| NOVEMBER
News 2006 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Jon Dale, Nate Dorward, Lawrence English, Stephen
Griffith, Vid Jeraj, Richard Pinnell, Massimo Ricci, Nick Rice,
Derek Taylor, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
In Concert: Erstquake 3
In
Concert: Strotter
Inst.
In Print: The Future
of Modern Music
In
Concert: György
Kurtág 80th Birthday Celebration / Wolfgang Rihm
On Kranky: Chihei
Hatakeyama / Keith Fullerton Whitman / Bird Show / Gregg Kowalsky
/ Jessica Bailiff / Benoît Pioulard / Boduf Songs / Chris
Herbert / Christina Carter
From Canada: Keith, Oswald & Turner / Rob Clutton
/ Nimmons & Braid / Lisa Miller / Carsick / François
Houle / Jesse Zubot / Fond of Tigers
JAZZ & IMPROV: ONJO
/ ONJQ / Akiyama, Ambarchi & Licht / Temperamental Trio
/ Aaron Siegel / Steve Lacy / Steve Lantner / James Beaudreau
Flaherty, Corsano
& Yeh / Randy Sandke / Art Ensemble of Chicago / peeesseye
/ Elliott Sharp / Frank Wright / Adam Lane / Zlatko Kaucic
CONTEMPORARY: Earle
Brown / Brian Ferneyhough / Julian Anderson / Christian Wolff
/ Virtual Rhythmicon
ELECTRONICA: Astra
/ Fhievel / Post / Biphop Generation
Last month
|
"Nobody
does more harm than people who feel bad about doing it," as William
S. Burroughs once drawled. I guess he's got a point. I'm reading and
re-reading the book review included below and wondering whether or
not I'd be better off deleting it altogether and using the space for
other reviews. The fact of the matter is I don't really enjoy writing
negative reviews of albums, books or concerts, for the simple reason
that they rarely serve any positive purpose. That sounds like a pretty
dumb thing to say for a start – since when was negativity positive
anyway? – but sometimes it's the case. Reading a review of a
restaurant that totally trashes the place could save you from a nasty
case of food poisoning (having just had one myself, believe me they're
worth avoiding). With books and records though, a hatchet job is rarely
more than a pedestal for the critic to perch on and rain urine down
on artists / labels / publishers (maybe even readers / listeners)
cowering below.
I was taken to task recently by a Ms Lisa Seitz about the review of
the Gendreau / López split LP on CIP in last month's issue:
"I write to you not to chastise any of your opinions. I have
never written to any critic before. I felt compelled to write to you
because I was rather pissed about how your review was so obscure.
If I didn't already know about this record, I wouldn't have known
much more after reading your review. I was incensed; I could not even
understand why you would bother. It was as though you were taking
care of a task without any interest in presenting the work. There's
so many releases that are put out each week, why not review something
you actually like and that you have something to say about? Or review
something you don't like, but let the reader learn something about
the work. I suppose that this is my little personal gripe, nothing
against you in particular, but against critics at large. I also expected
a lot more depth from a reviewer at PT – but then again, I'm
not in the business and maybe this is how business is done."
I replied at some length explaining my reasons for reviewing the disc
in the first place (which to be honest had more to do with the way
the music was presented by the CIP press release than how it actually
sounded), but point taken. One of the sad facts about "the business",
as you call it (though "business" usually implies money
changing hands, which isn't the case here – the only currency
in PT land is LP/CD/DVD, and the odd cassette) is that you can never
listen to an album as many times as you'd like before having to write
about it. This is an old beef of mine, and has been discussed at length
elsewhere on several occasions, but it's central to the Gendreau review.
In short, I think you're right, Lisa. I'll be returning to the album
for another listen soon. Don't expect a new review though.. I won't
have time. I'll be too busy trashing someone else's work, haha.
Sometimes, however, the question as to whether one should or shouldn't
put pen to paper, as it were, simply doesn't arise. James McHard's
book just hit a raw nerve. I'm sure he's a lovely person, and his
wife too (I suppose it's his wife), who sent a very nice letter along
with the book. No doubt I'll have disappointed – if not infuriated
– both of them with the review below. But with a title like
The Future of Modern Music you've more or less got it coming
to you however good the book is. (Had been called My Thoughts
About Modern Music, would I have requested a review copy, though?
I doubt it..) So why am I still feeling pangs of, if not guilt, let's
say unease? Perhaps because even the lousiest crappiest dumbest dollop
of third division trash (I'm not referring to McHard's book here btw)
is something that somebody somewhere has laboured over with enthusiasm,
dedication and love. It's someone's baby. And who feels good about
beating a kid? Nobody. But sometimes they deserve a good smack.
Anyway, as I've had my time cut out polishing up the knuckle dusters,
I've enlisted the services of our man in Canada, Nate Dorward, who
is hereby appointed Editor of this august journal. For over a year
now he's been proofreading the issue just before posting, and I've
been amazed each month at his ability to spot the tiny errors I invariably
miss. A safe pair of hands, as they say in cricket. Thanks also this
month to Tomas Korber for his interview with Mark Wastell, to Richard
Pinnell for his dispatch from the Erstquake zone, and to all those
too numerous to name who've helped out with additional info and photos.
Bonne lecture.-DW
Erstquake
3
Tonic, New York City
26th September – 2nd October 2006
Photographs
by Terence Andriolo
For
the third successive year the Erstquake Festival in New York was curated
by Erstwhile's Jon Abbey and Chris Wolf, and Tim Barnes, head honcho
of the Quakebasket label. The programme, spread over twenty sets and
four nights, clearly reflected the diverging tastes of the three curators,
and the audience found much to discuss and argue about. Each night
began with a very quiet set, the plan being for the volume to rise
throughout the evening with the closing sets showcasing the festival's
cautious embrace of the currently in-vogue noise scene. I found this
element of the festival refreshing and invigorating, and worked hard
to leave any preconceptions I may have had about any of the music
behind with the over-exuberant Heathrow airport security officials.
Either
side of the festival I was able to catch an outside show featuring
some of the performers in town for the main event. Shortly after arriving,
in a lack-of-sleep-induced haze, I found myself sitting amongst a
small throng of people in a tiny patch of Brooklyn parkland, surrounded
by the incessant noise of the city, listening to the trio of Greg
Davis, Albert Casais and Jeph Jerman in two acoustic sets using almost
entirely natural objects (stones, leaves, shells, twigs..). Their
intensely focused, intimate scrapes, whispers and crackles blended
into the city sound (and often disappeared altogether), creating a
little bubble of serenity in such a wildly active environment. The
small audience clearly appreciated the opportunity to really open
their ears.
In
the bright light of New York's Tonic the following day, some of the
magic I have always associated with Davis and Jerman's music seemed
strangely absent, but their performance was well up to standard. They
began in a similar vein to the night before, with tiny sounds made
by rubbing and stroking sticks and stones (and at one point the beautiful
sound of conch shells half full of water), but this time amplified
to room-filling levels. The image of the musicians conjuring sounds
from such unlikely sources was possibly a little too diverting, and
I found myself closing my eyes to take in the musical conversation
hidden behind the visual spectacle. If I had to find fault in what
was a very beautiful start to the festival, it would be that both
musicians seemed to feel the need to use everything on the table,
instead of choosing fewer sounds and allowing them to develop over
time. It gave the music a slightly restless feel that it could probably
have done without.
The
following set from Los Glissandinos, the clarinet / laptop duo of
Kai Fagaschinski and Klaus Filip, was eagerly anticipated after
my immense enjoyment of their 2005 Creative Sources album Stand
Clear. Fagaschinski is an exceptionally accomplished clarinettist
who can produce a remarkable array of sounds, and Filip's stark, simple
sinetones complement them perfectly. The familiar contemplative austerity
of the Los Glissandinos sound was beautifully realised live, with
Filip providing a translucent base through which Fagaschinski threaded
his soft tones, occasional piercing attacks and warm flutterings.
The opening piece induced an oddly appealing claustrophobia, as the
sounds hung heavy in the air around us, a Rothko-like sense of weight
and depth that was one of the highlights of the festival.
 Bryan
Eubanks and Barry Weisblat (photo, left) played two short pieces,
the first more interesting than the second. Weisblat miked up a naked
flame to create an unpredictable crackling undercurrent which was
amplified and mixed with the static interference of small fluorescent
light tubes interacting with a radio and Eubanks' open circuits and
tone generators. It managed to steer clear of the inevitable drone,
forming patterns of occasionally cyclical stabbing, disruptive abstraction.
The refusal to fall back on long drawn-out sounds was commendable,
but not always successful; the set seemed to suffer from a lack of
familiarity between the musicians. The flow was disrupted and from
time to time the music seemed to lose its way. In the second piece
Eubanks introduced a pattern of short rising tones that further muddied
the focus and interfered with the communication. It all eventually
settled into an uninteresting ten-minute drone.
The
set by Scenic Railroads – Joe Panzner on laptop and Mike Shiflet
on laptop and electronics – was a lot less interesting than
their work on CD. Relatively obvious digital scribblings and crackles
met sustained bass tones and other sonic leftovers in an unfortunately
predictable tinnitus-inducing crescendo, which (to the musicians'
credit) eventually dropped away to a more restrained dynamic plateau.
But after this the pair seemed to lose direction, and the set petered out
instead of going anywhere interesting.
 One
man renowned for cooking up a storm is Basque laptopper Mattin,
who began his appearance with electronics/percussionist Tim Barnes
by placing a huge guitar amp somewhat precariously on a wobbly table
in front of the stage, causing myself and others to scatter to the
rear of the hall to what appeared to be relative safety. Barnes began
to build a beautiful stream of cold metallic sound by rubbing a cymbal
slowly (photo, right) and passing the sound through simple effects,
and Mattin started prowling around the back of the room, circling
those of us that had sought safety there with his laptop held at head
height, a high pitched screech stretching the computer's internal
speaker. As Barnes' playing grew in intensity, Mattin began
(as he does) shouting anti-consumerist expletives as he prowled around
the room. Fighting the temptation to either laugh or trip him up,
I watched as he approached the amp, stabbing the output lead in and
out of the laptop, filling the room with tearing bursts of white noise
and feedback interspersed with his barely comprehensible screams.
The set ended with a jolt soon after. Mattin has always sought to
provoke a reaction (instead of worrying about making good music),
and his antics became the talk of the festival. For those of us that
had seen him do similar things before though, it amounted to little
more than mildly diverting, yet boringly predictable theatre, albeit
with a rather good backing track.
The second night began with a set from Sachiko M and Sean Meehan.
No two musicians in this area could be better suited to one another,
and the music they produced was intensely powerful, working with extremes
of space and dynamics to produce tension. Sachiko's sole means of
amplification was a pair of headphones placed on the table in front
of her, resulting in an exceptionally quiet music that fought with
external noises throughout. She played just two sinewaves during the
course of the set, bisected by a short burst of twittering chatter
halfway through. Meehan chose his moments to insert sustained tones
into this most simple of sound pools, rubbing dowel rods against cymbals
placed on an upturned snare drum. The resulting music was spellbinding,
balancing tightly wound tension and frozen austerity. I enjoyed it
immensely, but wonder if it could have ever failed. With such simple
basic elements involved, what would a bad Sachiko/Meehan set sound
like anyway?
Michael
R. Bernstein's work in the Double Leopards was completely unknown
to me prior to the festival, so his duo with Mike Shiflet was a discovery.
Shiflet played laptop again, alongside what appeared to be Bernstein's
analogue synth. It began promisingly enough, with bursts of electronic
chatter and bass-heavy throbs giving way to gritty, abrasive sounds,
which held the attention for a few minutes before the music was overtaken
by an annoying reliance on rhythmic loops. Some of the basic elements
were interesting, but there was little real invention in terms of
overall structure.
One
of the most exciting groups I've heard on disc this year is English,
the duo of Bonnie Jones and Joe Foster, so I had great expectations
for their appearance. My hopes were not in vain as their half-hour
set, filled with strong arresting gestures, false starts and tense
silences, held the audience in suspense. While both musicians used
similar set-ups of broken circuits, digital delay pedals and other
electronic ephemera, Foster's trumpet brought an acoustic immediacy
to the music (although at no stage did he come close to producing
a trumpet-like sound). English's music is hard to describe; on a basic
level they work with similar sounds and instrumentation to many of
the other artists on the bill, yet their intensity comes from the
shapes and spaces within the music, the frequent gaps of silence
and contrasting sounds that play with raw power and nameless emotion
in a bright, edgy manner. Great
stuff.
In
a masterstroke of festival curation, English were followed by the
duo of Burkhard Stangl and Christof Kurzmann, who set about changing
the mood of the evening completely with a reprise of their Schnee
project, which has already produced two CDs for the Erstwhile label.
Schnee explores the boundaries between pop and the more abstract music
catered for by this kind of festival. Stangl switched between guitars
and piano, and Kurzmann alternated laptop and clarinet, and ran through
an improvised comedy routine with a squeaky microphone stand. A short
and brilliantly executed Derek Bailey tribute from Stangl was a nice
moment that reflected Jon Abbey's opening night dedication of the
festival to the great man. When Kurzmann broke into an awkward rendition
of Neil Diamond's "Song Sung Blue" and joined Stangl in
a short jazzy duet you had to chuckle at the cabaret. It all came
as welcome relief from the seriousness of the rest of the festival.
 While
earlier sets had touched on the noisier end of the current music scene,
the final set of the second day was the first to truly embrace the
noise aesthetic. The duo of longstanding noisemonger Lasse Marhaug
and former Wolf Eyes member Aaron Dilloway (photo, left) looked pretty
menacing – two foreboding figures behind a table of electronics
that looked destined to be abused – yet when they began I was
surprised at how much detail could be heard in the music, albeit it
of the ugly, looping variety that had plagued the Bernstein/Shiflet
set earlier. A queasy, off-kilter loop occupied much of the foreground
early on, above steadily growing organ-like sounds, and for a while
there was something to listen to. About fifteen minutes in, though,
the pair seemed to tire of this and began to build that familiar featureless
wall of noise so popular these days. Trying to make out any detail
then became a painful waste of time. Dilloway and Marhaug began to
bounce about behind their tables, throwing gestural arms at control
knobs and slamming fists down dramatically on whatever was below them.
Dilloway by now had a microphone rammed halfway down his throat and
was probably adding roaring vocals into the maelstrom, but they were
impossible to make out. Apart from a few halfhearted swaying bodies
rocking in their chairs, the audience sat pretty motionless, which
seemed to defeat the purpose of listening to such physically arresting
music. If there's nothing to sink your ears into then at least get
up and move. As things were, the set failed to grip me in any manner
other than as a testosterone-fuelled pantomime. Someone later told
me I didn't "get it" because I was "just too old."
Maybe so, but get it I didn't, though not for want of trying.
Saturday
opened with what was for me the set of the festival. The last time
I saw trombonist Radu Malfatti live was with Polwechsel in 1994. Mattin,
of course, I'd seen much more recently, but this partially composed
set sounded like neither of those events. Sitting opposite his collaborator
in the centre of the room, Malfatti followed a score that cued the
beginning and ending of his long, dry low notes, a small clock at
his side timing the lengthy silences between them. Mattin sat silently
for the first few minutes, appearing to do nothing, though he was
in fact recording the noise of the room, complete with shuffling chairs,
the creaking wood of the Tonic bar (and the occasional guilty cough).
He then set about playing the recording back into the room via the
PA system, sometimes alone, sometimes following Malfatti's cue. The
combination of the trombone lines and the Mattin's eerie sounds created
an intense atmosphere as the audience sat, unsure of what exactly
it was they were listening to. It struck a perfect balance between
musicianship and listener input. As Malfatti's trombone was also recorded
by Mattin, there were occasions when it could be heard though he wasn't
playing, adding a playfulness to the set probably only noticed by
half of the room. This was music of immense beauty performed with
admirable precision.
Burkhard
Stangl and Kai Fagaschinski (photo) followed, in a set of intertwining
tones, picked guitar notes and angular interactions that continually
threatened to break into melody but just kept itself in check. Stangl
again moved through guitars and techniques, beginning by bowing a
contact mic resting on his thigh as Fagaschinski wove warm tones in
and around the resulting texture. Stangl went on to bow and strum
the guitar, extracting precise sounds with ridiculous ease, to be
met by an equally assured response from the clarinet. Having stayed
just on the abstract side of the dividing line for the majority of
this involving set, towards the end the duo gave way to the melodic
urge. As Stangl picked out a gentle chord Fagaschinski played a mournful
tune the pair had written together (years earlier) to bring things
to a close. I enjoyed this set a great deal, and found the subtle
manner with which it addressed the influence of pop far more palatable
than the annoyingly self-conscious irony of the Schnee performance
the day before.
 Though
I'd only seen Cosmos (Ami Yoshida - photo, right - and Sachiko M.)
live once before, I had an idea of what to expect. It was intriguing
to hear Yoshida's alien vocalisations, focussed in a tightly defined
area of high pitched guttural yelps and placed at regular intervals
over some of the most interesting sounds I've heard Sachiko produce
for a while. Small splurts of digital shrapnel mixed with the more
familiar long tones created the perfect landscape for Yoshida to build
upon, but she resisted the urge to move outside her narrow sonic range,
seemingly rooted in a way of improvising that hasn't evolved much
in recent years. It was a great set, though, if hampered by my wishful
thinking.
After
Cosmos, GOD (Bryan Eubanks and Leif Sundstrom). As I seem to be one
of the few people that didn't get much out of the their 2005 album
Anti Sex, Anti Wiretapping, I was ready to discover what
it was that everyone else could hear. As it happens they set about
doing something quite different with their array of electronics, mixer
and miked-up cymbal. The grainy roughness of the album was less evident
as Sundstom began with a deep bass-heavy roar. This formed a foundation
for shifting layers of static until Eubanks added precisely the same
rising tone pattern he'd used in his set with Weisblat two days earlier.
To use this sound again was odd, and it didn't work any better this
time round. For a while Sundstrom met Eubanks' persistent tones with
notes that created a beating pattern as the pitches crossed, but it
quickly became boring. Overall I remained unmoved, but I have greatly
enjoyed a new GOD CD I picked up at the festival. There's hope for
this atheist yet, perhaps.
The
prospect of a solo Aaron Dilloway set after an evening of intense
listening was not appetising, but I dutifully took my place at the
bar at the back of the room with open ears, and was pleasantly surprised
at least to hear the first completely unpredictable set of the festival.
The intense volume of his duo with Marhaug never fully materialised,
but what remained only really confirmed my suspicion that, deprived
of the sheer physicality of full-on noise assault, there is very little
of interest. An ugly churning, nauseous sound very similar to one
he had used in the Marhaug duo became a key element in the set, blending
into sheets of shapeless noise and a ridiculous routine that involved
Dilloway placing handfuls of mikes into his mouth before chanting
in a dreadful "voice of God" manner. It all floundered to
a halt without the seemingly inevitable rise in volume that most of
us had expected. Even after he was called back for an encore, Dilloway
refused to allow the volume to run away again (to his credit), but
unfortunately the uninspiring featureless sludge we were left with
barely made it above the embarrassing.
The
final night opened with the only entirely acoustic set of the festival:
the percussion trio of Jeph Jerman, Tim Barnes and Sean Meehan. Three
highly sensitive percussionists working in very different ways to
create a finely constructed improvisation
of immense poise and sophistication. Jerman dropped his natural objects
for a small drum that he set about caressing with remarkable dexterity
using his hand and a small vibrating motor; Barnes focussed on tiny
metallic sounds, often based around a tiny bell-like object, and Meehan
filled in the gaps with his subtle dowel tones. What really made this
set was the level of sensitivity and egoless interplay. It was one
of the few performances of the festival that was solid from start
to finish and did not overstay its welcome. I'd very much like to
see it appear as a CD release.
Outside
of Cosmos I have never been fully impressed by Ami Yoshida as an effective
group improviser, but her performance with Christof Kurzmann was the
most convincing I have heard yet. She proved to be far more versatile
than she was in the Cosmos set the day before, swooping and gurgling
her way through the doodles and squiggles blurting their way from
Kurzmann's lloopp software. My problem was that I just didn't enjoy
Kurzmann's sounds. His input had a cheesy feel to it, a Carl Stalling-like
playfulness that broke with expected traditions. It obviously involved
a great deal of skill, but I found it hard to enjoy. At one point
a series of loud bass drum thuds seemed to herald the end of the set
as Ami ground to a halt, but things picked up again until an odd finale,
where Yoshida stood in a motionless trance for several minutes after
a bemused Kurzmann had finished playing. A brew full of strong moments,
but not really my cup of tea.
 The
combination of Sachiko M and the epileptic electronics of English
was one of Erstquake's most intriguing matches. Questions about how
it would work were partially answered by Joe Foster's decision to
play acoustic, focussing on blowing through the trumpet mouthpiece
onto a single drumset (photo, left) to create a hovering vibration
which he altered by shifting position or by switching from the drum
to a small bowl wrapped in a taut balloon. The delicacy of his sounds
complemented a restrained Bonnie Jones, whose fractured blasts of
noise punctuated Sachiko's pure tones, leaving space in the sound
for the trumpet work to shine through. This set showed great promise
from the start and English drew Sachiko slowly towards them, until
around halfway through when a sudden eruption of clicks and pops from
her empty sampler were met with a rough edged hiss from Jones and
rasping harshness from Foster, in one of the festival's most vivid
moments. If the set could be faulted it would be for its overly long
closing sequence; an earlier break in the music could have been used to bring
things to a halt. But this is a minor niggle in what was overall a
powerful set.
Phill
Niblock isn't known for his collaborative improvisations, so it was
no real surprise that his approach to performing with Jason Lescalleet
was less of a duo, more of a conceptual partnership. Niblock began
alone, sitting offstage playing a series of pre-recorded drone based
pieces through a simple mixer and at high volume. A rich, warm flood
of sound made up the main element of the music, a typically opaque
Niblock wash that was then blended (somewhat clumsily to my ears)
into a series of running water sounds, other field recordings and
more abstract sources. After twenty minutes or so Lescalleet got up
from his chair and set about his arsenal of instrumentation strewn
across the stage. A laptop, several old Casio sampling keyboards and
a mountain of ageing reel-to-reel tape decks provided a myriad of
possibilities, and it was soon difficult to ascertain what sound came
from where. Initially he recorded or sampled Niblock's output, extracts
of which reappeared throughout the performance, before delving deep
into the droning morass to add a thick, growling resonance to Niblock's
cleaner lines. Lescalleet works as a constructivist, taking simple
blocks of sound and building them up into a towering structure, and
this was especially evident tonight. Watching him go about his work
was inspirational. By the time Niblock had stopped playing about ten
minutes later his absence was barely noticed, as Lescalleet crawled
about his audio playground in a heaving mass of noise. On a very basic
level this harsh mass wasn't that different from what Dilloway and
Marhaug created two days earlier, but its detailed approach and careful
construction were considerably more satisfying. The set ended with
Lescalleet manually disrupting one of the tape reels to bring proceedings
to a crashing halt while the original, now slightly degraded, water
sounds trickled away in the background. Great stuff.
That's
where the festival should have ended. The final duo by Jazkamer (Lasse
Marhaug and John Hegre) produced a set lacking in any focus or direction,
an aimless, energy fuelled heap of wildly twisted dials and runaway
power electronics. It was loud enough to clear half of the exhausted
room to the lobby, but the volume was not the problem. I have no idea
how much control Marhaug and Hegre had over the resulting music –
they barely looked at their equipment as they wrenched it about –
but it suffered from a complete lack of depth and substance, consisting
of little more than a scrambled screeching mess of sound. As it came
to an end my escape from the hall was rapid.
 As
most of the audience headed back home to their particular corners
of the world I made my weary way back to Brooklyn the following evening
for a final show. Houndstooth, the venue, turned out to be a charming
little menswear shop in which merchandise was pushed to the sides
to create a space big enough for maybe thirty people. Once Kai Fagaschinski
(photo, right) could be prised away from trying on trilby hats his
Kommando Raumschiff Zitrone duo with Christof Kurzmann set about playing
a set to launch their CD First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,
recently released on the Quincunx label. In the intimate proximity
of the room the slow, dreamy abstractions the duo produced wafted
out into the noisy city. Some of the swaying decentred sounds from
First Time reappeared, eliciting new responses from Kai ranging
from dry fluttery whispers to icy high register blasts. Near the end
of the piece a barely recognisable piano snippet evolved into a recording
of Elvis Costello's version of the Charles Aznavour ballad "She"
which slowly built in volume until it was all that remained, blasting
out in orchestral majesty as the musicians departed the stage area.
It was a relaxing, lighthearted and highly enjoyable paean to the
pop song that proved a perfect partner to the CD in question.
There was one more performance, and it was quite simply stunning.
Radu Malfatti played a rare completely improvised set with Klaus Filip
made up of only the bare essentials. Malfatti sat relaxed in an old
50s-style armchair, conjuring extended tones from his trombone that
often just escaped into audibility, each separated by lengthy gaps
into which Filip placed equally careful and well chosen laptop tones.
The noise seeping into the tiny venue played a big part in the music.
It seemed to annoy Malfatti from time to time, but also created the
perfect backdrop for the softly developing music. Malfatti tapped
his finger slowly on the edge of his bell in an almost metronomic
manner, making a sound so quiet it may have been out of the reach
of those at the back of the room. This was sublime, wonderfully thoughtful
music in a superb setting. I only wish that it had come earlier in
my trip as my ability to listen with the necessary focus was limited
at this point, but I enjoyed this as much as anything else at Erstquake.
Riding the subway home that night it occurred to me that it was fitting
that after a festival curated so that each night ended with music
of extreme volume, the last music I saw in New York should be something
exceptionally quiet.
My
overall feelings about the festival are that it was a huge success,
even if very few of the musicians strayed beyond their safety zones,
and this year's focus on more established groups made a certain level
of predictability inevitable. I attended with open ears and an open
mind. I may not have connected with all of the performances, but the
aim of the festival was never to appeal to all. One of the most invigorating
and enjoyable elements of Erstquake is the social interaction between
fans of this music, and discussions before during and after the festival.
While I struggled to hear much of merit in some of the noisier sets,
others found them inspirational for completely different reasons.
It's precisely this mix of tastes, reactions and values that makes
for a good festival. Whether or not Erstquake will happen again next
year has yet to be confirmed, but as a model for how an intriguing
and exciting festival should be put together, this 2006 edition provided
the perfect blueprint.–RP
Strotter
Inst.
Galérie Joëlle Possémé, Paris
September 14th 2006
 The
term kanalstrotter refers to the urban poor of pre-World
War II Vienna who eked out an existence by dredging the canals of
the Danube for whatever they could find, often discarded animal fat
which they then sold on to soap manufacturers. It was a harsh existence,
and it's a harsh image, but an appropriate metaphor for the work of
Swiss turntablist Christoph Hess, aka Strotter Inst. "As [the
Strotter] were standing on the edge of society, today Strotter Inst.
stands on the edge of art and music, working with stuff thrown away
by others", proclaims Hess's website manifesto (go to: www.strotter.org/ch_news/).
That "inst." also "stands on the edge of art and music",
being an abbreviation for both instrument and installation, and the
visual aspect of Hess's performance is as important as the extraordinary
sounds he conjures forth from his customised dubplates and Goldring
Lenco turntables. These are carefully mounted on metal stands specially
adapted so that large elastic bands can be stretched across them and
plucked by objects whizzing around underneath. The pick-ups –
often prepared with needles and string – are placed gently on
the elastic bands suspended above the turntable, and amplify the passing
twangs. It sounds as good as it looks.
"The optical comprehension of how the sound is generated gets
more and more important," Hess writes. "The turntable gets
the honour, not the DJ." Strotter Inst. music is about recycling,
but recycling objects themselves, not other people's music. An old
sound effects disc sits on a low table in the corner of the Galérie
Joëlle Possémé in Paris where Hess is performing
to accompany the opening of an exhibition of paintings by Heini Bürkli
(a relation, as it turns out), but it's only a bit player in Strotter
Inst.'s cast of characters.
A Strotter Inst. performance is no haphazard affair; it's carefully
calibrated to suit the acoustics of the performing space, and scripted
in the form of a rough written score Hess uses to cue up his various
discs. The signals from the turntables are fed into a mixing desk
and the loops, drones, rumbles, cracks and clicks are meticulously
crafted into a coherent and powerful 45-minute span of music. Hess's
concept of turntable-as-instrument might recall the work of performers
like Martin Tetréault, Otomo Yoshihide and Ferran Fages, but
the music he makes with them is closer to the world of Philip Jeck
– the accent here is more on composition than improvisation.
 Hess
began activities as Strotter Inst. in 1998, and his debut album, appropriately
enough a handsome 180g vinyl entitled Schlepper, appeared
on Bauer im Anzug Produktion in 2001. For his first CD release, Monstranz
(same imprint, 2004), Hess decided to cross "the bridge between
the archaic and the contemporary" in an amusingly original way:
the album's first track is embossed in the digipak itself and only
playable on a turntable. And, looking to the future, the last track
is only available as a download from the net. The remaining eleven
pieces are arranged around the central 33-minute long eighth track,
a drop-dead masterpiece of phase-shifting loops that anyone who knows
and loves the music of Steve Reich simply cannot afford to pass by.
In addition to his solo work Christoph Hess also performs with the
intriguingly entitled Herpes ö Deluxe (check out 2003's Havarie
on Everest for some jaw-dropping electronica complete with soundbites
from Werner Herzog and Alice in Wonderland), and more recently, Strotter
Inst.'s work has popped up on the RLW I.K.K. - Purpur album
on Sirr (which is where I first heard about him) and on a 7"
entitled Anna (www.impliedsound.com). Each side of this disc
contains two tracks, and each ends in the same locked groove: one
track plays from the centre of the disc outwards. It's typical of
Hess's uncompromising approach to his work: a Strotter Inst. production
is a unique and precious document, and the creativity doesn't stop
when the musician hands over the master to the pressing plant. If
Christoph Hess happens to be dredging the fat out of your local canal,
make sure you go along to see him do it (watch out for those mousetraps
though) – meanwhile get hold of his discs before it's too late.–DW
James
L. McHard
THE FUTURE OF MODERN MUSIC
Iconic Press
 You're
asking for trouble writing a book called The Future of Modern
Music. Books three times the length of this one have been written
on just one of the many composers featured here (and we're only talking
composers, too: if you're expecting any discussion of what the future
of modern music is really about, i.e. the extraordinary revolution
taking place in the domain of technology, the explosion of electronic
music in all its forms, the evolution of the recording industry and
the rise to prominence of just about every type of music which can't
be accurately described as "composition", you're going to
be disappointed). Trying to deal with figures of central importance
– Janacek (odd that a book published in the 21st century should
kick off with a composer born halfway through the 19th),
Debussy, Mahler, Ravel, Malipiero, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Bartók,
Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Varèse – in a mere 107 pages
inevitably involves such a degree of dumbing down it's almost laughable.
But James McHard isn't out to address the academic community, despite
his claims to the contrary: "I offer these words and insights
primarily to you, the concertgoer, as a means for discovering new
treasures of sound. However, ancillary value can be obtained, as well,
by the interested professional, especially by those forward-minded
professors and teachers; their students; and, of course, the composers
themselves who are in search of new means by which to reinvigorate
their arsenal of musical materials." A pious wish. "Missing
are the terms pregnant with the mechanical gyrations that are so much
a part of the musical jargon of the past modernism," he goes
on. In other words, don't expect any music theory, because you won't
get any. McHard is probably justified in having a go at the "sandbox
entertainment" of erudite publications like Perspectives
of New Music, but in choosing not to provide even the briefest
layman-friendly definition of Schoenbergian dodecaphony, it's impossible
for him to back up statements like "[Schoenberg's] best and most
expressive works are the pre-serial, freely atonal ones, from the
19-teens", a position I happen to agree with but one that requires
careful analytical underpinning.
It's clear McHard has little time for serialism, but his definition
of "sound-based music", which he posits as an escape route
from Darmstadt's dead-end street, is unfortunately vague to the point
of incoherence: "This is music that is created by the manipulation
and transformation of raw sound materials from one characteristic
state to another. It focuses on the qualities inherent in sound; i.e.
composition focused solely on natural phenomena that access
the very doorways to comprehension by the ear and the mind."
The problem with such a term – excluding for the moment the
bizarre, almost insulting notion that serial music is not "sound-based"
(I wonder what Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky, Boulez, Dallapiccola
and Wolpe would have said to that) – is that it encompasses
a truly bewildering number of extremely different musics. You know
what McHard is trying to get at – he's championing those composers
who write "by ear", trusting their own intuition rather
than letting themselves be guided by the dogma of that or that -ism
– but a "category" that includes composers as radically
different in philosophy and approach as Cage, Scelsi and Xenakis (to
name but three) is problematic indeed.
This, combined with glib recycling of well-worn clichés, becomes
rapidly annoying. "Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of
a Faun saw the dawn of an intuitively sound-based music. Debussy
consolidated his musical experiences and created an exotic, dreamlike
world of sound. Harmony was stripped of its functionality, as sounds
rolled through vague patterns. Colors emerged in shifting patterns.
There was scant concern over next-ness; that is, over whether
there ought to be a 'B', now that an 'A' had made its appearance."
One might wish to excuse McHard for not having read extensively on
the subject – if he really wants to discover the functionality
of Debussy's harmony he could start with Robin Holloway's Debussy
and Wagner [Eulenberg, 1979] – but any freshman musicology
student with a copy of the score and pair of ears can very easily
produce an analysis of the piece that would refute such fatuous nonsense.
For a more professional job, check out William Austin's analysis of
the work in the Norton Critical Scores edition (1970).
McHard's "Historical time-line chart of the development of sound-based
compositions", which begins with Debussy and ends with Julio
Estrada and Gerard Pape (McHard studied with both, so he's not surprisingly
keen to write nice things about them) is so nebulous and sectarian
it's basically useless. Where are Ligeti, Cerha, Penderecki, Grisey
and Murail, "sound-based" composers if ever there were such
a thing? Answer: tucked away in an appendix entitled "Additional
Composers". This is a veritable tour de force in which
McHard manages to "deal with" Hartmann, Prokofiev, Roussel,
Honegger, Orbón, Leifs, de Falla, Toch, Eisler, Markevitch,
Schnabel, Skalkottas, Revueltas, Lilburn, Saygun, Kamran Ince (hey,
my old college room-mate!), Hába, Cowell, Nancarrow, Partch,
Antheil, Russolo, Ligeti, Kurtág, Berio, Maderna, Pousseur,
Goeyvaerts, Penderecki, Górecki, Crumb, Takemitsu, Dutilleux,
Barraqué, Barbaud, Bussotti, Schnebel, Kagel, Evangelisti,
Clementi, Donatoni, Henze, B.A. Zimmermann, Cerha, Koenig,Terterian,
Ustvolskaya, Rihm, Grisey, Murail, Dufourt, Neuwirth, Lachenmann,
Sciarrino, Scodanibbio, Hoffman-Richter, Feldman, Brown, Wolff, Tudor,
Young, Oliveros, Scavarda, Cacioppo, Wise, Sheff, Reynolds, Ashley,
Mumma, Lucier, Behrman, Yasunao Tone, Toshiya Tsunoda and Otomo Yoshihide
(misspelt to boot) in THIRTY-TWO pages. Quite why he should have chosen
to include someone like Heinz Hoffman-Richter (try Googling that and
see what you dredge up) while mentioning seminal figures like Pierre
Schaeffer and Steve Reich just once (and not mentioning Luc Ferrari
and Terry Riley at all) is as bizarre as it is inexcusable.
But the more "extended" features – the author calls
them "analyses" but they're not – are sadly just as
full of asinine platitudes. Each of these composer profiles consists
of a brief biographical sketch (sketchy biographical brief, rather)
entitled "His Life" – they're all men, these composers,
by the way – and an attempt to summarize "His Style".
There follows a list of "His Major Works", which are neither
dated nor listed in chronological order. Instead of doing the job
properly and employing correct and detailed footnotes (too reminiscent
of Perspectives of New Music, perhaps?), McHard has the annoying
habit of sticking in bracketed references to works included in the
(far from) "Complete Biography" he provides at the end of
the book.
Throughout it all, McHard comes across as a nice chap, and his heart's
obviously the right place, but such sloppiness tends to sap your enthusiasm.
Vulgarisation is one thing – and I'm all in favour of trying
to present complex notions of music theory in a way that the layman
might understand (most folk could, for example, easily handle the
basics of set theory) – but inaccuracy like the following just
will not do: "As though to confound his critics and admirers
alike, Stravinsky did one more stylistic about-face. In the early
1950s – significantly, after Schönberg's death –
he adopted serialism, a device he had deplored (much as he deplored
its founder, Schönberg). Although, the particular brand of serialism
Stravinsky used was based more on Webern's system, with its canonic
counterpoint, than on Schönberg's. Retaining his characteristic
austerity, Stravinsky wrote many works in this style, most notably
his Agon (1953) ballet with orchestra." Agon
was started in 1953 but not completed until 1957, and only its central
section is serial. McHard, not being a fan of Perspectives-style
"technical musicology", is presumably not aware of Stravinsky's
use of rotational arrays (Boulez is the influence here, not Webern)
and would have done well to sit down with a copy of the Huxley
Variations and the Requiem Canticles before committing
himself to print. Perhaps the most perplexing thing of all about this
obviously well-intentioned but frustrating book is the fact that two
musicians of considerable stature – Estrada and Pape –
should have given it their blessing. They really should have known
better, for I seriously doubt that any "forward-minded professors
and teachers" either now or in years to come will wish to include
The Future of Modern Music on their library shelves. I'm
afraid I won't let it anywhere near my coffee table.–DW
György
Kurtág’s 80th Birthday Celebration
London Wigmore Hall
September 20th, 2006
 In
the year that British composer-pianist Thomas Adès (photo,
left) has turned 35, his former teacher, the Hungarian composer-pianist
György Kurtág (photo, below right), has turned 80. This
birthday celebration for Kurtág, devised by Adès for
the Wigmore Hall, therefore offered an opportunity for Adès
to pitch his wits against the master miniaturist’s, and, surprisingly,
the younger man emerged unscathed.
Adès’s music making has been criticized for being too
facile, too white – in other words, complacent. Yet the refinement
of both his piano playing and his compositions suggest otherwise.
It is true that his talent is usually confined to the comic, lyric
and conservative and rarely ventures into the tragic, epic or radical,
but he has found a niche that, for all its pastiche of older forms,
is genuinely idiosyncratic and sometimes profoundly sorrowful.
Perhaps Adès’s most affecting performance of the evening
in this respect was of the opening piece, Kurtág’s Three
Old Inscriptions (1986-7), performed in near darkness. Soprano
Valdine Anderson captured the elusive vulnerability of the first inscription,
an epitaph for a flower darkened by shifting microtonal shades. Accompanying
her at the piano, Adès ruthlessly eliminated all exaggerated
gestures and achieved a quiet menace, especially in the counterpoint
he brought to the deep basses of the second piece (a bridegroom’s
doodles in the stocks after a fight over his wife). The third was
another angular little Schubertian epitaph, with a tortured “rest
gently in peace” at the end.
The lights went up in the hall in time for Einige Sätze aus
den Sudelbüchern Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs, a Kurtág
song cycle consisting of 22 tiny aphorisms by the Swiss writer Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg, a near-contemporary of Schubert’s. This
time, Anderson was accompanied by double bassist Corin Long instead
of Adès. Many of these miniatures consist of a surreal throwaway
comment (e.g. “a soporific church chair”) followed by
a long drawn-out yawn, but the concentration required to execute them
is deceptive. If anything, Anderson overdid it a little, saving too
little energy for the other song cycle in the program. Long was most
effective in the sections where the double bass imitates an orchestra,
much like the orchestral effects Kurtág’s fellow Hungarian
Franz Liszt achieved on the piano. In “Prayer”, he mimicked
the improvisation of ritual drumming, and in “Touropa”
he hit the back of the strings with his bow, harking back to the makeshift
military bands that might have been employed by the Goths and the
Vandals described in the aphorism.
The first half ended with a performance of Adès’s Arcadiana
(1994) by Kurtág’s former students, the Keller Quartet.
The form of this seven-movement string quartet inevitably recalls
late Beethoven – the sixth movement, O Albion, is almost a parody
of the Cavatina in Beethoven’s Op. 130 – although Adès
wrote it back in his early twenties. The underlying theme of the quartet
is, like most of the concert, a little closer to Schubert: that one
can only find one’s bliss, or Arcadia, in death. First violinist
András Keller played the opening melody of the first movement,
"Venezia notturno", at a ghostly distance from the rocking
gondola imitated by the rest of the quartet, bringing it closer and
closer until the movement stopped abruptly, like the sweet grapes
held out to Tantalus in Hell, only to be pulled away at the last moment.
The second movement is, like the sixth, a parody of a Viennese Arcadia,
although with Mozart as the precedent. All the even-numbered movements
are related to land, and all the odd-numbered ones to water –
the third is a drugged-up party version of Schubert’s Auf
dem Wasser zu singen (a trend Adès continued with his
Rite of Spring pastiche in Asyla), the seventh is
named “Lethe” after the river in the Greek underworld,
and the fifth, "L’Embarquement", is the second of
two references to French painting (in this case, Watteau’s L’Embarquement
à Cythère), the first being the fourth movement,
which refers not only to Poussin’s Et in Arcadia but
also what Adès describes as a “tango mortale” from
Bizet’s Carmen.
 The
second half proceeded along similar lines – the Keller Quartet,
spread around the auditorium and joined by Long and violinist Krzysztof
Chorzelski, opened it with the straightforward “Doodles”
from Signs, Games and Messages (1989-97), followed by Adès’s
edgy solo piano rendition of a little Prelude and Chorale from Játékok,
or “Children’s Games” (1975). Then Valdine Anderson
launched into another exhausting 20-item song cycle, the Attila
József Fragments (1981). These unaccompanied “snapshots
of desperation”, as Adès was later to describe his Billie
Holiday parody, Life Story, are, like Schubert’s Winterreise,
stripped to their saddest and barest particles, a musical equivalent
of the tiny poems Kurtág’s Eastern European contemporary
Paul Celan wrote soon before committing suicide. This gruelling programming
stretched Anderson’s endurance, which had the perverse advantage
of underscoring the world-weariness of lines like “The water
thickens, swelling into ice [appropriately, she thinned her tone on
“ice”], and my sins gather into death."
The evening concluded with another quartet and another early piece
by Adès. Kurtág’s Six Moments Musicaux for
string quartet (2005), a reference to the Schubert piano pieces of
the same name, were mournful and ferocious by turn, handled with a
remarkable variety of texture by the Keller Quartet. The birdsong
of the whimsical fifth piece, an etude for harmonics entitled “À
Tabea Zimmermann…Rappel des Oiseaux”, would have had Messiaen
in raptures, before the ghosts of the Germanic tradition return in
the fading funeral march at the end of the sixth. Appropriately enough,
this prefaced the final contribution, Adès’s Five
Eliot Landscapes for soprano and piano (1990), which demonstrate
how influenced Adès’s piano writing was at the time by
Messiaen (the third, “Usk”, begins like the second of
the Vingt Regards and the final “Cap Ann” is
even subtitled “Hommage à Messiaen”), and Ravel (the second,
“Virginia”, is reminiscent of Gaspard de la nuit).
What is remarkable is that Adès manages to throw in enough
dramatic quirks to convince you that there is an original voice behind
this without venturing beyond stylistic parody. As a result, the Five
Eliot Landscapes are a party piece of the utmost solemnity, and
Anderson and Adès gave them a suitable send-off.
Wolfgang
Rihm – Kalt, Chiffre I, In Frage
London, Queen Elizabeth Hall
October 5th 2006
 Wolfgang
Rihm (photo, left) could not be described as one of London’s
favorite composers, but it seems like his considerable “retro”
reputation on the Continent and particularly in his native Germany
is winning him some space in the chamber music programs at the Queen
Elizabeth Hall. In February, the Alban Berg Quartet will be dropping
in to perform Grave, Rihm’s homage to their late violist Thomas
Kakuska, and members of the Philharmonia plugged the gap on October
5th with a versatile concert consisting of Kalt (1989-91),
Chiffre I (1982-3) and In Frage (2000) as part of
the orchestra’s “Music of Today” series introduced
by British composer Julian Anderson (watch this space for an interview
with Anderson).
Both Kalt and In Frage were UK premières,
and both more than confirmed Rihm’s celebrated range and formal
skill. In Kalt, or “Cold”, hoarse, wintry breaths
slither across the viola, cello and double bass, before an oboe and
a cor anglais play a single note back to one another, building faster
and louder until the three strings and other instruments (piano, trombone
and percussion) join a new dialogue, which disappears in a receding
series of unaccompanied drum beats ending in widely-spaced strokes
of fresh force and savagery. The sustained notes on the woodwinds and
the clipped notes on the drums made the silence around them resound
differently, the former imitating a bare, biting wind, the latter
a frozen, open stillness.
In Frage, the third and last piece in the programme, continued
the trend: a static drama reminiscent of the first part of Boulez’s
Pli Selon Pli, it opens with a series of echoing piano chords
that might have been torn straight from a late Scriabin sonata, followed
by a chant and a deadlocked instrumental dialogue (for clarinet, bass
clarinet, cello, double bass, percussion, harp and piano this time)
that give equal weight to each instrument’s signature figuration
before a quavering, practically unaccompanied viola melody leads the
participants off into silence (violist Rebecca Chambers stole the
show after some outstanding ensemble work in all three pieces, notably
from conductor André de Ridder). Both pieces displayed Rihm’s
ability, reminiscent of Greek tragedy, to generate stark drama from
alternating conversation with monologue. (Not surprisingly, Rihm has
written an opera based on the version of Oedipus by pre-eminent post-war
German playwright Heiner Müller).
Chiffre I, the second item, was a boogie by comparison, bearing
more resemblance perhaps to Prokofiev than any other composer. Pianist
Sarah Nicolls cracked the whip in an unusual instrumental ensemble
(also including clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, two cellos
and double bass), chasing what Rihm self-deprecatingly described as
the piece’s "enigmatic, sketchy art." It's a comment
one does not readily associate with a musical dramatist as self-aware
as he is.–NR
Chihei
Hatakeyama
MINIMA MORALIA
Keith Fullerton Whitman
LISBON
Bird Show
LIGHTNING GHOST
Gregg Kowalsky
THROUGH THE CARDIAL WINDOW
Jessica Bailiff
FEELS LIKE HOME
Benoît Pioulard
PRÉCIS
Boduf Songs
LION DEVOURS THE SUN
Chris Herbert
MEZZOTINT
Christina Carter
ELECTRICE
I've
always been intrigued by the Kranky label. The Chicago-based imprint
started in the mid 1990s, when underground independent labels were
experiencing boom time via the resurgence of the 7" format and
the serious beginnings of indie rock/pop's dalliance with experimental
music (Sonic Youth notwithstanding). Shacking up with the post-rock
phenomenon, Kranky released some of the movement's defining sides
- Labradford's A Stable Reference, Jessamine's The Long Arm of
Coincidence and Stars of the Lid's The Ballasted Orchestra
– and early on they also championed the out sound of New
Zealand, releasing music by Roy Montgomery, Dadamah and Flies Inside
the Sun. I doubt I'd be alone in saying, though, that until recently,
largely thanks to their signing Dean Roberts and Charalambides, I'd
felt Kranky were a bit behind the eight-ball, releasing discs of sweetly
polished "sublime", mostly quite pleasant but often lacking
edge.
Kranky strikes me as the American 4AD: there's always been a definable
sound that unites the bulk of the label's releases, and their artwork
shares a vaguely similar aesthetic, though thankfully they've not
employed an in-house design team to out-perform the label itself.
A while ago, one of Kranky's founders revealed their fondness for
the ECM label, and though this conjures up images of wallpaper-music
hell, it's worth remembering that ECM's early catalogue was relatively
forward-thinking (Art Ensemble, Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden etc).
ECM also occasionally deign to step outside of their comfort zone,
as with Herbert's recent remixes of Nils Petter Molvaer – a
move that maps (albeit a bit uncomfortably) onto Kranky signing dance-rock
outfit Out Hud.
Ultimately, though, Kranky appear most comfortable moving through
the possibilities of post-post-rock Ambient/texturology, with recent
releases by Chris Herbert and Loscil, for example, among the label's
best. When they move into pop/song territory they're nowhere near
as decisive, and some of their signings in this field have been problematic.
But given they've provided both Charalambides and Dean Roberts/Autistic
Daughters with a good home, and their aesthetic radar has obviously
become more finely tuned.
 Recently
Kranky have been navigating similar territory to German label Kompakt
and their Pop Ambient series: indeed, any piece from Chihei Hatakeyama's
debut disc Minima Moralia could have fallen from one of the
annual Kompakt Pop Ambient compilations. Based in Tokyo,
and performing in the Opitope duo with Tomoyoshi Date (with whom he
also runs the Kualauk Table label), Hatakeyama produces music that
floats in that non-space between seductive, grainy ambience and pellucid
New Age mannerism. By trickling tiny string-streams of acoustic guitar
into these reflective puddles of non-demanding sound, Hatakeyama risks
devolving to folktronica. However, while Minima Moralia shares
an auralessness peculiar to so much 21st century drone-dream construction,
Hatakeyama's light touch allows for more breathing space than usual,
resulting in music content to eddy and swirl away in a backwater of
its own design.
 Keith
Fullerton Whitman's Lisbon documents a live performance from
said city that took place on October 4th, 2005. To this point, my
fondest memories of Whitman's music involved his Amen break mastication
on Hrvatski's Oiseaux 96-98. Subsequent releases have seen
him absorbing the internals of guitars, computers and the Sonic Arts
Union with varying degrees of success and/or failure, with Lisbon
his strongest solo recording yet. It starts with pure-tone post-Lucier
hum, but quickly detours through many fields of glistening and drowsy
computer love. Whitman's editing hand is extremely decisive even in
the live context, allowing buzzing, angelic noise to reach a heady
plateau several times, only to slice off limbs in exacting fashion.
Another great reconfiguring of the digital-guitarrorist interface.
 Lightning
Ghost is Ben Vida aka Bird Show's second shot at his own private
Ethnomusicological Forgery Series. Some may know Vida from his time
in Town & Country and Pillow, or perhaps the earlier Bird Show
album Green Inferno. I've always really liked the idea of
Bird Show – chants built from repeating cells of vaguely Occidental
percussion, flecks of Juju guitar and the scour and hum of undefined
wind instruments – even if the actual outcome doesn't always
live up to expectations. The main obstacle is the multitracked vocals,
which start to sound a bit nasal and whiny, close to that babbling
little shit from the Microphones. The lack of energy neuters songs
like "Field on Water", but Lightning Ghost takes
off midway through with the suite-like structure of the extended title
track and the fog-wise melody of "Greet the Morning"; and
there's certainly something charming and very open about the whole
affair. But I'd love to hear Vida explore these ideas in a more adroitly
psychedelic and instrumental manner.
 Gregg
Kowalsky has performed for several years under the Osso Bucco nom-de-plume
and studied at Mills College. Through the Cardial Window
returns us to Kranky's fascination with modern dronology, and this
disc is one of their more successful forays into the field, shifting
between dense and heavy scorings for refrigerator hum tonalities ("Gara
Note") and glittering starlit buzz ("Long Distance Decade").
Kowalsky's academic background comes into play on the closing "Tangents
(guitar pickup)", which feeds recordings of the Mills Ensemble
through an acoustic guitar pickup, but it's balanced with "Into
the Marshes They Drove Me", which sources material from the decidedly
non-conservatorium faux-metal group Isis. Kowalsky's compositions
are sturdy and they can fill or gingerly tint the room – though
Through the Cardial Window actually functions best in the
latter context. And if you assume that's the album's primary purpose,
to lambaste its non-demonstrativeness would involve accusing it of
crimes it never intended to commit. I guess.
 Jessica
Bailiff's first few albums for Kranky drenched her fragile songwriting
in waves of post-flying saucer attack distortion, a relationship consummated
by her Clear Horizon collaboration with fsa's David Pearce. Feels
Like Home presents Bailiff's songs in denuded form, and the gentle
dappling of reverb around acoustic guitar and voice, coupled with
Bailiff's faux-frail delivery, reminds me of the first few His Name
Is Alive albums for 4AD. No surprise, then, to find HNIA's Warren
Defever credited with "silverizing" (me neither) in the
liner notes. If you enjoy music of such deliberation you might get
something out of Feels Like Home, but stripping the thick
layers of paint from Bailiff's production leaves me wondering whether
her songs were always so slight and precious.
 A similar
problem befalls Benoît Pioulard aka Thomas Meluch's debut for
Kranky, Précis. There are a few charming songs on
the album – "Ash Into the Sky" and "Together
& Down" are both gorgeous, lambent ghost-melodies –
but too often, Précis is simple indie pop given a
surface-level glaze of quote-unquote mystery, with perfunctory songs
strummed on acoustic guitar and subsequently drizzled with enough
effects-pedal or tape-deck "atmosphere" to register as slightly
Other. While not unpleasant, it struggles to define its own space
within an overpopulated genre. The debut Boduf Songs album, Lion
Devours the Sun, bears a similar relationship to folk music,
regardless of how much Southampton, England's Mathew Sweet protests
otherwise. The constant pluck of a dampened acoustic guitar, coupled
with Sweet's half-whispered vocals, signifies neo-folk construction
and the textural touches rarely lift the songs, acting as stopgaps
or, at best, painterly interludes. I suspect Sweet has it in him to
make a great record, but this ain't it.
 Also
from England – Birmingham this time – is Chris Herbert,
whose debut Mezzotint is the secret jewel in Kranky's 2006
crown. Herbert's gritty, post-Gas/Voigt texturology moves far beyond
the terrain traversed by ten-a-penny Ambient dunderheads, and though
it shares space with the Hatakeyama and Kowalsky discs, Herbert's
pieces are both the most natural and most effortlessly exploratory.
The cover says it all: pure grain and pattern, no images or symbolism,
and the music is, in one sense, curiously devoid of representational
faculty; yet it's also very eloquent and often rather moving, especially
when sad, churchy organ tones rise and fall through the latter half
of the album. Most music of this persuasion, unable to escape the
curse of "faceless ambient dreck", mistakes the repetition
of one tendency for the exploration of a pre-proposed idea. Herbert,
by contrast, grabs the natural dialect of Ambient and makes it work
simultaneously due to and yet somehow beyond cliché.
A very circular way of saying that this is excellent sound work, effortlessly
done.
 I suspect
a few people were thrown by the relative accessibility of the Charalambides'
recent album A Vintage Burden; after the rhapsodic freefall
of their mammoth Joy Shapes, it certainly felt like a bit
of a regroup and rethink. (With Heather Leigh Murray now devoting
her time to the excellent Taurpis Tula trio she shares with David
Keenan and Alexander Neilsen, A Vintage Burden saw Charalambides
return to duo format for a relatively straight-laced set of devotionals.)
Christina Carter's Electrice also surprises. Carter sets
strict parameters for aspects of the project, with everything in the
same key and guitar tuning, all coated in a slightly sickly glaze
of digital reverb/delay. I'll cop to being fonder of Carter's unadorned,
punk-primitive sides like Living Contact or her recent astonishing
acapella CD-R I Am All the Same Song, but Electrice reveals
itself hesitantly, its initially unyielding and monomaniacal quality
slowly disrobing to reveal yet another complex set of cellular, crepuscular
(non-)songs from Carter's gilded pen. When viewed as a whole, her
music is in a constant state of flux, each release slowly unveiling
different aspects of the same thing. The ever changing same? Hey,
don't sweat it. If it worked for Jandek..–JD
Michael
Keith / John Oswald / Roger Turner
NUMBER NINE
Emanem
Rob
Clutton
DUBIOUS PLEASURES
Rat-Drifting
Phil
Nimmons / David Braid
BEGINNINGS
NNB
Lisa
Miller
Q
Green Ideas
Carsick
CARSICK
Drip Audio
François
Houle
AERIALS
Drip Audio
Jesse
Zubot
DEMENTIA
Drip Audio
Fond
of Tigers
A THING TO LIVE WITH
Drip Audio
 Toronto’s
free jazz and improv scene has historically been hardy but small and
uneven in quality, despite the presence of institutions like CCMC,
the city’s worthy if hit-and-miss answer to AMM and MEV. One
encouraging development in recent years has been AIMT, the Association
of Improvising Musicians of Toronto, which focusses on bringing out-of-town
musicians to Toronto for workshops and collaborations. Number
Nine is the result of one such collaboration, a meeting between
British percussionist Roger Turner and two Torontonians, the guitarist
Michael Keith and CCMC’s resident saxophonist John Oswald.
The trio’s music is strongly reminiscent of classic British
free improv at its most ragged and gritty. Keith clearly knows his
Bailey and Russell, but also draws on his blues-rock background –
at one point he even manages to pull off what can only be described
as a free-improvised trucking song. John Oswald is most famous for
his plunderphonics work, but he was playing free-improv alto sax long
before he gave Michael Jackson a sex-change. He’s a staunchly
non-virtuosic player, a valid approach but one that places serious
demands on an improviser’s ear and powers of invention. Oswald’s
scattershot abrasiveness rarely gets that far, unforunately, and while it’s
entertaining in small doses it definitely wears thin across an entire
CD. Turner isn’t as insanely inventive here as on his records
with Phil Minton, but he does find useful ways of interacting with
Oswald, treating him almost as a second percussionist. Nothing on
the CD is going to knock your socks off, but the music still keeps
the synapses twitching pleasantly, and Keith is a name to watch out
for in future.
Bassist Rob Clutton is a member of countless Toronto ensembles, most
often working with the trumpeter Lina Allemano and the guitarist Tim
Posgate. Dubious Pleasures is a solo bass recital, a genre
that Clutton handles with the requisite virtuosity when needed but
without making too big a deal about it. “How Big Are the Dots”
is the key track, a virtuoso exercise in real-time sound-morphing
that can also be heard as a whimsical portrait of neurosis. It begins
with a fearful, stunted elegy that emerges from a seething subterranean
world of scrapes and grumbles then melts into eel-like squiggles.
Eventually the piece reaches an unsteady lyrical plateau, before breaking
up into hysterics and finally sinking back into the lower depths.
This mode of surreal musical narrative is where Clutton tends to be
most impressive – another example is the briefer “Taken
Over by the Hounds of Reason” (another great title, too!). Most
of the other tracks on the album, though, are rather different, offering a series of near-static
exercises in style. This approach works well on shorter tracks, but
less so on the album’s longest piece, the (excuse the pun) decidedly
stagnant “Pond”. Forget about that track, and the rest
of the disc sounds just dandy. The recording is good, too, and catches
some amusing background noise, including bird-chirps and a disconcerting
chorus of stomach-growls.
 Clarinettist
Phil Nimmons is a much-decorated veteran of the Canadian jazz scene,
while David Braid is a young Toronto jazz pianist who’s mostly
known as an up-and-coming mainstreamer. Beginnings was recorded
as part of a classical music concert series, and perhaps the occasion set
them free to disregard genre expectations: surprisingly, it sounds
like the audience responded warmly to this handsome but sometimes
thorny set of free improvisations. Song-form isn’t neglected,
though: some pieces draw on familiar forms, such as “Eeh”,
a bouncy truncated blues in the manner of Paul Bley’s “Figfoot”.
In other pieces they invent new tunes on the spot: “Cee,”
for instance, is a cross between “Peace Piece” and one
of Mingus’s Ellingtonesque rhapsodies, while “Ayy”
is a pastorale that any Impressionist composer would have been happy
to put his name to. Best of all though is “Eff”, a late-Romantic
whirl of tremulous emotions and dramatically changing harmonies. Even
the Cecil Taylorish tempests of “Dee” are handled with
a traditional sense of theme and variations, developing fluently out
of a little bumblebee phrase. Minor recording flaws are noticeable
on the first two tracks, but nothing too irritating, and the music
itself is refreshingly uncategorizable. Pity about those track titles,
though.
 Vancouver
has a much more feted avant-garde jazz scene than Toronto, and it’s
also a busy crossroads for players from the US and Europe. West Coast
pianist Lisa Miller’s Q, for instance, sounds like
the work of players in close and extended contact with the US and
European scenes; drummer Dylan van der Schyff in particular shows
a fine grasp of everything from jittery Euro-style free-play to tricksy
modern jazz drumming. Miller’s band is tight and well-balanced
– as well it should be, since the quartet pairs two married
couples: herself and bassist Sean Smith, and van der Schyff and cellist
Peggy Lee. This is the kind of avant-oriented disc that gets labelled
“accessible.” Call it a chamber-music take on the modern
jazz quartet: the main mood is a distilled slowmotion lyricism, and
that feeling somehow persists even during the occasional testier exchange
or odd-meter groove. Miller seems to be trying to find musical forms
in which classical, jazz and free-improv traditions come together
not as some weighty cross-genre fusion but as something altogether
lighter on its feet. There are moments where the music touches on
darker moods – notably the haunting “Weary,” a drifting
edge-of-sleep improvisation that narrows down into a slow dance –
but in general the feeling is of elegance tempered with a pleasing
(rather than bleak) melancholy. It’s an admirable and enjoyable
debut album, though a bit too tastefully done: some rough edges wouldn’t
have gone amiss.
 The
last four in this bunch are from Vancouver’s Drip Audio, one
of the most reliable sources for smart, genre-flouting music in this
country. Carsick is a duo of cornettist J.P. Carter and guitarist
Dave Sikula. Their self-titled debut initially seems to be a set of
melting Americana mood-pieces à la Frisell, punctuated by brief
electronic-improv interludes, but this balance is up-ended by the
album’s last, longest and best track, the mini-epic "Rise
to Downpour". Carsick’s use of electronics is tasty and
purposeful: they have a knack for turning fiddly sonic crumbs into sharply
pointed arrows, and know exactly the right moment to bite off a loop
(rather than letting it drag on, as happens in too much electronic
improv). They are willing to be disarmingly simple: the guitar part
on "High Over Sand", for instance, is just five arpeggiated
triads repeated ad infinitum. But the most exciting feature of this
duo is how, on the improv-oriented tracks, they summon deliciously
lyrical music (rather than non-idiomatic austerity) out of minimalist
hisses, plinks, chokes and wheezes. The first eight tracks, while
enjoyable enough, don’t quite seal the deal, but "Rise
to Downpour" is a different matter, showcasing all these players'
virtues: sensitive acoustic interplay, a wry melodic sense, and a
great use of electronics, as the piece drifts seductively into a swirling,
smeary mass of noise.
 I’ve
never quite understood the point of holding solo recitals in obtrusively
reverberant spaces like cathedrals or empty water reservoirs –
sure, it’s very pretty, and the echoes give the improviser something
to respond to, but the music tends to get pushed in predictable directions
and after a while the audio saturation becomes monotonous. Give me
a nice dry pub back-room any day. Anyway, François Houle’s
Aerials is a set of solo improvs for clarinet that strongly
foregrounds a particular acoustic space: he is playing into the
interior of a piano (a technique Steve Lacy used on occasion), using
it as a sympathetic resonating chamber. Houle is one of the few players
to tackle Evan Parker's example head-on, and it’s uncanny to
hear Parker's patented sonic cycloids duplicated so exactly on another
instrument, though Houle tends to be briefer and never quite matches
EP's bristling density of event (though "Circulaire" gets
darn close). Most of the album is considerably sparser, though: sometimes
Houle focuses intently on a particular technical area or idea without developing
it too far past the initial premises; other tracks (the most successful,
I feel) have a more Lacy-like concentration on spinning out pure melody, with more wide-ranging and unpredictable results. The overgenerous
70-minute running time tends to show up the music's limitations, unfortunately,
especially Houle's fondness for predictable call-and-response between
clarinet and answering reverberation.
 It's
an enormous distance from the chill beauty of Houle's disc to the other solo outing
in this bunch, the appropriately named Dementia by Drip Audio's
head honcho Jesse Zubot. His notes are worth quoting:
"This music was documented during a condensed period of contemplation
(June 2006) and is meant to reflect the decline of a human’s
cognitive state. The urge to go back and edit problematic musical
events was purposely avoided in order to capture moments of confusion,
paranoia, hope, agitation and the momentum of passed time." It
was Elliott Sharp, I believe, who suggested that the only truly "free"
improviser was an amnesiac one. What kind of music, then, might emerge
from other abnormal mental states such as "Delirium", "Dementia",
"Delusions", and "Apraxia" (to name four track
titles)? In this cracked, self-undermining sound-world, it's as if
every time the violinist reaches for a humanly expressive extreme
– a melodic arabesque, a snatch of a folk tune – it's
cruelly revealed as the utterance of a virtuosic but broken music-machine.
Which of course only prompts Zubot to redouble his efforts, until
the whole thing becomes a twisty agitated mental/musical act of tail-chasing,
an attempt to catch a glimpse of the back of your own head or jump
out of your own increasingly uncomfortable skin, even as it constantly
throws up damaged moments of beauty and wonder. Who knows if it's a good
idea to play this album over and over again – it's the kind
of thing that could permanently alter your neurons if you aren’t
careful – but I guess I’ll take the risk, because it sounds
better each time.
 Fond
of Tigers' A Thing to Live With is the hardest album in this
bunch to pin down: kaleidoscopic prog rock laced with out-jazz, barbed-wire
noise and ambient weirdness. The seven-piece band, led by guitarist
Stephen Lyons, features two drummers (Skye Brooks and Dan Gaucher),
and there's a lovely cinematic depth to the whole thing, players slipping
in and out of focus or shifting from the margins to the centre before
you know it. The results are a fine balance between mindbending tightness
(convoluted odd-metre riffs delivered with virtuosic precision)
and even more mindbending doses of fuzzed-out bliss. "North"
and "Elkore" are dizzyingly intense rock powered along by
the double-drummer groove and cracked open by Zubot's scorched-earth
violin; even better is the gentle canon of "A Thing to Live with
That Will Live with You". But the best stuff comes in the album's second
half, with a pair of tracks whose near-identical titles will please
Lynne Truss fans. "Here, You Are Hated" is a seven-minute
epic built around a stately trumpet/violin melody: layer after layer
of piano, guitar and drums are added and adjusted until waves
of sound start sloshing around like water in a pool. "Here You
Are, Hated" is the album’s most exhilarating track, a neurotic
race from one bone-crunching Mahavishnu-style riff to the next and
back (the band handles the relentless switcheroos
with aplomb). Like the Carsick album, this one ends with a long track
that’s stylistically distinct from what's gone before: "Parade
Rehearsal" begins with a long dip into sunburned unease, before
the guitars and drums thrash it to bits and the music plunges into
a dense parade-ground musical clash. The textures then unexpectedly
thin out for a little spacey improv, and then there’s a final
upswing into a sunny guitar-and-vibes groove, with Carter adding
wistful trumpet. Marvellous stuff. -ND
Otomo
Yoshihide’s New Jazz Orchestra
ONJO
Doubt Music
Otomo
Yoshihide’s New Jazz Orchestra
OUT TO LUNCH
Doubt Music
Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Quintet
LIVE IN LISBON
Clean Feed
Otomo
Yoshihide’s passion for jazz is well known, and has fuelled
two of his most highly acclaimed working units since 1999. The ONJQ
evolved into the ONJO around 2004, after the departure of saxophonist
Kikuchi Naruyoshi and the arrival of Kahimi Karie, Alfred Harth, Sachiko
M and Kumiko Takara. Aside from serving as a showcase for Yoshihide’s
unique compositional skills, ONJQ/ONJO have celebrated artists as
diverse as Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Jim O’Rourke, James
Blood Ulmer and even the Beatles, reinventing their compositions as
an utterly convincing mesh of EAI and furious free jazz. Familiar
themes expand inexorably into free-for-all improvisation, at times
homing in on scattered, near-silent small sounds while on other occasions
(such as their version of O’Rourke’s “Eureka”)
reaching for Last Exit-style devastation. It’s a peculiar sonic
morphology that generates hours of ear-cleansing, high-octane material.
 ONJO
– the album – is the more “intellectual” of
the two Orchestra outings. “Eureka” is sung in Jane Birkin-like
French by Kahimi Karie, who whispers and sighs until Otomo’s
gentle chordal accompaniment gives way to hundreds of contrasting
lines in an explosion of intertwining counterpoint. “Theme from
Canary” starts with ruined vinyl and continues with a melodic
motif worthy of Gil Evans. Charles Mingus’s “Orange Was
the Colour of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk” (already recorded by
ONJQ on Tails Out) walks along the cliff-top of pulverized
freedom, and Ornette Coleman’s “Broken Shadows”
rises out of a boiling lava of false starts and snippets. By contrast,
the closing “A-Shi-Ta”, with Hamada Mariko vocalising
over a slow percussive pattern, could almost be incidental music to
a theatre piece, its evocative depth and intensity perfectly counterbalancing
the preceding tracks.
 There’s
a strong element of humour in Out To Lunch, as Dolphy’s
milestone is both honoured and dissected by an army of expert students
transformed into mad scientists at the flick of a switch. The themes
are fought over with an enjoyable mixture of mercurial irony and transcendence,
with the honours going to “Hat And Beard” (also one of
the Quintet’s strongest covers, as demonstrated by their superb
version on the DIW album ONJQ Live) and the title track,
both pieces offering themselves in sacrifice to chaotic collective
interplay. “Gazzelloni” meanwhile is a brutal four-minute
beating with a punkish flavour (I’m reminded of Hal Russell’s
NRG Ensemble). “Something Sweet, Something Tender” starts
with an unbelievable bass clarinet solo from Harth. The Seoul-based
Frankfurter is one of the most recognizable voices in the Orchestra,
along with Axel Dörner, Mats Gustafsson and Sachiko M, the latter
applying her sinewaves discreetly throughout both discs. “Straight
Up And Down – Will Be Back” closes the show with a 28-minute
trip through EAI, everything insinuated rather than affirmed in an
invisible bridge linking two worlds that have more in common than
you might think as far as inquisitive musicianship is concerned.
 My personal
favourite in this batch is the truly huge Live in Lisbon,
which was recorded live at 2004’s Jazz em Agosto festival (and
reviewed in these pages) and features Charlie Haden’s “Song
for Che”, Dolphy’s “Serene”, Otomo’s
“Flutter” and (again) O’Rourke’s “Eureka”.
Special mention must be made of Mats Gustafsson, playing with ONJQ
for the very first time that night, who is a force of nature throughout
but so profound when needed (how can you not fall in love
with that baritone on “Flutter”?), and drummer Yoshigaki
Yasuhiro, whose explosive energy would make even Shannon Jackson envious.
If “Song for Che” – a heartfelt hymn if ever there
was one – and “Serene” elicit a few raised eyebrows
among the non-believers pretending to be your best friends, then try
harassing your neighbourhood by blasting “Eureka” at full
volume: the spirit of O’Rourke’s simple melody, first
extrapolated with gut determination, then cried out by the Quintet
until their eyes pop out of their sockets, will send your teeth flying
out. This version is THE ONE, five musicians touched by grace, playing
their asses off and their hearts out. Jaw-breaking, positive, enormous
music. Get a copy of this CD pronto and start digging through ONJQ’s
back catalogue on Tzadik and DIW too. A revelation awaits you.–MR
Tetuzi
Akiyama / Oren Ambarchi / Alan Licht
WILLOW WEEP AND MOAN FOR ME
Antiopic
 In
his article "The Dark Blues" in the last issue of Signal
To Noise, Kurt Gottschalk quotes a remark of Alan Licht's about
Loren Connors: "In a way Loren has done for blues guitar what
Derek [Bailey] did for jazz guitar. He threw all the traditional structure
out the window. Derek was still playing through changes like a jazz
guitarist would, but he threw the chord structure out. With Loren,
it's saying 'let's take the modality and the string-bending and throw
out the 12-bar or the structure or the lyrics, the 'my baby done me
wrong', and do it in an improvised structure." It's an astute
observation, not only for what it says about Bailey (recalling Lol
Coxhill's famous description of him as "the greatest be-bop guitarist"),
but also because it sums up what Licht himself and fellow string-benders
Oren Ambarchi and Tetuzi Akiyama are doing on this 3" sonic postcard
of a 2004 tour they made in New Zealand. Gottschalk's idea of the
"one-bar blues" (not that it's really his idea – what
else is early John Lee Hooker, when all's said and done?) isn't as
daft as it might sound. After all, jazz was able to dispense not only
with the changes but also the notion of regular beat (and with it
that of the traditional rhythm section) and still stay jazz. Free
Jazz, they called it. So why not Free Blues instead? Taking its cue
from John Fahey of course, as well as Connors' work both solo and
in duos with Jim O'Rourke and Licht, it's tended so far to be leisurely
(critics might say lethargic), introspective and more often than not
melancholy. This applies just as well to Akiyama's early work, notably
the wonderful and little-known Flagments Of Paradise with
Taku Sugimoto, and his own solo Relator on Slubmusic, and
Ambarchi's superb solo outings on Touch (Grapes From The Estate)
and Idea (Triste). Willow Weep And Moan For Me is
a more intense outing, principally due to the fact that there are
three guitarists in action, each of whom has cultivated his own idiosyncratic
take on the blues. Ambarchi and Licht are content to unearth their
roots in drone, or one-chord rock (nobody ever complained about the
term one chord-rock, did they?), while Akiyama is distinctly more
combative, not surprisingly perhaps considering one of his accessories
of choice is a samurai sword. In the current climate of anti-terrorist
paranoia, one wonders how long that's likely to continue; if you can't
walk on a plane with a tube of toothpaste and a bottle of mineral
water in your hand luggage anymore, what chance have you got of bringing
along a deadly weapon, even if it's checked in in your suitcase? Let's
hope then that this magnificent outing is just the prelude to a full-length
offering: a beginning, not an end.–DW
Temperamental
Trio
THE RAW AND THE COOKED
Kadima
 Thanks
to the noble work of trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj and guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui,
news of the free music scene in Lebanon has reached a wider public
in recent times, and was doing so even before recent events once more
catapulted Lebanon centre stage. But we still know very little of
developments in free improv south of the border in Israel, which makes
the appearance of this set of 17 tracks more than welcome. Jean Claude
Jones (bass and electronics), Loic Kessous (computer and electronics)
and Stephen Horenstein (baritone saxophone) serve up a tasty mezze
– oops that's a Lebanese dish.. but no matter, national
boundaries do not exist in this music – of pieces ranging from
tight, scrabbling insect music of "Dyad" (Horenstein's gnarly
baritone reminds us of how great a player he is on those albums with
Bill Dixon) to the spacier electronic landscapes of "Heavy Metal".
None of the pieces outstays its welcome – only two tracks go
beyond the four-minute mark – which also makes a welcome change,
even if it leaves one a little hungry for more. Perhaps Kerbaj and
Sehnaoui can negotiate the minefield of bureaucracy and get these
members of Jerusalem's Kadima Collective to play at the next edition
of their Irtijal Festival in Beirut. That'd be a more meaningful move
in promoting cross-border understanding and reconciliation than the
empty rhetoric of Mr Bush and Ms Rice.–DW
Aaron
Siegel
THE CABINET
Longbox
 Solo
percussion albums used to be flashy, can-you-really-believe-I-only-got-two-hands
affairs, but several recent examples have taken the opposite tack,
shifting the emphasis from musician to material, from virtuosity to
simplicity. After the elegant minimalism of Sean Meehan's Sectors
(for Constant) and the tam tam explorations of Eddie Prévost
(Entelechy, Matchless) and Mark Wastell (the Vibras
on wmo/r and Longbox), here's another addition to the list. Unlike
the abovementioned, however, Aaron Siegel, best known perhaps as Anthony
Braxton's drummer of late, isn't interested in long duration: The
Cabinet consists of 21 two-minute tracks, each of which investigates
a small number of basic sounds in meticulous detail – the hieroglyphics
on the CD back tray give you a few clues as to what they are –
in a kind of acoustic equivalent of Jason Kahn's recent snapshots
(see review of Astra Steloj below). Each track is intriguing
in itself, but the album is best appreciated if listened through from
beginning to end, as the sequencing of the pieces has been carefully
thought out to produce a satisfying and convincing 42-minute span
of music.–DW
Steve
Lacy
ESTEEM
Atavistic UMS
 The
mid-70s were fruitful years for Steve Lacy, finding him recording
for numerous European labels and touring constantly. On Esteem,
a previously unreleased 1975 performance recorded in Paris, he is joined by his regular foils, altoist Steve Potts, cellist/violinist
Irene Aebi, and bassist Kent Carter, as well as new hire Ken Tyler
on drums (pianist Michael Smith would complete the line-up later that
year). The proceedings start with the wonky locomotive of "The
Crust," on which Potts fills up every available space with dervish-dances
of circular breathing, his horn often sounding strikingly like a musette.
Potts could certainly let loose, as witness his performance with pianist
François Tusques on 1971's Intercommunal Music (Shandar),
or his work on Lacy's explosive Esthilaços (Guilda
da Musica, 1972), but it's comparatively rare to hear him let loose
these kinds of pyrotechnics in Lacy's mid-70s bands. Tyler may not
have Noel McGhie's mastery of complex backbeat-laden Jamaican funk,
but his dry snare-drum cracks and airy cymbals provide an open ca
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