baritone and drums over which Robidoo takes it out with some
of the most intense and varied free conga soloing I've ever heard.
He pirouettes over the ensemble before settling into a trio with the
“jazz” drummers, and takes centre stage as the traps enter
into a holding pattern. Krill and Musoni create a Sunny Murray-like
acoustic wave field, but Robidoo keeps ratcheting up a notch while
the traps add textural tension, a foggy canvas for his dense web.
The march-like theme returns, and a snippet of one of Tchicai’s
nagging brays is slowed down and expanded into an unwieldy but yet
somehow swinging orchestral mass, the leader riding above until he
naturally fades into the ensemble, a vamp of peaks and valleys sashaying
itself out the door. A dense, almost ritualistic percussive call starts
off "Orga Fleur Super Asam," as Bruel’s slinky baritone
enters over tympani and conga before getting pummeled into pastoralism.
Sinuous bass, filigree piano and liquid alto herald a second section
in which Tchicai solos above jaunty toms and gongs, and the tension
is maintained by rapid-fire African percussion and eddying rhythms,
before the music finally segues into Vogel’s brief "Nova"
theme. "På Tirsdag," which Tchicai later revisited
unaccompanied on John Tchicai Solo plus Albert Mangelsdorff
(SAJ, 1977), is insistent yet fragmentary in its keening soliloquy,
as rustling drum echoes and Andersen’s rubbery electric bass
pile sonic sludge around it.
Without
doubt the recording quality adds an interesting dimension to this
session: even taking into account the exigencies of a radio broadcast,
the fact that Robidoo and the bass are the most foregrounded elements
while horns and drummers sound as though they were in separate rooms
certainly makes for an interesting mix. Much of the music sounds distant,
as though trying to climb out of the muck it finds itself half-buried
in – one has to strain to hear its cries, let alone its conversations.
It’s not so much a bad recording as a strange one,
but what sets it apart from other music of the period – and
what is particularly telling with respect to Tchicai’s work
– is that for being so singularly rhythmic in its conception,
there is a constant effort made to not only undermine but destroy
any sort of traditional polyrhythmic structure. With guitarist Pierre
Døerge and the New Jungle Orchestra, Tchicai would later adopt
a less subversive approach to mass and time, an Afro-European synthesis
that wouldn’t have been possible without Cadentia. Whereas detailed
analysis exists of the work of European free orchestras like Globe
Unity and the Brotherhood of Breath, as groups exploring the difficult
terrain between the two aesthetic poles, Tchicai's ensemble has escaped
significant notice in the history of this music. Rather than letting
it slip out of sight in the annals of European jazz history, Cadentia
Nova Danica deserves the treatment of a visible reissue.–CA
[photo courtesy John Shelton]
Maurizio
Bianchi
DEAD COLOURS
Silentes
Maurizio
Bianchi + Nimh
TOGETHER'S SYMPHONY
Silentes
Aube
REWORKS MAURIZIO BIANCHI VOL. 1
Silentes
Maurizio
Bianchi
M. B. ARCHIVES
Vinyl-On-Demand
 From
being an obscure experimentalist, Italian de-composer Maurizio Bianchi,
after rising like a phoenix from his own ashes (after ceasing activities
with the 1984's Armaghedon), has become something of a present-day
icon. And deservedly so. Since his return in 1998 Bianchi –
these days a fervent Jehovah’s Witness – has produced
a seemingly unstoppable flow of releases on Emanuele Carcano’s
Ees’t label, though many have gone sadly unnoticed and little
reported, perhaps because non-Anglo Saxons have to struggle for second
or third place billing in the current cultural climate. Nevertheless,
Bianchi’s position at the uneasy fringes of outrageous, unclassifiable
or outsider music is held in high esteem by the small community that
appreciates such work, and he's duly respected for his unswerving
commitment to his inner dictum. That said, since his return, noiseheads
have been largely disappointed, as the beloved nihilistic manifestos
of cruel, isolationist Industrial loops and splices have been recast
in the form of pensive keyboardism bordering on ambient / New Age.
But Bianchi's commitment to his new aesthetic is as total as it was
before, and what results is a music that manages to be at one and
the same time obsessive and utterly sedating. Dead Colours
is a case in point. Originally conceived between 1997 and 1999, it
presents a challenging addendum to the trilogy of albums Colori,
First Day/Last Day and Dates that set the scene for
the more uneasy fragmentary excursions of Frammenti and Antarctic
Mosaic. Taking up the whole disc, it drifts from bleak, spiralling
sombre synthesizers to smooth, flowing piano (the kind of shimmering
atmospheric soundscapes Harold Budd might have contributed to Eno’s
On Land if he hadn't already appeared on The Plateaux
of Mirrors), a pensive, suspenseful atmosphere of bright tones
and melodic figures vanishing into the ether.
 Bianchi’s
recent collaboration with Rome’s self-styled "ambient-electronic-ethnic-experimental
musician" Giuseppe Verticchio, aka Nimh, is documented in the
mammoth four CD box, Together’s Symphony, which brings
together two joint ventures and two solo offerings, one each. Verticchio's
Subterranean Thoughts is sourced from fragile field recordings,
encrypted in secret electronic transmissions and recontextualised
into fields of drone and crisp buzz. The collaborative venture Secluded
Truths exists in a gloomy habitat of otherworldly decaying loops,
trademark Bianchi minimal pianism, and Nimh’s cosmic couriers
of sequenced, discarded voices. The pace is leisurely and the atmosphere
ethereal. The other duo disc, Together’s Symphony,
consists in fact of tracks composed separately by each artist. It's
a quieter affair, warm, textured and dauntingly elegiac. Bianchi’s
solo Niddah Emmhna, based on a chapter of Leviticus, falls
into two prolonged symphonies apparently relating to globular activity,
the first juxtaposing the aural poison of metallic ambiance with mesmerizing,
constantly overlapping eruptions of "erythrocyte frequencies"
(to quote Bianchi), the second a journey through a recurring motif
of morphed "neurologic piano" and blackening feedback. It's
a masterpiece of subtly disturbing sound-sculpturing that recalls
the work of Akifumi Nakajima, aka Aube, whose own Aube Reworks
Maurizio Bianchi is a set of seemingly endless de-decompositions
of Bianchi's M.I. Nheem Alysm (2004) in which Nikajima adds
a sense of ascetic sluggishness to the already Spartan development
of the original, generating micro-organic orchestras fiercely concentrated
on the nature of sound and its hypnotic properties.
 With
M.B. Archives, Vinyl On Demand has produced yet another weighty
5 vinyl glossy box set which, if you're an annual subscriber as the
label recommends – and it's a damn good idea considering what's
on offer this year – comes with a bonus 7" of Bianchi’s
earliest incarnation, Sacher-Pelz. Compiling all the tapes he released
on his own label between 1980 and 1983, namely Com.SA, Computer
S.p.A., Voyeur Tape, Noise-O-Rama, Cold Tape, Dicembre 1980, Industrial
Tape, S.F.A.G., I.B.M. and Technology 1, it provides,
along with the two 5CD boxes, Archeo MB 1 and 2
on Ees’t, a definitive overview of Bianchi’s early work.
Siegmar Fricke's remastering and digital transfer of the tapes is
immaculate, not that Bianchi never showed the slightest interest in
sound quality, hi-fi, lo-fi or even no-fi. By the time he reached
his mid twenties, he'd digested punk, Industrial, musique concrète,
contemporary instrumental and electronic music, and was ready to disgorge
his mass media discomfort on a society harassed by government corruption
and the threatened liberation promised by the Brigate Rosse, with
the heights (depths?) of disco as its accompanying escapist soundtrack.
Bianchi's visionary manifestos embraced the no-nothingness of abstract
noise assault, whether dealing with the self-generative uncontrollability
of its inner structure, the chance possibilities of systematic trial
and error, or self-devised methods of composition he called de-composition.
This essentially was a strategic rearrangement of deliberately obscured
sound sources, especially other people’s, using a Lucier-like
procedure (cf I Am Sitting in A Room) of disfiguration (re-recording
the original source until it became but a trace), primitive effects,
loops and, notoriously, by deceptive stop-starts of tape decks and
turntables. Even his use of presets and effects was unorthodox, his
Korg synth, Roland KS20 rhythm-box, Echo-box, a two-track tape machine
often disintegrating into feedback atoms of pink noise. Bianchi's
aims and methodology were as shocking and deceptive as they were resolute,
and almost a quarter century later they've lost nothing of their vitality.
However he samples or reproduces the spirit of German electronic music
(early Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, Conrad Schnitzler, Sesselberg,
Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s collective) or post-Etudes de Bruits
musique concrète, Bianchi always ends up with a highly personal
synthesis, informal, almost burlesque. Not surprisingly, since he
was hanging around with the likes of William Bennett (Whitehouse,
Come Org), Nigel Ayers (Nocturnal Emissions), Philippe Fichot (Die
Form) and Monte Cazazza, the music is steeped in the kind of infatuated
Industrial negation Boyd Rice explored with his decentred/locked/looped
grooves: disorientation by shock tactics. Take for instance Technology
1, whose penetrating rainbow electronics are embedded in dissonant
amplified signals that churn and weave distortedly, a floating sculpture
of multidirectional sound mass. Or Cold Tape’s claustrophobic
tape acceleration, medium as message, repeating its mutant sequences
to form an irregular continuum of deranged trance-like squeaks, abruptly
switching to the disturbance of backward turntables, their broken
loops a distant recollection of Neu!’s experiments with velocity
and the inherent imperfections of recorded media. Although Bianchi’s
predilection for momentum and abrasion creates an urgent apotheosis,
his selection and use of material does obey clear compositional rules
of his own creation. Noise-O-Rama’s exemplary use of
sudden feedback explosions set against a modular wave constriction
shows how far his technique could develop from minimalist principles
without ever repeating itself. Elsewhere, Com.SA's linear
electronics conflagrate with no apparent narrative logic, while S.F.A.G
illuminates symphonic vistas of empowering magnitude anticipating
Black Light District’s mournful, mellotron-like saturation.
There's simply no way to discover all the worlds these recordings
create at one listen, since they reveal something new and extraordinary
at each hearing, not only as historical artefacts but as eternally
contemporary documents of pure artistic rage. Consume with caution.–MA
RESONANCE
Vol.10 No.2
London Musicians Collective
www.l-m-c.org.uk
Magazine (64pp) + CD
Continuing
this month's theme of reviewing things that by now are old enough
to have disappeared altogether (though in this case not yet I hope)
I was delighted to find a copy of this edition of Resonance magazine
in the letterbox, sent my way presumably by editor Caroline Kraabel.
As the house organ of the LMC, it's always a good read and this particular
number is no exception. Subtitled "Locality & Reproduction",
it explores various aspects of those two concepts – with a bit
more of the more of the latter than the former, perhaps. On the subject
of Locality, the most substantial article is Susan Alcorn's "Texas:
Three Days and Two Nights", a mini tour diary packed full of
the kind of detail I love to read: "Elvis used to perform at
Magnolia Gardens on the banks of the San Jacinto River as it widened
before emptying itself into the Gulf Of Mexico and at the Harbor Lights
near the Ship Channel, which, before closing in the mid-Nineties,
was a popular watering hole for Norwegian and Greek sailors, motorcycle
gangs and prostitutes. When I played there, the piano player kept
a loaded pistol on top of his keyboard, and the musicians openly smoked
pot on the bandstand. This was one bar the police never entered."
 As you
can well imagine, being a free improvising pedal steel guitarist isn't
exactly a full-time job guaranteed to pay all the bills, so Alcorn
makes ends meet by playing the kind of repertoire more usually associated
with the magnificent instrument: Country and Western. It's an affectionate
if slightly hair-raising description of a scene most folks, especially
here in Old Europe, can only try to imagine: "Everyone in the
band is dressed in blue jeans and Brooks & Dunn style western
shirts. Before we start the first song the singer shouts out, 'Are
there any rednecks out there?' A tepid response. He tries again. I
said, 'ARE THERE ANY REDNECKS OUT THERE?' A slightly better response.
Then he yells, ' Can I hear a Yee Haw?' A few people shout out, 'Yee
Haw', and the band begins to play. [..] The bass player, playing a
big old fretless bass (a big no-no in C&W) is hopelessly and blissfully
out of tune." And yet despite the horror stories of whisky soaked
musicians dying in the street, KKK school principals and point blank
shootings, this is home to Alcorn, and she describes it with as much
love as detail: "As much as this part of Texas repulses me and
sometimes scares me, I don't for a minute forget that this forgotten
murky backwoods is a cradle of American culture both black and white."
Sachiko M's "Sayonara Off Site", bemoaning the demise of
Tokyo's mythic improv venue, is as minimal and sparse as much of the
music that was performed there in its brief history (for a more informative
overview of that particular scene, check out Clive Bell's piece in
The Wire a while back). Chris Cutler's "A Personal Note about
Locality" is more substantial, and certainly worth the price
of admission for the archive photo of Henry Cow (dig the sideboards,
Fred). Another venue that closed its doors to improvised music in
November 2005 was London's Bonnington Centre, where the brothers Bohman
– Adam and Jonathan – had been curating concerts since
July 2000, for the first of which, Adam wryly notes, "there must
have been quite a big audience, relatively speaking, because each
musician got £6 after the float money and the room hire were
taken out." What prompted the closure of the Bonnington wasn't
a lack of enthusiasm – there's never been a shortage of that
in London's improvised music scene, which is as vibrant and creative
as ever despite being in permanent survival mode (providing you're
happy to play for six quid) – but a change in British licensing
law, the impact of which Kraabel and Hamish Birchall discuss in "Have
You Tried The Palace?"
The most interesting stuff comes when we get to Reproduction, beginning
with a fascinating discussion between Michael Parsons and John Tilbury
on the various recorded versions of Haydn's 1793 Fantasia in F.
What a welcome change to read practitioners of today's music talking
with precision and erudition about a piece written 213 years ago (even
if the article is peppered, rather curiously, with quotations from
the writings of Morton Feldman, not that they're inappropriate)! The
accompanying CD contains extracts from the Haydn piece as performed
by Tilbury himself and Wanda Landowska in 1957. Editor Kraabel's questions
and comments are apposite and thought-provoking, no more so than in
"Enthusiasm for Another Area", the interview she conducts
with John Butcher. Butcher's an articulate chap, and always gives
a good interview if asked the right questions, and this is an especially
clear and intelligent discussion of how he perceives the relationships
that exist between his saxophone(s) and the electronics, which he's
explored on several recent albums, notably his Fringes solo Invisible
Ear, a track from which appears on the accompanying CD.
 Kraabel's
other full-length interview is "DANGER: User-serviceable Parts",
with Joe Banks aka Disinformation, who goes into plenty of detail
on his Wimshurst Machines, Crookes Tubes and Violet Ray wands. And,
if the photograph of Banks performing his "National Grid"
behind a very prominent sign saying "VERY LIVE ELECTRICITY! ABSOLUTELY
DO NOT TOUCH" isn't fun enough, there's a nice juicy story of
how some "sort of rugby types" in the audience found out
exactly how painful a little jab of Violet Ray wand can be. Banks
deadpans that "a large Tesla Coil [is] SO dangerous you could
easily kill yourself or a member of the audience, and even I'm not
irresponsible enough to take that kind of risk." Bloody good
job this kind of gear never ended up in the hands of G.G. Allin is
what I say.
There are entertaining and informative discussions of individual musicians'
personal practices, in the form of Sarah Washington's "Please
Undo Me (A Circuit Bender's Plea") and Sylvia Hallett's "Corruption
& Trickery: My Personal Path Through Electronic Music", and
both women's work is featured on the CD too ("Insul", by
Washington's DIY electronic collective P Sing Cho, and Hallett's "Ligurian
Transport"). Elsewhere Michael Chanan's "Six Reflections
on Music and Memory" is a treasure trove of perceptive and quotable
anecdotes, well backed up with appropriate and unpretentious (for
once) quotes from and references to Barthes, Freud and Koestler, and
there are also some choice extracts from the recent re-edition of
Evan Eisenberg's wonderfully readable discussion of the history of
recorded sound The Recording Angel. Originally published
in 1987, it anticipated many of the consequences of recorded music's
migration from analogue to digital, if not its sheer scale. "Music
has come full circle," he writes in the Afterword to the 2004
edition. "But the geometry is not what I foretold. My compass
seems to have been faulty. Music has indeed slipped the surly bonds
of vinyl. It has shed its thinghood. It has reentered the lepidopteral
realm of the fleeting, the flitting, the ephemeral. But not by entering
the noosphere or the Samian kingdom of numbers, both of which are
now so crowded with bits, bytes, tones, takes, riffs, mixes and mash-ups
that no one can hear anything. The tyranny of digits, I now understand,
must pass. Its slaves will either be deafened by their own headphones
or else will turn, in exhaustion, to the stuff from which music was
anciently hewn: the lungs, tongues, and sinews of men and women acting
upon catgut, horsehair, cow hide, bone, wood, reed and empty air."
Which takes us the quotation that prefaces Phil England's magnificent
and supremely depressing "Ecology of Sound Technology":
"The problem with electronics is that you're using a dead energy
in the first place – fossil fuel. What'll they do when it's
used up?" That comes from Phil Minton (who has been known, however,
to use a mic when necessary, and admits it later in the magazine),
and sets the scene for an article full of disturbing revelations,
solidly backed up by links to environmental / ecology-conscious websites,
not so much food for thought as a veritable banquet, though by the
time you've read through to the end you feel guilty about even putting
the kettle on to make a cup of tea, let alone switching on your computer
to forward England's gloomy predictions to a friend by email.
 One
of the artists England cites as having taken some concrete pro-environmental
action is Matthew Herbert, who's decided to limit himself to one flight
a year (you might want to check out why by reading "The Environmental
Effects of Aviation in Flight" at www.rcep.org.uk/avreport.htm).
As Herbert wrote in the liners to his last album, "It was going
to be difficult to criticise apples being flown from New Zealand to
England all year round if I was then taking flights myself every weekend.
[..] I will also be delighted to leave the pitifully weak and uninspired
vision of the world presented to us by airlines and airports.."
To which cynics might add Matthew Herbert albums. As England points
out, "Herbert's example presents a challenge to improvising musicians
whose financial survival is frequently predicated on foreign concert
and festival engagements." (Damn right, if the alternative to
a gig at a French Ministry of Culture-subsidized festival paying $500
is a jam session in the Bonnington for a fiver, which would you
choose?) Mr Herbert might be able to afford to lose 40% of his
income, but I doubt the same can be said of the other improvisers
featured in this magazine. And before you start burning up CDRs of
your music to hawk around to foreign promoters in the hope of landing
another lucrative (and ecologically catastrophic) gig, forget it.
There are those carbon emissions to think about: you can calculate
how much you are pumping out by scaring yourself at http://www.carbonneutral.com/calculators/index_world_calculator.asp.
As I write this I'm sitting on a train in Rennes station, watching
the bloke sitting opposite me use his mobile phone to call his girlfriend,
who's standing on the platform directly on the other side of the
window, less than two feet away. And to think that women and
children are getting raped, shot and tortured in one of Africa's bloodiest
civil wars, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, largely over who
gets to exploit the country's mineral resources, including Coltan,
used principally in mobile phones. Aye, lad, it's a miserable bloody
world when you think about it a bit. Fortunately, if you're prepared
to put aside such heavy considerations for a few minutes, there's
a delightful little video clip on the disc by Matt Wand of a bloke
called Mike Pendell who handcuts 78 rpms in his flat in Brighton.
True, as Bob Ostertag and Pierre Hebert's Between Science And
Garbage concludes, "today's cutting edge technology is tomorrow's
garbage," and Pendell's vinyls, like Ostertag's Tzadik CD, will
one day find themselves in a landfill site (as will we all), but while
we wait for the oceans to rise and the oil reserves of the world to
peter out, it's good to have something entertaining and passionate
to read, listen to and watch.–DW [photo of Susan Alcorn's
guitar by Ken B Miller]
Rhodri
Davies/Burkhard Beins/Lucio Capece
Ausland, Berlin
April 9th 2006
 Post
reduktionismus, referring to the German term for the movement
that in these pages is more likely to be called EAI, is a breeze that's
been blowing gently for a while here in Berlin. An air of disenchantment
with the constructive mechanics of reductionism itself seems to be
the order of the day, not that many players on the scene are keen
to comment on it; several have been seen splashing in the sonic ocean
of rampant white noise, or adding another page to John Zorn’s
game piece Cobra, though such escapades can be considered
as mere ad hoc experiments rather than deliberate attempts to free
up what, in Berlin, has always seemed a self-imposed, tough aesthetic
discipline. I am referring to the blocks of silence and tiny, gurgling
sounds that this particular kind of improv is based on, as a means
to develop a musical form which for some key players represents a
conscious ostracism of free jazz and old school improv. Such gestures,
however, quickly become pointless when repeated, codified and copied
by many. Until a couple of years ago, it was somewhat frustrating
to attend a concert where there was no discernible difference between
the players; no matter how challenging the line-up may have seemed
on paper, the music ended up sounding quite similar.
Tonight's concert featured two of reductionism's key players and prime
movers, Berlin-based (now relocated to Rome) percussionist Burkhard
Beins, and London-based harpist Rhodri Davies, teaming up with emerging
contrabass clarinet and sopranino sax player Lucio Capece, who, originally
from Argentina, set up shop in the German capital a couple of years
ago after stays in New York, Paris and Brussels. As Capece wasn’t
exposed to the early manifestations of Berlin's burgeoning redux scene,
we had (as Argentinian expats both) been exchanging shifting points
of view since. While he still adhered to the aesthetics of the conceptual
non-narrative structure and its almost concrète cubism, the
scene had for me, despite its lowercase trendiness (having attended
almost every concert that took place during those early years), reached
a point where some kind of development was required to makes things
interesting again.
If rumours were rife of renewal, it wasn’t, happily, reductionism's
noisy antithesis that was showcased tonight; it seemed more in accordance
with the principles of intimacy to keep things on the calm side. The
grey concrete structure and bare walls of Ausland, a revamped cellar
in East Berlin's fashionable Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood, is well
known for playing nasty tricks on musicians who rely on both decibel
overload and micro-acoustic subtlety, but it proved surprisingly well
suited to this set. The audience plays an important role in this kind
of musical niche market, and tonight they created a warm atmosphere;
among the punters were many players themselves – for these are
social events too, with plenty of small talk, and good opportunities
to plan future projects. I’ve seen Rhodri Davies in various
contexts, and have always had great esteem for his playing, distinctive
in whatever context, either with Apartment House doing Fluxus stuff
or exploring post-Webernian intricacies with IST. Tonight he was keen
to impart a sense of evolving warmth and reintroduce a sense of delicately
crafted, organic development, both characteristics often explicitly
ruled out in reductionism/EAI's code of conduct. Maybe it wasn't a
radical departure, but it certainly was a pleasant one. His eBowing
and electronics (recordings of his harp courtesy of John Wall) recalled
the golden tone of Richard Leinhardt's treated tam tam work, creating
an edgy dronescape for Beins' rubbed and bowed cymbals and Capece’s
bubbling contrabass clarinet to float through. Parallels could have
been drawn with Organum and Eliane Radigue too, perhaps, even if Beins
was particularly adept at abruptly interrupting an approaching climax.
The focus then was more on the product than the process, and if, to
quote the title of Mark Wastell and Mattin's opus, "reductionism
is dead", this concert was certainly a stylish eulogy. And maybe
the first time a 4/4 bass drum beat propelled the music towards its
conclusion.–MA [photo by Vitor Joaquim]
Dom
Minasi
THE VAMPIRE'S REVENGE
CDM
 With
such a stellar cast as this – wait for it: Ken Filiano, Jackson
Krall, Perry Robinson, Joe Giardullo, Jason Hwang, Tomas Ulrich, Carol
Mennie, John Gunther, Herb Robertson, Steve Swell, François
Grillot, Ras Moshe, Matthew Shipp, Mark Whitecage, Borah Bergman,
Joe McPhee, Paul Smoker, Sabir Mateen, Blaise Siwula, Peter Ratray
and Byron Olson – you can almost forgive guitarist Dom Minasi
for basing the whole project on the novels of Ann Rice. Remember Interview
With The Vampire? (The book, not the film..). Wow, that
was a while back, wasn't it? Yes, and it's taken a full decade for
the elusive guitarist – unless I'm mistaken nothing appeared
on disc between his two 1975 Blue Note albums and 1999's Finishing
Touches on CIMP – to gather together the forces necessary
for such a huge undertaking. The Vampire's Revenge is an
ambitious suite of ten major compositions ranging from the intricate
openers, "The Seduction" and "Who's Your Dentist?"
(can't decide if Perry Robinson on the former or Joe Giardullo on
the latter is more outstanding, and who cares?), to the raucous march
of "The First Day", or, on disc two, from the angular complexity
of "Blood Lust" to the thrills and spills of the closing
title track. Matthew Shipp's crunchy structuralist pianism is perfect
for "The Dark Side" – would that he spent more time
making records like this one instead of the corny rap crossover shit
on the Blue Series (plus, how many albums do you know that feature
both Shipp and Borah Bergman?). Spectacular performances abound, and
it'd be doing a disservice to all concerned to single out just one
or two, but Herb Robertson is simply awesome on the title track. The
rhythm team of Filiano and Krall is exceptional, and Minasi is everywhere,
buzzing around the charts like a mad cross between Wes Montgomery
and Sonny Sharrock. OK, the vocals, courtesy of his partner, Carol
Mennie, are a bit hysterical at times ("one more one
more onemoreonemoreONEMORE BITE!"), and the odd snatches
of the old Twilight Zone soundtrack might raise as much of
a smile as the lurid purple inner sleeve cover art, but what do you
expect from a vampire story, for Bram's sake? Even if you don't dig
Ann Rice (I don't, to be honest), you'll have to go a long way to
find a large scale project in contemporary jazz as convincing and
rewarding as this. Go on, take a bite.–DW
Reuben
Radding
FUGITIVE PIECES
Pine Ear
 An
increasing number of musicians and listeners are looking upon traditional
free jazz as a stylistic cul-de-sac, and bassist Reuben Radding confronts
the problem head on with this new disc on his own Pine Ear imprint.
Assembling an ensemble of players at the vanguard of process- and
texture-oriented improv, Radding spearheads a program of music that
borrows from electro-acoustic and ambient musics, even though the
instrumentation at first glance suggests a conventional jazz combo.
Percussionist Andrew Drury makes use of a multitude of bowed and scraped
surfaces, alternating clattering metallic dissonance with quietly
precise patter. Trumpeter Nate Wooley’s dessicated drones and
hollow breath sounds bring to mind the work of fellow tone scientists
Greg Kelley and Axel Dörner, though he also produces some striking
dynamic contrasts by throwing in more recognizable patterns. Tenor
saxophonist/clarinettist Matt Bauder rarely sticks to a strict note-based
lexicon either, instead gravitating towards harsher tonal extremes.
Radding is often similarly abstract, but his sound remains enormous:
his mighty pizzicato and thunderously humming arco still possess power
enough to rattle the rafters. Six tracks, two of them little more
than fragments, build up to the finale, "The Gradual Instant",
on which Wooley's trumpet becomes a variable-speed metronome, and
Radding's bass suggests the creak of wind-blown rigging on a sea-faring
clipper. Drones and grainy scrapes abound, as well as lulls into near-silence.
It’s a standout performance, and the piece's marathon 32-minute
length feels fully justified. A word of praise is due too for the
cover art by Susan Bowen: the images of junkyard materials recombined
into new architectural configurations beautifully complement the music.–DT
Rudi
Mahall
SOLO
psi
 The
number of solo reed recordings has grown by leaps and bounds in the
last several decades, but solitary bass clarinet recitals are still
a rarity. Recognizing the dearth, Rudi Mahall redresses the gap with
this new studio disc of unaccompanied improvisations. Collage cover
art brings to mind the visual style of Zappa while the tray card reveals
Mahall's appetite for wursts of varying hues and girths (Uncle
Meat, anyone?). The wry humour carries over into the music. Bouts
of extended technique are scattered across the seven tracks, but Mahall
doesn't clog the set with empty displays of expertise, and resists
the temptation to indulge in Dolphy-derived tics or low end spelunking.
Instead, he prefers the middle register, with results sounding sometimes
uncannily like Braxton’s work on alto saxophone, and shows a
Lacy-like attention to melody, space and repetition. Mahall makes
room for roughness and imperfection in his improvising: notes are
punctuated by audible huffing and puffing, and there's an occasional
hesitancy that initially sounds unplanned but comes to seem entirely
deliberate. The only misstep to my ears is a mercifully short segment
where he submerges the horn in water, producing a spate of gurgling
mingled with shrill overtones. Mahall has taken an instrument historically
favoured by doublers and fashioned a personal vernacular on par with
that of the saxophone family. The fact that the results are so damn
listenable almost seems like a lagniappe.–DT
David
Chiesa/Jean-Luc Guionnet/Emmanuel Petit/Eric La Casa
BELVEDERE
Creative Sources
 Although
there are several notable examples of what our Editor-In-Chief has
dubbed "environmental improvisation", I can say without
doubt that this is one of the most accomplished ones I've heard. Microphones
were placed in and around the Villa Adriana, in the Ardèche
department in southern France, home to a M. René Quinon (to
whom the record is dedicated), each feeding a mixer sensitively manoeuvred
by Eric La Casa, and the musicians walked in and out following their
own instrumental signals, "working on the construction of a sort
of an abstract and tentacle-like belvedere plunged into the acoustic
space of the place". Amidst the ever wonderful singing of various
kinds of birds and the unbelievably tuned buzz of the insects, listening
to these rarefied sounds is a privilege. The most striking tones come
from Guionnet, who explores resonant corners with his alto saxophone
by playing long extracorporeal lines that send those auricular membranes
into defence mode (all the while eliciting an interested response
from some of his chirping buddies), until he ambles out and around
with short staccato blasts that almost catch us by surprise, tiny
smoke clouds which the gentle luminosity of the day turns into silky
whispers of pliable truth. Chiesa's double bass is a house within
the house, his bow murmuring on the strings with religious respect
for silence, clicking microsounds like wood cracking and giving under
the heat – picture an enlarged sonic photograph of Nikos Veliotis
taken by Mark Dresser. Guitarist Petit remains barely visible, yet
his feedback heightens the sense of tranquillity and excites wasps
and flies, whose constant drone becomes a garden ceremony. Waves of
charged string resonance – an infinitesimal fraction of Chatham/Branca-like
turbulence – cross paths with Chiesa’s vibrational sensitivity
and Guionnet’s ghost notes, skeletal textures reacting to the
kind of magic that the Villa Adriana seems to transmit to the artists
in their obscure evocation of inscrutable figures who approach, summoned
by the sound, but remain too shy to show their handsome faces. The
concluding dialogue between Guionnet, a passing plane and the forest
voices is finally interrupted by a car stopping nearby, abruptly indicating
that it's time to go. Too bad.–MR
Agnès
Palier/Olivier Toulemonde
ROCCA
Creative Sources
 Agnès
Palier seems to find her sounds inside a small cave within herself,
enervated emissions of breath and tiny vibrations of vocal cords coalescing
into a highly personal fairyland – without the happy ending.
Although a singer coming from a classical/jazz background, she uses
her tools with a sort of repressed anxiety that sets the overall tone
of Rocca close to those transcendental absurd theatre pieces
which have the audience either scratching their heads or wailing in
approval. Embryonic phonemes and timbral nuances coagulate according
to their own strange morphology, at times sounding like a cassette
player left on a towel at the beach with the batteries running out
and the tape melting. Olivier Toulemonde's discreet amplified objects
are the perfect complement to Palier’s frail digressions, microsonic
crumbles, and percussive clucks and snaps; the deconstructed machinery
of his caressing whispers underlines Palier's suffering postures,
like those muffled earthquake thump-and-drag sounds made by children
at play in the apartment above you. A valuable experience in uncomfortable
pleasure and an inquisitive dismemberment of your listening attitudes.–MR
Tom
Djll
BELLEROPHONE
SMUDGE
Soul On Rice
 Most
of you out there could, if pushed, come up with a nice little list
of so-called extended techniques trumpeters (I'm beginning to wonder
if we shouldn't abandon the "extended techniques" moniker
altogether, so widespread these days is the use of hisses, gurgles
and wet splats, not to mention unconventional mutes and mic placements):
Axel Dörner, Greg Kelley, Franz Hautzinger, Matt Davis, Nate
Wooley, Masafumi Ezaki, Ruth Barberán – and Tom Djll.
But perhaps the Santa Cruz CA-based trumpeter isn't as familiar to
you as he should be. Though active in the lively Bay Area improv scene,
Djll's recordings aren't all that easy to come by, especially here
in Old Europe. Mutooator, a stunning set of duets with musicians
including William Winant, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Tom Nunn and Myles Boisen,
and the splendid Signs Of Life (with Matt Ingalls, Bhob Rainey
and Jack Wright) are both well worth tracking down, and they're joined
now by not one but two new Djll offerings, Bellerophone and
Smudge. Both reveal the trumpeter as an alarmingly versatile
player, and someone who's not prepared to rule out certain more "traditional"
ways of playing just for the sake of ideological purity (unlike, perhaps,
Dörner, who tends to keep his avant improv chops at a safe distance
from his more conventional outings with Die Enttäuschung and
Alex von Schlippenbach). Sure, on Bellerophone, there's plenty
of ominous sub-bass growling (the title track), spitty blustering
("Feelautomie"), eerie whistling ("Gastrophonie")
and innovative split channel mute work ("Haveitbothwaysophony"
– shades of Ben Neill's mutantrumpet), but there's also a hilarious
version of "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" on which he
sounds like a giant kazoo.
 On
Smudge Djll extends his already wide vocabulary using a Serge
Analog Synthesizer and digital processing to produce seven tracks
of enormous variety and colour, from the high register acoustic beatfest
of "Oxide" via the nasty mangled noise of "Flame"
and the sweeping drones of "Schizt" to the ghostly resonances
of "Patina". The horn is still recognizable, especially
on the queasy "Exfoliate" and the ultra-reductionist "Covalents",
and the most substantial offering, "Split", multitracks
Djll's split-tone technique to create a one man Scelsi brass band.
With typical modesty Djll cites Kyle Bruckmann's Gasps & Fissures
and John Butcher's Invisible Ear as influences, but he has
no need to be "in awe of [their] musicianship, attitude and generally
evolved level of intelligence." Smudge is a worthy companion.
Check it out. And Bellerophone too.–DW
Terry
Day
INTERRUPTIONS
Emanem
 You
don't see many one man bands about these days (remember Dick Van Dyke
in Mary Poppins?) – after all, who needs to strap cymbals
and bass drums to ankles and elbows when at the click of a mouse a
machine about the size and weight of a Sunday paper can unleash a
truly apocalyptic barrage of noise? But these 32 recordings by Terry
Day, a one man band – People Band, that is –
if ever there was one, date from those happy times when even CDs were
just a figment of somebody's imagination. Originally earmarked for
a cassette only release in 1981, they were recorded for the most part
in various apartments and studios in London, Newcastle, Luton - and
Amsterdam's STEIM. Day was (presumably still is, though he's sadly
not as active now as he used to be) the quintessential "second
generation" improviser – though that's a stoopid appellation
if ever there was one, because the People Band he helped to found
was one of the very first improvising outfits in the early
days of 60s free music – meaning an ability to play as many
different instruments as possible in as many different styles, more
often than not at breakneck speed, was the order of the day. Unsurprisingly,
in terms of aesthetic, the music on Interruptions recalls
Day's other outfits of the time, notably Alterations, but here, with
the exception of one brief appearance by Davey Payne and two by Alterations'
Peter Cusack, he's all alone, creating his own orchestra by (decidedly
primitive) multitracking. The number of instruments he gets his hands
on is typically bewildering – in addition to your good old standard
piano, cello, saxophone and electric organ, the list includes bird
toy warblers, bamboo pipe, Chinese flute, African thumb piano, mandolin,
poppers (?!), balloons, plastic trumpet, kazoo and a Michel Waisvisz
crackle box – but if that isn't enough, fans of his raspy singing
voice won't be disappointed. On "Be A Good Boy" (music by
Cusack, btw) he sings along to a farty oompah that's as deliciously
dumb as his lyrics, and on "It Ain't My Cup Of Tea" there's
more than a smattering of Johnny Rotten in the delivery and articulation.
In terms of recording quality I think we can safely say that this
one isn't going to end up with a Grand Prix de Disque from the Academie
Charles Cros, but for sheer fun and raw creativity, it's hard to match.
Let's hear it for Terry Day, the man that put the mental into instrumental.–DW
Paul
Hood / Michael Rodgers
CASTLES
TwoThousandAnd
 Michael
Rodgers is, like John Bisset, proof that free improvised acoustic
guitar music can be tonal, even rhythmic, without necessarily sounding
like a dawn raid on the John Fahey back catalogue. On "Three
Scenes For The Black Fortress", Paul Hood's skipping disc lays
the foundations of a B major drone that Rodgers happily builds on
with some heavy low strumming. If anyone ever released an album of
unplugged stoner metal, it might sound something like this, were it
not for those turntables. But Paul Hood is a refreshingly original
turntablist who evidently had as much fun spiking the drinks with
snippets of Arthurian legend, dubby videogame bleeps, low flying aircraft
and revving motorbikes as he and Rodgers did gulping them down. So-called
"second generation" British improvising outfits like Alterations
were always good at supercolliding diverse musical genres, but while
their work was often anarchic and frantic, a mad dash down the aisles
of the supermarket throwing things willy nilly into the caddie, these
eight brief tracks by Hood & Rodgers are more of a leisurely stroll
through the stylistic backwoods. And what a joyfully unpretentious
outing it is.–DW
Pascale
Labbé / Jean Morières
UN BON SNOB NU
Signature
 In
case, like me, you've passed 40 and now have to hold Japanese import
CD reissue gatefolds at arm's length to read the small print (I think
the word is "presbyopic" or something), this handsome twofer
comes with a huge foldout insert you could probably read from about
50 metres away, though it doesn't tell you much more than the track
titles that are already printed on the box. Unless, that is, you happen
to like that slightly intellectual verbiage, sprinkled with just a
hint of pretentiousness, that used to characterize those old In Situ
liner notes. I can pass on the palindromic album title too, to be
honest – let's skip the words and concentrate on the music.
Improvising vocalist Pascale Labbé hasn't released much in
recent times, and flautist Jean Morières, like that other reclusive
player of the same instrument, Jérôme Bourdellon, hasn't
exactly flooded the bins with product either – all the more
reason to rejoice at this collection of 26 brief but superbly executed
and magnificently recorded duets (sometimes more than duets, too,
since our two protagonists aren't averse to a little multitracking
here and there). Labbé's work makes for an interesting comparison
with Agnès Palier's (see elsewhere), but remains more, erm,
mainstream (i.e. most of the time she actually sounds like what you
would call "singing"..). Similarly, Morières apparently
has little time for extended techniques – Jim Denley / Alessandra
Rombolá he is not – which all makes for the kind of album
of improvised music you could, at a pinch, play to your mum and dad
when they come round for afternoon tea without risking serious domestic
trauma. Also, although all 26 tracks could quite happily have been
contained on one disc, it's rather nice to see the set split into
two halves, reinforcing the symmetry of the gatefold / duo / palindrome
idea.–DW
Mattin
& Cremaster
BARCELONA
Audiobot
 Not
a collaboration between Basque laptop terrorist Mattin and cult filmmaker
Matthew Barney, unfortunately (shame – sure he could have done
a better job than la Björk). Cremaster, in case you
don't know, is the Barcelona-based EAI duo of Ferran Fages (feedback
mixing board) and Alfredo Costa Monteiro (guitar and pickups). No
surprises here as to what to expect: lots of decidedly user-unfriendly
noise, some of it relatively harmless – fine static drizzle,
sprinkles of pops and clicks – some of it pretty obnoxious,
ranging from howls of feedback to all-out screaming. It's jolly enjoyable
stuff, if you like that kind of thing, wonderful for a hangover (as
in Vyvyan's famous question to Mike in The Young Ones: "What's
good for a hangover?" "How about drinking the night before?")
but if you've got several Mattin or Cremaster albums in your collection
you can probably do without this one. That said, if you have
got several Mattin or Cremaster albums in your collection you're probably
an Iberian Peninsula EAI / noise completist, in which case you won't
want to pass it by.–DW
Joel
Stern / Anthony Guerra
OUTDOOR BOWERS
Pseudoarcana
 A
lot of EAI these days has that inner city claustrophobia, humming
like a substation or clattering like a cotton mill, but there's a
distinctly rustic feel to proceedings here, not only in the album
title and cover art, but in Stern's field recordings, which range
from squeaky gates to all manner of flying creatures, tweeting, clacking,
buzzing and twittering. Along with Guerra's explorations of the upper
partials of sustained bowed tones, the title track sounds like Arnold
Dreyblatt on a summer holiday on a poultry farm in the Gers. Le
bonheur est dans le pré, quoi. "Old Whitechapel Silence"
moves indoors, with Guerra's delicate pings and tweaks accompanied
by a rattle of cutlery and crockery that sounds like it was recorded
on a microphone hidden inside a teapot. The harmonies Guerra sketches
in on "Rainy Day Woman #5" are relatively tonal, though
not as unashamedly so as on his recent solo outing Empty Kingdoms.
The final "Avierys" returns to the open air, planes miles
above in a clear blue sky, birds singing merrily away somewhere in
the distance, but its intricate rustles and scrapes are perhaps best
appreciated on headphones. Beautiful stuff.–DW
Doc
Chad
DUCK, CHAD
House of Chadula
 Eugene
Chadbourne’s greatest virtue is that he doesn’t take himself
too seriously (would that other so-called "free" improvisers
followed suit more often), and Duck, Chad is a glorious selection
of covers, standards, improvisations and protest songs recorded and/or
documented during 2004 and 2005 in venues and studios in USA and Germany.
In keeping with the samizdat aesthetics of the release, the package
consists of assembled collages glued onto old record sleeves with
the CD-R. The opener, Nick Drake’s "One of These Things
First", played on 12-string guitar with some additional German
musicians, starts with a paraphrased intro of Tom Waits’ version
of "Somewhere" and is followed by "Grey", with
lyrics written by Chadbourne’s daughter Lizzie. Right after,
Chadbourne sessions on Captain Beefheart tunes in New Haven with Doctor
Dark band, playing some mean guitar on "Veteran’s Day Poppy"
and "Plastic Factory". Harburg/Allen’s "If I
Were King of the Forest" presents the Doctor's growlingly ironic
vocals accompanied by Brian Jackson, pianist of Gil Scott Heron’s
band (remember?). On the traditional "Rattler" Jackson helps
Chadbourne out on flute, while Chadbourne’s "Old Piano"
and the Heron/ Jackson classic "Lady Day and John Coltrane"
are banjo and piano duets. Chadbourne’s improv chops are once
more to the fore in a duo with Han Bennink, playing Coleman’s
"Legend of Bebop" (I only wish I could see it on DVD). The
rest consists of solo tracks, including the hilariously premonitory
"Cheney’s Hunting Ducks", recorded months (!) before
Mr Cheney had a bad day hunting, "Lyndy", dedicated to the
torturing lady officer from Abu Ghraib prison, a C&W arrangement
of Coltrane’s "Pursuance" and "Sleeping through
Concerts", where Chadbourne remembers his days of being a music
critic.-VJ
Vinko
Globokar
LA TROMBA E' MOBILE
Atopos
 It's
not just the album title that refers to Verdi: in the 1980 work that
gives this album its name, Vinko Globokar quotes not only "La
Donna e' Mobile" but also a paso doble, tango, bolero and even
a funeral march, interrupted by blasts of car horns, sirens, police
megaphones and whistles as the players – here a group of (sadly
unnamed) students – move around the performance space (which
can be anything from a traditional concert hall to a sports stadium
or a public square, the composer informs us) in accordance with various
predetermined geometrical figures. The music is "simple and easy
to play", but is probably more fun in concert than it is on disc,
like its upmarket "serious contemporary" older cousin, Stockhausen's
Ylem. Dédoublement is a tougher nut to crack, but
there's more protein in it. The clarinettist – here Michael
Riessler – is required to perform "increasingly complex
sounds" while simultaneously controlling the head tension of
two pedal timpani, and playing the clarinet in close proximity to
the mighty drums, modulating the sound in quite remarkable quasi-electronic
ways.
Globokar, as well as being a prolific and resourceful composer, is
also a fine trombonist, best known for his work in the improvising
group New Phonic Art, from 1969 to 1982, and as a member of Stockhausen's
band in Aus den Sieben Tagen (touchy subject that –
wrangles over royalties eventually leading him to appear on the discs
merely as "Anonym"). Globokar and his former NPA playing
partner, percussionist Jean-Pierre Drouet hadn't played together for
nearly twenty years before these two tracks, respectively 25 and 6
minutes in duration, were recorded in Sogna in September 2001. And
recorded quite superbly – every wheeze and splutter is right
in your earhole. It's a reminder that Globokar's name belongs with
Rutherford and Malfatti in the Improv Trombone Hall Of Fame. Meanwhile
Drouet, trained as a classical percussionist and delightfully free
from the prevailing dogma, isn't averse to the odd foot-tapping pulse,
not to mention throaty Indian war whoops, and the two men are clearly
having a ball (so is the audience). It's a shame, in a way, that improvised
music as mature and dynamic as this should be hidden away on a contemporary
music label such as Atopos instead of on a higher profile improv imprint
like, say, Emanem, but it's well worth seeking out.–DW
Phill
Niblock
TOUCH THREE
Touch
 This
triple CD set starts right where 2003's Touch Food left off,
adding another chapter to the recorded history of dronemeister Niblock,
the guru of outrageous auricular membrane excitation. Static minimalism
has never sounded so full of movement. Disc one opens with Seth Josel's
eBowed acoustic guitars, and on Sethwork the tiny acoustic
imperfections deriving from adjacent resonating strings are perceptible
in the harmonic cloud generated by the superimposition of tones typical
of the composer's method. The second track – contrary to what's
erroneously printed on the CD itself – is Lucid Sea,
featuring the alien wooden flute-like sounds of Lucia Mense's recorders,
a gradual oceanic drift from octave consonance towards serious microtonal
vibrational skull massage. The powerful low frequencies of Arne Deforce's
cello on Harm trigger the kind of irregular oscillation of
acoustic beats which is clearly perceptible even at volume levels
lower than Niblock recommends. It's simply sublime, a celestial bagpipe
weeping for a dying forest, another milestone in this man's oeuvre.
For Parker's Altered Mood, aka, Owed To Bird, which opens
the second CD, the composer asked German saxophonist Ulrich Krieger
to choose a Charlie Parker theme to build the piece on, and the resulting
take on "Mood" (six superimposed recordings of the first
thirteen notes of the theme) is Touch Three's most luminous
and meditative offering: think Jon Gibson and Dickie Landry's lines
in Glass' Music With Changing Parts played into the wind,
all slippery quarter tones and phantom harmonics. When you hear music
like this, a different light shines on reality. Another saxophonist,
Austrian Martin Zrost, lends his name to Zrost, in which
the interference patterns of his soprano, though perhaps a little
easier on the ears than some of the other pieces on offer here, still
leave you feeling like you're standing on the quayside waving goodbye
to your loved ones as they sail off to battle, warships blasting their
horns as they pull away from the shore. Impressive stuff, and it needs
all the space of a large room to be fully appreciated, especially
after 16 minutes or so, when those giant helicopters zoom in. Franz
Hautzinger plays trumpet on Not Yet Titled, which starts
out with a "normal" intervallic layering of tones until
something happens halfway through, an enormous swarm of bees invade
the living room to dispel whatever false sense of security you've
been lulled into, aided and abetted by a squadron of Lambrettas and
an orchestra of didjeridoos (both non-existent, of course). Valence,
featuring Julia Eckhardt's viola, begins the third disc by returning
to the principles of spectral staticity that always seem to correspond
perfectly to Niblock's choice of string instruments. Its complex mosaic
of contiguous tones forms a background for intense reflection, a harmonic
utopia whose ever so slightly different voices can be singled out
even in the ebb and flow of timbres. It falls once more to Krieger
to bring proceedings to a close with two further pieces. Alto
Tune, like several other Niblock works, begins in consonance
before shifting into slow mutations of the imagination (I hear looped
segments of a Christmas carol sung by indefinable children's voices),
while Sax Mix, whose mathematical complexity is worthy of
Benoit Mandelbrot, is performed on alto, tenor and baritone saxes,
meshing old and new materials (it's a 75-track mix of three existing
sax pieces, Ten Auras, Sea Jelly Yellow and Alto
Tune itself) into a single harmonic monster whose distance from
conventional reed music is directly proportional to the mesmerizing
effect it produces. Complexity leads to freedom from every useless
aspect of sound organization. No bullshit indeed.–MR
Roland
Kayn
INVISIBLE MUSIC/HOMMAGE A K.R.H.SONDERBORG
RRR
 At
72, Roland Kayn's vision is brighter than ever, the perpetuation of
his endangered species of self-regulating music guaranteed by a totally
autonomous release schedule which treats us to periodic jewels like
this double CD, another compendium of acousmatic / cybernetic emotion
whose sound colours dissolve in rarefied nuances of timbral amazement.
Invisible Music (2003) is a three-movement composition whose
whopping 122 minutes stretch over one and a half discs. As usual with
Kayn, the malleable "harmony" determined by his unpredictable
scores is a polychromatic experience that defies effective description.
Translucent orchestral chords are dissected, decomposed and woven
together in alternation with parabolic chorales, eliciting long moments
of wonder(ing) as sudden poignant appearances of celestial electronic
beings and surreal transfigurations lead the listener deep into the
twilight zone. There is no time to ask, no way to understand; just
accept events as they are, and allow the body to be pervaded by a
mystifying sensation of undefined / undefinable knowledge. Camouflaging
his sound sources through masterful equalization work contributes
greatly to the sense of dislocation, even if some elements are recognizable
(notably in the third movement): fragments of organ, brass and strings
and, paradoxically, the occasional "easier" melodic line
seemingly mocking Rick Wakeman and Vangelis. But not for long. In
short, we're talking "masterpiece" again. In contrast, Hommage
a K.R.H. Sonderborg (2003) is surprisingly atypical. Starting
out with the kind of engrossing string cadenza Michael Nyman would
have loved to pillage, it's an eventful collage of icy wind, looped
particles of chamber minimalism and incomprehensible white noise eating
away at electronic rhythms until a muffled bell sounds the death knell
of any hope you might have had of fathoming out what's going on. Roland
Kayn's music (I've said it before) is like the sun: any child can
sketch it but nobody can watch it long enough to fully memorize its
actual shape.–MR
Anthony
Pateras / Robin Fox
FLUX COMPENDIUM
Editions Mego
 Face
it kids, if you're going to invite the ladies of the local parish
church's knitting circle round for morning coffee, you're not going
to reach for a Mego album as background music. The majority of releases
in the Mego catalogue are the aural equivalent of having shards of
broken glass spat in your eye. And despite the fact that in real life
they look about as harmless and affable as your old high school geography
teacher, Anthony Pateras and Robin Fox are as good at gobbing as the
audience at the 100 Club used to be in the glory days of punk. (Though
if you're a fan of Fox's recent Substation with Clayton Thomas
on Room 40, or Pateras' mighty trio with Sean Baxter and David Brown,
you'll know this anyway and will already have your goggles on.) Flux
Compendium is as tight and funky as early Xenakis, and a splendid
example of the kind of music that ought to be required listening for
any music undergraduate – but probably never will be, because
our boys are having too much fun they're playing tiddlywinks (on "$2.50")
into a set of Tibetan prayer bowls. The virtuoso cut'n'splice of "Throat
in Three Parts" makes Bob Cobbing and Yamatsuka Eye sound like
Prima Materia. It's not all shatter and splatter, though: "Perilymph"
layers slowmoving, shifting cluster drones for nearly ten minutes
before they're gradually replaced by morse-code like beeps and cheeps.
Still, on the closing "Flex & Belch" it's the farts
and burps that win in the end.–DW
Howard
Stelzer
THIS MAP IS A GIFT
Gameboy
 Expect
to read quite a bit about Howard Stelzer in these pages in the months
to come, as it seems 2006 will see a whole slew of new releases coming
onto the market of music by the Boston-based electronician, of which
This Map Is A Gift is the first to come my way so far. It's
a 39-minute continuous span of music picking its way through a forest
of sounds, recognisable and unrecognisable, near and far. And the
forest seems to be somewhere in New Zealand; squiggles of guitar,
laptop and percussion (courtesy Clinton Watkins, Richard Francis and
Stefan Neville, respectively) flit in between the trees, while somewhere
out of sight a hammer throwing competition in a sheet metal factory
is in full swing. Stelzer is, or at least used to be, a Peter Greenaway
fan – as I recall, one of his early bands was called Tulse Luper,
after the character in Greenaway's perplexingly dense early structuralist
short films. There's something of a puzzle element to Stelzer's music
too, which like Greenaway's films pulls you in, forcing you to search
for meaning and structure in the midst of a welter of information.
Unlike Greenaway's work, whose seeming impenetrability can often come
across as chilly, even frigid, Stelzer's soundworld is hot and sweaty.
It's a jungle in there - OK, maybe it's not New Zealand after all
- so wear light clothes. But be sure to take all necessary precautions
against insect bites, because there are some mighty strange and nasty
things flying about.–DW
Giuseppe
Ielasi and Howard Stelzer
NIGHT LIFE
Korm Plastics
 The
Brombron project, which temporarily houses two musicians at Extrapool
in Nijmegen for cross-pollination purposes, is one of those rare examples
of creative curatorial acumen. The endeavour presupposes collaboration,
but the aesthetic decisions made by the Extrapool and Korm Plastics
teams are well rendered, so there’s little doubt that the outcome
will be at least an interesting adjunct to the artist’s primary
creative energies. On the downside, there’s always the threat
that artists won’t rise to the occasion, and at least one Brombron
disc has been clumsy and slightly wilful, though that’s probably
more an indicator of the creators’ own temperaments. Polite
middle ground ensues when the collaborators circle each other deferentially,
bowing and doffing their caps; most thrillingly, sometimes the two
artists push and prod each other out of creative comfort zones.
Ielasi
and Stelzer’s Night Life sits down somewhere between
the latter two. They’re comfortable in each other’s presence
and share awareness of general modus operandi, but there’s enough
benign transformative energy thrown down to ensure the disc gestures
toward new possibilities. Stelzer’s tape manipulations are transparent,
often evoking process or flux as they acting as bedrock for electronics
and acoustic guitar. He sometimes favours queasy or seasick sounds;
the tape is gnarled out of existence, fed through playback heads as
the oxide flakes away and gathers in whorls of dust over the record
button. Ielasi’s tone is immediately identifiable; his guitar
playing is generous and rich even at its most minimal, yet he harbours
great tension within phrases and chords, harnessing a sound that is
as tense and mutable as it is melancholy and gorgeous. Night Life’s
tracts of buzzing drone, populated by insectoid stammer and sidereal
presence are repeatedly disturbed by pointillist mediations. Stelzer
and Ielasi reach a fantastic entente cordiale, pushing and pulling
at the right moments. They are at ease in each other’s space.–JD
Sébastien
Roux
SONGS
12k
 Since
the last outing by Sébastien Roux that came my way, Pillow
on Apestaartje, though outstandingly well recorded and beautifully
produced, was just a leeeetle on the soft side, I was delighted
to discover that this collection of seven pieces, recorded in and
taking advantage of Parisian state-of-the-art studios including La
Muse en Circuit and IRCAM, is more angular, intricate, fragmented
and rewarding. The dreamy Day-Glo blue room chillout waves of bliss
have been replaced by the kind of crunchy complexity even Boulez might
grudgingly enjoy, though he'd probably turn up his nose at the occasional
passages of gentle tonality from Roux's source instruments (prepared
piano, metallophone, guitar, cello, harp and bass). There's a lot
to get your teeth into here: each "song" is packed with
myriad pristine shards and flecks of sound, exquisitely crafted and
carefully sequenced and panned, but despite the complexity there's
not the slightest hint of Mego-style overload / overkill. Roux hasn't
lost his feel for harmonic coherence either: check out how "The
Cello Song" circles around E flat, and how the instrumental sounds
and their electronic transformations are dovetailed with the kind
of clockmaker precision Stravinsky admired in Ravel. A superb piece
of work – Roux's best so far by far – definitely worth
seeking out.–DW
Fhievel
LE BAPTÊME DE LA SOLITUDE
Petite Sono
 My
fellow journalist Charlie Wilmoth over in the webpages of Dusted is
on the one when he compares the work of Italian sound artist Luca
Bergero to that of Keith Berry. There's the same concern for detail
throughout this excellent and elegantly packaged CD (I admit it, I
have a Rodgers and Hammerstein-like fondness for things that come
tied in string), and the same ability to create music that manages
to convey a sense of space and distance without being spacey or distant.
Discreet, intimate and poetic, rather; and, once more like Berry (who
seems ever happy to throw in quotations of Basho), Bergero isn't afraid
to append evocative titles to his work – though even if the
album were called ST/4-1,080262 or Composition N°
247 instead of Le baptême de la solitude it would,
I suspect, work its charms. The delicate fluttering high frequencies,
luminous but never obtrusive drones and carefully treated field recordings
are, however, best appreciated on headphones. Unless, that is, you
happen to live in a place quiet enough to baptise your solitude by
appreciating its many subtleties on a good pair of speakers.–DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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