From
our men in Amsterdam and Paris
It's
been a busy couple of weeks in Amsterdam for new music: starting with
the Karnatic Lab festival at the Badkuyp, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t
IJ and the Bimhuis, and ending with the Gaudeamus Competition for
contemporary music performers. Karnatic Lab is a relative newcomer
to the scene, compared to the venerable Gaudeamus organization, which
has tirelessly promoted Dutch music at home and abroad for decades.
The quality of the performers at this year's competition was particularly
high, and though I disagreed with the jury's final choices (I always
do), I had a great afternoon at the finals. First Prize went to Mathias
Reumert, a Danish percussionist who won for his performances (by heart)
of Donatoni's Omar II and Ferneyhough's Bone Alphabet
(unbelievable). On the other hand, his maraca performance in
Javier Alvarez' Temazcal, was more like a rock star routine,
though undeniably virtuosic. Second Prize went to the Duo Disecheis,
a sax and piano duo from Italy, which I found puzzling, since their
neoclassical repertoire was hardly of the modernist caliber of the
other contestants, though they did create a phenomenal environment.
Perhaps it was an easy choice, compared to the two most brilliant
players: Finnish accordionist Niko Kumpuvaara, who won Third Prize,
and recorder virtuoso Julien Feltrin who won Fourth. Kumpuvaara, with
shaven head and the ungainly weight of the accordion in his arms,
played with fanaticism in the intensely sad soundscape of Berio's
Sequenza XIII and Ere Lievonen's gritty, excellent Marcia
Macabre, a world premiere that aggressively exploited the instrument's
range. Feltrin was breathtaking, revealing a good sense of comedy
in Moritz Eggert's Ausser Atem and transforming the otherwise
pristine and chaste sound of the recorder in Kage, by Roderik
de Man, into a memorable journey (he was the only contestant to get
a curtain call). These were musicians' musicians, individuals with
depth of soul and breadth of expression, not to mention incredible
technique, and everyone present had strong opinions about them, ranging
from the passionately enthusiastic to the angrily critical. But, as
often happens, competitions award non-controversial showiness.
Another
highlight this month was the 57th (!) Karnatic Lab concert, on April 10th. Four
different groups played on this eclectic concert, and the one I fell
for instantly was Trio Scordatura. Their oddball stage presence could
be best described as charmingly relaxed. Scordatura excels in microtonal
music; Elisabeth Smalt wielded two violas, one conventional, but often
de-tuned (actually re-tuned to different scales, to be precise),
the other a replica of a Harry Partch Adapted Viola with a longer
neck marked in non-European increments. Alfrun Schmid provided ethereal
/ eerie vocals, and Bob Gilmore (Partch biographer, fervent microtonalist
and occasional contributor to PT – see his fine interview last
month with Phill Niblock)
crafted the programming and added backup on synth. Each piece flowed
into the next in a brilliant and all-too-uncommon example of musical
synergy. Alvin Lucier's amplified Voice was almost painfully
strident, and I cowered in my seat as Schmid shifted her pitch between
two sinewaves. The resulting beats as she modulated her voice were
absolutely mesmerizing. James Tenney's trio, Harmonium #1 seemed
to depart from the same thematic material. Horatiu Radulescu's
Intimate Rituals XI is the 11th in a series of pieces derived
from two "sound icons", i.e. pianos in alternate tuning,
turned on their sides, and strummed. The minuscule Badkuyp is far
too small a venue for even one grand piano, so this was played on
tape, while Smalt's viola (also retuned) created a tight dialog with
the electronic background. The program, evolving rapidly now, after
17 minutes of the almost static Radulescu, moved to François-Bernard
Mâche's Kubatum, a supposedly ancient love song, in which
the synthesis's marimba sound unfortunately did not shine. But it
was the perfect lead-in to A History of Cowboys, by Paul
Swoger-Ruston, three songs to texts by those original horsemen of
American solitude, Emerson and Bukowski. The upbeat performance of
this quirky trio was a delightful close to their show.
The Karnatic Lab Festival was also eclectic, but the emphasis on Heavy
Metal music at their big show in the Muziekgebouw was baffling. Director
and composer Ned McGowan's gloriously dense transcriptions of Swedish
thrash kings Meshuggah for his Hexnut ensemble are beyond reproach,
but remain, I think, novelties in the larger scheme of things. The
audience for new music, even in Holland, is limited, and I doubt it
includes many Metal fans at all. They certainly wouldn't be caught
dead in the classically oriented, elite, high-culture Muziekgebouw.
Hexnut will probably need to find a different direction. Or get some
serious tattoos. One possible clue to the ensemble's promising future was in the ten-minute ensemble premiere of Second City, with texts from the bible ("A time to be born...") and a storyline written by local expat Robert Glick, seductively narrated by vocal artist Stephie Buttrich, in her best film-noir style. —GL
Though
the Paris Transatlantic mailbox hasn't exactly been overflowing with
letters of complaint about the relative lack of new interviews (still
by far our most popular feature, if those site stats are to be believed),
a few punters have written in to wonder who's going to be featured
next. You'll be pleased to learn then that there are several in the
pipeline. Two lengthy conversations with Tom Johnson have yielded
a huge amount of material, which I'm still working through in close
consultation with the composer – though I've had to slow down
somewhat this past month due to a most unwelcome bout of tendinitis,
which has made transcribing and editing even more agonising than it
usually is – and there's also a lively 80-minute conversation
with one of my percussion heroes, Gino Robair, waiting to be transcribed.
In addition to this, last year's huge email exchange with Rafael Toral
will eventually be reconfigured into a coherent interview (and extended
with some recent face-to-face dialogue), and I'm currently enjoying
an ongoing if slow exchange of mails with Akira Rabelais and looking
forward to a lengthy chat soon with Philip Samartzis, who's currently
resident in Paris, I'm delighted to report. Meanwhile, down in Nantes,
new recruit to PT ranks, Will Guthrie – best known no doubt
for his outstanding electronic percussion work and tireless championship
of new music from down under via his Antboy operation – is working
on an interview with one of his (and my) great heroes, Roscoe Mitchell.
So there's plenty to look forward to. Meanwhile, our man in Ronda,
John Gill has come up trumps this month (and saved my poor aching,
guilt-stricken lower right arm in the process) with his splendid career
overview / interview with Steven Brown and Blaine Reininger, aka Tuxedomoon.
Paris-based punters might also like to know that the Tuxies will be
beaming in to appear at La Cigale this autumn (more news as and when).-DW
How
many organs must a man have?
 After
some dickering on the phone and by email, I finally get the Orgelpark
on the phone. I've been hearing rumors about this brand-spanking-new
venue, their plans to do hundreds of concerts, and a goal of bringing
the image of the remote, inaccessible pipe organ into the 21st century.
On the phone, the director doesn't have much time for me, and makes
it clear in a mixture of Dutch and English that I will have to share
an interview with three other journalists. Later, I call him back,
and he mistakes me for a critic from a gay paper in London. This is
going nowhere fast, so I opt instead for hearing a concert, figuring
I can grab his ear for a quick chat during intermission. On a typically
grim Dutch rainy night (I swear it was extra wet and extra dark that
night), I trek over to the Parkkerk, which is on the edge of the Vondel
Park.
Amsterdam is known for its grungy new music venues. Peeling paint,
crumbling ceilings, mismatched chairs, lovingly neglected 1970's wallpaper,
and found objects are almost a badge of honor for most venues around
town, whether it's alt.rock or wired didgeridoo and live amplified
crickets. Imagine then my surprise to arrive at the ultra-chic and
frankly sanitized new Orgelpark, Amsterdam's newest venue (since January
20th) featuring three (soon to be four) organs, two grand pianos and
a harmonium. The venue is as slick and staid as an art museum, complete
with cute ushers in color-coordinated outfits to match the lighting
fixtures. Chic, yes. Hip, no.
A bell rings for the concert, and we leave the pristine bar, which
looks like something out of an Milan furniture showroom, climb the
stairs, and marvel at the high vaulted ceiling and perfect acoustic
of the concert hall. Big as they are, the organs actually seem small
in the vastness of the space. The interior of the building is lovingly
restored in a Victorian color scheme of pastels, varnished woods,
greens and pinks, elegant lighting. Composers' names are illuminated
on the balcony railings overhead. Reading them absent-mindedly, I
do a sudden double-take, as instead of the Dead White Men listed (for
example) on the Concertgebouw friezes, the Orgelpark features avantgardists
Cage, Ligeti, Messiaen (granted, Dead White guys too) and a host of
other organ innovators – Dupré, Eben, Straube, Lemare,
Distler – who don't normally get their names inscribed on walls.
The director may be hard to talk to, but I like his sense of humor,
and the atmosphere is friendly as he welcomes us all to the concert.
There's chatting amongst the audience – it's like going to the
Schuberts' for a spot of chamber music. Then the lights dim, and the
Sauer organ thunders out. It's a marvelous performance, and all too
short. We watch silent films from movie magician (literally: he started
his career as an illusionist) Georges Méliès, whose
"Voyage à travers l'impossible" turns out to be one
of the first science fiction films ever. All of us in the audience
are entranced at the joyous anarchy and home-made animation, not to
mention the mellifluous sound of two different organs (not at the
same time, I should add), delightfully played by Joost Langeveld,
who has a real flair for this film music.
 The
Parkkerk is so perfectly restored that it's hard to imagine what it
was like ten years ago: largely abandoned, and with no anticipated
future, it served as a rehearsal space for dance groups and community
events. Herman Roering, a painter, and the brother of the former organist
Johan Roering, started a one-man campaign to save the organ which
his brother had performed on at the Parkkerk for many years. The church
itself was in terrible shape, with boarded-up windows and the damage
from woodworm the only holy thing about it. The organ itself was totally
unplayable. If it was going to be restored, and compete with Holland's
already rich offering of organs and churches, a visionary financial
backer would be needed. Enter the Utopa Foundation.
Sometimes having a large budget can be a good thing, and clearly funding
is absolutely not an issue for the new Orgelpark. During intermission,
I finally get my interview with the Foundation's director. He doesn't
want to talk about money, but he certainly has easy access to it,
for the entire setting is luxurious, if understated. He asks to remain
as anonymous as possible so I'll just note that this is not his first
large artistic project, and that he has a proven track record of (slightly
commercial) artistic patronage on a grand scale. His past as a successful
businessman might make him seem out of place in the new music world,
but it certainly serves him well in terms of making this utopian project
a solid success. The goal of producing 125 concerts a year,
which would bankrupt most venues, is obviously not a problem. And
the lack of traditional Amsterdam fuzziness and peeling wallpaper
should not deter audiences, because the acoustic and the music and
the artistic direction are terrific. The programming itself is a fun
and eccentric mix: jazz one night, improv the next, followed by a
series of sappy late 19th century organ classics, then Cage and Ives
another night, and of course periodic period film evenings which delve
back into visions of the early 20th century. Go to: www.orgelpark.nl–GL
Anthony
Braxton
9 COMPOSITIONS (IRIDIUM) 2006
Firehouse 12
 After
disbanding the iconic Braxton/Crispell/Dresser/Hemingway quartet in
the early 1990s, Anthony Braxton pursued multiple paths, creating
a massive body of standards interpretations (with the leader often
at the piano rather than playing saxophone) and embarking on unwieldy
projects like the Trillium opera cycle. But his major preoccupation
has been the Ghost Trance Music series of compositions, a development
that still challenges and perplexes even dedicated Braxtonophiles.
The ensembles involved in GTM performances are usually dominated by
clusters of horns, and sometimes dispense with a rhythm section entirely.
The central feature of the early GTM pieces is a monotonous windup-toy
loop of eighth notes varied only by the occasional rhythmic hiccup;
later pieces have the same lockstep quality but become increasingly
venturesome in terms of rhythm and choice of pitches. In the course
of a performance, this melodic continuum is at length ruptured by
intrusions of other compositions or of free improvisation, though
the lockstep inexorably resurfaces afterwards. The results sometimes
– as on the Delmark album Four Compositions (Quartet) 2000
– sound quite similar to the "pulse track" structures
of the 1980s, but can also sound completely cracked, as when singer
Lauren Newton spends the majority of Composition 192 (Leo)
reciting the alphabet.
And now it's apparently all over. With this box set Braxton says farewell
to Ghost Trance Music (though he's already got more projects in the
wings – the equally mysteriously named "Falling River Musics"
and "Diamond Curtain Wall Musics"). In March 2006, he had
the unprecedented opportunity to present the final series of Ghost
Trance compositions over an extended residency at one of New York's
premier jazz clubs, the Iridium. Braxton's ensembles have long been
a key training ground for younger musicians, and the Iridium "12+1tet"
is mostly made up of his students (or perhaps one could take the hint
of Last Supper symbolism and call them "disciples"), as
well as two more senior players, Nicole Mitchell and Jay Rozen. The
nine CDs in this collection document everything played during the
four nights of performances, and come with a 56-page booklet containing
a thoughtful overview by Braxtonologist Jonathan Piper as well as
commentaries by many of the musicians (one misses the assiduous bookkeeping
of a Graham Lock, though: some guidance as to the subsidiary compositions
involved in these dense collages would have been helpful, and not
hard to assemble, given that the backstage footage shows the musicians
keeping score of composition numbers on a tally-sheet).
The cherry on top is the tenth disc, a DVD with a documentary feature
mingling clips from the performances and excerpts from a talk by Braxton; it also includes a video of the entire performance of Composition
358. The sum total is, needless to say, a luxury item that will
set off waves of covetousness in the heart of any Braxton follower
– and perhaps a certain amount of hesitancy as well, since,
aside from the price tag, the prospect of listening to and absorbing
ten hours' worth of this endlessly demanding music is daunting in
the extreme. (Those who are less committed or well-heeled
can download the CDs individually from the Firehouse 12 website or
eMusic, but the DVD is sadly only available in the box set.)
Braxton's musical strategies are familiar enough by now: the consecutive
or simultaneous collaging-together of multiple compositions, the "multi-hierarchical"
approach to the ensemble which permits it to break up into multiple
zones of activity (sometimes totally independent, sometimes under
the leadership of various player/conductors), the use of indefinitely
long notated passages as rhythmic/melodic "tracks". As always
with Braxton, each move forward in his musical career involves recapitulation
of everything that he's done before: whereas some musicians progress
by discarding their old selves and their old work, Braxton works by
accretion, quite literally – handing out enormous stacks of
music from his 40-year back-catalogue to the musicians for them to
draw on during performance. Despite this sense of familiar procedures
at work, though, there are parts of this set that suggest
new developments in Braxtonville, or at least reveal sides of his
work I'd not heard so clearly before. A full account of the nine CDs
is impossible, short of delaying this review until 2008;
I'll instead confine my remarks to the final performance, Composition
358 (dedicated to the poet/novelist Nathaniel Mackey). Aside
from the attractions of the double audio/visual presentation, this
is also in my view the set's strongest performance – though
not its most typical, perhaps.
As with many GTM performances, the ensemble is heavy on wind instruments,
mostly high-pitched ones, and uses guitar rather than piano –
though Mary Halvorson's wry, warm contributions are markedly different
from skronky John Shiurba or fast-fingered Kevin O'Neil. At centre
stage is an empty chair: its sole occupant is an hourglass –
like a parody "conductor" or "timekeeper" –
which measures out its length of each set. Ranged around the glass
is an inner circle. Stage right, Braxton and saxophonist James Fei,
a GTM veteran by now – indeed, his playing is so much in the
master's vein that it can be hard to tell them apart, especially when
both play soprano together like a demented virtual aulos. Stage left,
a trio led by cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, featuring alto/sopranino
player Steve Lehman (the cool head in this mix) and saxophonist/clarinettist
Andrew Raffo Dewar. In this multi-hierarchy, Braxton and Bynum are
the two main leaders; one pleasure of the DVD is seeing them marshal
the troops via hand-signals or messages written on small dry-wipe
boards. The outer circle has three clumps of players. Stage right,
behind Braxton, is the superbly colourful trio of bassoonist Sara
Schoenbeck, flautist and occasional vocalist Nicole Mitchell and violinist/violist
Jessica Pavone. (Watch out for Schoenbeck on the DVD, lunging around
like she's wailing on tenor sax.) Stage left, behind Bynum, is the
pocket-sized brass section of trombonist Raut Regev and tuba player
Jay Rozen. At the back of the stage are bassist Carl Testa and drummer/percussionist
Aaron Siegel, who often follows the music's upwards drift towards
light timbres and high pitches by working on vibes. Lastly, on the
extreme edge of the ensemble, is guitarist Mary Halvorson – largely
out of camera range, though her contributions still loom large.
The piece opens with the ensemble plunging as usual into the GTM note-tickertape.
More than any other Braxton project I know of, the Iridium edition
of GTM reveals his tendency to work towards density of event while
avoiding anything like harmonic thinking: terms like "dissonance"
or "consonance" are basically irrelevant. Or, rather, it's
as if entire compositions are the harmonic units – as if, say,
Composition 159 were one "chord", which can be
juxtaposed or sequenced with other compositions/chords. The GTM track
and other collaged-in compositions are presented as stark lines stated
in unison or at fixed intervals by the ensemble – rather like
a haywire, high-pitched chant (and Braxton does in fact mention his
interest in Gregorian chant in the documentary). Composition 358
is one of a new class of GTM that Braxton dubs "Accelerator
Whip", and it lacks the regimented pulse of the earliest GTM:
here, the score is so generously strewn with grace notes and proportional
groupings of notes (17:2, 13:2, &c) that any sense of steady pulse
disappears, especially since the ensembles are decidedly messy in
the absence of a central conductor. The score also contains "freeze
frames", moments where players may optionally hover over a single
note or move off into some other territory. On some other discs of
the set, the freeze frames rapidly divert the ensemble away from the
central GTM track; one unusual feature of Composition 358, on the other hand,
is that the 12+1tet stays with the GTM track for a full 14 minutes,
continually reshaping it as players drop in and out or move off. At
one point Braxton's sopranino slithers out of the ensemble momentarily,
for instance; a little later, Siegel plunks cacophonously away on
vibes at a freeze-framed note.
 Music
journalist Steve Smith, in his comments in the booklet (extracted
from his Night after Night blog, as is the photo opposite) touches
on a perennial theme of the avant-garde, the idea of art as a model
for an ideal community: "Braxton's Accelerated Ghost Trance Music
is less a compositional strategy, and more a utopian model for an
ideal democracy. There are rules to follow, laws to abide, and these
are largely controlled by the ruler of the clan. But those laws are
more guidelines than strictures; if followed properly, the result
affords complete individual freedom within a well-defined societal
structure that hums along quite musically." I suspect this paradoxical notion is very close to what Braxton intends, and for all its attractions
as an idea it suggests how disconcertingly abstract the music can
be: one often registers not so much the actual notes or textures but
the sheer fact of connections being made – that player A is
right now working with player B on composition C, while players D
and E ignore them in order to improvise freely and player F lays out.
Such passages seem to me among the least successful on these discs.
Composition 358, on the other hand, is the disc that most
consistently points to a new development, or emphasis, in Braxton's
music – a new way of making use of that massive back-catalogue, as the raw materials for
extended, collectively
improvised orchestration. At 6'20",
for instance, half the ensemble drops out and there's an extended
passage which demonstrates GTM at its best, as the 12+1tet essays
a spontaneous multi-part orchestration, paying great attention to
sound-colour and pacing. As the saxes and a few accomplices maintain
the GTM track, other players add new touches: a forceful bagpipe drone
from the brass; Bynum's sardonically excitable bursts of cornet; hovering
Gil Evans clouds of sound from flute, bassoon, trombone and tuba;
the vibes' odd combination of harsh attack and gently shimmering sustain;
little rootlets of melody from the guitar running beneath all the
aboveground activity. A passage around the 10-minute mark stumbles
upon a kind of Cagean swing-time, as two forcefully rhythmic but unsynchronized
GTM tracks (one accelerator whip, one old-skool GTM) bounce off each
other while Siegel strafes the proceedings from the drum-kit. Many
more such passages could be singled out: my favourites include the
extended passage of jingling, clanging Sun Ra exotica that crops up
just after the original GTM dies down; a throbbing Daliesque meltdown
that suddenly yields up a clunky dub rhythm; a quiet morse-code passage
which Steve Lehman all on his own pushes towards a cool, seesawing
swing à la Greg Osby; and a moment right at the end when, just
as the music clouds over with heavy, sustained chords, Schoenbeck
and Halvorson lock eyes across the stage and unleash handfuls of playful,
downwards-tumbling lines.
It's obviously too early to offer anything approaching a definitive
judgment on this set. Committed Braxtonites will already have purchased
it and been duly delighted. Those less committed but sympathetic –
in which camp I'd put myself – will find it by turns fascinating,
baffling, exasperating and exciting. As often with Braxton's more
ambitious projects, question-marks remain over how well the music's
potential is actually realized – despite the evident enthusiasm
of the 12+1tet and their immersion in his music and vision, the results
are sometimes ragged and out-of-focus. But anyone seriously interested
in his music should give it a listen, even if only in the form of
individual downloads of a few CDs. A last note: one of the most heartening
things about the set is how well Braxton is playing – a welcome
turn of events after the worryingly out-of-puff soprano and sopranino
playing on the two Leo Standards (Quartet) 2003 outings.
Indeed, one major reason for my fondness for Composition 358
is Braxton's superb work throughout, especially his excoriating unaccompanied
sopranino solo near the piece's end.–ND
Gunnar
Lindquist G.L. Unit
ORANGUTANG!
EMI-Odeon E062-34163
 Scandinavia's
improvised music scene benefited from early visits by American free
jazzmen: Cecil Taylor, the New York Contemporary Five, Albert Ayler
and Ornette Coleman all made trips to the area between 1962 and 1965.
Don Cherry was a particularly frequent visitor and eventually settled
there for a longer spell, bringing his scattershot suites of North
African and South Central LA juju to Copenhagen, Helsinki and Stockholm
in 1962-63 with Sonny Rollins and the New York Contemporary Five and
again with Albert Ayler in 1964. Ayler's influence on Scandinavian
saxophonists is well documented (indeed, Swedish reedman Bengt Nordstrom
released Ayler's 1962 baby steps on his Bird Notes label). But if
Ayler's wide-vibrato approach to pure sound, in concert with the pulsing
waves of drummer Sunny Murray, was the basis for what came out of
the horns of the Swedish jazz vanguard, Cherry's kitchen-sink suites
were what gave rise to their form, and to a unique concept of pan-musical
brotherhood that characterized Stockholm's jazz scene for years to
come.
At
the tail end of the '60s, Cherry convened improvisational workshops
at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, bringing together both old guard and
young musicians for classes that often resulted in performances of
his massive "Togetherness" suites. Movement Incorporated
(Anagram), recorded at one of these workshops in 1967, brought
Cherry and regular trombonist Brian Trentham (a foil in his short-lived
quartet with Cameron Brown and Ed Blackwell) together with Turkish
trumpeter Maffy Falay and drummer Okay Temiz, saxophonists Nordstrom,
Bernt Rosengren and Tommy Koverhult, bassist Törbjorn Hultcrantz,
and drummer Leif Wennerström for over an hour's worth of ebb
and flow through themes from the transistor radio of Cherry's creative
mind. In addition to Stockholm's free jazzmen, the geodesic dome at
the Moderna Museet also hosted music by Pandit Pran Nath, Gong, Dollar
Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) and Bo Anders Persson (of Pärson Sound,
Trad Gras och Stenar and Harvester). Needless to say, an extraordinarily
fertile scene of cross-pollination existed in late '60s Sweden.
Saxophonist
Gunnar Lindquist (1937-2003) was also a record producer, whose name
appears in the credits of sessions by leaders as diverse as Lars Gullin
and Eje Thelin. Lindquist convened his own version of Movement
Incorporated in 1969-70, bringing together a 17-to-23-piece orchestra
for Orangutang!, an homage to the life-exploring forces of
Don Cherry's music. Each side of Orangutang! is a suite,
sometimes thematically indebted to "Togetherness" but with
a collective mind all its own. Many of the usual suspects in late
'60s Stockholm jazz make appearances here – Bengt Berger, Nordstrom,
Rosengren, Koverhult, Sune Spångberg, Falay, Sven-Åke
Johanssen and guitarist Kjell Norlén are among the cast. Lindquist
brought a varied arsenal to the proceedings himself, including tenor,
flutes (bamboo and metal), piano, miniature metal clarinet and percussion,
though his position is more that of a ringleader than a featured soloist
– the music an expression of what these men have learned, rather
than of Lindquist's compositional mind (though all music is credited
to him).
The
1969 recording of "Waves – Experience X – Orangutang"
makes up the first side, the music itself recorded live at Stockholmsterassen.
Though derived from Cherry's teachings, there are some fundamental
differences between works like Movement Incorporated and
the music of the G.L. Unit. Cherry's music is, of course, full of
signposts – thematic and rhythmic elements that tie together
what might otherwise be ragtag, interchangeable or whimsical. "Togetherness"
encompassed a broad range of musical cultures – North Africa,
India, Europe and America – and it was Cherry's personality
that acted as an umbrella. Lindquist's suite lacks obvious signposts
or personality; the emphasis is placed on collective experience, and
any themes that might develop are an organic outgrowth of freedom.
To a degree this was true of Cherry's music, too, but he always remained
the one-man umbrella over it all. Where a call from trumpets might
signal the "Complete Communion" theme and guide the ensuing
improvisation, the only thing demarcating the "movements"
on this date is an altered-speed soundtrack of seagulls, barking dogs
and incoming tide, probably taped by Lindquist himself.
Heralded
by chirpy field recordings that are later mimicked by clarinets, flutes
and soprano saxophone, "Waves" lets an easy swing grow out
of heaps of dissonance, reveling in the incongruity of straight-time
rhythm, chordal comping and continuous commentary from flutes, tambourines,
cello, and reeds. Lindquist's post-Coltrane tenor has a burnished
keening sound, providing a deep gutbucket bottom to what might otherwise
be a top-heavy, high-pitched ensemble. Segments seem like snapshots
from a larger whole, snippets of unison lines from trumpeters Peter
Hennix and Torsten Eckerman ringing bell-clear while a chorus of yells
and a rhythm section trying to find its footing tug melody into the
morass. Norlén and pianist Allan Wajda lean towards post-bop,
in the face of folksong skronk from Nordstrom's alto and bassists
and drummers following the saxophonists' cue. A brief singsong theme
and a Cherry-esque fragment emerge only to be buried by seashore sounds.
The title track is the most massive of the set, Lindquist doling out
repetitious tenor honks to fill out the ensemble as Spångberg
thrashes around.
Recorded
in March 1970 at the EMI studios, "Freedom – Equality –
Brotherhood" is more obviously beholden to Cherry's thematic
references, full of gleeful martial statements and folksy lilt and
making its yawp obvious from the first few bars. The full 23-piece
orchestra, including five percussionists and three cellists (one doubling
on bass), is employed for maximum weight. After the initial group
statement, the cellos take the reins in a lengthy tug-of-war interlude,
an almost comically languid pas-de-trois that shatters any momentum
the theme might have had. The featured tenor soloist is probably Rosengren,
taking off with gruff and worried phrases over a fierce percussive
conversation that only gets denser as Falay's bebop-inflected Cherry-isms
take center stage. The entire ensemble briefly comes together, Lindquist
blowing frantically over the four drummers, tempos fast as water through
the floodgates – until the piece stops on a dime, a powerful
finality to music so obviously made from life.
The
G.L. Unit record – which featured a raucous cover drawing of
an enraged ape – went out of print almost immediately and is
one of the scarcer titles in the Swedish jazz canon; indeed, as far
as this writer knows, it's Lindquist's only instrumental appearance
on record. It has languished in the EMI vaults since its initial release.
There was a brief campaign to reissue Orangutang! as part
of the Unheard Music Series; sadly, rights could not be secured and
as of now, the tapes remain vaulted. Let's hope that Lindquist's music
and his legacy can see the light of day in the near future.–CA
[Thanks to Mats Gustafsson for help in assembling this article.]
i
and e Festival
Trinity
College Printing House and Unitarian Church, Dublin.
30th March - 1st April
If you compiled
a list of countries considered as hotbeds of experimental musical
activity, you could be forgiven for not including Ireland, but the
small but perfectly formed i and e Festival curated by Dublin-based
musicians David Lacey and Paul Vogel has quietly built a reputation
over the past three years for showcasing the blossoming Irish scene
and attracting some of the biggest names in contemporary improvisation.
The most recent edition of the festival took place in Dublin at the
end of March, most of the music being performed in the Trinity College
Printing House, a long, narrow, awkwardly shaped room with limited
lighting possibilities but remarkably good acoustics.
It
opened with the Irish duo of Judith Ring on laptop and mixer and Fergus
Kelly on his extraordinary invented instruments, on this occasion
a large free-standing metallic sculpture that he bolted together Meccano-like
before the show. Their music was underpinned by a series of Industrial
drones (mostly from Kelly), over which each musician sprinkled fragments
of sonic leftovers, Ring's veering more towards laptop glitchery,
Kelly's based around the bowing and scraping of metal. Halfway through
the drones gave way to some more fractured interplay between the pair
before returning towards the end. Not perhaps the most groundbreaking
of performances, but its evolving detail held my attention throughout,
and it proved a pleasing opener to proceedings.
 There
then followed a solo set from percussionist Will Guthrie (photo, left),
who hails from Australia but is now based in France. His table of
bric-a-brac looked more like a car boot sale than any traditional
percussion set-up; his music likewise is made up of small parts, clatter
and chatter filtered through contact mics and fed into a mixer. In
live performance, the fraught kinetic energy of the sound he makes
becomes visible, and the mass of rhythmic structures that can be heard
on his recordings makes more sense. Guthrie is one of the most original
and exciting musicians working in this field right now, and one of
very few I prefer to hear play solo rather than with other musicians.
His set in Dublin evolved from simple agitated metallic rattles and
radio interference into a tense, brooding swarm of sound. Building
in volume yet exuding a nervous fragility, the delicately vulnerable
music fell apart halfway through the (characteristically) short set,
dropping into silence briefly before assembling a powerful revolving
structure of chimes and scrapes out of the quietness until it eventually
slipped away to a conclusion. Powerful stuff indeed.
Not to be outdone in the tension-filled solo stakes, Joe Colley's set
was driven by a raw emotive power that saw him writhing around in
his seat as if it was an electric chair, eyes clamped shut, living
and breathing the music almost as an extension of the broken electronics
and mixing board in front of him. Beginning with a rapidly pulsing
hammering into which he wove screeching strands of electronic squall,
his music was aggressively urgent, yet never veered into a wall of
noise. The set discharged a writhing muscularity that twisted about
as much as Colley himself. It was a remarkable performance, very much
enhanced by the visual aspect of watching a musician connect deeply
with his work in a manner not normally so apparent in this area of
music.
By the last set of the evening exhaustion had begun to take hold of
me, but this slightly dazed state of mind seemed to work in my favour
for the performance by Andrea Neumann and Wade Matthews. Matthews,
an American ex-pat now resident in Madrid, worked mainly with soft
textural laptop hisses and fizzes, balanced and complemented by the
sensitivity of Neumann's inside-piano work. Her gentle chimes, short
whirring drones and warm open strings added colour to Matthews'
architectural plan, and the occasional external sounds creeping into
the room, notably a passing ambulance siren, seemed particularly poignant
and appropriate. The interplay between the two musicians was subtle,
and the music was soft and sensually confident, pulling the listeners
into its quiet forms. It made for a perfect close to a night of very
strong music, offsetting the visceral power of the previous sets beautifully -
a credit to Lacey and Vogel's masterful programming, which was a feature
of the festival.
 The
next day found us back in the same room for two lunchtime performances.
An unfortunate accident involving a jug of water and Lee Patterson's
intricate table of equipment meant a slight change to the schedule,
and Andrea Neumann (photo, right) played again, this time in a duo
with AMM master pianist John Tilbury. It was the first time the two
had played together, the exposed insides of Neumann's piano meeting
the traditional familiarity of Tilbury's baby grand in a quite wonderful
manner. The music they produced was once more quiet, with Neumann
staying away from any extended drones, preferring to accompany Tilbury's
playing with carefully chosen pitches and textures - only contributing
when it felt right to do so, often leaving her playing partner to
play alone, often leaving the room silent. Not since Duos for
Doris have I heard Tilbury matched so well in an improvised setting.
The sensitivity of Neumann's playing drew the best from the great
pianist, matching his Feldmanesque passages with abrasive dryness,
his percussive assaults on the inside of the piano answered by Neumann's
restrained use of a hand-held fan against the frame of her instrument.
A third of the way into the set one very quiet passage involved both
musicians rubbing the innards of their instruments with dowel rods,
neither looking up to realise they were doing the same thing, until
Tilbury introduced an arpeggio flourish that seemed crashingly loud
in context, but probably wasn't. This was one of the most stunning
live performances I've witnessed in a good few years. Glorious music.
Following a set of such majesty was never going to be easy, and the
uncertainty surrounding Lee Patterson's freshly blow-dried equipment
didn't help his trio with Paul Vogel and Wade Matthews. Vogel proved
to be the wild card, his understated laptop work that had marked previous
festivals replaced by a manipulation of raw feedback and a monolithic
old synthesiser, with his clarinet remaining untouched on a shelf
behind the musicians. He was dressed in what appeared to be the traditional
attire of a refuse collector, a dirty red body warmer that had certainly
seen better days. Not a fashion statement but a musical one as it
turned out, as a contact mic scrunched into a pocket revealed its
acoustic properties. His search for unusual sound sources went further
as he pressed a mic against his heart to bring a surprisingly alien
sounding rhythm to the proceedings, and later a large glass vase was
held over an upturned speaker to manually shape the feedback spilling
from it. Matthews' contribution consisted mainly of flute and saxophone
interventions, spluttering abstractions and gravelly drones, all played
with a big smile, his clear enjoyment of playing a joy to behold.
Patterson provided a quiet undercurrent to it all, with detailed layers
of intricate sounds generated mainly from field recordings and small
wire structures played with an e-Bow. It was a fascinating concoction
of sounds pulled together from all kinds of sources and thrown into
a steaming cauldron of possibility. The music may have lacked some
coherence following the sparse precision of what had preceded it,
but it was highly enjoyable all the same.
A
few hours later we reconvened at the Printing House for four more
evening sets. David Lacey's percussion and electronics made their
first (and sadly only) appearance of the festival in a trio with Will
Guthrie and long-term collaborator Vogel. Much of Lacey's contribution
focussed around high pitched sinewaves and harsh sheets of gritty
dissonance conjured from agitated metal surfaces. Vogel's ageing synth
added different textures along with his contact-miked clothing,
and early in the set even a heavily treated recording of his dog's
stomach rumbling (!). Guthrie's busy percussive chatter filled the
gaps left in the music, keeping our ears busy trying to pin down what
they were hearing. This was challenging, amorphous music sculpted
out of ugly sounds, a troubled sonic landscape that continuously turned
itself inside out in search of where to go next. The sound of inventive
thoughtful musicians intent on constant exploration.
There followed a solo performance from Irish saxophonist Sean Óg.
In complete contrast to the music that came before, he played three
short pieces on different instruments, each resembling a passionate,
soulful John Butcher, shifting from bleak mournful passages to jagged
skronky free jazz, often falling in and out of extended techniques.
Not my usual cup of tea but in context a surprisingly welcome interlude
of direct human expression.
Next up was a solo performance by the water-challenged Patterson,
whose quiet, contemplative set was made up of carefully layered field
recordings and sounds generated live from small, closely miked objects.
Recordings of pond life began the piece, drifting throughout the hushed
room until subsumed by a low humming drone, apparently a recording
of the fan in Patterson's oven back home. Small glass bottles filled
with hot water were left to cool with contact mics capturing the tiny
sounds of their contractions, which were then magnified into the room.
But later in the set Patterson's water-damaged equipment began to
play up, and a series of loud bursts of electronic static interrupting
the filigree delicacy of the music every time he touched his mixer
left him clearly perplexed. He attempted to incorporate this unwanted
intrusion into the music, but without much success. A finely crafted
blend of sound from one of the UK's most interesting musicians had
its frailty cruelly exposed.
 The
Saturday evening ended with what at first seemed a bizarre combination
of Joe Colley and French field recordist and sound artist Eric La
Casa (photo, left). For the first time in the festival the lights
were turned off, with the faces of the musicians lit by La Casa's
laptop and a single candle flickering between them. If at first this
seemed just an extension of the Colley's dramatic onstage persona,
it became quickly apparent that the candle played a part in the music,
as Colley blew on it from time to time, a photosensitive sensor translating
the fluttering light into sound. Throughout a set of beautifully sculpted
sounds played to the room through quadraphonic speakers all kind of
acoustic phenomena worked their way into the music. La Casa's varied
field recordings and Colley's subtle electronics were combined with
the sound of a contact-miked wooden chair pushed about the floor between
them, a small halogen light with a broken, flickering connection held
in Colley's hands and a radio scanner picking up what sounded like
the local Dublin taxi service. The music welcomed all of these elements,
the musicians using each of them as a spark (quite literally at times)
to send it off on different tangents, in what was a fine end to the
improvised section of the festival.
 The
final night saw the festival move to the resonant acoustics of the
Unitarian Church for a performance of Morton Feldman's For Bunita
Marcus by John Tilbury (photo, right). Composed in 1985,
For Bunita Marcus is one of Feldman's later, freer works, of
which Tilbury is widely recognised as one of the leading performers,
his London Hall recording of the piece an acknowledged masterpiece.
Sitting just a few feet from Tilbury and listening to this music unfold
was a beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Fans of Feldman hardly
need convincing of the fact. The music drifted off around the high
ceiling of the church, at once both soporific and inspiring. The performance
seemed a lot looser and more languid than Tilbury's recorded version,
clocking in some eight minutes longer. Perhaps the naturally laid
back feel of the Irish capital left its impact on the music. It was
a lovely way to end a really strong weekend of music that put Ireland
firmly on the contemporary music map. i and e 2007 was the most consistently
excellent festival I've attended in several years and a credit to
its curators.–RP
[photos courtesy Fergus Kelly]
Jorge
Castro
CINÉTICA
 Cinética,
divided in three parts – "Immune", "Impulse"
and "Forward Movement" – was entirely conceived for
electric guitar with digital processing; it lasts only 25 minutes,
but it's definitely time well spent. Simple lines or reiterated chords
constitute the source for an Ambient picture of slanted space in which
fathomless resonances and throbbing waves invade the listening environment
with gentle firmness. There are also several moments in which strange
swayings, bewitching loops and pitch-transposed harmonies give the
mixture an alien halo, flabbergasting and uncertain, as if the music
were in search of a definite direction. The passage from the second
to the third segment sees Castro kicking in some serious distortion
together with something that sounds like crippled shortwaves; this
creates a gorgeous cadenza that morphs into a waterfall of infinite-repeat
suspension. The whole finally flows into a desiccated, folkish-sounding
locked groove, swiftly turned into thin but lethal vapors by Castro's
heavy manipulation.
Amy
Denio
TASOGARE
 This
is the soundtrack to a dance piece by Japanese choreographer Yoko
Murao, and finds Denio (on accordion and voice) flanked by the excellent
Eyvind Kang on viola. It all starts with a fascinating drone, an impenetrable
dark cloud hovering around apparent tranquillity. The instrumental
timbres instantly fuse into one, harmonics coalescing into a static
tapestry until we reach Niblock-like pitch contiguities, though I'm
also reminded of shades typical of Christoph Heemann and Andrew Chalk's
Mirror. About 11 minutes in, intricate figures start dancing and intersecting
as if played by an unknown instrument, soon to be overwhelmed by additional
doses of incessant accordion-and-viola repetitions. The first hint
of rhythm, which involuntarily rips a page out of Stephen Scott's
book, appears briefly, only to be submerged again in an ocean of bliss.
As in the best minimalism, one never knows if what's heard is real
or just a product of the imagination. A sort of bionic hornpipe appears
halfway through, introducing a dramatic call-and-response passage
of superimposed chanting, before a series of choked seagull-like string
shrieks raises the anguish level quite effectively. Elements of Middle
Eastern/Arab phrasing are elicited by Kang, yet everything is soon
redirected towards motionlessness, as Denio's vocals take center stage
with melodies crossing Native American and Asian influences. Instrumental
plucks, raps and noise push the music towards its natural exhaustion,
the tension relenting frame by frame as the sonic organism resolves
to a composed recollection of all its parts and derivations. A superb
piece of work by two fine artists.
Bill
Horist and Marron
SLEEP HAMMER
 Bill
Horist plays guitar and Tanaka Yasuhiko (aka Marron) is billed as
playing guitar plus "Dubmarronics" (don't ask); the music
was recorded live at Seattle's Gallery 1412 in 2005. At first, the
digital delay-drenched arpeggios sound almost poetic, but promptly
yield to pneumatic drill outbursts and percussive concoctions that
mix Industrial gamelan and headache-inducing resonance. Strings get
repeatedly raped by a three-head monster with the faces of Henry Kaiser,
KK Null and James Plotkin: melodic intensity, destructive weaponry,
harmonic dissent and the ever-present power of the Big Hum. I open
my windows and the glimmering misshapenness of "Shizuka no Umi"
meshes splendidly with the lamentations of my neighbour's donkey in
a moment of fabulous surrealism, while the birds start chirping louder
(talk about understanding the components of sound.. long way to go,
"sentient beings"). The music stands on its own two feet
even without animal enhancements though, and brims with keen intelligence
and compositional skill. In "Happyland", Hendrix dwarves
and straight-up-yer-nose jazzbos can be seen shoulder to shoulder
with Reich, Laurel & Hardy, Brecht and Stravinsky, then an overdriven
medusa blinds our eyes with caustic Pro-Co Rat liquids and ear-piercing
shrilling. "Ame mo Fureba, Yuki mo Furu" could prompt a
lawsuit from Robert Fripp for its rape and dismemberment of Frippertonics,
while "General Gingersnap" whirrs and whistles through our
most depraved feedback desires before turning into fly-in-a-bottle,
saturated-and-delayed paranoia. This alternation of edge-of-oblivion
ethereal polychords and "wake up and smell the coffee" dissonance
is just what my doctor ordered to remove from memory all the useless
guitar albums that I've been listening to for decades. Sleep Hammer
is highly un-recommended to fans of Stern, Ritenour, Carlton and DiMeola;
the rest of you loonies, climb aboard.
Emily
Hay / Marcos Fernandes
WE ARE.
 Besides
Hay (voice, flute, piccolo, piano, electronics) and Fernandes (percussion,
field recordings, electronics), the musicians involved are Lisle Ellis,
Ellen Weller and Al Scholl, who variously contribute bass, sax, flute,
guitar and electronics. Two major elements characterize the music:
Hay's voice – often similar to Shelley Hirsch's but even more
malleable and unpredictable – and the utter absence of "style",
which is made easier by the often pulseless approach of Fernandes,
who's more interested in electronic soundscapes and fractured decompositions
of barely existent metres than in churning out regular rhythms. The
duo's imagination produces instant visions and moments of mystery
in "Belly Of The Craft", while a track like "Away From
The Doom" is downright exhilarating, the scenario continuously
shifting between third-rate horror movie soundtrack and a miniature
replica of Diamanda Galàs engaged in some kind of recreational
activity. "Spar" is a splendid example of creative improvisation
animated by clever electronics; on the other hand, the following "Wicked
Child" is so complex that it sounds computer-generated. The two
movements of the title track open and close the album, symbols of
the irrepressible urge towards unadulterated spiritual freedom that
the whole CD constantly manifests. High-quality stuff from every point
of view.–MR
Walter
and Sabrina
ROCK'N'ROLL DARKNESS
Danny Dark
 Just
when I was finally getting over the impact of the monumental triple
CD Chioma Supernormal reviewed in these pages a couple of
months ago, here comes another helping of Walter Cardew and Stephen
Moore's idiosyncratic Art Bears-meets-Zappa-meets-Penguin Cafe Orchestra-meets-Eisler-meets-Residents-meets
Alternative TV post-prog post-punk cantata oratorio rock opera. If
you took the plunge and forked out for a copy of Chioma,
you won't be all that surprised by Rock'n'Roll Darkness,
nor its cover art with the strategically defaced soft porn imagery,
but newcomers to the world of Walter & Sabrina expecting some
kind of dirty Stooges apocalypse could be disappointed. Moore's lyrics
might be full of whores, piss, sweat and semen but there are no whammy
bars or fuzz pedals in sight in the band – instead there's glockenspiel,
trombone, violin, and that most un-rock'n'roll instrument, the oboe,
and not much groove either in Cardew's odd, polyrhythmic universe.
An acquired taste, perhaps, but the music of Walter & Sabrina,
despite its obvious stylistic precursors (see above) sounds like little
else in today's new music. If you find the album cover umm titillating,
you might also be interested to know there's a bit more full frontal
nudity on offer in the Quicktime movie the disc also contains to accompany
its title track, but this odd homemade DV (shades of the new and ever
so disappointing David Lynch offering, and Moore and Cardew's chicks
don't even get to sing "The Locomotion") doesn't add much;
the music works perfectly well without it.–DW
Circle
TOWER
Last Visible Dog
 Now
celebrating sixteen years in business, Circle is Finland's most prolific
and arguably hardest-to-pin-down post-rock outfit. Hard to pin down
stylistically that is, since founding father bassist and vocalist
Jussi Lehtisalo isn't exactly a recluse (there's even a recent photo
of him online, which is more than you can say for Thomas Pynchon).
Perhaps the one unifying feature of the group's 20-odd albums to date,
most of which seem to be out of print, is repetition; after notable
flirtations with Krautrock, drone and psychedelia, Tower,
despite its title, is a lighter affair, a collection of eminently
listenable airy grooves which are so far removed from the power riffing
of their earlier outings as to be almost a different band. But scrape
the dirt off from the surface of screaming monsters like 2000's
Prospekt and you'll find a warm underbelly of spacey organs and
cosmic keyboards. Lehtisalo and his crew are joined on Tower by
Verde, aka Mika Rintala, who also handles the mix, and very well too.
Not much else to add, really; there's certainly not much information
to be gleaned from the black and white (well, sort of dirty green
and white) photo of a pine forest on the back cover of the booklet,
and any resemblance to Miles Davis's In A Silent Way, which
has been much commented on elsewhere, seems pretty superficial, referring
more than anything else to the hi-hatty grooves and bubbling electric
pianos. Terry Riley would seem to be more relevant. But have a listen
and decide for yourself.–DW
Valet
BLOOD IS CLEAN
Kranky
 Valet
is the solo project of Honey Owens, a floating member of Jackie-O
Motherfucker and one of the key players in Nudge, and Blood is
Clean reissues a limited edition self-released CD-R. Though her
collaborations with JOMF place her within the orbit of the "New
Weird America", under the Valet aegis Owens moves closer to abstract
Fourth World psychedelia, at times echoing her label mate Bird Show
in her attempts at ethnomusicological forgery, most evident via the
scrum of hand drums that permeate the opening "April 6".
It's an interesting gambit, suggesting near-paradoxical "field
recordings of hermetic enclaves", with each piece on the album
a self-contained sprawl, a loose translation of primal forms into
a lucid yet unknown tongue. While the breathy register of Owens's
voice sometimes comes across as a bit too garbled and quasi-mystical,
she's learnt how to set her singing throat against music that takes
psych and strips it of its playerly, egomaniacal contexts. The guitars
on the title track and "My Volcano" splutter like classic
psych, but they're strangely denuded, shorn of the overarching concepts/contexts.
There's been a lot of this kind of music floating around over the
past five years or so, and while Owens doesn't quite reach the ecstatic
heights of groups like The Skaters, she's nonetheless able to convincingly
essay an alternate prescription for the manifestation of the personal
universe via homespun audio.–JD
Various
Artists
NEED FOR A CROSSING: A NEW NEW ZEALAND VOL. 1
Table Of The Elements
 The
last time I interviewed Bruce Russell, for Signal To Noise
magazine, he expressed some resignation about the 'free noise manifesto'
he wrote in the early 1990s: "It served its purpose but like
all manifestos it was polemical and it had its historical limitations.
It's not invalid but you have to see it in the light of the times
it was written in and the purposes that it served at the time. Because
it is twelve years ago that I wrote it." While you can understand
Russell's hesitancy to be bound by the manifesto's rubric, there's
no denying how crucial it in unlocking the stranglehold "the
song" had on New Zealand's underground. Russell's own work with
The Dead C, A Handful Of Dust and the Corpus Hermeticum label cleared
space for a generation of noise artists from New Zealand, and the
Le Jazz Non compilation he curated was perhaps its most potent
manifestation, a rallying cry for noise artists not just from NZ but
other outposts (there was a sequel of sorts from Norway).
If one of the primary achievements of Russell's proselytising zeal
was to topple the song from its privileged position, he never resorted
to pure dogmatism about the largely false song/noise binary, and one
of the great pleasures of the next generation of NZ artists –
Pumice and Antony Milton in particular – is the way they reconnect
the two forms, inveigling structure into chance operations. Need
For A Crossing may not have the defining impact of Le Jazz
Non, but it's a good, if unintentional, sequel. Shorn of the
need to make "statements" about noise, Need For A Crossing
rather offers a series of 'propositions' or rhetorical questions:
how does Greg Malcolm reconcile noise guitar with rembetika?
How does the pop song function within the crackly, disintegrating
tenor of Pumice's recording aesthetic?
There are many highlights on Need For A Crossing. Pumice's
cover of GFrenzy's "Stars" pivots around a stark piano riff
drowning in distortion; GFrenzy's own "Mouth of Bloody Vengeance"
is pop in miniature, a frail melody wrapped in lo-fi loops and strummed
guitar. Birchville Cat Motel's "Skies Crimson Tears" mainlines
mercury, its webs of guitar drone spun like thick silver thread. Peter
Wright closes the set with "Another Gate", a typically beautiful
construction for aerated 12-string guitar recorded live in London,
2005. Indeed, one of the interesting things about Need For A Crossing
is the itinerant nature of its contributors, with Wright now
based in London and Leighton Craig working from Brisbane, Australia.
It's a reflection of the cross-genre/cross-structure approach the
best of these artists play with, an acknowledgment that, now the ground
has been cleared by their predecessors, it's perhaps their job to
figure out new ways to weave seemingly contrasting forms together.
That it's not seamless attests both to the "work in progress"
nature of these recordings, and the inspiration inherent in these
ten tracks, an everyday inventiveness that likes things rough-hewn
and hand-made.–JD
Xedh
AGUJERO NEGRO
Hamaika
 I
don't for one moment regret studying Latin at school, but still think
I'd have been better off with Spanish. That way I might be able to
understand what's being said on this album, the sixth offering from
the new Basque post rock / noise imprint Hamaika. And you get forget
that"post rock" too: this is noise and is actually billed
as such ("noise by Miguel A. Garcia, voices by.." etc).
As noise albums go – though I'm no great connoisseur, having
barely a hundred of the things – its volleys of woofer-shredding
pneumatic drill thrills and feedback drenched high frequency scree,
invariably accompanied by (or accompanying – it's not clear
which) human vocal expressions apparently intended to communicate
every emotion from apoplectic rage to sheer terror, sound pretty run-of-the-mill
to me. It's certainly not shocking, though presumably intended to
be. Track five – rather hard to figure out what those titles
are from the back of the disc, but I think its "La carne y la
maquina" – sounds like a gang rape in an iron foundry,
but, a quarter of a century on from Whitehouse and Monte Cazazza,
this kind of stuff has totally lost its capacity to surprise. In fact,
Whitehouse and Monte Cazazza sound pretty tame nowadays too. Maybe
after all I'm not missing much by not being able to understand what's
being said (or rather yelled, screamed, whimpered, spat, throttled);
with track titles as brilliant as "Your Pussy is a Cunt"
it's probably safe to assume we're not talking Federico Garcia Lorca
or Miguel de Cervantes here. And anything that goes out of its way
to bill itself as "extreme" is most definitely not to be
trusted. This is dull second division stuff.–DW
Scott
Fields Ensemble
BECKETT
Clean Feed
 Think
of music you associate with Samuel Beckett and you probably think
something spare, lean, minimal, Morton Feldman being the most obvious
point of reference. There was, after all, their (anti-?)operatic collaboration
Neither, and two of the composer's three last completed works
were Beckett-related (Words and Music, and For Samuel
Beckett). But despite several striking similarities – compare
Feldman's fondness for gently permutating cells and the internal repetitions
and sonic play of Beckett's late prose – there are appreciable
differences, notably the size and scale of their final works. While
Feldman stretched out in the last decade of his life, almost as if
he'd foreseen the arrival of the 80-minute compact disc that would
become the ideal medium for the spacious, thinly-painted canvases
of his late compositions, Beckett's works became ever more condensed,
distilled. (You could, though, argue that the ultimate distillation
of his work was 1969's tiny playlet, Breath, which, devoid
of both actors and dialogue, lasts just 35 seconds.. but there's still
some debate among Beckett scholars as to whether this was evidence
of the author's wry sense of humour, written as it was for Kenneth
Tynan's bawdy review Oh Calcutta!). Whatever, when you think
Beckett you don't automatically think of elegant and intricately crafted
modern chamber jazz, but that's precisely what guitarist Scott Fields
offers us here on this magnificent quartet outing with John Hollenbeck
(percussion), Scott Roller (cello) and Matthias Schubert (tenor saxophone).
There's little direct correlation that I can find between the album's
five tracks and the Beckett works they take their titles from –
Breath, Play, Come And Go, What Where
and Rockaby (all plays as it turns out) – but
dig a bit deeper and the similarities begin to appear. One of the
reasons Beckett's oeuvre has consistently fascinated musicians is
its sheer musicality: a constant sense of play between micro and macro
form, a concern for motive, idea, development, coupled with a wicked
ear and subtle sense of humour. And that's exactly what Fields is
working with here. Sometimes the pieces are as ferociously determined
as the monologue that propels The Unnamable to its unforgettable
conclusion ("I can't go on, I'll go on"), sometimes they
appear to slump into the ditch at the side of the road like Watt.
Sometimes they're as wild and effusive as Lucky's celebrated stream-of-consciousness
speech in Waiting for Godot, sometimes they're as still as
Still. Fields' accompanying text, not surprisingly a little
Beckettian itself, seems to be apologetic in tone ("All that
improvisation. Anti-Beckett, if anything. I have a lot to answer for.
Pray for me") but there's nothing to say sorry for. Beckett was
apparently fond of Franz Schubert; I'd like to think he might dig
Matthias too. The playing of all four musicians throughout is exemplary,
the scores cunningly crafted and intriguing to the point of being
frustrating (and if that isn't Beckettian I don't know what is) and
the recording superb. What more could you ask for? A sequel, perhaps.–DW
La
Pieuvre
LA PIEUVRE 1999 – 2005
Helix
"Pieuvre"
means "octopus", in case your French is a bit rusty. And,
with a name like that, those of you old enough to remember Keith Tippett's
Centipede might be able to guess that it's a big band. No fewer than
31 musicians are listed as taking part on this retrospective double
CD chronicling the ensemble's activities over the past few years,
and I won't bore you with a complete personnel list. In fact, if you
live outside France, or even outside Lille, where La Pieuvre has its
lair (if octopuses have lairs), you're not likely to have heard of
many of them. But guitarist / composer Olivier Benoit, who's entrusted
with "direction" of this great sprawling beast, certainly
deserves a mention. Large ensemble improvisation is an area fraught
with problems (leaving aside the sheer logistical difficulties of
getting 30 cats together to play and rehearse in the first place),
most notably the thorny question of who wields the big stick in front
of the band. If, as Eddie Prévost once memorably wrote, the
classical symphony orchestra with maestro at the helm was the perfect
metaphor for capitalist society, how can improvisers, who are more
often than not defiantly anti-capitalist, if not downright anarchic,
allow themselves to be channeled (coerced, perhaps) into creating
coherent large ensemble structures without sacrificing their individuality
on the altar of the conductor's tastes and preferences? For there
has to be some sacrifice involved: if you don't think so, try inviting
31 improvising musicians into a room for a jam session and see what
kind of bloody mess you end up with. To his credit, Benoit does the
job splendidly, weaving the diverse timbres of instruments as diverse
as erhu, Balinese flute, djembe and zither into tapestries of considerable
beauty whose surface is as varied and colourful as their underlying
form is solidly grounded. But inevitably such music, not being notated
(I'll hazard a bet that half the guys in the band can't read music
anyway, not that that's ever been a problem for Jean-Luc Guionnet,
who's one of the creature's many tentacles), tends to go in for mass
effect. We're talking Xenakis rather than Boulez here, earthquakes,
tsunamis and blizzards instead of patient pruning and weeding in the
back garden. The cumulative effect is pretty overwhelming –
don't try and listen to this all in one go without a so'wester –
but if your idea of a breath of fresh air is being strapped to the
mast in a Force 10 gale, there's plenty here to enjoy.–DW
Spontaneous
Music Ensemble
FRAMEWORKS
Emanem
 What
a shame Emanem's Martin Davidson couldn't have used some of Jak Kilby's
terrific photographs to grace the album cover instead of these uninspiring
wisps of grey on a decidedly unappetising plum background. Still,
as the saying goes, never judge an album by its cover (though I admit
I often do): Frameworks is magnificent, and none of this
music has previously been released, which is all the more reason why
you should put the booklet aside and just listen. Don't chuck it away
altogether though, as Davidson's essay inside provides essential background
information, as well as the complete text scores of John Stevens'
"Click Piece" and "Sustained Piece", both of which
are used here as strategies to channel the contributions of individual
improvisers into coherent collective improvisation. The idea that
there should be some kind of score or set of guidelines is probably
anathema to many so-called free improvisers, but those who sniff at
Stevens' pedagogy would do well to remember that the drummer was just
as good playing hard swinging bop (if you don't believe me you'd better
check him out on Bobby Bradford's Love's Dream, also on Emanem),
and, when he did so, willingly played according to the rules.
I like to think he'd have agreed with Igor Stravinsky's famous line
in Poetics of Music: "My freedom will be so much the
greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of
action and the more I surround myself with obstacles." But, whatever,
any doubting Thomases should shut the funk up and check out "Familie
Sequence", recorded on July 14th 1968 and featuring, alongside
Stevens, Norma Winstone (voice), Kenny Wheeler (flugelhorn), Paul
Rutherford (trombone) and Trevor Watts, making a rare apperance on
bass clarinet. After an opening section of sustained tones, apparently
inspired by Japanese gagaku (though if Davidson didn't tell
you you'd probably never guess.. then again Stevens was far too subtle
and intelligent a musician to churn out tacky pastiche), the ensemble
works through the "Sustained" and "Click" pieces
in what is one of the most intriguing and accomplished instant compositions
the SME ever committed to disc. (For details on Stevens' instructions
see the liners, but here's an extract from another essay of Davidson's
that you can find at http://efi.group.shef.ac.uk/mstevens.html: "two
very basic concepts became the CLICK PIECE (in which everyone makes
short repeated sounds in their own rhythm) and the SUSTAINED PIECE
(in which one inhales as deeply as possible then sustains a note for
as long as comfortably possible on the exhale)") The ensemble
is perfectly balanced, with Winstone's exquisite wordless vocals and
Wheeler's impeccable, fragile yet hard-as-nails flugelhorn beautifully
offset by the rich lower registers of Rutherford's trombone and Watts's
bass clarinet.
"Quartet Sequence" dates from April 25th 1971 and features
the same line-up of SME that appeared on the BYG LP Birds Of A
Feather (hilarious anecdotes about which can also be found in
the CD booklet): Stevens, Julie Tippett on voice and guitar, Watts
on soprano sax and Ron Herman on bass. It's an outstanding half hour's
worth of music, and another poke in the eye for anyone who believes
that improvised music can not (or should not or even must not) include
elements of repetition. Tippett and Watts at times are truly manic
in their reiteration of tiny cells and shapes, giving the music an
almost obsessive, Feldman-like quality. Tippett's simultaneous vocalisms
and guitar (let's hear it for that guitar playing too!) are particularly
exciting, and while she and Watts buzz around the pitch space they've
charted out like bluebottles, Stevens and Herman provide a splendidly
intricate backdrop.
Finally, "Flower" is a Stevens / Watts duo recorded at the
Little Theatre in 1971 and documents the SME's most austere minimalist
period. The "rules of the game" are pretty easy to work
out – listen to how each of Watts's isolated pitches corresponds
to one element of Stevens' kit – if Feldman comes to mind at
times in "Quartet Sequence", "Flower" recalls
the reductionist rigour of Christian Wolff, and, standing in the shadows,
Webern. It makes you wonder why we've had to wait nearly 40 years
for this amazing music to see the light of day – and wonder
what else might be languishing in the vaults somewhere.. Could someone
put their paws on the original French Birds Of A Feather session
tapes, for example? Until that happy day comes, make sure you don't
miss out on Frameworks.–DW
ZMF
Trio
CIRCLE THE PATH
Drip Audio
 ZMF
stands for Zubot (Jesse, violin) Martin (Jean, drums) and Fonda (Joe,
bass), a trio that first got together a few years back through the
good offices of the Vancouver Jazz Festival's Ken Pickering. This
cracking debut was recorded just days after the three musicians began
playing together, and it's a real fun-filled adventure, from the atmospheric
glistening harmonics of the opening "Long, Dark & Slow",
via the tight cellular workout of "Circle" and the slinky
12/8 swing of "Slow Blues" to the angular intricacy of "#135",
the only piece not penned by a member of the trio. Not surprisingly,
with a title like that, it's by Anthony Braxton, and Fonda brings
his authentic Brax street cred to bear on proceedings to great effect.
He also kicks off the following track's rollercoaster ride with a
monster bass solo. More thrills and spills are in store before the
album comes full circle with a slight return of "Long, Dark &
Slow." Violin / bass / drums trios aren't all that frequent,
and (believe me) it takes considerable arm power for a humble fiddler
to go the distance with a hard driving rhythm section. Zubot does
that and more, and without recourse to stacks of electronic gadgets;
it's all too easy to slap a few FX pedals and a contact mic on the
violin and can get much more noise for far less effort. He manages
to incorporate good solid conservatory technique without ever sounding
like a "classical fiddler trying to play jazz" (mentioning
no names), and is just as good at flying off the handle into the kind
of wild scratches and squeaks Malcolm Goldstein would be proud of.
Meanwhile, Jean Martin handles percussion duty with great flair, both
swinging hard and playing colour when needs be. All in all, this is
a terrific debut. Let's have some more.–DW
Cold
Bleak Heat
SIMITU
Family Vineyard
 After
their sensational debut It's Magnificent But It Isn't War,
here's a welcome return from one of Fire Music's killer quartets –
Paul Flaherty (alto and tenor saxophones), Greg Kelley (trumpet),
Matt Heyner (bass) and Chris Corsano (drums) – and I note with
delight that it's got a sensational 4/10 rating from the Silver Platters
website (huh, remind me to delete that one from the Firefox bookmarks),
which must mean a) their reviewer was expecting a Stan Getz / Astrud
Gilberto compilation and got this by mistake or b) he had his ears
up his ass or c) these guys must be doing something right. Those who
enjoyed CBH's debut will know what to expect: typically hyperactive
percussion from Corsano (I'm still not entirely convinced the man
only has two arms), ludicrously agile bass from Heyner (best upper
register bowed work since Alan Silva took his cello into outer space
with Sun Ra), gritty lyricism from Kelley and, well, Paul Flaherty
needs no introduction to regular readers of these pages. I may be
wrong, but I do detect a slightly more pronounced strain of melancholy
in Flaherty's playing of late; the opening of "Mugged By A Glacier"
(is that a reference to that great line in Gravity's Rainbow
about the English cough sweet that Pynchon memorably described as
being beaten about the head by a Swiss Alp?) is particularly touching
– but there's plenty of blood and sweat to mix with the tears.
Terrific track titles too, including "The Voice Of The People
Is The Voice Of God", "Should We Destroy The Hubble?"
(hey, why not?), "A White Bandaged Head In The Shadow Of Death"
and "To Understand All Is To Forgive All", which should
be tattooed on the penis of the bloke who gave it 4/10.–DW
Charles
Cohen / Ed Wilcox
THOSE ARE PEARLS THAT WERE HIS EYES
Ruby Red
 Anyone
who chooses a quotation from The Tempest as their album title
is OK with me, and the fact that this one comes recommended by Julian
Cope (by and large, a gentleman of taste) doesn't hurt either. Anyone
familiar with 2000's Bullet Into Mesmer's Brain by the Philly-based
free rock outfit Temple of Bon Matin will recognise the names of Messrs
Cohen and Wilcox, and the trademark squiggles and blats of Cohen's
Buchla Music Easel are (happily) even more in evidence here. Unlike
other synth + percussion outings of note (thinking particularly of
Thomas Lehn and Gerry Hemingway's two fine outings on Erstwhile and
Umbrella here, though I could also declare an interest, as they say,
and cast in a crafty plug for my own duo Rats with Edward Perraud),
this is quite relaxed and spacious. Wilcox, billed on "drums
and gongs", leaves plenty of room for Cohen to showcase his vintage
instrument (analog synth junkies can find out more about it at www.buchla.com/historical/music_easel/music_easel.html),
and the music they produce is colourful and eminently listenable.
If you like your music a bit more gnarly and tense, this might not
be right up your street, but if, like me, you're a hardcore Dr Patrick
Gleeson fan, you'll love it.–DW
Eagle
Keys
EAGLE KEYS
Even Stilte
 Lausanne-based
Francisco Meirino, aka Phroq, returned home from his recent Japanese
tour with a recording of a solo electric bass by Tim Olive (currently
studying traditional Japanese fast food in Osaka, if his recent emails
are anything to go by), added computer and electronics and ended up
with these two extended tracks – total duration just under 50
minutes – of splendid soft noise EAI. Quite how the pair of
them make the sounds they do is a wonderful mystery – there's
very little on here that remotely resembles what I can recognise as
the sound of an electric bass, but, carefully swaddled in Phroq's
discreet drones and blankets of hiss and hum, there are plenty of
elusive crackles and crunches. Perhaps if you hid a couple of contact
mics in your kid's toybox, surreptitiously recorded the sounds of
various plastic, metal and wooden small objects being assembled and
dismantled by tiny inquisitive hands, took the resulting tape and
hid it somewhere in your air conditioning system it might sound something
like this. Olive's last outing with Bunsho Nisikawa, the intriguingly-titled
Supernatural Hot Rug And Not Used, was mysterious and compelling;
Eagle Keys – not sure that's just the name of the album
or has become the name of the duo by default as is often the case
with these collaborative ventures – is even better. It's superbly
paced, carefully constructed and above all sounds terrific. Check
it out.–DW
Graham
Collier
HOARDED DREAMS
Cuneiform
 Convened
at the Bracknell Jazz Festival in 1983, the all-star cast performing
bassist-composer Graham Collier's Hoarded Dreams is the stuff
of Euro-jazz discographers' wet dreams. Commissioned by the Arts Council
of Great Britain expressly for the festival and its participants,
the nineteen-piece ensemble includes trumpeters Ted Curson, Manfred
Schoof, Kenny Wheeler, Henry Lowther and Tomasz Stanko; trombonists
Eje Thelin and Conny Bauer, reedmen John Surman and Juhanni Aaltonen,
pianist Roger Dean and guitarist Ed Speight. (Collier conducts from
the front, rather than the bass chair, which is occupied by Paul Bridge.)
Though tapes have circulated for years, it's a fine sight to see this
famed performance properly issued.
Though Collier's work of the 1970s moved away from edgy odd-metered
post-bop to encompass more rock-inflected elements, Hoarded Dreams
embraces fully the possibilities offered by the diverse skills and
aesthetics of its participants, letting soloists push and pull at
the surrounding musical context. In part two, for instance, Surman's
rough-hewn baritone is in fine form, and his wails yank at Dean's
fleet, light comping and the pliable strums of guitarists Speight
and John Schröder. A maddening duo between Curson and drummer
Ashley Brown follows Surman's bellows (Curson has always known what
to do without a piano), collective cadenzas flying at the
blink of an eye, Curson and Surman engaging in a battle of trills
to close out the section. Collier has always had a penchant for the
pastoral, too, and the third movement lets Speight stretch out over
moody tonal sandcastles, harkening back to some of the Gil Evansesque
investigations of 1967's Deep Dark Blue Centre (Deram) before
the band lights a fire.
What's clear is that Collier writes for his bands, even as new figures
enter the picture. As much as regulars like Dean, Speight, Themen
and Griffiths ground the ensemble in a tight and familiar sound, a
new voice like Conny Bauer's multiphonics can find a place here (he
brings just the right brooding quality to part four). And it's important
to remember that it wouldn't be a Graham Collier record without a
massive, infectious swing – however dissonant the proceedings
get, there's plenty of big-band showmanship on offer too. The fact
that these nineteen musicians make Hoarded Dreams' far-flung
aural spread not only sound concise and direct, but actually swing
like a small group, is a testament to their remarkable abilities.–CA
Graham
Halliwell/Tomas Korber
THE LARGE GLASS
Cathnor
 The
Large Glass, the first collaboration between Graham Halliwell
and Tomas Korber, pulls off a considerable feat: by all but freeze
framing process, the duo manages to alienate their instrumentation
from its chosen lexicon, but not through any recourse to "extended
technique" practice. The bald list of instruments includes "prepared
saxophone feedback" and "electronics", but there's
nothing that can be index-linked to the physicality of the sound sources
– something that's possible even with much extended technique
playing. This alienation effect (though we're not talking Brecht here)
isn't exactly new or surprising, but when it's essayed as strongly
as Halliwell and Korber do it, it's no small achievement. The
Large Glass offers a cold, almost inhospitable climate, a vast
Arctic tundra within which feedback becomes spectral, amplifying its
almost non-corporeal presence as the distressed cry of malfunctioning
systems. At times, the album reminds me of the mid 1990s wave of "isolationism",
sharing an impulse toward evacuating the human from the mise-en-scene
and slowing everything down until ghost tones and muted feedback gather
in dirty puddles under the feet of the collaborators. Its elegiac
feel comes of pacing and placement, a considered chill.–JD
Malcolm
Goldstein / Barre Phillips
LIVE IN PUGET-VILLE
Bab-Ili
 It's
amazing that their paths didn't cross sooner, when you think about
it. In the early 1960s both Malcolm Goldstein and Barre Phillips were
living and working in New York City, and both discovered free improvisation
about the same time – violinist Goldstein in the context of
his groundbreaking work with the Judson Dance Theater, Phillips as
a jazz bassist with the likes of Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Giuffre and Bob
James (yes, that Bob James, but if you've never heard his
ESP' Disk Explosions you've got a thrill in store). And yet,
like characters in a Pynchon novel, you just know that at some stage
these guys will (have to) run into each other. Their first meeting
in fact occurred at the Densités Festival in Verdun in 2004,
in what was originally scheduled to be a trio with British guitarist
John Russell, and it worked out so well that when Goldstein returned
to tour Europe again last year he and Phillips set up several dates,
both as a duo and as a trio with percussionist Lê Quan Ninh.
I remember being somewhat underwhelmed by their trio appearance at
the Instants Chavirés, and now I think I know why; as the old
saying goes, two's company, three's a crowd (especially when the third
member is a one-man Percussions de Strasbourg like Ninh): Goldstein
and Phillips quite simply complement each other to perfection. The
six tracks on this fabulous live set recorded in Puget-Ville near
Phillips' homebase in the South of France run the gamut from austere
drone to hyperactive hardscrabble, from pure chorale (the end of "BMPG"
is magic) to extended technique jamboree, from playing that would
dazzle any conservatory-trained violinist and bassist to what sounds
like the untutored scratching of a four-year-old's first fiddle lesson
(except of course we know it isn't). It's also curiously "traditional"
improv – Goldstein in particular has always been a very vocal
player (and often sings along to prove it), and his improvisations
often follow the kind of dramaturgical plan that many post-AMM post-redux
improvisers studiously avoid – while remaining spellbindingly
"in the moment", i.e. seemingly out of time altogether.
Such is the mysterious and beautiful paradox of these master musicians.–DW
Rafael
Toral
SPACE SOLO 1
Quecksilber
 Those
who got into Rafael Toral's music through his guitar work, and its
unashamedly tonal post-Eno Ambient drone (he isn't too fond of those
last two words either, but they do tend to stick) might find the bleeps
and squiggles of the Portuguese sound artist's latest offering rather
strange, especially if they're unfamiliar with last year's Space
(Staubgold), which inaugurated the ambitious Space Program,
a series of albums that will occupy Toral for the best part of a decade
to come, and of which Space Solo 1 is the second chapter.
He finally unplugged the drone and hung up his guitar after 2001's
Violence Of Discovery And Calm Of Acceptance ("there
was a clear feeling of completion, and I knew if I continued along
that path I'd just repeat myself and become formulaic," he told
me in an interview that formed the basis of a Wire feature last September
– shortly to appear in extended and updated form here, fans
please note), since when he's been busy designing, building and playing
a whole studio full of customised electronic instruments for the Space
Program. Each of these will be showcased in its own Space
Study, but several of them feature in the Space Solos,
a parallel solo project (there's also a projected set of six ensemble
albums entitled Space Elements).
Toral's "fascination with hacking" isn't new. His investigations
of "randomness and the resolution of the uncontrollable in real
time" with Paulo Feliciano in the duo No Noise Reduction began
back in 1990 (the pair's 1997 AnAnAnA album On Air, though
hard to find now, is worth checking out as an important precursor
of the Space Program), and in 1995 he found himself in the
hackers' paradise of Amsterdam's STEIM improvising with "a modified
toy with a messed-up pitch control". But there's a maturity to
Space and Space Solo 1 that's lacking in the earlier
work, a sense that Toral has finally assimilated the influence of
Cage, Lucier and most importantly Sei Miguel. Toral has been involved
with Miguel's music since 1996's Showtime, and appears on
the trumpeter's outstanding Creative Sources release last year The
Tone Gardens (Miguel and trombonist Fala Mariam repaid the compliment
by guesting on Space). The key to what the Space Program
is all about is probably Toral's description of the project as "what
electronic music might have sounded like if the studios that sprang
up shortly after World War Two had been frequented by jazz musicians
instead of composers." That link with jazz is tenuous, but it's
there: there's a kind of odd swing to Space Solo 1 that recalls
Michel Waisvisz's pioneering work with the legendary crackle box (isn't
it about time somebody somewhere reissued Steve Lacy's Lumps?).
But there's also enough silence – space, if you will –
surrounding Toral's electrode-controlled cross-modulating twin square-wave
portable oscillators, delayed feedback empty circuits with joystick-controlled
filters and amplified coil springs to remind us of his enduring allegiance
to Cage. This adds a certain austerity to the music, which is matched
by the pale grey green colour scheme and the black and white architect's
drawing doing on the cover, a reminder (perhaps) that space isn't
just some sci-fi final frontier, but our everyday awareness of the
objects that surround us and their relationship to each other.–DW
Alvin
Lucier
EVER PRESENT
Mode
 If
I ever "retire" from "journalism" there's nothing
I'd like to do more than sit around all day listening to Alvin Lucier
albums. And, thankfully, riding the wave of interest generated in
his music by EAI heads in search of historical precedents, there are
plenty of them to choose from now. This latest, Lucier's second on
Mode after 2003's Navigations / Small Waves, is another keeper
(dumb thing to say, that – they all are). Bagpipe is an instrument
I usually like about as much as pipe organ (not a lot, as a famous
magician used to say), but in Matthew Welch's hands it sounds wonderful,
upper partials bouncing merrily off the walls for the 13 glorious
minutes of Piper. Don't listen on headphones, you'll miss
out on a lot of fun; pump it up to Niblock volume and thrill. Fan
finds four koto players moving gradually out of phase with each other,
pitches moving ever so slowly up a major third, harmonics ringing
out, acoustic beats jostling each other in a riot of colour and energy.
And the basic idea behind it all is so goddamn straightforward.
As Howard Skempton once said of La Monte Young, there's so much
to listen to. Lucier's magic – and I don't use the word
lightly – is being able to take the very simplest of ideas and
create music of quite extraordinary complexity and acoustic richness.
Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra, despite its title, calls
for nothing more than a triangle, and the performance consists of
merely (merely!) "changing the pressure of the fingers on the
triangle as well as the speed and loudness of the tapping." The
result is simply astounding. 947 is another of the composer's
explorations of the acoustic beats that appear – and disappear
– when sustained tones from a live instrument (Jacqueline Martelle's
flute) interfere with pure waves. On Ever Present, the waves
sweep both upwards and downwards two octaves, as Erik Drescher (flute),
Akiko Okabe (piano) and Sascha Armbruster (alto sax) slip their sustained
tones in to intersect with their stately curve. The shape of the waves
is a precise translation into music of the plan of the oval walkways
Robert Irwin created for the garden of the Getty Center in LA. "It
was beautiful to watch the people walking through the garden,"
Lucier notes. "They seemed to be in a special frame of mind,
feeling the spaces.." So will you be when you hear this.–DW
Rhys
Chatham
A CRIMSON GRAIL
Table Of The Elements
 The
first two days of October 2005 saw a massive gathering of people,
guitars and amplifiers in and around the sanctuary of the Basilique
du Sacré Coeur in Montmartre to watch a phalanx of 400 guitarists
playing Rhys Chatham's A Crimson Grail (Moves Too Fast To See)
for 12 hours throughout the rainy night as part of the "citywide
marathon of sound, image and movement" called Nuit Blanche (the
first time something similar was tried in Italy a national blackout
occurred). This 56-minute release captures three segments of the performance
in what is more a celebration of an event than a formal document:
the live recording is often blemished by voices, coughs, shouts and
chatter from the huge audience, and apart from the composer, the only
recognizable names among the musicians are bassist Ernie Brooks III
and drummer Jonathan Kane. But when the music prevails, something
special happens amidst these roaring cadenzas, in the guise of phantom
harmonics and ghost voices. As Kane's liners explain, the sonic architecture
of Chatham's writing takes advantage of the church dome's interior
to have the different sections "morphing in an organic way".
The three movements and the short encore captured on disc are pretty
straightforward harmonically (at times too much so for my own taste),
and the second part's incessant tolling tests the patience somewhat
before growing into an impressively thunderous finale. But the most
mesmerizing passages, where a single gesture repeated by hundreds
of hands elicits chimes of limpid beauty from that enormous mass of
vibrating strings, are in themselves enough to make the disc worth
hearing: they're so intensely charged that one can't help joining
in with the enthusiastic applause-cum-yelps from the audience at the
end of each section.–MR
Toru
Takemitsu / Jim O'Rourke
CORONA – TOKYO REALIZATION
Columbia
 Jim
O'Rourke's artistic life seems to have come full circle in recent
times. As a child-prodigy composer, he ascended to relative fame in
the early 90s through indispensable works like The Ground Below
Above Our Heads (Entempfuhl), Tamper (Extreme) and Disengage
(Staaltape/Korm Plastics), first snapshots of an acousmatic vision
that remains unique to this day; trod a hundred paths constellated
of out-of-the-ordinary guitar playing, laptop composition, top-rank
improvisation and longstanding associations (Gastr Del Sol, Illusion
Of Safety); traveled in the business class of modern rock with his
participation in Sonic Youth while becoming an in-demand producer
and a collaborator with the crème de la crème
of minimalism (Niblock and Conrad, to name just two). In recent years,
a lot of the Chicagoan's early music has been released in various
formats, which suggests that his erstwhile dissatisfaction with some
of his old pieces has mellowed.
O'Rourke's recent activity in the world of cinema and his current
Japanese residence have now brought him to tackle yet another challenge
that, in a way, meshes snippets of his whole career in a single disc.
And although Corona was composed decades ago by Toru Takemitsu
– himself a prolific composer of soundtracks – O'Rourke's
approach clearly affects the music, transforming it into a creature
of his own. Scored for prepared piano, Hammond organ and Fender Rhodes
electric piano, the two long segments are dissonant reflections broken
by necessary gestural decisions. The sense of tension created by static
organ clusters and piano resonance is magnified by spastic arpeggios,
sudden irritations and abrasive detours that mostly take place in
the piano's innards, which O'Rourke seems to know like his own pockets.
This intensely pregnant atmosphere forces the listener to repeatedly
reconsider bits of sonic information, which at first seem peripheral,
but later are revealed as fundamental elements of the piece. The recording
seems to have been made on analog tape, as a little crossover is audible
in the most rarefied sections on headphone listening; but really,
the best way to appreciate the music's interlocutory reverberations
and heartstopping ruptures is by listening to it on a stereo with
the speakers at medium-to-high volume. Either way, Corona
remains an important chapter in O'Rourke's career, as well as a notable
addition to the list of recordings of Takemitsu's work. But it is
also a very elusive album that won't reveal its shrouded beauty to
the first comer.–MR
Maurizio
Bianchi
DAS PLATINZEITALTER
Incunabulum
 For
better or worse – worse, in my view – Maurizio Bianchi
will forever be associated with the Industrial scene he emerged from
in the early 80s, when he signed a "joke contract" with
Whitehouse's William Bennett, who did the Italian a monumental disservice
by grafting archive recordings of Nazi propaganda onto his music,
thereby adding a sinister extra-musical resonance to its strangely
disturbing lo-fi sludge. To add insult to injury it was also released
under the name Leibstandarte SS MB. No wonder Bianchi ended up withdrawing
from music for over a decade (during which time he also apparently
became a Jehovah's Witness, though I'm not sure to what extent Bennett
can be held responsible for that). But maybe the Italian has had the
last laugh, though, for while the shock value of Bennett's early work
has worn off (c'mon, does anyone out there really get scared or affronted
anymore listening to crap like "Shitfun" and "Tit Pulp"?),
Bianchi's elusive, luminescent soundscapes fit in perfectly with a
lot of today's post-Ambient dronery. Das Platinzeitalter
is a curiously compelling set of six pieces, much of whose appeal
lies into trying to figure out what is hiding under the moss of amorphous
reverberant drone Bianchi has cultivated in his garden of "archaic
waves, ancient loops and primitive electronics". It's like lying
half asleep under the blankets trying to make out the music your neighbour
is playing through the wall. From what one can glean from the inner
sleeve, it seems like it could be a remix of sorts (is that what's
meant by a "procession" here, I wonder?) of Incunabulum
head honcho Jozef van Wissem's own collection of obscure Renaissance
lute music, A Rose By Any Other Name, but if there is a lute
in there it's certainly hard to spot. Instead, half dreamt, half imagined,
are what might be distant church bells, Gregorian chants, cicadas
on a starry night, even the muffled thud of tribal drumming heard
from afar. Whatever it is, and however it was made, it's beautiful
stuff.–DW
Mark
Templeton
STANDING ON A HUMMINGBIRD
Anticipate
Ezekiel
Honig
SCATTERED PRACTICES
Microcosm
 Amid
the welter of "Dark Ambient" noodlers naming CDs after Tarkovsky
movies, here are two men with something different to say. If quietly..
Both seem to be concerned with dismantling their sonic sources, or
diverting them through arbitrary processes, or simply leaving them
switched on and seeing what they get up to while you're out of the
room. Both also seem to like the idea of allowing the mediating technology
– electricity supply, amplifying equipment, recording machinery
– to interfere when it's in the mood. Of Edmonton-based Mark
Templeton's three key instruments, guitar, accordion and banjo, it
is the last that gives Standing on a Hummingbird its signature
flavour, sometimes wistful like Durutti Column, sometimes rangey,
in the manner of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas soundtrack. Boomy
acoustic piano, snatches of conversation and other found sources,
plus a generous helping of tape crackle, give it the austerity of
Eno circa Discreet Music and the more sombre side of Harold
Budd.
 New Yorker
Honig takes the title for his latest solo work from philosopher and
critic Michel de Certeau and his famous work of psychogeography, The
Practice of Everyday Life. "Scattered practices" translates
into pavement English as "unrelated stuff", perhaps even
simpler still, "stuff", but here Honig teases with titles
that hint at narrative: "Going Sailing", "Oceans &
Living Rooms", "Homemade Debris". Like his earlier
solo work and collaborations with Morgan Packard, this assembles sundry
found sources and sonic cut-ups against elegantly spare electric keyboard
figures and dance beats slowed down to what might be termed flatline
dub. Both albums are determinedly modest projects, with the seeming
aim of submerging narrative to the point where it becomes subliminal.
Refreshingly free of the cute turns that turn so much Ambient music
into ear candy, but still managing to mesmerise with their deft placement
of found noise objects in sound fields that verge on but resist melody,
both would have earned a smile and a wink from papa Cage.–JG
Matt
Shoemaker
SPOTS IN THE SUN
Helen Scarsdale Agency
 Jim
Haynes spares no efforts in making his Helen Scarsdale releases something
special. Quite apart from their sonic content, the printing, paper
stock and attention to detail are all commendable. This latest offering
from Matt Shoemaker is another one for the shopping list [the first
edition of 50 sold out fast, so you'd better get cracking with this
second run of 400 – DW]. The realm of electroacoustic composition
can be a slippery slope cluttered with all-too-familiar debris from
former rockslides, but Shoemaker is sure-footed enough to arrive at
destinations few of his contemporaries have managed to reach. As a
result, Spots On The Sun is one of the most refreshing concrete
records to surface in sometime. The treatments, source materials and
compositions point equally to genuine experimentation and a studied
understanding of his compositional approach. "2…"
is a spellbinding sound-space activated by measured use of spatial
techniques and well-positioned electronic and incidental sounds. Elements
are brought into and out of hearing range with a precise execution,
heightening the act of listening and resulting in a truly rich, cliché-free
listening experience. As familiar as some of the source sounds may
be, their recording and treatment keeps them at a conscious distance.
It's like remembering a sound many years later; or, perhaps, this
is the way we imagine sound to exist in our dreams. The pieces seem
to be realised in a way we can't quite comprehend, focussing our attention
and reinforcing our determination to understand the journey on which
Shoemaker is taking us.–LE
Andrew
Chalk
GOLDFALL
Faraway Press
 One
of the problems that Andrew Chalk aficionados must face is that his
splendid works are typically released in very limited editions that
disappear within weeks, often on vinyl (which rarely translates into
good aural quality, courtesy of the pressing plants' apparent lack
of interest in sound art). While the larger sleeves of the LPs reward
collectors with magnificent handmade artwork, this CD reissue is extremely
welcome, allowing us better to appreciate the delicate textures and
graceful suspensions of Chalk's creations, which often seem so frail
that even breathing disturbs their bewitching charm. Goldfall
uses Vikki Jackman's piano as source material, which is, as usually
the case with Chalk, rendered completely unidentifiable. The CD faithfully
reproduces the content of the original LP. The melancholic first half
contains echoes of Satie, Basinski and Eno, with Jackman's almost
immobile elegies surrounded by lightly crunchy ambience, piano fragments
approaching the listener like a dragonfly skimming over a pond. The
second section is a reverse-tape version of the piece that adds a
touch of greyness to it all, a foggy curtain of distant rumbles and
imaginary calls that invites us to unveil the mystery that lies behind,
only to realize that it could just be a deserted district or a gloomy
industrial estate. It's not what's heard that makes Goldfall another
indispensable addition to this artist's body of work, but rather what
we're afraid of discovering in our own thoughts after the music finishes.–MR
Organ
Eye
ORGAN EYE
Staubgold
 Say
what you will about the New Zealand-via-Australia duo of Minit, at
least they're smart enough to do everything slowly. It took
them a several years to follow their debut album, Music,
with 2006's Now Right Here; the relatively swift appearance
of Organ Eye on its heels is one of 2007's more welcome surprises,
all the better for being a new quartet with David Maranha and Patricia
Machás of Osso Exótico, Portugal's premiere slow-moving,
rarefied drone outfit. Organ Eye wraps the quartet in the
cloaking veil of blurred, shape-shifting dronology prevalent among
many artists working within their field, but there's something about
these performances – perhaps the intimation of chance that comes
from their live improvised settings – that transcends the rote-ness
of so many of their peers. And while the drone is an underlying structure
for "TEMA #1", Minit's oscillating electronics scratch livid
patterns in the sidelines, scraping away like bolts of light underneath
your eyelids, or etched bursts of denuded filmstock in the hand-crafted
films of Stan Brakhage. The quartet work in loosely episodic fashion:
"TEMA #1" moves from tentative beginnings to an engorged
rush of fizzling noise at about the fourteen minute mark, which recedes
into insectile near-silence. This may imply a tension-release structure
that's not exactly under-represented in the field of modern improvised
electronics, but Organ Eye's attention to texture becomes the scaffold
upon which their improvisations build. Or, in the case of "TEMA
#2", it becomes the uncarved block around which all manner of
rangy, hissing noises skirl. This is a staggeringly confident recording
that transcends the genre through its attention to the genre's detail.–JD
Phillip
Pietruschka
ITINERANT LABOURS
Cajid
 Phillip
Pietruschka has been long overdue for a widely distributed release
and this issue from Cajid is a welcome addition to their roster. Based
in Melbourne, Pietruschka has existed somewhat off the wider radar,
concerning himself with a series of projects and works that have kept
his attentions close to home. Here he steps out and in doing so offers
up a vivid, if scattered impression of his sonic psyche. Scattered
though the sounds might be, they carry with them a sense of direction
and drive which lends this record a particular potency. Pietruschka's
meticulous compositional choices give the music a sense of controlled
audio clutter in which various elements jostle for position (instrumental
source sounds come courtesy of Andrew Barrie, Nat Bates, David Brown,
Anthea Caddy, Tim Catlin, James Cecil, Gus Franklin, Will Guthrie,
Arwen Johnson, Sianna Lee, Antonia Sellbach and Adam Yee); when one
rises above the rest it provides a sense of resolution to the blurry
focus. Dramatic shifts are thin on the ground until a third of the
way through "Lucuna", where his procedures undergo a sharp
redefinition as he abruptly introduces a whopping wall of distorted
noise. It's the kind of radical shift that might occur in a horror
film, moments of everyday life suddenly shattered as some vicious
instrument of death pierces through a living body. These unexpected
interruptions continue through the piece with varying success. But
they pale in comparison with the pop section of "The Evidence
Of Love", which sounds like a facsimile of Stereolab oddly out
of place in the more refined avant company of the other pieces. Perhaps
that's the point. At just under 30 minutes, Itinerant Labours
raises more questions about Pietruschka than it provides answers
to. We await the next dispatch with interest.–LE
On
SECOND SOUFFLE
Brocoli
 After
calling upon Helge "Deathprod" Sten to mix their 2004 debut
Your Naked Ghost Comes Back At Night (Les Disques du Soleil
et de l'Acier), the Paris / Chicago duo of Sylvain Chauveau (piano
and prepared guitar) and Steven Hess (prepared piano and percussion)
have enlisted the services of Pierre-Yves Macé to provide "additional
sounds, processing and mixing" on Second Souffle. As
it's not customary to add accents to capital letters, I should point
out for the benefit of those not well versed in French that's there's
a hell of a difference between souffle ("breath")
and soufflé (the culinary delicacy), and that there's
no accent here: second souffle in fact translates as "second
wind", and has the same connotations as its English translation,
a clear reference to the fact that the sounds used on this album came
from the same sessions as its predecessor (talk about getting extra
mileage..). To quote the press release (I can't resist), Chauveau
and Hess's "lowercase improv session" becomes in Mace's
hands "a slick display of ambient, improv and concrete music".
I imagine that that "slick" is intended as a compliment,
but I'm afraid it isn't one in my book. Nor do I hear the "post-rock
surgical flair of early Pluramon along with the sumptuous cadences
of Gastr del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife", though
I certainly admire anyone who has the balls to set the bar that high.
It's nice to see Macé turning his attention to lowercase improv,
especially after his scathing criticism of Sachiko M in print a while
back, but his impressive display of laptop post-prod has the curious
and presumably unintended effect of making the source recordings sound
more inconsequential than they actually are, as if he couldn't content
himself with letting the music speak for itself. Lowercase improv,
when it's well done, can be pretty challenging; here it's merely pretty.
The coup de théâtre "it's only a recording
folks" trickery on the closing "afterward", in which
the languid minor sevenths of Chauveau's piano disappear into and
reemerge from a background of de rigueur morse code bleeps
and glitches, is slick all right. Maybe after all we should reinsert
that acute accent – as any budding chef will tell you, cooking
a soufflé to order is a risky business. It can all too easily
fall flat.–DW
Raglani
OF SIRENS BORN
Gameboy
 The
latest Gameboy releases – all limited runs and I've been sitting
mesmerised by this for months before writing about it so it's probably
even sold out by now (hope so too) – come packaged in delicate
Japanese paper, and are available in different colours to boot. The
fragile pastel pattern design is perfect for Of Sirens Born
too, as what Joseph Raglani is doing on guitar, analog synth, melodica,
bamboo flute, voice and electronics is as delicate and beautifully
crafted as the frail paper it comes in. There are distant lipstick
traces of the 70s – Popul Vuh (the floating pulsing synths on
"Rivers In" belong in the same cloud above Macchu Picchu
that Gonzalo Pizarro's footsoldiers emerge from in Aguirre),
Robert Wyatt (the vocals that slip in almost without being noticed
on "The Promise of Wood and Water"), Eno (the rich tapestry
of synths on "Perilous Straits") – but the strange
assemblage of squiggles and crackles that open the magnificent "Washed
Ashore" proves that Raglani is just as at home in the soundworld
of 2007. Nevertheless, it's enormously comforting in these superficial
silly soundbite times to hear an album that works clearly and unambiguously
with tonal harmony without sounding fake, plastic, twee or ironic.
Of Sirens Born is beautiful, accomplished work – check
it out, in whatever colour you can find it.–DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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