| FEBRUARY
News 2007 |
Reviews
by Stuart Broomer, Jon Dale, Nate Dorward, Lawrence English, Vid
Jeraj, Richard Pinnell, Massimo Ricci, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
Alexander von Schlippenbach
In Concert: LMC Festival
2006
Fred Lonberg-Holm
Ralf Wehowsky
Gruppo di Improvvisazione
Nuova Consonanza
Reissue This: Afro Soul Drum Orgy
JAZZ & IMPROV: Andrew
Hill / Rudresh Mahanthappa / The Reveries / Joe McPhee &
Paul Hession / Oluyemi Thomas / Patrucco, Honsinger, Mengelberg,
Baars & Bennink / The Electrics / Fernandez, Guy & Lopez
/ Baars & Henneman / Joëlle Léandre
Mark Wastell / Tammen,
Harth, Dahlgren & Rosen / The International Nothing / Jay
Crocker & Chris Dadge / Mike Pride / Tsukasa, Yukie, Hiroshi
/ Monotract / Iconoclast
CONTEMPORARY: Peter
Zummo / Tom Johnson / Natasha Anderson / Giacinto Scelsi
ELECTRONICA: Rosy
Parlane / Marc Behrens & Paulo Raposo / John Duncan / Asher
Last month
|
Before
some smart alec writes in, I know that A. K. Salim's Afro-Soul
/ Drum Orgy has indeed been reissued relatively recently - on
vinyl only - but it seems once more to have sold out and disappeared.
Hopefully Stuart Broomer's excellent piece below will whet appetites
and maybe even prompt some eccentric millionaire jazz fiend to invest
in a proper CD reissue, before the legions of bloggers out there start
posting ripped versions for free download. Meanwhile, if readers are
looking for a good investment themselves, they could do no better
than hunt down a copy of Azioni, the wonderful 2CD + DVD
box from Die Schachtel documenting the wild and wonderful late 60s
work of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (go to www.die-schachtel.com),
lovingly reviewed by Jon Dale below. And, as you'll see, there are
plenty of other treats in store. Thanks as always to everyone who's
sent material in for review, and apologies as always to those whose
music we haven't managed to cover this time round. Bonne lecture.-DW
Alexander
von Schlippenbach
TWELVE TONE TALES Vols. 1 & 2
Intakt
 This
is a major release, make no mistake. The mere idea that some kind
of middle-ground might exist between strict dodecaphony and free improvising
is exciting enough: that Alexander von Schlippenbach, in only his
third solo recording in a career that spans over 40 years, has actually
found it is enough to establish this pair of albums as one of the
most important musical documents to have appeared in the past decade,
maybe even the past half century. Quite a claim, eh? Let's see if
I can make it stand up to some scrutiny. If you're the kind of bug
eatin' ape that falls asleep after half a paragraph of music theory,
you'd better swing off to another part of the jungle right now (though
I will try and make this easy enough for my worthy constituent Wire
reporter Phil Freeman to understand).
Imagine a piano keyboard. There are different names for the twelve
notes of the chromatic scale, five black and seven white, ebony
and ivory living together in perfect harmony side by side on my piano
keyboard oh lord, depending on where you come from. In Britain
and the US we call the white ones A, B, C, D, E, F and G (to complicate
the issue, B for the folks in Germany is what I'd normally call B
flat: they use H for B natural, and there's also an S for E flat –
hence Johann Sebastian Bach and Dimitri Shostakovich's little musical
games on their own surnames, B-A-C-H, D-S-C-H etc. – smart,
eh?). In France they use a system called solfège –
remember Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music? Doe, a
deer, a female deer etc. – a cute system whose invention
is credited to a merry monk named Guido of Arezzo who chose as mnemonic
devices the first syllables of a Latin text set to an existing plainchant
melody that just happened to correspond to the first six white notes,
starting with C ("UT queant laxis / REsonare fibris / MIra gestorum
/ FAmuli tuorum / SOlve polluti / LAbii reatum /Sancte Johannes").
In case you're wondering where "do" and "si" came
from, a bloke called Bononcini started substituting the former for
"ut" in 1673 and Anselm of Flanders added the latter at
the end of the 16th century. God knows why they couldn't have stuck
with A, B and C, but never mind.
Going back to the question of racism Macca touched upon in that annoyingly
cloying ditty quoted above, what about the black notes? As has been
the case for centuries, blacks get a raw deal, in music notation as
in anything else: they don't get their own letter of the alphabet
(except sometimes in Germany, as I mentioned earlier) but have to
make do instead with "sharp" and "flat". (Notice
the inferiority implicit in the nomenclature – we talk about
"accidentals"..) Anyway, without wanting to stir up religious
hatred by blaming all that on the monastic orders of medieval Europe,
let's move on before Phil falls asleep. Most of you can understand
what we mean when we talk about key, I imagine. If a piece of music
is "in D major" it had damn well better end with a D major
chord, or else (I'm assuming even Phil knows what I'm talking about
when I say "major" and "minor"..). That's why
that Mozart piece called A Musical Joke (Ein Musikalischer
Spaß, K. 522, 1787, which I've never found all that funny
to be honest) ends with a godalmighty dissonant crunch instead of
a nice, clean major triad.
By the end of the 19th century, composers were getting pretty bored
with pieces that stayed more or less in one key. Wagner had put the
cat among the pigeons with the opening of Tristan und Isolde (first
performed in 1865) by writing a chord sequence that seemed to be not
in one key, but point to several possible harmonic destinations
(American musicologist Robert Bailey built up a whole theory of double
tonality in Wagner, and I'm still looking forward to his long-awaited
book on the subject – in the meantime you'll have to make do
with his essay Richard Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from
"Tristan and Isolde", in the Norton Critical Scores
series, Norton 1985). Tonality was in trouble: by dint of a whole
network of such harmonic ambiguities, it was possible to write whole
stretches of music that weren't in any key whatsoever. Check out the
early works of Schoenberg, the late symphonies of Mahler or the early
operas of Strauss (that's Richard, not Johann, Phil btw) for examples
of tonality ready to split at the seams, a steamy, queasy world of
permanent doubt and unresolved tension. Unresolved, that is, if you're
expecting it to resolve – but what about just staying
put in the twilight zone and basing your harmonic system precisely
on the in-between-ness of so-called dissonance?
This is precisely what Arnold Schoenberg was doing in his so-called
"free atonal" works of the early 20th century (from the
Second String Quartet Op. 10 to the Four Songs Op.
22). And it made the music he wrote literally impossible for his contemporaries
to analyse using traditional theory terms predicated on the idea of
tonal centre. In fact, nothing very sensible was written on pieces
like Erwartung (1909) until after World War II, when a younger
generation of American music theorists, including composer Milton
Babbitt, began formalising what's become known as set theory. Now,
before we get bogged down in concepts of pitch class and K / Kh complexes
(I can hear Phil yawning already), it's quite simple: just ditch all
the old A, B, C bullshit and start using numbers to refer
to those twelve tones. C is 0, C sharp / D flat is 1, D is 2 etc.
That way a C major triad – C, E, G – can be written <047>.
Of course, given our denary counting system, we run into a problem
when we get past 9 (or the note A, if you prefer): B flat should by
rights be written as 10 and B natural as 11, but that way we'd have
difficulty representing, for example, an E flat major triad, because
<3710> is not a triad at all, but a rather scrunchy Feldmanesque
tetrachord, E flat – G – D flat – C (before Music
Theory doctoral students write in and complain, I'm not getting
into questions of p- and pc-space here, if you don't mind). So set
theory has opted instead for "A" and "B" to represent
B flat and B natural. (Confusing, I'll admit – what I grew up
calling B is what Germans call H, my B flat is their B and now I've
had to get used to calling B-flat A, but never mind.)
Once you've got the hang of the notation, though, you've got it cracked.
Any collection of pitches, either horizontal (melody) or vertical
(harmony) can be represented by numbers. And any subsequent transformations
of pitch material – transpositions, modulations, whatever –
can be expressed clearly and understood by just about anyone with
a basic grasp of simple mathematics. (And if you're bright enough
to figure out how to fill in those IRS forms, that includes you too,
Phil, old chap). One of the first things you realise when you get
to grips with set theory is that the four triads we all learn in music
school – major, minor, augmented and diminished – are
in fact only three of twelve possible trichords.
(Wait a sec, how did four become three? Easy: the minor triad and
the major triad are both in the same set class, as we ahem set theorists
like to call them – "3-11" is our name for it –
one is the mathematical inversion of the other. Start on middle C
and count four plus three semitones up and down: the C major triad
inverted is F minor.) Just imagine for a moment a system of Music
Education where students were taught to recognise by ear all twelve
trichords. It wouldn't exactly lead overnight to the situation Anton
Webern dreamt of – the milkman whistling his music – but,
hell, we wouldn't be far off. The whole corpus of so-called "difficult"
Western 20th century music, from Schoenberg to Stockhausen, Berg to
Babbitt, would suddenly become not so difficult after all. Just a
thought..
Meanwhile, you ask, were composers like Schoenberg and Stravinsky
really thinking about all this mathematical stuff back in the early
years of the century? There's plenty of evidence to indicate that
they indeed were, though they weren't using set theory notation to
describe it – in any case, music always comes first and theory
comes later to explain it: if it's the other way round you're in trouble.
Set theory is also an invaluable tool in analysing Bartók,
Varèse and Ives (read Allen Forte and you'll find there is
an answer to the Unanswered Question), and of course all
twelve tone music.
Ah, at last we're getting to the point; what is twelve tone
music? Very simply it's a compositional system to assure structural
coherence by basing part or all of a piece on a row, a statement of
all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Instead of going to Wikipedia
(sorry Phil), you can get a clear idea of what it's all about here:
jan.ucc.nau.edu/~krr2/12tone/12tone1.html. As you see, there
are quite a few rules to follow if you're going to produce a strictly
dodecaphonic composition, the most restricting of which is the system's
inbuilt aversion to repetition: no pitch or group of pitches (melody,
chord) can be repeated until all twelve have gone round again. (It
also goes without saying that twelve tone theory and equal temperament
go hand in hand, but that, along with microtonality, is another can
of worms I'll refrain from opening right now, if you don't mind.)
It's a kind of enforced democracy – and as we've seen in Iraq,
enforced democracy doesn't work. In the case of Schoenberg, the difference
between free atonality (I should have inserted that "so-called"
again, because "free" isn't the word, as any analysis of
his pre-twelve tone music bears out) and strict dodecaphony is striking:
compare the Op. 19 Piano Pieces (1911) to the Op. 25 Suite
(1923). The former are clearly moving towards the twelve tone universe,
and offer rich pickings for set theory analysis, but they haven't
got there yet – they're still haunted by the intervals and melodic
shapes of tortured fin de siècle expressionism; the
latter, however, is strangely wooden, due in part to Schoenberg's
decision to use already outmoded dance forms, but also because of
the bland non-memorability of the melodic lines. In short, I can sing
along to Op. 19, but I can't to Op. 25, and I've studied them both.
Before hardcore Schoenberg fans start jamming the switchboard with
angry messages, I should admit that my own personal lack of enthusiasm
for twelve note Schoenberg (with a few exceptions) is well known.
I don't have the same problem with Berg and Webern, or with the music
of the generation that followed them in the aftermath of the Second
World War. But it's worth pointing out that total serialism –
i.e. applying the same principles of structural organisation to other
musical parameters such as rhythm, dynamics and timbre – though
necessary as a blast of rejuvenating dynamic modernism to a Europe
decimated by social and political upheaval, led down a blind alley
and ended up bashing its head against a brick wall at the end of it.
The way out of that impasse was to loosen the composer's stranglehold
over the proceedings, either by introducing an element of indeterminacy
into the performance, in terms of both notation and structure (the
influence of Cage), or by changing the basic rules of the game to
reinsert a sense of gravitational pull in the pitch domain, by allowing
certain constellations (Pierre Boulez's term) to be repeated and developed.
 If
you were wondering what the hell all this has got to do with two discs
of solo piano music by Alexander von Schlippenbach, you can stop wondering.
Introducing an element of indeterminacy into performance and allowing
certain pitch constellations to be repeated and developed is what
the German improvising pianist has been doing since the 1960s, and
the miracle of these performances, recorded over just three days in
June 2005, is that Schlippenbach manages to integrate both the spirit
and the letter of twelve tone composition into a highly developed
and utterly distinctive individual improvising practice.
As you might expect, it's no haphazard affair. Each of the two albums
falls into two halves (the whole set could just as well have been
released as a 4CD or 4LP set), each beginning with one of the four
"Twelve Tone Tales" themselves. With the exception of the
first, these consist of an opening "Invention A", followed
by a "Paraphrase" and a closing "Invention B"
(the first TTT dispenses with the second Invention). To quote Bert
Noglik's liners to the second disc, "the Twelve Tone Tales [..]
each begin with an invention composed with twelve tones [..]. Their
improvisational extensions in the paraphrase (and, in some cases,
the second invention) also relate to the same twelve-tone row."
While many of his contemporaries who helped kickstart European free
improvisation in the mid / late 1960s have gone out of their way to
distance themselves from jazz, Schlippenbach has not only
never denied his roots, but proudly dug them up and displayed them
on several occasions, either by arranging pieces by W.C. Handy and
Jelly Roll Morton, or covering the music of Eric Dolphy and Thelonious
Monk (including the extraordinary recording of the complete Monk songbook
in 2004's Monk's Casino). On Twelve Tone Tales he
also pays a direct homage to European contemporary music, in the form
of his teacher, Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918 – 1970). The only
piece on Volume 1 not penned (if that's the word) by Schlippenbach
is Zimmermann's spiky twelve tone "Allegro Agitato", which
is an extract from incidental music Zimmermann wrote in the mid 60s
for a radio play called Die Befristeten (with text by Elias
Canetti) and subsquently arranged for the Manfred Schoof quintet,
as Bill Shoemaker informs us in his notes. Far from sticking out like
a sore thumb, it fits perfectly into Schlippenbach's formal scheme,
sandwiched between the more rhapsodic "K2" and "The
One", which closes the first half of Volume 1.
But it's perhaps in "Devices And Desires", which follows
on from "Twelve Tone Tales (I)", that Schlippenbach's harmonic
system reveals itself best. As Noglik points out, he "has developed
the ability to work out a sequence of six-note chords with left and
right hands in the sense of a twelve-tone row". Maybe that remark
needs some explanation: go back to the old piano, close your eyes
and plonk the little finger, first finger and thumb of your left hand
down on the keyboard. Chances are you've hit some recognisably tonal
subset of the good old major scale (especially if you've just hit
white notes – after all, those pesky little accidental blackuns
are narrower and have been made deliberately harder to hit, haven't
they?), either a major or minor triad, or a first inversion thereof,
or a McCoy Tyner-like pair of stacked fourths (D-G-C, E-A-D, etc.).
Let's assume for the sake of argument that it's D-G-C (<027>
if you prefer). Now, find those same three pitches with your right
hand thumb, first finger and little finger an octave higher, and amuse
yourself by moving the right hand trichord up by semitonal increments
while keeping the left hand where it is. Immediately you end up with
some crunchy "dissonances". Mess around for a few minutes
with a pen and a piece of manuscript paper and you can soon come up
with a set of block chords that sounds both recognisably jazzy and
that uses all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. This, essentially,
is what Schlippenbach is up to here, though with a whole multitude
of two, three, four and five-note chords derived (or not) from his
original starting row – check out on "Devices And Desires"
how the same trichord moves outwards in contrary motion (at about
0'44" into the piece, and again more prominently at 1'05"),
generating some pretty dense harmony from remarkably simple means.
And you can hear it. There's no need to portray your own
dumb ignorance as a virtue by describing yourself as a lower order
of primate and revelling in the fact – all you have to do is
listen. If you sit back and just wait to be entertained,
entertained you will be, make no mistake: Schlippenbach's music does
indeed swing hard, and it does indeed take strange, surprising and
often amusing turns, but it also engages the listener – if s/he
is prepared to make the effort – in an active process of discovery
of music's basic building blocks. And in the world of solo piano music
it stands alongside the most convincing offerings of the past sixty
years, both composed – from Barraqué to Boulez to Stockhausen
to Ligeti to Finnissy – and improvised – from Taylor to
Pullen to Mengelberg to Blake to Van Hove.
Indeed, as the psychiatrist said, walking down the stairs at Fawlty
Towers, "there's enough material here for an entire convention"
– from the delicious Monk chord that opens "Twelve Tone
Tales II" (listen to how Schlippenbach moves the inner voices
up and down by strategic semitones, from Thelonious to Bernd Alois
in two seconds) via "Meo", whose angular lines and crashing
octaves move effortlessly into and out of rich sonorities worthy of
Gershwin or Debussy before exploding into a display of pianistic virtuosity
comparable to the finest and most ecstatic moments of Fred Van Hove
and Cecil Taylor, to the terrifying motoric toccata "LOK 03"
that closes Volume 1 so spectacularly.
 Volume
2 is just as impeccably sequenced, moving from the austere opening
Invention of "Twelve Tone Tales III" into the florid extravaganza
of "Allegorese" and out via the short power punch of "Wildcat's
Proper Hit" (which proves that Schlippenbach can cover just as
much distance in 1'10" as he can in ten minutes, when he wants
to) to the delicate arabesques of "Born Potty" – note
how this revisits the same descending triadic territory as the piece
that preceded it. In the final section of Volume 2, after
"Twelve Tone Tales IV", and the hectic flurries of "Off
With Your Coat Hassan", Schlippenbach lets his hair down with
a set of cracking cover versions – Eric Dolphy's "Les",
"Out There" and "Something Sweet, Something Tender",
Jerome Kern's "All The Things You Are" (these last two also
appeared on Schlippenbach's 2002 quartet outing Broomriding)
and, finishing off with a bang, Monk's "Trinkle Tinkle".
The choice of Dolphy is significant, and a reminder that Schlippenbach
is not, after all, the first musician to attempt to marry the seemingly
incompatible worlds of twelve tone composition and hard swinging modern
jazz. Remember Dolphy's scorching work on 1960's pioneering Third
Stream album Jazz Abstractions? Both the oblique post-bop
harmonies and the angular lines of his themes fit perfectly into Schlippenbach's
universe; not surprisingly the Berliner is one of very few musicians
who's covered Dolphy material convincingly.
Jerome Kern might not seem, on the face of it, to have much to do
with dodecaphony, but get ur Realbookz on and check out how the underlying
bass line of "All The Things You Are" walks nearly all the
way round the circle of fifths and becomes a tone row in its own right.
Not here though – in what is perhaps the most cunning cover
on offer, Schlippenbach retains only the (recognisable) melody line,
and throws the window open to freeze dry it with the "air from
another planet" that blew through early Schoenberg. The harmonies
he conjures up are so richly and exquisitely ambiguous, one wonders
if he hasn't just written the damn piece out. And if he has, who cares?
To quote Gunther Schuller's notes to Jazz Abstractions: "This
[..] will undoubtedly raise the old ghostly question: 'But is this
jazz?' The answer – whatever it may be – is irrelevant,
since musicians on both sides of the fence are not necessarily concerned
with whether a given piece be jazz or not. They are satisfied that
it be music – music not of yesteryear's categories,
but of today's musical realities."–DW [photo
of AVS by Giovanni Piesco]
LMC
Festival 2006
15th, 16th and 17th December 2006
ICA, London
The
London Musicians Collective's Annual Festival of Experimental Music
has long been the highlight of the London avant-garde music calendar.
In 2006, for its 15th incarnation, and the second under the watchful
eye of curator Ben Drew, the festival moved to a weekend just seven
days before Christmas, and to the ICA, a more central venue that ensured
a 100% advance sell-out (but which also meant that a bottle of beer
cost £3 and came with a slice of lemon wedged into the
top).
The first night opened with a purely acoustic duo featuring Tom Chant
and Sharif Sehnaoui. Chant is a versatile saxophonist, having working
with everyone from Evan Parker to Coldcut, and this was not his first
performance with the Lebanese guitarist. Their understanding of each
other was clear, with Chant restricting his input to sustained notes
and breathy flutterings to meet Sehnaoui's earthy undercurrent of
strings softly stroked with a collection of metal files. The dry cyclical
textures proved very pleasing on the ear, with the reward coming from
the superimposition of musical elements rather than any sense of narrative.
Things became more active later, with Sehnaoui picking over the strings
with what looked like wire wool and Chant's burbling chirrups gathering
pace, but the most successful moments of the set came in its early
stages.
Having enjoyed the music of Dutch laptop composer Roel Meelkop on
CD, I was looking forward to his music in a live setting. Meelkop
creates slow-moving, luscious constructions that could be lazily categorised
as lowercase, but tonight his music often reached high volume, with
layers of fizz and hum cascading over warm tones and digital glitchery,
crescendos cutting away suddenly to reveal quieter strata of sound
underneath. The material itself was enjoyable and was executed with
surgeon-like precision and impeccable timing, but the performance
meandered somewhat, never really adding up to anything more than the
sum of its parts. Every time the music approached what seemed like
a natural ending, it started up again. The audience remained respectful
(a notable feature of the weekend), but was uncomfortable and fidgety,
fighting to retain focus with little to see happening onstage.
 The
final two sets of the first evening both came from a large group put
together by Otomo Yoshihide (photo) to perform two very different
versions of his Anode project. The ensemble featured a mix of electronic
and acoustic players from a variety of backgrounds. Angharad Davies
(violin), Matt Davis (trumpet), Tom Chant (sax), Sarah Washington
(electronics), Tim Barnes (percussion), Stefano Todescu (vibes), Ichiraku
Yoshimitsu (drums), Ishikawa Ko (sho), Mark Sanders (drums), Rhodri
Davies (harp), Sachiko M (empty sampler), Masahiro Uemura (drums),
Andrea Neumann (inside piano) and Otomo himself on turntables made
up a group that formed a circle around the perimeter of the room with
the audience at its centre.
The two sets showcased the two extremes of Otomo's music. In the first
the musicians were instructed to play as quietly as possible, and
follow precisely the opposite approach in the second, building a wall
of thunderous noise around the audience trapped in the centre. The
first set was stunningly beautiful. Though the musicians weren't supposed
to pay any heed to what was being played by others around them, no
more than two or three of them seemed to be playing at any given time,
and the music that resulted retained a slow pace throughout. It crept
up on you from different corners, small sounds tiptoeing past before
being replaced by others. Separating it from the natural ambience
of the room became difficult, and I found myself straining to hear
sounds that may not have been there to hear. The removal of the traditional
situation we are used to in a live setting in which the music comes
from one direction and exterior sounds from another made for an interesting
and very beautiful listening experience that proved to be the highlight
of the festival.
Oddly enough, the noisy set was remarkably similar: as it became difficult
to discern individual sounds in the room, the brain struggled to link
this to the visual messages it was receiving. Matt Davis could be
seen blowing hard into his trumpet and Angharad Davies urgently thrashing
at her violin, but the only way to hear what they were doing was to
walk over to where they played and listen up close. People began to
get up – at Otomo's suggestion – and move to experience
the music from different parts of the room, removing barriers between
audience, musicians and performance space. Whether that was Otomo's
intention or not I can't say, though the thought crossed my mind as
I left the hall, ears ringing, at the end of the first night.
The
Saturday night opened with a solo set from the Berlin based electronics
wizard and inside-pianist Andrea Neumann. Her instrument consists of the
guts of a piano hooked up to a mixer and assorted other electronic
paraphernalia. Live, it sounded more like Keith Rowe's guitar than
John Tilbury's piano, as her set developed slowly through a delicate
layering of static fizzing and growling abrasions with an undercurrent
of something feeding back below the surface. The way she controlled
these diverse layered elements was particularly impressive. Ten minutes
or so in, the music wrestled itself to a dead halt, then started up
again with a series of phasing electronic sounds that sounded alien
to the rest of the set but which soon made way for a pattern of industrial
scrapes and syrupy tones with the chime of a struck piano string appearing
very occasionally from below the surface. While perhaps a little predictable (solo performances with this kind of instrumentation have a tendency
to drone), Neumann's set was well constructed and very enjoyable, though
I have to admit I'd have preferred to hear her performing in a duo.
Texturizer is a Greek duo featuring laptopper Coti K and Nikos Veliotis,
whose customary cello was placed to one side in favour of his video
manipulations projected onto a large screen above the stage while
he and Coti sat modestly to the side. Veliotis's cello was far from
absent from the proceedings, however, as much of the music seemed
to originate from the instrument, with samples used to build up a
loosely rhythmic churning of gravelly layers. The revolving drone
element of the music wasn't subtle enough to keep me interested, but
the interaction between the sound and the video certainly was. The
images were (I think) all sourced from abstract stills taken of the
cello, projected in black and white but then affected directly by
software driven by the music, in a similar manner to the recent Billy
Roisz / Toshimaru Nakamura AVVA DVD (Erstwhile). As the music
became more agitated, so did the images, descending into pure abstraction
from their only vaguely recognisable starting point. There's much
room for growth in this area of audio-visual interaction, but on this
occasion one half of the equation outperformed the other.
Having witnessed percussionist Tim Barnes' sublimely sensitive playing
on several occasions, the prospect of hearing it combined with the
minimal austerity of Ishikawa Ko's sho was an exciting one, and the
music they made in what was their first duo encounter was indeed beautiful,
with Barnes's gentle nuances as enthralling as ever. He concentrated
on a single snare drum in the early part of the set, moving to a tam
tam later on, while Ko's limited palette of sounds imbued the music
with a sense of charged hush, not often silent, but with a ritualistic
feel. And yet somehow, the musicians didn't come together as well
as I felt they could. There seemed to be an awkwardness to the music
– perhaps intentional, perhaps due to their not having played
together before – that disrupted the flow in places. Often Ko
just stopped playing for extended periods for no apparent reason,
and what would have made for natural end to the set after about half
an hour was ignored and the duo went on playing. Enjoyable, and a
joy to behold, but I can't help feeling it could have been so much
better.
The night closed with two presentations of tape works by French musique
concrète grandmaster Bernard Parmegiani (photo). For this
performance four speakers projected sound from each corner of the
room, the multi-channel aspect allowing Parmegiani's music to be heard
in a manner far surpassing the everyday CD experience. The first of
the two works was a performance of one section of his De Natura
Sonorum from 1975. Listening to it in a big room under these
conditions was a great experience, and the slightly dated feel of
the music didn't seem to matter as the sounds flew about the head,
mixed live by the composer standing in the centre of the room. More
disappointing was the UK premier of his Au gré du souffle
le son s'envole. Following some obvious use of synth sounds to
create the impression of strong winds blowing, the music returned
to a world not far from De Natura Sonorum, its synthetic
sounds and jagged, fast moving segments sounding very dated. It's
somewhat disheartening to note that the most recent work from a composer
who was so ahead of his time thirty years ago sounds so irrelevant
in 2006.
The
final night of the festival began with a set from bassist John Edwards
and drummer Chris Corsano. The young percussionist's skill and poise
was very apparent as the pair set off at high speed, exchanging dramatic
gestures and adrenalin-fuelled flourishes, working through a colourful
set of hyperactive shape-throwing and flying drumsticks with obvious
dexterity, but the music just wasn't my cup of tea, tending towards
the more traditional free jazz orientation of improvised music, an
area I am less interested in these days. Clearly a large section of
the audience felt otherwise, however, as much whooping and hollering
summoned the pair back for a short encore.
Tomas Korber followed with a solo set for electronics. Sat alone at
a table centre stage he looked a jaded figure, having suffered from
a bout of food poisoning all day that had nearly led him to cancel
his performance. His piece was a composition that began with him using
a guitar to generate feedback which was then controlled and looped
until the guitar could be placed aside and the rest of the set executed
by manipulating the electronics and mixer alone. It was quite stunning
in its execution. Beginning with a pattern of lurching metallic feedback
interspersed with pregnant silences, the piece grew with the addition
of pure tones and for a while a pulsing bass throb that died away
to allow shimmering lines of feedback to slip over each other and
coalesce into a hypnotic wash of sound. This grew in intensity for
the next ten minutes or so before disappearing into huge clouds of
hissing interference that filled the room and held the audience captive
for several minutes. This pressure-cooker atmosphere was brought to
a close when Korber folded the immense sound in on itself to leave
a single high pitched feedback tone that he gradually allowed to wither
away to a gentle hum to end the set. Korber's performance exuded a
confident grandeur that was missing from some of the other solo performances
of the weekend. The composed element to the piece no doubt allowed
him the time and space to execute the work with great precision, and
this showed in a performance that balanced beautiful craftsmanship
and dramatic power in equal parts.
There followed another semi-composed solo set, this time by American
composer and sound arranger Olivia Block. Block's work on CD is generally
made up of field recordings and fragments of specially recorded instrumental
sounds that she meticulously pieces together to form rich, cinematic
works. The question of how this could work in a live situation was
always likely to be an intriguing one. In effect, she played a recording
prepared in advance – mostly field recordings, and possibly
fragments of her recent release Heave To – into which
spaces had been left for improvised insertions on a small autoharp
laid on the table beside her, which she scraped, plucked and played
with a beater. While it was a pleasure to experience Block's soundworld
at high volume, it didn't really work for me. The mix of recordings
and live material seemed clunky, and the autoharp didn't really add
anything of consequence. It felt almost as if it had been added simply
for the sake of having a live performance element. An unfortunate
and annoying buzz emanating from one of the speakers didn't help matters
much either. As a big fan of Block's work on CD I would have been
perfectly happy with a presentation of the pre-recorded material alone
through a good quality sound system. If she'd had the same PA set-up
as Parmegiani did the night before, the comparison between old and
new electroacoustic composition would have been most illuminating.
 The
festival closed with a collection of works by various
Fluxus and Scratch Orchestra composers performed by Keith Rowe and
Ben Patterson. Not announced beforehand, the pieces played were performed
in a fluid manner, some happening sequentially and some taking place
at the same time. The entire performance was met with a degree of
bewilderment and laughter by the audience, which began when the duo
walked onstage along with their "assistant" Lee Patterson,
who spent the entire performance attending to three coloured birdfeeders at the
back of the stage (photo) which dripped water continually into contact
miked bowls beneath them. These formed the basis of George Brecht's
composition Drip Music. Much amusement followed as the trio,
wearing white labcoats for the occasion, stood about discussing the
drips and making notes on clipboards before Rowe and Ben Patterson
walked to the front of the stage, leaving the drips tapping out an
irregular percussive pattern. After a very brief realisation of Christian
Wolff's Stones, which involved them scraping stones together
near microphones, the pair picked up a series of sheets of paper,
which, as Rowe sat reading the headlines, Patterson began to tear
up and scatter about the stage in what I assume to have been a performance
of his Paper Piece. Rowe soon joined in this paper tearing
activity, and rustled contact mics as Patterson set off up the central
aisle of the auditorium, handing out sheets and balls of newspaper
and encouraging the crowd to make as much noise as possible with their
newly discovered "instruments". Patterson then left the
stage as Rowe, behind his guitar at last, introduced a loud hollow
drone into the proceedings. Patterson then returned in a suit to conduct
the audience with their balls of paper, seemingly a performance of
George Maciunas' Solo for Conductor, which also involved
him cleaning his shoes and jacket with brushes. Things continued at
this somewhat chaotic pace until Patterson sat behind his instrument
(an unidentifiable stringed instrument hooked up to an assortment
of effects pedals), and the pair set about a ten-minute performance
of a page from Cornelius Cardew's Treatise. Throughout the
set Keith Rowe's mobile phone rang three times, a modern day version
of Brecht's Telephone Piece. At first he ignored it, but
eventually answered, and had a brief discussion with Ben Drew (sitting
just offstage) about how the performance was going. The biggest laugh
came with a rendition of Robert Watts' piece C/S Trace, which
involved Patterson shooting ping-pong balls at Rowe, who caught them
in a pair of cymbals with a crash. Rowe and Patterson then went back
to the birdfeeders to check progress with Lee Patterson who had been
studiously refilling them during the performance. They compared notes,
nodded in agreement and then with a bow, left the stage.
As the composers were announced afterwards, there were apparently
other compositions by Takahisa Kosugi, Cardew and Gavin Bryars buried
amongst the bedlam, but goodness knows where. Serious in places and
hilarious in others, it was great to witness, particularly as I had
not seen most of the pieces performed before, and we all left the
venue with smiles on our faces. It was a great way to end a festival
so close to Christmas. Hats off to Ben Drew and the LMC - I'm looking
forward to next year.–RP
Fred
Lonberg-Holm Quartet
BRIDGES FREEZE BEFORE ROADS
Longbox
Carlos
Zingaro/Fred Lonberg-Holm
FLYING ASPIDISTRA #2
Self Release
David
Stackenäs/Fred Lonberg-Holm
FLYING ASPIDISTRA #3
Self Release
In
Zenith
BUILDING A BETTER FUTURE
Miguel
 Fred
Lonberg-Holm's Bridges Freeze Before Roads is a challenging
album that distributes delicacies and abrasions with extreme balance
and exquisite finesse. Lonberg-Holm is not a "leader" but
a coordinator of revolutionary minorities, fragmenting and seaming
his ideas into incidental murmurs and self-conscious vibrations, his
cello gleaming in a malaised sunshine. Clarinettist Guillermo Gregorio's
excruciatingly difficult anti-structures alternately sting and caress,
highlighting his utter control of timbre; his pregnant emissions splinter
into thousands of harmonics then reunite, if necessary, into a sine
wave. Jason Roebke and Glenn Kotche are nothing like a "rhythm
section": Roebke uses his bass to warm what could be icy music,
plucking and snapping in spurts, while Kotche's percussion is like
falling leaves, faint breaths and dessicated fruits on an ancient
table, ants crawling all over the place to look for stale crumbs,
brittle remnants of what once was defined as beat.
 You'll
rarely find a violin/cello duo richer in fantasy, inventiveness and
– why not – lyricism than Lonberg-Holm and Carlos Zingaro.
The improvisations on Flying Aspidistra #2 were recorded
in Chicago in 2003; the music is snappishly spontaneous, taking shape
in the space of a few seconds only to catch sight of itself in a broken
mirror and run away. The musicians are armed with dazzling technique,
as well as a willingness to give one another handsome presents and
furuncular eruptions in equal doses. Zingaro can make his violin sound
guttural and whistling, eligible for a pungent seance with any wacky
troubled soul willing to stop for a chat. Lonberg-Holm saws and carves
away in a spirit of dauntless exploration, constructing multicoloured
kites that fly around his comrade's fiddling. These excellent tracks
confirm both musicians' place on the cutting edge of radical string-playing,
introducing the listener to new gospels of dissonant egalitarianism
and plucky musical intelligence.
 Flying
Aspidistra #3 is a direct-to-DAT series of duos for guitar and
cello recorded in 2004. It's very different from #2, a tranquil,
almost pensive album which only seldom abandons the prevailing mood
of thoughtfulness and reflection. For the most part, Stackenäs
works with delicately dissonant, resonant chords, which he lets unfold
with a contemplative satisfaction without hurry or nervous juggling.
Lonberg-Holm complements him effectively, elaborating elegant on-the-spot
counterpoint and droning melancholy, spiced with heartbreaking contrasts
in a sort of hybrid Veliotis-meets-Cora style. Even when the players
immerse themselves in harsher kinds of meditation – as on tracks
5 and 6 – we can't help but appreciate the downright clarity
of their interplay. Another unknown gem in the Aspidistra series.
 In
Zenith is a trio of Lonberg-Holm, Jeb Bishop (trombone, bass,
guitar) and Michael Zerang (drums). They play an electrifying concoction
of styles marked by a fun-drenched optimism (CD title included). The
first comparisons that come to mind are Curlew and the Tiptons, yet
the music is often slightly more consonant – as in a cantabile
theme like "Betsy Come In". If you need a helping of tangential
bobbing-and-weaving fury instead, look no further than the splendidly
titled "Morton Gets the Urge", where the musicians seem
to be looking for a quick hiding-place after throwing a rock at a
sleeping grizzly. In this genreless mayhem Lonberg-Holm's cello is
the main voice, while Bishop – except for a few more lyrical
trombone parts – performs a multitask, high-energy role. Zerang
sustains the whole structure and adds his own interpolations and flurries.
The disc was mastered by Jim O'Rourke, and it's a nice one, likely
to be appreciated by alternative rock and RIO aficionados, even if
it is a notch below Bridges and the Aspidistras.–MR
Domenico
Sciajno / Ralf Wehowsky
GELBE TUPFEN
Bowindo
RM74
/ RLW
PIROUETTEN
Crouton
Bhob
Rainey / Ralf Wehowsky
I DONT THINK I CAN SEE YOU TONIGHT
Sedimental
Tony
Conrad / Ralf Wehowsky / Jim O'Rourke
AVANTO 2006
AAAAA
A
while ago I submitted a little essay to Mark Wastell and Brian Marley's
collection of articles + DVD Blocks
of Consciousness and the Unbroken Continuum, which, for those
of you whose coffee table isn't adorned with a copy, began with the
following paragraph: "Here's a little test for you to try out
on your friends: ask them to name ten 20th-century composers. Meaning
born after 1900 – so Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartók,
Debussy and Ravel are excluded. Pop stars or jazz musicians don't
qualify (though one could certainly make a case for including Ellington,
Monk and Mingus), but Gershwin and Bernstein do, so I suppose you
could also accept Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim and even (gulp) Andrew
Lloyd Webber ... and, by extension, Ennio Morricone, John Williams
and Jerry Goldsmith. If they manage to come up with ten, ask them
to do the same for composers born after 1950. Unless they're
new music nuts, or just plain nuts, they'll be hard-pressed to come
up with half a dozen. The point I'm making is simple: what's usually
laughably referred to as 'contemporary music' in major record outlets
consists for the most part of work written by men (not women –
that's another point worthy of an article in itself) who are either
dead (Cage, Xenakis, Berio, Nono, Feldman...) or old enough to be
my father, even grandfather (and I was born in 1963): Carter, Boulez,
Ligeti, Stockhausen, Kagel, Ferrari, Ferneyhough. Here in France the
work of John Zorn, Bernhard Günter and Heiner Goebbels –
who I would classify as composers without a moment's hesitation –
is normally found in record store bins intriguingly titled 'musique
nouvelle' (as if Justin Timberlake, REM, Slayer, Massive Attack and
Marilyn Manson weren't new), along with the kind of music Gil Scott
Heron once ironically referred to as 'miscellaneous'."
Zorn, Günter and Goebbels.. Hmm, I should have added Ralf Wehowsky's
name to the list (especially since, if the interview he gave me in
July 2005 is anything to go by, it was he who more or less pointed
Bernhard Günter in the direction of the ultra-quiet music he's
followed ever since). Since the members of the pioneering P16.D4 collective
(see the interview and save
me having to write all that out again, will you?) went their separate
ways, Wehowsky has produced a considerable body of solo and collaborative
works which defy classification and as a result slip neatly into the
crack between contemporary classical and electronica – or into
any crack you care to mention. The music of P16.D4 was often mistakenly
tagged as "Industrial" and mentioned in the same breath
as some of the noiseniks they collaborated with (Merzbow, notably),
and some of that mud seems to have stuck to Wehowsky, hence perhaps
his popularity in alt.music circles and the willingness of certain
alt.rock major players – David Grubbs, Bruce Russell, Alan Courtis
– to seek him out. But, at the risk of going against my own
definition of composition in the article cited above (it wouldn't
be the first time I've contradicted myself, and it won't be the last),
the music Wehowsky creates is most definitely composed, in
the sense that it's put together slowly and painstakingly, reorganised,
mixed and remixed with the kind of attention to detail associated
with academic composition of the highest order. And yet, he had no
formal conservatory training in composition, and his music isn't,
to the best of my knowledge, studied at any university music faculty
or conservatory, though other notable names in musique concrète
such as Henry, Parmegiani and Ferrari certainly are. That's partly
because, as mentioned above, he's still associated with music and
musicians glibly referred to as "popular", but more significantly
because his oeuvre flies in the face of traditional definitions of
what a composer is, being for the most part collaborative –
either reworking someone else's material, or working jointly with
another musician at various (sometimes all) stages of a project.
Collaborative projects are now frequent in the world of new music,
or at least that corner of the world of new music this magazine tends
to specialise in: the advent of the Internet, the CDR and various
applications in music software has made it surprisingly easy for musicians
on opposite sides of the planet to work together, sometimes simultaneously.
Wehowsky has always been interested in joint ventures, and many of
his most important releases, most notably the epic 5-CD set Tulpas,
have featured contributions from many musicians of wildly different
persuasions. "For me music is about communication. Once it was
a rather one-way communication, addressing everything to God (and
waiting for a reply), today it's more about communication with other
human beings. A rock group is a typical example of a communicative
system. In ideal circumstances there's no unique authorship, no separation
between composer and performer, and a constant interchange of ideas
and musical material," he says. No unique authorship, no separation
between composer and performer.. hard to sell that idea in the staff
room of the music faculty, eh? You can't imagine Brian Ferneyhough
and Helmut Lachenmann writing a piece together, however tempting that
might sound. Composers are, egos apart, solitary figures. The old
Ken Russell stereotype of wacky / tortured (delete where appropriate)
genius is hard to ditch. Somehow the image of a discreet, almost elusive,
bloke tucked away in the Black Forest making music in his spare time
and releasing it in limited editions on obscure labels isn't the kind
of thing that is likely to attract the Powers That Be.
 "Is
there a beginning?" Wehowsky muses in the liners that accompany
Gelbe Tupfen, his split release with Italian laptopper /
composer Domenico Sciajno. "Or is there an end? Did Christoph
Schmid really invent the lyrics for Ihr Kinderlein Kommet,
back in 1794, or was he simply the one to write down verses already
in the air? Did my daughter Sonja deliberately try to sing moving
around the notes of that song a few days before Xmas 2001, or was
she just fooling around? Is it a sign of higher intelligence to release
an (anti)Xmas record on 7" vinyl once every year like the Belgian
label Meeuw Muzak does, or just a flirt with bad taste? Was it clever
to supply them with an electronically treated version of Ihr Kinderlein
Kommet for 2003's yearly event? And was it a wise decision
to extend this experiment in a different way, seen by many as more
serious, and to invite other artists to join this experience?"
If the resulting music is anything to go by, yes. The I.K.K. material
has generated several collaborative ventures, including one I.K.K.
- Purpur on Sirr which I was honoured to participate in myself.
But unless you're lucky enough to own a copy of the original single
of Wehowsky's daughter gasping her way enthusiastically through the
Christmas carol, you'd probably be hard pressed to identify it from
the music it has spawned. Sciajno's i.Dk.Sk. (user-unfriendly
titles are a Wehowsky hallmark too) transforms the source recordings
using a self-designed set of patches in MAX/MSP. It's a classy piece
of work, as elegant and subtle as anything Sciajno has released to
date. If Sonja is hard to spot in the forest of metallic drones, gurgles
and pops, some of Wehowsky's own organ tootlings peek out of the foliage.
In effect, it's a typically Wehowsky-like remix of a remix, layers
of meaning and structure accumulating at each reworking, and the resulting
music is rich and dense – some say difficult, but I don't buy
that: Webern sounded difficult to me when I first heard it, but now
it's as easy to listen to as Mozart – not something you can
appreciate fully at first listening. (That's my cack-handed way of
avoiding the hoary old cliché "richly rewards repeated
listening.") The same applies to Wehowsky's own i.k.k. -
mneme gelb, a slow trawl through the icy waters of exquisite,
glistening drones. (It's too late now but remind me to ban the use
of the word "drone" as my New Year's Resolution 2008, please
– it means next to nothing anymore).
 On
Pirouetten, Wehowsky, using his nom de scène
– well, not really.. he hasn't performed in public for over
a decade – RLW, teams up with Swiss electronician Reto Mäder,
aka RM74 (check out Mikrosport on Domizil). Not sure if the
word "lighter" is appropriate, but it feels lighter
than Gelbe Tupfen. Maybe that's because the tracks are shorter,
maybe because the source sounds (Wehowsky plays gamelan, sitar, guitar,
trombone, chimes, and Mader organ, accordion, cello, bass, guitar
and harmonica, and there are some wild field recordings) are at times
more evident. But even in the tracks where they are there's a lot
of crafty transformation going on further back in the mix. It's precisely
this contrast between what you think is going on and what you know
deep down isn't that makes the album so fresh. That and the beautiful
winter tree photographs of Elisabeth Blättler that accompany
the release on separate cards (another collectible Crouton, folks).
I don't know what liners are on about with their references to "centurial
folkways" (?), and I don't understand the bit about Lacan and
Freud (then again, I never understood much Lacan in the first place),
but it sounds fabulous.
 As has
been hinted at above and elsewhere, Wehowsky albums take their time
to appear, and the gestation process of the magnificent I don't
think I can see you tonight, his collaboration with Bhob Rainey,
is lovingly described in the notes printed in the gatefold cover of
the disc. For example: "April 2003 With some goading
and inspiring suggestions by Ralf, Bhob records numerous saxophone
excursions, most significant of which is a variation on Ralf's 'Drunken
Walk' suggestion, where Bhob plays saxophone, rolls around in an office
chair, bounces a ping pong ball with his feet, and generally causes
distress in an already cluttered attic where he lives. Ralf invokes
Sun Ra's Black Forest Myth, Cecil Taylor's Tales From
The Black Forest and Brötzmann's Schwarzwaldfahrt
on his own journey through Germany's dark woods: Black field recordings
by Ralf." And so forth. Amusing and honest, but not quite what
you'd put in your CD if you were applying for a teaching position
in a composition faculty. Not that I'm suggesting that's where Wehowsky
belongs (he already has a good day job as it is, thank you very much),
but from where I'm sitting this is one of the most important works
of electronic music to appear this decade. Or musique concrète,
if you prefer, though I think the old ideological distinction between
the two doesn't mean much anymore. Field recordings – and there's
another expression that's outlived its usefulness: how can you make
a field recording in a cluttered attic? – are here to stay,
but Rainey and Wehowsky show that there's a lot more to making music
than just slapping them into Max / MSP or some such application, diddling
about with EQ and adding a few fades and FX here and there. Take the
time to understand your material, live with it, get to know how it
behaves, what it will and won't do, and then take the time to design
and build a compositional structure that will reveal it to its best
advantage and surprise both you and anyone listening to it, again
and again. Above all, take the time. As the irritable old geezer who
repairs Woody's arm in Toy Story 2 says, "you can't
rush art!" Listen to how the title track emerges slowly from
a shell into which fragments of recognisable noises are being sucked
as backwards soundfiles, taking nearly seven minutes to reach the
open air, where distant sounds of children at play, footsteps and
tiny smears of saxophone multiphonics and all manner of sonic building
blocks both recognisable and tantalisingly inscrutable are gradually
brought together to construct the musical equivalent of a Gothic cathedral.
 Avanto
2006 – if that is indeed the name of the disc, as AAAAA
seems to be the name of the label (though where I live it stands for
Association Amicale des Amateurs d’Andouillettes Authentiques:
yumyum) – finds Wehowsky in the good company (record saleswise)
of Tony Conrad and Jim O'Rourke. Conrad's DAGADAG is a 13'26"
add / subtract round for multitracked violin, and seems to be dedicated
to La Monte Young. (Maybe I've missed out on something here, but wasn't
it only recently that Conrad was picketing Young concerts? Remember
that old spat about ownership of the Dream Syndicate music? Well,
maybe they managed to sort something out. Someone write in and tell
me please if that's the case. The only references I can find to this
piece on the WWW are in Finnish, and you know how my Finnish is. Who
knows, maybe it's an old piece.) O'Rourke's Out with the Old
is dated "1990 / 1991 / 1994 / 2006", which would seem to
indicate it's another recent reworking of old drone pieces from the
early 90s. There've been a few recently, and this is very pleasant
indeed at Niblock-rending volume, even if it isn't my personal favourite.
This particular disc is worth the price of admission alone for Wehowsky's
Würgengels Lachende Hand, an impressive and at times
disturbing work sourced from material sent to the composer by Finnish
guitarist Topias Tiheäsolo and recordings of The Rovalli Revival
Band, which (sorry to blow your cover Ralf) features the young Wehowskys
Sonja and Sören and RLW himself on oud. The title, though hard
to translate accurately, comes out roughly as "Death Angel Laughing
Hand", and refers to an artwork in Prinzhorn's Bildnerei
der Geisteskranken, a collection of artworks created in mental
institutions in the early 20th century (what later became known as
"Art Brut"). "When looking at the pictures I was reminded
of the almost surreal texts the children invented for the recordings,
and the way conventional elements are interwoven with strange ones
in unconventional ways," Wehowsky writes. You'll need a smattering
of German to understand "die Raeuber betteln jetzt um Geld"
("the robbers are begging for money now") and "passt
gut auf, ihr kinderlein, bald werdet ihr zerquetscht sein....ihr seid
bald alle tot und das ist kein mord" ("take care you children,
soon you will be crushed... all of you will be dead and this is no
murder"), lines whose sinister comic book noir undertones
are deftly picked out by Wehowsky's unstable, granular drones. Nothing
is quite what it seems – it rarely is in Wehowsky's music. Things
that sound simple first time round prove to be incredibly complex,
and vice versa. The structure of the piece is also cunning: it falls
into six sections (0'00"–3'26", 3'33"–5'51",
5'55"–12'29", 12'30"–13'47", 13'55"–18'20",
18'29"–22'25" according to the composer), and the
development of the material is far from linear. The piece has its
own crippled logic, and is as arresting as one of Prinzhorn's artworks,
but in its use of raw, untreated source material it's also in a sense
some of the most direct music Wehowsky has created to date. Here's
hoping that some of the kids who invest in this to top up their Conrad
and O'Rourke collections will get a kick out of Ralf Wehowsky's music
and start collecting that with equal passion – I'm sure Tony
and Jim would second me on that one – because they'll find there's
as much on offer as in any piece of new music you care to mention.–DW
Gruppo
di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza
Gruppo
di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza
AZIONI
Die Schachtel
 Could
there have been a more appropriate imprint to unearth previously unreleased
documentation of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza's most
important line-up than the superlative Italian label Die Schachtel?
The label is named after one of Gruppo leader Franco Evangelisti's
most powerful pieces, and they've spent much of their time digging
for gold in Italy's underground – for example, their Marino Zuccheri
reissue. Better yet, the Die Schachtel commitment to quality packaging
means Azioni is a joy before you bung the first disc into
the player, a gorgeous cloth-covered box housing two CDs, one DVD
(all in digipak), a poster and a book. The latter includes an essay
from Evangelisti, further commentary by Gruppo members Walter Branchi
and John Heineman, and an excerpt from an extended study by Daniela
Tortora.
For those who have been on the lookout for the Gruppo's music, but
who are unprepared to pay excessive prices for rare LPs, Azioni
comes as manna from heaven. It's a perfect complement to the Ampersand
reissue of Musica Su Schemi and the Editions RZ compilation
of tracks from the outfit's 1960s and 1970s albums. Perhaps some day,
some enterprising label will reissue those titles in full: 1966's
Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, 1967's The
Private Sea of Dreams, the 1969 album issued as part of Deutsche
Grammophon's Avant Garde series, 1970's The Feedback, and
1973's self-titled album. There's also the Dagored reissue of Ennio
Morricone's soundtrack to Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura, in
which you can hear Nuova Consonanza get as close as they ever will
to playing, umm, "funky". (It's an astonishing listen, easily
one of Morricone's best soundtracks.)
Evangelisti formed the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza
in 1964. The line-up was mutable, and at various points featured the
aforementioned Branchi, Heineman and Morricone, alongside Roland Kayn,
Ivan Vandor, Mario Bertoncini, Egisto Macchi, Jerry Rosen, Antonelli
Neri, Giovanni Piazza, Giancarlo Schiaffini, and for a time, Musica
Elettronica Viva founder Frederic Rzewski. There was indeed some overlap
between the aesthetics of Nuova Consonanza and MEV, though one suspects
the fundamental difference lay in MEV's desire to completely reject
their entire history as academically trained composers (to paraphrase
Alvin Curran). The Gruppo, under the guidance of Evangelisti, drew
instead on their dual status as composers and improvisers to enact
a kind of instantaneous composition (but thankfully without the hippie
airhead vibes of, say, the latter-day Damo Suzuki). Significant among
Evangelisti's tactics was his encouraging the Gruppo to practise to
strengthen the group's internal resolve and their ability to think
on a dime. You can hear the results through all of their's recorded
output, and it's central to the works collected on Azioni.
The first CD collects three pieces from the sextet of Bertoncini,
Branchi, Evangelisti, Heineman, Macchi and Morricone. "Kate"
focuses on percussion, sounding out this territory with playing that
can shift on a dime from apposite to opposite, if you will. "Untitled"
feels relatively open-ended, though it reaches a point halfway through
where the piano all but swallows the listener, dropping you into its
guts via spectrum-sweeping extended technique. This is surgical
music, but not in any clinical sense; rather, this is what Evangelisti
calls the "traumatic" (ab)use of traditional instrumentation,
open-heart antics performed on instruments, at times splaying them
across the recording tape. This approach also allows for great intimacy,
as in "Untitled", where breaths whisper through valves while
bowed metals ring out, bringing one of the Gruppo's most suggestive
performances to a close.
With "Es War Einmal", the sextet move between moments of
fragile repose and all-out assault, reaching a high level of density
around nine minutes into the piece. (A similar section appears just
after the twenty-minute mark.) Though those moments are galvanising,
one is drawn more to airier, less programmatically intense passages
on the recording. When the cloud cover clears at the thirteen-minute
mark to unveil bird calls and harmonics scraped queasily from lone
strings, the metaphoric breath of fresh air shifts the music closer
to a European take on the Art Ensemble of Chicago. (This comparison,
coincidentally, also arose while playing sections of Azioni
to Will Guthrie, who immediately latched onto the percussion in "Kate"
as some kind of continental parallel to the AEC.) Towards the end
of "Es War Einmal" brass and strings enter into an acutely
responsive dialogue that could only come from studious, "prepared"-
or, at least, "exercised" - improvisation.
On the second disc, the Gruppo divides into variously populated cells.
The trios and quartets tend to zoom in on one specific area of exploration.
On the two recordings of "Fili", Branchi, Bertoncini, Evangelisti
and Heineman dedicate their energies to a thorough investigation of
the internal workings of the piano. It's slow and ponderous, a product
of deliberate study as opposed to uncharted spontaneity. The Heineman,
Morricone and Vandor trio shoot brief pulsing tones into "Trix
3 (prove concerto '67)", only to scratch its eyes out with lip
smacks, breaths and bruises for trumpet. When the full line-up converges
on "A7" and "A7-2" - this time around, with
Kayn and Vandor in tow (but without Macchi) - they move into
polyglot territory, stretching out even further than the first disc
into extremes of volume and density. Yet it's never too much;
these composer-performers share an ability to load their performances
without cluttering. In other words, this is not your usual scratchy,
desiccated improvisation - not that there is anything inherently
wrong with scratchy, desiccated improvisation, but its regular lapses
into rote disconnection can make for a grinding listen, which is not
something that you could say about the Gruppo's music.
It can, however, be a grind to watch. Azioni's DVD component, a forty-seven
minute documentary by Theo Gallehr titled Nuova Consonanza: Komponisten
improvisieren im Kollektiv, makes for great historical viewing:
finally, a chance to see the outfit in action, rehearsing for a 1967
performance in Rome. Once the sense of discovery starts to fade, you're
left with some staggering music, some less-than-staggering interview
fragments that sometimes verge on self-importance, and one golden
moment where Ivan Vandor drops the mask for an all-too-human plea
for, well, "contact". It's especially hilarious given the
context, and pricks the bubble of experimental music in a slyly charming
fashion. I'm happy I've seen Gallehr's documentary, though I'm not
exactly rushing back to the TV and DVD to watch it again.
In his review of Azioni in The Wire, Byron Coley
ponders what, if anything, separates this work from similar recent
releases in the field, arguing that "it's not easy to hear how
this material is too different from what a similarly outfitted group
of improvisers would do today". Well, that's perhaps the great
victory of Azioni, though I'd make that claim with a caveat
of sorts. While any of this music could be recorded and released
by a gaggle of improvisers in the here and now, I suspect any review
would immediately try to carbon-date the players' listening habits
almost forty years - everything would sound "like the Gruppo".
(Or MEV, or early AMM, or....) Yet another justification for the ongoing
relevance of this music in our schema. Azioni was 2006's
most potent, historically necessary archival issue, and a timely poke
in the eye for those who reduce the history of "composerly"
improvisation to the giants of abbreviation, MEV and AMM.–JD
A.
K. Salim
AFRO-SOUL/DRUM ORGY
Prestige 7379
 An
obscure leader? A title that links African drumming with an orgy and
a cover photo of dancing and drumming tribesmen in loincloths, all
in a red wash? It's hard to know what combination of factors might
keep an important record from reissue these days, but whatever the
cause, A.K. Salim's Afro-Soul/Drum Orgy, recorded on October
8, 1964, and released in 1966, is an exceptionally good record, one that
could stand musically with almost any contemporaneous recordings.
What little I know about A.K. Salim comes from Leonard Feather's New
Encyclopedia of Jazz (1960), Tom Lord's Jazz Discography
and Robert Levin's 1965 liner note to Afro-Soul/Drum Orgy.
Salim is – astonishingly, to my mind – absent from the
nearly 3000 double-column pages of the New Grove Dictionary of
Jazz, 2nd Edition. Even his full name is inconsistent. Feather,
Lord and Levin have it as Ahmad Khatab; AMG-online has it as Ahmad
Kharab. He was born in Chicago on July 28, 1922. One entry in the
Lord discography gives his original name as Albert Atkinson, while
Feather provides A.K. Atkinson. He attended DuSable High School with
Bennie Green and Gene Ammons and by 1939 was playing alto with them
in King Kolax's band. He jammed at Minton's and associated with Lester
Young, Parker, Gillespie and Monk. He stopped playing in 1944 when
his jaw was dislocated, meanwhile arranging for Lucky Millinder and
Count Basie. His best-known tune was "Blee Blop Blues" for
Basie. A period out of music, from 1949 to 1956, is explained by work
in real estate, interests in photography and studies at the Manhattan
School of Music.
In the mid-1950s, he wrote arrangements for Dizzy Gillespie, Woody
Herman, Tito Puente and Machito (this last a fine album called Kenya:
Afro-Cuban Jazz with Cannonball Adderley). Salim's own discography
is very small, including a few sessions on Savoy from the late 1950s
on which his compositions are played by all-star groups that include
Nat Adderley, Phil Woods, Johnny Griffin and Philly Joe Jones (Blues
Suite and Pretty for the People have appeared on CD, as well as a track on the sampler Jazz Is Busting Out All Over;
Flute Suite and the shared Stablemates – half
Salim, half Yusef Lateef – have not). Afro-Soul/Drum Orgy
is the last recording on which his name appears in the Lord Discography.
Though little is known of Salim, he was clearly a visionary,
ready to work with unusual circumstances. Afro-Soul/Drum Orgy
was apparently the idea of producer Ozzie Cadena, who wanted spontaneous
music played over African rhythms. Salim would act as conductor, composer
and arranger in the studio, and I assume he had a great deal to do
with putting the band together, which consists of trumpeter John (usually
"Johnny") Coles, and reed players Pat Patrick and Yusef
Lateef. There are six percussionists in the band, but only Philemon
Hou, playing an African xylophone, was an African, "a Zulu ... working
at the World's Fair." The rest are described as Latins with experience
in Afro-Cuban music, among whom "Julio Callazo knew some African
rhythms and helped to set patterns for the drummers." The backdrop,
then, is Afro-Cuban, a music in which Salim had considerable experience
with Gillespie, et al. Four of the drummers – including Callazo
and Osvaldo Martinez - are playing congas; William Correa is playing
timbales. The result is a pulsing wall of polyrhythms created by musicians
who use the pitches of their congas to create micro-melodies, tonal
shifts that signal rising tensions, and sharp metallic ostinatos from
the xylophone and timbales. The music is extraordinarily improvisatory,
with the introductory figures worked out on the spot and three of
the four tracks completed on a first take. Suddenly, in a world almost
bereft of harmony and dense with time, the three sidemen spark brilliantly.
The opening "Afrika" (conveniently translated as "Africa")
is melody reduced to a moan against the dense drumming, a four-note
figure within a minor third, a half-valved smear from Coles that
launches a stunning solo, some of the freest and most expressive trumpet
work you're ever likely to hear. The theme of "Ngomba Ya Tempo" (Elephant
Dance) is played by Lateef on argol (more usually "arghul").
It's an Egyptian clarinet with two tubes, one a drone, and Lateef
uses it to create sinewy lines with close pitches. Lateef's flute
establishes the mood on "Kumuankia Mzulu" (Salute to a Zulu),
the piece's initial shape deriving from Philemon Hou's xylophone.
"Pepo Za Sarari" (Trade Winds) has the three horns blasting
elemental chords.
I consider Coles, Patrick and Lateef very underrated musicians, but
I would know far less about their abilities and potentials if I had
not heard them here. Coles and Patrick spent their public careers
in the shadows of very powerful identities: the former with Charles
Mingus and, in effect, subbing for Miles Davis with Gil Evans; the
latter anchoring the Sun Ra saxophone section. While Lateef worked
and recorded as a leader, his own groups were often relatively conventional
affairs with a good deal of exotica grafted onto hard bop underpinnings.
He, too, achieved prominence as a sideman, with Cannonball Adderley.
Here they're in a very special situation – not leaders, but
not sidemen either, getting to work out heads on the spot. They're
also formally liberated, playing without recourse to a harmonic framework.
The resultant music is startling, with all three musicians happily
discarding chord changes and just intonation. Coles constructs a whole
musical language out of half-valve slurs and asides and quarter notes.
Patrick, playing alto on two of the tracks, is a scintillating player
with the kind of huge sound that only a dedicated baritonist might
be expected to have. Lateef often concentrates on his tenor's lowest register,
pulling out great elephantine roars and blasts that create walls
of harmonics, further triggering wails and rootless arpeggiating runs.
Each horn plays as if quarter tones and drones were its natural language,
even when the saxophones superimpose some bop runs on the congas'
complex pulsations. Some fine musicians create an essential moment
in which ideas of origin and liberation and collective creation are
questioned and focused. At the same time, it is music that feels polished
and completely realized. For Salim, no doubt a frustrated improviser,
it's an act of the highest creativity. His remark that "The horns
were playing for sounds rather than traditional or conventional
jazz lines… They were really having a conversation," is
an apt description. This is one of the earliest recordings
that might be described as conducted improvisation.–SB
Andrew
Hill
TIME LINES
Blue Note
 There’s
no better indication of Andrew Hill’s perpetually awkward position
within the jazz world than the fact that Time Lines represents the
third (!) time he’s been signed to Blue Note, after his initial
1963-1970 run during the label’s heyday and a brief 1989-90 spell on
its revived incarnation. The disc features his current
working band, with Greg Tardy on tenor sax, clarinet and bass clarinet,
John Hebert on bass and Eric McPherson on drums, and they’re
fully attuned to the obliquities of Hill’s music. Tardy is now
a veteran member of Hill’s ensembles, having been on board since
Dusk (Palmetto, 2000); he’s in especially strong form here,
unafraid to use his solos to push a performance in a sharply different
direction. The album’s most striking presence, though, is the
elusive trumpeter Charles Tolliver, who’s been little heard-from
in recent years but is on excellent form here, his pungent ideas and
full but beautifully weathered tone cutting through on every track.
While the mood of Time Lines is less brooding and dangerous than usual
for Hill, the music is still full of his trademark harmonic and rhythmic
ambiguities. He seems to be experimenting even more than usual with
multiple layers of activity – fast and slow, metrical and ametrical
– which don’t necessarily sync up to a fixed downbeat.
On several tracks it’s hard to decide even what the basic time-signature
is, and the sense of perpetual instability is increased by Hill’s
presenting two pieces, “Ry Round” and “Malachi”
(a tribute to the late Malachi Favors Maghostut) in markedly different
versions: “Ry Round 1”, for instance, is a slow almost-blues
with a fast clickety-click drum pattern, while “Ry Round 2”
is even harder to pin down, leaning towards march rhythms but also
dropping into bizarre cuckoo-clock repetitions. McPherson’s
drumming is strikingly fluid and elided – a potent mix of not-quite
Latin, not-quite free, not-quite swing – and even when Hebert
is elaborating a fixed bass ostinato the repetitions seem curiously
unanchored, less a reference-point than just one more texture. Hill’s
playing is more fragmented than it used to be, more Monk-minimalist;
the effect is sometimes like half-speed, off-balance gospel, sometimes
like ultra-calligraphic gestures where one or two notes are left to
stand for an entire line of melody. Like Monk, he’s a challenging
comper, often dropping out to leave soloists (Tardy in particular)
to their own devices.
I’m probably in the minority among jazz fans and pundits in
not being entirely sold on the two cornerstones of Hill’s current
resurgence: the comeback album Dusk and the belatedly released 1969
session Passing Ships seem to me fascinating but uneven recordings.
Time Lines, though, is a different matter entirely: this is vintage
stuff, a disc that stands comfortably with the best of the pianist’s
back catalogue yet not quite like anything he’s done before.
The one flaw is a slightly wonky recording – drums low in the
mix, the miking of the piano catching some stray noise and pedal-thumps
– but that’s only a minor quibble about one of the best
jazz releases of 2006.–ND
Rudresh
Mahanthappa
CODEBOOK
Pi
 Last
time I reviewed a Mahanthappa disc for PT, I called his pieces "alien,
awkward streams of notes – urgent broadcasts within a narrow
frequency band, more like transmissions than melodies." The metaphor
has now become literal, except the transmissions are now also coded:
the compositional methods used on Codebook involve "adapting
... methods of cryptography to melody and rhythm." (If you want
more details, see this handy article in Wired.
The packaging, in a cute touch, includes a decoding disc and two encrypted
messages, one of which gets you a free album download.) If the disc's
subject-matter is on the surface abstracter than the
meditations on colonial history and postcolonial identity that formed
the background for Black Water and Mother Tongue,
it still has troubling resonance in this age of paranoia, surveillance
and identity-theft; Mahanthappa further points up the link to current
US political life by borrowing Bush's ludicrous self-description as
"The Decider" for the title of one of the disc's most vehement
tracks.
By now Mahanthappa and his regular companion, pianist Vijay
Iyer, have developed a particular pattern for their quartet albums
– solos of boiling intensity that are nonetheless grounded in
tightly worked post-M-Base metric mazes; one or two tracks revisiting
a more traditionally jazz idiom (here it's the Andrew Hill-flavoured
"D (Dee-Dee)"); and a wrap-up track that resolves the accumulated
tension of the rest of the album in a beatific farewell. But the conversation
between Mahanthappa and Iyer has developed with every album: Mahanthappa's
playing works an increasingly complex balance between passion and
disenchantment (a combination that seems very much of this particular
cultural moment), while the pianist seems to get increasingly looser
and more playful, both as soloist and accompanist – listen,
for instance, to his little flickers of chording on "Enhanced
Performance", or the way he constructs entire solos by batting
rhythms back and forth between his hands. With this album, more than
most in this sequence, there's a slightly upside-down feeling to the
whole thing, at least if you're weaned on a traditional jazz feel:
one feels that the music's jittery central pulse is set by the sax
and piano, and that bass and drums (regular bassist François
Moutin and newcomer Dan Weiss on drums) are providing an active but
relatively smooth canvas on which the metrical structure's "hits"
are clearly marked. (Compare, for instance, the fluid, downbeat-blurring
approach to odd metres on Andrew Hill's Time Lines.) Codebook
marks a strong continuation of Mahanthappa's work for the Pi
label; I'm not sure how far down this particular stylistic path he
can go before he'll need to vary the instrumentation or approach,
but it's well worth following him to find out.–ND
The
Reveries
LIVE IN BOLOGNA
Rat-Drifting
 Who
knows exactly when the mass of old pop songs got sorted through and
canonized under the name of the Great American Songbook, otherwise
known by the ugly acronym GAS. Ella Fitzgerald's Songbook series
for Verve in the 1950s is an obvious landmark, and appeared near the
end of the era when the GAS was still open; by the mid-1960s the canon
was more or less set in stone, and jazz's dialogue with popular music
became altogether more fraught and unequal.
Whatever you think of
the GAS as an ideological/artistic concept, it's a body of music that's
still endlessly pleasurable and adaptable for the way it deals so
intensively but literately and articulately with that most unruly
of emotions, love.
The charm of the Reveries – the Toronto-based
trio of Ryan Driver, Eric Chenaux, and Doug Tielli – is the
way they let these classic songs ("Gone with the Wind",
"Mood Indigo", "Close Your Eyes", etc.) unravel
back into love's original sweet emotional inarticulacy. The instrumentation
includes guitars, harmonica, "thumb-reeds" and "quasi-ruler
bass", but their signature device is the "mouth-speaker":
a disassembled cellphone speaker placed inside the mouth-cavity. By
contact-miking their instruments, running the sound through the mouth-speakers,
and manipulating the oral cavity, the Reveries create a feedback loop
where the sounds of one player's instrument may issue (subjected to
buccal wah-wah and guttural distortion) from another's mouth. The
mouth-speakers also have the bonus effect of adding layers of drool
and horrendous speech impediments to the dreamy, lullaby-like vocals
(think early Chet rather than Ella). In an interview with the Toronto
paper Eye, Driver describes their music succinctly: "Basically,
the concept for The Reveries is setting existing love ballads that
would normally be largish productions into a lo-fi, surreal context
through the use of simple ‘exotic' instruments and a tangle
of basic electronics, creating physical complications for ourselves.
... I think we might do this in order to musically accentuate the
inherent vulnerability, mystification and confusion that so often
come with the sorts of sentiments we are dealing with lyrically."
Listening to
Live in Bologna (the trio's second album, following 2003's
Blasé Kisses) often made me think of my hours
as a child spent devising annoying noises to horrify the family (some
kids practised faces in the mirror; I practised sounds); but it also
made me think of the hospital patients in The Singing Detective,
wracked with tremors and disease but breaking into radiant song. The
tracks generally take their sweet time – they don't call themselves
"The Reveries" for nothing – but you wouldn't want
to break this lazy after-hours-on-Mars ambience too suddenly: by the
time each piece has drifted to its conclusion, "You've Changed"
(as one of the tunes puts it). Or everything else has.–ND
Joe
McPhee / Paul Hession
A PARALLAX VIEW
Slam
 Just
when you thought Flaherty and Corsano had the sax'n'drums market cornered,
here comes the mighty McPhee, on tenor and soprano, touring England
back in 2003 with the stupendous (and still to my mind undersung)
percussionist Paul Hession. Oddly enough, Hession tells us in his
brief liner notes that he did in fact play with both McPhee and Paul
Flaherty in Amherst MA back in April 2002. I wonder whether that
was recorded. Fortunately these six improvisations from Liverpool's
Bluecoat and the Leeds Adelphi were, by the aptly named Geoff Clout.
But comparing A Parallax View with one of Flaherty / Corsano's
cow-rending rollercoasters isn't all that useful, in point of fact.
McPhee, though he was making the Black Nation rise when Corsano wasn't
even a twinkle in his daddy's eye, has never gone in for all out vein-bursting
apocalypse à la Brötzmann (to whom, along with
Michael Zerang, the closing "What Can We Do?" is dedicated).
And Hession, while he can build up one hell of a head of steam when
necessary ("Tipping Point"), is at his best playing those
Sunny Murray vibrations, exploring each and every nuance of a small
number of instruments – his snare drum work on "From Eremite
to Termite" recalls Murray's vintage late 60s outings (and that's
a compliment). This is poised and mature work from two master improvisers.
"We will make music in the forest, in the cool, green light of
evening," intones McPhee at the opening of "Blue Coat, Blue
Collar" (shame Hession and Clout couldn't have found a cool,
green photograph to grace the album cover instead of the murky pine
cone (is it?) and nocturnal snapshot of the players standing on what
must have been a pretty draughty waterfront in Newcastle). "When
the studios are silent, vacant relics of the past, we will still be
here." I hope so, Joe, I hope so.–DW
Oluyemi
Thomas / Kenn Thomas / Eugene Wilson IV / Howard Byrdsong
NIGERIA
Not Two
 With
the exception of the Eremite duo with Alan Silva, Transmissions,
I've been somewhat bemused if not underwhelmed by recent appearances
on disc of "the magical mystery man from the West Coast",
as William Parker once memorably described Oluyemi Thomas, but there's
something about this latest outing that keeps me coming back for more.
Put it down to the instrumentation as much as anything: free jazz
albums featuring synthesizers and fretless bass are certainly thin
on the ground, so it's refreshing to hear Kenn Thomas's keyboard work
(even if the synth isn't actually credited on the album itself) and
Eugene Wilson IV's fat, rubbery bass behind Oluyemi's strangely touching
bass clarinet bleats and smears. Fire Music is very much alive and
well these days, it seems – see elsewhere in these pages, and
witness the explosion of interest in cats like Paul Flaherty and the
much trumpeted release on ESP of Frank Wright's Unity (talking
of Alan Silva, I had the man on the phone before Christmas fuming
about that particular release, but we'll leave Bernard Stollman to
field questions of proprietorship..) – so it makes a welcome
change to come across a free jazz album that manages to steer clear
both of post hardbop stylings and all out neural meltdown. And even
if the opening "Nigeria (After Orie & Benjamin)" eventually
moves into the kind of harmonic territory you'd normally associate
with Masada, the way Wilson's bass prowls around the Phrygian undergrowth
is certainly striking. The nine tracks follow on from each other without
a break to form a coherent and satisfying suite of pieces. All are
credited to Oluyemi, though "Life Long Journey" is a solo
piano spot for Kenn (and a curious one too, somewhere between Burrell
and Ravel) and the following "Prayer" finds Wilson bubbling
and gurgling away Pastorius-like to himself. On the closing "The
Other Side Of Self" Oluyemi takes up the musette where the late
great Dewey Redman left off (though it should be added that this was
recorded back in September 2001), sensitively backed by Byrdsong's
deft if discreet cymbal flecks and Wilson's springy bass, while Kenn
once more tries to pull the strands together into some sort of modal
logic, before giving up altogether and heading out into cluster country
just over halfway through. It's an intriguing end to an intriguing
album, and there's nothing more intriguing than the photograph of
a snowcapped mountain peak with pine forests that adorns the inside
of the gatefold. If that's Nigeria, I'm Sonny Rollins.–DW
Patrucco
/ Honsinger / Mengelberg / Baars / Bennink
CIRCUS
ICP
 "Why
is it 95% of albums featuring vocal improvisers are awful?" my co-editor Mr Dorward recently asked in exasperation. "Because 95%
of vocal improvisers are awful," I replied. No personal disrespect
intended to Alessandra Patrucco here – I'm sure she's a lovely
person, and she certainly has a good singing voice, but what she does
here just doesn't work. Perhaps teaming her up with some of the most
idio(syncra)tic figures in the improv world isn't a good idea, either.
Hell, if there's one sound I hate it's the sound of my idols toppling
off their pedestals.. I can't think of another album with Misha Mengelberg
on it that I actively dislike, so I guess that means Circus is
in a class of its own. It all hinges on that most elusive quality
in music, especially improvised music: humour. Mengelberg and Bennink
are pastmasters at it, not only in the schtick of their onstage activities
(Bennink's theatre of the absurd antics, Mengelberg's deadpan hunchback
plunking) but, more importantly, in the music itself, the notes. Mengelberg
is one of the few musicians I can think of – Steve Beresford
is another, and before that you'd probably have to go back as far
as Haydn – whose music can make me laugh out loud. None of that
raw bar room brawl skronky German humour à la Brötzmann
/ Van Hove, or the prima donna tra-la-la nonsense Joëlle Léandre
lapses into all too easily; we're talking subtle, like playing
Round Midnight in a major key. When it's done right
it's magnificent; when it's overdone it's bloody awful. Like any comedy,
really. Patrucco's earnest operatics just don't fit into the quirky,
Monky world that Han and Misha bring to life so well in their duos
and at the heart of the ICP Orchestra. As for the other two participants,
Tristan Honsinger's sense of humour is more like Spike Milligan's:
it's funny / uneasy humour, humour on the edge of insanity. And Baars,
if his latest duo Stof with Ig Henneman is anything to go
by (see below), doesn't have a sense of humour at all. He did on Kinda
Dukish, but I guess it got lost somewhere on the way to the studio
to record this. Shame. In a catalogue that's been so consistently
excellent for over three decades, Circus sticks out like
a sore thumb.–DW
The
Electrics
LIVE AT THE GLENN MILLER CAFE
Ayler
 If
it's live at the Glenn Miller Café, it's on Ayler. Label boss
Jan Ström has his own corner at the bar and he's probably signed
a partial lease on the stairs in the adjacent apartment building where
the sound engineer usually sets up his gear. (There's no room in the
GMC itself, take it from me.) This time it's The Electrics –
Sture Ericson (tenor sax and clarinets), Axel Dörner (trumpet),
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (bass) and Raymond Strid (drums) –
with the long awaited sequel to Chain Of Accidents (in the
strange numbering system Ström uses that was aylCD035, whereas
this new one is aylCD034, even though it was recorded four and a half
years later). It's also the best recording yet to emerge from the
GMC, thanks to some serious mixing by Ericson and Strid which helps
capture the stereo image of the tiny venue better than anything I've
heard from there before. They obviously thought the music was worth
the effort, and they were right. The Electrics is another one of those
groups after my own heart, one that can play free and swing hard and
see no contradiction between the two. Improvised Free Jazz, I called
it elsewhere. It's wonderful to hear Dörner playing crisp and
clear, the Tony Fruscella of new music, instead of gurgling and hissing
(which he also does, and very well too). The interplay between him
and Ericson, especially when the latter takes to the bass clarinet,
recalls the mighty Die Enttauschung (and, standing behind them in
the shadows, the Dolphy / Little Five Spot quintet.. though of course
there's no piano here). Not all the music is at the same high level
– as with any improv, there are peaks and troughs, and the fact
that the musicians consciously choose to work with the more recognisable
vernacular of free jazz means that it's easier to spot the latter
– but when these lads start cooking they're a match for the
chef at the Glenn Miller Café, who's pretty damn good too.
It's a great place to eat as well as catch fine live music. Next time
you're in Stockholm, check it out. Reserve in advance though; you
won't believe how small the place is.–DW
Agustí
Fernandez / Barry Guy / Ramón López
AURORA
Maya
 Think
Agustí Fernandez meets Barry Guy and you're probably thinking
of the kind of deluge of molten lava that characterised the Spanish
pianist's volcanic contribution to Guy's Oort-Entropy back
in 2005, or his spectacular scrap with Mats Gustafsson on Critical
Mass. Add wildcard dynamo percussionist Ramón López
to the mix and you've got all the makings of a Fire Music trio of
epic proportions, right? Yes, well, right, but if you won't get any
of that here. In fact, if this had been recorded by Jan Erik Kongshaug
up in Rainbow Studios in Oslo or by Martin Wieland in Tonstudio Bauer
in Ludwigsburg, it'd be perfectly at home in the ECM catalogue. Indeed,
it makes for an interesting comparison with the 1998 Paul Bley / Gary
Peacock / Paul Motian reunion outing on ECM, Not Two, Not One
(though López's flick / splatter percussion probably has more
in common with the work of Tony Oxley, so perhaps In The Evenings
Out There would be a more sensible choice, even if that was recorded
seven years earlier). Fernandez has penned all the tunes on offer,
with the exception of Guy's "Odyssey" (previously recorded
on the Barry Guy New Orchestra Inscape-Tableaux album), and
they're unashamedly tonal throughout, revealing a side to the pianist's
playing that aficionados of Fire Music are probably unfamiliar with
(though closer listening to the Fernandez discography reveals a strong
current of lyricism, even romanticism – check out Dark night,
and luminous with Marilyn Crispell). And Guy, whose spiky virtuosity
has been a cornerstone of aggressive modernism in both free and contemporary
classical music for nearly 40 years, proves he's just as good at running
up and down the standard scales as Eddie Gomez or Dave Holland. López's
flecks of tabla, brushes and rattles are a good foil to it all: though
he can, when he wants to, ride that cymbal as well as Jon Christensen
(on "Rosalia"), he's really in his element sprinkling tiny
showers of colour and light over the canvas. With a more conventional
drummer like Motian behind the kit it could all too easily sound sentimental,
even maudlin. As it is, it might be a little too pretty for hardcore
free jazzers, but if you're prepared for once to accept that there's
more to life than blowing the other guy (no puns intended) into the
Oort cloud, this is a welcome reminder that music can also be tender,
subtle and unashamedly beautiful.–DW
Duo
Baars-Henneman
STOF
Wig
 Well,
here's proof that Wittgenstein was wrong: yes, there is such a thing
as a private language – or at least one that's a very well-kept
secret between two people. The first names of husband and wife team
of Ab Baars (tenor sax, clarinet, shakuhachi, noh-kan) and Ig Henneman
(viola) suggest characters out of Endgame, and indeed Beckett
might have appreciated this duo, both for the aphasic, waterdrops-wearing-down-a-stone
obsessiveness with which they pick at a note, and for the
bleak, directionless playfulness which takes the place of an actual
sense of humour. The grey mood reflects the circumstances
of the recording, which was made shortly after the death of Henneman's
sister Eiske. The title-track is an elegy for her (she was by trade a clothing
designer – "stof" means both "fabric" and
"dust"), and it's the most absorbing thing on the disc,
especially the closing section where Baars' pure clarinet tugs against
the viola's stoical double-stops. The other tracks are mostly freely
improvised. The duo's tendency to take sketchy materials and subject
them to microtonal scratches and dings is at times like a stony, minimalist
echo of the Maneris, and Baars' shakuhachi on "Giallo di Napoli"
also suggests Cage's rock-garden meditation Ryoanji. But
the music of Cage and the Maneris is far more generous in what it
offers the listener; Stof, by comparison, is often thin and
uncommunicative.–ND
Jöelle
Léandre
AT THE LE MANS JAZZ FESTIVAL
Leo
 This
double CD showcases the full multiplicity of Jöelle Léandre's
talents within a variety of ensemble combinations, everything recorded
between April 26 and May 1, 2005 in Le Mans. Such a varied collection
inevitably presents many climaxes and some minor plateaus; despite
this, the two hours are full of excellent music. The most extraordinary
moments are Léandre's duets with fellow bassist William Parker,
a series of dialogues that twine round like DNA code, raising spiritual
forces through spiky figurations and technical wizardry. On the same
demanding level, the three tracks with violinist India Cooke (check
out their Firedance on Red Toucan) are a gathering of volatile
ideas that nevertheless gain a monumental weight; Léandre's
flavoursome designs work wonders with Cooke's glissandos and elegant
doodads, complemented by her heartfelt vocalizing in "Just now
three". While there's probably no need to explain what kind of
stuff the trio Les Diaboliques plays (except maybe to the person who
spelled Irène Schweizer's surname as "Schweitzer"
all over the CD booklet), here they're nicely represented by two sensitively
theatrical improvisations in which singer Maggie Nicols performs the
main roles in mockingly dramatic style, while Léandre and Schweizer
construct and instantly destroy sets and scenery behind her. Another
trio – with Mark Nauseef and Markus Stockhausen – is less
satisfactory, mostly due to Stockhausen's Miles-inflected muted trumpet,
which – ironically or not, as the liners would have us believe
– at times makes this sound like an outtake from Decoy.
The four segments featuring the quartet of Léandre, Paul Lovens,
Sebi Tramontana and Carlos Zingaro possess heart and a sense of humour,
even if at times the musicians revert to tried and trusted tricks.–MR
Mark
Wastell
AMOUNGST ENGLISH MEN
Absinth
 If
someone asked me what Mark Wastell's "field of research"
was, my answer, after listening to this sober yet intense effort,
would be: "defining the shape of resonance between silences".
Scored for grand piano, tam tam and tubular bell, Amoungst English
Men is the direct consequence of Wastell's Vibra albums
for solo tam tam. It's music that must be played (and listened to)
with Templar concentration, acknowledging its influences – Feldman,
most notably – and achieving the noble result of putting listeners
in a state of almost complete detachment by delivering them from tension,
little by little. The composition is articulated through three "phases";
the first 15 minutes feature barely moving harmonic cascades and looming
phrases, courtesy of Wastell's manipulating the keys in the Steinway's
bottom octave, a reflective exploration of an area of the instrument
prone to timbral deterioration given the conflictual nature of resulting
overtones. Wastell avoids dead spots by leaving the necessary space
for the music to fill our mental mould while he prepares us for the
second and most engrossing section. There, at first, piano and tam
tam play a sort of slowed-down call-and-response game, until the gong
is left alone to fill the room with amorphous halos and caressing
throbs which recall not only Vibra but also "Amann",
the closing track of Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura's magnificent
Between. In the last five minutes or so, a rarefied and almost
imperceptible tolling diminishes the sound weight progressively and
effectively, bringing the piece to a perfect conclusion. Amoungst
English Men confirms Mark Wastell as a truly sensitive musician,
and one who's not afraid to express fundamental truth with minimal
means, carving deep signs in the wood of our essence.–MR
Tammen/
Harth/ Dahlgren/ Rosen
EXPEDITION: LIVE AT THE KNITTING FACTORY
ESP-DISK
 In
many ways the original free jazz label, ESP relaunched itself a couple
of years ago with reissues of its classic recordings. Now the label
has ventured much closer to the present with this 2001 performance.
It would be hard to imagine a contemporary band more appropriate to
the label, for the quartet of "endangered guitar"-ist Hans
Tammen, reed player Alfred 23 Harth, bassist Chris Dahlgren and drummer
Jay Rosen manage to play energy-school free-jazz in a fresh way, something
seldom managed in American jazz these days. It's the result of a wholly
collaborative effort, but it begins with the two Germans, with Harth's
fidelity to the sound and style of Albert Ayler (and Wright, Brötzmann,
et al.) and the extraordinary resource of Tammen's horizontally-played
guitar, with its endless stream of bowed, struck and plucked sounds.
While there's an inevitable temptation to treat this band in terms
of its national origins, Dahlgren and Rosen are more sonically resourceful
(at times sounds are not immediately attributable to Tammen, Dahlgren
or Rosen) than is in any sense typical for American rhythm sections
these days, and the group consistently manage to engage both musical
thought and feeling. There's a lot going on here with traditional
modes of stylistic mimesis. It's definitely not "non-idiomatic"
but pluralistic instead. At one point it sounds like a saxophone imitating
a band imitating passing airplanes; at another a flock of (Messiaen-ic)
birds. "Retained Notions of Speed and Purpose" combines
the pained wobble of the Ayler ballad style with some wonderful, high-pitched
electric violin-like lyricism from Tammen. "From One Place to
Another" has Harth squealing against some chugging machine rhythms
generated by the rest of the band until the saxophonist arrives at
"When the Saints Go Marching In." "A Long Trip by Water"
has well-sustained atmospherics from Tammen that float in between
Harth's intense wail and Rosen's falling-down-the-stairs backbeat,
suggesting a group that's comfortable in several places at once. Tammen
opens "A Place that Has Emotional Significance" with some
swirling pentatonic runs that begin with an almost reed-like sound
and ultimately invoke the continuum of blues and rock guitar pyrotechnics.
In all, it's a fine performance of consistent focus and intensity
from a band that should work together regularly.–SB
The
International Nothing
MAINSTREAM
Ftarri
 By
rights this shouldn't be in the Jazz / Improv section at all (though
to be honest I've long since stopped worrying about where to draw
exact boundary lines), since, as the accompanying press bumph makes
clear, each of the eight tracks on the cheekily-entitled Mainstream
(it isn't) is carefully composed. But the two men behind the project,
Berlin-based clarinettists Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke, are
noted improvisers, and Ftarri is an offshoot of the Improvised Music
from Japan label, so you'll stand a better chance of finding a copy
of this by looking in the Improv bin than in Contemporary Classical.
The name they've chosen for their group is either depressing or ironic,
or both – a sly comment on the music's wilfully obscure niche
market or a nod to the network of lowercasers strategically positioned
around the globe (Berlin Reductionism + Tokyo Onkyo + New London Silence
= International Nothing?)? – but the music isn't. It's a vibrant
(in several senses of the word) if at times deadpan exploration of
the tonal combinations and combination tones of two clarinets, and
it's refreshingly free from the plink plink fizz of extended technique
fluster and bluster. Just tune your instruments carefully, hit those
pitches dead on, and leave your listeners to thrill to the acoustic
beats. Personal fave tracks: "wenn alles wehtut und nichts mehr
geht" and "feathered machine song". Talking of songs,
the album actually contains two: On "and the morning", Berlin's
answer to Karen Dalton (without the dental problems), Margareth Kammerer,
adds vocals and guitar, and Christof Kurzmann provides the odd nightmarish
berceuse "hauntissimo" that closes the album. Neither are
ever going to make it into the Top 40, so don't be fooled by that
album title, but they do stick in the mind, almost annoyingly so.
On "lovetone" – now there's a Top 40 title
for you – the clarinettists are joined by bassists Derek Shirley
and Christian Weber for a grisly Polwechsel-meets-Scelsi workout.
Great stuff. All I need to know now is why the cover is adorned with
a rhinoceros, a hippopotamus, a walrus and an armadillo.–DW
Jay
Crocker / Chris Dadge
HUMMING & CRACKLING
Bug Incision
 The
titles say it all, really. Both the name of the album, which describes
quite well a lot of the sounds Messrs Crocker (banjo, preparations,
percussion) and Dadge (percussion) make here, and the label name,
with its attendant associations of insect music and laboratory experiment.
Bug Incision is a CDR label run out of Calgary, Canada, which if I
remember rightly is where Eugene Chadbourne fled to to avoid the draft.
He must have left some kind of lasting impression there, as Crocker's
banjo work (inevitably?) recalls some of the good Doctor Chadbourne's
thornier outings. But there's more percussion than banjo on offer
here, and the musicians' concern for small sounds brings mid-70s John
Stevens and the SME to mind – which means I'm definitely not
following Brooker Buckinham's instructions in the liner notes: "Zen
mind. Forget everything you know about music. Forget every piece of
music you've ever heard." But then again neither is he, when
he describes it all as "skeletal jazz phantoms from an alternate
universe – one where a bizarro Derek Bailey get [sic] drunk
on moonshine in the Appalachians and curses the mountains through
brittle invectives voiced on a beat-up banjo." That sums it up
nicely.–DW
Mike
Pride's Scene Fucker
THE ENSEMBLE IS AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE
Public Eyesore
 Back
in November last year I got a huge package of discs from "Omaha's
most unknown label", Bryan Day's wonderfully active and often
ignored Public Eyesore, which first came to my attention a while back
when I was asked to write liners for Jack Wright and Bob Marsh's Birds
in the Hand. I haven't heard much from PE – that's Public
Eyesore, btw, not Public Enemy (though come to think of it I haven't
heard much from them lately either) – for a while, so forgive
me if some of the releases I'm nattering on about here aren't exactly
new. This one for example was recorded way back in February 2003 and
appeared a couple of years after that. It's one of an ongoing series
of releases by the ahem attractively named Scene Fucker project, which
is basically percussionist Mike Pride and anyone he can get his hands
on. Very much Improvisation, as opposed to Improvised Music (if you
read what I wrote on the subject in last month's Wire): we're
talking a gnarly no-holds-barred snarling mess of moments, some inspired,
some less so, but all constantly entertaining. Like life, really.
Joining Pride, who plays percussion, glockenspiel (though as the glockenspiel
is a percussion instrument to start with you wonder why it merits
a separate mention), electronics and microcassette, are Gerald Menke
on pedal steel, Jessica Pavone on viola, Brian Moran on electronics
and Aaron Ali Shaikh on soprano and alto saxophones. At times lyrical
(Pavone sounds great, and so does Menke – imagine Bill Frisell
playing Scelsi), at times gritty and combative (Pride is especially
good at throwing spanners in the works – he even gets stuck
in a kind of drum'n'bass groove at one point, to the apparent indifference
of everyone else involved), it's a fine example of what American improvisers
do best: get down, get dirty, take risks, go for it.–DW
Yagihashi
Tsukasa / Sato Yukie / Higo Hiroshi
KUMISURU
Jabrec Art Music
 This
is another one that Bryan Day slipped into his care package, though
it's not on his label (if you want a Public Eyesore release featuring
Yagihashi Tsukasa, try Automatic, but it's not as much fun
as this). Tsukasa plays alto sax here, accompanied by Sato Yukie on
electric guitar and "electro goods" (that sounds intriguing)
and Higo Hiroshi (of Friction fame) on electric bass and "electro"
(more electric goods, I imagine, though it's hard to tell). Phil Zampino
over at Squid's Ear wasn't all that smitten, but from where I'm sitting
this is an unusually fresh, unpretentious kind of improv, open and
spacious, catholic in its tastes – yep, there's even a melody
or two in there – and very satisfying to listen to. It's kind
of like a cross between Acid Mothers Temple and early Incus, and if
that doesn't whet your appetite I don't know what will. The three
musicians manage to kick up quite a head of steam when they want to,
but they're just as good at opening up the window and letting it all
drift outside. Good stuff. Electro good, even.–DW
Monotract
LIVE IN JAPAN
Public Eyesore
 Strictly
speaking this isn't just a Public Eyesore outing, since seems to have
been co-released by Imvated, Carbon, Gold Soundz, Humbug, Audiobot,
and Breaking World as well (now that's what I call co-production),
but I hope they have the same groovy psychedelic pink'n'orange hand-folded
packaging as this one. Monotract is the trio of Carlos Giffoni, Nancy
Garcia and Roger Rimada (originally from Florida, now New York based,
I think), who specialise in a kind of lo-fi anarchic post-punk free
improvised Industrial No Wave disco techno, the sort of gleefully
colourful what-the-fuckery that will either have you wringing your
hands in despair for the Future of Music (what future?) or
jumping for joy at the continued creativity of the scene (which
scene? well, take your pick). Divine artlessness has long been the
hallmark of great alt.rock anyway, so it should come as no surprise
that this lot were taken under Thurston Moore's wing for All Tomorrow's
Parties' Nightmare Before Christmas. Free souvenir Butlins beermat
for any of you who can sing along with the cover of Throbbing Gristle's
"United." Yikes.–DW
Iconoclast
THE BODY NEVER LIES
Fang Records
 Since
1990 Iconoclast NYC has consisted of saxophonist/vocalist Julie Joslyn
(who uses pedals and live electronics), and drummer/keyboardist Leo
Ciesa; both musicians also play on homemade instruments such as plastic
tubes and copper pipes. Listening to their most recent recordings,
I can't help thinking that they've lately been going in circles. The
music is heavily folk-inspired, linear and massive, building a whole
tune from a single phrase; it tends towards a naïve lyricism,
something like chamber prog with some free-jazz elements. I sympathize
with their yearnings toward transcendence, but the group's expressive
elegies played on top of straight marches instead bring to mind the
Seven Dwarfs singing "Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho". Ciesa's solid
drumming serves as a strong basis for Joslyn's kaleidoscopic contributions,
but her saxophone improvising is tame compared to her anarchic vocals
– it's like Frank Lowe tripping on LSD versus Diamanda Galas.
There are interesting moments, of course, such as the Kimmo Pohjonen-style
psychedelic-accordion echoes from Joslyn's electrified saxophone on
"Corrective Jerk". But in general the music is rather predictable
– bit like No Wave for moshers. –VJ
Peter
Zummo
ZUMMO WITH AN X
New World
 A
few years ago, Arthur Russell albums were rare as rocking horse shit,
but, thanks in no small part to the good people at Audika, there's
a lot of good stuff available once again, and I see from the Audika
website that no fewer than four new Russell projects are scheduled
for release this year – not surprising perhaps since he left
a huge archive of unreleased recordings behind him when he fell victim
to AIDS in 1992. One of the cellist's most frequent playing partners
was trombonist / composer Peter Zummo, whose velvety tones have graced
the discographies of David Behrman (My Dear Siegfried), Peter
Gordon (Brooklyn) and Guy De Bièvre (Bending the
Tonic, twice) and can be heard throughout Russell's Calling
Out Of Context and First Thought Best Thought. Similarly,
Russell's distinctive, gossamer-light yet strong-as-steel-wire cello
playing and impeccably pitched, understated vocals are essential elements
of Zummo With An X. So all you Arthur Russell fans out there
take note. Originally released on Loris Records (exactly when I'm
not sure – haven't been able to Google up much on this mysterious
label – but let's say mid 1980s), Zummo With An X contains
music written for Trisha Brown's 1985 ballet Lateral Pass and
a 1980 work entitled Instruments. This latter is a seven-movement
work for trombone, cello (Zummo and Russell), trumpet (Rik Albani)
and marimba (Bill Ruyle), and is described so well on the New World
website I can do no better than quote their text: "short phrases
based on intervallic jumps are repeated at individual repetition rates;
the ensemble listens for a unison playing of the phrase, and reverses
the phrase at that moment. Different notes sound together in unplanned
ways, resulting in combination (bass) tones." The piece, Zummo
notes, was recorded "in a Soho loft with a full-track Nagra tape
recorder and, in 'classic' monophonic recording style, used only one
microphone, a Sennheiser 42." In keeping with his desire to get
away from a "militaristic" sort of minimalism, Zummo also
left the loft windows open, so the low rumble of distant traffic is
as much part of the listening experience as the conceptually rigorous
yet remarkably supple exploration of intervals (one for each movement).
Perhaps those combination tones could have been captured better in
a pristine studio recording, but that obviously wasn't the composer's
intention.
Lateral Pass, Zummo comments, is "curiously like a four-movement
symphony", though it's not scored for conventional symphony orchestra.
Joining Zummo and Russell is Ruyle (tabla, marimba) once more, along
with Guy Klucevsek on accordion and Mustafa Ahmed on additional percussion.
Sci-Fi is a haunting work that owes as much to Russell's
distinctive vocals as it does to Zummo's delicate muted smears. The
final movement, Song IV, is the most substantial, and appears
on the CD reissue in two versions, one for trio (Ruyle, Russell and
Zummo) and one, previously unissued, for the quintet. It's a remarkably
simple yet compelling investigation of a four-note descending scale,
propelled gently yet decisively forward by Ruyle's tablas, and featuring
some exquisite work from all involved. Not sure I'd entirely agree
with the Audika people and call it a "sublime masterwork",
but it's certainly very fine and highly recommended.–DW
Tom
Johnson
SYMMETRIES
Karnatic Lab
 If,
for Steve Reich, "performing and listening to a gradual musical
process resembles [..] placing your feet in the sand by the ocean's
edge and watching, feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury
them", the pleasure one derives from the ascetic minimalism that
Tom Johnson has concentrated his attention on for the past quarter
of a century is more like getting your kicks out of looking at a set
of log tables. Though to be honest, comparing Reich and Johnson isn't
all that fair (as Johnson would be the first to point out), for several
reasons, most notably because Reich's musical processes take time
to unfold (and when he abandoned the strict process aesthetic in the
early 1980s his music subsequently sacrificed structure for surface
and lost all interest), whereas Johnson is a master of the miniature,
the tiny mathematically elegant aphorism. Indeed, when he tackles
the large scale form, as in the notorious Chord Catalogue,
the results are far less appealing. But I wonder if some of the 49
tracks that make up Symmetries couldn't have been longer
– only four of them go beyond the one minute mark – or
at least slower.
In 1980 Johnson started work on a series of symmetrical drawings using
Stephen Dydo's music typewriter, which were eventually published in
1981 by 218 Press (the scores of all 49 pieces are included in the
fold-out liners here, though you might want to get hold of a magnifying
glass before you start investigating them in detail). What started
out as a kind of "conceptual music" was subsequently arranged
for two pianos and performed with Philip Corner. Even if you're not
familiar with Johnson's work, it won't take more than one glance at
the scores and about ten seconds of listening time to figure out what's
going on. Needless to say, each of the 49 pieces is strictly symmetrical,
which means that the joy of discovering something new is immediately
tempered by the knowledge that it's not going to go anywhere other
than back to where it started from. Hold up a mirror to your nose
and see what you'd look like if your face was totally symmetrical:
pretty strange, if not downright disturbing, right? What I like in
people's faces, not to mention art, is the irregularity, the irrationality.
Symmetry is cool – in several senses of the word – but
I prefer mine crippled, as Morton Feldman would say. Sometimes it's
fun, especially when the composer gets away from the rather tedious
stacked regular intervals – octaves, sevenths, fifths and fourths
figure prominently – that characterise much of his work; alternating
thirds and seconds leads to richer harmony, and not surprisingly several
tracks seem to hark back to the pitch universe of Bartók (19)
and Stravinsky (10). Adding adjacent semitones to stacked
perfect fourths (39) recalls Lutoslawski's Funeral Music
(not to mention several pieces by Christopher Rouse), and the alternating
tone / semitone configurations of 30 inevitably sound like
Messiaen. But the regular rhythmic plodding quickly becomes tiresome,
and the implacable symmetry soon removes what little magic there might
be, even in the elusive Webernian closing track. And maybe that's
the point; Johnson would, after all, probably be the first to claim
there's no mystery to what he does – but some of his other recent
pieces, especially those in which the mathematical processes are accompanied
by spoken text, reveal a wry, dry sense of humour that wouldn't go
amiss here.–DW
Natasha
Anderson
SPORE
Cajid
 Remember
when you were a kid and you had to play the recorder? Not the tape
recorder, dummy, the musical instrument. I'll bet your junior
school Christmas carol concert never sounded like this. Natasha
Anderson heads for the outer reaches of the recorder universe, concentrating
her attention on the F contrabass and tenor recorders and the Garklein-Flötlein
("being only 6 inches long in total with only 3 inches covering
all 7 holes, small fingers are essential!" it says at www.hants.gov.uk/hrs/range/garklein.html),
plus a few odd middle joints and Max / MSP to mix the ingredients
into the tastiest dish of recorder music since Berio's Gesti.
Of course, there are the usual toilet splatters here and there –
you might want to wait until your breakfast is well and truly digested
before trying out "Revenge On The Head", and if you have
recurring nightmares about killer bees the title track could be a
bracing experience too – but Anderson's impeccable ear and sense
of timing makes this Cajid's most exciting and convincing release
to date, from the dizzy microtonal heights of "7/11" to
the gloomy caverns of "Leach". Check it out.–DW
Giacinto
Scelsi
THE ORCHESTRAL WORKS 2
Mode
 Mode's
Scelsi series reaches Volume 6 with three recordings made live at
the Wien Modern festival in November 2005, featuring the Vienna Radio
Symphony Orchestra, Concentus Vocalis and Wiener Kammerchor conducted
by Peter Rundel and Johannes Kalitzke. Scelsi junkies will probably
already have their copy by now, as the disc features the world premiere
recording of the epic cantata for chorus and orchestra La nascita
del Verbo, which was written between 1946 and 1948 and first
performed a year later at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
in Paris (where, you will recall, Stravinsky's Sacre provoked
a legendary riot at its premiere) conducted by Roger Desormière.
It's an impressively weighty piece, the composition of which apparently
plunged the composer into a period of creative crisis, but one whose
orchestration and material – there's even a fully-fledged double
fugue – looks back to the sprawling early 20th century choral
works instead of forward into the brave new world of microtonality
and "spherical sound" that the composer subsequently explored.
The quintessential Scelsi orchestral masterpiece, Quattro Pezzi
(su una nota solo), which dates from barely a decade later, is
in another galaxy altogether. This remarkable work still sounds amazing
nearly fifty years after it was written, and its exploration of microtonal
and timbral nuances paved the way for Grisey, Murail and Radulescu
(and I don't agree with Jean-Noël van der Weid that musique
spectrale is an inept name for their music) and is one of late
20th century music's greatest treasures. I'm not sure the work has
ever been recorded as well as it deserves to be – I don't know
how many mics the Viennese techies had at their disposal but some
of the myriad nuances sound a little far back in the mix – but
Peter Rundel's reading of the piece is certainly as sensitive to detail
as the other available recording of the work in my collection, conducted
by Jurg Wyttenbach, which featured the orchestra and chorus of Polish
Radio in Cracow. Without wishing to cast aspersions on them and the
Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra on this new recording, it'd be great
if one day the work could be recorded by a truly major league outfit
with a huge budget – and no audience: sorry to come across all
Keith Jarrett-like, but the coughs and splutters, not that there are
many of them, are somewhat distracting. As Joëlle Léandre
(quoted by van der Weid in his liners) rightly states, your perception
becomes so intense when performing and listening to Scelsi's music
that you actually become sound itself, as it were, and the bronchial
spasms of the Viennese concertgoers do tend to break the spell a bit.
Still, I'm not complaining. Especially since the disc also includes
Uaxuctum (1966), subtitled The Legend of the Mayan City which
they themselves destroyed for religious reasons, another monsterpiece
for ondes Martenot, seven percussionists, timpani and 23-piece ensemble.
In terms of both its scoring (chorus, ondes Martenot) and Mayan inspiration
it makes for an interesting comparison with Varèse's 1934 Ecuatorial
– was Scelsi familiar with the earlier work? van der Weid makes
no mention of the piece in his essay – but where Varèse's
setting of the Popul Vuh was taut and wiry, Scelsi is grim
and dramatic, all sinister pedal points and rolling timpani thunder.
Oddly enough, it seems to have dated a little more than the Quatro
Pezzi, and though its harmonic language is far removed from the
world of La nascita del Verbo, it shares with the earlier
work a strong sense of theatricality ("horror movie music!"
my eight-year-old described it, enthusiastically). Since Scelsi's
oeuvre was taken up enthusiastically by a younger generation of self-proclaimed
tone scientists it's been all too easy to overlook its raw gut power.
This fine disc serves as a timely reminder how overwhelmingly emotional
his music is. Here's to Volume 7.–DW
Rosy
Parlane
JESSAMINE
Touch
 He
is mostly unsung and not overly prolific – his previous Iris
dates from 2004 – but Rosy Parlane is one of the kingpins of
slowly uncoiling, constantly changing drone music whose purposefulness
is directly proportional to its smothering beauty. Divided into three
movements, Jessamine was composed between 2004 and 2006,
and features important contributions on the guitar front from Tetuzi
Akiyama, Lasse Marhaug, Anthony Guerra, Michael Morley, Donald McPherson,
Matthew Hyland, David Mitchell, Stefan Neville and Campbell Kneale.
In addition, Marcel Bear designed and built "amplified sawblade"
and "shimsaws" (and also plays the latter in the first section).
Parlane recorded the tracks using a plethora of electric and acoustic
instruments, bowed metals, radio, computer and field recordings, masterfully
assembling and layering his sounds to create textures that range from
organic to post-nuclear. After the leaden quasi-consonant sky evoked
by the dirty electric mantra that is "Part One", listening
to "Part Two" made me think of a fenced-off radioactive
area attacked by sonorous weapons of destruction which we're forced
to watch in awe. Especially here and in the third movement, whose
apex is a monstrous, hypnotizing wall of distorted guitars, Parlane
shows his ability to create mind-numbing atmospheres without resorting
to fancy tricks; a consistent framing "tonality" is established,
but it's what happens inside the frames that counts –
and that includes extraneous noise, electrostatics, subtle deviations.
Overall, the album's most alluring feature is its sense of imminence,
of waiting for an event that might or might not happen. During this
uneasy anticipation of what's still to come, various paths to possible
harmonic wholeness are glimpsed; the onus of foreseeing and understanding
the right ones falls on us. It took more than two years, but Jessamine
was well worth the wait.–MR
Marc
Behrens / Paulo Raposo
HADES
and/OAR
 Marc
Behrens and Paulo Raposo have been running the Sirr label together
since 2001, but this collaborative release appears on the increasingly
wonderful and/OAR imprint, which is going from strength to strength
these days. After some early cassette only releases, Behrens' first
CD Advanced Environmental Control appeared on Bernhard Günter's
trente oiseaux label in 1995, but, as is also the case with Francisco
López, it's a mistake to associate him exclusively with the
quieter end of abstract electronic music. Hades in fact is
quite noisy, especially 34 seconds into the opening track, "Gate",
a clattering, squeaking assemblage of sounds recorded on Portuguese
ferryboats, but it eventually settles into more familiar territory:
low rumbling drones and ghostly wails, accompanied by meticulously
transformed natural sounds (footsteps, doors slamming, distant voices,
and waves breaking). Hades, as Wikipedia will tell you (hey, if Wiki's
good enough for Phil Freeman it's good enough for me –
'scuse me if I haven't got time to re-read The Odyssey),
was "the gloomy abode of the dead, where almost all mortals go.
There is no reward or special punishment in this Hades, akin to the
Hebrew sheol. In later Greek philosophy appeared the idea
that all the dead are judged after death and rewarded or punished.
In this view, Hades was the destiny of those who were not particularly
good or bad." Indeed; if you were good you ended up in the Elysian
Fields (not my idea of fun, the Champs-Elysées, I can tell
you), if you were bad it was off to Tartarus and if they couldn't
make up their mind what to do with you you went to Asphodel. That
probably explains why DJ Spooky ended up there. Anyway, whether the
south bank of the River Tagus is Lisboan Paulo Raposo's idea of "the
gloomy abode of the dead" or not is open to question (it looks
a far nicer place to hang out than certain parts of Manchester I know),
but if it's as beautiful as the music on this album I'll take my place
in the queue to cross the Acheron right now. I'm waiting for the
silent boatman / To ferry me across the unknown waters. Oops,
wrong album.–DW
John
Duncan
FIRST RECORDINGS 1978-1985
Vinyl On Demand (3LP + DVD)
JOHN
DUNCAN - WORKS 1975-2005
Errant Bodies/Ground Fault (Book + CD)
 The
growing interest in John Duncan's work as a composer, performer and
conceptual artist shows that even normal folk, if subjected to the
right suggestions and stimuli, are able to recognize real talent,
independently from their religious, sociopolitical and personal convictions.
Duncan, for many years only championed by discerning fellow artists
and independent-minded writers, has by now reached an iconic status
which time will only help to enhance, as the man from Wichita remains
a cutting-edge explorer who always manages to stick a salt finger
in the wounds of truth. First Recordings 1978-1985 is a gorgeous
3-LP box set, a spartan black-and-grey artifact containing music originally
released on low-budget and even lower-circulation cassettes and vinyls.
It's a fascinating view of several back-pages in Duncan's book, which
will bring back memories of youth for those who have been following
him since the early days, when Viennese Aktionism and noise-boosted
sonic terrorism were major elements in his work. Yet the most striking
track on offer is "No", a Reichian (Wilhelm, not Steve)
performance based on therapeutic anti-aggression hyperventilation
exercises that took place in Los Angeles' KPFK station's open stage
studio in 1978. Duncan's breathing starts normally, then becomes more
and more violent until his gasps morph into desperate cries for help,
as if he were being subjected to torture; snippets of pre-recorded
sentences complement the whole. It's an intensely disturbing, distressing
piece. The rest is equally compelling: "Dark Market Broadcast"
is based on masses of shortwaves and unrecognizable utterances, transmitted
by Duncan via pirate FM radio in 1985 when he lived in Tokyo, while
"Station Event" is a recording of Tom Recchion and Michael
LeDonne-Bhennet improvising live on KPFK on percussion and woodwinds
while Duncan handles listeners' phone calls, putting their comments
and rants on the air. The set also contains a DVD with two early videos,
whose content could be stomach-churning for many; let's just say that
you should keep the thing away from curious kids, if you have any.
 The
Errant Bodies book is a handy document of the many facets of John
Duncan's art. Like the box set, it's pretty serious-looking –
all black and white – with a lot of photos, graphics, drawings
and explanations/instructions for most of the events that Duncan has
devised, including the infamous "Blind Date", which for
many years sentenced him to exclusion from the Los Angeles avant-garde
scene and ruined his private life (read – or surf the Internet
– if you don't know what we're talking about). The book also
features eight different essays about Duncan. Aside from one or two
misfires, these provide useful and incisive analyses of his work in
relation to its cultural and social context (Giuliana Stefani's account
of "Blind Date" is just perfect). The accompanying CD contains
five compositions dating from 1980 to 2003, which is a good refresher
course even for dedicated Duncan-followers: rediscovering the shortwaves
and field recordings of Crucible (Die Stadt) is nice enough,
but listening after many years to 1984's fabulous Riot (AQM)
made me realize that many of today's noise gods – from Merzbow
to Marhaug to Wiese – owe Duncan a bottle of wine or three.–MR
Asher
LANDSCAPE ELSEWHERE
Conv
 Asher’s
procedures have ebbed and flowed over the years, but most recently
they have come to focus on using repetition and minimal sonic development.
These works require listeners to make their own journey – to
lose themselves within his soundscapes. On Landscape Elsewhere’s
four selections, gently understated tones roll freely across beds
of crackling textures and low-voltage electronics. The combination
of these two passive elements requires us to rethink how we engage
with music: at one extreme, we can try for an absolute focus; at the
other, we can permit the attention to swing back and forth between
surrounding sound interruptions (like the cars outside my window and
the child doing the dishes as I write this now) and the recorded compositions
themselves. Records that encourage both kinds of listening are increasingly
rare these days, and perhaps making such a document is a more complicated
process given the chaotic day-to-day uses (and abuses) of our ears.
Asher offers us a hand into his tempered environment, but never forces
or pressures the listener – it’s a welcome experience,
free from expectation but rich in sonic yield.–LE
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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