| JANUARY
News 2007 |
Reviews
by Stuart Broomer, Tom Djll, Nate Dorward, Vid Jeraj, Larry Kart,
Richard Pinnell, Massimo Ricci, Graham L. Rogers, Jean-Michel Van
Schouwburg, Derek Taylor, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
REISSUE THIS: Barre Phillips / Marion Brown
/ Tony Oxley / Roscoe Mitchell / Material / Gil Mellé
/ John Benson Brooks
On Clean Feed: John
Butcher & Paal Nilssen-Love / BassDrumBone / Roswell Rudd
& Mark Dresser / Lisbon Improvisation Players / Amado, Kessler,
Nilssen-Love
Walter & Sabrina
Group
Francisco López
On DVD: Akira Rabelais & Stephen Mathieu /
Blank Plays Duden / John Cage
JAZZ & IMPROV: Iskra
1903 / Chadbourne & Fox / Mattin, Conrad, Barnes / Mattin
/ Christian Weber / Rob Reddy / Carnival Skin / Dave Burrell
/ Brötzmann & Zerang
Keith Rowe &
Oren Ambarchi / Paul Hubweber & Philip Zoubek / Jim Denley
& Peter Blamey / Howlin' Ghost Proletarians / Alan Purves
/ Sabine Ercklentz / Tilt
CONTEMPORARY: Iannis
Xenakis / Charlemagne Palestine & Tony Conrad / Morton Feldman
/ Women in Electronic Music
ELECTRONICA: Deluxe
Incinerator / Bhob Rainey / Strotter Inst. / Un Caddie Renversé
dans l'Herbe / Janek Schaefer
Last
month
|
You
may know of Church Number Nine as one of the rarest and finest
albums by the Frank Wright quartet (and if you're still on the lookout
for a copy of its reissue on the French label Black Keys, drop me
a line – I can help you out), but it's also the name of one
of the many wonderful blogs that sprung up in recent times, on which,
for a modest fee, you can download albums that you'd probably have
to remortgage your home for to buy on eBay. Go have a look at churchnumber9.blogspot.com and, if you're a free jazz nut, you'll toss your cookies, as Jon Rose
would say. Some of the downloads have been removed, presumably for
copyright reasons, though if the people who are sitting on the master
tapes of these amazing sessions are spurred into action and reissue
the albums as a result, so much the better. Let's hope they also read
this month's lead feature, a selection of no fewer than seven long
out of print masterpieces that are just crying out for a deluxe reissue
– make no mistake, nice though it is to download the mp3s and
images of the original artwork, there's no substitute for a beautifully
repackaged, remastered re-release. Keep your fingers crossed somebody
reading this might take action: it's amazing music. And the same can
be said of the other forty-odd releases covered here this month, thanks
to the energy and enthusiasm of our expanding list of contributing
writers – welcome aboard Larry Kart and Graham Rogers, welcome
back Stuart Broomer, Tom Djll and Jean-Michel van Schouwburg. Thanks
also to our regulars: Nate Dorward (now dotting the i's and crossing
the t's as Editor), Clifford Allen, Vid Jeraj, Richard Pinnell, Nick
Rice, Massimo Ricci, and Derek Taylor, and to the others whose work
helped to make 2006 our biggest and best year yet – Marcelo
Aguirre, David Cotner, Jon Dale, Lawrence English, John Gill, Stephen
Griffith, Roy Morris and Jason Kahn. And thanks most of all to everyone
who's sent music in for possible review; I say "possible"
because, sadly, there's no way we can cover everything we receive
(but I don't think we're doing too badly). Bonne année
et bonne lecture!-DW
Barre
Phillips
JOURNAL VIOLONE
Opus One
also issued as BASSE BARRE (Futura GER) / UNACCOMPANIED BARRE (Music
Man)
 This
is THE first recording of solo bass improvised music, a milestone
which still stands tall today. In 1968 Barre Phillips was performing
in London when composer Max Schubel asked him to provide a random
selection of improvised double-bass material for later use in an electronic
composition. Phillips duly went into London’s St. James’
Norlands church and played spontaneously for three hours with no amplification;
upon hearing this spirited, bracing music, Schubel promptly abandoned
his original plan and issued it as played on his then-new Opus One
label. "This music is my inner feelings, gleaned from three hours
of letting my head go", Phillips writes on the sleeve. Engineer
Bob Woolford (of early Incus and Emanem repute) was also present,
and captured the results superbly. The sound of the bass is close,
bright, forward, resonant, with a rich bottom end, and is cast against
just the right amount of the natural acoustic of the church. The LP,
38 minutes long, comprises two uninterrupted side-long improvisations,
played by a young, vigorous Barre Phillips. A man in love with his
instrument.
The performance opens with Phillips instantly evoking the full vocabulary
of free bass playing, then virtually an unheard world. He begins the
performance with tapping, strumming sounds, leading briskly into stinging
harmonics (later more associated with Barry Guy), dark growling low
notes (later more associated with Peter Kowald), semi-tones, quarter-tones
and rich glissandos (more familiar in Xenakis’s work). Around
10 minutes in, the church bells ring twin notes in the distance, and
in a flash Phillips wittily incorporates them into his improvisation.
He contrasts scratchy, scraping sounds and searing attacks with perfectly
classical arco chordal work, dovetailing them seamlessly and throwing
himself into the instrument with a sense of joyful abandon rarely
heard from him since. Few traces of the man’s jazz background
are discernible; instead, the music twists and turns through terrain
which did not become more identifiable in European free improvisation
until some time later. After the performance has wound down to a tender
ending, Phillips carefully places his bass on the floor with a clunk
and audibly walks out of the church, leaving the future of bass-playing
to deal with the consequences.
In the liner notes to his 1994 solo CD Testimony, bassist
William Parker writes, "This music is for ... Barre Phillips
who started it all." This is the disc that started it all. A
simple masterpiece.–GLR
Marion
Brown
PORTO NOVO
Freedom FLP-40140
 Following
the signing of Anthony Braxton to the then brand-new label Arista
in 1975, producer Michael Cuscuna and Arista launched a new jazz series
dedicated to the burgeoning free jazz scene. This series, Arista/Freedom,
focused mainly on reissues of milestones of the Afro-American avant-garde.
The Black Lion/Intercord label kept the same Freedom logo for their
issues. The first of these treasures lovingly re-issued by Cuscuna
was Albert Ayler's mythical Ghosts (Debut/Fontana, a 1964
recording featuring Sunny Murray, Gary Peacock and Don Cherry). Rechristened
Vibrations and given the catalogue number AL1000, this iconic
example of the 1960s New Thing was a fittingly symbolic way to launch
the new label. The second reissue, Marion Brown's Porto Novo (AL1001),
was obviously selected for its rarity and uniqueness. Like many free
jazz albums issued by commercial companies (Impulse! being a notable
exception), it had met a sad fate on its original release, spending
a while stranded in record-shop racks before ending up in the cut-out
bins.
The album's five tracks were recorded by André Van De Water
at a December 1967 concert in Holland. At that time, a small colony
of US improvisers were living in Western Europe, and a collaboration
began with European players. Jeanne Lee, Marion Brown, Barre
Phillips, Steve McCall and trumpet player Ambrose Jackson performed
in a crisscrossing variety of groups in Germany, Holland and Belgium,
playing with Willem Breuker, Gunther Hampel, Fred Van Hove, Buschi
Niebergall, John McLaughlin, Han Bennink and others (including the
guitar hero René Thomas, though that's another story). Fortunately,
one of these meetings was produced and issued by the famous Alan Bates: the label read A.B. Productions, and the vinyl and gatefold cover
sleeve were made by Polydor International.
Porto Novo is a port town on the west coast of Africa which was a
major hub of the international slave trade until the beginning of
the 19th century, the departure point from which African prisoners
were shipped to Jamaica and other colonies. The slave trade and commercial
activities between West Africa, the colonies, and Europe were known
as "triangular commerce", which makes it a doubly appropriate
title for this trio album. The combination of Brown, bassist
Maarten van Regteren Altena and drummer Han Bennink makes this a fantastically
energetic group, with Brown's very beautiful tone put under pressure
by Bennink's Panzer Division antics. On "Porto Novo", an
agitated calypso that is the album's longest track, the giant Dutchman's
full-steam-ahead drumming is positively overwhelming.
The album stands as (in my view) the best work on record of this legendary
saxophonist. While Brown was never as technically adept as a contemporary
like Jimmy Lyons, he nonetheless forged one of the most original and
arresting alto sax sounds in free jazz, as distinctive as Ornette
Coleman or Trevor Watts. Porto Novo was also a significant
waystation for the two Europeans. It was Altena's first recording,
and offered one of the first opportunities to hear Han Bennink blossoming
from a straight jazz musician into a nonpareil free-jazz drummer.
(Only Bennink's explosive New Acoustic Swing Duo with William
Breuker (ICP 001) predates this album.) It remains an album to set
beside Ornette's 1965 trio recordings (At the Golden Circle, Volumes
1 and 2 on Blue Note and the Croydon concert that was also reissued
on Arista/Freedom) and Trevor Watts' first album with Amalgam, Prayer
For Peace (Transatlantic), as an example of 1960s free-jazz alto
sax at its most sensitive.–JMVS
Tony
Oxley
ICHNOS
RCA Victor
 Having
suffered the indignity of English CBS releasing his first two LPs
as corporate tax write-offs (The Baptised Traveller in 1969
and 4 Compositions for Sextet the following year), Tony Oxley,
then 33, saw his third recording (with almost identical personnel)
appear on RCA Victor in 1971. The two CBS discs finally appeared on
CD in 1999. Ichnos did not. The three discs share similar
line-ups, though The Baptised Traveller did not include trombonist
Paul Rutherford, while both CBS discs had Jeff Clyne on bass. On this
disc (and the subsequent untitled Incus 8 LP) Barry Guy replaces Clyne.
Remarkably, several of these pioneering affiliations continue to this
day, nourished by 35-40 year-old musical roots.
The opening track "Crossing" is a brooding, menacing solo
percussion tour de force, a fine example of Oxley’s
ability to generate musical tension, emphasizing textures by contrasting
metal with skin and minimal electronics with acoustic bowed timbres.
By 1971 his preferred percussion set-up had evolved into nothing resembling
the conventional jazz drum-kit (see photo), and his instantly recognizable
sound is heard here at full throttle. The entire sextet explodes into
life on the jagged two-note cue which opens "Oryane", and
the band spits out a searing collective improvisation with stinging
contributions from a very electrified Derek Bailey, an uncommonly
fierce Kenny Wheeler, a wryly stalking Paul Rutherford, and a raging
Evan Parker on tenor, all hovering over the rattling of skeletons
from Barry Guy’s bass and the thunder of Oxley’s percussion.
This is a magnificent, if brief, piece on a par with the finest moments
of Ode or The Topography of the Lungs. Trumpet and
bass drop out for two "Quartets", which are improvised over
minimal structures. Spaces are wider, sounds more carefully placed,
and the players breathe as one (a different version of "Eiroc"
by the same line-up, perhaps recorded at this session, appeared on
Incus 8). The concluding "Cadilla" again features the full
sextet, and sounds compellingly like "Iskra 1903 and Friends",
with Rutherford mischievously on the prowl and Guy very much taking
the lead in the six-way cut and thrust. His replacement of Clyne from
the earlier CBS discs contributes tellingly to the gravitas of both
sextet pieces on this record. This is powerful work from a time and
place when free improvisation was in its youth and talented musicians
with uncluttered heads took risks and disregarded rules, creating
the spontaneous, imaginative music which came to define the genre.–GLR
Roscoe
Mitchell
NONAAH
Nessa
 Inaugurating
the long high summer of Roscoe Mitchell's career, the music on the
1977 two-LP set Nonaah (Nessa) consists of a 31-minute solo
concert performance of the title piece, two duets (one with Anthony
Braxton, the other with Malachi Favors), a trio piece with Muhal Richard
Abrams and George Lewis, two more Mitchell solo pieces (one a concert
performance, the other a studio recording), and a 17-and-a-half-minute
setting of the title piece for four alto saxophonists (Mitchell, Henry
Threadgill, Joseph Jarman, and Wallace McMillan). There is nothing
here that is less than excellent, but the two versions of the title
piece are masterworks. The solo "Nonaah" found Mitchell
in front of an initially antagonistic Swiss audience that had arrived
to hear Braxton and was angry to learn that he had cancelled on short
notice. Insisting on fierce restatements of the angular "Nonaah"
theme, with eventual slight permutations, for roughly five minutes
("the music couldn't move until [the audience] respected me,"
Mitchell has said), the challenged soloist, no doubt somewhat angry
himself, then places clearly contrasting sections of improvisation
edge to edge, each phrase virtually welded in place with his paradoxical
blend of explosiveness and objectivity, until we are left with one
of the most imposing musical ziggurats that Mitchell or anyone else
has ever created. The four-alto "Nonaah" is in three movements
– a rapid "cranky vamp machine" (in the words of annotator
Terry Martin) that at first seems only to repeat itself but soon can
be heard to generate typically fierce, gear-grinding variants; a gorgeously
longlined, sotto voce slow movement that one thinks of as fourth-dimensional
Ellington (it's as though each timbral strand of Paul Gonsalves' sound
were being separated and rearranged with the aid of an electron microscope);
and then a whirling, "angular, spacy mobile" in which each
player is relatively free to work personal variations on the material
within what they, and we, now understand to be, in Mitchell's words,
"the 'Nonaah' ... world or atmosphere." Here in the
final movement, after a while and without too much effort, one can
distinguish each player – Mitchell and Threadgill's roles are
especially evident – while the fact of so much exuberant release
being at once stimulated and contained/compressed by the total course
of the piece is a hallmark of Mitchell's art at its peak.–LK
Material
MEMORY SERVES
Celluloid
 Those
who've only heard more recent Bill Laswell may be forgiven an impulse
to pass over this one in the used bins, but don't mistake Memory
Serves for the kind of avant-world-freedub that boils albums
like Sacred System: Nagual Site into overspiced soup. 1981's
Memory Serves stands alone in not only Laswell's output but
pretty much head and shoulders above the entire output of the Downtown
scene of the early 1980's. (Take that, MacArthur Zorn!) Taken as a whole,
Memory Serves is a unique realization of collective composition,
an approach that brings forth perfectly apposite improvisations. This
heightened interactivity is due to the collaborative talents of everybody
on it – taking in a decent cross-section of Downtowners and
AACMers – but the thrilling thing about this album is its damned
coherence; it feeds off the diversity and pyrotechnics of
the assembled talent while avoiding the pitfalls of grandstanding
and competitiveness that mar other "supergroup" one-shots.
Give due credit to the core of the band, Laswell / Beinhorn and producer
Martin Bisi. Perhaps if this line-up had cranked out a half-dozen
more albums, we'd have gotten used to / tired of the dazzle, or perhaps
the lustre would've faded into routine, as it so often does. But there's
just this one document, and as the years recede its brilliant surfaces
shine ever more sparklingly.
Henry Threadgill's laughing, shouting entrance in "Disappearing"
kicks the record into high gear. Laswell and Maher really Take Care
of Business here. The rideout section floats on a faster, pointillistic
groove as Maher's fantastic fills and Olu Dara's wackadoo cornet do
the disappearing trick. Laswell's froggy bass gives Dara plenty of
backtalk with which to parley. In "Upriver" Sharrock and
violinist Billy Bang speak in more drawling tongues, humorously recycling
Delta blues tropes. (Fans of Sharrock-shred may be disappointed: he's
pretty well boxed in on this album; moreover, there are no extended
solos.) "Unauthorized": Bang and Threadgill, then Ronald
Reagan solos! I salute what you've done for America ... in
your work, you build. "Square Dance" provides a good
chance to hear Beinhorn's tapes go up against Sharrock and Fred Frith's
scorching guitars in a totentanz with Threadgill and Lewis's
yelping horns. Frith does his best to push "Metal Test"
and "Square Dance" into bleaker Massacre territory
with blackboard-scratch violin and a guitar solo in the former that
blows the chilly breath of death. On the merciless "Square Dance,"
he hacks away with a Sharrocking edge with terminal tremolo while
horns and tapes gate in and out: little crashing pills of stereo-oids.
The opening (title) track doesn't pack the punch of the rest of the
pieces, and his brings us to the album's main weakness: its songs.
Lyrics are cut from rather pedestrian "1984" cloth, nerdily
bemoaning the desolation and alienation of modern living. These are
drearily hammered into the ear by Michael Beinhorn's "singing",
which seems a distraction at best, adolescent depressive-wallowing
at worst. "Silent Land" fares the best of the three vocal
tracks, with Beinhorn taking a falsetto range with overdubbed whispers
(and he's back in the mix, which sounds like one of those dripping
Tarkovsky cellars, here inhabited by C. K. Noyes' sparse-tic percussion)
while Lewis overdubs himself in a mournful chorale. So, ignore the
vocals – the rest of Memory Serves is raucous, noisy
fun, taking no prisoners. A reissue would serve its memory well.–TD
Gil
Mellé
TOME VI
Verve
 As
braggarts go, Gil Mellé was a master. A short list of his self-proclaimed
exploits is enumerated in the liners to his Complete Blue Note
Fifties Sessions, a seminal collection of his early work now
also sadly out of print. They range from the concrete (first Caucasian
signed to Blue Note as a leader) to the fanciful (instigator of virtually
every innovation in electronic music). Whatever the magnitude of Mellé's
ego, he certainly left behind some interesting albums, and the mysteriously
titled Tome VI (1968) is one of them, a weird mélange
of electronic and acoustic elements that was among the first of its
kind in jazz (or the first, by Mellé's measure). Operating
under the futuristic sobriquet of The Electronauts, sidemen Forest
Westbrook, Benfaral Matthews and Fred Stofflet provide a strong jazz
grounding for the leader's explorations on electronic sax and an array
of specially designed sound generators. A diaphanous, dream-like quality
distinguishes the modal "Blue Quasar", as Mellé's
echo-saturated soprano lines snake across a standard rhythm section
vamp before the track moves into a dissonant conversation between
scribbling strings, gurgling synthetic arpeggios, and cascading drums
and piano. "Jog Falls Spinning Song" echoes Indian
music in its aggressive cyclic rhythms, metallic string strumming
and spiraling soprano patterns, though Mellé's aqueous electronics
take centre stage. The other pieces aren't as interesting, and the
album's eccentricity means that it's probably very low priority for
Verve's reissue program. A shame, as the music certainly stands out
in a catalogue better known for mainstream bop and swing.–DT
[Since this review went to press the album has been reissued! Hooray!
Shows our man Taylor was barking up the right tree! Woof woof! –DW]
John
Benson Brooks Trio
AVANT SLANT
Decca
 Composer
and pianist John Benson Brooks is an almost invisible figure in jazz
history. In the 1940s he composed pop songs ("You've Come a Long
Way from St Louis" might be the most famous) and associated with
Gil Evans and others at the "birth of the cool." The connections
endured. Evans later recorded Brooks' "Where Flamingos Fly,"
while in a 1971 memoir Gerry Mulligan described him as "our dreamer
of impossible dreams." Brooks made three LPs between 1956 and
1968. Of the three, only Alabama Concerto, recorded for Riverside
in 1958, has appeared on CD. It's his masterpiece, a unique balance
of baroque form, folk melodies (Brooks was employed transcribing Harold
Courlander's voluminous southern field recordings), and jazz execution.
Likely because of the band – a quartet of Cannonball Adderley,
Art Farmer, Milt Hinton, and Barry Galbraith – and its provenance
– Riverside then Fantasy and the Original Jazz Classics line
– it's still available, but you'll find it under Adderley's
name, not Brooks' (OJCCD-1779-2).
That interest in folk music was already apparent in Brooks' 1956 effort
on the Vik label. Folk Jazz U.S.A. has his arrangements of
American folk songs famous and obscure played by a band that includes
his own piano, Galbraith's guitar and Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, the famous
saxophone tandem putting aside their usual tenors for alto and baritone
respectively. It's apparent that Brooks was fascinated with stretching
jazz in the direction of populist roots and classical form, but he
was actually fascinated with stretching jazz in almost any direction,
including a 1961 electronic piece called "Bird meets Cage."
In 1959 he formed the John Benson Brooks Trio, a free jazz group interested
in twelve-tone rows and chance procedures, with poet Howard Hart on
drums and jazz critic Don Heckman on alto. I recall reading a Down
Beat review of a 1962 performance and wishing I could hear them play.
It turns out that was the group's only performance, it lasted 20 minutes,
and it did make it to record when I wasn't paying attention.
At some point Brooks played the concert tape for Milt Gabler along
with a collage tape called "D.J.-ology." According to John
Clellon Holmes' liner note, Gabler had the idea of mixing the two
tapes together: the free jazz concert was thus spliced around a tape
that includes spoken word excerpts (snatches of poems by Ferlinghetti,
Sandburg and LeRoi Jones), civil rights marches, folk songs, and passages
from Lightnin' Hopkins and Sammy Davis Jr. Thus a 20-minute concert
was conflated into a 44-minute LP. Avant Slant – subtitled
"(one Plus 1=II?): A Twelve Tone Collage Catalyzed by Milt Gabler
from Two Ideas by John Benson Brooks" – came out in 1968
with a garish psychedelic cover and lettering that makes Brooks' name
hard to spot. It's strange indeed, as was so much in that period;
what other year might Decca put out a CD by an obscure free jazz pioneer?
I wish I could say Avant Slant is a great record, for Brooks
certainly deserved it to be. Unfortunately it isn't. I suspect the
two Brooks tapes could have resulted in a consistently arresting work,
but thrown in for good measure are some noxious cabaret songs –
words by Gabler, music by Brooks – and some actor-performed
dialogue that isn't nearly as witty as someone must have once thought
it. Despite four engineers and Gabler's editing supervision, the treatment
of the material is often simply linear and consecutive. It never interacts,
the way it might have if it were layered, but then again, the sequential
presentation leaves the original music virtually intact. The Brooks
trio plays spiky music in its own compound terrain, with Heckman's
intensely vocal alto, Hart's cymbal sizzles, and Brooks' abstract
piano managing an intersection of free jazz and serialism. If the
music has an apparent weakness in this form, it's that the marked
avoidance of triadic suggestion sometimes results in a kind of stasis.
And, too, there's a sense that the trio's performance is consecutive,
a series of episodes rather than fully interactive dialogue.
The cumulative effect of the complete package is so discordant that
you have to learn to listen to it, imagining that some parts are in
an unknown foreign language to avoid embarrassment (one of Gabler's
songs is called "Love Is Psychedelic"), but it's an opportunity
to hear an otherwise unavailable early episode of genuinely liberated
free jazz that somehow manages to survive the multiple layers of context.
Even on the original release, Holmes suggests that listeners might
try to retrieve the improvisations: "The Twelves" (as Brooks
calls these works) "are intensely fascinating and twelve-tone
aficionados will want to tape them in sequence off this record so
that they can hear the original twenty-minute concert as it was presented
in Washington." If Avant Slant is ever reissued on CD,
the concert might be reconstructed as a bonus track.–SB
John
Butcher & Paal Nilssen-Love
CONCENTRIC
 Heavyweight
combinations usually don't come as counter-intuitive as the one on
Concentric. Butcher's made a career out of mining microtones,
speaking in alien saxophone tongues that pierce the boundaries of
audibility. His early ties to free jazz forms have largely fallen
away and any outstanding debts to Evan Parker have long since been
paid in full. Twenty years his junior, drummer Paal Nilssen-Love is
most renowned for his muscleman persona, propelling energy jazz outfits
like The Thing and Free Music Ensemble. This set finds each man bending
his style in the other's direction without compromising those core
features that set them apart. Just as Butcher can still burn ears
with furnace-hot reed blasts, Nilssen-Love is capable of abstract
percussive patterns that subvert metric codification. At first, it
seems as if the drummer is making most of the concessions, trading
power for texture and speed for colour to complement the saxophonist.
But Butcher is equally willing to find common ground, even going so
far as to flirt with melody and conventional form during segments
of "Mono Lake" and the mammoth "Stob". The disc's
most extraordinary moment of union comes when they match pitch ranges
on "Point Lobos," with Butcher making use of his patented
harmonics and split tones and Nilssen-Love contributing metallic bowing
and scraping. Their respective fan bases will be reassured, meanwhile,
by passages on the disk marked by Butcher's characteristic reed pops
and avian flutters and Nilssen-Love's stentorian beats. The results
are a highly enjoyable album by two of the most original and flexible
players on the current free music scene.–DT
BassDrumBone
THE LINE UP
 BassDrumBone
was among the more unique ensembles of post-Loft Era New York: a trombone-and-rhythm
freebop unit that featured the youthful talents of bassist Mark Helias,
drummer Gerry Hemingway and trombonist Ray Anderson. Rhythmically
this was a very pliant group, each point of the trio providing equal
muscle and swing. The group’s most productive decade was the
1980s, when they waxed a few sides for Black Saint and Soul Note;
after that, its members soon went in other directions, though they
reunited a few times in the 1990s. But the seeds sown in BassDrumBone
informed groups like Mark Helias’s post-Newk trio Open Loose
and Hemingway’s quintet with trombonist Wolter Wierbos.
Now, three decades after its formation, BassDrumBone has returned
with The Line Up, an affirmation of the group’s unabated
strength.
What separated BassDrumBone from their brethren was a healthy dose
of humour (i.e., “fun”) amid the R&B grit and free
sprawl. “Rallier,” the final cut on The Line Up, is a
prime example of the group’s approach: a mass of slushy tailgate
atop a bouncy uptempo walk, wandering through a sped-up Monky wonderland
before Hemingway rushes the tempo to breakneck and Anderson dives
into metallic wah-wah and auto-dialogue reminiscent of Paul Rutherford.
This isn’t to say Anderson is a scene-stealer, for cooperation
is always evident. Hemingway consistently ratchets tempos upward,
tightening and loosening the rhythmic density in response to every
brassy gargle and Dixieland burr, while Helias holds down the bottom-end
in consistently creative fashion. “Insistent” yanks the
Haden-Higgins funk out of Ornette’s “Ramblin’”
and slaps manic trombone vocalizations on the top, with Anderson sounding
like Mangelsdorff after he’s been hanging around with Bennink
for too long. Helias and Hemingway take brief spotlights before the
Bob Wills-via-Brooklyn head returns. Anderson paints a grimy blues
soliloquy at the outset of “Rainbow” over arco bass and
percussive rustle, bringing to mind the 1966 Roswell Rudd version
of Bill Harris’s “Everywhere” for Impulse. But the
bright mid-tempo section, marked by Anderson’s lively vocalizations,
scuttles any preceding darkness. The Line Up reaffirms the
importance and continued power of this trio: it’s good to have
them “back”, even if they never were quite gone.–CA
Roswell
Rudd / Mark Dresser
AIRWALKERS
 It's
interesting how recognisable trombonists often are. Paul Rutherford:
feline and agile; Gail Brand: plush and cuddly; Johannes Bauer: dry,
lean and mean. There's always been a raw, gritty edge to Roswell Rudd's
playing, something about the way he attacks notes, most evident of
course when he's blasting at full volume – I'll never forget
the first time I heard him rip up the JCOA on "Communication
#10" – but still discernible in the more tender passages.
It's like kissing someone with a beard; nice but it stings afterwards.
On Airwalkers (yep, I'll keep you posted about the forthcoming
legal battle with Nike) he's joined by the perenially impressive Mark
Dresser on bass in nine highly enjoyable if not exactly earth-shattering
duets. Worth a listen though, as there aren't many trombone and bass
albums out there. Offhand I recall a couple by Radu Malfatti and Harry
Miller, Bracknell Breakdown on Ogun and Zwecknagel
on FMP, and Dominic Duval recorded a fine set of pieces with Steve
Swell as part of his Rules Of Engagement project on Drimala,
but I don't think that ever appeared (now Drimala has disappeared
too, it seems). And of course there's Dresser's 2003 outing on CIMP
with Ray Anderson, Nine Songs Together. But where that album
was intense and exploratory, Airwalkers is more relaxed and
friendly. The Raz Mesinai studio wizardry that helped make Dresser's
recent Clean Feed solo Unveil so impressive isn't necessary,
but there's still plenty to marvel at technically. On "Pregnant
Pauses" he's a one-man viol consort, and on "Roz MD"
he swings the music forward economically and cunningly – you
know just where that beat is, you don't need to hear it every time.–DW
Lisbon
Improvisation Players
SPIRITUALIZED
 In
the early stages of Clean Feed's existence, listeners were treated
to a number of world-class Portuguese improvisers – Bernardo
Sassetti, Mario Delgado, Rodrigo Amado, Carlos Barretto – who
weren't being recorded anywhere else at the time. Though Clean Feed's
roster has since become more international in focus, showcasing American
talent as well as various European players, the label is helping to
keep some of the new Portuguese groups visible.
The Lisbon Improvisation Players (LIP), primarily featuring saxophonist
Rodrigo Amado and drummer Bruno Pedroso, is one of the more active
groups on the Lisbon scene, and it's notable for often bringing together
Portuguese and American improvisers. The latest installment, Spiritualized,
features Amado, Pedroso, bassist Pedro Gonçalves, the American
trumpeter Dennis González, and (on two tracks) cellist Ulrich
Mitzlaff. All three of the LIP's releases so far share a remarkably
unified aesthetic: despite being freely improvised, the music's changes
of direction are so strongly delineated and its moments of unity so
directly nailed that the pieces are almost tuneful. Though elsewhere
Amado has engaged with the more austere end of European improvisation
– in a trio with Ken Filiano and Carlos Zingaro (The Space
Between, also on Clean Feed) – the LIP gravitates more
frequently towards loosely-swinging free-bop.
The disc starts with "Tensegrity," which builds from a buoyant
conversation between Gonzalez's brassy poise and Amado's husky baritone
towards a collective processional. González repeats and abstracts
a reveille, while Amado in turn digs in his heels as a subtle, fractured
funk solidifies behind and around his earthy fluidity. A brief opening
in the trio's thrum allows González a way in with what is now
an elegant classicism, buoyant and soulful as Gonçalves and
Pedroso steamroll forward and fall away. There are moments of skitter
and skronk – the raw blats from the horns that sound over seasick
bass/cello scrabble on "Meeting of our Times" – but
what really sets the LIP apart from their free-improvising peers is
an attention to swing and (dare I say it?) soul.–CA
Rodrigo
Amado / Kent Kessler / Paal Nilssen-Love
TEATRO
European Echoes
 Teatro
represents the champagne bottle shattered against the bow of the new
European Echoes label, itself an offshoot of the prolific Clean Feed
imprint. The disc teams Portuguese reed prodigy Rodrigo Amado with
a rhythm section drawn from the now well-established Chicago-Scandinavia
jazz nexus. Bassist Kent Kessler and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love are
old allies, having most recently served as two-thirds of the furnace
crew for the Brötzmann Tentet. Working on tenor and baritone,
Amado superficially recalls Ken Vandermark in his highly rhythmic attack and tendency to shuttle between
aggression and rumination,
though on the whole he's a stronger improviser. The disc offers two
lengthy improvisations followed by two shorter ones; the bassist and
drummer cycle through complex grooves (both implied and explicit),
and Amado surfs the constantly morphing metrics without missing a
beat. If there's a problem with this live set, it's that the group
doesn't do enough to distinguish themselves from countless other sax-led
free jazz trios, a problem particularly apparent on the longer pieces
where the trio moves predictably from loud to soft, dense to spacious,
and so on. The bubbly on pour here has got plenty of fizz, to be sure,
but it's still lacking in distinctive flavour.–DT
CHIOMA SUPERNORMAL: THE DARK ALBUM
Danny Dark Records
 The
45 tracks on this extraordinarily (ridiculously?) ambitious triple
album are performed by the Walter & Sabrina Group, a six-piece
band featuring Walter Cardew (voice, various instruments), Matthew
Dungey (voice, keyboards, oboe), Mette Bille (mezzo soprano), Nima
Gousheh (voice, guitar, santur, Persian translation), Dave Baby (Jew's
harp, swanee whistle, kazoo, clap) and Celia Lu (soprano and Mandarin
translation), augmented where necessary by members of a 14-strong
instrumental ensemble. Walter & Sabrina Group was the brainchild
of Cardew and Stephen Moore (who writes most of the extraordinary
lyrics) and was formed back in the early 90s when Cardew was studying
for a Master of Music degree at Goldsmiths College. The members of
the group, with the exception of Dave Baby, were Cardew's fellow students.
Just in case you were wondering, Walter is the son of the late Cornelius
Cardew, but "any influence he had on me has taken unexpected
forms," he explains. "I played with him in the Progressive
Cultural Association band in the year before he died. And although
I came to realise that the politics of that movement were abhorrent
I think it is from that music that I derived the strongest influence.
It always surprises me now how similar Walter & Sabrina lyrics
are in style to those political songs (although I don't actually write
our lyrics – Stephen does)." Cardew came to music "through
jazz and pop rather than classical music (which came later), playing
various instruments but mainly drums. Cornelius of course encouraged
our musical involvement and would sit at a table on a visit and make
a more or less instant transcription of our latest favourite jazz
tune, and arrange it for sax (played by my brother Horace) and trombone
(me), with transposed parts. We used to spend holidays in Cornwall
with my grandfather, uncle and cousins, and musical evenings there
would range from arrangements of Frescobaldi to Louis Armstrong via
'Colonel Bogey'." Though his first "big loves" were
jazz drummers – "Buddy Rich and Elvin Jones – Cornelius
used to take us to see them close up at Ronnie Scott's (I looked older
than I was)" Cardew eventually developed an interest in rock
and soul. In the late 80s he played for a while with The Pasadenas,
but left the group to study composition at Goldsmiths, where he started
working with Moore on "some very rough and ready recordings,
often using home-made instruments. This eventually became Walter &
Sabrina and we produced our first album in 1995. Stephen came from
an arty/rocky background and turned me on to tons of stuff from Howlin'
Wolf to Throbbing Gristle."
By way of putting the Cornelius connection to one side so we can concentrate
on the album at hand, it's worth quoting briefly from the huge, sprawling
essay cum prose poem cum autobiography cum manifesto that accompanies
The Dark Album's 173 minutes of "hymns of hate [..]
bedded in songs designed for others to sing": "Forever overshadowed
by pseudo famous Father, who died, run down on snowy hump outside
Leyton station, before became even less respectable and successful.
A grimy supermarket carrier bag knocked from his hands, skid on ice
into the gutter."
Cheery stuff, eh? And the opening "Archaeology Part 1" sets
the scene nicely: "And it's all dead all dead – everything
you see / Everything you hear and eat / Everything you touch just
seems to rust / Useless useless, everything useless, never a thing
/ that you can smell / That doesn't reek of death.." And so on.
But behind the verbose Oedipus Schmoedipus noir rhetoric
of both text and lyrics, all pain, porn and self-doubt projected out
into poisonous guilt trips, this is an oddly attractive if often user-unfriendly
collection of "heightened, expressionistic folk" songs.
Several of them – "Archaeology", "Mr Pain",
"Self Harm" and "Susan Cure" – come in pairs, with
one version featuring the text intoned over the instrumental ensemble
by Cardew, spitting out Moore's tough spiky lyrics with Cockney venom
(Alternative TV's Mark Perry inevitably comes to mind, and a passing
reference to "Sniffing Glue" – Perry's legendary punk
fanzine, though that was spelt "Sniffin'" – would
seem to indicate they're aware of the reference), and the alternative
take setting the words to elaborate angular melodic lines. If this
album had come out a quarter of a century ago it would probably have
been released on Chris Cutler's Recommended Records – it's sort
of Art Bears meets 1930s Paul Hindemith with strategic doses of The
Residents and Trout Mask Replica thrown in for good measure.
Drop the needle (as it were) just about anywhere and you'd be hard
pressed to find any of the trappings of 21st Century New Music –
there's no laptop drizzle, no sleek post-techno glitch, no dreary
New Weird folk noodling, no stoner metal. Or any kind of metal. God
knows how a track from it ended up on a Wire Tapper compilation.
Instead there's a strange, colourful array of acoustic instruments,
mostly traditional / classical, in a set of arrangements that wouldn't
sound all that out of place on an early Mothers of Invention album.
Primitive – but effective – electronics sit side by side
with carefully scored charts, gnarly Zoot Horn Rollo guitar and odd
twangs of harpsichords and Jew's Harp. And Cardew's tortured declamations,
whose matter-of-fact narration contrasts brutally with the sadomasochistic
viciousness of the texts. He reads "I watched someone being brutalised"
as if he was discussing the football results in the taproom of a pub
on the Isle of Dogs.
For all its charms (sorry, even if I'm not supposed to enjoy it –
"it is SuperNormal, relentlessly, boringly, tragically, pretentiously
dull" – but I do!), the ear begins to tire by disc three
of the set, which is a shame as there are some scorching live versions
of songs heard earlier. One wonders whether two discs might have sufficed.
But then again, the full power of Moore's bleak vision – forget
Neil Hannon, this is the Divine Comedy – is perhaps
best appreciated if you grasp the nettle and OD on the whole package.–DW
Z'ev/Francisco
López
BUZZIN' FLY/DORMANT SPORES
Lapilli
Francisco
López/Ilios
HYSECHASTERION
Antifrost
Francisco
López
UNTITLED (2005)
Anoema
 Z'ev's
"Buzzin' Fly" is dedicated to Tim Buckley, but there's not
a single sound in there you could associate with Lorca. It's
the perfect soundtrack to today's weather: black and grey, wind and
rain, headphones full of thunderous slams and cavernous echoes, electronically
manipulated into a complex if indeterminable tissue of menace. The
third and the fourth movements are the most intriguing, as Z'ev reconfigures
his world of suffering through repeated trips to the purgatory of
treated percussion. Don't lower your guard even for a split second,
in case you're mentally challenged – suffocated, rather –
by outbursts of malevolent droney bubbles and sparkles. It's intense,
involving stuff not for the fainthearted, like the urgent need to
awake from a very bad dream.
"Dormant Spores" also starts with thuds and rumbles, but
within two minutes we're in typical López territory, ears shaken
by glacial low-frequency subsonic wind like the slow breath of a giant
whale a dozen octaves below. This soon becomes an eye of the storm
/ natural catastrophe recorded 10,000 feet underground inside a sealed
coffin surrounded by a cybernetically generated dam-burst. It's a
gorgeous moment that tops the whole disc as far as vehemently intangible
emotions are concerned, until it stops abruptly to plunge us back
into a distant percussive reverberant fog, before a tip of the hat
to Z'ev himself in the form of "industrial" clang and clatter.
 Ilios
and López recorded the sounds of a monastery in the Greek mountains,
and then created a fantastic album consisting of two separate versions
of the same basic material. Ilios starts with the tranquillity of
the monastery garden, followed by an overpowering rainstorm, the lonely
sound of manual work and the ever-present sea (it could also be the
wind, or both). Footsteps. A hiss. A hammering. More footsteps. Chirping
birds and, finally, a compelling subsonic embrace lifts the whole
piece up until it becomes a debilitating skull massage. I imagine
I can hear a mourning chant from the sea, but no, it's just another
aural illusion. Sizzling distortion is added to this intimidating
wall of sound – there's no shelter in sight – and it morphs
into jet-propelled sensory deprivation, until all that remains is
the numbing drone of a motor. Frequencies beat, slow down, someone
coughs, everything stops.
López begins with a short segment of looping ghostly harmonics,
then immediately puts his assembling skills to work, catching repetition
where it's not normally found, juxtaposing birds, insects and environmental
forces in alluring traps for our brain to fall into, a peculiar beauty
revealing itself to be a hideous yet fascinating being feeding on
synthetic oscillations and bad instincts. Peace is restored for a
few interminable moments, until another terrifying blast of metallic
frequencies comes back to hunt out those who managed to escape the
first time. It's the most potent section of the piece, an imposing
spatial geometry in constant flux throwing us right back into the
strong arms of Nature with a spectacular studio / field recording
crossfade. A final murmur; the sea is beckoning me in. If this is
"silence", you have no ears.
 Untitled
(2005) brings together four more excellent pieces. "Untitled
#177" was created with sounds recorded "in Bangkok by building
transmissions". It's ferociously stomach-gripping, choking our
calmness by alternating surrounding peril and more distant, sparsely
contoured timbral shades that recall John Duncan. "Untitled #178",
recorded in Amazonia "during the dry season of 2005", begins
surprisingly enough with violent rain and thunder immediately pierced
by extreme high frequencies. Cut to a nocturnal environment, crickets
and birds making us feel like unwanted guests in a perfect biosystem.
López's electronics provide a haunting background until everything
fades to black (or does it?) before a conclusive, splendid entomological
choir. "Untitled #111 (for Jani Christou)" is a live recording
of the piece's premiere at Berlin Podewil by Zeitkratzer: it’s
an impressive roar of masterfully controlled drones, disciplined percussion,
pregnant friction and barely repressed energy that makes the composition
sound like Hermann Nitsch on steroids. Great stuff. "Untitled
#183" features yet another helping of environmental recording,
this time from Quebec. Insects are prominent, with a few "megabuzz"
soloists approaching the mics, but the overall sensation is once more
of a penetrating spiritual wholeness: pouring rain is a symbolic purification
from the illusory significance and useless words that only the
stupidity of men, the self-proclaimed "most evolved beings",
could define as "truth". Then, like all the things they
fail to understand (which is more or less everything), they destroy.–MR
Akira
Rabelais / Stephan Mathieu
quien era aquella
Conv
 I
see from the Conv website that this limited edition DVD-R (100 copies)
has already sold out, but a little footnote at the bottom of the screen
informs us that some copies may still available from the label's distributors.
It might be hard to hunt it down, but it's worth the effort. Mathieu
handles the music, a slow pan across a beautiful landscape of sustained
tones and subtly shifting harmonies. But Akira Rabelais' video is
anything but a slow pan: it presents a magic lantern show of some
30,000 images (that's based on my own rough estimate of ten a second;
sometimes there seem to be more, and occasionally the slideshow stops
temporarily on a shot of what appears to be the surface of the sun).
Remember that bit in Yellow Submarine just before they blast
off for Pepperland when all those images come thick and fast? Well
it's like that – for 49 minutes. Images of almost everything
you can think of flash by at breakneck speed: holiday photos, plates
of food, film posters, architectural details, lichens and fungi, pottery,
paintings by just about anybody from Brueghel to Pollock via Vermeer
Turner Monet Renoir Picasso and contact sheets high school yearbooks
softporn centrefolds all tits and ass and smiles for the camera stills
from Hollywood movies all flashing by at breakneck speed so fast you
don't immediately realise that some of the images appear several times
like the girl wearing a teeshirt with the words fuck subtlety written
across not to mention Sydney Harbour Bridge the Grand Canyon and all
the pubs mosques cathedrals interiors exteriors whisky bottles pistols
rifles and butterflies. You won't even have time to blink. Not to
everyone's taste perhaps (Frans de Waard was decidedly lukewarm over
at Vital Weekly), but certainly to mine. Hope you manage to track
down a copy.–DW
Oliver
Augst / Rüdiger Carl / Christoph Korn
BLANK PLAYS DUDEN
Revolver /Textxtnd
 Think
turntables and you probably think DJ battles, breaks 'n' beat 'n'
baseball caps, noise, sweat. Or, if you're from the new music crowd,
cats like Otomo thrashing his Technics to death with a crash cymbal.
Not three young to middle-aged guys in neat white shirts and black
jackets (all that's missing are the ties and shades and it's Reservoir
Dogs) in a squeaky clean modern office building in downtown Frankfurt,
idly twiddling faders and knobs, performing to nobody at all except
themselves. It's the total antithesis of just about everything turntablism
– and all live improvised music for that matter – is normally
associated with: there's no interaction with the public (because there's
no public), no interaction with the viewer (no information on the
disc except for the bald credits scrolling up at the end to inform
you that this is the work of Oliver Augst, Rüdiger Carl, and
Christoph Korn, aka Blank, filmed by Martin Kreyssin) and no visible
expenditure of physical energy on the part of the musicians (Rüdiger
Carl spends several tracks slouched in a sofa, nonchalantly flicking
switches as if he was brushing a crumb off his sleeve). Just 17 short
tracks featuring the three musicians playing with their locked groove
LP Duden. The music itself isn't exactly appetising, and
the sound is dry and claustrophobic – the signals from the three
decks are routed directly into a laptop (visible in certain tracks)
and nothing else: we can see the musicians chatting to each other
while they play, but can't hear what they're saying. At times one
wonders if they can hear what they're playing themselves, as there's
very little interaction as such between them; each man pursues his
own agenda with curious, stubborn detachment. It's not devoid of humour
– on one track they amuse themselves by slowing down the discs
with the tips of their noses, and on the final cut Carl gets up to
do what looks like tai chi and Korn stands on one leg, balancing his
turntable precariously on one hand. But the cumulative effect of the
entire disc is oddly cold and as impersonal as the faceless glass
skyscrapers of High Capitalism that are as much a part of the project
as the music; we might as well be watching three businessmen reading
the Wall Street Journal. The fact that it comes in a fabulously produced
LP-sized gatefold sleeve designed by Günter Förg and Tobias
Rehberger is further confirmation that this a highly collectable art
object, beautifully produced and packaged, elegant, colourful and
ultimately useless.–DW
John
Cage
ONE11 AND 103
Mode
 In
1992, John Cage declined several invitations to attend celebrations
marking his 80th birthday in order to devote himself to the completion
of One11, the eleventh work for solo performer
(hence the title) in the series of Number Pieces that occupied him
during the five last years of his life. The performer in this case
was a solo cameraman – Van Carlson – and Cage's ambitious
project was nothing less than a full-length film (90 minutes) with
no characters and no plot, directed by Henning Lohner and accompanied
(or not as the case may be) by the orchestral work 103, which
dates from September 1991. It's quite simply one of Cage's great works,
and one of the most complex and time-consuming to realise, though
as usual the basic idea was remarkably simple: use I-Ching generated
chance procedures to determine the placement, angle of projection
and intensity of 168 lights in an empty television studio and provide
the solo cameraman with a similarly calculated score defining camera
movements (a similar chance-generated working plan was subsequently
devised for the editing of the film that took place in New York after
the film had been shot in Germany in April 1992). The film consists
of 17 scenes, each of which is further divided into takes, and Cage's
idea was to dispense with editing as far as possible; amazingly only
600m of film were not used, and were duly pillaged to provide the
visual backdrop to the opening credits. Andrew Culver programmed the
composer's calculations into a computer which controlled the lighting
changes – some 1200 of them, each featuring up to twenty different
lights – and the full resources of the studio in Fernseh Studio
Munchen were put at Cage's disposal.
Shot entirely in 35mm black and white, One11 consists
of predominantly slow pans across the blank wall of the studio, illuminated
by soft oval patches of light of varying intensity that drift across
the screen like clouds. It's a remarkably beautiful experience in
conjunction with the rich sustained chords and occasional spiky twangs
of 103, two versions of which are included on the disc as
alternative soundtracks, one performed by the WDR Sinfonieorchester
Köln conducted by Arturo Tamayo, the other by the Spoleto Festival
Orchestra conducted by John Kennedy. The disc also includes two documentaries
on the creation of the film, including insightful explanations by
the people involved and some choice quotations from Cage himself.
When asked why he'd finally decided to venture into film, he answers:
"if I get an opportunity to do something, I jump at it instead
of hesitating. Because there isn't much time left." And, later:
"In this day of violence, overpopulation, war and economic collapse,
it gives us something to enjoy." It does indeed.–DW
Iskra 1903 (Paul Rutherford, Barry Guy, Philipp Wachsmann)
CHAPTER TWO: 1981-3
Emanem (3 CDs)
 That
gasping sound you hear is a reviewer coming up for air after prolonged
submersion. There's no way to listen to this one except repeatedly,
indeed obsessively: if one's first reaction to this astonishing 222-minute
trove of unreleased material is that it's simply way too much to digest,
the second reaction – once you start sampling it –
is that it's almost seductively easy to get plugged into it. The highly
focussed documentation – four of the six dates compiled
here were recorded inside a single packed week in December 1983 –
encourages such obsessiveness, offering one of the finest opportunities
for compare-and-contrast sonic archeology since Leo's series of double-CD
sets from Braxton's 1985 tour.
In its two different incarnations, Iskra 1903 represents trombonist
Paul Rutherford's finest work as a leader (as opposed to his equally
seminal recordings as a solo performer, notably the 1974 opus The
Gentle Harm of the Bourgeoisie). The original group (1970-73),
featuring guitarist Derek Bailey and bassist Barry Guy, was perhaps
the earliest sustained example of a drummerless free-improv group,
even if it wasn't quite unprecedented (in fact, all three musicians
had been in an early, drummerless incarnation of Trevor Watts' Amalgam
which apparently went unrecorded). The group's name alludes to the
revolutionary newspaper edited by Lenin ("iskra" is Russian
for "spark"), while the number is Rutherford's personal
shorthand: 19 = "twentieth-century music", 03 = "for
trio". The Rutherford/Bailey/Guy Iskra 1903 released a self-titled
double LP on Incus and were one of the three groups represented on
the Deutsche Grammophon Free Improvisation triple LP. In
2000 Emanem released Chapter One, a three-CD set that augmented
the Incus LP with a pile of unreleased material, and the following
year dug up a further CD of unreleased material, Buzz Soundtrack;
the DG recording, meanwhile, remains unfortunately out of print. The
music on the existing recordings changes markedly in character from
session to session - from the calm beauty of the 1970 studio piece
"Improvisation 0" to the aggressive buzz of activity on
the 1972 live recordings from Germany - but is characterized by the
tug between Rutherford's endlessly furling/unfurling ribbons of melody
and Bailey and Guy's spiky contributions, which downplay determinate
pitching in favour of sound-as-shape (ranging from amorphous sonic
blobs to stiletto-thin plings) and extremes of duration, velocity
and attack.
So much for Chapter One. The group lay fallow for a few years before
Rutherford revived it in a new form, with violinist Philipp Wachsmann
replacing Bailey. This trio lasted from roughly 1977 to 1995, and
until now the only documentation was from near the end of its lifespan,
on Frankfurt 1991 on Emanem and a self-titled album on Maya
(1992), as well as some appearances on London Jazz Composers Orchestra
albums as momentary subsets of the larger group. (LJCO had a symbiotic
– i.e. two-way – relationship with the
longstanding groups enfolded within its lineup, such as Iskra 1903
and the Parker/Guy/Lytton trio; Chapters One and Two
both include pieces recorded at concerts of small-group LJCO subsets.)
Chapter Two at last fills in the two-decade gap in the extant
documentation with a 1981 performance (the LJCO sub-group date), a
March 1983 date which features Evan Parker sitting in for one track,
and the series of concerts from December 1983. All but one of the
recordings are by Wachsmann, and the sound is consistently good across
the set - a pleasant change from archival recordings that sound, well,
archival.
This is slippery music, with a marvellous "how did we get here
from there?" quality. Improvisations typically start
with the kind of chain-reaction density of event that is a trademark
of UK improv – momentary provocations and rejoinders
shooting off like sparks from a flintstone. But the players are also
masters at sifting a mass of ideas down (when they so choose) to something
worth exploring at length, and it's usually not long until some temporary
oasis or sturdier sound-sculpture is established among the welter.
Stretches of squeezed-down minimalism – gritty electronic
textures, stringy drones and languorous microtonal snowdrifts –
frequently take over, and in one case (on "Stoleri") the
musicians sustain this idiom for nearly 20 minutes of continuous,
winding development. Every so often, the group's fractious interplay
and grainy soundscaping sideslip into vulnerable glimpses of sublimity,
as a submerged melody or whiff of tonality breaks through to the surface:
listen, for example, to how the buffo opening of "Eiverl"
leads to a Rutherford/Wachsmann duet of unusual simplicity and fragility
(strikingly different, in the violinist's case, from his usual quickchanges
of mood and style) while Guy supplies soft thumb-piano-style accompaniment.
Such transitions and linkages are the heart of this music, and they
have a subtle way of leaving you wondering if it's the sound itself
that's changed, the musical context around it, or (in a kind of duck-rabbit
illusion of change) just your own perspective as a listener. On "Vendia",
for instance, fierce knocks erupt from one of the strings just before
the 12-minute mark; initially this seems an isolated outburst, but
half a minute later, all three players return to the idea, first smoothing
it out into a calm pulse then later flipping it back in the direction
of hammering mayhem. The motif seems completely absorbed and disposed
of by this point, but a minute or so later Wachsmann now spins it
off in a different direction, mimicking (with pizzicato and detuning)
the woody pluck and pitch-slides of a Chinese instrument, then plingy
ukulele.
Aside from the tracks I've mentioned, it's worth singling out "Phelgstar",
a performance of unusual formal cogency and ease from within the spacious
acoustic of the Southampton Arts Centre: the arco strings and Rutherford's
euphonium (the only track on the set to feature the instrument) repeatedly
expand outwards into rich tapestries of sound then contract to the
tiniest gestures. "Epis", the 16-minute track that concludes
the entire set, is a notable encounter between the trio and a guesting
Evan Parker, whose tenor sax playing is at its most curt and guttural;
it's fascinating to hear how the trio's aesthetic changes in response
to his presence, with Wachsmann and Guy virtually slashing through
the performance. But there's ultimately no way to summarize this set,
even in an extended review: it's music that won't be rushed into yielding
up its treasures. The fairly rudimentary electronics may sound a bit
dated in this age of laptop wizardry, but otherwise this is (as they
say) timeless stuff. Enjoy it, study it, wonder over it –
well, just listen.–ND
Eugene
Chadbourne/Dave Fox
THE FOXBOURNE CHRONICLES
Umbrella Recordings/Assembled Sound
 This
is an understated disc by the good Doctor's standards, but that's
not necessarily a bad thing: the pairing of Chadbourne's wonky guitar
and banjo and the lush classical-piano chops of Dave Fox is
still exquisitely absurd. On the opening track, "The Plumbers",
the players check out the resonance of the performance space
(a chapel in Greensboro, N.C.) with delicate plings and twangs. Next up, four solo features: Chadbourne genially desecrates
Bill Evans' "Time Remembered" and Nick Drake's "One
of Those Things", while Fox ripostes with the pastorale "Chantarelle
and Chardonnay" (as delicious as its title) and a handsome reading
of "Secret Love" that wouldn't cause a Keith Jarrett fan
to blink. But the meat of the album is Fox's four-movement "Sonata
for Banjo and Piano (Semi-Improvised)". Part I, "Theme and
Variations", resembles bluegrass slowed down to nursery-rhyme
speed; part II, "Epic", is a series of Nth Stream miniatures
with titles like "The Zombie within Purcell", with a bonus
pair of (simultaneously delivered) lectures on music history from
Stravinsky to Carlos Santana. The sonata closes with a "Rondo"
(Stephen Foster interrupted by occasional mudslides) and a hushed
"Funeral March" for Patsy Cline. In total, the entire album
comes in at a pithy 41 minutes, all of them exceedingly enjoyable,
barring Chadbourne's tuneless vocals on the Drake tune. What's next?
A Chadbourne-with-strings album? Banjo arrangements of the Concierto
de Aranjuez and the Billy the Kid Suite? We can only
hope.–ND
Tony
Conrad / Tim Barnes / Mattin
TONY CONRAD / TIM BARNES / MATTIN
Celebrate Psi Phenomenon
 Another
month, another Mattin album.. (or two – see below). What I like
about Mattin is you never know what you're in for – which as
far as I'm concerned is, or should be, what improvisation is all about.
It's very much a question of hit or miss, and if the last Mattin platter
that came my way, Berlin with Axel Dörner (reviewed
here last month) was a smash hit, this one is more of a miss. Or should
I say less exciting. Less exciting, that is, unless you play it at
at FEROCIOUS volume to imagine (as far as possible) what the concert
in Conrad's home base Buffalo NY might have sounded like live. Label
head honcho and proprietor of the Birchville Cat Motel Campbell Kneale
waxes lyrical about it all in his press blurb, but it remains nonetheless
an hour of unruly, ugly snarling noise. Conrad's trademark in-yer-face
thick drones are replaced by shuddering screes of feedback, and Barnes'
contributions on gong and electronics are unceremoniously buried under
a layer of nasty gunge from Mattin. Not for the faint-hearted, but
judge for yourself: like all of Mattin's albums this is – or
soon will be – available for free download from his website.
Or you can buy it for a snip at $7 from the CPP site. But I wonder
how many times your neighbours will want to listen to it.–DW
Mattin
SONGBOOK VOL.4
Azul Discografica
 It's
a shame Jacques Derrida definitively deconstructed himself and left
the planet a couple of years ago, as this might have made an ideal
Christmas present for him. Mattin has, after all, made as much of
a career out of deconstruction as the dear departed maître
penseur; for a start, he's deconstructed rock and roll with Billy
Bao and La Grieta, deconstructed the rulebook of free improvisation
by popping up with playing partners as wildly different in orientation
as Radu Malfatti and Tim Goldie, deconstructed his own record label
by making everything he does available as a free download, and arguably
deconstructed himself – put it this way, if you booked Mattin
for a gig, would you know what to expect? Nah, neither would I. This
is the fourth volume of his Songbook series, in which he
totally deconstructs the idea of the pop song (though he's hardly
the first to do so – pop and rock have been unravelling slowly
for the past quarter of a century in case you hadn't noticed), improvising
the whole gritty mess direct to disc, or rather, straight into the
mono input of his Thinkpad. He's joined on these six "songs"
(I suppose we should use the inverted commas) by Taku Unami on bass
and piano, Anthony Guerra on guitar and, in the toilet (it says here)
Jean-Luc Guionnet on sax and Tomoya Izumi on "shouting".
God knows what was going on in the toilet.. next time I see Jean-Luc
I'll try to find out. Meanwhile, this disc – only 22 minutes
long but nicely produced with good liner notes by Toné Gorgoron,
whoever s/he is – comes with a mission statement outlining the,
um, ethos of the Songbook project. It ends with the line
"Release the recordings on different labels and laugh at different
people's reactions." Including, presumably, mine. So I'd better
shut up. Suffice it to say I might keep this one a bit longer than
Volume 1.–DW
Christian
Weber
3 SUITS & A VIOLIN
HatOLOGY
 3
Suits & a Violin is the result of two days of recording at
Radio Studio Zürich in 2002 by a quintet led by double bassist
and composer Christian Weber. The other members are Hans Koch (bass
clarinet, saxophones, electronics), Michael Moser (cello), Martin
Siewert (guitar, lap steel, electronics) and Christian Wolfarth (drums).
This music swallows its influences with elegant nonchalance and spits
them out with imperious intelligence; the results are as vivid, pungent
and up-to-the-minute as any EAI milestone in recent years.
The opening track, "Pony Music", is a study in the management
of unconventional harmonic directions, an allegorical war of attrition
between sheer noise and more refined forms of discordance. "Sun
Perspectives" begins with scrape-and-hit strings, irregular electronic
patterns and a guitar (?) loop; Weber’s fingerbombs and fragmented
oscillations eventually yield to an underworld of groans, tweets and
drones, in one of the disc’s most vehemently dramatic moments.
On "Buzz Aldrin" squealing cymbals and roaring arco bass
occupy opposite ends of the spectrum but soon enter into a nervous
cohesion, amidst ululating cello whistles and an electronic guerilla
war, the whole ending with cavernous bass notes tolling like a funeral
bell. "Camping Light Night" breathes with anxious rasps
and exhalations, a burrow of invisible fears and impenetrable proximities
which can only be heard by putting the ear to the ground. It's a genuinely
mysterious entity, its strained percussive logic and thin-skinned
reed/string conflict pushing beyond the reach of descriptive language.
"Frogmouth", the longest track at over 15 minutes, is launched
by pricking highs from cello (?) and sax, which are soon opposed by
shadowy bass and guitar outbursts. After a tightly controlled first
half, a snarling low-frequency creature emerges from its soiled chrysalis
for a few unnerving moments, to be replaced by a stunning cluster
of electronic rumbles; the looping background of unintelligible voices
leaves the final word to a string of underwater firecrackers and spellbinding
cymbal repetitions. The album closes with "Lone Star", where
strings and weak reeds hesitantly disturb a desolate landscape of
timbral deterioration, which neither Siewert's volume swells nor Koch's
chirping clarinet can turn into a sunny morning. It’s an unhappy
ending that works deep into the psyche, leaving us confined in a tiny
room of buried autism, naked and full of doubts. After Polwechsel's
splendid Archives of the North, HatOLOGY has served yet another
ace: 3 Suits is one of the best releases of 2006, and comes
very highly recommended.–MR
Rob
Reddy’s Gift Horse
A HUNDRED JUMPING DEVILS
Reddy Music
 The
album comes with an ambiguous epigraph, William Carlos Williams’
vision of the climb up the slopes of Parnassus as a Dantesque uphill
battle against the “hundred jumping devils” of seductive
ideas and images (which are at once helpers and betrayers). The conceit
is neatly complemented by the cover art, a Renaissance-style fresco
of the damned and their horned and winged tormenters that is all earthy
browns and yellows. The music has a similarly warm but sombre, slightly
archaic palette: Reddy’s soprano sax playing is nasal, almost
shawm-like, and when he joins in with violinist Charles Burnham and
french horn player Mark Taylor the results are rich and plangent,
swelling into hurdy-gurdy drone or conjuring up echoes of mournful/joyous
African or Cuban song. But this rather cool and melancholy beauty
is only one element here: there’s also the gracefully bubbling
grooves laid down by bassist Dom Richards and percussionist Mino Cinelu
(Reddy’s use of [quieter] percussion rather than the conventional
drumkit is a smart move that totally upends the usual jazz-ensemble
dynamics), and the cat’s-paw guitar of Brandon Ross, bobbing
up and down and throwing in spindly little interjections that have
a disproportionately striking impact. Reddy’s indebtedness to
Henry Threadgill is obvious, not just because of the presence of HT
stalwarts Ross and Taylor but also in Reddy’s own alto sax playing
and some of his compositional devices, but the music is strong enough
to stand the comparison; indeed, sometimes the music’s at its
best when the debt is most obvious, as in the slinky Beckett tribute
“The Unnamable”, which is constructed over a very Threadgillish
sequence of modulations. If there’s a complaint here it’s
that the music is too consistently elegant – a little disarray
and fervency would have lifted it to another level altogether –
and that the longer tracks tend to fall into string-of-solos patterns
rather than working towards a climax. Excellent stuff, nonetheless.–ND
Eisenbeil
/ Kugel / Robinson / Evans / Greene
CARNIVAL SKIN
Nemu
 It's
a total bummer that The Wire magazine (and most of the others
for that matter) asks their contributing writers to select the best
discs of the year as early as late October, considering the volume
of new releases that hits the streets in November and December. I'm
wondering whether or not I wouldn't have chosen this one as album
of the year had I received it in time (as it happens that dubious
honour went to Loren Connors' Night Through) – it's
that good. Carnival Skin is a killer quintet formed by guitarist
Bruce Eisenbeil and drummer Klaus Kugel, who recruited bassist Hilliard
Greene, trumpeter Peter Evans and clarinettist Perry Robinson to make
one of the hottest line-ups in free jazz of the past ten years. Maybe
twenty. Perry Robinson needs no introduction to aficionados of free
music – he's been a driving force in free jazz for over half
a century, while never quite achieving the top billing he so richly
deserves. If you thought the clarinet couldn't hold its own in a fire
music outfit, think again: Robinson burns. And when he's
not burning he's swinging, and when he's not swinging he's singing.
In Peter Evans, whose solo trumpet debut More Is More on
psi raised many eyebrows last year, he has the perfect foil. Evans
was impressive enough all alone, but you should really hear him get
down here. The six tracks are driven effortlessly forward by the Greene
/ Kugel rhythm team, with meticulous and expert punctuation from Eisenbeil,
who's never sounded so good. His solos spit fire and sweat (somewhere
Sonny Sharrock is looking down approvingly) and his accompaniment
counterpoints the work of the horn players to perfection. There's
an urgency to this music that's all too often lacking in today's so-called
free jazz, much of which has settled into the kind of comfortable
orthodoxy it originally set out to challenge, but also a tough, unsentimental
lyricism not always on offer in the work of other firebreathers. It's
a truly outstanding disc and if you don't get hold of copy at the
earliest available opportunity you're a damn fool.–DW
Dave
Burrell
MOMENTUM
High Two
 Following
on from 2004's Expansion, which teamed him up with William
Parker and Andrew Cyrille, pianist Dave Burrell is joined here by
bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Guillermo E. Brown on seven well-executed
and superbly recorded tracks. Maybe too well recorded (is't possible?),
at least Brown's kit, which on the opening "Downfall" as
if it ought to be driving a ten-piece funk band. Though he does occasionally
let fly with rollerball clusters à la Don Pullen (not as often
as he used to, mind), Burrell by and large solos with single lines
sparely accompanied by the left hand – Mal Waldron comes to
mind, as does Andrew Hill – and he comes close to being stomped
into the ground on the opener by Brown's muscular slow sweaty funk.
Not that the pianist seems to mind: Billy Martin also gave him a good
pummelling on Consequences. Burrell's frequent forays into
the lower octaves can present a problem for a bassist – William
Parker didn't always strike me as the best choice on Expansion
– but Formanek wisely leaves most of the action to the pianist
and the drummer, though he's always there when there's any danger
of the root being lost. The only reservations I have about this otherwise
fine disc are a) there's not more of it – for once 43 minutes
doesn't seem like enough – and b) it'd be great to hear some
of Burrell's finely crafted tunes performed by larger forces. Maybe
the good people at High Two can get a Dave Burrell Sextet off the
ground, and perhaps persuade Mr B's old saxophone colossus pal David
Murray to come along and thicken the plot. Just a thought.–DW
Peter
Brötzmann / Michael Zerang
LIVE IN BEIRUT 2005
Al-maslakh
 Douglas
S. Kahn's history of sound Noise, Water, Meat finds its primary
example of the scream in Lautreamont's Maldoror. Hard to
believe there's not a single reference to Peter Brötzmann, the
saxophonist whose existentialist scream can freeze the blood in your
veins. Here's another addition to the enormous Brötzmann discography,
a duo with percussionist Michael Zerang recorded during the 2005 IRTIJAL
festival and released on Mazen Kerbaj's Al-maslakh label. Both musicians
start in predictable energy-music mode for the first ten minutes of
"Illusion of Progress", then shift to elegiac Eastern-sounding
melody before Zerang's astonishing drum solo. Next comes some intriguing
microtonal dialogue, and the track ends with a version of Brötzmann's
tribute to Fred Hopkins, "Master of a Small House," originally
recorded on the Hatology disc Tales Out of Time. On "Yalla
Kholoud", Brötzmann picks up his tarogato, lending the music
just the right oriental timbre, but the track's high-point is Zerang's
solo on darbouka – the Lebanese national instrument, Kerbaj
explains in his liner notes – and cymbals, which comes at you
from the speakers like an electric cobra. "A Daytime Nightmare"
is of less interest, and "Banyan Revolution" is a blues
for clarinet and assorted finger-rubbed platters, on which Brötzmann's
emotional power is strongly to the fore, though it's Zerang who sounds
most exploratory. The track itself sounds like an encore from a physically
exhausting performance, filling it out to exactly an hour in length.–VJ
Oren
Ambarchi / Keith Rowe
SQUIRE
For4Ears
 One
of the most remarkable things about the body of work Keith Rowe has
released in recent years is how damned difficult it is to review.
He's not alone in totally redefining the entire vocabulary, technique
and aesthetic of an existing instrument, but whereas it's not all
that hard to trace some kind of evolution in the work of, say, Jason
Kahn or Axel Dörner, Rowe's work remains stubbornly resistant
to analysis. In fact, it's impossible to analyse it in any conventional
way. As any Music Theory major will tell you, analysis involves the
representation of what a piece of music consists of – its basic
material and the transformation and development thereof – in
condensed (usually graphic) form, the better to understand its internal
workings. A musicologist, on the other hand, will seek to examine
the work in a larger context, as part of the artist's entire oeuvre,
or as representative (or not) of an existing genre / trend. Both theorists
and musicologists would find Keith Rowe's work is frustratingly hard
to pin down. It has no interest whatsoever in traditional musical
parameters such as pitch and rhythm, which means you can't transcribe
it with any accuracy, and while serious EAI heads (for whom this review
is superfluous in any case, as they tend to rush out and buy anything
Rowe does without question) might detect some kind of evolution in
it in terms of the kit being used, the fact remains that this duo
with Oren Ambarchi recorded in 2002 sounds similar enough to the one
that preceded it, 2001's Flypaper on Staubgold, as to render
more or less redundant any question of stylistic evolution, at both
the theoretical and musicological level. As the French say, "c'est
une évidence", which I guess Phill Niblock would translate
as "it is what it is". We're left with a simple, bald description
of the music (not that it's easy to describe), and even that fails
to do justice to the nuanced and beautiful sounds these two musicians
create. The upshot of it all is that if you know Rowe's work, you'll
love this; and if you don't (though goodness knows how you've managed
to pass it by for so long), Squire is as good a place to
start in as any.–DW
Paul
Hubweber / Philip Zoubek
NOBODY'S MATTER BUT OUR OWN
Nurnichtnur
 The
album title might seem to indicate that both the artists – trombonist
Hubweber and pianist Zoubek – and the perennially wonderful
Nurnichtnur label don't give a monkey's about world fame (or even
a Wire review, haha), which is a shame considering this is
one of the best improv albums to come my way for a long time. No frills,
no bullshit, just trombone and piano (lightly prepared) in the kind
of improvisation that has, unfortunately, dropped off the radar as
far as the so-called hip zines are concerned (i.e. no drones, no laptops,
no noise). To quote that memorable line of Fred Frith's, it's as much
about virtuoso listening as virtuoso performing, though it's clear
from this – and from his earlier Emanem outing Papajo
with Messrs Edwards and Lovens – that Hubweber can blow the
trombone inside out. Zoubek's no slouch as a pianist and composer
either, from what little I've been able to gather from German websites,
and he's got an acute ear for pitch and a sense of timing that would
make Misha Mengelberg chuckle. That said, this is no whacked-out platter
of New Dutch amuse-gueules: it's thoughtful, pitch-sensitive
and accomplished music and anyone interested in today's improvised
music should check it out.–DW
Jim
Denley / Peter Blamey
FINDINGS
Split
 Jim
Denley is perhaps best known as a flautist, notably in Machine For
Making Sense, Australia's foremost improv outfit (unless you think
that particular honour should be bestowed upon The Necks), and he's
studied both the contemporary classical repertoire and the Japanese
end-blown instrument, the shakuhachi. But on these four brief but
pungent tracks, each entitled "Kept", he's on alto sax.
Though you'd probably never guess. His crumbling gurgles and airy
blasts mesh so well with the electronics of his playing partner, Peter
Blamey, that it's often hard to tell who's doing what. Blamey explores
feedback generated by "ageing audio equipment" (it says
here), and produces a fog of dense sizzling hiss through which Denley's
disembodied sax shines its hollow, breathy pitches. Findings is a
more extreme and concentrated outing than the last Split that came
my way – Denley's splendid duo with Joel Stern, Tape and Paint
Game, in which the extended techniques workout took place against
a backdrop of colourful field recordings – and it's a tough
but rewarding listen, the kind of wall of sound you want to scrape
your ears down until they bleed.–DW
Howlin'
Ghost Proletarians
THE SINGER
Absurd
 If
I ever win the lottery – EFL students please note the use of
the First Conditional, implying that I confidently expect it to happen
one day, fool that I am – one of the things I intend to do is
release the complete catalogue of Absurd records in a ludicrously
expensive 60 (65? 70? still counting!) CD box set – forget the
Merzbox, here's the Absurdbox! – with facsimile reproductions
of the original packaging, as almost everything Nicolas Malevitsis
has ever released is total gold (though I shouldn't say that since
he's put out a couple of my own things in his time, but whatthhell
blow your own trumpet). And most of them have now sold out. Let's
hope this one does too, as I see its predecessor, also on Absurd,
Dead Roads, already has. Once more unto the breach with guitarists
Fabrice Eglin and Michel Henritzi, The Singer comes with
more cover artwork courtesy Patrick Boeuf – last time it was
Robert Mitchum, this time it looks like Johnny (Cash, not Hallyday,
you cretins) – and it's another moody, magnificent,
3am alone at the bar of Jack Ryans Atlantic Ave Rochester NY with
thick pasty snow falling outside and a near-empty pitcher of Genesee
Twelve Horse in front of me with Cash on the jukebox existential epiphany
of the highest order. Henritzi has released enough intense guitar
shit on his A Bruit Secret label(s) – Taku Sugimoto, Tetuzi
Akiyama, Bruce Russell – to know by now that there's no point
playing a note unless you really mean it. And both these guys really
mean it. Best One Note Blues album of the year (this year and last
year).–DW
Alan
"Gunga" Purves
ALL BY MY SHELF
Gunga
 Scottish
drummer/percussionist Alan Purves is one of the many expatriates on
the Amsterdam jazz scene, and while not as ubiquitous as Michael Vatcher
or Han Bennink, turns up in a variety of aggregations, notably Joost
Buis's brilliant Astronotes, the spirited New Dutch Western Swing
of Bite the Gnatze, and the rather dodgy Dutch-Canadian band Aros.
All By My Shelf is an overdubbed solo album of music originally
created for a theatre production for the deaf – and if that
sounds like a complete absurdity (along the lines of spazz guitarist
Billy Jenkins' recording the theme song of a TV show for the deaf),
then maybe the joke's on you, as you listen to these meticulous assemblages
of junkshop / toyshop trouvés and try to imagine what
it looks like to see Purves working over (e.g.) "Brim Bram, School
Bell, Nails, Toy Siren, Squeekie Toy, Broken Perc." (the instrumentation
of "Not By My Shelf on a Train in the Kitchen"). Worth comparing
this disc to Hans Reichel's Lower Lurum (what is
Reichel doing nowadays, by the way?) or to Terry Day's belatedly released
meisterwerk of overdubbing, Interruptions. But the difference
between Day and Purves could be summed up by one of PT's touchstone
quotes: "Does he care about his pitches?" Melodic precision
isn't exactly top priority amidst the delirious spatter-paintings
of Interruptions, whereas Purves's squeaky toys are arrayed
in disconcertingly melodious choruses – it's a different kind
of dementia, closer to that guy on The Muppets picking out melodies
from a row of cute furry creatures with a pair of mallets. Which brings
up the obvious question: what exactly was that theatre piece
this stuff was meant to accompany?–ND
Sabine
Ercklentz
STEINSCHLAG
L’innomable
 Steinschlag
is another solo trumpet album full of flplpbrrr noises and
escaping hisses of air. This time they come from Sabine Ercklentz,
a Berlin based experimental trumpeter who is relatively under-recorded
(2003's Charhizma album Oberflächenspannung with Andrea
Neumann being her only notable release before this). Steinschlag
differs from other recent solo trumpet outings by the likes of Axel
Dörner, Mazen Kerbaj or Matt Davis in that its tracks are composed
and pieced together on a computer using fragments of (untreated?)
trumpet sounds recorded by Ercklentz in 2005, and it's precisely this
break from the unprocessed extended techniques of her peers that succeeds
in making the album more inviting than it might seem on paper.
Although Ercklentz's sounds are immediately recognisable, they are
constructed into awkward tumbling collages of sound that have a distinctly
inhuman feel. The four tracks each focus on different sonic areas,
the first three all having in common a stuttering, fractured structure,
superimposing abrupt bursts of skewed trumpet occasionally underpinned
by extended tones. But Ercklentz is no John Wall, and her pieces are
built up in a seemingly rough, unpolished manner which, when coupled
with the natural instrument sounds used, gives the music a sense of
immediacy, as if it were live trumpet improvisation. Yet as one side
of your brain considers this idea, the other points out its sheer
impossibility.
At just half an hour long Steinschlag doesn’t overstay
its welcome, and the closing "Mäusemilch", barely two
minutes in length, is a little gem that veers about as far from the
rough and tumble of the rest of the disc as possible. Thirty seconds
of silence are intruded upon by a stream of the faintest of tiny tinkles
and clicking that flits past in a few brief beautiful moments before
the disc ends. It's a promising first full-length solo from Ercklentz
and another strong entry into the L’innomable catalogue.–RP
Tomaž
Grom / Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
TILT
L'innomable
 Finally,
a homegrown entry in L'innomable's catalogue! Slovenians Tomaž
Grom and Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec have been working together as Tilt
for 10 years now. Grom has played bass with the Alzheimer Trio, Lolita
Libre, Bast, Zlatko Kaucic, GAP and Sonny Simmons, and also works
in electronic composition for dance and theatre. Vrhovec Sambolec
studied clarinet and composition at the Royal Conservatory in The
Hague, curates a music series at the Galerija Kapelica, and nowadays
divides his time between Ljubljana and Amsterdam. This self-titled
disc is their second, following a collaboration with poet Primož
Cucnik released as Dvojnik ("Double") (Sploh, 1996).
The first three tracks are from a 2004 performance at a festival in
Alicante, and find them in sound-arty EAI mode, with Grom's acoustic
bass embraced by the clicks and glitches of Vrhovec Sambolec's live
electronics. It's raw, confrontational music, but excellent stuff,
never succumbing to overplaying or self-parody. Tracks four to seven
were recorded the same year at home in Ljubljana. The music is quieter
and more relaxed: ambient drones are weighed down by looped sonic
interventions (Thomas Lehn or Anthony Pateras come to mind), and Vrhovec
Sambolec's electronics complement the percussive sounds Grom gets
out of his bass's prepared strings and body. It's good to hear that
the musicians are living in the 21st century: there are even some
references to club culture, and a few quotes (Steve Reich via Autechre
on the last track). An excellent release, well up to the high standards
of the L'innomable label.–VJ
Iannis
Xenakis
PERCUSSION WORKS
Mode
 A
few years ago the music of Iannis Xenakis suddenly became radically
chic, thanks to the well-intentioned efforts of the likes of DJ Spooky
and other Deleuze-toting hipsters. More recently a younger generation
of fun lovin' noiseniks have been singing the praises of pieces like
Bohor and Persepolis as if they were the latest
offerings from Merzbow, Prurient and Sickness. But this attraction
to the visceral, violent side of the composer only addresses half
of the Xenakis enigma, as percussionist Steven Schick makes clear
in his informative and eminently readable liner notes to this 3CD
set. There was also Xenakis the mathematician, master of the impenetrable
FORTRAN, creator of UPIC. Any of you out there read Formalized
Music (me neither – I got as far as page 100)? It's easy
to thrill at the swarming glissandi of Metastasis or succumb
to the apocalyptic intensity of Kraanerg, but without the
serious theoretical underpinning, those extraordinary works wouldn't
sound the way they do. And without the background and years of study,
none of the distortion pedal abusing wolf-eyed teens currently tearing
round the alt.music racetrack will ever get remotely close.
As Schick points out, the striking contrast between the brutally impersonal
world of advanced mathematics and symbolic logic and the spine-tingling
raw emotion is no more evident than in the body of works Xenakis wrote
for percussion (with or without added instruments): Persephassa
(1969), Psappha (1976), Dmaathen (1976), Pléïades
(1979), Komboï (1981), Kassandra (1987), Rebonds
(1988) and Oophaa and Okho (1989). No recording
could possibly capture the sheer power of this pieces in performance
– I caught Pléïades in Paris shortly after
its premiere, and can still remember the utterly devastating experience
of being surrounded in the Auditorium of Université Paris II
Assas by six sets of sixxen (specially created instruments
consisting of tuned metal plates) – but until you get a chance
to see and feel it in the flesh, you could do no better than get hold
of these excellent recordings by Schick and the red fish blue fish
percussion ensemble (lowercase intended.. Dr Seuss plays Xenakis,
dig it).
Schick is also joined by Philip Lanson (baritone and psaltery, on
Kassandra), Jacqueline Leclair (oboe, on Dmaathen
in the most thrilling double-reed / percussion battle to come my way
since Kyle Bruckmann went the distance with Weasel Walter on his Musica
Genera album and) and harpsichordists Shannon Wettstein (on
Komboï) and John Mark Harris (Oophaa). Not
all the pieces are as spectacular as the percussion ensemble pieces
Persephassa and Pléïades – the
rather plodding Okho once more raises the question as to
whether the composer was losing his touch a little in his final years
– but that's one of the risks you take when you release a complete
set of anything. This one's worth the price of admission alone for
the spectacular ending of Persephassa, in which Schick and
his crew use multitracking to realise, for the first time on disc,
the ferocious near-impossible complexity of the score's final pages.
I say near-impossible, because, as Aki Takahashi once wryly noted,
"if Xenakis's music is truly impossible, why are so many people
playing it?"–DW
Charlemagne
Palestine/Tony Conrad
AN AURAL SYMBIOTIC MYSTERY
Sub Rosa
 Recorded
in October 2005 at Bruxelles' Mercelis Theatre, this album is Palestine
and Conrad's first meeting in 30 years. According to Palestine's liners,
his wife Aude was struck by the fact that, after all that time, it
took less than five minutes for the two old friends to elicit "a
natural musical chemistry of beauty and power" when they played
together again.
The single piece lasts about 50 minutes and is sustained by a constant
electronic drone which counterbalances the most raucous sections.
Palestine and Conrad approach each other circumspectly, testing each
other's responsiveness via meditative piano arpeggios and sinuously
dissonant violin lines that immediately show a willingness to break
the tranquillity. Conrad's avoidance of "clean" playing
can be sublimely thrilling or (as one sound artist remarked) akin
to "undergoing chemotherapy". Yet even in the most jarring
moments, he shows complete respect for the ritual of the moment, his
verge-of-distortion lyricism clinging to Palestine's hammered crescendos
like a belltower's shadow at sunset. The musicians raise their game
until the music becomes riveting, full of scorching, abrasive power.
In the midst of all this, Palestine breaks into shamanic chanting,
which effectively adds to the ritualistic atmosphere, though his untrained
voice has never appealed much to this writer (no, I didn't like
Karenina one bit). Still, the fervent crescendos here are utterly
impressive and vital to the music’s success. Having reached
its emotional apex, the music slowly descends into post-coital stillness;
everything slows down, the vocals get less excited and more reflective,
and it's back to square one until the applause.
Overall, a pretty satisfying album. Conrad is more or less his usual
self, but this nostalgic curmudgeon of a reviewer missed the soul-stirring
halos of piano resonance of Palestine's Strumming Music and
Four Manifestations, to which I instantly came back after four
spins of this CD. But that was truly music from other spheres, and
not even Palestine (or Conrad, for that matter) can possibly match
that radiance every time.–MR
Morton
Feldman
THE VIOLA IN MY LIFE
New World
 I've
been waiting for years for this one to appear on CD, as my old CRI
vinyl (which I bought at Harold Moore's on Great Marlborough Street
in London during an insanely irresponsible first term at university
when I managed to blow my entire student grant on discs and end up
with a whacking great overdraft to boot) has a huge pothole halfway
through side one, which totally ruins Karen Phillips' sublime Webernesque
wisps of melody on Part II of The Viola In My Life. You can
see why the advent of the CD led to an explosion in the Feldman discography:
no annoying clicks or scuffs to scratch the surface of the near-empty
canvas, and no need to get up every twenty minutes to turn over the
LP. In point of fact, The Viola In My Life (1970) and False
Relationships and the Extended Ending (1968) each fit comfortably
on one side of an album, but at 30'27", Why Patterns?,
which rounds out this magnificent release in a recording from 1978
featuring the composer on piano, probably wouldn't, or at least not
without some loss of sound quality. It's a fine choice to fill up
the CD, charting the path from the suspended sonorities of the late
60s pieces to the long distance runners of the last decade via the
supremely accessible Viola In My Life. Apart from the celebrated
ending of Rothko Chapel, Feldman's gift for melody isn't
often discussed, but it's precisely this that makes Viola
such a touching experience. And the performances, by what was then
a stellar crew of new music virtuosi including David Tudor, Paul Jacobs
and Yuji Takahashi, have been lovingly remastered by Joseph Dalton
and Tim Tiedemann (using DCS 900 20-bit a/d converter, whatever that
is). There's a huge amount of Feldman out there on CD these days,
but if you can afford to splash out on this one you'd be daft to let
it pass you by. Go have a friendly chat with your bank manager.–DW
Various
Artists
NEW MUSIC FOR ELECTRONIC AND RECORDED MEDIA: WOMEN IN ELECTRONIC MUSIC—1977
New World
 New
World's CRI reissue mission continues with the welcome return of an
album that originally appeared on Charles Amirkhanian 's 1750 Arch
label in 1977. Despite that mouthful of a title, it's a splendidly
accessible compilation, which kicks off in style with "one of
the first composed pieces of electronic music" (quoth Amirkhanian),
Music of the Spheres, written as far back as 1938 by Johanna
M. Beyer (1888 – 1944), one the forgotten pioneers of American
new music who studied with Dane Rudhyar, Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger,
and Henry Cowell. Performed by the quaintly named Electric Weasel
Ensemble – Allen Strange, Stephen Ruppenthal and David Moore
on Music Easel synthesizers, Brenda Hutchinson on pulse control, Don
Buchla on "frequency shifting and mix" and Amirkhanian on
triangle (!) – its swooping oscillators and pure waveforms still
sound remarkably fresh thirty years on from the original release.
Quite what instruments Beyer actually intended the music to be performed
on isn't all that clear ("electric" instruments could mean
just about anything), but Allen Strange's realisation of these haunting
canons is sensitive and impressive.
Annea Lockwood's 1975 World Rhythms features recordings of
"pulsars, earthquakes, volcanic activity, geysers and mud pools,
rivers, peepers, fire and crows, storm on a lake, wave lapping on
a lake shore and human breathing", and should normally last between
39 and 90 minutes, but this eight-minute clip still sounds fine; Pauline
Oliveros attacks Puccini with gleeful abandon and two Hewlett Packard
oscillators in Bye Bye Butterfly (1965); and the pristine
Bell Labs sound of Laurie Spiegel's Appalachian Grove I (1974)
is as clean and clear as Kraftwerk, even if the piece seems to show
no real desire to break out of its pentatonic prison. The tribal drumming
and cathartic yelling of Megan Roberts' I Could Sit Here All Day
(1976) have aged a little, but the impeccable, fragile sinewaves
of Ruth Anderson's Points (1973–74) haven't.
The disc ends up with, unless I'm mistaken, the first appearance on
record of a certain Laurie Anderson (unless the 7" single produced
by the Holly Solomon Gallery, It's Not The Bullet That Kills You
– It's The Hole came out earlier – maybe someone
could enlighten us). New York Social Life (1977), which also
appears in Part 3 of Anderson's epic United States project, makes
for a rather amusing comparison with "New York Telephone Conversation"
(by Anderson's then future husband Lou Reed), and Time to Go
(1977) is a touching tale of a museum guard who had to "snap
people out of their art trances" at closing time. As usual the
CD comes with a superbly researched and informative 28-page booklet.
Time to go – to your local record shop.–DW
Goat
/ Sixes / Xome
DELUXE INCINERATOR 3 x 3"
CIP
 Here's
a small but deadly package to warm you up on a cold winter evening,
a triple three-incher of scorching noise courtesy Xome, aka Bob Scott,
who is (as I can never resist quoting Blake Edwards' website) "a
highly regarded noise artist from San Francisco, perhaps best-known
for his live shows – fantastic displays of split second timing
and rapid jumps between drenching feedback and gristly distortion";
Goat, from Texas, whose "infrequent and incendiary five minute
live sets are the stuff of lore"; and Sixes, "a demonic action
figure from Oakland, CA who alters air pressure in any given room
with his saturation tests of fuzz and distortion chaos." Quite
what constitutes a "highly regarded noise artist" as opposed
to an aspiring or second division or frankly hopeless sound artist
is open to debate, as is where these days one is supposed to draw
the line between noise and music. And trying to decide what is a good,
even great, noise album as opposed to a bad one reminds me of that
old joke – Q: What's the difference between a good haircut and
a bad haircut? A: Two weeks – maybe it's just a question of
pumping up the volume a couple of notches. Noise is a musical genre
(maybe we should say noisy genre) that has managed to dispense with
value judgement altogether. So this lethal little set is as good as
you want it to be.–DW
Bhob
Rainey
TWO SIDES OF A BITTER SWEET
Evolving Ear
 Though
best known for his duo (+) nmperign with trumpeter Greg Kelley, Bhob
Rainey has (like Kelley) in recent times diversified into electronics,
and has finally finished a long-awaited collaborative project with
Ralf Wehowsky (of which more later). By way of aperitif, this seven
incher on Evolving Ear presents two all-too-brief examples of the
exquisite craftsmanship of his solo electronic composition. There's
no indication of what speed you're supposed to play the disc at, but
the wail of cop car sirens at the end of "The Summering Unsound"
would seem to indicate 33rpm is right (actually, it sounds pretty
cool at 45). "A Desert Of Consolation" starts out with spacious
glistening drones quietly punctuated by soft pillows of flanged cooing,
and then treads through a pile of fallen leaves into what sounds like
a recording of the bowel movements of a small mammal, before tiny
skittering loops crash into a wall of radio static and the crackle
of empty vinyl, a faux run-out groove before the vrai
run-out groove. "The Summering Unsound" (great title) features
the gurgles of what sounds like a contrabass clarinet, followed by
distant rain (or is it the sizzle of a summer barbecue?), snippets
of conversation, metallic clangs and the final emergency of approaching
sirens, in a cunning mix of the mundane and the mysterious, an elegant
restatement of the question that has preoccupied musique concrète
for over half a century: can an instantly recognisable sound like
a police car be heard out of context and appreciated as a purely musical
object in its own right? You decide. Cinema for the ear, indeed. Let's
have some more.–DW
Strotter
Inst.
ANNA ANNA
Implied Sound
 The
title sums up perfectly what's on offer on this latest offering from
Christoph Hess and his mousetrap-surrounded Goldring Lenco turntables:
it's a double palindrome – there are two tracks on each side
of the seven incher, one that plays from the edge of the disc inwards,
the other from the centre of the disc outwards, meeting in a locked
groove in the middle of the side. Pretty nifty, eh? And I bet he had
to spend quite a bit of pocket money to press it up. Musically, we're
in the same ballpark as Strotter Inst.'s Monstranz CD: objects
strategically attached to his customized dubplates whirr round, snag
and pluck elastic bands suspended above the turntables, building up
a layer of polyrhythmic clunks and twangs that Hess mixes live with
the rough hiss and crunch of vinyl. It's kind of like an instant lo-fi
Steve Reich phase piece, but its raw pulse also breathes the evil
fog of early 80s New Wave / Industrial (yep, Mr Hess knows his Boyd
Rice), a kind of home-made Martin Hannett sound above which you're
half expecting some sepulchral angst from Ian Curtis to appear. But
no: the four tracks (once more, like the Rainey reviewed above, all
too brief – I could go for another whole album of this stuff)
topple into the pit of their locked groove prison and lie there battered
and bleeding, begging to be released. That's where you come in. Great
stuff.–DW
Un
Caddie Renverse dans l'Herbe
THE REVERSED SUPERMARKET TROLLEY FLIES TOWARD THE RAINBOW
Lalia
 I'd
been looking forward to another full-length outing from Didac P. Lagarriga
for a while, having thoroughly enjoyed Like A Packed Cupboard
But Quite and the earlier three-incher Now There's A Weird
Taste In My Mouth on Dekorder. But I wasn't expecting this. It's
an unedited (at least I think so) recording of a birthday party for
a two year old – the lucky lass in question being a certain
Maria-Amaryllis, whose first birthday, you may recall, was celebrated
by Klimperei's La Tordeuse à Bandes Obliques –
which Lagarriga accompanied with his balaphone, mbira, berimbau, piano,
cello, guitar, bass, melodica, laptop and various recordings of well-known
children's ditties. From time to time one or more of the kids (and
maybe a parent or two) pops up in the mix with a gurgle of delight,
but they don't get in the way of Lagarriga's supremely artless noodling.
It's a refreshingly light montage of tinkles, pings and giggles, and
comes in an ingenious bit of rainbow packaging which took me about
as long as the album lasts to figure out how to close (reminds me
of that Groucho Marx line "run out and find me a four-year-old
child; I can't make head or tail out of it"). Fortunately, help
is at hand: www.ideaspot.gr/demos/lalia. Happy Birthday Maria-Amaryllis!
I wonder who'll be playing at your party this year.–DW
Janek
Schaefer
IN THE LAST HOUR
Room40
 Sound
artist Janek Schaefer, writing on his ever entertaining website (www.audioh.com),
describes In The Last Hour as his "finest hour".
And he's probably right (though I'll admit I haven't heard everything
he's done recently, and Chris Sharp's Wire review of his
collaboration with Stephan Mathieu, Hidden Name, certainly
whets the appetite): it's a beautifully crafted four-movement work
for field recordings, piano, wind organ, music box, bell, clarinet,
turntables, minidiscs, loop pedals, mixer, editing software and sound
reactive light and organs (of the electric, wind and pipe variety)
which was premiered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
in 2005 (there's a terrific photo of the audience lying on the floor
on Schaefer's website). Each of the movements takes its title from
Iain Banks's postmodernist science fiction novel The Bridge,
but Schafer's work, though undeniably more romantic than it used to
be (that's fatherhood for you.. but then again, once you've designed
a turntable with three arms and released a disc that skates in all
directions, what else is there to do?) is no mere programme music.
It does, however, tap into a rich vein of English minimalist melancholy,
its chiaroscuro bass clarinets and solemn church organs often recalling
Gavin Bryars. There's even a touching quote from "Nimrod",
from Elgar's Enigma Variations. The instrumental sounds are
carefully mixed with Schaefer's impeccable field recordings and sprinkled
with vinyl crackle to make a rich, moving and mature work. You might
not hear it at the Last Night Of The Proms just yet, but who listens
to the Last Night Of The Proms anyway?–DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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