| DECEMBER
News 2006 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Nate Dorward, Lawrence English, Rachel Grace,
Stephen Griffith, Massimo Ricci, Nick Rice, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
In Print: Rock, Pop
On Creative Sources: Ernesto
Rodrigues, Guilherme Rodrigues, Mathieu Werchowski, Joseba Irazoki,
Wade Matthews, Bechir Saadé, Punck, Christine Sehnaoui,
Sharif Sehnaoui, Neil Davidson, Ricardo Arias, Günter Müller,
Hans Tammen, Sabine Vogel, Neumatica
In Concert: Dancers
on a Tightrope: Beyond Shostakovich
Reissued: Masayuki
Takayanagi
On DVD: Harry Partch
/ AVVA
JAZZ & IMPROV: Roscoe
Mitchell / Mattin & Axel Dörner / Free Zone Appleby
/ Nels Cline / Peter Evans / Roswell Rudd
Nafta / Quintet Avant
/ EKG + Giuseppe Ielasi / Scott Fraser & Bruce Friedman
/ Jeff Kaiser & Tom McNalley / Empty Cage Quartet
CONTEMPORARY: David
Tudor & Gordon Mumma / George Cacioppo / Tod Dockstader
/ Manfred Werder / Helena Tulve / Walter Marchetti
ELECTRONICA: Eric
La Casa / Vertonen / KTL / Chris Watson & BJ Nilsen
Last month
|
Editorial
(slight return)
It's that time of year again when the ol' mailbox fills up with requests
from people I've never met from the other side of the world asking
me to submit my year end Top Ten Best Of lists. Before you ask, I'm
not going to submit one here. It was hard enough doing the Top 40
I did three years ago. Anyway, I've chosen ten for The Wire
again, somewhat under duress, but the whole idea of trying to choose
so few discs from a year that still has still has more than a month
to run has always struck me as pretty daft. As if to prove the point,
no fewer than 67 discs have arrived here in the past seven days. And
there's still another one due I'm looking forward to: Revolt Music,
due out shortly from this month's featured interviewee, Weasel
Walter. And if you're expecting more bla bla from me here, forget
it. I'm too busy checking out this huge pile of discs. Meanwhile,
have fun with Weasel, and the rest of this month's issue. Bonne
lecture.-DW
Philippe
Robert
ROCK, POP
Editions Le Mot Et Le Reste 314pp 20 Euros
 Rock,
Pop is the work of French music journalist Philippe Robert, who
writes for Les Inrockuptibles, Mouvement, Vibrations and
Jazz Magazine. It's subtitled un itinéraire bis
en 140 albums essentiels – "itinéraire bis"
meaning, for those of you who don't read French, "an alternative
itinerary". I think you can work out what "en 140 albums
essentiels" means for yourself. The 140 essential albums –
well, OK, I translated it for you anyway – were recorded between
1965 and 2005 (so if you're a Buddy Holly fan, you can scroll down
the page right now), and Robert provides brief contextual reviews
of each of them, accompanied by tips for further listening and a black
and white shot of the original album cover. If you haven't guessed
already, it's all in French, but don't let that put you off reading
this review, as the book raises issues of central importance to anyone
interested in new music, and not just rock and pop.
For anyone with a modest record collection, the difficulty of choosing
just 140 albums to represent the entire history of rock and pop should
be immediately apparent. It'd be hard enough to pick just "classics"
(leaving aside for the moment the tricky question of what constitutes
a "classic" rock or pop album.. we'll come back to that
later); pitching your tent leftfield and going for more obscure albums
is even more dangerous. A voracious record collector – Philippe
Robert most definitely is one – could all too easily opt to
play the snob card and select a whole bunch of long out of print "cult"
albums (we'll come back to that definition too later), but Robert
has chosen to avoid that path by deliberately selecting albums that
are (or should be) currently and easily available on CD.
A bit of background for readers not familiar with the small world
of French rock journalism: last year the doyen of French rock journalists,
Philippe Manoeuvre, Editor-in-Chief of Rock & Folk magazine, published
his Rock'n'Roll: La Discothèque Rock Idéale
(Editions Albin Michel), the ultimate bourgeois yuppie coffee table
book, a lavish affair with full page colour reproductions of the original
sleeves of the 101 "records that changed the world". (Not
sure The Libertines have changed the world yet, but never mind, that's
another story.) Coming hard on the heels of such an aggressively marketed
volume by a truly charismatic writer (perhaps the only one in French
rock / pop journalism: Manoeuvre is the kind of medicine man who could
sell you a bottle of table wine and have you believe it was Château
Margaux), Rock, Pop faces something of a problem. Even though
his mission is avowedly different – this is the itinéraire
bis, remember – Robert admits that he excluded several
albums precisely because they had already featured in Manoeuvre's
book. Even so, he makes an exception for Trout Mask Replica
and Rock Bottom, and manages to slip in an odd "classic"
or two that probably should have made it to PM's shortlist (notably
Astral Weeks, which will probably bring a smile to the face
of Lester Bangs in the hereafter).
What's most striking though about Robert's selection is its bias towards
the late 60s / early 70s. It's no surprise he opted not to list the
albums in chronological order, as the reader would only reach the
mid 70s two thirds of the way through the book: if these albums were
grouped into four ten-year time periods (1965-1975 inclusive, 1976-1985,
1986-1995 and 1996-2005), no fewer than 93 of the 140 would appear
in the first. A cursory glance through the list gives you a clear
idea of what Robert likes: folk and folk-derived (Tim Buckley, Vashti
Bunyan, Karen Dalton, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Bill Fay, The
Incredible String Band, and more recently Devendra Banhart, CocoRosie
and Joanna Newsom..), lavish arrangements (David Ackles, David Axelrod,
Van Dyke Parks, Talk Talk, Jean-Claude Vannier..), early 70s prog,
especially Canterbury-related (Caravan, Egg, Soft Machine, King Crimson,
Van Der Graaf Generator..), and, with very few exceptions (Guru Guru,
Neu!, Can..), it's all Anglo-Saxon. The only French albums that make
the cut are Magma's Kobaia, Vannier's L'enfant assassin
des mouches and Dashiell Hedayat's Obsolete. Whether
this is a case of snobisme or not is something of a moot point –
why choose Vannier's album and not Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody
Nelson that he provided arrangements for? (perhaps because Manoeuvre
snagged it first) – but what about Brel, Brassens and Ferré?
Does French chanson constitute another genre entirely separate
from rock and pop, as most record stores in this country would have
you believe?
Obviously, the answer to these questions lies in the subtitle: this
is one alternative itinerary, not the alternative
itinerary. Rock, Pop is, like all the best rock journalism,
unashamedly subjective. But unlike Manoeuvre, who stated once with
breathtaking tongue-in-cheek mauvaise foi that August Darnell
(remember Kid Creole and the Coconuts?) was one of the Three Great
Figures in Black Music, or Ben Watson, who can argue the merits of
Johnny "Guitar" Watson or the Prime Time Sublime Community
Orchestra with truly missionary zeal, Philippe Robert feels the need,
it would seem, to justify his choices by reminding us that they've
been rubber-stamped by today's hip arbiters of taste and fashion in
alt.music, notably Thurston Moore and Jim O'Rourke (but also David
Tibet and Steven Stapleton.. that ol' Nurse list still has a lot to
answer for).
Back in the early 90s the FNAC record stores here in Paris printed
up millions of groovy little circular labels marked "JOHN ZORN!"
that were duly stuck on any album in the bins that had even the remotest
link to the man himself, from Napalm Death (the Mick Harris connection)
to Faith No More (Mike Patton) to Juan Garcia Esquivel (a JZ favourite),
knowing full well that it would sell out mighty fast. As it happens,
Philippe Robert hasn't got much time for Zorn (though he does include
Naked City in his top 140, of which more later), but he's
on good terms with Sonic Youth, having co-produced the excellent MMMR
LP with Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Loren Connors and Jean-Marc Montera
in 1997, and is more than happy to milk the connection for what it's
worth. And why not? If people reading Rock, Pop rush out
and buy Skip Spence and Slits albums, that's fine by me.
But this brings us back to the question I asked earlier: what constitutes
a "classic" or a "cult" rock / pop album? Who
decides which albums will "stand the test of time"? The
answer is straightforward enough: we do! Journalists, more often than
not backed up by the enthusiastic man-you-gotta-hear-this raves of
enlightened insiders like O'Rourke and Moore. If rock and pop ever
become truly assimilated into the Western Art Music Canon and studied
at universities and music schools, I'll hazard a bet that the walls
of the faculty libraries will, a few years down the road from now,
be lined with back issues of Mojo and The Wire (in
France, Rock & Folk, and hopefully Les Inrockuptibles..
at least the old monthly version of the Inrocks before the
rag went all weak and weekly). Somewhere along the way though, some
kind of line has to be drawn between one's wild enthusiasm for relatively
obscure figures like Linda Perhacs and Jan Dukes de Grey and the heavy
responsibilities that come with the job of being a well-respected
cultural commentator. I'm no great authority on (nor fan of) hard
rock / metal, but if I'd been assigned the task of writing a book
like this (actually I would have refused point blank, but never mind),
I would have at least tried to include a few more examples than Philippe
Robert does here. Blue Cheer's Vincebus Eruptum and Earth's
Hex: Or Printing In The Infernal Method are hardly representative
of the diversity of the genre. Similarly, punk and post-punk / New
Wave hardly feature at all. Excluding the Sex Pistols and Joy Division
is fair enough (Manoeuvre covered them, after all), but what about
the first Damned album? Or Buzzcocks' Another Music In A Different
Kitchen (perfect pop punk if ever there was such a thing)? Or
The Associates (one would have thought that that voice and those arrangements
would have made it to Roberts' shortlist without hesitation)? Sandinista
is all well and good, but for a truly volcanic crossover between reggae
and hardcore, what about Bad Brains? The answer to this last question
touches on another one of the book's self-imposed shortcomings: the
total absence of Black Music. No Motown, no James Brown, no Parliament
/ Funkadelic, no Prince. The reason for this, as the author explains
in his introduction, is that he's apparently considering another book
specifically devoted to the subject. And a truly terrifying prospect
that must be: covering ALL black music – jazz, soul, funk, disco,
hip hop, R&B, techno and reggae and Afrobeat in one 100-album
selection (rather you than me, Phil!).
The title of the book itself also might lead you to expect some kind
of definition on Robert's part of what rock and pop actually are,
and how we're supposed to differentiate between them. Wisely perhaps,
he steers clear of the subject. But some of the albums he includes
clearly belong to neither category: Julie Tippetts' Sunset Glow
is indeed a rare and wonderful treasure, but it's sure as hell
neither rock nor pop. Nor is Naked City, and goodness knows
what Merzbow's Door Open At 8AM is doing there. And why is
Keiji Haino – Robert is a major league Haino fan – represented
by a relatively obscure release on Michel Henritzi's Turtle's Dream
label (sure that's still in print, Philippe? I have my doubts..).
Surely a vintage Fushitsusha would have been more in line with the
mission statement?
From the point of view of the penmanship itself, I find an occasionally
fusty quality to the writing at times (at least that's how it strikes
someone who's not a native French speaker); a heavy use of the imperfect,
pluperfect and conditional tenses seems to consign the albums to a
kind of hermetically sealed archive. Even a disc as recent as Animal
Collective's Feels sounds curiously remote, as if the author
is trying to imagine himself twenty years from now looking back at
it. Does he loves the music so much he wants to be nostalgic about
it in advance? Or could he perhaps be a little afraid to nail his
colours to the mast à la Manoeuvre and commit himself
to print with the unbridled enthusiastic present tenses and imperatives
of his heroes (and Rock, Pop's dedicatees) Julian Cope, Richard
Meltzer and Byron Coley? A discuter..
Of course, the fact that this review has gone to such lengths to pick
and poke is a clear indication of how thought-provoking Robert's book
is. Though I might take issue with a few of the things he says and
have lingering doubts about some of his choices, I'm the first to
recognise that a book such as this is nothing short of a heroic undertaking,
and is strongly recommended. Providing your French is up to it, that
is, as I doubt it'll be translated into English in the foreseeable
future. All the more reason for you take the plunge and learn la
langue française. Jette-toi à l'eau!–DW
Ernesto
Rodrigues / Mathieu Werchowski / Guilherme Rodrigues
DRAIN
 Despite
the standard string trio line-up (Mathieu Werchowski on violin, Ernesto
Rodrigues on viola and his son Guilherme on cello) this is a sweetly
uncommon outing. On "Graduation" conventional string playing
is shredded into a swarm of disemboweled, frictional harmonics, with
continuous ghostly bowed whistling counterpointed by wooden encounters
of the nth kind, extracurricular spring boinging and all manner of
percussive clatter. It's a sort of tiny superdense instant revolution
destined to fail within minutes, a DIY deconstruction of polyphony
disguised as small-scale industrial clangour. After the stop-start
charges, scrambled Morse code and queasy glissando traffic jams of
"Light", "Metaphor" begins with icy scraping –
sort of Hans Reichel meets Radu Malfatti – then walks on a bounce-and-resonate
tightrope, saturating the acoustic space with throbbing hums, hyperactive
chattering and spicy dissonant pizzicati. A truly orchestral hysteria
sets in, the players totally possessed by a Webernesque St.Vitus'
Dance before they return to picking, plucking and bumping. I'm wondering
if I should have this played at my funeral, especially that fabulous
concluding descending cascade. "Solitude" mixes Hitchcock
and Jon Rose, shining like bleached bones in the desert, forcing the
attention on substances that are barely perceivable on first listening,
but in fact form the very skeleton of these awkward miniatures. Everything
is just perfect.–MR
Joseba
Irazoki
OLATUETAN
 Unlike
the inputless mixing boards, empty samplers, customised FX pedals
and the whole arsenal of amplified bits and pieces in use these days,
the guitar comes with a whole lot of cultural baggage, from classical
to free via flamenco, country, jazz and rock. A lot of guitarists
today go out of their way to avoid any reference to existing styles,
but Joseba Irazoki positively revels in the sonorities of the venerable
instrument, from the scrabble of "Behin Baileyrekin Olatuetan"
(my Basque is pretty rusty but I take it that's a reference to the
dear departed Derek, even if there's a good dose of Sonny Sharrock
in there) to the delicate arpeggios of "Behin Bashorekin Olatuetan"
(Basho as in Robbie that is). Irazoki also plays lap steel and banjo
– not surprisingly, he's performed with Eugene Chadbourne –
and the seven tracks wander delightfully like an ant threading its
way through the blades of grass that adorn the album cover. Lovingly
played and well recorded, Olatuetan is another fine addition
to the solo guitar outings that grace Creative Sources' ever-expanding
catalogue.–DW
Wade
Matthews / Ernesto Rodrigues / Bechir Saadé / Guilherme Rodrigues
ORANGES
 On
Oranges The Rodrigues duo is back in action against with
Bechir Saadé on bass clarinet and nây [an end-blown flute
of Persian origin – DW] and Wade Matthews on alto flute,
bass clarinet and electronics. The album is divided into nine movements
in a kind of suite, if a far from uniform one, opening with beautiful
Nikos Veliotis-like regretful string drones accompanied by discreet
electronic backgrounds and the light crackle of wood, while Saadé's
lingual flutters generate hisses and clicks. Elsewhere, lively microtonal
activity is contrasted and enhanced by the strings' preparations and
extended techniques, and there are spurts of insurgence from the repressed
elastic warp and squelch of Matthews' electronics. The fifth movement
is an engrossing juxtaposition of close intervals (and probably the
best track in terms of emotional depth) which turns into airy multiphonics
and koto icicles courtesy of Ernesto plucking in the red light district
of his viola. The granular battle between subtraction and addition
takes these daring improvisations into the kind of territory that
could leave less seasoned explorers dying of starvation and dehydration
within minutes.–MR
Punck
A CONSTANT MIGRATION (BETWEEN REALITY AND FICTION)
 This
reminds me of the strange French habit of spelling "steak"
with an extra "c": "steack" (they do the same
with Franck, don't ask me why). There's nothing punk about Adriano
Zanni's music though; instead of taking out that "c" you
might want to remove the "n": this is more Puck, Midsummer
Night's Dream rather than Never Mind The Bollocks, evocative
and superbly crafted music for laptop and field recordings. It's also,
unless I'm very much mistaken, pretty much composed – if Zanni
can produce this kind of stuff live I want to see him – which
I suppose also raises the question as to why it's on an improv label
like Creative Sources (wouldn't it attract a little more attention
if it were on Bowindo, I wonder?). The six tracks follow each other
without a break, from the cavernous slightly disturbing percussive
rattles of the two opening tracks to the strange atmospherics of "44°25'37N
12°34'28 E" (that had me looking for a Fennesz connection,
but a Google search for the precise co-ordinates only got me as far
as an Italian astrology website, but I think it's somewhere in or
near Genoa.. maybe someone will enlighten me) to the distant police
cars and barking dogs in "From Belleville to Ravenna" and
the exquisite chill of the closing "Hagakure (II, 105)".
Wherever and whatever it is, A Constant Migration is worth
checking out.-DW
Ernesto
Rodrigues/Guilherme Rodrigues/Christine Sehnaoui/Sharif Sehnaoui
UNDECIDED (A FAMILY AFFAIR)
 Joining
Ernesto on viola and Guilherme on pocket trumpet and cello are Christine
Sehnaoui on alto saxophone and husband Sharif on electric guitar.
"Sitting On A Fence" is full of Frithian halos, expanded
reverberations, low snarls and bundles of harmonics, an amorphous
mantric radiation ruptured by surreptitious quivering percussion.
"Flip Coins" starts with a deep drone accompanied by what
sounds like a feverish gasp, before evolving into wails and wheezes
layered over harmonically imbalanced abrasion and harsh angular counterpoint.
About five and a half minutes in, you feel the presence of a monster
about to wake up, but instead the music shifts towards scarcer, breathier
configurations. "Over Turn" works in the dangerous area
of barely contained restraint, the players going to pains to keep
the sonic train on its tracks despite the absence of a driver. Sharif
Sehnaoui’s appliance-stimulated guitar produces an endless,
trance-inducing flow of electricity, while the boundary lines between
the other instruments are blurred by the protective cushion of near-silence
provided by the ominous and omnipresent hum.–MR
Neil
Davidson
GRAIN
Creative Sources
 If
Phill Niblock's ever up in Glasgow and stuck for a guitarist to perform
Guitar Too, For Four he could always give Neil Davidson a
call, because there's some serious eBow droning going on here, and
very pleasant it is too, if that's your cup of tea (i.e. if your collection
already includes several Ambarchis, Lichts and Torals). It's not all
stasis though – not that the drones Davidson lays down on tracks
like "Incidence" and "Across" are ever really
static: there's a lot happening on the micro-level if you take the
time to listen carefully – on "Cast" his playing is
as fragile and spiky as Tetuzi Akiyama. That said, the attention sometimes
wanders, if you let it. Maybe that's part of the plan.. For myself,
I have a slight preference for Davidson's earlier duo outing Flapjack
on FMR with Raymond MacDonald. But judge for yourself.–DW
Ricardo
Arias/Günter Müller/Hans Tammen
INTERSECTING A CONE WITH A PLANE
 On
this excellent release Ricardo Arias plays a bass-balloon kit ("a
number of rubber balloons attached to a suitable structure and played
with the hands and a set of accessories, including various kinds of
sponges, pieces of Styrofoam, rubber bands, etc"), Günter
Müller is featured on his customary selected percussion, mds,
iPod, electronics and processing and Hans Tammen mangles his "endangered"
guitar. You'll search in vain for a wall to bash your head against,
blood pummelling your temples into a dull ache, as huge rumbling bubbles
host a gathering of a million squeaking mice against a backdrop of
earthquake and thunder. Cybertermites munch their way through your
floorboards over a Jackmanesque wave of harmonics and low-frequency
interference, irregular convulsions perched nervously above Tammen's
extra-terrestrial tampoura, and the music crumbles and splinters into
a cauldron of earth loop and suffocated volume swells. Your padded
cell has been invaded by a battery of radioactive rats, tiny irregular
heartbeats amplified in sickening, Chernobyl-like oppression. Don't
try to understand.–MR
Sabine
Vogel
AUS DEM FOTOALBUM EINES PINGUINS
Creative Sources
 I
may as well admit it: I'm suffering from Solo Wind Instrument Improv
fatigue. Even if you're a dedicated fan of this kind of music there
surely comes a point when you have to ask yourself how many albums
of fffplschpllllkrrrschfff you need, not to mention how often
you're likely to listen to them all (even discs I've very much enjoyed
in recent times by David Gross, Stéphane Rives and Michel Doneda
have sadly been gathering dust on the shelves here of late). I'm certainly
not singling flautist Sabine Vogel out for particular attack, having
very much enjoyed her work on Schwimmer with Bosetti, Griener
and Thieke, and nor is this particular album "just another solo
wind instrument improv outing", interleaving as it does Vogel's
improvisations with (all too brief) field recordings of ice and an
extended exploration of the city of Stockholm, but there's something
about the music that leaves me cold. And it's not just the album title.
Successful solo improvising is hard to pull off, and it's all too easy
to fall back on simple (maybe not so simple technically but simple
musically) extended techniques. One is impressed by the sounds –
wow, is that really a flute? never mind penguins, a lot of this stuff
sounds like hippos having fun in a mud bath – but ultimately
longs for a note or two. But, as I say, it's the end of a long week
listening to solo wind improv outings here at PTHQ (others include
the latest outings by Jack Wright and Henry Kuntz). I'll come back
to this one when I've thawed out.-DW
Neumàtica
ALUD
 Noise
therapy, from Pablo Rega (homemade electronic devices) and Alfredo
Costa Monteiro (pickups on turntable), and it's pretty scary. Those
lullabies mummy used to sing are by now forgotten, it’s time
to learn survival. Machines start buzzing, their menacing yet familiar
presence soon overwhelming. Everything is intensity, in tension, in
question, a progressively blurring stain. A couple of crunching hand
grenades of distortion and, when the smoke clears, distant metallic
drones like the cellar door about to close. Light a match and you
realize how dirty the place is. Those goddamn workers in the apartment
next door, don't they ever stop? The air conditioning doesn’t
work properly, either. There's a bad smell of fried eggs and the radio
won't tune in, yet messages can still be detected, their meaning barely
decipherable amidst sounds of boiling water. Someone's trying to break
in. Water is running down the wall and the paint peeling off. Breath
failing, lack of oxygen. A coin spins on a metal sheet. Sounds of
footfalls, burning coals, eternal war. You might feel better later.–MR
Dancers
on a Tightrope: Beyond Shostakovich
London South Bank Various Venues Oct. 13th–15th
Eastern
European composers seem popular with British arts institutions –
that is, as long as they’re already dead. London has practically
force-fed itself commemorations for the centenary of Shostakovich’s
birth this year, but few venues have found space for a close examination
of the Soviet and post-Soviet contemporary composers who have emerged
from under his shadow (or overcoat, as the Russians say). The Proms
concerts alone featured eight of his symphonies, three concerti and
a concert version of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk along
with a host of shorter items, but they only included seven more recent
Soviet or post-Soviet works, five of which were by composers who are no
longer alive.
 So
the South Bank and composer Gerard McBurney deserve congratulations
for bringing us “Dancers on a Tightrope – Beyond Shostakovich”,
a weekend festival that showcased not only Shostakovich and the late
Alfred Schnittke, but also five living composers: the Russians Galina
Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina (photo, left), the Georgian stalwart
Giya Kancheli, the possibly minimalist Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov,
and the very definitely minimalist Estonian Arvo Pärt (not that
he needs many more champions – it might have been preferable
to have seen some younger composers given a hearing instead, as all
the featured composers were at least 65 years old).
The three-day marathon featured films – alongside an evening
of Shostakovich’s film music – and talks as well as the
standard musical fare in the concerts, which were well programmed
but could have sometimes benefited from a more theatrical staging,
particularly in the two opening concerts of the festival on October
13th. In a last-minute reordering, both opened with a piece by the
Webern-influenced Gubaidulina, continued with an early Webern-like
work and then a later, more extended “tone-poem” by Silvestrov,
finishing with large scale funereal works – from Schnittke in
the first concert, given by the Arditti Quartet in the Purcell Room,
and from Ustvolskaya in the second, given by Reinbert de Leeuw and
the London Sinfonietta in the larger Queen Elizabeth Hall. Both ensembles
had variable success, however, in exploiting the more cinematic aspects
of this fluid sequence of repertoire.
The opening Sinfonietta item, Gubaidulina’s Dancers on a
Tightrope for violin and piano (1993), not only gave the festival
its title, but also elucidated the “tightrope” symbolism
of the long sequences of repeated notes around which Gubaidulina’s
music is sometimes structured. Using single notes to center atonal
music has become a post-war mannerism; for instance, heavy crescendos
during sustained, repeated chords, first developed by Varèse
back in the 20s in Amériques, have been done to death
as a “suspenseful” dramatic device by a number of composers,
including Nono and Birtwistle. Gubaidulina’s love of more Webernesque
smaller forces has perhaps given her a suppler, more lyrical perspective
on this type of “pedal point”, and as a result virtuoso
figurations on the violin gradually fan out from her initial single-note
“tightrope” without the “tightrope” becoming
tediously insistent. During this precarious dance, the pianist menacingly
scratches the strings inside the instrument and then claws out howling
clusters of protest from the keys in the bass, forcing violinist and
pianist into a bitter argument with many plucked strings before the
violin part finally pirouettes into thin air. In what was almost certainly
a portrait of Soviet and maybe even post-Soviet censorship under strain
(the piece was written for the Library of Congress in Washington,
D.C., home to the Soviets’ Cold War opposition), pianist John
Constable invested the censors with steely fingers and suitably impassive
facial expressions, while violinist Andrew Haveron embodied the artist’s
anguished mania, breaking so many hairs on his bow in the process
that one concertgoer was heard to ask whether or not this particular
effect was intended as a symbol of the tightrope snapping under the
strain of official distaste. In retrospect, this performance explained
the similar “tightrope” structure in the Ardittis’
earlier rendering of the composer’s String Quartet No. 2
(1987), although it didn't explain why the quartet couldn't convert
their vigorous interpretation into something more visually stimulating
(even a few dimmed lights might have helped in this case).
 The
Silvestrov (photo, right) performances in both programs had similar
hitches and virtues. From the start, the Ardittis had the advantage:
the three-minute Quartetto Piccolo from the composer’s
student days in Kiev uses its material rather more economically than
the repetitive Symphony No. 2 from 1965 (performed by the
Sinfonietta), and the style played to the Ardittis’ more abstract,
anti-theatrical tendencies. The Quartetto Piccolo’s
remarkable “stop-start” moments, a Silvestrov trademark
in which the piece tails off into silence and suddenly begins again,
found an even fuller expression in the later String Quartet No.
1 (1974). This 20-minute single movement opens with an old-fashioned
elegy recalling Glinka and late Beethoven string quartets, before
angular ornaments intervene and gradually break the melody until it
peters out. The effect recalls the ghostly distortions in the photographic
paintings of Gerhard Richter, or a Beckett character’s fumbling
for words and phrases, and it would have been appropriate if, to accompany
their excellent dry-eyed performance, the Ardittis had opted for world-weary
hearthside lighting, although the wooden structure of the recital
hall already roused nostalgic sentiments. Silvestrov’s setting
of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale (1983) in the Sinfonietta
concert was more colorless: most of the images from the poetry, such
as the poet’s drowsiness, the nightingale’s unchanging,
immortal calls, and the “bell/To toll me back to my sole self”
were incorporated into the music, but Keats dances between the concepts
with an entertaining and nimble rhetoric, while Silvestrov repeats
them with little variation in a monotonously minimalist fashion. Although
soprano Susan Bickley sang her part “in full-throated ease”
(Keats), there was little the Sinfonietta and de Leeuw could do to
enliven the score.
The most unqualified triumphs in both programs were the final contributions
by Ustvolskaya and Schnittke. Ustvolskaya’s work is not often
performed in the UK, although she is the most significant Russian
composer of the generation between Shostakovich and Schnittke. Her
Symphony No. 2, de Leeuw’s 2005 performance of which
was screened in a documentary about her the day afterwards, is as
“minimalist” as the work of her American contemporary
Morton Feldman, although it is naturally much closer to the aggressive
instrumental writing of Prokofiev (Ustvolskaya frequently requires
the pianist to punch the keyboard, in the manner of Prokofiev’s
first War Sonata). The Sinfonietta played her wordless 50-minute
requiem Three Compositions (1970-5) in semi-darkness, building
a giant wall of sound that collapsed apocalyptically onto the listener.
The first movement employs a tuba, piccolo and piano in an exploration
of the most extreme registers, while the second features a hammer
struck on a wooden coffin (or equivalent), a line of double basses
(which sounds like workers sawing the coffin down to size for a funeral)
and piano (their barking foreman, perhaps). Ustvolskaya’s tiny
adjustments of the simplest elements, such as insistently repeated
chords, grip the listener throughout, except arguably in the third
and shortest Composition, which is in any case a tiny amen compared
to the anguished prayers of its predecessors.
Schnittke’s String Quartet No. 2 (1980), which concluded
the Arditti recital, was cinematic enough not to need any additional
theatrical effects, unlike his String Trio (1985), which
violinist Gidon Kremer and his group Kremerata Musica brought to the
Queen Elizabeth Hall the following afternoon. Schnittke incorporated
Orthodox chant material into the quartet in memory of the director
Larissa Shepitko, for whom the composer wrote two film scores, and
the work as a whole might be seen as an account of the car crash that
caused her death and the mourning that followed. The work opens with
a slow, listless sequence, followed by wide, galloping bowing on the
strings, a calmer reflection on previous material, and more wild bowing
until the music comes to an abrupt halt. Melancholy drones and another
gallop lead into some warmer, more nostalgic drones and a whistling
flicker of hope at the end. The cinematic format gives a dramatic
logic and control to what otherwise could have been indulgent pastiche,
and the Ardittis provided a suitably unsentimental response.
The String Trio, by contrast, was written to mark the anniversaries
of Berg’s birth and death, and here Schnittke is content to
ruminate on the styles of Berg, Shostakovich and Bartók with
little dramatic variety (or concision – the piece lasts over
25 minutes). The Kremerata Musica were unable to transcend the material,
but they fared better with the other items in the first half of their
program, the Silvestrov Sonata for violin and piano (Post-scriptum)
(1991), which was very similar in idea and form to his String
Quartet No. 1, and Pärt’s short minimalist gem Fratres
(1977) for violin and piano, in which pianist Katja Skanavi outdid
even Kremer in providing each chord with a separate weight, dynamic
and texture. The second half was more consistent: Gubaidulina, like
Silvestrov, recapitulated the successful formula of her String
Quartet No. 2 in her String Trio of a year later (1988),
with some other textural tightrope acts thrown in for variety –
the piece ends with a tiny motif dancing into the upper reaches of
the violin – and Giya Kancheli (who was spotted in a black moleskin
jacket outside the concert hall giving a soft-spoken interview to
Estonian TV, a cigarette smoking constantly beneath his white moustache)
contributed a quiet, genial Piano Quartet (1997) to match
his pre-concert persona (although rumor had it that after the final
concert in the festival “Ivan the Terrible Vodka” would
be providing some suitably “relaxing” drinks). L’istesso
tempo, as the quartet is subtitled, alternated traditional material
such as elegies and waltzes with some ferocious clusters, particularly
on the piano; it is a tribute to Kancheli’s formal skill that
it sustained its material for over 25 minutes without any extra padding,
although the swift repeat of the climax was probably superfluous.
A stuttering Kancheli encore concluded the contemporary contribution
to a festival which demonstrated, as its title promised, that there
is life beyond Shostakovich.–NR
Masayuki
Takayanagi New Direction Unit
AXIS: ANOTHER REVOLVABLE THING VOLUMES 1 & 2
Doubt Music
 Working
with his New Direction Unit in the early to mid-1970s, guitarist Masayuki
Takayanagi came up with a useful twofold concept of free improvisation.
In what he terms "non-section music," there are two different
ways in which improvisations are structured: "mass projection"
and "gradual projection". With their attendant cosmic/spiritual
implications, gradual projections steadily climb to the stratosphere,
offering subtle investigations of sounds by small groupings of players.
Mass projection, on the other hand, is an all-at-once engagement with
weight, density and condensation of material – sound moving
in chunks of high-octane activity rather than delicate conversation.
Of course, it wouldn't be free improvisation without a subtle dialectic
between these yin and yang options, neither of which would exist without
the other.
Takayanagi was born in 1932, and spent much of his early career as
an orthodox jazzman, playing straight-ahead gigs with figures like
pianist-arranger Toshiko Akiyoshi. A steadily increasing interest
in the avant-garde led him to work with percussion wizard Masahiko
Togashi in 1969 and, soon after, an occasional duo with altoist Kaoru
Abe. Togashi's We Now Create, a quartet with Takayanagi,
reedman Mototeru Takagi and bassist/cellist Motoharu Yoshizawa, was
released on Victor (and later reissued on CD by Bridge Recordings);
the music features elements of both mass and gradual projection. "Variations
on a Theme of Feedback" points in the direction of things to
come, building a huge sonic weight on the back of Takayanagi's raw,
drawn-out feedback. The guitarist's engagement with freedom is subtle:
rather than opting for the pyrotechnics of Ray Russell (whose career
followed an uncannily similar trajectory) or Derek Bailey, Takayanagi's
playing is an odd mix of fragmented but traditional guitar chords
and ringing feedback, offering a measured calm beneath the stormy
work of Takagi and Togashi.
 Though
at first little-documented, Takayanagi's groups gained a moderate
level of underground recognition by the mid-70s. Axis: Another
Revolvable Thing, his third "mature" set, was cut as
a double LP for Offbeat Records. Takayanagi is joined by drummer Hiroshi
Yamazaki (who also played in a duo with Abe), reedman Kenji Mori and
bassist/cellist Nobu Ino for readings of his "Mass Projection"
and "Gradual Projection" pieces. Both volumes were recorded
live on September 5, 1975 at Tokyo's Yasuda Seimei Hall; to fit them
better onto the original LP sides, the pieces were taken out of concert
order – though the magic of modern technology can rectify that.
Volume One features a fragment of gradual projection ("Fragment
II"), a solo percussion piece ("Fragment III") and
an extraordinarily unruly mass projection ("Fragment VI").
"Fragment II" is music of subtle shading, despite the constant
hum of activity. It begins with low rumble from bass clarinet and
barely-audible cello harmonics, before Takayanagi and Yamazaki enter,
the acoustic guitar responding to the percussion chatter with plinks
and shards. Yamazaki's percussion solo is a masterpiece, moving from
an unrelenting surge into a shimmering wash that quickly fragments
into angular melodic shapes, slabs of hot copper intermingled with
tom jabs and jittery activity. Volume One's centerpiece,
though, is "Fragment VI," a 23-minute salvo of feedback,
soaring alto multiphonics and Sunny Murray-like percussion chatter.
Mori's alto sax spews pure skronky melody that pushes and pulls against
Takayanagi's tendrils of feedback and distortion. As the slabs of
sonic color blend together, one would expect the piece to become almost
static, but there's instead a continually ratcheting-upward of tension
that gives it an extraordinary power.
 Speed
and dexterity characterize the opening gradual projection of Volume
Two, with Ino's pizzicato bass and Takayanagi's acoustic guitar
dancing together, tense accents from Yamazaki's kit underneath and
Mori's pan-flute shading in shrill harmonics (he's a revelation on
flute, his birdcalls sounding nearly tape-manipulated in their twisted
vocalization). As delicate as this music might appear, it's imbued
with frightening dexterity and animated dialogue, its movements far
from what one might call "gradual." The second and third
segments of Volume Two, despite being mass projections, are
less dense at their outset than "Fragment VI's" twisted
slab – the former centers on waves of feedback and percussion,
flute skittering atop a wash of electricity, while the latter is built
around the peals of a gong, punctuated by soprano whinnies and sludgy
detuned guitar. It would appear that, in Takayanagi's lexicon, mass
projections are built from long tones dense in themselves, rather
than a collective density. If only his terminology had caught on,
we might today think of music as diverse as Company and Sunny Murray
as two sides of the same coin.–CA
Harry
Partch
ENCLOSURE 7: THE DREAMER THAT REMAINS / DELUSION OF THE FURY
Innova
 Innova's
Philip Blackburn has astutely realised that the VHS video cassette
will soon be as hard to find as Harry Partch's beautiful original
instruments, and has duly reissued this priceless document in DVD
format. Stephen Pouliot's 1972 film profile of Partch, The Dreamer
That Remains, has been revised and tidied up a little for the
occasion, and though the definition is still rather fuzzy (and we
shouldn't dwell on the sartorial elegance of Danlee Mitchell and the
members of his ensemble.. dig those sleeveless tee shirts!), it's
an essential and unique profile of a true original. While anyone in
search of serious biographical information on Partch is strongly advised
to invest in a copy of Bob Gilmore's exemplary Harry Partch (Yale),
Dreamer provides us with a rare and wonderful opportunity
to see and hear the man in action, especially in the bonus outtake
which shows him making rose petal jam (don't think he would have landed
a job at La Tour d'Argent, though). The grainy and often badly-lit
footage of Partch's "ritual of dream and delusion", Delusion
Of The Fury, is frustrating, but the sound quality is good and
it's an essential document of a performance of the work in UCLA's
MacGowan Hall in January 1969. Partch's typically eclectic scenario,
based on Japanese Noh theatre and African folklore, but also referring
to his own experiences as a hobo during the Depression years, might
be a little dated, and Virginia Storie Crawford's choreography hasn't
aged all that well, but neither detracts from the work's originality
and affective power. The disc is rounded out with a splendid Slideshow
in which Partch describes and demonstrates each of his wonderful instruments
one by one. Tasty. (I might pass on the rose petal jam, though.)
AVVA
GDANSK QUEEN
Erstwhile
 Gdansk
Queen isn't Erstwhile's first foray into the world of DVD –
there was Jonas Leddington's splendid documentary balance beams
in the AMPLIFY02:balance box, you will recall – but
it is the first DVD specially conceived as a separate release on the
label. The disc contains seven tracks, ranging in duration from 3'06"
to 18'40", created by Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board)
and Billy Roisz (video mixing boards). It goes without saying that
you'll need to have your DVD player hooked up to the stereo if you
don't want to have to listen to the music through headphones or through
a crappy pair of speakers, but even if you do it'll be hard for the
video to compete with the music, in terms of total environment, that
is. Nakamura's music, at correct volume (and you know by now what
that means) completely impregnates the listening space, bounces
off walls and ceilings and totally reconfigures the acoustics of the
aural environment, not to mention your brain. The slightest tilt of
the head changes the harmonic spectrum often to an extraordinary degree.
The ideal video complement to such a musical experience would, I guess,
to be in a similarly all-enveloping environment. An IMAX cinema would
be awesome, but as it stands even the largest commercially available
home cinema screen would still not be large enough. There's no equivalent
to a pair of headphones in the world of video (except in Wim Wenders
movies); even if you view in the dark you'll still be able to make
out – and be distracted by – other objects in the room,
bathed in the glow of Roisz's superb primary colours. But ultimately
– and this coming from a HUGE fan of Billy Roisz's live video
work with Efzeg – the distraction here is the video itself.
Music is capable of defining and exploring several parameters (not
to mention substrata within each) simultaneously, whereas video, even
exquisite work like this, seems inevitably primitive in comparison.
For the most part, Roisz seems to be following Nakamura, which is
logical enough given the music was recorded first, in November 2004
in Tokyo and June 2005 in Vienna. When the music changes, so does
the image (it's not always as unsubtle as that makes it sound, mind),
which, impressive though it may be, still leaves one with the impression
that the video is of secondary importance. Watching the visuals with
the sound turned off is pleasant enough but not entirely captivating,
whereas if Nakamura's music were released separately as an audio CD
it would, as far as I'm concerned, be among the finest things he's
released to date.–DW
Roscoe
Mitchell Trio
NO SIDE EFFECTS
RogueArt
 This
trio with bass/cello and drums is one of the more conventional line-ups
in Roscoe Mitchell’s extensive discography, but still retains
the edge of his earlier work. The two discs are separately titled
"No Side Effects" and "Frames", but the divisions
between them aren’t obvious, and I found myself instead mentally
grouping the pieces into four categories: 1) loping, upbeat pieces
with attractive melodies, often in waltz-time, which Roscoe handles
with a disjunctively note-to-note manner; 2) slow, sombre pieces with
notes held as long as possible; 3) furious hornet-attack blowouts
featuring Roscoe's circular breathing, Harrison Bankhead's incomprehensibly
rapid bass strums and bowing, and Vincent Davis's splashy cymbal work;
and 4) quiet, chamber-like percussion pieces. Mitchell leaves the
clarinet at home but brings his flute and piccolo in addition to the
usual array of saxophones – there’s one circular-breathing
bass sax feature on the second disc that has to be heard to be believed.
There’s some excellent work from Davis, but it’s Bankhead
who really stands out. In Eight Bold Souls his contributions were
mostly absorbed into the group sound, but lately he's been surfacing
more in small-group settings, and they reveal an absolute monster
on the bass. All told, this recording stands as an excellent "state
of the trio" release in the tradition of Rollins' Live at
the Village Vanguard and Joe Henderson's State of the Tenor.–SG
Mattin
/ Axel Dörner
BERLIN
Absurd
 You
may remember the story a few years ago of the rap group A Tribe Called
Quest who were, if my memory serves me right, sued up the ass for
having sampled Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side" on a track
on their first album called "The Luck Of Lucien." The legal
action was apparently the idea not of Lou, who was probably too busy
at the time designing those dumb glasses he wears in Brooklyn
Boogie, but of his then wife (this is before he shacked up with
Laurie "O Superman" Anderson btw). On this latest magnificent
outing from Mattin and Axel Dörner there are no direct quotations
from Mr Reed's music as far as I can make out (though it would have
been relatively easy to slip a blast of Metal Machine Music
in at times without anyone noticing it), but the album cover –
not a jewel box, not a digipak, but a nifty canvas bag – is
embossed with an image from the cover of Berlin (the famous
one). Lou Reed aside, this is the most enjoyable Mattin album to come
my way this year, and goodness knows there have been plenty of them;
for once he's not content to lurk at the extremes of the dynamic spectrum,
but darts across it, counterpointing Dörner's trademark breathy
blasts and growls with extraordinary musicality. Yes, you heard it
right, I said musicality, you cynical bastards.–DW
Various
Artists
FREE ZONE APPLEBY 2005
psi
 The
latest entry in psi’s Free Zone Appleby series of Evan
Parker-curated improv symposiums breaks the hitherto austere pattern
of FZA releases with a round robin of free jazz quartets and trios,
topped off by the inevitable all-hands-in nonet. It’s a surprisingly
entertaining album, ideas popping back and forth relaxedly between
the musicians and the mood slipping easily from whimsy to galumphing
frenzy to dark meditation. The band is stellar, and on paper it looks
like overkill: three saxophones (Parker, Paul Dunmall and Gerd Dudek),
two basses (Paul Rogers and John Edwards), two drummers (Tony Levin
and Tony Marsh), not to mention trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and violinist
Phil Wachsmann. But the three trio tracks are excellent: Wheeler’s
in his best lyrical/scorching form on “Red Trio-1”, the
perennially underrated/underrecorded Dudek burns through “Red
Trio-2” (with Edwards at times sounding like he’s setting
out to compete with Marsh’s bass drum), and Paul Dunmall, Phil
Wachsmann and Tony Levin turn “Red Trio-3” into a Theatre
of the Absurd performance. The quartet track is even better:
20 minutes of Parker and Dudek in glorious spiralling dialogue, drawing
on Coltrane but also on the Konitz/Marsh duets for a style of nuanced
rapid-response interplay where each player instantly grasps the contours
and implications of the other’s line, works a parallel to it
that blurs distinctions between mimicry and Talmudic commentary, then
adds a final twist. John Edwards and Tony Levin don’t so much
support as frame the horns' interplay, standing apart in arched-eyebrow
silence then diving in with furious intensity. “Red Earth Nonet”
makes for a suitably grand if somewhat uneven finale to the disc,
the twin basses giving it a grave quasi-orchestral grandeur. Parker’s
ability to make extraordinary music with large ensembles (and their
subdivisions) seems to grow with every year, and this album stands
with the recent Crossing the River as one of the best latterday
examples of his work in this area.–ND
Nels
Cline
NEW MONASTERY: A VIEW INTO THE MUSIC OF ANDREW HILL
Cryptogramophone
 Andrew
Hill has finally "made it", in the sense that the jazz mainstream
is at last throwing plaudits and record contracts in his direction
and the classic Blue Note dates have mostly returned from cut-out
limbo. That said, who knows what the adulation means, given that the
mainstream prefers to canonize idiosyncratic figures without actually
incorporating more than surface features of their music, as the earlier
examples of Monk and Nichols show. But there's perhaps more to Hill's
belated recognition than just giving a neglected master his due: though
the dark ambiguity and inner turmoil of his best music make it a body
of work that's never going to be truly popular, they give it added
relevance in this era of post-millennial unease and distress.
Guitarist Nels Cline has already made two excellent forays into Coltrane's
repertoire (Interstellar Space and a crucial role in ROVA's
extraordinary Electric Ascension), demonstrating his ability
to dig deep into hallowed classics and find something new and strange.
On New Monastery he offers a fractured, free-form take on
Hill's music, generally avoiding straight time- and changes-playing (aside from the joyous blues spree of "Yokada Yokada/The Rumproller") and
often collaging multiple pieces together, a practice he notes is an
extension of Hill's use of episodic form on pieces like "Spectrum".
It's an ensemble bursting with colour and celebratory energy on the
uptempo pieces, as if liberated by the strange orderly flux of Hill's
compositions, and genuinely attuned too to Hill's estranged balladry
(which at times Cline gives a faintly country twang). The core of
the band is Cline's Singers trio with bassist Devin Hoff and drummer
Scott Amendola, augmented by the guitarist's percussionist brother
Alex Cline on two tracks. Andrea Parkins' accordion throws Jackson
Pollock blobs and splashes and Dino Saluzzi tristesse into the mix,
while Ben Goldberg steps into Dolphy's formidable shoes with some
excellent clarinet and bass clarinet work. The key player here, though,
is veteran cornetist Bobby Bradford, whose soulful eloquence reaches
to the heart of these tunes – sample his playing on Hill's great
ballad "Dedication", fully worthy of comparison with Kenny
Dorham's work on Point of Departure. The 24-minute collage of "No Doubt"
(from Black Fire), "11/8" (A Beautiful Day)
and the title-track of Dance with Death drags a bit –
though the last part is worth the wait – but the rest of the
album is superbly achieved, from the perpetually scrambled and resurrected
marchtime of "Not Sa No Sa" to the astounding skronkfest
"Compulsion", with its truly demonic solo from the leader.
Cline is adamant that this disc is not a "tribute record"
but just "a view into the music of Andrew Hill"; that sounds
like hair-splitting to me, but whatever you call it it's a cracking
good record, which ought to be stuck in the ear of every Blue Note
hardbop fan clutching their Mosaics and Connoisseurs.–ND
Peter
Evans
MORE IS MORE
psi
 This
is a cat-among-the-pigeons disc: just when solo trumpeters like Axel
Dörner, Matt Davis and Franz Hautzinger have taken extended technique
to Beckettian just-one-more-gasp, "you must go on, I can't go
on, I'll go on" extremes, up pops the young American trumpeter
Peter Evans with – let's continue the literary analogies –
an Olsonian (or Evan Parkerian) focus on body, breath, the scrapping
of the body/mind-duality, the construction of whole new languages
that seem virtually to speak themselves. "More is more",
indeed (take that, Mies van der Rohe!), and Evans' CD artwork of monstrous
hydra-headed instruments, a cross between a one-man-band get-up and
a Brazil-style ductwork nightmare, perfectly captures the unruly excess
of his music. Interestingly, he focusses on piccolo trumpet for most
of the album, as if in analogy to the way solo saxophone has become a genre that favours
soprano players – indeed, on "Clothes
of Inhabitants Near or Far Away" he exactly mimics the sound
of a soprano sax. There are passages where I'm not quite sure where
Evans is going, but on the other hand there's never a sense of static
presentation of a technique for its own sake: the trumpeter is interested
in the way one sound grows out of another, in squeezing melody out
of noise, in exploring the full range from extreme discontinuity to
frightening singleness of focus. For all the echoes of the classic
solo recitals by Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford &c, this
disc ultimately strikes me as maintaining a stronger relationship to
jazz – the touches of Roy Eldridge bravura on "Slender
Explosions of Noises" are just one sign – and you could
almost read the disc as a jazzer's riposte to that famous skeptic
about improvisation, John Cage, as Evans rams the whole mundane external
world of sounds that Cage loved through the bell of his horn: pit-bull
growls, bird calls, abstract blips, helicopter whirrs, hiccups, scat
vocals, bel canto singing, percussion ensembles and hideous screams.
The results are a vivid and above all entertaining roaratorio for solo trumpet,
and suggest that Evans is a major talent in the making.–ND
Roswell
Rudd
BLOWN BONE
Emanem
 Originally
released only in Japan in 1979, Blown Bone features trombonist
Roswell Rudd and a stellar 1976 pick-up band that "just happened
to be available on these two days": a core quintet of Rudd, Steve
Lacy (soprano sax, as if you needed telling), Enrico Rava (trumpet),
Wilbur Little (bass) and Paul Motian (drums) augmented on the four-movement
"Blown Bone" suite by Kenny Davern (clarinet, soprano),
Tyrone Washington (tenor), Patti Bown (electric piano) and Jordan
Steckel (bata drum). Vocals are provided by Sheila "Million Dollar
Ears" Jordan ("Blues For The Planet Earth", "You
Blew It") and Louisiana Red ("Cement Blues"). Sandwiched
between the three quintet tracks and the suite is a previously unissued
four-minute piece from 1967 entitled "Long Hope". For some
reason the personnel here is only listed in the booklet and not, with
customary Emanem concern for detail, on the back tray, but joining
Rudd (on piano) are Robin Kenyatta (alto), Karl Berger (vibes), Lewis
Worrell and Richard Youngstein (basses) and Horace Arnold (drums).
The opening "It's Happening" swings hard and fast, despite
a few rhythmic hiccups here and there – perhaps if Rudd had
had four days of studio time instead of two he might have had the
luxury of being able to record several alternate takes – and
it's wonderful to hear Lacy clucking and squeaking behind Sheila Jordan's
impeccable scat on "You Blew It". There's a slight drop
in recording quality on the 1967 ballad "Long Hope", originally
the prologue to a jazz opera entitled The Gold Rush, but
who cares when the music is so exquisite and beautifully performed
(Kenyatta, yeah)? One wonders why it took nearly forty years to emerge.
The Blown Bone Big Band is tight and punchy, and it's a treat to hear
Lacy soloing over Patti Bown's almost funky electric piano. Rudd's
arrangements are as skilful as his compositions, and he adds some
tasty trombone behind Louisiana Red's "Cement Blues". After
the Ellington-inflected interlude "Street Walking", an mbira
(thumb piano to you) kicks in on the closing "Bethesda Fountain".
The music settles into an infectious Latin groove and a winding, rubbery
solo from Washington punctuated beautifully by Bown's Rhodes. There's
a smooth clarinet solo from Davern, a brief percussion break, and
that's it. Not a great album but a darn good one. Hats off to everyone
involved in reissuing it.–DW
NAFTA
LINES AS LINES
Ten Pounds To The Sound
 Calling
your group after an international trade agreement might sound like
an odd idea (and it's a bugger of a job trying to get any info on
Google as a result), but makes sense when it's a trio consisting of
a Canadian, an American and a Mexican: respectively Kurt Newman, guitar,
Chris Cogburn, percussion and Juan Garcia, bass. I'm not sure whether
there should be one of those pesky little encircled "R"s
indicating Registered Trade Mark (or whatever it means) after the
name of the group, but as I never add one after Deep Listening and
make a point of forgetting the "TM" after Bill Dixon I'm
not going to make any exceptions here. Newman hails from Toronto,
but until recently was based in Austin Texas, home not only to percussionist
Cogburn but to a dynamic and refreshingly dogma-free improvised music
scene. Garcia met Cogburn and fellow Texas improv prime mover Dave
Dove when he moved to Houston from Monterrey, Mexico at the age of
17. His meaty bass makes a fine foundation for the music to build
upon. Cogburn is as good at hitting his instruments as he is at bowing
and rubbing them, and Newman's guitar playing is splendid, at times
sounding like a koto, at times like Django Reinhardt beamed down to
jam with late 90s Polwechsel. If you can't imagine what that could
possibly sound like you ought to check it out for yourself. If you
can't find one of the elegant hand-stitched CDRs (limited edition
of 100), it seems the music is available for download at www.rasbliutto.net/artists/chriscogburn.html
and there's also a video of this July 2006 concert at Okay Mountain
for you to check out at kurtnewman.blogspot.com/2006/08/nafta-at-okay-mountain.html.–DW
Quintet
Avant
EN CONCERT A LA SALLE DES FETES
Editions Mego
 Despite
the deadly dull album title (are Jérôme Noetinger, Lionel
Marchetti, Jean Pallandre, Marc Pichelin and Laurent Sassi making
a pitch for the bal musette market?) and the group name (very
musique contemporaine, but actually arrived at by chance
when they first performed at 1998's Musique Action festival in Vandoeuvre
– "there was another group playing after us, so we were
the 'quintet before', hence 'Quintet Avant'," Noetinger told
The Wire a while back), this is one of the most entertaining
and creative outings to hit the streets this year. The QA's first
outing Floppy Nails was vinyl only – maybe indicative
of Noetinger's resolutely pro-analogue stance, as is the use of Revox
tape recorders ("not long ago, everybody dreamt of having a Revox!
It was the Rolls Royce! Today there's this spurious idea of ‘progress’,
this imposition of new technology by the market. There's something
totalitarian about it. It's like asking a violinist why he doesn't
play a computer") – but this one is a CD and even comes
in a common-or-garden jewel box. It also comes with de rigueur
Tina Frank design, which is spot on: the QA slice and dice everything
from ducks and dogs to birds and beeps as spectacularly as Frank deconstructs
what looks like a promo photo for office furniture into slats of pure
colour energy. Ferme les yeux CRACK ! embrasse-moi SMACK ! SHEBAM
! POW ! BLOP ! WIZZ ! SHEBAM ! POW ! BLOP ! WIZZZZZ !–DW
EKG
/ Giuseppe Ielasi
GROUP
Formed
 EKG
albums so far have been impressive, sober, even frosty experiences,
and this latest outing on which Ernst Karel (trumpet, analog electronics)
and Kyle Bruckmann (oboe, English horn and analog electronics) are
joined by Giuseppe Ielasi (electronics, guitar, piano, etc.) is no
exception. It is, though, thanks to the added colour of Ielasi's etc.,
a slightly more accessible release than last year's No Sign
(Sedimental) and 2003's chilly Object 2 (Locust). It's a
patient exploration of musical material – timbral, melodic and
even rhythmic (fear not, EAI heads: the fragmented, looped percussion
is still light-years away from Ultimate Breaks And Beats)
– assembled from recordings made during a tour of New England
in April last year, with additional sound recorded in Chicago, Berlin
and Milan. And a carefully composed affair too, right down to the
rondo lugubroso of the closing "Umweg". Another fine
release from Will Benton's excellent Formed label.–DW
Scott
Fraser/Bruce Friedman
LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURE
 With
musicians coming from diverse backgrounds – Fraser is an electroacoustic
composer who works as a sound designer for Kronos Quartet amongst
others, and Friedman a trumpeter active in "free improvisation,
jazz, symphonic, musical theatre, brass ensembles, mariachi and an
assortment of pop musics" – you might expect a bizarre
concoction fusing all of the above into a delirious quotes-a-go-go
kind of human sampladelia. But here I am, following the sad, thoughtful
lines of Friedman's trumpet in "Traces", and thinking of
Mark Isham (don't laugh, about 18 years ago he was doing some damn
good things). Friedman is a more economical player, and the simplicity
of his statements contrasts effectively with the looping shades, sparkling
chords and processed tones of Fraser's electric guitar. The album
alternates this kind of ECM-derived, vast-landscape pensiveness ("As
Visible Wind" brings back memories of Terje Rypdal) with "gentle
cybernetics vs regular trumpet" peculiarities. It's an unusual
release by pfMENTUM standards, and not a bad one, even if it is a
tad lacking in terms of emotion.–MR
Jeff
Kaiser/Tom McNalley
ZUGZWANG
 If
you're an aficionado of strange sounds deriving from normal instruments
overprocessed by effects and electronics, this is right up your alley.
The "normal instruments", in this case, are Kaiser's quarter-tone
trumpet and McNalley's electric guitar, which create a whole range
of turbulent emissions throughout the 72+ minutes of the disc, every
once in a while sweetened by some sensitive measure of linear phrasing,
which comes naturally for Kaiser, as we can guess from the beauty
of his regular tone. On the other hand, McNalley often has to resort
to some (still pretty noisy) pedal effects in order to apply a lacquer
of refined elegance to the few polite sentences that he manages to
squeeze among the ultra-crunchy, grinding distortion that characterizes
the most unpalatable tracks (this doesn't mean that they're not good,
only a little difficult to follow if you're not concentrating).
Eleven improvisations, ranging from one and a half minutes to the
almost thirteen of the initial, extra complex "Carbon Fianchetto",
in which there's about as much chance of finding two like sounds as
there is of meeting the Dalai Lama at your local McDonald's. Cerebral,
yet substantial stuff. To be swallowed in small doses.–MR
Empty
Cage Quartet
HELLO THE DAMAGE!
 Formerly
known as the MTKJ Quartet, the Empty Cage is Jason Mears (alto sax,
clarinet, wood flute), Kris Tiner (trumpet, flugelhorn), Paul Kikuchi
(drums, percussion) and Ivan Johnson (contrabass). The four started
playing together in 2002 ("horrible music", Tiner remembers),
and have progressively worked to free themselves from the worst clichés
of jazz and free jazz, all the while showing due respect to major
players such as Coleman and Braxton. This double CD presents two live
sets captured in Los Angeles at the end of 2005. It sounds like a
single-microphone recording, as there’s a sense of collective
wholeness to the sound rather than a focus on individual instrumental
nuances. Tiner is the most prominent soloist, his lines remaining
comprehensible enough even for regular jazz fans, but certain frictions
between Mears and Johnson are the real attention-catchers on the first
disc. The second evolves into a different kind of interaction, with
Kikuchi and Johnson laying down riffs over which Mears and Tiner (unconsciously?)
evoke the sound of classic British jazz (are you listening, Harry
Miller?). As the performance develops, the quartet seems to be searching
for some kind of illumination that lies over the hills and far away.
Two things detract from an otherwise successful album: the recording
quality (I would really like to hear these fine players in a studio
setting) and the double CD format. Editing it into a 60-minute single
disc would have distilled the music instead of diluting it.–MR
Gordon
Mumma / David Tudor
DAVID TUDOR & GORDON MUMMA
New World
 Musicologist
John Holzaepfel is currently at work on a biography of David Tudor,
and his liner notes for this splendid disc provide us with a clear
idea of what's likely to be in store: in addition to a concise potted
biographical sketch of the pianist-turned-composer, they cover his
early years in Philadelphia as a gifted organist, the epiphany of
discovering Stefan Wolpe's Dance in the Form of a Chaconne,
and his rise to prominence as THE interpreter of post-War avant-garde
piano repertoire on both sides of the Atlantic. A full-length volume
on the subject should make a fascinating read. Meanwhile, it's not
just Tudor the pianist that concerns us here – this disc also
includes two archive recordings of his most famous composition, Rainforest,
one taped at a Merce Cunningham Dance Company appearance in Rio in
July 1968, the other the work's first concert performance at Cornell
in March of the following year. As a precursor of today's EAI and
installation pieces, Tudor's live electronic music is of enormous
historical significance, and it still sounds terrific, despite
the rather crude panning on the Rio tape and a somewhat lacklustre
recording. Tudor heads who already own the 1998 Mode release of Rainforest
(Mode 64), which also features a 1990 recording of the piece
made in New Delhi, won't want to be without this one either.
David Tudor's phenomenal talents as a performer are also in evidence
in the recordings (once again archive stuff) of Gordon Mumma's piano
music he and the composer made at various venues during Merce Cunningham
tours in the late 1960s. Here the experimental nature of the compositions
– the open form plan of Gestures II (1964), whose eleven
sections may be played in any order, and the Mographs, whose
scores were derived from seismographic data recording earthquakes
and underwater nuclear test explosions – is matched by the innovation
of the recordings themselves, which experiment with unconventional
microphone placement and sound spatialisation to remarkable effect.
The music still sounds as crunchy and uncompromising now as it must
have done back in the 60s, and those lucky enough to have snagged
New World's fabulous 5CD box set Music from the ONCE Festival
1961–1966 (of which more later below) will enjoy comparing
this reading of Gestures II with Mumma and Robert Ashley's
earlier recording. Oddly enough, the piece that seems to have dated
the most is the most recent: Mumma's three-minute Song Without
Words, written shortly after Tudor's death in 1996 and dedicated
to his memory, which reaches back not only to Wolpe but also to the
late 19th century piano repertoire David Tudor grew up with.–DW
George
Cacioppo
ADVANCE OF THE FUNGI
Mode
 Mention
was made above of New World's Music from the ONCE Festival 1961–1966 box, and those wise souls who invested in a copy
will remember George Cacioppo (1926–1984) as one the lesser
known members of the ONCE group (the list also includes Donald Scavarda,
Bruce Wise, Philip Krumm and George Crevoshay). The release of six
Cacioppo works on Mode is good news indeed, then, even if four of
them – Time On Time in Miracles (1965), Advance
of the Fungi (1964), Two Worlds (1962) and Bestiary
I: Eingang (1960), already featured in the New World box (in
any case, these smart new readings by the Ensemble 2e2m and the Atelier
de Musique Contemporaine du CNR de Versailles make for an intriguing
comparison with the archive recordings from Ann Arbor). The disc also
includes Mod 3 (1963), for flute, percussion and double bass,
and Holy Ghost Vacuum or America Faints (1966), a wonderfully
lugubrious 26-minute exploration of the electric organ recorded by
the composer himself back in 1966.
In the characteristically thorough liner notes, which also include
an affectionate profile of Cacioppo by Gordon Mumma, Gerard Pape describes
Cacioppo's music as "the missing link between American 'sound-based'
music of the 1960s with [sic] the 'sound-centred' musics of Giacinto
Scelsi and his disciples, the French spectral composers Tristan Murail
and Gérard Grisey." Leaving aside the woolly terms "sound-based"
and "sound-centred" (which were discussed in these pages
last month), and the rather debatable assertion that Murail and Grisey
were Scelsi "disciples", Pape does have a point. Cacioppo's
music is intensely focused on the inner workings of sound, and avoids
fast moving displays of technical virtuosity à la Boulez
in favour of slow, spacious writing. But his music owes much to Varèse
too, and the mastery of the melodic line and sensitivity to the interval
has more in common with early 20th century music than with the often
uneven semi-improvised fantasias of Scelsi. Cacioppo's vocal writing
is also excellent (not something that can always be said of the Italian),
for both solo voice – Janet Pape's work on Time on Time
and Bestiary is gorgeous – and chorus, in the sombre
title track. George Cacioppo's career as a composer was brief, and
his life was dogged by health problems which led eventually to his
death, but he left us with some of the most elegant and original American
music of the post-War years, and it deserves to be much more widely
known and performed. Make sure you check this out.–DW
Tod
Dockstader
AERIAL 1–3
Sub Rosa
 Writing
about Dockstader in the June 2005 issue of The Wire, Ken
Hollings remarked: “Tuning through an old radio dial put you
in touch with the space between stations, a mysterious zone of harmonies
and distortions that existed and functioned according to a strange
and distinct logic.” There is a parallel between this description
and the position of this tape manipulating maverick, whose daily job
in the audiovisual field brought him, among other things, to develop
sound effects for cartoons such as Mr. Magoo; in fact, despite his
evident talent, the academic establishment of the 60s prevented Dockstader
from pursuing a career in composition, because he lacked the formal
credentials needed to access the hi-tech studios where he could practice
his advanced, if self-taught craft. Like many other composers who
somehow slipped through the cracks of music history, he had to wait
a long time before his genius was recognized. Aerial is his
finest work – and puts him among the all-time greats.
Dockstader’s fascination with radio is rooted in early childhood,
when, confined to his room due to a skin disease, he used to tune
in to generate his own perspective on a world that he couldn’t
really see. Throughout his life, radio has remained a constant presence,
yet it was only when he began the arduous task of transferring all
his analog shortwave recordings to digital and selecting the best
material from hundreds of hours of tape that Aerial began
to take shape. Using the first computer he’d ever owned (bought
as recently as 2001!), he shaped the material into a veritable masterpiece.
The three discs, released separately [the image above is just the
cover of Aerial 1 - DW] , contain a total of 59
tracks, totalling 225 minutes. The sequencing – the pieces follow
on from each other without a break, as suggested by Dockstader's friend
and frequent collaborator David Lee Myers – seems to have been
planned to open new vistas onto the unconscious, stimulating new,
unexpected reactions that sometimes verge on rage. Aerial 1
is full of emotional suspensions, tracing the boundary lines of that
pregnant, unquiet stasis one finds in other thoroughly undescribable
jewels such as Roland Kayn’s Tektra, as mutated chorales
and celestial resonances ease hearts and stomachs through a slow descent
into eternal muteness, dim light and harmonic eclipse. Aerial
2 is the most variegated, a cross of impenetrable poise and
“stable anarchy” which stretches sounds to the very limit,
as if Dockstader wanted to foment heavenly rebellion in his listeners
by his acrid stabs of dissonance, only rarely sweetened by brief returns
to calm. Here, more than on the other discs, one can hear what the
composer referred to in the Wire piece as “a demented
carousel or a pipe organ gone badly wrong”. Aerial 3,
especially its final section, returns to the initial path with new
dimensions – irregular repetitions, pulse waves and modulated
spirals of incongruent shapes – which work miraculously together,
establishing a new series of unanswered questions which allow this
music to fast forward and carve its true significance in our soul
before the mind has even started to adapt to its new codes.–MR
Manfred
Werder
20061
Skiti
 There's
a heartfelt statement of intent inserted into the cover art for this
debut issue from Toshiya Tsunoda's Skiti label: "We think that
radical artists can be regarded as saints or hermits…we bring
you radical sound works and conceptual compositions. You can hear
a message from holy hermits". It's as if some holy doctrine were
being decreed – a theological framework, which may go on to
house an entire body of abstracted sound works curated by Tsunoda.
The first dispatch from his monastery is Manfred Werder's 20061.
Drawing from the same creative breath as Cage's 4'33",
this piece places Toshiya Tsunoda (tambura), Tetuzi Akiyama (guitar,
stones) and Masahiko Okura (alto sax) alongside a riverside sound-bed
on the outskirts of Tokyo. Together these three musicians create a
gentle range of metered emissions – never accenting them or
provoking any dynamic shift, their actions refocusing the listener's
ear from the wider sound field of the everyday to the sounds close
to the microphone made by the performers.
There's
a genuinely personal and intimate quality to this record, which begins
with a hearty chuckle as the three players take position and concludes
with their moving "off-stage" (and being applauded –
by passers-by who stumbled into the session by accident?). The informal
atmosphere is disarming, suggesting real passion and excitement bubbling
forth from the musicians (and presumably Werder himself). As yellowheads
fly past, scattering their cries across the stereo field, children
laugh and play nearby, passers-by talk too loudly and trains shudder
low frequencies into this recorded environment, find yourself transfixed
by the simplest of everyday sources, gilded with acoustic insertions
– a wonderful timed-exposure snapshot of a place, three men
and a composition.–LE
Helena
Tulve
SULA
Estonian Radio
 Helena
Tulve, at 34, is one of Estonia’s youngest composers. In 2000,
she was awarded Estonia’s Heino Eller Composition Prize for
her orchestral composition Sula ("Thaw"), which
was chosen by the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers four years
later as the "most outstanding" work. In 2005, Estonian
Radio proudly declared her Musician of the Year. To date, she has
been Erkki-Sven Tüür’s only composition student. Tulve’s
focus is not on rhythm, but rather on sound and resonance. Her inspiration
comes from modern classical and Gregorian chant, but she is also influenced
by the organic elements of Estonian life: long summer days and dark,
cold winters.
In theory, a recording should help make a composer’s music even
more accessible, but this doesn’t seem to have been the case
with Sula - the album - even if the white-on-white cover
and origami-style casing sets the stage for a bit of intrigue. The
chamber works on the disc are performed by the NYYD Ensemble and were
composed between 1993 and 2004. The first three works, Saar
("Island"), Sans Titre, and Ithaka, are
explorations in texture calling for minimalist instrumentation. …Il
Neige calls, among other things, for harpsichord and kannel –
a traditional Estonian stringed instrument. The fullest of the chamber
pieces is Lumineux/Opaque, an interplay between absorption
and reflection scored for violin, cello, piano, and three glasses.
The title track is a complex orchestral piece performed by the Estonian
National Symphony Orchestra. Even at its most dramatic moments, it
is still contemplative and somber. Tulve explains that the piece "denotes
the process of thawing, melting – the transformation of ideas,
materials, timbres and sounds from one state to another… there
is a distinct direction as well as uncontrollable order to this massive
movement." It rounds off an album full of beautiful and challenging
compositions performed by top notch Estonian musicians.–RG
Walter
Marchetti
UTOPIA ANDATA E RITORNO
Alga Marghen
 This
140-minute work consists, quite simply, of the andata, a
70-minute composition for piano (subtitled "99 Variations without
a Theme", though to be frank it's hard to make out if it's fully
written out or partially or even totally improvised) accompanied by
– or rather heard simultaneously with – the sounds of
a particularly violent thunderstorm, and the ritorno, which
is nothing more than the selfsame recording played backwards. It all
sounds simple enough, and, well, it is simple enough, though it comes
with a lot of intellectual baggage in the form of an extended multilingual
prose poem by the composer and an earnest, erudite essay by José
Luis Castillejo which goes into considerable detail on the work's
"problematic", even "nightmarish" implications.
Well everybody knows that time can't run backwards, except in the
Beatles' Yellow Submarine (and maybe in books by Stephen
Hawking, though I've never been able to stay awake long enough to
finish one), but Castillejo seems to make quite a song and dance about
the fact, seeing it as symbolic of some apocalyptic end-of-music-as-we-know-it
scenario. But from where I'm sitting the point Marchetti is trying
to make is straightforward enough: if the andata is the journey
to utopia and the ritorno the journey back, I assume that
utopia itself for Walter Marchetti is the point in the middle. When
music stops altogether. As he has written elsewhere: "When I
was young, I wasn’t shrewd enough to close my ears in time."–DW
Eric
La Casa
AIR.RATIO
Sirr
 4'33"
be damned – I always preferred that piece by Max Neuhaus where
he shepherded the listeners out of the concert hall, onto a bus, stamped
the backs of their hands with the word "LISTEN" and drove
them off to the Holland Tunnel (I think it was). It's a pity Eric
La Casa wasn't around at the time with his state-of-the-art mics to
record it, as he's one of the best listeners in the business. Air.Ratio
finds him lurking in the nether regions of various public buildings
in Paris – the Pasteur Institute, the Maison Radio France, the
Pompidou Centre and the more recent Pompidou Hospital, to name but
a few – recording the sounds of the air ducts. You'd be surprised
how different they all sound too, as the opening and closing "Calibrations"
(one minute's worth of two-second extracts of each of the 30 two-minute
tracks on the album, the aural equivalent of a photographic contact
sheet) make abundantly clear. Actually the second "Calibration"
isn't the last track on the disc – the album ends with a minute's
silence. "The absence of sound reactivates the centrality of
the listener in his attention to sound and musical construction, in
his private place," explains La Casa (no comment on the translation..
I did it actually). Anyway, if you have to take a pee in the new National
Public Library one day and find a bloke in there with a portable DAT
recorder, don't be surprised. Is it art? Is it music? Who gives a
toss? Listen.–DW
Vertonen
STATIONS
C.I.P.
 As
you know, I'm quite fond of annoying readers by quoting the CIP website.
Here's what main man Blake Edwards (aka Vertonen) has to say about
this one: "This CD draws on elements culled from three years
of live performances to create a finely decorated abbatoir of sound.
Crystal candlesticks and creaking floorboards sit side by side, painting
myriad sounds that aim to keep you on your toes from drones and abrasive
rhythmic chugging to noise explosions and musique concrete –
sometimes within the same piece." Stations is certainly
the liveliest and most colourful Vertonen release to date, and now
that Noise has been pitched well and truly into the spotlight (have
you read Tony Herrington on Wolf Eyes in the latest Wire?
your jaw will drop) let's hope we'll soon see Blake topping the bill
at Victoriaville, or somewhere equally ahem high profile. Whether
doodling around with touch tone phones ("Beltone Segue"),
chopping up samples of rock ("Hands Up 1974!", "Nobody
Walks" – Terry Bozzio?) or just slamming your head to the
floor with breeze blocks of power noise ("Face Grab With Chlorine"
is my own personal favourite), this is an action packed, genuinely
fun release. If you haven't filed for bankruptcy after blowing all
your pocket money on Wolf Eyes, pop down to the local emporium and
get yourself a copy. You'll have a blast.–DW
KTL
KTL
Editions Mego
 This
new collaboration between Stephen O'Malley and Peter Rehberg is touted
as a collision of extreme computer music and black metal, but the
hype isn't quite borne out by the CD. Like so many releases of this
nature, in which two artists of stature are locked together in
an uncertain but crushing sonic embrace, the result teeters between
genius and mediocrity. Thankfully, there are only a few unfocused
excursions on the disc, and the pervasive use of tonal stasis and
humming drones, even if garnished with meticulous texture, helps shape
the individual pieces and the record as a whole. Of the four tracks,
"Forest Floor Part One" is the most active and the least
cohesive (proof of the old cliché "less is
more"): O'Malley's rippling guitar is interrupted by a burst
of Rehberg's SuperCollider patches, and drifts into a humid cloud
of drone and feedback as the piece loses its way. The boiling textures
of "Forest Floor Part Three" are far more successful, and
the two other tracks, "Estranged" and "Snow",
give us a glimpse of this duo's true potential: in this restrained
and tempered context, O'Malley and Rehberg seem freed from the constraints
of their respective discographies, and more willing to dispense with
the expected masochistic blasts of noise.-LE
Chris
Watson / BJ Nilsen
STORM
Touch
 You
could argue that Chris Watson is a magician of sorts. And in my humble
opinion, a magician of the highest order. His magic involves simple
acoustic devices worked with great care, transporting the listener
to places that few of us may imagine, let alone visit. In theory it's
a simple enough proposition – find a remarkable (or in some
cases not) environment and document it with a microphone – but
what's important is Watson's ability to envisage landscapes and their
natural inhabitants in ways that pay heed to the richness of incidental
sounds. Combine this with some finely tuned edits and ‘compositional'
(for want of a better term) choices and you have some enthralling
listening situations.
This duet release from BJ Nilsen and Watson meditates on the moments
before, during and after the 'storm'. Watson's opening contribution
is a discrete sound walk focused on environmental detail. Passing
through gusts of seabirds to remote dark caverns, and returning into
the sunlight to capture the sounds of various mammals taking refuge
on the beach front, it suggests a certain narrative progression. Nilsen's
work in contrast is defined by a broader sense of the storm itself
– the forces of nature that hiss and pelt with vigour –
and in many ways replicates the tones and textures of his recordings
under the Hazard byline. In collaboration, these two field recordists
establish a mutual appreciation of space that is equally attentive
to epic vastness and microcosmic detail. A timely reminder to listen.-LE
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
|
|