Musicora,
the annual Parisian music industry showcase and cultural exhibition,
used to be something of a European event, attracting professionals
and public from neighboring countries, and offering vast opportunities
for networking and discovery. Now it has deteriorated into a commercial
lowest-common-denominator (grand public, as the French so
delightfully put it) fun fair, one that makes the professionals nervous
and fidgety. Contemporary music, which used to take advantage of the
gigantic audience (thousands of people attend every year) has virtually
disappeared from sight, probably because the booths cost more and
more, and the audience has been correspondingly dumbed down. Le
Living, a cheerful collective of new-music groups run by the
Ms. Ondine Garcia, was the one faint hope at Musicora for those of
us who believe that French music did not stop with Debussy. Le
Living’s goal is to unite France’s diverse small
new music groups, initiatives, competitions, magazines, etc. And they
are doing an admirable job. But I wish they had more support. Grassroots
initiatives like this can be a lot more effective than the government-run,
state-sponsored, bureaucratic institutions, which still dominate French
culture.
Indeed, during the weekend, the liberal Libération
newspaper ran an article attacking the centralized nature of French
culture (easy target), and revealing that most cultural leaders are
really bureaucrats, in it for power rather than artistic reasons (wow).
Of course this is not news. It’s a big problem in France, and
one that is slowly strangling the country’s creativity. But
the article went on to present the "American Culture System"
as the solution. The what?! At least there is still money
for the arts circulating in Europe, even though the days of Jack Lang
and his largesse are long gone. But please don’t start holding
up America as a model of cultural enlightenment! The American cultural
system is one of government neglect, corporate dictates, and conservative
meddling. Cities like New York host a hell of a lot of creativity,
but that is not due to some cultural policy – it’s more
a matter of sheer numbers, enthusiastic but over-extended private
foundations, money from Wall Street, the glorious potential of the
melting pot, yankee ingenuity, and the mind-numbing state of the arts
in the rest of the country which pushes the most creative artists
to flee to the big city. Paris will never be New York. And New York
will never be Paris. Meanwhile, France actually has made big progress
in recent years decentralizing their cultural institutions, and they
should keep doing so. Maintaining the desired level of cultural supremacy
is not an easy task. It was hard for the Esterhazys and it’s
hard for the French.
Meanwhile, in the Baroque heaven of the instruments hall at Musicora,
lost among the violin makers, bow rehairers, mother-of-pearl carvers,
and other fine craftsmen, arched over their precious woods, I stumbled
on one of the Baschet instruments. The Baschet brothers' beautiful
high-tech conceptions are on display at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, but they're equally famous for their low-tech pedagogical
instruments, which are still used by schoolchildren all over France,
with their delightful if somewhat limited musical possibilities. But
the elaborate instruments such as the enthrallingly sensual one I
played that day are far too delicate and complex to use, not to mention
difficult to build. The crystal keys of this contraption are stroked
with wet fingers to produce a vibration which is picked up by a calibrated
steel weight, and transmitted through metal rods out to shiny spaceship-type
wings which act as amplifiers. It’s entirely analog, and has
(nifty!) no moving parts. Like a Theremin, the effect is eerie and
breathtaking, but in the hands of the wrong person, excruciatingly
cloying. Many eccentric instruments attract players who are so delighted
with the initial sounds of the instrument that they never investigate
further, which results in superficial music, transcriptions of pieces
for other instruments, and showpieces that are about as exciting as
the phone book (in the hands of John Cage, the phonebook was pretty
darned exciting, but that’s another story..). The French government
should create a multi-million Euro center for these kinds of groundbreaking
instruments so we can really discover their full potential. Wait,
on second thought, let’s put that center in New York. I hear
Nike is looking for new sponsorship opps..—GL
Apologies
first and foremost to my good pal Brian Olewnick for not officially
welcoming him on board the good ship PT last month, with his splendid
Robert Ashley review. Hope we'll see more of you in the future, Brian
(though I know somebody has to hold the fort over at Bagatellen).
A warm welcome back this month to Bob Gilmore, who contributes a fine
interview with Phill Niblock
(and in case you were wondering what happened to the regular flow
of PT interviews, fear not – there are three more in the pipeline).
And of course thanks to all our regular contributors and to the folks
who've sent stuff in for review from all corners of the globe. How
about that for a dumb cliché.. since when did a globe have
corners? Never mind, back to the matter in hand: thanks also
to The Wire magazine for allowing me to run the Misha Mengelberg
concert review in last month's PT. As it didn't appear in the March
Wire I assumed it wouldn't make it to the April issue, but
I see it has. Still, to quote another dumb cliché, you
read it here first. Bonne lecture.-DW
Radu
Malfatti
HOFFINGERQUARTETT / ZEITSCHATTEN / FRIEDRICHSHOFQUARTETT
DÜSSELDORF OKTETT / THREE BACKGROUNDS / HOFFINGER NONETT
WECHSELJAHRE EINER HYÄNE / DA PELZIGE M / NONOSTANTE II
RAUM – ZEIT I / RAIN SPEAK SOFT TREE LISTENS / NONOSTANTE
III
b-boim
 After
an initial cursory listen, it seemed easy to compare discovering this
cluster of new Radu Malfatti releases to wandering into a room full
of Barnett Newman's mid period paintings. Many of these discs feature
sparse, emotionless music made up of single lines of sound separated
by large expanses of silence. Yet whilst around half of these twelve
limited edition self-released recordings are similar in compositional
structure, close repeated listening reveals a continual development
across the past ten years, and a rich, detailed understanding of the
thorny relationship between sound, silence and the grey areas in between.
For a listener, approaching a dozen discs of Malfatti's compositions
is a daunting prospect. The veteran Austrian trombonist's outings
as an improviser are somehow easier to come to terms with than the
rigid austerity of these new CDRs. The former can be approached and
assessed in terms of the human emotional qualities associated with
the brief history of improvised music, but there is less to relate
the latter to. The late works of Cage, Feldman and Nono point some
of the way towards Malfatti's work, but any further comparison falls
short. Radu Malfatti has got to where he is after nearly forty years
of musical investigation – and he hasn't stopped moving.
The
first four b-boims are typically unforgiving. hoffingerquartett
(2005) is scored for string quartet, but is presented on this
disc in an "electronic realisation" by Malfatti himself,
in which samples of each instrument are painstakingly sequenced by
computer to create a virtual quartet. The score of the piece consists
of a list of precise timings that exist as windows within the digital
silence into which Malfatti places his sounds, dry layers of bowed
wood that sound more like a passing underground train than any traditional
string quartet. The timings seem to be based on a simple mathematical
structure whereby the durations of the sounds and the silences between
them are defined by the score to form recognisable patterns. The cold
harshness of the sound itself is amplified by the clinical manner
in which it begins and ends.
2004's zeitschatten for clarinet and cello is also heard
in an electronic realisation made two years later, but 2005's friedrichschofquartett
features the instruments it was written for – flute, clarinet,
trombone and contrabass recorder – played by Malfatti's colleagues
from the Wandelweiser Group,
Antoine Beuger, Jürg Frey and Eva Reiter. Even so a degree of
post-production remains evident in the recording as the silences in
the music are inserted digitally, depriving the recording of any Cageian
room noise and creating a confusing, unnatural feel to the piece that
further challenges the listener's ideas of what music is and how it
should sound. The score calls for subtle changes in the individual
sounding events, but these remain barely noticeable as the extended
silences cause the mind to re-evaluate its memory of the preceding
events. Appropriately, several of the b-boim discs come with brief
koan-like quotations from Malfatti's old friend Francis Brown. "If
no sound is being created, can the memory of previous sound be interrupted?"
"How many dimensions does sound have?" "Does the mind
stop listening between sounds?"
b-boim
004, 2006's düsseldorf oktett, returns to the electronic
realisation process and reduces the eight different acoustic instruments
– guitar, clarinet, alto saxophone, trombone, violin, viola,
violoncello and vibraphone – to a thick sinewave-like hum. This
time the composition involves separate lines that start and finish
independently, overlapping in places, and its overall effect is accordingly
different from the three previous releases. It's a less confrontational
music, whose warm sounds and hint of conversation between the different
layers comes across as slightly more human (yet it also for this listener
results in a slightly less rewarding listening experience).
The
fifth release in the series is a very different animal. In February
2006 Malfatti and fellow Wandelweiser composers Jürg Frey and
Michael Pisaro each performed a solo work of their own composition
simultaneously at the New York's Merkin Hall. Three Backgrounds
captures the event through a recording that contains plenty of coughing,
people milling about and even a mobile phone ringing, the music nestling
deep amongst what sounds like the hum of air conditioning and distant
traffic noise, highlighting perhaps the irony implicit in the title
of the piece. Frey's clarinet, Pisaro's guitar and Malfatti's trombone
go about their business independently, occasionally overlapping, often
fighting for air amongst the clamour of an audience trying to remain
silent. Though Malfatti's interest in silence and how it can be used
in music extends beyond the Cageian theory that formed the starting
point for the Wandelweiser Group, Three Backgrounds references
Cage's 4'33" more closely than the other b-boim releases, not
least because Malfatti's own contribution is but a part of the whole.
While the other releases confront the listener with silence, asking
him/her to deal with it as a fundamental element of the composition,
Three Backgrounds rejoices in its impossibility, and makes
for a much easier, but also very beautiful listening experience. Malfatti
had reservations about releasing it, owing to dissatisfaction with
the recording quality, but we can be grateful he did. It's one of
my favourites of the series.
b-boim
006, 2006's hoffinger nonett (2006) is a piece composed for
sinewaves, (presumably nine of them, though it's not possible to discern
nine distinct voices in Malfatti's electronic realisation), and returns
to low pitched sounds interspersed with silence, this time running
simultaneously with short snippets of higher pitches, whose overlay
suggests regular patterns in the listener's mind. The eighth b-boim,
das pelzige M, dating from the same year, inhabits similar
territory. The extended tones constructed on Malfatti's computer are
listed here as flute, clarinet, trombone and cello, sampled to create
the smooth clear tones of this piece. Between these two releases sits
wechseljahre einer hyäne (2003), ("the hyena's
menopause"), again similar in structure, with long lines of precisely
sustained notes broken up by periods of silence. Here the work is
performed live by the saxophone quartet Intersax, featuring Ulrich
Krieger, who commissioned it, and after the two digitally created
pieces the warmth of the saxophones and the tiny delays in co-ordination
stand out noticeably. The releases here that use real instruments
come across as more richly detailed, and easier on the ear. The skill
involved in performing such music becomes more apparent, and the music
feels less alien. Even the occasional cough from the audience is a
small comforting familiarity that roots the music almost subconsciously
in the mind of this listener.
 Radu
Malfatti has gone on record, most famously in his interview with Paris
Transatlantic, as stating that one of a musician's biggest enemies
is stagnation. Indeed, the cover of Going Fragile, his 2006
improv release with Mattin (Formed) was plastered with texts to this
effect. The casual listener then could probably be forgiven for thinking
that the similarity in these compositions flies in the face of such
statements, yet these twelve discs span a ten-year portion of a long
career that has seen continual change, and there is a sense of clear
progression in these recent pieces, in which Malfatti's music seems
to be pushing even further away from the received wisdom of how recordings
of music should be constructed and perceived. The ninth release on
the label, nonostante II (2000), dispenses with sustained
notes, and is written instead for solo piano, played by Malfatti himself.
The familiar extended silences remain, surrounding tiny, carefully
defined groups of piano pitches. The very long silences that separate
them test the memory of even the most attentive listener, and it's
far from easy to relate one patch of piano sound to the next. Brown's
unanswered questions come to mind once more, but it's a text from
Michael Pisaro that adorns nonostante's sleeve, including
the line "the music is really always there, but like an iceberg,
(or the English underground) it only comes to the surface at discrete
moments". There is definitely the sense of a longer work existing
here, large portions of which have been erased, not dissimilar to
Futatsu, Malfatti's celebrated duo with Taku Sugimoto (Improvised
Music from Japan).
The
tenth b-boim is probably the least successful to these ears. raum-zeit
I (1997) is composed for a full string orchestra, built up here
once more by massed samples of individual instruments. Dating from
a decade ago, it's decidedly "musical", its long sustained
tones preceded by short passages of slow fragmented melody, the beginning
of a mournful tune that never quite arrives. The layered effect of
the sampled instruments is less successful, and the discernible looping
betrays their artificial nature. Whereas the previous electronic realisations
made no attempt to sound real, raum-zeit's layered strings try to
do so and end up sounding fake, and detract from the overall effect
of the composition. The
eleventh and twelfth releases thankfully return to live recordings
using real instrumentation. 012, nonostante III (2000) is
scored for four string instruments and a clarinet. This piece is the
most complex yet; the sustained notes are still present, but incorporate
rising and falling sections, and there are numerous extraneous sounds
coming in from the surrounding silence: strings pressed down, shuffling,
scratching, people moving about the room. The silences here are charged,
full of the aural detritus of the room, sounds that could well be
part of the score, leaving the listener uncertain as to what is intended
or incidental. Listening on headphones projects you into the space,
but the tense, decentred nature of the music requires massive concentration
to decipher what is present.
The
sound of a "silent" audience also fills the eleventh (and
to my ears most successful) b-boim. rain speak soft tree listens
(2003) is a recording for string quartet and piano that also
features the voices of twenty five guests each simultaneously whispering
one of the words from a line taken from a Robert Lax poem: the five
words of the work's title. At the heart of the recording remains the
sound of the concert hall environment in Dusseldorf, complete with
the usual shuffling and creaking, but also external sounds can also
be clearly heard: voices calling, traffic passing, even church bells.
Over this backdrop the strings place long slabs of dense, dry sound
that peter out in places, leaving single instruments to finish before
cutting away abruptly to silence. The piano contributes only single
notes spaced wide apart in the recording, often close to the brief
moments when the massed voices whisper their shapeless words. The
cumulative effect is one of immense beauty. The restrained use of
these composed elements set with precision amongst the unexpected
external sounds is truly magical.
Radu
Malfatti remains one of the most uncompromising and challenging composers
today. Far from merely making quiet music, his compositions confront
our expectations; listening takes focus and concentration. They ask
questions about our perception of sound once it is placed into the
medium of recorded music, and how it is affected by a human memory
that is conditioned to understand a musical moment by the sounds preceding
it. Much of this music troubles you as a listener, asking you to continually
reprocess what you are hearing, not allowing you to take any moment
for granted. As such, Radu Malfatti's work extends Cage's ideas further,
and these twelve discs document that process admirably.–RP
New
Phonic Art
MEETING IN BADEN-BADEN
DRAMA/CORRESPONDENCES
New Phonic Art / Iskra 1903 / Wired
FREE IMPROVISATION
 There
is a dictum attributed to Anthony Braxton in which he differentiates
his music from other AACM musicians on the basis of influence –
sure, the music sprouts from Africa, but the pieces he studies most
are by Cage, Stockhausen and others. (In fact this also applies to
the music of many of his AACM colleagues, even if they don't admit
to it as readily). The Art Ensemble of Chicago brought blues, rock,
and bebop dexterity to their program of Great Black Music, amidst
disparate percussive forays that had perhaps more to do with contemporary
concert music (my ears have pegged Les Percussions de Strasbourg)
than with your average Folkways set. What one can't appreciate from
audio examples is the theatrical end of the AEC, involving not only
costume, poetry and commentary, but also elaborate staging around
a maddening array of instruments. The AEC and other AACM units seemed
to find even the sonic options provided by free jazz to be an idiomatic
trap, and therefore found their aesthetics a certain distance from
Coleman, Coltrane and Cecil Taylor.
In Europe during the late 60s, there was no historical precedent for
free jazz, but improvisation was seen by composers as a way to escape
the dead end of serial music, with composers like Penderecki, Stockhausen,
Morricone and Bernd Alois Zimmermann employing free musicians to various
ends. Argentinian-born, Cologne-based composer Mauricio Kagel even
went so far as to bring homemade and non-Western instruments (and
improvisation) to his situationist excursions. The Paris-based group
New Phonic Art, formed in 1969 by trombonist/composer Vinko Globokar,
jazz/classical reedman Michel Portal, percussionist Jean-Pierre Drouet
and Argentine composer/keyboardist Carlos Roqué Alsina, had
connections to the very different music of Kagel and Stockhausen.
Though initially New Phonic Art performed compositions, by the early
1970s their meetings became wholly improvised.
Despite such settings as Kagel's Exotica (which found Portal,
Globokar and friends surrounded by a few hundred non-Western instruments,
not to mention AEC-esque face paint), New Phonic Art focused as much
on action and interaction as color, and their sonic palette was derived
from semi-traditional instrumentation, albeit used in some rather
bizarre combinations and to extreme tonal ends. Alto and tenor saxophone,
various clarinets, taragato (Romania), zurna (Macedonian oboe), trombone,
alphorn, organ, bandoneon, piano, and a vast arsenal of percussion
all feature prominently, but the group was known to employ non-European
instruments as well. This led to one memorable incident (recounted
by Portal in an interview at www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=18096):
"[On tour in Mexico] we had a huge variety of instruments from
Afghanistan, Morocco and other places, and had to have them shipped.
When we got to Mexico, we had to tell the customs officers who we
were and what we were doing. So I was to tell them that we were the
New Phonic Art Ensemble, and we play music. We had to fake the documents
to make it easier. The officer asked us what kind of music we played
and so I told him that we played classical music. And he said 'You
have a lot of instruments. What kind of music is it?' 'Contemporary.'
'What is the name of your group?' 'New Phonic Art.' ' Como?'
'New Phonic Art.' 'Hmm.' So then he said to his comrade, 'No fornicar..
("No fucking.."). Open the cases!' Nobody had a clue what
was going to happen, and we had to open up all the cases and try to
explain what was in them."
 Though
its members appear on recordings of music by Stockhausen (Aus
den Sieben Tagen on DGG, Harmonia Mundi and Shandar), Kagel (Exotica,
Acustica, and Der Schall on DGG), Puig, Berio, Thomas
Kessler and others, New Phonic Art only released three albums in their
five-year lifespan, despite being regulars on the festival circuit.
Meeting in Baden-Baden (Wergo 60.060, 1971) was their first
foray, and was followed by the ultra-rare Drama/Correspondences
(BASF/Harmonia 202.1803, 1973, released under Globokar's name).
The final installment was New Phonic Art 1973, their contribution
to the notorious Free Improvisation 3 LP box (DGG 2740.105,
1973 which also included music by Iskra 1903 and Wired).
Probably the least restrained of the three is the DGG session, cut
shortly before the group's 1974 dissolution. The recordings were made
in Paris at Polydor Studios, one before a group of close friends and
the other without a live audience. According to the liners, the three
improvisations chosen for release "best mirrored the situation
within the group, its human relationships and forms of musical communication."
The LP starts with a brief piece, call and response from alto and
trombone over a pummeling beat of organ and percussion, a manic assault
of high jinks that, when compared with the measured tonal explorations
of the third improvisation or the Wergo disc, seems almost out-of-character.
Portal explained the theatricality of the group as follows:
"Kagel was someone who liked to make fun of people and he had
me act as an old blues player, as an old tired jazzman, and he would
incorporate noise elements into this as well. He would direct me to
say something odd while making some sounds – 'no more water,
no more water..' – a lot of pandering. There was a lot of involvement
with the Living Theatre, where we would go onstage just speaking nonsense.
We defied a lot of the rules, and even Xenakis told me just not to
care and not to worry if what came of it was good or not. I'd be asked
to play a phrase or make a noise and not to think about the context
or what others were doing. The proposal was to free myself and the
other musicians from questions of 'why do you play that way' or 'what
are you doing?'"
(Portal's own groups from the period also embraced theater, involving
audience participation on Chateauvillon '76 ("L'Escargot",
with Pierre Favre, Bernard Lubat, Béb Guerin and François
Mechali) and strange, improvised recitations by Barre Phillips and
Howard Johnson on Portal's CBS 1971 LP Splendid Yzlment.)
If one follows the literature of the time, New Phonic Art was a group
trying to make their way back to music making as sound, action and
communication, without any predisposed attachments. Quoting again
from the DGG liners: "the basic guidelines [were] no prior discussion,
no verbal, visual or audible subject matter, no focusing on a broader
aesthetic, psychological or social proposition, and no time limits."
Inasmuch as the group was able to develop its own very specific sound
universe - so specific that one can expect certain things from
it (and we'll get to that in more detail later) - their improvisations
can either defy the analysis befitting most contemporary music or
much improvised music. Whereas Braxton's contrabass clarinet solo
on Jacques Coursil's Black Suite (BYG Actuel, 1969) is full
of rage, power, and a facility that at times nearly matches Warne
Marsh, in the hands of Portal the instrument is only breath and mass
in response to the burble of Globokar's trombone or Alsina's fluttering
piano. Though I've been critical of John Litweiler's portrayal of
Portal as coldly emotionless before, in the context of this ensemble,
it's apt in a way, insofar as the tropes of Fire Music are separated
from all meaning to become just one of many sonic possibilities in
a very wide palette.
Certainly, we can talk of a "typical" New Phonic Art beginning
- as when chortling alto, searing trombone, and a marimba-darbouka
dialogue open "Improvisation 2" on the DGG set. It's only
when the music opens up to a field of woodwind and vocal nonsense
that the possibilities begin. Classical percussion tradition and organ
music are obliquely referenced, providing an undertow of poise beneath
obnoxious trombone farts and contrabass clarinet rumble, a "Rip,
Rig & Panic" for the conservatoire. Is it possible as a musician
to avoid one's past - whether it comes from a record collection
or a recording career? Of course, groups like AMM made statements
to the effect that one could get away from reference, and the liner
notes to New Phonic Art recordings point in a similar direction. Whether references
to other music are just chance associations that surround what are,
first and foremost, sounds is a matter for dialecticians. But
this music is necessarily knotty, for the contradictions are easy
to find. Surely, when Alsina plays faux-classical organ phrases to
the accompaniment of bandoneon and laughter (both literal and instrumental),
it can evoke a cabaret after the audience has split. And,
strangely enough, the group returns to this evocation after a lengthy
and arrhythmic percussion foray, Globokar blatting away on alphorn
to the organ-bandoneon sawdust song.
All this isn't to say that the group couldn't get down and get seriously
heavy - a nearly apocalyptic weight characterizes the sidelong improvisation
on Meeting in Baden-Baden. There's the shimmer of tam-tam,
expanding and contracting in density as chirps and sighs from clarinet
and trombone engage in bleak dialogue, while Alsina's organ bleats
spacey tones and his block chords are the music's cement shoes. Here,
the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Brötzmann-Mangelsdorff Quartet,
or Sunny Murray's stately sound-fields enter as sonic reference points.
Indeed, this might be the closest New Phonic Art ever got to free
jazz, and it would be something that subsequent recordings backed
away from.
What dissolved New Phonic Art was something entirely natural - the
group couldn't go on forever. The gradual establishing of clichés
made true free improvisation impossible, according to Portal, and
an interest in freedom as a tool within compositional contexts also
became paramount: "Eventually we had to stop the group, because
we had reached the limits of what could happen with the personalities
of the players and with the ensemble. Though it was pure improvisation,
one could tell what the others were going to do before they did it.
One of the musicians was a sad guy, and he'd always start his improvisations
with a lament: 'oooh, oooh, mmm...' and I always thought, 'I know
who's doing that!'"
Indeed, if one is familiar with Portal's music, or has listened to
his (and Globokar's) work with Stockhausen and Kagel, certain
actions become predictable. Similarly, when Brötzmann plays a
solo with Bennink, you know Bennink is going to stop drumming, let
the saxophonist hang out unaccompanied, and return with a yell and
a slam of the toms. So it goes with free improvisation: when one plays
group music, a group sound begins to develop. As a soloist, too, clichés
develop just as language develops. It's a sign of personality and
that we're human. New Phonic Art embraced the necessary pitfalls of
improvisation with a view to freeing up group situations, in the knowledge
that being in the present is the real way to go from "ancient
to the future." –CA
Fred
Frith
THE HAPPY END PROBLEM
Fred Records/ReR
IMPUR
Fred Records/ReR
Janet
Feder/Fred Frith
IRONIC UNIVERSE
Ad Hoc (CD + DVD)
 Fred
Frith's long-time collaboration with choreographer Amanda Miller is
the basis of The Happy End Problem. Consisting of two separate
soundtracks – "Imitation" and the title track –
the music manifests its beauty from the opening of "Ukon"
(the first part of "Imitation"), where gorgeous intersecting
arpeggios flow into suspended chords of rare emotional intensity.
The music benefits enormously from the stunning performances of all
the players involved: particular mention should be made of the truly
awesome Carla Kihlstedt on violin, whose graciously incisive phrasing
perfectly defines the borders between dance, dream and conscious intention
in this magic symmetry of notes and space. The other important voice
in "Imitation" is shakuhachi-player Kikutsubo Day, whose
bent whispers add both East-Asian and Gaelic flavours to the piece's
many influences, even if it remains pure Frith in its essence. "The
Happy End Problem" is a 21-minute track that uses snippets of
Igor Stravinsky's Firebird Suite to build tensions and repetitions
in an otherwise calm setting, enhanced by environmental recordings
and additional pancultural references. Kihlstedt executes her parts
flawlessly, while Frith's contributions on bass, guitar and laptop
are more elusive. My soul undergoes a meltdown about 15 minutes into
the track, when Wu Fei's delicate gu zheng figures remind us of the
frailty of purpose amidst the often overwhelming forces of life..
one of the most touching sections of what Chris Cutler rightly calls
an instant classic.
 Fred
Frith loves "roaming the corridors of music schools", and
any PT reader who's done this will be familiar with the educated cacophony
deriving from the many different sounds coming out of adjoining classes.
On Impur he sets this pandemonium in a structure of sorts,
dividing the musicians of the Ecole Nationale de Musique de Villeurbanne
(near Lyon) into "various groupings and ensembles" and giving
them instructions (and stopwatches) to play predetermined pieces at
various times. The departments involved even include African Drumming
and Early Music (together with the obviously abundant phalanx of rockers)
but for some reason the jazzers, evidently too snotty, declined to
participate – at least officially. It's a enjoyable 55 minutes
of clashing brass sections, acoustic chamber delicacies-cum-tribal
subdivisions and guitar chords getting lost in a haze of sulphuric
distortion and phased-out reverberation, but probably an experience
that better rewarded the audience that witnessed the event in the
flesh.
 Frith
and Denver-based guitarist Janet Feder turn in a real surprise with
Ironic Universe. I was expecting a radical album of bowed/scraped
strings and bumps-on-wood, a kind of sacred ceremony for the dismemberment
of the instrument. Instead, these twelve pieces, which include six
Feder solos, are refined fingerstyle improvisations, with just a touch
of preparation that lets the strings gently buzz and sizzle, placing
imaginary mirrors for the chord shapes to refract and counter-refract.
It's a lovely record, and one that needs at least two or three spins
to reveal its depth. Take a superficial "background music"
approach and you might think Windham Hill or Adrian Legg, but this
is serious, inquisitive music by two sensitively capable guitarists.
The set is complemented by a DVD containing solo performances in Colorado
by the two artists: Frith in Boulder (2004) and Feder in Denver (2006).
If you still had any doubts, the DVD alone should be enough to make you
place an order.–MR
Richard
Lerman
MUSIC OF RICHARD LERMAN 1964 - 1987
EM
 Richard
Lerman was born in San Francisco in 1944 (but ended up in Milwaukee
by the end of his teens) and studied at Brandeis, where he started
experimenting with tape music back in 1963. After a 20 year stint
teaching film, performance art and computer music at Boston Museum
School, he took up a position at Arizona State University West in
1994, where he still teaches Media Arts. Originally released on Folkways
in 1982, Travelon Gamelan was an ambitious project for amplified
bicycle wheels (Jac Berrocal eat your heart out) presented both in
a "concert version" or in a "promenade version",
a kind of moving installation. Piezo pickups and portable amplifiers
were attached to the bicycles and the sounds of plucked and bowed
spokes, squeaky brakes and twanged cables – all notated in a
score, by the way, which is available for consultation on the first
of these two enhanced CDs – mingle, in the prom versions, with
the sounds of the street and Lerman himself giving instructions to
his cyclists. The first CD features no fewer than five versions of
TGam, promenade versions recorded in Boston (1979) and Amsterdam
(1982) and concert versions from Pittsburgh (1981), Amsterdam once
more (recorded on the same day as the prom version) and Wellington
(1986). There's even an 18-minute film of a performance in Vancouver
in 1987. It's a fun piece to listen to, watch and read about, in the
copious and beautifully prepared booklet accompanying the discs, complete
with numerous photographs, Lerman's original liners to the Folkways
LP, and a fine essay on Lerman's music by Arthur Sabatini.
Disc one is fun all right (makes you wonder what else is lurking in
the Folkways archives and crying out for reissue), but disc two is
even better. For Two Of Them (1964) has been described as
an "early Plunderphonics piece", though that's stretching
it a bit: Lerman approaches his source materials – recordings
of Mahler's Sixth Symphony and the Stan Kenton Band playing
Bob Graettinger's City of Glass – with a primitive
reverb unit, a bank of filters, a white noise generator and unbridled
enthusiasm for sonic exploration, but hardly the conceptual rigour
(nor the postmodern irony) of a John Oswald. The original pieces are
barely recognisable, but that's not a problem. It's a great swirling
mass of scary noise, and a fitting companion to other better known
pieces of 60s American tape music by James Tenney and Pauline Oliveros.
Sections for Screens, Performers and Audience (1975) is a
16mm film projected to both audience and performers alike, which serves
as a graphic score for live improvisation. The musicians in this archive
performance from 1975 are Basil Bova (piano), Earl Grant Lawrence
(flute), George Cordeiro (alto sax) and Lerman himself on sho and
live electronic transformations. The tape is rather hissy and the
musicians are clearly classically trained cats improvising as opposed
to, ahem, "professional" improvisers, but it's none the
worse for that. From the look of the images printed in the booklet,
this is a piece that deserves to be performed by some of today's top
notch players, especially now that graphic scores, since the revival
of interest in Cardew's Treatise in recent years, are hip
once more. Perhaps Lerman could circulate DVD copies of the film to
some interested parties.
End of the Line: some recent dealings with death (1976) features
an eight-piece ensemble playing sombre sustained tones along with
a tape delay system, itself also subtly modified (filtered, ring modulated..)
by the composer. Tape delay also features in Accretion Disk, Event
Horizon, Singularity (1979), an ambitious project modelled on
the idea of a black hole – "all the sound is eventually
captured by the 'system' – it simply becomes more and more dense,
unable to escape", the composer writes. Indeed, this recording
of the work's first (?) (only?) performance at Godard College in Vermont
in 1979 was so good that the names of the performers got sucked into
oblivion too, it seems. 2 1/2 Minutes for a BASF Loop (1980)
actually lasts 13'22", and is notable for the incorporation into
the loop system of recordings made outside during the performance
– specifically, a rather impressive rainstorm; once more
Lerman's technical set-up is available for consultation as a pdf file
on the enhanced disc. If the BASF loop piece drags a bit, the same
unfortunately can't be said for Soundspot (1982), an intriguing
installation featuring a 40-foot long slinky and metal tines from
a toy piano, suspended from the ceiling and amplified thanks to Lerman's
beloved piezo devices. What a shame its ghostly whines only last just
over a couple of minutes. The set closes with the intriguing Music
for Plinky and Straw (1986). Lerman explains: "Because the
plinky amplifies the vibrations inside of different gauges and lengths
of harpsichord wire soldered to a piezo disk, it is reminiscent of
the sound of a gamelan orchestra. The straw, which fits over a condenser
mic capsule models the sound of a microphone inside a bendable organ
pipe. The score's performance instructions are notated by physical
gestures and text. The same gestures applied to both instruments in
performance, yield widely differing sounds." Once again, there's
a brief (and I mean brief, i.e. 33 seconds long) Quicktime movie included
showing how it's done in performance, which is interesting enough
but not as much fun as listening to the piece and trying to imagine
how the sounds are made.
All in all, this is a superb set, produced with real loving care –
the booklet is exemplary – and taking full advantage of CD technology
to include scores and film footage to accompany the music. One can
only hope that the good folks at EM Records might get their hands
on some of that ONCE Festival archive material. I wouldn't go so far
as to say that Lerman is an unjustly neglected genius – the
music is very good, not great, and the recording quality doesn't always
show it to its best advantage – but in his place I'd be as happy
as a pig in shit to see my own work documented with such affection
and attention to detail. Well worth a flutter, ladies and gents.–DW
Charlemagne
Palestine
THE GOLDEN MEAN
Shiiin
Charlemagne
Palestine
A SWEET QUASIMODO BETWEEN BLACK VAMPIRE BUTTERFLIES FOR MAYBECK
Cold Blue
Perlonex
with Keith Rowe/Charlemagne Palestine
TENSIONS
Nexsound
Once
upon a time buying a Charlemagne Palestine LP without resorting to
a bank loan was the stuff of dreams.. It seems nowadays we're virtually
forced to select keepers from the batches of CDs that appear each
month. Well, maybe I'm exaggerating a little. For the record, I wouldn't
give away anything from my Palestine collection (except Karenina).
And certainly not The Golden Mean, which comes in a limited
edition of 1000 copies with a soft velvet cover [comes in five different
colours – mine's orange, what's yours Massimo?-Ed.]. The performance
was captured at la Chapelle de la Sorbonne in Paris, 1979 and finds
Palestine sitting between two Bösendorfers (the photo makes him
look like Keith Emerson) in search of the Holy Grail of overtone contrast.
The music comes very close to the spirit of this minimalist maverick's
old masterpieces, whose repeated middle Cs, with gradually increasing
intensity and the addition of adjacent semitones, slowly develop into
ear-caressing domes of clusters and chords that shine like water droplets
dangling from a rainbow's arc. It's a magnificent work, one that puts
the listener in peace with life for about 40 minutes and totally justifies
the long wait that loyal Palestine followers have had to endure after
Shiiin announced its release as "imminent" – at the
beginning of last year.
 A
Sweet Quasimodo.. is another performance for two pianos, this
time recorded in Maybeck studio (Berkeley, California) in 2006. Palestine
begins with a short spoken introduction, also rubbing harmonics out
of a glass of cognac and vocalizing in his own unique falsetto. Then
the piece begins, and what we get is definitely less serene than The
Golden Mean, but still engrossing. Starting with the usual reiteration
of solitary notes, Palestine builds in a dynamic process that's almost
violent at times, a breath-like, come-and-go cycle of superimposed
dissonances that ends with a long silence and a few final words before
the applause. As always, you've got to play the thing quite loud to
perceive the high resonances fighting and embracing, which is what
Palestine's music is all about. At a first listen, I found it somewhat
detached and less inspired, but repeated spins convince me of its
staying power.
 Perlonex
is the Berlin-based trio of Ignaz Schick (turntables, live electronics),
Jorg Maria Zeger (electric guitars) and Burkhard Beins (percussion,
objects). For their fifth anniversary concert, held at Podewil in
2004, they invited Keith Rowe and Charlemagne Palestine to join them,
and the results, heard in Tensions, are exactly what one
would expect from these musicians. The first disc features Rowe, who
seems completely absorbed in the group's music, in a slow, if uneasy
mantra that inches forward to become unbearably strained and edgy
at midpoint, with its necessary frictions and ruptures, but with all
the players involved showing an accomplished sense of sound placement
and interaction. The set with Palestine has its moments, too, but
while the American's synthesized waves mesh well with Perlonex's dynamics,
his piano is completely out of context at times: the tolling chords
he hits with all his might struggle to get heard (at least in this
particular mix), often seeming more superfluous than complementary.
Still, there are enough transcendental, mesmerizing sections where
the four instruments fuse into one to make it worth keeping.–MR
Spontaneous
Music Ensemble
QUINTESSENCE
Emanem
 Never
was an album so aptly named. Recorded on February 3rd 1974 at London's
ICA, these 85 minutes of music created by John Stevens (percussion,
cornet), Derek Bailey (guitars), Kent Carter (cello and bass) and
soprano saxophonists Evan Parker and Trevor Watts stand as one of
the greatest, perhaps the greatest, documents of free improvisation,
full stop, period, endae fuckin story, as Irvine Welsh so
eloquently put it. Some might marvel that this was the first time
all five men had actually played together, though considering that
they'd already worked with each other in various combinations for
several years, the extraordinary near-telepathic interplay between
them and the quality of the music it helped create should come as
no surprise. In improv, sometimes it happens, sometimes it
doesn't. Most of the time it's better when it is happening, but even
if it isn't it can be fun; mistakes, wrong turns down blind alleys,
slight misunderstandings or even cussed bloodymindedness can lead
to some great music, and improvisers as different as Misha Mengelberg
and Jack Wright have created a lifetime's worth of fine music by thriving
on such tension. Others prefer to nurture longlasting relationships,
Evan Parker being the most obvious example – his trio with Barry
Guy and Paul Lytton has been around for about a quarter of a century,
and the Schlippenbach Trio with Alex von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens
a decade longer than that. But however one choose to plan out one's
career, or whoever one chooses to play with, it all boils down to
the same thing: improv is created in the moment, and in Quintessence
there is, as the old cliché goes, never a dull moment.
Never.
I could make quite a long list of such moments and attempt to draw
your attention to what's going on in each of them ("check out
Bailey and Carter at 16'45" in "Forty Minutes (part 1)"
etc.) but what would be the point? You know how to listen, for Chrissakes.
Or least you should do by now – if not what are you doing with
this album in your CD player? But if by chance you don't, or you're
coming to free improvisation for the very first time, these gentlemen
will show you how to listen. And you'll listen hard – give this
music the attention it deserves and you'll be as exhausted and exhilarated
after it's over as these guys must have been that memorable night
33 years ago. I'm reminded of that story of George Bernard Shaw who
once told violinist Jascha Heifetz he should play a wrong note every
night before going to bed, because "the gods are jealous of perfection"..
it's almost a shame that "less than a minute" of music in
"Thirty-Five Minutes" was edited out "to remove two
brief moments of untogetherness", to quote Martin Davidson's
liner notes. It almost makes you want to have them back in there to
remind us that these chaps were human after all.
Davidson originally released Quintessence as two LPs in 1986,
and again on CD in 1997. With his typical concern for filling up the
compact disc with as music as can comfortably contain (there's so
much information on an Emanem disc you often think it might spontaneously
combust), this double CD package also includes performances from the
Little Theatre Club in October 1973 – three trio tracks featuring
Stevens, Watts and Carter (on double bass this time) and a couple
of gems by the Stevens / Watts duo, including the amazing "Corsop",
whose explorations of tiny twitters and tweets often at the threshold
of audibility seem to point forward to the lowercase improv that became
à la mode over two decades later (drop the needle
near the end and you could swear it's nmperign). The trio version
of the raw, Ayler-inspired "Daa-Oom" (Stevens' wild yodels
were described variously as "ghastly" and "virtuosic"
at the time – you decide which adjective best applies) apparently
"ran out of steam" after five minutes, but it's a hell of
a five minutes, and makes for a fine comparison with the ten-minute
duo version that rounds off the disc.
Somewhere in the shady recesses of my mind I hear the familiar strains
of Eric Coates' music.. this is real Desert Island Discs stuff, and
I'm left wondering why it didn't make it to the awfully self-indulgent
Top 40 I compiled for these pages nearly four years ago. Remind me
to put that situation right for 2013's Top 50. Meanwhile, I could
quite happily listen to these two discs for the next six years, secure
in the knowledge that I'll be as surprised and moved by the thrilling
music they contain at each subsequent listen. Make sure you are too:
if you missed out on the earlier releases of Quintessence,
please don't miss out on this.–DW
Exploding
Star Orchestra
WE ARE ALL FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE
Thrill Jockey
 Exploding
Star Orchestra is cornettist / composer Rob Mazurek's most ambitious
project to date, a 14-piece big band featuring the cream of the crop
of Chicago new music – Nicole Mitchell (flutes), Jeb Bishop
(trombone), Corey Wilkes (trumpet), Josh Berman (cornet), Matt Bauder
(bass clarinet and tenor saxophone), Jeff Parker (guitar), Jim Baker
(keyboards), Jason Adasiewicz (vibraphone), John McEntire (marimba),
Matt Lux (electric bass), Jason Ajemian (acoustic bass), Mike Reed
and John Herndon (drums) – and the foot-tapping swing of We
Are All From Somewhere Else will soon be thrilling audiences
throughout Europe on an extensive tour. But despite the fine playing
of all concerned (special shot out again to Ms Mitchell) and some
crafty writing on Mazurek's part, I'm left feeling somewhat underwhelmed.
Mazurek seems all too willing to let the music get stuck in one of
his infectious grooves, which is fine for a project like Sao Paulo
Underground but tends to flatten this particular big band into something
more resembling.. erm, Tortoise (surprise). Or rather Tortoise crossed
with late 50s Mingus and late 60s AACM, with maybe a hint of late
90s Masada. Those telltale Tortoise keyboard percussion instruments
are all over the place – there are more vibes on this album
than in a Jean-Pierre Melville movie – and you end up wishing
they'd take a break, or at least do something different from doubling
the bass(es). Adding a bit of laptop weirdness and Mazurek's beloved
electric eels (from his adopted home country of Brazil) is a nice
touch, but it doesn't take long before Adasiewicz and McEntire come
tinkling back in to drag us back to Chicago. After a brief Muhal-esque
piano interlude from Baker, the second extended suite, "Cosmic
Tones for Sleep Walking Lovers" – titular nod to another
ex-Chicago bandleader there – comes clattering in. It sounds
rather like Ascension-meets-Tubular Bells (both
the instrument and the Mike Oldfield album) but unlike the Coltrane
classic, the energy seems scattered outwards – exploding star
indeed – rather than focused inwards, and instead of resolving
itself through some sort of cathartic Brötzmann Tentet blowout,
which would have been fun, it opts for the kind of pentatonic minimalist
riffery Paul Dresher and Daniel Lentz were doing about 20 years ago,
and better. The problem is that minimal riffs and grooves are cool
but they go round and round instead of onward and upward; the only
way to get out of the circle is to thin out the texture one voice
at a time, which is just what Mazurek does – and no prizes for
guessing which instrument ends up playing the riff. Part Three of
"Cosmic Tones", with its lazy Dorian mode swing, inevitably
recalls early 60s Coltrane, but the scoring is claggy and it isn't
Elvin Jones behind the kit. One longs for a few more surprises, but
they don't come all that often. Rob Mazurek has gone to great pains
in recent years to distance himself from those Windy City hard bop
roots, but it seems he still hasn't quite managed to hack through
them and float free.–DW
Talibam!
HUNGRY HUNGRY HEMISPHERES
The Fair School
 Last
time a Talibam! album came my way (accompanied, as you will no doubt
recall, by a chunk of an old Doobie Brothers LP) I coined the phrase
"Gonzo jazz rock fusion". The term "gonzo" is
often misattributed to the late lamented Hunter S. Thompson, and "Gonzo
Journalism", to quote good old Wikipedia, "tends to favor
style over accuracy and often uses personal experiences and emotions
to provide context for the topic or event being covered. It disregards
the 'polished' edited product favored by newspaper media and strives
for the gritty factor." That certainly seems to sum up the collective
insanity on offer here, as Messrs Ed Bear (feedbacksaphone, sales
pitch and vox), Matt Mottel (synthesizer, vox, rant) and Kevin Shea
(drums, philosophical explanations) tear up the 40 Watt in Athens
Georgia as impressively as Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo trashed their Vegas
hotel rooms in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. Interspersed
with musings from behind the kit from Mr Shea on life in outer space
and genetic mutations, Hungry Hungry Hemispheres is just
the kind of 180mph bike ride through a sandstorm Duke was dispatched
to cover, and would have made the perfect soundtrack to Terry Gilliam's
film of Thompson's book. God knows what substances our three time
travellers were ingesting prior to recording this epic session, but
to play with this kind of fearsome intensity I doubt it was decaf
cappuccino.–DW
Michael
Flower / Chris Corsano
THE RADIANT MIRROR
Textile
 I
know exactly where I was when this music was being recorded
on January 21st last year in the Instants Chavirés just outside
Paris. Freezing my rocks off in a church in Cologne thrilling to the
music of Phill Niblock, in fact. So I'm delighted that, thanks to
the good offices of Textile Records, now in the capable hands of Fabien
Louis since the untimely death of Textile's founder Benoît Sonnette
(see last month's Edito), I can now enjoy the concert I missed. Or
at least part of it. And what a cracker it was; Mick "Vibracathedral
Orchestra" Flower's "japan banjo" (sort of lap steel
sitar with FX pedals) taps into that rich vein of improvised one chord
minimalism left largely unexplored since the legendary all night concerts
of Terry Riley back in the 60s, and percussionist Chris Corsano drives
the music on with some of the most inspired polyrhythmic pulse power
he's ever committed to disc. It's a shame he's a tad far back in the
mix compared to Flower, which makes it more of an Angus MacLise mantra
than a Sunny Murray sizzle or a Bonham bash, but that's a pathetically
minor quibble. When the musicians hit their stride – and it
doesn't take them long to do it – what they produce is some
of the most exciting drone jam since MacLise himself shuffled off
this mortal coil back in June 1979.–DW
Taku
Sugimoto / Taku Unami
TENGU ET KITSUNE
Slub Music
 Recorded
live at Loop-Line in Tokyo in May last year, Tengu et Kitsune
is a 45-minute (exactly) duo for electric guitars, a tale of
two Takus, as Messrs Sugimoto and Unami hocket tiny commas of sound
– most of them isolated pitches, often short and muffled, sometimes
repeated – across an otherwise empty page of stereo space. It's
nowhere near as ascetic as some of Sugimoto's other recent offerings
(thinking Live In Australia and Principia Sugimatica
here, though unlike the latter Tengu et Kitsune is entirely
improvised, not composed), and quite lively by his standards. It's
also refreshingly consonant in places. Imagine two superimposed 45-minute
Jim Hall solos with about 99.75% of the notes erased. Those not familiar
with Japanese folklore (me, for instance) might want to check out
some tengu background at www.furyu.com/archives/issue2/tengu.html.
FYI, in this duo Sugimoto is the tengu and Unami the kitsune
(fox). I'll leave it up to you to decide whether Sugimoto is a karasu
(crow) or a yamabushi (mountain priest). I did find one interesting
snippet of info on that site, though: "The king of all tengu
is Sojobo, an elderly, white-haired yamabushi tengu, famous
for teaching martial arts and strategy to Minamoto Yoshitsune on Mt.
Kurama, north of Kyoto." A reference, no doubt, to Radu Malfatti.–DW
Phil
Minton / Veryan Weston
WAYS
Jazzwerkstatt
 Oh
gracious art, in many grey hours / When life's fierce orbit encompassed
me, / Hast thou kindled my heart to warm love, / Hast charmed me into
a better world! / Oft has a sigh, issuing from thy harp, / A sweet,
blessed chord of thine, / Thrown open the heaven of better time; /
Oh gracious art, for that I thank thee! Not perhaps the kind
of lyric you'd associate with the rough growl of Phil Minton, but
you'll be surprised how tenderly he sings Franz von Schober's words
(in German too). In fact, you'll be surprised at more than that in
this outstanding set of songs performed by the inimitable countertenor
/ tenor / baritone / bass / sub-bass / woofer / tweeter / crooner
/ belcher (delete where appropriate), accompanied by his long-standing
partner at the ivories, Veryan Weston. It's not exactly new –
the first seven tracks were recorded in Cologne back in 1987 (and
released as Ways on ITM), the remaining 12 in London five
years later (Ways Back on the same label). The two Brel covers,
"Who's Next" and "Songs for Old Lovers", also
appeared on another ITM album, Tribute to Jacques Brel. But
you may have a hard time tracking those beauties down, so why not
spring for this ceedee and get it all on one shiny galette.
It's a regular pot pourri of delicious treats, featuring
not only old masters (in addition to Schubert's "An Die Musik",
D.547 Op 88 No 4, as quoted above, there are some pearls from Hugo
Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch and Charles Ives' magnificent
"The One Way"), old chestnuts (Arthur Sullivan's "The
Lost Chord", which Minton apparently discovered on the legendary
kitsch TV show Stars On Sunday), wild and wonderful covers
("Jailhouse Rock" becomes early Schoenberg, "Somewhere
Over The Rainbow" emerges from a rainstorm of fisticuffs from
Weston, Brecht / Weill's "Mandelay Song" is almost –
but not quite – as wacky as the Flying Lizards' version) and
some sensational originals, including settings of poems by Ho Chi
Minh and a stunning set of lyrics to Eric Dolphy's "245".
The Brel pieces are especially fine – Minton's blunt "cocks"
and "fucks" make for a nice contrast with Scott Walker's
glitzy reading of the song on Sings Jacques Brel, and better
reflect the brutality of the original lyric. Both performers are truly
outstanding throughout. Buy now or cry later. Or, if you have the
old ITMs, buy again.–DW
Johannes
Bauer / Thomas Lehn / Jon Rose
FUTCH
Jazzwerkstatt
 Hard
to believe that analogue synth whiz Thomas Lehn, who kicks up a veritable
shitstorm of electronic fury on this outing, was once a member of
Radu Malfatti's near-mythical ultra minimal trio with Phil Durrant
(remember Beinhaltung on Fringes, dach on Erstwhile?).
He certainly sounds more at home tearing it up, and does it alarmingly
well; this could be the best – it's certainly one of the best
recorded – Lehn outings to date, and all the more welcome given
the fact that much of his back catalogue has dropped off the radar
along with the label it was released on, Grob. It's an odd trio line
up, though; the hyperactive Rose is in his element here, turning in
a display of serious virtuosity on violin and tenor violin that would
make Nigel Kennedy sit up and take notice (check out those octave
glissandi, man!). Trombonist Bauer's response to the demented video
game he finds himself caught up in is to pick a few notes and phrases
and try to blast the opponents into submission. He doesn't succeed
of course, but he comes damn close. It's exciting stuff, not exactly
subtle but none the worse for that. About time we had more fun in
improv, which has been taking itself far too seriously of late.–DW
Eugene
Chadbourne
NEW DIRECTIONS IN APPALACHIAN MUSIC
House of Chadula
 "New
Directions in Appalachian Music" is one of six projects that
Dr. Chad presented during Chadfest 666 in 22nd Musique Action Festival
at Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy. The idea was to get the cream of European
improv to play covers of bluegrass, hillbilly and country and western
songs, and joining Dr. Chad on lead vocals, electric guitar and banjo
is a fine line-up: vocalist Phil Minton, lapsteel guitarist Mike Cooper
(also backing vocals on "You're The Reason"), Paul Lovens
on drums and assorted cymbals, double-bassist Johnny Hamill and violinist
Cedric Privé. The set includes Gram Parsons' "Hickory
Wind", Kermit the [Appalachian] Frog's "Rainbow Connection",
Ludacris' "North Carolina" and Beefheart's "Orange
Clawhammer", among others. Besides the lead singer, who plays
as straight as he can (whence the humour), Minton's vocal dynamics
include weird yodelling and the Tuvan drone-overtones of "Hurry
Home Darling". On "Hello Stranger" he even comes close
to sounding like Johnny Cash. It's a typical Chadbourne gambit: you'd
never expect these guys to perform this kind of repertoire at all,
but they do, and they do it damn well.–VJ
Cor
Fuhler
STENGAM
Potlatch
 Recorded
without overdubs or laptop electronics, Stengam is a 43-minute
composition for grand piano, E-Bows and super magnets that flows without
interruption despite being subdivided into eight tracks on the CD.
It starts almost tentatively with "North-South", as if Fuhler
is dipping a toe in the water before plunging in: gentle bumps and
muffled tolling establish a calm mood, the atmosphere underscored
by subtly elongated vibrations of the lower strings. On "Ferrous",
wavering ripples and multiform frictions keep us on the edge, waiting
for some sort of explosion or complication; it's the most aggressive
passage in an otherwise inward-drawn music. The resolution to the
tension comes in the disc's second half, the six sections of "Stengam".
In part 2, magnets put the bass strings in continuous oscillation,
after which Fuhler juxtaposes further adjacent tones, this time in
the treble, generating beautiful sustained tensions that are kept
at a safe distance from excessive brilliance via strident bowing,
rarefied plucking and regular pulse, all of which reaching their apex
during part 3. The end of the disc finds Fuhler returning to a more
percussive, almost ritualistic approach, the final segment introducing
additional suspensions and uncertainties before slipping into silence.
Stengam presents several sonic combinations whose molecules
spread in the air with authority, but I'm left with the sensation
of barely scratched surfaces, secrets that remain locked in vaults.
Fuhler hints at many aspects of the physics of vibration in relation
to the piano, but somehow never fully gets to the essence of the matter,
changing perspectives too often. It's a shame, because there is some
real substance there. A fine and worthy effort, then – but a
whisker or two short of true excellence.–MR
Traw/Rhodri
Davies
CWYMP Y DWR AR GANOL DYDD
Confront Collectors Series
 The
title, apparently pronounced "coimp uh DOO-err ahr GAnol deeth",
translates as "water falls at morning's end" (thanks to
the hounds at Bagatellen for that info). Traw (pronounced "trow"
as in "trowel") is a trio of Welsh laptoppers – Richard
Llewellyn, Owen Martell and Simon Proffitt – who went to work
on some E-bowed harp improvisations sent them by Rhodri Davies before
getting together for a live session with the man himself. The process
of recording, reconfiguring and replaying is roughly similar to the
celebrated Say No More series of albums Bob Ostertag put
out a while back with Phil Minton, Mark Dresser and Gerry Hemingway
(except there's no written score involved) but the sound world the
Welshmen inhabit is several lightyears away. This is well thought-out,
elegant EAI, leisurely in pace but rich in detail – if a tad
heavy on reverb in places – ranging from the tiny helicopter
flutters of "Sgwd Yr Eira" (sorry, don't know what that
means, nor how to pronounce it) via the cavernous clangs of "Einion
Gam" and the sinister "Mellte", in which ominous low
thuds and mid and high register drones are gradually wrapped in a
blanket of white noise fuzz, to "Y Pannwr" and the closing
"Llia", which explore the austere clanging resonance of
Davies' harp frame to great effect. Serious stuff, but eminently listenable.
In fact, the only difficult thing about this album is pronouncing
its title.–DW
Furt
OMNIVM
psi
 In
Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman, "omnium"
is "the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden in
the root of the kernel of everything".. And if that isn't a pleonasm,
God knows what is. Furt, aka Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, based
this four-movement work – its movements are entitled "ever",
"obliged", "yet" and "us" – on
sounds sourced from the spoken voice (in several languages), gamelan
(of Durham University), saxophone (Evan Parker), bass (Barry Guy)
and percussion (Paul Lytton), which are sampled, sliced, diced, stewed,
sautéed, grilled, flambéed and tossed around the stereo
space with Marco Pierre White abandon. If you're the kind of hyperactive
jitterbug who finds Stockhausen's Kontakte, Farmers Manual
and Pateras / Fox too torpid, you'll love it. There are probably literally
millions of pings, splats, fizzes and gurgles on offer, and they're
impressive and exhilarating to listen to. Whether it all adds up to
the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden in the root
of the kernel of everything is for you to decide, but there's certainly
plenty of everything in there.–DW
Otomo
Yoshihide
MULTIPLE OTOMO
Asphodel CD+DVD
 In
2003 I had the pleasure of programming Otomo Yoshihide for a series
I curate here in Brisbane called Fabrique. He borrowed my turntable
for the concert and right before he performed he remarked, with a
grin, "please don't worry when I use the turntable, I won't damage
it, it'll be just like when you gave it to me". I'll admit I
did feel a touch apprehensive, but he wasn't lying. The turntable
was returned in the same condition, but metaphysically it
was an altered device, the strength and gestural intensity of Otomo's
handling suggesting brave new possibilities for this conventional
piece of equipment.
On Multiple Otomo, an aptly titled CD and DVD document, Otomo
Yoshihide's work with turntable, prepared guitar and electronics is
examined in alluring detail. His augmented turntables operations,
exploiting everything from "personalised vinyl" to cymbals,
springs and other less-familiar items, are brought into a sharp scalpel
focus. Tones find themselves slicing through the ears with shredding
purity, while low frequency rumbles and corrupted layers of feedback
invade the body. The physicality of Otomo's performance, both bodily
and sonically is present here, but without a PA and one heck of a
sub the experience can only ever be of a documentary nature.
With the DVD obscured by some fancy cut-up edits and digital effects
(most of which complement his performance actions), this edition will
appeal and no doubt attract an entirely new audience to Otomo's work.
The abstraction associated with a purely audio document is removed
and in place his actions, preparations and techniques take on a quality
that's equally satisfying for all senses. In lieu of the real thing,
Multiple Otomo is a worthy document of this vital agent of
sonic debris.–LE
Günter
Müller
REFRAMED
Cut
 I
was just beginning to penetrate the mysteries of Günter Müller's
remixing process on the splendid double CD on Esquilo, Live and
Replayed, when this one appeared in the mailbox a couple of weeks
or so ago. Cut CDs never fail to grab the attention, thanks to Jason
Kahn's classy Op Art covers, and they always sound as good as they
look. Reframed is for all you gong junkies who've already
worn out their CDRs of Mark Wastell's Vibra 1 and redownloaded
it from wmo/r. Which means it's right up there with James Tenney's
Having Never Written A Note For Percussion, Mathias Spahlinger's
entlöschend and Rhys Chatham's Two Gongs as
one of the Great Bowed Metal Pieces (oops, forgot Eddie Prévost's
Entelechy there). Though you'd probably never figure out
that this gorgeous music is all sourced from bowed cymbals unless
somebody told you – it could be distant thunder, passing traffic
heard from a nearby hilltop or Gregorian chant recorded in the depths
of a cave system – hard to believe such rich, deep and mysterious
sonorities could come from those round shiny things you see sweaty
drummers battering the shit out of on MTV. But it's true: listen carefully
to track three and you might just catch a metallic edge to Müller's
delicate crescendos. Elsewhere though it's as magical and inscrutable
as Eliane Radigue (except perhaps for the fifth and final track where
some of Müller's laptop clicks peek through the clouds). Wonderful
stuff, check it out.–DW
Ingar
Zach
IN
Kning Disk
 I'm
not sure whether the word "percussion" shouldn't be struck
out (pun intended) of the improv lexicon altogether, since so many
of today's top performers have moved away from hitting things in favour
of stroking, scraping and rubbing them. Eddie Prévost probably
started it with those bowed cymbals, but since Burkhard Beins began
using everything from polystyrene blocks to pebbles to rub around
his snare drum, seems like everyone's doing it. Norwegian percussionist
– make that frictionist, then – Ingar Zach has
played with many of the scene's top performers (check out the track
record at www.ingarzach.com/biography.htm) and this 26-minute solo
set is a superb demonstration of what he's capable of. Starting with
several minutes of beautifully placed and executed crescendos on bowed
cymbals and crotales, In moves through some alarm-clock jingles
and rattles (sounds like he's using one of those hand-held battery-powered
fans or something) into some ominous growling bass drum resonance
(E-bows? Who knows?). Slowmoving and majestic, it's all so well structured
you'd almost bet it had all been plotted out in advance on graph paper.
Some semblance of pulse clicks in about halfway through but is soon
swallowed up by rich drones and washed away by waves of hissing noise,
before a slightly scarred perfect fifth emerges from the ebbing tide,
and Zach thickens the texture with more crotales and iron foundry
clatter to bring the piece to its conclusion. The whole affair is
superbly paced and the recording magnificent. Best solo percussion
- sorry friction - outing since Christian Wolfarth's on For4Ears last
year.–DW
Tomas
Korber / Bernd Schurer
250904
Balloon & Needle
 In
the letter that came along with this elegantly packaged disc from
South Korea, Choi Joonyong informs me that this 18-minute set featuring
Tomas Korber (electronics) and Bernd Schurer (computer) was recorded
in a Zürich squat after a day's serious drinking. Well, nothing
new there; I'll bet a fair number of fine improv albums were recorded
after (maybe even during) the consumption of prodigious quantities
of alcoholic beverage, though perhaps Mr Joonyong feels compelled
to share this information with us in order to add a "human dimension"
to this austere assemblage of pale sinewaves, mildly disturbing rustles
and odd screes of bright white noise (the opening and closing blasts
should be sufficient to clear any hangover you might be suffering
from). It doesn't need it; the music works its charms very well all
by itself, thanks very much. Another fine though perhaps not absolutely
essential addition to the ever-expanding Korber discography.–DW
Dimitri
Voudouris
NPFAI.1 / PALMOS / NPFAI.3 / PRAXIS
Pogus
 Dimitri
Voudouris was born in Athens in 1961 but relocated to South Africa
quite early on, where he studied pharmacy, science of religion, philosophy
and socio-cultural anthropology (whatever that is). He came to composition
quite late, it seems (in the 90s), and describes his approach as being
based on "research of cognitive psycho-acoustic behavioral patterns
in humans" – though I dare say that would apply to just
about any composer, whether s/he realised it or not. NPFAI.1
– that stands for "New Possibilities For African Instruments"
– comes with a rather dry, detailed set of notes explaining
how the sounds of a kundi (bowed harp) and an m'bira
(thumb piano) are processed into 15 different sonic layers, manipulated
and recombined. There's also a forbidding-looking diagram of the "sound
field construction" which is well nigh impossible to understand
without a powerful magnifying glass, but presumably designed to impress,
as if the music wasn't impressive enough. NPFAI.3 gets busy
with the sounds of a tenor marimba (tuned in Xhosa just intonation
in case you're interested), applying granular, algorithmic and subtractive
sound synthesis to end up with 13'30" of intriguing swoops and
squiggles. To what extent it triggers archetypal images and thought
patterns in accordance with the composer's Jungian intentions depends,
I guess, on how closely you listen. Palmos is slower, longer
(33'34" in fact) and easier to get lost in, weaving sounds sourced
from a Hammond organ, an oboe and a bandoneon into a rich and carefully
worked texture of great precision and beauty. But the best is saved
until last: Praxis commemorates what Voudouris describes
– alarmingly – as the Croatian genocide (the Croatians'
systematic victimization of Orthodox Christians during the recent
war), processing recordings of an Orthodox church service in Johannesburg
into no fewer than 556 "sound compartments" which combine
considerable complexity with real affective power. It's this kind
of mixture of serious science and raw emotion that we associate with
another famous Greek exile, Iannis Xenakis, and Praxis could
stand alongside any of Xenakis' electronic works with pride.–DW
Stephen
Scott
THE DEEP SPACES
New Albion
 You
can blather about Feldman, Lachenmann, Cage and Xenakis as much as
you like, but if you've never heard the Oregon-born composer Stephen
Scott's Vikings Of The Sunrise (New Albion) you've missed
out on one of the highpoints of contemporary music – we're talking
Desert Island Disc here. Like all Scott albums, Vikings features
his Bowed Piano Ensemble, a 10-member unit working the interior of
a grand piano with all kinds of objects, notably rosined sticks and
nylon threads, in intricate manual choreography to summon forth puzzling
spectral halos and unprecedented harmonies. In recent years, Scott
has added a new element to the music – the voice of Victoria
Hansen – which has shifted the focus of his compositions towards
the exploration of different kinds of melodic material. The Deep
Spaces is a song cycle based on the words and music of famous
poets and composers (including Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Liszt),
inspired by the natural beauty of Lake Como in Northern Italy. Scott's
settings for Hansen have a graceful savoir-faire, the delicate
arpeggios and percussive caresses centering on her never-invasive
timbre, the whole often sounding like the soundtrack to a fairy story,
especially when the Ensemble tears your heart out with those unpredictable
harmonic shifts and tangential bass lines so typical of Scott's work.
A gentle lullaby theme based on a two-note octave fragment recurs
throughout, but other facets of the composer's artistic vision are
present in "Evening On Como", with its slow cavalcade of
string resonance and contrapuntal auras. It's another splendid Stephen
Scott album, one that reveals more of its minute details with each
new listen. Time for the music establishment to finally recognize
this man's merits – and for me to give this its fifth consecutive
spin.–MR
John
Cage
ATLAS ECLIPTICALIS WITH WINTER MUSIC
Mode
 Originally
released as a 4LP set back in the early days of Mode Records, the
first two discs of this 3CD set document the two live performances
of Cage's 1961 orchestral work Atlas Eclipticalis played
simultaneously with 1957's Winter Music (in a version for
three pianos) recorded at Seattle's Cornish Institute on December
11th 1983. Disc three presents what the label rather grandly describes
as an "all-star" recording of all 86 instrumental parts
of Atlas Eclipticalis, (the first of its kind) recorded under
the composer's supervision at the John Cage At Wesleyan festival
in 1988 – the "stars" include the Arditti Quartet,
Alvin Lucier and Christian Wolff – and an version of Winter
Music directed by Stephen Drury, overdubbing four pianists five
times to get the required 20-piano result. As ever, the CDs are accompanied
by an erudite and comprehensive set of liner notes, including, amongst
other things, facsimiles of Cage's handwritten performing instructions
and essays on the works by the composer, Matthew Kocmieroski, Don
Gillespie and Stephen Drury.
While not questioning for a moment Gillespie and Drury's assertion
that Atlas was the major Cage work of the 60s (like
Concert for Piano and Orchestra was for the 50s and Sonatas
and Interludes for the 40s), the Seattle performances are still
a tough listen. One wonders whether it is really necessary to sit
down and concentrate furiously all the way through, or let the mind
wander ("if the mind wanders, let it", as the composer once
famously wrote). But even if you choose to spin this while you busy
yourself with other more mundane activities such as picking mushrooms
or consulting the I Ching, the occasional fortissimo
percussion crashes will soon shake you out of Ambient mode. The fuller
textures on the 1988 86-part version are more engrossing, though for
my money the late orchestral number pieces 103 and 108
are more satisfying. The 20-piano version of Winter Music
is much more fun, its multitracked jagged clusters and pointy staccatos
getting almost funky. Cage completists who missed out on the earlier
LP box set (me!) can rejoice; it's a thrill to see this sitting on
my shelves, even if I wonder how many times I'll return to it in the
years to come.–DW
NOISE
& ELECTRONICA
Damion
Romero
NEGATIVE
PACrec/P Tapes
Sixes
CURSED BEAST
Troniks/Enterruption
Roman
Torment
SKIN GAME
PACrec
The
Rita
THOUSANDS OF DEAD GODS
PACrec
Envenomist
ABYSSAL SIEGE
PACrec/Snip-Snip
Mike
Shiflet
ICHINOMIYA 5.3.6
Troniks/Little Enjoyer
If
you’ll allow the personal indulgence, before writing at any
length about noise I need to air a disclaimer: I’ve spent
a good portion of my past blithely dismissing noise as one-dimensional
and hollow, rather than revelling in its seemingly infinite possibilities.
Free noise from New Zealand was safe for me as its history and direct
relationship with free rock and improvisation placed it within contexts
I could grasp, whereas Japanese noise, for example, always seemed
like an indulgence. Realising that both are worthwhile was a simple
reality check only a blithering fool like me could take years to
realise, though in retrospect my problems with noise were more to
do with the ways people wrote about it or approached listening to
it. Anyway, here are some disconnected notes on a batch of releases
from one of the homes of American noise, the Troniks/PACrec stable,
perhaps the most reliable of noise labels in recent years.
 Damion
Romero’s Negative tends toward near-stasis, but if
there’s something rote about his choice of audio sources –
the disc opens with recording of a downpour, crossed with the urban
hum of cars burning up asphalt – Romero quickly detours outside
of the square. Though it’s easy to latch onto dronological
inquest as some easy access to the seeming-infinite, Romero never
uses drone as anything so simple as a resting point. For one thing,
he is too direct in his overloading of the sonic spectrum, pushing
the drone into the realm of metal-on-metal contact or the malevolent
purr of giant threshing machines and humming motors. Secondly, there
is elegance to Romero’s touch, with each of the thirty-one
minutes of Negative weighed down with an emotional tenor
that almost approaches dejection – certainly a melancholy
that is rarely evidenced in the field these days. Hive Mind and
Justin Meyers also share this trait, the imbuing of noise aesthetics
with emotional force. It’s powerful stuff.
 Sixes’
Cursed Beast’s birth pangs are documented well on
the disc’s sleeve, with equipment destroyed, teeth pulled,
and a resultant throat abscess all adding personal context to the
overarching gloom. These recordings are from 2002-2003, but you
couldn’t have guessed it – one of noise’s great
achievements is its suspension of chronology, and Cursed Beast
could easily be passed off as dating from 1980 or 2007. The seven
tracks are scored by machine clank that reverberates through a haze
of delays, with electronics and guitars re-connecting on the cutting-room
floor. The disc is all a haze of wires and burnt-out electronics,
everything tattered and cindered. If it is sinister, it’s
not trying to lapse into any clichéd sense of "foreboding":
the tenor of Cursed Beast is rather one of comfort in negation,
or perhaps the ultimate denial of the personal. Indeed, I prefer
to think of the vocals that do appear on this recording as being
channelled from an external broadcast, rather than performed by
the artists themselves.
 I
don’t think any noise "column" can consider itself
a serious proposition without covering one absolute ball-tearer
of a record, and Roman Torment’s Skin Game is that
beast, its punitive, speaker-shredding onslaught the very definition
of noise at its most reductively defined. Except the Roman Torment
duo of Evan Pacewicz and Jeff Witscher have a lot more going for
them than simplistic recourse to noise mores. Though they roll out
an endless blast of extremely rough-hewn noise, their pacing is
perfect, with each track clocking in around the five-minute mark,
allowing enough space for every cut to simultaneously be in your
face and yet develop slowly. One of noise’s best traits is
the great calm at the centre of its storm, and Roman Torment understand
that borderline-lackadaisical progress helps to bring out both the
immersive qualities and crystalline intricacies of walls of crunching
distortion. When a peal of feedback breaks cover midway through,
it almost feels like liberation. Almost.
 Skin
Game is forgiving compared to The Rita’s Thousands
Of Dead Gods, however. Sourcing raw material from great white
shark cage diving, The Rita drives his resources against the wall
and keeps them there for almost a full hour. As with Roman Torment,
the initial blast slowly scrapes away to reveal detail, but it’s
a different kind of detail to the musical micrographia of, say,
reductionism, though it may carry a similar impulse within its magnification
of a seemingly discrete moment. With Thousands Of Dead Gods,
the unrelenting nature of the composition becomes its legerdemain,
each tiny fleck of texture that peeps up from underneath the "raw
wall" of power electronics blown up into near-revelation by
the increased sensitivity of headphone listening. In other words,
it’s loud and brutal but somehow manages to contain multitudes
within its singularity.
 I
sometimes forget that noise is a broad church, a hangover I suspect
from the days in which music press reportage misread Japanoise,
for example, as being rigorously single-minded in its devotion to
obliteration. After the more dirtied soundworlds of figures like
Romero or Sixes, David Reed’s Evenomist synth project kicks
in with great surprise, with walls of analogue tonology that hang
in the air like a foul stench. Which is, of course, a great compliment.
Of all the discs reviewed here, Reed’s feels the most like
a throwback: he’s using a particular sound, heavy on the ectoplasmic,
proto-electronica resonance, that dates his kit, if not his composition.
It’s almost Kosmische, oddly enough, though those artists
rarely reached for the kind of "suffocating expanse" that
Reed inches toward here. Rather than being starbound with nowhere
left to go, Abyssal Siege is cold to touch.
 Mike
Shiflet’s Ichinomiya 5.3.6 is as good a place to
end as any, particularly as it’s quite anomalous within this
context. At least, it appears to be at first blush – and then
its insinuating computer buzz and standoffish personality reveals
itself just as forthrightly monomaniacal as The Rita first appears.
I’d not crossed paths with Shiflet’s work for some time
before hearing this, but I’m not surprised to find that some
of the busyness of earlier recordings, like his collaborations with
Joe Panzner, have given way to an interest in the plotting of incremental
variation across an almost-static horizon. Shiflet describes it
as an attempt to "replicate the mindset" the rural Japanese
village he lives in "inspires and (to) put the listener in
the same headspace", which bungles my desire to abstract Ichinomiya
5.3.6 away from those problematic readings of Japanese stillness,
zen, patina, wabi sabi etc. But it’s a gorgeous little disc,
demanding a parallel internal immobility of its listener, wherein
its gently paced play of cat’s-cradle high-pitch tones and
grounded hum does its work.–JD
Daniel
Menche
DELUGE & SUNDER
Beta-Lactam Ring
 Let's
all stop identifying Daniel Menche exclusively with noise. Most of
his past music already contained the seeds of imploded harmony, often
a sort of disguised chorale finding its nourishment amidst unreasonable
quantities of injurious distortion. In other releases, such as Garden
(Auscultare Research/Ground Fault) with Kiyoshi Mizutani, we
were led into states of highly charged standstill which projected
us back to the deeply-buried traces of a long lost innocence. With
Deluge & Sunder, Menche conjures up the healing qualities
of drone music with the same shamanic spirit – mixed with the
usual bad intentions – that have characterised the best records
in the history of the genre. Conceived between 2001 and 2003 (Deluge
was released on vinyl that year, while the sequel Sunder
has remained unheard until now), these four tracks avoid boisterous
affirmations in favour of growls and rumbles deriving from bowed /
scraped / violently struck piano strings in conjunction with harmoniums,
harmonicas and a lot of horns (to quote Menche, "it's a HORNY
record"). Forget brass sections though, think instead of a subterranean
purr, a superimposition of dissonant mantras acting as a sublime introduction
to the "emotional pragmatism" of static music with sense.
We've been told about La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and related pupils
for years, with most people accepting as a dogma everything they've
ever released. With Deluge & Sunder Daniel Menche skyrockets
to that level: this surpasses many albums that people still pay $400
to get a copy of, most of which aren't worth more than $25 in any
case. 66 minutes of goosebumps, serious emotions born from that "big
vibe" that in theory animates life, yet which many ignorantly
still consider to be mere noise.–MR
Jason
Kahn
FIELDS
Cut
 With
an almighty hiss and tone, Fields highlights Jason Kahn's
growing body of work concerned with field recordings and electronics.
It's a bold way to commence proceedings, a mediated soundscape that
brings to mind a train calling last passengers to an imaginary platform,
impatient hissing clouding the stereo field in layers of sonic steam.
As various tonal sections and pulses emerge, these visions evaporate
and in their place a more developed compositional framework takes
hold as spluttering synth-lines interconnect.
This relationship of uniting abstracted source materials to create
strong visual impressions through sound is the residual thematic for
the record. "4", with its gated bursts of noise and eventual
minimal drone, masks a wonderful hinted at but never fully revealed
field recording. Equally the distorted blusters of "6",
which screen various chirping birds and other creatures within a hazy
blur of microphone wind interference and adeptly deployed synth work,
suggest an environmental document corrupted by technology. Memory
dissolved, audio decayed and in the process a wonderful sense of character
is laid bare. Kahn's field recordings assume texture roles more often
than not – they bear little information beyond evidence of the
technologies used to record them (mic hiss and other miscellaneous
noises) and, as a result, connect perfectly with his measured synth
and electronics embellishments.–LE
Mecha/Orga
56:24
Absurd
 An
elderly gent glances sidelong at the camera with an air of what seems
to be mild suspicion, pipe in hand, walking stick hooked on the back
of an adjacent empty chair. The back cover shows the same space, viewed
from a different angle, devoid of people this time. Open up the gatefold
and it seems to be some sort of cafeteria, maybe in an old people's
home. Maybe not. Hard to figure out what's for lunch, too, but the
music accompanying it is straightforward enough. Or is it? "Drone"
is a word I'm trying to give up for Lent, but it's still the best
one available to describe Yiorgis Sakellarious's 56:24 – that's
both the title and the duration. Meta-drone, maybe. Nah, too vague
and pretentious. Mega-drone might do. It all starts off simply enough
with just one tone, which is gradually, almost imperceptibly joined
by others, thickening to form a huge, pulsing cluster, the kind of
complex simplicity Phill Niblock would love. La Monte Young once famously
spoke about drones you could get inside, which seems to imply
some effort on the part of the listener: concentrate enough on those
frequencies and you'll access their higher levels of spectral complexity.
With 56:24 you don't have a choice – it sucks you in,
wraps you tight and nearly stifles you. Bees echoed dark carbon
hums that dashed in nothing. Gnats fucked my ears and nostrils. Hit
my brain like hones and numbed to nothing. Shame it all fades
rather brutally at the end; a sudden plunge into black hole might
have been more fun than fade to grey. But maybe that's what the guy
in the photo's afraid of. Nice one, Yiorgis.–DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
|
|