| AUTUMN
2008 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Jon Dale, Nate Dorward, Stephen Griffith, Joe
Musgrove, Massimo Ricci, Louis Sterrett, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial:
Return of the Old Thing
Relishing the difference between art and life
Jon Mueller
In Concert: Liquid
Architecture
In Concert: Potlatch
10th Anniversary: John Butcher / Christof Kurzmann / Jean-Luc
Guionnet / Toshimaru Nakamura / Cor Fuhler / Trio Sowari
On Drip Audio: Wilson,
Lee, Bentley / Fond of Tigers / Tony Wilson Sextet / Butcher,
Müller, van der Schyff
On DVD: Henning Lohner / Peter Greenaway's 4 American
Composers
JAZZ, IMPROV, ETC:
Anthony Braxton & Joe Morris / Tom Djll &
Tim Perkis / Peter Evans & Tom Blancarte / Hevoset / Hisato
Higuchi / Paul Hubweber & Uli Böttcher / Keefe Jackson
/ Guus Janssen
Annette Krebs &
Toshi Nakamura / Slizard Mezei / Steve Cohn / Papajo / David
Papapostolou & Daniel Jones / Pateras, Baxter, Brown / Odean
Pope / Praed / Sten Sandell & Matthias Stahl / John Stevens
& Evan Parker / SME / Mark Trayle / Seymour Wright / James
Zitro
CONTEMPORARY: Malcolm
Goldstein / Chris Newman / Maja SK Ratkje / Samuel Sighicelli
ELECTRONICA: Alva
Noto / Byetone / Asher / The Green Kingdom / bran(...)pos /
Bulbs / Kyle Bobby Dunn / Emeralds / GAS / Giuseppe Ielasi /
Claudio Rocchetti / Zbigniew Karkowski & Lin Zhiying / Stephan
Mathieu / Rick Reed / Jim Haynes / Janek Schaefer / Riccardo
Dillon Wanke
Last
issue
|
We're
back. So much for the "sabbatical".. almost as many
new discs have appeared in the mailbox since I put a stop to the monthly
issues of PT just over a year ago as used to turn up before, most
of them addressed to "Editor In Chief Paris Transatlantic",
which is either a sign that the folks who posted them hadn't read
last July's Editorial or that they somehow sensed (hoped? prayed?)
that the mag would return one day. Well, they were right. I'm tempted
to throw in a line like "back by huge popular demand" but
that depends what you mean by huge. Maybe in the small world of weird
new music that we all love here, a few dozen anguished emails counts
as huge – I suppose it is rather a lot considering many of the
albums that get reviewed here appear in ridiculously limited editions
– but in The Great Scheme Of Things it's not a lot, really.
One thing I noticed as I perused the site stats in the months following
the July 2007 issue (and the brief flurry of activity in October last
year kindly curated by publisher Guy Livingston, who returned to the
fray with noble intentions but had to take a raincheck himself when
other pressing personal issues – including his wedding! –
intervened) is that they didn't drop off as markedly as I'd expected.
Just goes to show how many people read this shit anyway, doesn't it?!
Our archive of Interviews still remains the site's big draw, and,
amazingly, they're still getting the same number of hits now as they
were a year ago. On the subject of which, I received - seven years
down the road! - the following email from Evan Parker:
"Dear
Sirs,
The feelings attributed to me by Radu Malfatti in the interview you
published in 2001 seem now to be taken as fact and are circulating
and multiplying all over the internet. I would appreciate it if somewhere
you could make it clear that the statement: "...
I know Evan Parker hates Ferneyhough on the grounds that he just can't
see the point of writing music which is completely unplayable. But
if you have a close look at Evan's own work, you realize that he is
moving around in exactly the same category. His work also is "unplayable"
- at least for others - and he seems to be as interested in virtuosity
as good old Brian is. Neither of them can get rid of the old structures,
the density, the mobilmachung and they both quite willingly follow
the path of Beethoven, Boulez (Pierre j' vous laisse) and the rest"
is an assertion of Radu's own invention and is a grotesque and hopelessly
muddled summary of my views of Brian Ferneyhough's music. I have no
problem with Radu's wish to reinvent himself, but I do find it tragic
that he has chosen to do so by insulting so many of his old friends
and colleagues . I am sorry it has taken so long to respond. I underestimated
the power of the internet to keep alive and endlessly re-circulate
malicious gossip of this kind. All best, Evan Parker"
So,
as PT interviews (or bits of them) are "circulating and multiplying
all over the internet", I came to the conclusion, after transcribing
a fascinating afternoon's conversation with musique concrète
composer / writer and noted film theorist Michel
Chion in early June, that it deserved to appear in its entirety
here, instead of languishing on the hard drive as a reservoir of juicy
quotes to illustrate the Wire article for which it formed
the basis (out in the August 2008 Wire, btw). I also finally
got round to transcribing an interview I did with Australian sound
artist Philip Samartzis
(apologies for not publishing it earlier, Philip, but what you say
is just as relevant in 2008 as it was in 2007, if that's any consolation),
so this particular issue starts off with a double whammy of interviews
for your edification and entertainment. You'll notice that Michel
Chion spends as much time talking about cinema as he does about music,
and that in a way is also true of myself, recently. This past year
(not that you're all that interested but I'm going to tell you anyway)
has seen a veritable explosion in the Warburton Family DVD Collection
– haha, here he was complaining about not having enough time
to listen to music and now he spends even less because he's busy watching
films – my dear wife Marie, who wisely used to keep
my spending on CDs in check, is just as movie-mad as I am. I have
been approached, notably by Derek Taylor over at Bagatellen, to write
something detailed about some of my favourite films, but I haven't
got round to it yet. And I'm not promising anything either: reviewing
the Lohner and Greenaway DVDs in this issue took quite some time.
With music at least you can listen to most things on headphones while
doing other sundry activities, but you can't strap a DVD player to
your head and cycle to work while watching a film. Well, you could
try, I suppose. Let me know if you manage it, and what the police
say.
Anyway, enough. You'll also notice that this issue is billed as "Autumn
2008" and not "September 2008", which is about as clear
an indication I can give that I'm not ready to resume monthly issues
of PT for a while yet. It's been a busy year for my own albums (thanks
to everybody involved in releasing and reviewing them) and I'm still
have quite a bit of scribbling to do for The Wire, so let's
be more realistic and aim at making PT a quarterly publication, shall
we? In any case, there's enough good stuff in this issue (if I say
so myself) to keep you busy for three months, thanks to the gloriously
enthusiastic return of PT's regular contributors Nate Dorward, Massimo
Ricci, Clifford Allen, Jon Dale and Stephen Griffith, and warm welcomes
to new boys Louis Sterett and Joe Musgrove. Bonne lecture!–DW
Relishing
the difference between art and life
"Art's
obscured the difference between art and life. Now let life obscure
the difference between life and art."
- John Cage, from Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only
Make Matters Worse)
 When
I was a kid back in the pre-ceedee daze, a friend of my dad's who
was always introduced to me as "Uncle" Colin (it's funny
how many uncles and aunties you have at that age) used to come round
at least once a week for a "listening session" with my dad
in our front room (my mum took refuge in the back room with the TV),
which consisted of playing their latest acquisitions as loud as they
could get away with. As we lived in a semi-detached house and our
next-door neighbour, a Mr. Spencer, was almost legally deaf having
worked for nearly half a century in the din of a cotton mill, things
could get pretty damn loud before anyone (usually my mother) complained.
I have many fond memories of Bruckner and Mahler symphonies, Wagner
operas, Strauss tone poems and even adventurous forays into the mid-20th
century mainstream – Martinu's Double Concerto, Lutoslawski's
Concerto for Orchestra – at what Byron Coley once memorably
described as "cow-rending volume". The problem was all this
stuff was on vinyl – remember we're talking the early 70s here
– and the quality of the pressings often left much to be desired.
The super duper 180g slabs collectors thrill to today were a long
way away; LPs back then were often thin, floppy things, notoriously
prone to attracting static, frequently warped and covered with bumps
and holes (any of you vinyl freaks out there remember those mid 70s
Affinity LPs, or Eno's Obscures? yep, that bad). Russian
pressings were particularly atrocious; in 1976 my dad went to Leningrad,
as it was known then, with a delegation of local communists (he didn't
give a fuck about politics but back then joining the Party was the
only way he was ever going to get to have a look inside the Hermitage)
and came back with a stack of LPs including, appropriately enough,
a copy of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony which I swear
was packed inside recycled toilet paper. The brown inner sleeve stank
to high heaven. It was also the worst goddamn pressing I'd ever heard,
full of dull thuds (looked at through a magnifying glass its surface
looked like a relief map of the Scottish Highlands), static crackle,
clicks and pops, and a strange microtonal swoon due to the fact the
hole that should have been in the middle of the disc wasn't. And this
years before Boyd Rice.
 Needless
to say these imperfections used to drive dad and Uncle Colin mad.
They spent as much time listening for surface noise as they did listening
to music (and spent as much money on gadgets designed to combat it
as they did on LPs themselves: in addition to all manner of anti-static
cloths and pads, I remember one particularly fearful object called
a Pixall that looked like a miniature garden roller whose surface
was as sticky as flypaper, which was designed to pick up particles
of dust from the surface of the disc, but was so effective it even
removed the labels from the centre of the record if you weren't careful).
What was amusing to me then was that while the surface noise caused
them no end of distress, they were perfectly able to filter out other
annoying extraneous sounds – notably the roar of the Spencers'
TV through the wall, and the barking of Shep, the border collie across
the street, who yelped distressingly behind his front door every three
seconds whenever his owners buggered off to the pub and left him alone.
Then again, being able to filter perceptual information, concentrate
on the important and exclude the unimportant, is essential. You wouldn't
be here reading this stuff now if your mother hadn't been able to
identify the cry of her own mewling puking infant in a ward full of
skriking newborns, and tell that you needed feeding, or changing,
or both.
 We're
very good at filtering out you know the er umm kind of little noises
and and odd erm repetitions that you hardly e-ever notice when listening
to to spoken language but umm which stick out like a a umm sore thumb
if you see them in print. It's about ignoring the surface noise and
listening to the music. But when the music itself recedes so far into
the background, through the use of long silences and extremely low
dynamics, the surface noise can't be ignored any more. Whereas in
the past we'd hear it and filter it out, now, in the absence or near-absence
of any music to take its place, we start listening to it.
For Radu Malfatti (if you'll permit me the luxury of quoting one of
my favourite PT interviews), "the more we are aware of things
the better. We can decide later if we 'need' them or not, but look
at all those people who are unaware of most of what's going on around
them. Sure, it would be a curse if every little detail entered our
brain and passed through the short-term memory gate and stayed in
long-term-memory – then we really would have a lot to carry
around with us! – but someone once said that we don't use more
than 65% of our brain capacity, and I'm absolutely sure that most
folk don't even use that. I assume that this is the underlying structure
or meaning of the meditational aspect of certain human knowlege. What
happens if we elevate the known into the realm of unknown, the unimportant
into the realm of important? We sharpen the consciousness and I think
we then are able to become aware of the acoustic environment surrounding
the music – and: the music itself!"
 If
you listen to a lot of standard Top 40 stuff, classic rock, metal
and jazz, or any other style of music which could be described as
busy and beat-driven, you probably never notice the "acoustic
environment surrounding the music", but if, like me, an increasing
amount of your listening time is spent with minimal lowercase improv
/ EAI / field recordings / Wandelweiser-esque stuff, you'll be acutely
aware of it, and probably go to great pains to seek out a relatively
quiet time and place to do your listening. Unless you prefer to wait
until late at night (in my case, after 11.30pm when the restaurant
ventilator in the adjoining courtyard finally shuts down) or get yourself
up at the crack of dawn (4am's perfect if you're an insomniac), you'll
need a good set of headphones. Of course, if you want to listen to
das profil des schweigens in the same room as your kids watching
Saturday morning cartoons, there's nothing to stop you – in
fact, I rather resent being told how to listen to records: "play
loud", "use headphones".. it's my disc and
I'll listen to it any bloody way I like, matey! – but I'm not
sure how much you're likely to get out of the experience. Then again,
as Malfatti seems to go out of his way to make his music – i.e.
the actual notes he writes – as pale, thin and unmemorable
as possible, I think it's fair to assume that he wants us to
explore that "acoustic environment surrounding the music."
 The
next logical step, it seems, is to dispense with the music altogether
and just listen to the world around us as one never-ending piece of
sound art (or forget the "art" altogether, and just listen
to "life", referring to the Cage quote above). Well, that's
fine if you're fortunate enough to find yourself in a rich and strange
acoustic environment – for the past two weeks I've been thrilling
to the buzz of innumerable bees in the flowers above the patio of
our secluded gîte in the heart of the French countryside,
the incredible rasp and flutter of thousands of invisible crickets
in sunlit upland meadows and the amazing acoustic of Alpine valleys
(including this one here in the photo) where the roar of a motorcycle
can be clearly heard over two miles away – but I'll hazard a
bet that the acoustic environment you spend most of your time in is
neither rich nor strange. I'd like to be able to appreciate the incessant
groan of passing traffic, the neighbours' radios, rows and ringtones,
but I'm afraid I don't. And the bloke downstairs' pathetic attempts
to get beyond bar three of Voodoo Chile most definitely don't
count as art, no way.
 That
Cage quotation at the top of this piece has been at the back of my
mind for a while now. I don't think for a minute that he was advocating
abandoning art – music – altogether in favour
of life – the sounds of the acoustic environment. If that had
been the case, he'd have drawn a straight line under 4'33"
and followed it, bringing his career as a composer to a neat
and logical conclusion. Which of course he didn't. As he said to Joëlle
Léandre shortly before his death, "I'm going to leave
you, and I'm afraid that people haven't understood my music."
"His music," Léandre stresses, "not
his thinking or his writing. Cage was one of the great figures of
the twentieth century, but first and foremost he was a musician. A
composer!"
 Cage
and the composers and improvisers who have followed in his footsteps
have taught us that the acoustic environment, the surface noise, is
always there, and that it can not and should not be ignored. But in
recent years the pendulum has, to my mind, swung a little too far
in the opposite direction. As someone who spent years trying to learn
the nuts and bolts of musical composition, I'm a little suspicious,
not to say resentful, of folks who package raw field recordings and
sell them as compositions. It's like selling bottles of seaside air.
Go to the seaside and full your lungs for free. The recording of Manfred
Werder's 20061 which inaugurated Toshiya Tsunoda's
Skiti label is lovely indeed, but I wonder what Werder had to do with
it, other than provide the poem which constitutes the score: "a
place, natural light, where the performer, the performers like to
be / a time / (sounds)". It's not that I suspect Manfred (photo,
left) is cashing in in some way or another – this is after all
a bijou limited edition, not a big budget box on Deutsche Grammophon,
so there's no point opening up the old wounds of the Stockhausen Aus
den Sieben Tagen royalty cheques affair – but what did
he actually compose, and how might the album have sounded
different if Tetuzi Akiyama, Masahiko Okura and Toshiya Tsunoda had
gone along to record an album of open-air improv in the riverside
park at Tamagawa-Ryokuchi without having read his poem?
 I
can hear a composer's ear at work in Michael Pisaro's Transparent
City, which discreetly adds carefully selected sine tones to
unadulterated field recordings, but the anaemic beeps and plunks of
Okura, Taku Unami and Taku Sugimoto's Chamber Music Concerts Vol.
1 leave me unimpressed and unmoved (and oddly enough seem to
spoil my enjoyment of the acoustic environment, paradoxically in the
same way that the cracks and bangs of the shitty Soviet pressing spoiled
my dad's enjoyment of that Shostakovich). There's much to admire in
Sugimoto's post-Italia work, but little to love; I'll trade
two or three minutes of Fragments of Paradise or Opposite
for Futatsu and Live in Australia anyday. Not to
rub your nose in it either, dearest reader, but I'm mighty glad that,
as a so-called journalist, I received my copy of the latter free
– I'd have felt rather put out if I'd paid full whack for one
of those exquisitely-packaged IMJ CDs only to discover that a good
part of it consisted of the sound of rain falling outside the concert
venue. And talking of rain, or of what Malfatti fondly calls "the
lull in the storm", much as I like dach, his Erstwhile
trio outing with Phil Durrant and Thomas Lehn, I can't help wondering
if the album would have attracted the attention it did (for which,
I'm happy to say, I was in part responsible, reviewing it enthusiastically
for The Wire) if the sounds of the roof cracking and buckling
in the post-rainstorm sunshine hadn't been so prominent.
 That
recording, as it happens, was made at the Ulrichsberger Kaleidophon
festival in Ulrichsberg, a delightful little village in the northwest
corner of Austria not far from the German and Czech borders. Earlier
this year I was fortunate enough to play the same event myself with
the rambunctious and distinctly non-lowercase Return of the New Thing
quartet, but the epiphany I experienced there did not take place in
the concert hall (even though the gig went down very well with the
punters), but in the woods outside the village the following day.
Having some time to kill before being driven back to Linz for the
return flight to Paris, I took my trusty mp3 player and wandered off
down the hillside on which the village is perched, crossed a fast-flowing
brook and threaded my way up through an impossibly green meadow to
a small copse overlooking the valley. I was listening to Joe Foster,
Bonnie Jones and Toshimaru Nakamura's One Day (Erstwhile)
and the way the music blended with the sounds of twigs cracking beneath
my feet, insects buzzing around my head, the wind in the trees above,
the distant drones of a tractor across the valley and an aeroplane
somewhere out of sight in the sky above was absolutely magical. The
acoustic environment helped frame and define the music, and vice
versa.
 And
that's the way it should be: it's not about obscuring the difference
between art and life, but relishing it in all its glorious incongruity.
There's no right or wrong way to listen to music, and no right or
wrong place or time to do it either. You hi-fi purists can scoff all
you like – I take your point about compression and shitty little
earplugs and whatnot, but if an album can make the hairs stand up
and the tears flow that's all that counts. Appropriately enough, after
One Day, the next thing that was cued up on the mp3 as I
made my way back through the fields to Ulrichsberg was Graham Lambkin's
Salmon Run, which sits contentedly on the fence between art –
the classical music he samples (quotes? borrows?) – and life,
the noises we make and hear while listening to it. I sat down in the
hot sunshine by a roadside shrine, listened to "The Bridge to
Aria / Salmon Run", and wept.–DW
Jon
Mueller
METALS
Table of the Elements
Jon
Mueller
STRUNG
Table of the Elements
Jon
Mueller
HOLLOW VOICES/SINGING HANDS
Friends and Relatives
Jon
Mueller/Jason Kahn
TOPOGRAPHY
Xeric/Crouton
Mouths
3V1/3V2
Absurd
 It
must be amusing for metal fans to witness improv/noise heads immersing
themselves in all things black and death, particularly as metal obsessives
can be quite rigorous regarding authenticity and boundary policing,
who's a true metal fan and who's not. A lot of recent adoption of
metal aesthetics by the underground has felt ham-fisted and opportunistic,
but Jon Mueller's on safe ground with Metals, as he's more
interested in the architecture of metal, its rhythmic and physical
possibilities, which gives his engagement with the genre a welcome
degree of abstraction. "Trace Essential" captures the foreboding
central to metal through carefully placed bass drum bombs and slowly
encroaching texturological inquest, but "Homeostatic" is
where things really take off. As a dissection of the blast beat it's
as fascinating as Francisco López's metallic edit-frenzy from
years ago, but it's played in real time, so Mueller captures two of
the keys to metal: athletics (more than a touch of über-mensch)
and repetition. The cymbals alternately fire like flares or skirl
in a muddied, distortion-caked pool. I still think Metals
functions better as another angle on Mueller's sensitivity to percussion's
non-linear properties (even when he's working blast beats into a 500
mph motorik) than an engagement with metal as genre, but it's a good
listen.
 Strung
is Mueller's contribution to Table Of The Elements' Guitar
Series Vol. 3, a lovely clear 12" with etching from Sav
X on the B-side. Mueller approaches the instrument with a percussionist's
sensibility for both rhythm and sonority – the first and third
parts of Strung revolve around an icy-cold blast that punches
in and out of your eardrums like pure binary construct. The guitar
tone here is razor-sharp yet strangely elastic, and when Mueller uses
an e-bow, he repeatedly clips and stutters the drone by disrupting
the strings, replacing one kind of static (inertia) with another.
In the third section, he clangs away like Branca on downers, but,
mixed so low, it's closer to the buzz of distant train lines or the
depopulated hum of power stations at night.
For
the Friends And Relatives cassette, Mueller bares a rougher side.
Both sides are unedited transcriptions of amplified bass drum, brutishly
recorded on a wavering cassette deck. It feels somehow appropriate
for the format: cassettes are wrongly read as throwaway items because
of some weird cultural cringe about the lower end of consumer electronics,
but conversely the lack of pressure on an artist to "step up
to the plate" via tape gives them more scope to experiment without
temporal or aesthetic restraint. "Hollow Voices" morphs
gentle waves of feedback into walls of singing noise, and when Mueller
introduces active elements toward the end of the piece, it comes as
quite a surprise. The shift from relatively unadorned feedback to
rattling, jumpy interaction has an effect, over the extended timeframe,
which a precision-edited piece wouldn't allow. "Singing Hands"
is sterner stuff: its unchecked buzzing, stretches of pure tone and
woodpecker rhythms don't exactly coalesce, but they're more provocative
for their stringency. Hollow Voices/Singing Hands is about
exposition of process, and it's worth hearing for its explicitness.
 Jason
Kahn's been working on his architectural approach to music for some
time, and while he's not yet topped Miramar (which documented
the architecture of the main room in Studio Midi) there's great continuity
in his recordings. His embrace of feedback and resonance through drums/percussion
makes him a perfect collaborator for Mueller, and Topography
documents recordings from a short tour undertaken in 2007. Topography
– yeah, I can see that; these are indeed recordings that give
detailed representation of the region they're exploring, and there's
certainly a descriptive-relational aspect here too – Mueller
and Kahn's playing is integrated and analytical: there's rigour in
their approach, and an embrace of phenomena over expression, as they
let percussion, cassettes and synth just be, with seemingly minimal
interference. If you're aware of either player's previous releases,
this'll sound as you'd expect – chasms of snare drum rattle,
slowly spinning orbs of analog fuckery, hissing noise that occasionally
breaks into slow-motion crackle and splatter, with room reverb factored
in as a fundamental element. Like some recent improvisation, particularly
in the EAI field, they're fonder of letting two sounds sit alongside
each other and slowly spool out, rather than aiming for detailed interaction,
but their ear for both simplicity and tone means the five live excerpts
on Topography don't require huge leaps in logic to sit together
as pleasurable listening experiences. Sure, it's no huge surprise,
but it's elegant, rewarding stuff – and far from lazy or laurel-resting.
 Mouths
is another of Mueller's projects, here collaborating with Jim Schoenecker
and Carol Genetti. Genetti's vocal work at the beginning of "3v1"
sets the tone – a sung note that cracks, wavers, wobbles, and
shivers for an extended time, it's slowly swarmed by percussive noise,
before an unceasing rattle, ghosted by the lone foghorn peal of voice
swimming in the background, pitches the composition into claustrophobic
territory. This actually feels closer to the emotional tenor
of metal than Mueller's Metals, to be honest. When Genetti's
voice reappears it's a real blast from outside, though I'm less impressed
by the wag who walked in while I was listening to this and said it
sounded like Yoko Ono. Recordings of Genetti's voice also appear on
"3v2", though for this live-to-air recording, Mueller is
paired in the performance space with Schoenecker. The gracefulness
in the pacing actually reminds me more of the patient enfolding of
texture and drone by figures like Mirror, Andrew Chalk, or Mimir;
"3v2" skirts the perimeters of various Industrial music
tropes without falling into the mire of Industrial Lite, and Mouths'
interest in the laminal gives these pieces a great sense of space/scope.
Further proof, if it were needed, that Jon Mueller's ear is a finely
tuned instrument indeed.–JD
Liquid
Architecture
Brisbane Powerhouse, July 4th / 5th
 Filling
a large part of the hole left in the Australian cultural calendar
by the demise of the long running What is Music? Festival, Liquid
Architecture (LA), now in its ninth year, can quite reasonably lay
claim to the title of "Australia's premiere Sound Art Festival."
Not the most widely contested title, of course, but LA programs concerts
in enough cities to be as close to a "national" festival
as any in the country to date. The festival's focus tends more towards
solo performers or existing groups working at the electronic end of
experimental music, rather than the improvised and collaborative work
which was a feature of What is Music? This is both a strength and
a weakness, as performers can present fully realized work, but it
often lacks the surprise that can arise from the chance meetings made
possible by improvised music situations.
This
year's festival kicked off with two nights in Brisbane, the first
performance being, appropriately enough, by festival director Nat
Bates, under the obscure pseudonym "Nat." Using a sampling
keyboard, in an almost "classic RMIT" style, he offered
up a brooding piece as indebted to mid 70's Parmegiani, Ferrari and
Bayle as it was to the sound effects driven narratives of computer
game music and sound design. Making good use of the surround sound
available, Bates balanced drones, pulses and abrupt but never too
violent eruptions to create a tense atmosphere with an imminent, but
never acted upon, threat of explosion.
Rafael Toral followed with a disappointing performance that struggled
to get beyond the level of technological demonstration. Using a series
of hand-held, and I guess, handmade, synthesizer devices, he produced
a somewhat limited display of pops, squelches, and occasional drones,
the traditional array of sounds produced by mysterious little boxes
with knobs on. With only one device used at a time, for seven or so
minutes, the feeling we were watching a showcase for gadgets instead
of a musical performance grew harder to ignore. There were engaging
moments, the first and last of the devices in particular producing
some excellent sounds in well-structured passages, but taken as a
whole it was repetitive, frustrating and dragged on far too long.
The odd man out of the festival, Ian Wadley's solo guitar performance
seemed a somewhat baffling inclusion. Struggling with technical difficulties
at the start of his performance, he failed to fully hit his stride,
meandering through a predictable set of delay/reverb heavy strumming
and twanging that occasionally gave glimpses of what it was intending
to achieve. At times he managed to strike a delicate balance between
melody and dirt over softly droning delayed chords, but these moments
were too few and far between to come across as more than happy accident.
 Presenting
a variation on his 2007 Editions Mego release Altars of Science,
Markus Schmickler (right) rounded out the evening in grand style.
With the sound both loud enough to have a solid physical presence
and clear enough to be able to hear all the nuances, Schmickler released
layers of cascading oscillations and shrieking digital noise, growing
from slivers of high frequencies into an immense swirling cloud reminiscent
(like much of the world's best computer music) of the long-form electronic
music of Xenakis. Despite its density, Schmickler remained at all
times in strict control of the sound he flung violently around the
space. Presented as a more singular entity than on the CD release,
this dizzying, overwhelming performance was by far the highlight of
the festival.
Opening
the second night, Clocked Out Duo, accompanied by New Zealand ethnomusicologist
Richard Nunns, turned in one of the best sets I've seen from them
to date. At its best, it mapped out a beautiful, haunted terrain,
with prepared piano and percussion intertwining delicately, serving
as a bed for Nunns' traditional Maori flutes, carved mostly from what
seemed to bone or jade. When he switched to percussion, however, the
set lost its way, and missing an opportunity to round the set out
about 2/3 of the way through, the two members of Clocked Out Duo seemed
unsure of how to respond to Nunns' material, and defaulted to an overly
busy mode which detracted from the delicacy of the first part of the
performance.
Berlin's
Andrew Pekler managed to strike a raw nerve, his set featuring an
over reliance on delay time/pitch knob turning sounds. Admittedly
a pet hate of mine, this sound almost without exception comes across
as clumsy and lazy to my ears, and its ubiquitousness here makes it
hard for me to present any balanced comment. His performance was essentially
a live mix of tracks from his releases, most notably Strings and
Feedback (which I'm actually quite fond of), but when coupled
with the over abundant and obvious effects, the loop-driven nature
of the tracks proved an irritant rather than in any way soothing or
meditative. Very disappointing, and as revealing of computer music's
weaknesses as Schmickler's performance was a showcase for its strengths.
Toy
Bizarre's set of processed field recordings fared markedly better.
With a peculiarly engaging stage presence for a laptop performance,
Cedric Peyronnet paced and swayed behind his equipment, silently (?)
singing along, giving the performance an oddly hermetic feeling, as
if the audience was privy to only some aspects of the work. The music
leaned heavily towards swelling digital drones, though some clean
recordings were allowed space within the mix, most effectively an
excellent recording of a plane passing low overhead. The initial surge
of the first 2/3 of the performance died away after this, trailing
into a series of smaller, less heavily processed vignettes. Excellent
work, if perhaps a little long and with one too many false endings.
Rounding out the two nights in Brisbane, Sydney based Alex White blasted
the audience with a short, sharp jolt of raw digital noise. With a
far more brute take on the matter to Markus Schmickler's, White's
set consisted mostly of short loops and harsh square wave frequencies
stacked on top of each other in multichannel space. The shuddering
stop/start dynamics of the piece added to the intensity, with the
audience never being allowed to settle into the noise for long at
any point. Brevity worked in White's favor here, the structure of
his performance never becoming too predictable.
Offering
more than anything else a snapshot of current practice in computer
music, which seems to be progressing quite nicely in some instances,
and not at all in others, this year's festival suffered from unevenness
in its programming. This is, of course, an unavoidable aspect
of festivals (and the sheer number of performances held under this
banner, in both major cities and regional centres all across Australia,
is commendable and must be noted), but with a slightly tighter rein
on its selection of artists, Liquid Architecture could easily move
from being a consistently good festival, to a consistently great one.–JM
In
Concert
Potlatch
10th Anniversary
Les Instants Chavirés, Montreuil, May 29th - 30th, 2008
The
Potlatch imprint was founded in 1998 by Jacques Oger and Jean-Marc
Foussat, whose vast archive of recordings of free music provided the
label with seven of the label's 14 releases until 2002's Madly
You, after which Foussat jumped ship and left Oger to steer Potlatch
into the calmer waters of EAI (it's interesting to speculate how the
world might have turned upside down if Foussat's recording of Günter
Müller, Keith Rowe and Taku Sugimoto at the Instants Chavirés
in October 1999 had appeared on Oger's imprint instead of Erstwhile,
but that, as they say, is another story..). To celebrate
ten years in business, Oger curated two evenings of music at Les Instants
Chavirés at the end of May, showcasing musicians associated
with recent releases on the label: the first a double bill with John
Butcher and Christof Kurzmann (The Big Misunderstanding Between
Hertz and MegaHertz, 2006) followed by Jean-Luc Guionnet and
Toshimaru Nakamura (this year's Map), the second featuring
Cor Fuhler (Stengam, 2006) and the Trio Sowari (Burkhard
Beins, Bertrand Denzler and Phil Durrant – check out 2005's
Three Dances).
 The
contrast between the two sax + electronics duos of the opening night
was as striking live as it was on disc. If Butcher and Kurzmann represented
the more "traditional" approach to improvisation, picking
up and developing each other's ideas with considerable alacrity (Kurzmann's
mastery of Klaus Filip's Max / MSP patch lloopp was simply stunning:
anyone who still scoffs at a laptop's inability to respond rapidly
should procure a copy of The Big Misunderstanding forthwith),
Guionnet and Nakamura took great pleasure in pushing each other into
the kind of dangerous territory that's made Map one of this
year's most exciting EAI releases. Not that the Butcher / Kurzmann
set was without its thrills and spills, mind: the tension was palpable
throughout, and Kurzmann, once pilloried in The Wire as someone
not interesting to watch as a performer (remember that old "sit,
swig and click" putdown?), was especially enthralling, tapping
his feet with quiet intensity as he laid down layers of subtle grooves
for Butcher's impeccable multiphonics to weave in and out of.
 Trawling
through some old Potlatch reviews of mine I came across the following
passage written about an earlier release on the label, Steve Lacy
and Derek Bailey's Outcome, a 1983 set from 28 rue Dunois
culled from the Foussat archive: "each of these master musicians
continues along his own way with characteristic determination (stubbornness,
even), and from time to time the paths cross, forcing them along other
avenues of exploration." Oddly enough, that applies equally well
to the music Jean-Luc Guionnet and Toshi Nakamura make together. Several
EAI aficionados of my acquaintance found Map distinctly frustrating,
but it's precisely the music's refusal to go where you think it ought
to which makes it so captivating. There were peaks and troughs in
their live set too, granted, but a great deal of the pleasure to be
had from this pair comes from listening to how they wriggle their
way out of a tight spot straight into another one.
 Cor
Fuhler's Stengam – spell that backwards to find out
what he's preparing his piano with – was one of several fine
EAI outings in 2006 that didn't get the coverage it deserved (autrement
dit, I'm still feeling slightly guilty about not reviewing it
myself), due in no small part to the subtle, even at times introvert,
nature of the music (i.e. this is not one to play on the mp3 player
in a crowded underground train on the way to the day job – try
some of Cor's earlier stuff with Han Bennink and Wilbert de Joode
instead). Having seen him perform live, taking what seems like all
the time in the world to place those magnets and ebows at just
the right spot on the strings, it all makes sense. Fuhler's the
first to admit he's moved on some considerable way from those rambunctious
trio outings with Bennink and de Joode: the Instants set was careful,
poised and for the most part quiet, with a fabulous ear for pitch
and timing. Maybe a future Potlatch fest could team him up with saxophonist
Stéphane Rives, whose 2003 Fibres remains one of the
label's most highly acclaimed releases. Just a thought.
 Trio
Sowari is one of European EAI's most consistently impressive working
units, and their set didn't disappoint. Percussionist Beins and laptopper
Durrant are old hands at lowercase – the former a stalwart of
the Berlin scene (Phosphor, Perlonex..), the latter one of the pioneers
of so-called reductionism (he helped coin the much-maligned term in
the first place) in the groundbreaking trio with Radu Malfatti and
Thomas Lehn documented on 1997's Beinhaltung (Fringes) and
1999's dach (Erstwhile). Trio Sowari takes its name from
Durrant's 1997 album of the same name, but the violin has been consigned
to its case in recent years, and it's on laptop that he joins forces
with Beins and tenor saxophonist Denzler, who's mastered a whole repertoire
of so-called extended techniques. You'd never guess he started out
playing thorny free jazz. That said, Trio Sowari's set at the Instants
was quite sprightly, Beins and Denzler's scrapes and hisses coinciding
with almost uncanny telepathy to counterpoint Durrant's meticulously
deployed fizzles and pops. "Too perfect," grumbled a local
noisenik at the bar afterwards. Well, I've heard that said that about
Evan Parker, too. Maybe it simply means that this kind of music has
matured sufficiently to define its own aesthetic rules and regulations.
Then again, one person's maturity is another's stagnation. Let's see
what the second decade brings. Here's to the next ten years, Jacko.–DW
Tony
Wilson/Peggy Lee/Jon Bentley
ESCONDIDO DREAMS
Fond
of Tigers
RELEASE THE SAVIOURS
Tony
Wilson 6tet
PEARLS BEFORE SWINE
John
Butcher/Torsten Müller/Dylan van der Schyff
WAY OUT NORTHWEST
 This
latest batch of releases from Drip Audio, the Vancouver-based label
run by violinist Jesse Zubot, is as varied and provocative as ever
– nice to see a label that's managing to step up the release
schedule while keeping the quality control firmly in place. The trio
on Escondido Dreams includes two familiar West Coast figures,
guitarist Tony Wilson and cellist Peggy Lee, plus a new name to me,
saxophonist Jon Bentley. It's the closest thing to a straight jazz
album in this batch – which is to say, not all that close. "Laxing
Lizards Resume" is a charmer of an opening track – almost
too charming, maybe, as it verges on the winsome chamber-folk that
Bill Frisell turns out by the bucketload – but the rest of the
album is a tougher proposition. The music is sparse and light in its
touch, at times abrasive but in a likeably offhand way. On the best
tracks it's as if the players are poised on the brink of a lush, downbeat
beauty but will only yield to such temptations gradually, even reluctantly:
sample, for instance, the way they take their sweet time over the
lazy, just-woke-up opening of "Man and Dog" before settling
into a softspoken groove. Bentley could be more forceful – he
has that fey saxophone sound which seems to be all the rage nowadays
– but Lee and Wilson are in superb form: the guitarist is particularly
deft at adding knobbly string-noise to otherwise lyrical surroundings.
 Release
the Saviours is the latest missive from Fond of Tigers, a seven-piece
juggernaut helmed by guitarist Stephen Lyons that tends to send critics
scrambling for their pigeonholes ("math-rock," "avant-jazz,"
"ambient," whatever). The pieces here stretch out even further
than on their debut A Thing to Live With, and the band dwells
longer in the quiet ambient/improv end of the pool this time around.
Nice, but the real moments to treasure are still the full-on blasts
of brainiac prog-rock bombast, where the band homes in on some insane
crooked time-signature riffs and stylistic U-turns. The meat of the
album comes in two ferocious epics, "Pemberdunn Maple Wolfs"
and "A Long Way to Temporary." The former covers a fairly
wide territory, from angry, knotty rhythms to pulsing catharsis to
something like a supercharged bossa nova. The other track is narrower
in focus: it begins with a little prelude, with drummers Skye Brooks
and Shanto Bhattacharya ripping into a mutant hambone pattern, but
the real core of the track is a tight, up'n'down groove that teeters
between euphoria and claustrophobia. Despite the track's fuzzed-out
volume and twitchy rhythms, the combination of busy surface elaborations
and gradual long-term development isn't all that far from Steve Reich.
Great stuff.
 There's
more glorious jazz-rock noise on Tony Wilson's Pearls Before Swine,
a sextet outing that features some of the Fond of Tigers crew (Zubot,
Brooks, trumpeter J.P. Carter), plus bassist Russell Sholberg and
saxophonist Masa Anzai, who's got John Zorn's acrid squall down to
a T (for better or worse). Indeed, in an odd way the music reminds
me of Naked City: though it's not nearly as jumpy, frenetic or stop-start,
it similarly tends to frustrate any expectations you have about coherent
development or the relation of solos to heads, even if it rarely plays
such incongruities for shocks or laughs (the exception being a goofy
country-metal version of Monk's "Hornin' In"). Wilson's
arrangements are fantastically tight, multilayered and energetic,
showing the obligatory obsession with odd-metre wizardry, but don't
expect solos to bear much relation to anything that's taken place
up to that point. The wry melodic crossweave meticulously set up on
"Squirk," for instance, is brushed aside by an extended
free improv blast, though the theme gradually drifts back in, a little
darker and more disillusioned. "I Am the Walrus" transforms
the Beatles tune into a nearly unbearable rock'n'roll wail then pulverizes
it into free-jazz skronk, before reassembling the pieces into cop-show
funk. The Monk cover is merely a cute stunt, but versions of Tom Cora's
"Jim" and "Ee-Gypt-Me" (by Canada's own Freddie
Stone) are more substantial, both of them featuring powerful wall-of-noise
grooves. It's all maybe a little too stylish for its own good, but
there's no denying that it's great fun, and there are moments of beauty
amidst the orchestrated mayhem, including a lovely feature for guest
singer Kevin House on "Junkyard Sea".
 John
Butcher usually prefers to work at a distance from anything resembling
a standard jazz line-up. So Way Out Northwest provides a
rare opportunity to hear him tackle The Tradition his own way, in
the congenial company of bassist Torsten Müller (who hails from
Germany but has been resident in Vancouver for the past seven years)
and Canada's own drummer Dylan van der Schyff. Nothing overtly jazz-oriented
here, despite the title's nod to Sonny Rollins' West Coast classic,
but I think Newk would still enjoy the richly fantastical vein of
Butcher's imagination on these six tracks (something usually obscured
in his more austere work). The word that springs to mind listening
to these pieces is "playfulness" – the music is bursting
with ideas, which tend to work on several levels at once: timbral
play often turns out to be the motor of a sprightly rhythm or the
seed of an angular melody. It's a very close musical dialogue (no
parallel-paths independence here, for the most part) but one where
particular subjects seem to change or evaporate or slide away, and
it's the interaction itself that counts, the network of quickfire
connections and exchanges. Butcher's extraordinary ear and control
of his instrument are as much in evidence here as in his solo work,
and Müller and van der Schyff both show a fine instinct for the
perfect, instantaneous response, working with the kind of speed that
gives even a tiny gesture the force of a coup. As the jazzbos
say, this CD smokes.–ND
Henning
Lohner
THE REVENGE OF THE DEAD INDIANS: IN MEMORIAM JOHN CAGE
Mode DVD
Peter
Greenaway
4 AMERICAN COMPOSERS
Les films du paradoxe DVD
 The
Revenge of the Dead Indians, whose somewhat curious title is
a quotation from Heiner Müller ("Cage is the revenge of
the dead Indians on European music.."), is a 129-minute film
by California-born Henning Lohner, who, you may recall, helped John
Cage realise his one and only film, One11,
just before the composer's death in 1992. Lohner, in an extensive
essay included in the booklet accompanying the Mode DVD, describes
Revenge as "a film essay about the state of [Cage's]
influence on our Western culture at the cusp of the new millennium."
Starting with over 250 hours of film footage shot over a period of
four years – mainly interviews with 42 participants (of whom
more later) and shots of "forgotten" landscapes, from the
deserts of New Mexico to the streets of New York – and 200 hours
of recorded sound, most of it music by Cage performed by Mode house
artists (Irvine Arditti, Stephen Drury, Margaret Leng Tan et al.),
Lohner and cinematographer Van Carlson set about editing and organising
their material according to "a personally transfigured Fibonacci
series" and "a pattern of musical composition that, despite
its apparent kinship with Cage's chance operations, came from the
domain of serial music." Textual material and images were divided
along thematic lines – "chaos", "chance",
"love", "music", etc. – and assembled into
a three-act structure (though the booklet's chapter index indicates
there are five acts, including a "performance" of 4'33"
by Cage and Lohner on a busy street in Berlin).
While
the music used is, as one would expect, well-recorded and performed
with attention and affection, the verbal contributions of the participants,
with the possible exception of Cage himself, are either irredeemably
trite or of questionable relevance. Benoît Mandelbrot explains
Fractal Geometry For Dummies by twiddling a branch, Iannis Xenakis
tells the old (old) story of wartime street protests in Athens, Jean
Nouvel raps on about Fleming's serendipitous discovery of penicillin,
Matt Groening (yes, I wondered what the hell Matt Groening was doing
in there too) draws a blind doodle, Frank Gehry sneezes, Frank Zappa
dicks around on a sampling keyboard, Dennis Hopper reads a snippet
(badly) from The Future of Music: Credo, and Yoko Ono helpfully
informs us that "if I hadn't met John.. er, well I would have
met John anyway." Yeah, right. I guess in one sense Lohner is
on the one when he describes it all as reflecting Western culture
at the cusp of the new millennium – ours is a culture of what
Richard Hell once described as "short attention spans, mysterious
hard-ons and sudden mood shifts." A culture of soundbites. It
makes no difference if they're from eminent scientists (Murray Gell-Mann,
Edward Lorenz, Marvin Minsky and Benoit Mandelbrot are all roped in
to give the whole affair a scientific seal of approval), they're soundbites
nonetheless. Some are mildly amusing, others frankly annoying; if
you manage to make it to the end of the disc without throwing a heavy
object at the screen every time Rutger Hauer's smug mug appears, you
deserve some kind of medal. When everyone shuts up and leaves us to
watch Walden Pond (where else?) and listen to the String Quartet
in Four Parts, it's just fine, but if you want to learn anything
about Cage you'd be better off reading his books and buying his records.
John Cage's music and thought belongs in your life; Revenge of
the Dead Indians belongs on your coffee table.
 Peter
Greenaway's 1983 Channel 4 documentary is a much more enjoyable affair,
consisting for the most part of footage of a performance in St. James
Church, Islington, London, to celebrate the composer's 70th birthday.
Among the pieces performed that day were Living Room Music (1940),
Double Music (1941), Forever and Sunsmell (1942),
Music for Marcel Duchamp (1947), Sonatas and Interludes
(1948), Speech (1955), Aria (1958), Music Walk
(1958), Cartridge Music (1960), Electronic Music for
Piano (1964), Song Books (1970), Branches (1976),
Inlets (1977) and Roaratorio; an Irish Circus on Finnegans
Wake (1979), extracts of which are interspersed with thirteen
of the one-minute Indeterminacy anecdotes culled from Cage's
Silence and A Year From Monday (has anyone reissued
that 1959 Folkways twofer on CD – Indeterminacy with
Concert for Piano and Orchestra and Fontana Mix
Folkways FT 3704? Doesn't look like it.. paging New World records!).
The performances are excellent – you can have fun spotting the
members of AMM in there too, by the way – and despite a few
de rigueur Greenaway symmetrical shots of empty chairs, the
director doesn't get in the way of his subject matter.
He
came dangerously close to doing so though in London's Sadler's Wells
Theatre on November 4th 1983, when he set up a huge computer-controlled
boom to film the Philip Glass Ensemble in full flight. I was at that
gig, and remember being amazed (and often distracted and annoyed)
by Greenaway's roving camera hovering above, behind and even beside
the musicians as they played. But the results are spectacular: being
able to watch the myriad tiny movements of Glass and Michael Riesman's
arpeggios and the agile fingering of Jack Kripl, Jon Gibson and Richard
Peck close up is a thrill. More of a thrill maybe than listening to
the music; Greenaway caught the Glass Ensemble just after Phil had
morphed into Philip, and really broken into the big time with a decent
major label (CBS) contract, two operas and the first of many movie
soundtracks under his belt. The sense of satisfaction at finally having
achieved long overdue recognition is present throughout, as Glass
reminisces about the (good? bad?) old days when he and the Lucinda
Childs Dance Company were pelted with eggs ("you don't go to
a concert with eggs unless you think you're gonna throw 'em.."),
and accepts his new-found fame and fortune matter-of-factly: "there's
no doubt that this music has a far wider audience than what you usually
associate with new music – but that's a question of historical
period.. that was true in the past too: Verdi's operas sold out".
But a quarter of a century on, it's clear that Glass has sold out
in more ways than one: there's nothing in the twenty operas, eight
symphonies, five string quartets, concertos for piano, violin, timpani,
saxophone quartet and umpteen soundtracks to match the adrenalin buzz
of Einstein On The Beach's "Spaceship", which brings
both the concert and Greenaway's film to a rapturous conclusion.
Including
Meredith Monk in a series entitled 4 American Composers when
she is, as Greenaway's documentary makes clear from the outset, also
a "singer, dancer, filmmaker, choreographer, performance artist"
is, perhaps, a risky move. Hearing her rap on about how she half-imagined
the dolmens of Brittany to be the work of extra-terrestrials (yay!
Erich von Daniken lives!), or the Wilhelm Reich-inspired libretto
for 1966's 16mm Earrings (ah, Wilhelm's aged about as badly
as his younger namesake Steve), or the supposed "pre-World War
III anxiety" of the dreadfully bland Turtle Dreams,
it's hard not to be reminded of the terminally hip loft(y) art(y)
fart(y) scene Laurie Anderson sent up so hilariously in her 1977 vignette
New York Social Life (all the while being part of it herself,
of course). Indeed, you could argue that Anderson would have made
a better subject than Monk for a documentary; she's certainly more
versatile and talented as a composer, even if she never landed that
ECM contract (for you to decide if that's a good or bad thing).
Jack of all trades, master of none is, unfortunately, the feeling
you're left with after watching this particular film, which spends
as much time covering Monk's experimental cinema (silent, for the
most part!) and dance routines as it does her banal sub-Glass doodles
and sha(m)anic yodelling, twittering vocals.
The
most successful documentary of these four as far as I'm concerned
is the one on Robert Ashley, specifically on Perfect Lives (Privacy
Rules), Ashley's seven-episode opera for TV, which was presented
in a live version, once more at the Almeida in 1983, prior to its
eventual appearance on the small screen the following year. Maybe
that's just because I've always been madly in love with my copy of
the old Lovely Music LP Private Parts (LML 1001, with "The
Park" and "The Backyard", whose cover artwork Jason
Lescalleet and Graham Lambkin affectionately chose to emulate for
their recent Erstwhile release The Breadwinner), specifically
the line "there's something like the feeling of the idea of silk
scarves in the air" which has, for some inexplicable reason,
haunted me ever since. For a start, Greenaway's structuralist approach
to filmmaking, with its concern for in-frame geometry and symmetry,
has much in common with video artist John Sanborn's approach to the
opera, each of whose episodes explores a particular configuration
of the visual space – vertical bars for "The Bar",
low horizon line for "The Park" etc. – but there's
also a fondness for showing text (spoken and sung fragments of Ashley's
libretto are intercut throughout) which is particularly appropriate
for a filmmaker whose Godardian roots are never far from the surface.
The interviews with the participants are for the most part informative
(though David van Tieghem's "he trusted us to find our way in
it and find who we are" doesn't really tell us very much) but
are never allowed to bog down the overall structure of the documentary,
which not surprisingly follows the seven-part plan of the opera itself,
ending with the final episode's "I'm not the same person that
I used to be." Perfect Lives is available on DVD these
days, so you can decide for yourself how well John Sanborn's hyperbolic
praise for the work has stood the test of time. Pretty well, in my
opinion. Revisiting these four documentaries a quarter of a century
after they were made, it's striking how relevant Cage and Ashley's
information overload is to our crazy mixed-media world, while Glass
and Monk seem to belong to a bygone age. Oddly enough, so does Peter
Greenaway.–DW
Anthony
Braxton & Joe Morris
FOUR IMPROVISATIONS (DUO) 2007
Clean Feed
 For
its one hundredth release, Portugal's Clean Feed has brought together
two of the world's finest improvising composers in a four-disc set,
reedman Anthony Braxton and guitarist Joe Morris. Each disc contains
one hour-long unrehearsed improvisation. Boxed sets are nothing new
for the Braxton-phile, and when I recently talked to him, Morris commented
astutely on the reasons for this: Braxton's ideas require continuous
restatement in order for people to catch up with them, and that goes
for some of the things he's been saying over the past three decades
as well as why four CDs might be required to make a series of simple
improvisational points. Morris relates that one of the things that
attracted him to Braxton is the latter's very clear rhetorical logic
that can be approached through both un-premeditated and fully notated
constructs.
On the surface, Four Improvisations (Duo) 2007 might seem
to be an unlikely pairing. Yet Braxton and Morris met years ago while
separately on tour in Europe. Both are connected with academia, Braxton
at Wesleyan and Morris at the nearby New England Conservatory, and
Morris has long taught Braxton's music to his students. Mary Halvorson,
a student of Morris's who works in Braxton's ensembles, gave her graduate
recital partly in duo with Morris, and this was the first time Braxton
heard him play. Liking very much what he heard, he suggested collaborating.
Though they discussed the idea of a recording in conversation, it
wasn't until Morris got a call from engineer Jon Rosenberg, who had
booked time in Wesleyan's Crowell Hall, that he realized the sessions
were actually going to happen.
For the sessions, Braxton used an hourglass to mark time and when
the sand had run to the bottom, the pair would break for lunch and
then flip the hourglass and play again. This process went on for two
days and yielded some of the most startling improvised music in recent
memory. Braxton is heard strictly on saxophones – sopranino,
soprano, alto, baritone, bass, and contrabass – while Morris
plays an arch-top acoustic (with a broken finger!). One of the reasons
this duet functions so well is that Morris approached the situation
knowing Braxton's interests and influences – players like Lee
Konitz, Warne Marsh and Paul Desmond. While Braxton doesn't play like
Konitz or Marsh, he has an understanding of what they were doing and
how that can be assimilated into his context. Similarly,
playing in ways that recall Jimmy Raney, Billy Bauer or a West African
kora without direct imitation gives Morris a tremendous amount of
stylistic fluidity.
This is entirely egalitarian music, a very large space in which no
voice dominates the whole. Each piece is sprawling, the ebb and flow
creating distinct areas even though the music isn't divided into sections
– thus, Braxton and Morris occupy both an entire canvas and
a needle-droplet of paint at the same time. The fourth disc finds
Braxton in the alto's lower registers at the outset in a wide-vibrato
post-Ayler ballad, its bluesy contours offering some of his most pathos-laden
playing since the contrabass clarinet solo on trumpeter Jacques Coursil's
Black Suite (America, 1969). Morris's lower-register strums
bring out worried alto phrases, a wave that's continually cresting.
Braxton stretches out into liquid long tones which Morris's chords
and curled lines ride, then works his way into a hard-bitten space.
The music brightens as Braxton turns to the soprano, a delicate cloud
of lilting breath and pluck, though it becomes surprisingly tensile.
Morris chooses closely spaced phrases in a limited tonal range here,
and Braxton's lines are concentrated and sparse. Buoyed by contrabass
saxophone and its lurch and swagger, Morris's lines become busier,
stretching out from a single down-stroke. Braxton hits a jog and there's
a brief romp before they return to an amble.
Even
when they appear to be "finding" each other, there's an
obvious rapport. The first day's first improvisation finds both tiptoeing
around each other at the start, but a few minutes in Morris spikes
and scumbles, drawing Braxton's soprano out into quick whinnies and
circular runs. Early on, the saxophonist finds ways to comp and support
Morris's flights, matching his phrases with easy, toe-tapping swing,
clean tones and torqued squawks. As Braxton hits a bowel-churning
scream on his lowest horn, Morris comps with the sound of busted lamellae
and later scrapes and whittles alongside bumblebee alto. After this
meeting, Morris characterized Braxton as an "easy" person
to play with, and that's clearly coming from a developed mutual understanding
of what a duo exploration is. Four Improvisations (Duo) 2007
is a set for the ages.–CA
Tom
Djll / Tim Perkis
KINDA GREEN
Self Produced
 Remembering
that trumpeter Tom Djll is something of a Bill Evans fan, I suspect
that title might have some obscure connection with Miles' Kind
of Blue (since it's now acknowledged that Evans penned "Blue
in Green" – nice interview here http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML.cfm?page=kahn.html
if you can't afford Ashley Kahn's book on the album) but green, as
we know, also means "inexperienced" or "unripe",
which certainly isn't the case here. Tom ('trumpet, treatments, assembly")
and Tim – Perkis ("electronics") – are old hands
at improv; Perkis is a veteran of The League of Automatic Composers
(check out The League of Automatic Composers 1978 - 1983
on New World), and Djll first appeared on disc back in 1985. I suppose,
by sheer dint of its instrumentation, you'd have to file this under
"EAI" – the album's stately 22-minute closing track
"sagebrush drip kyrie" certainly wouldn't be at all out
of place in the Erstwhile catalogue – but it's a darn sight
more sprightly and playful than most of the oh-so-dour stuff that
excites the punters over at IHM. Then again, since when did EAI have
to be all dreary drizzle? Hands up who remembers Particles and
Smears, or Bart? Perkis's laptop is as agile as eRikm's
kustomized Kaoss pads, whether squiggling and scribbling like your
favourite DJ on "go", or lobbing in sly snatches of Space
Age Bachelor Pad pap ("bottle glass window wing") and discreet
field recordings – dig the crickets 15' into the last track!
Meanwhile Djll, in addition to being well-versed in the "extended
techniques" that have now become de rigueur for any
card-carrying improvising trumpeter – there are plenty of cold
breathy blasts à la Dörner, Hautzingerian gurgles
and pops, and a fondness for smearing his sound by jamming a sheet
of metal across the bell that recalls Greg Kelley – reveals
ample evidence of his ability to play real notes on the horn, and
the right ones at that. And he's not averse to blowing a huge raspberry
here and there, lest you start taking it all too seriously. Excellent
stuff. Goodness knows what label it's on, though: maybe you can hunt
one down from Tom's MySpace page. –DW
Peter
Evans / Tom Blancarte
{SPARKS}
Creative Sources
 From
the very first moments of the opening "Xangu" you'll be
tempted to delete the adjective "discreet" from this duo's
intercommunicative dictionary. The vicious manner in which Evans and
Blancarte hurl hooks at each other, reciprocally clinching in a timbral
slugfest of epic proportions, is enough to leave you with bruised
ears, if not knocked out cold. You can really appreciate what years
of serious practice on an instrument bring in terms of strong tone,
structural capriciousness and sheer paroxysm. No afterthoughts, no
preambles, no reassuring familiarity with anything; this is like taking
an ice-cold shower after lengthy exposure to hot sun. Excruciatingly
revitalizing, one might say. The persistent tortuousness characterizing
the flare-ups Evans elicits from his piccolo trumpet makes us forget
altogether the silver-spoon inevitability that considers instrumental
transgression as a symbol of original sin (burning hell and brain
power are linked in some way, but not everybody's ready to admit it).
Blancarte, whose stunning bass I'm discovering here for the first
time, is completely involved with and excited by this tête-à-tête,
and the blend of his magnificent snarl and his playing partner's squealing
cries is a real treat, not to mention an authoritative assault the
upper partials, which in certain sections of "Ukonvasara"
and "Ishkur" is utterly amazing. Never was a record title
more pertinent.–MR
Hevoset
HEVOSET
Dekorder
 This
LP went missing for several days until I found it hidden behind my
son's bed with a pile of Picsou comics, dog-eared Pokemon cards, a
badly mutilated plastic Woody from Toy Story (injuries sustained
in intergalactic combat with Zurg, I found out later) and what looked
like it could once have been a half-eaten croissant. When questioned
on its disappearance, Max (9) said he wanted it for his bedroom wall,
which I can quite understand. When I played him the album itself,
he had second thoughts ("c'est de la musique, ça?"),
but a few years ago before pre-adolescent peer pressure set in (the
only things he seems to want to listen to these days are by David
Guetta, and if you don't know who he is, don't worry, you don't need
to), he'd have loved it. It's wild stuff, a typically offbeat offering
of lo-fi psychedelic wails, twangs, drones, fuzzy loops and scuzzy
beats from two of Finnish free folk's leading lights, Jan Anderzen
(Kemialliset Ystävät) and Jani Hirvonen (Uton). Devotees
of Anderzen and Hirvonen will lap it up, but anyone coming to the
rural weirderies of Northern Finland for the first time will find
much to enjoy too. What's most impressive about it – and its
companion release on Dekorder, Uton's Straight Edge XXS –
is not the gloriously colourful instrumentation, all wheezy squeeze
boxes, pipes, bells and rattles, nor Anderzen's (or is it Hirvonen's?)
haunting wordless vocals, but its strange sense of timelessness and
universality. I'm surprised nothing from these guys made it to David
Cotner's Otherness compilation reviewed here last year, because
this definitely belongs in the outer spaceways with your favourite
Sun Ra albums. Or on your son's bedroom wall. As Basil Fawlty once
said, "go and have some fun with a Finn."–DW
Hisato
Higuchi
BUTTERFLY HORSE STREET
Family Vineyard
WIND CHIMES IN THE HEAD
Sloow Tapes
 Guitarist
Hisato Higuchi, in Alan Cummings' article on him in The Wire 274
(Dec 2006), cites both The Velvet Underground and Miles Davis as formative
influences (and indeed there are hints of both "Candy Says"
and In A Silent Way on Higuchi's 2003 debut EP, She),
but also, more importantly, talks of the isolation, or hikikomori,
of the population of his adopted city, Tokyo. Maybe this accounts
for the sense of loneliness that pervades Higuchi's music, immediately
recognisable on "A Hundred Signs of Light", the melancholy
drift of layered guitars and cooing wordless vocals that opens his
second Family Vineyard outing, Butterfly Horse Street. But
"Grow" also reveals a noisy, Takayanagi-inflected side to
Higuchi's playing, already hinted at in "Guitar #3" on 2005's
Dialogue. After the burning, scratched space of its free
jazz sibling "Blood and Leaves," "Melody in the Mud"
sounds like a sorrowful apology, a short, sombre breath before "Electric
Guitar Light" plunges the listener back into a music of confusion
and loneliness, a controlled outburst of tonal accidents culminating
in the exploration of timbre and distortion of the closing "Cry
Baby Flowers," whose searing guitar work forces us to squint
into the sun.
 Wind
Chimes in the Head, Higuchi's first cassette release, starts
out in similar territory with "Ashi No Nai Inu" and "Note
1 (19 June 2007)", all soft humming and antiphonally responding
guitars, but the album runs out of steam in the remaining four tracks:
longer durations, greater use of distortion and, in two tracks, both
elements combined don't make for strong additions to already weak
music. "Memory and Grassland", and its disappointing 11-minute
sequel "Hikari No Joko", sound as if they were recorded
onto one of William Basinski's partially disintegrated tape loops,
a purposefully nostalgic wobbly sound curiously reminiscent of Hendrix's
"Star Spangled Banner". But it all seems more like an exercise
in shredding – clocking in at about 41 minutes it's Higuchi's
longest release to date – and lacks the sharpness of Butterfly
Horse Street. Re-examining and changing artistic direction is
fine if it leads to a broader palette and a greater understanding
of methods, but Wind Chimes in the Head tastes unripe.–LS
Paul
Hubweber / Uli Boettcher
SCHNACK 3
Nurnichtnur
 Genial.
Unpredictable. Funny. Ironic. Those are only a handful of the adjectives
that sprang to mind minutes after sitting down to enjoy the third
episode of Schnack, the latest release by trombonist supreme Paul
Hubweber and electronic nerve-driller Uli Boettcher. A Spartan-yet-elegant
graphic adorns the CD sleeve, and the useful liners are penned by
PT's own Dan Warburton; but nothing can really prepare you for the
listening experience, which is rendered all the more fragmentary and
schizophrenic by the short duration of the majority of the improvisations.
Let's start with Hubweber's timbre(s): the man is the happy master
of disjointed, if sinuously articulated phrasing, shifting from the
fringes of Quackland to granular disintegration. Whatever idea crosses
his brain is transformed into instant otherness, as counterbalancing
forces constantly struggle to determine whether Hubweber's instinctive
sketches should be radically refurbished or utterly destroyed. Boettcher,
a true virtuoso on his own chosen instrument, is hardly the guy to
corral his comrade into something, uh, minimalist: the guy ingests
deformed samples like Phil Daniels scarfing down blue pills at the
end of Quadrophenia, yet it's you the listener who must choose
whether to throw yourself from a cliff or conclude that, all things
considered, the innumerable refractions, rejections and reversions
are worthy of a visit to the nearest sanctuary of scrambled logic
for further adoration. Despite the absence of anything even vaguely
resembling "silence" or "quietness", this, along
with the recent Furt CD, might very well be the most stimulating EAI
around nowadays.–MR
Keefe
Jackson's Project Project
JUST LIKE THIS
Delmark
 Not
sure what's up with that band name - is it stressed "PROject
proJECT", noun plus verb? or is it just the most annoyingly redundant
title since Jack DeJohnette waxed Album Album for ECM? In
any case, whatever it's called, the group itself is well worth lending
an ear, boasting a cross-section of Chicago's alt.jazz talent and
some intriguing, well-seasoned composing and arranging by leader Keefe
Jackson. Hailing from Arkansas and based in Chicago since 2001, Jackson's
been dividing his time between various groups, including the Lucky
7s, the Chicago-Luzern Exchange and Fast People. On Just Like
This he doesn't take much solo space, but his spots on the freeish
"The Grass Is Greener" and two smart Duke-goes-harmolodic
swingers (the title-track and drummer Frank Rosaly's "Wind-Up
Toy") are enough to demonstrate a very personal approach, with
the quizzical, hollowed-out sound of Wayne Shorter at his most Warne
Marshish. Like those players, Jackson often gives the impression of
existing in a parallel universe to whatever piece he's improvising
over, full of ideas that jut out of the surroundings rather than comfortably
fit in. Similarly, one gets the sense that while he's writing "for"
these particular players, it's not simply a matter of showcasing them
and letting them strut their stuff but instead getting a certain friction
going between the writing and soloist. Hard to single out any of the
soloists, but I'll try: there's typically fiery work from Dave Rempis
and more poised contributions by Guillermo Gregorio, while clarinettist
James Falzone is equally impressive rising out of the austere chord-veils
of "Titled" as when he's cooking on the swingers. Cornettist
Josh Berman and trumpeter Jaimie Branch have an instinct for pointed
lyricism that makes their dips into note-shredding lunacy even more
alarming, and trombonists Nick Broste and Jeb Bishop and tuba player
Marc Unternährer provide heft to the ensembles and some wonderful
growly freeform interplay. The real stars, though, might well be the
rhythm section: Rosaly and bassist Anton Hatwich have a very natural
swing feel – it's not that often you hear an avant-oriented
big band where the swingers don't feel awkward or pushy. And when
it's time for fireworks, as on the Rempis/Rosaly dustup on on "Which
Well", watch out!–ND
Guus
Janssen
OUT OF FRAME
Geestgronden
 One
of the attractions of Monk's music has always been the way the nuts-and-bolts
issues of how to weld this phrase to that one are
right on its surface, Centre Pompidou-style: the key structural issues
are always audible rather submerged. On his new solo disc Out
of Frame Dutch pianist/composer Guus Janssen shows a similar
ability to make provocative music by fastening onto small structural
elements that would usually be naturalized within the larger architecture
of a piece or improvisation – a snippet of passagework from
a Baroque sonata or a tiny stride-piano lick might become the seed
for an entire piece, while a "head" can be constructed entirety
out of formulae normally used to end a piece ("In the End").
"Extrucage" turns an accelerating burst of chords lifted
from Tristano's "Becoming" into an entire exploration of
shifting clusters and bitonal stacking, while the title track takes
a bumpy little riff that splits the difference between Monk and the
Peanuts themesong for a ride. Janssen's brand of citationality
isn't exactly pastiche; often (as on "Pasquil") the effect
is more like listening to all the bits that go into making a piece
of music, but before they've been actually fixed into place.–ND
MORE
JAZZ, IMPROV, ETC
Annette
Krebs / Toshimaru Nakamura
SIYU
SoSEDITIONS
 One
of several dozen emails exchanged recently with long-suffering eagle-eyed
PT editor Nate Dorward was on the subject of Toshi Nakamura's recent
Erstwhile outing with Joe Foster and Bonnie Jones (aka English),
One Day (see above), which he was reasonably impressed
with but which had left him somewhat.. cold. He wrote: "It's
hard to hear, so to speak, what's at stake in the music
– i.e. I can listen to it and think 'hm, neat sound. Another
neat sound. Yeah, another neat sound' but to me that doesn't
add up to real music: it's not clear what connects all those events
or why one should care. With a traditional improv performance
there's a sense of a bristling dramatic space being established,
fought over and explored, but I don't detect that here, nor do I
have a sense of what alternative model is being proposed for interaction
/ listening that I should bother about." I suggested to Nate
he should post these remarks over at IHM, but he didn't seem to
be too keen on the idea, presumably fearing that his quiet suburban
home in Ontario would be firebombed by an angry crowd of EAI mujjaheddin.
Well, sorry Nate, old pal, but you're not getting away so easily
(though, as the saying goes, "the management declines all responsibility
for lost or damaged property as a result"); your comments go
right to the heart of the problem, the problem being how to listen
to EAI, especially if you come from a more "traditional improv"
(or traditional anything) background.
Clearly, as I've said many times before, approaching this kind of
music with the expectation that it's going to "develop"
along traditional lines – take a musical idea (a pitch or
collection of pitches, a rhythmic motive, even a particular timbre)
and transform it over a period of time into something else –
isn't likely to get you very far. "Bristling", "fought
over" and "explored" imply physical effort, even
muscularity; to the best of my knowledge Toshi Nakamura has never
burst a blood vessel and spattered the public with warm blood, though
I have noticed the occasional bead of sweat on his furrowed brow
as he sits statue-like behind his no-input mixing board. I can't
imagine Annette Krebs going fifteen rounds with Brötzmann,
either (though she could probably give him a nasty scratch with
that steel wool). But at my back I always hear Ben's wingèd
chariot hurrying near.. Exit, pursued by dialectic.
Nah, that old thesis-antithesis-synthesis stuff won't get you very
far here, but (beg to differ Nate) I really do hear a bristling
dramatic space in this latest offering from Nakamura and Krebs,
Siyu, on Daniel Yang's wonderful SoSEDITIONS imprint (as
usual, the packaging's exquisite, and as usual I nearly tore the
white card trying to get the damn thing open.. let's not talk about
the Olivia Block DVD I received in the same envelope – still
haven't figured out how to put that one together). It seems Nakamura
has a duo project going with just about everybody these days –
in the past couple of years he's appeared on discs with Keith Rowe,
Klaus Filip, Billy Roisz, Axel Dörner, Nicholas Bussmann, Lucio
Capece and Jean-Luc Guionnet – but for my money this is the
most satisfying release he's put out since 2006's between
on Erstwhile (not the most exciting, though: that honour goes to
the Potlatch outing Map with Guionnet – see above).
But Nate's comments trouble me – why do I like this? Merely
saying "hm, neat sound" doesn't seem to be enough, but
I'm wondering if, in the final analysis, it doesn't come down to
something as straightforward as that.
I've wrestled with the question of making value judgements when
it comes to EAI for far too long, and since the aficionados of the
genre over at IHM, who know more about the subject than I do, can't
agree amongst themselves about what's good and what isn't, I've
reluctantly concluded that it is purely subjective; one man's "real
music" is another's "fucking racket". So I'm afraid
I don't know what's at stake, and am at a loss as to say why one
should care. But I do care about these sounds – Nakamura's
music has fascinated me ever since I discovered it, and it's come
a long way since the loops and pulses of the early solo albums,
and Krebs' all-too-slight discography has been a source of great
pleasure since 2000's Rotophormen with Andrea Neumann –
and I admire the way they're placed. Wondering what connects the
sound events seems to be another way of asking whether the musicians
are actually listening to each other, which inevitably recalls Keith
Rowe's notes accompanying Duos For Doris: "I'm very
aware that it's almost heretical to praise not listening, but nevertheless
I feel there is a place for it. I write these thoughts not needing
or wanting to convince anyone of the correctness of these ideas,
but only to explain how I approached playing these sessions. If
I attempted not to actively listen to John's piano as my hand descended
towards the guitar laid out before me, what might happen? Possibly
I might avoid triggering memories of the piano, memories that by
definition would take me away from the immediate context and towards
some looping representations of past occasions. Clearly this is
not an absolute state because I imagine that some memory is needed
to comprehend the present. But given that my aim is to focus my
attention on the situation in that room, that room will likely contain
thousands of references which will in turn trigger memories. The
question for me then is how I might relate to whatever is occurring
in that room, certainly not with any loquacious clarity but rather
with the obmutescence of an object on a shelf."
I'm not sure that answers any of your questions, Nate (though it
must be the first time the word "obmutescence" has appeared
in Paris Transatlantic), nor do I know to what extent,
if at all, it applies to Siyu. All I can say is, to quote
Bullet Tooth Tony slamming the guy's head in the car door as "Lucky
Star" blasts out of the stereo, "I fuckin' love this record."
Don't ask me why.–DW
Szilárd
Mezei Ensemble
NÁD / REED
Red Toucan
Steve
Cohn
IRO IRO
Red Toucan
 The
small Montreal-based Red Toucan label continues its unstated mission
of providing a spotlight on the less exposed gems of the jazz world.
This particular offering is part of a trilogy by Serbian-born Hungarian
violist / composer Szilárd Mezei (the other parts, Whistle
and Drum, have yet to be recorded). The music blends folk
melodies, contemporary classical and African-American traditions
into an intriguing whole, and has something of a film noir tinge
to it, although Mezei insists that he doesn't think of such analogies
when composing. The five longish compositions for 14-piece ensemble
are heavily notated, though "Hep 1" and "Hep 2"
have a deceptively improvisational feel. On "Hep 1" the
group plays deliberately out-of-sync, hinting at rather than definitively
stating the main melody, while "Hep 2"'s Braxtonish theme
opens up ample solo space for saxophonist Bogdan Rankovic and trumpeter
Slobodan Dragaš. "Cirkula/Circle Saw", "Esölovak/Rain
Horses" and "Fohász/Petition" are more ponderous,
offering dour Balkan melodies underpinned by tuba, bass, two cellos,
trombone, piano and two drummers, and at times the music virtually
bludgeons the listener. Fortunately, "Rain Horses" offers
some relief; Mezei plays an impassioned viola solo, and a tinkling
vibraphone/xylophone interlude by Ivan Burka lightens the mood before
Dragaš's nimble Lester Bowie-like trumpet (Great Hungarian
Music: Ancient to the Future?) heralds a return to the somber anthem.
"Petition" is powerfully emotional, with pianist Milan
Aleksic percussively shredding the melody before the piece ends
with an optimistic coda. The recording could be crisper in the higher
ranges, but that's a minor complaint; this is an intriguing showcase
for unsung talent from an underappreciated area.
 Mezei's
still a fairly young artist; if he wants to find out about being
unjustly marginalized for the long haul he could contact the pianist
Steve Cohn (he really could: both artists have nice websites), who's
been tirelessly pursuing his muse since the early 80s to the sound
of unfortunately few hands clapping. This quartet, with Masahiko
Kono on trombone and electronics, cellist Tomas Ulrich and drummer/vibraphonist
Kevin Norton, made frequent stops at the Knitting Factory back when
the place still featured this type of music, and this live performance
was recorded there back in January 1999. The title is Japanese,
meaning "this and that" or "a variety of things";
"iro" on its own means "color", and there's
plenty of color here, given Norton's ability to switch seamlessly
from his trap set to vibes and back, not to mention Cohn's use of
the shakuhachi, shofar and ektara. On the first three compositions
(or "conceptions"), Cohn begins on one of his wind instruments,
or inside the piano, producing some interesting interactions, particularly
on "Kombawa" when Ulrich inventively echoes the shakuhachi
and Kono's burbles. But the group takes flight most convincingly
when Cohn turns to the piano, as he does towards the end of those
three tracks or on the entirety of the last cut, "Oyasuminasai".
Norton's cymbal work throughout, particularly on "Konnichiwa",
is exemplary in its rhythmic propulsion. Although it's unfortunate
that we don't have a more recent example of this still working group,
Iro Iro serves as a compelling document of what an evening
at the Knitting Factory used to be like. And Steve Cohn's website
has an interesting list of unreleased performances that he could
possibly copy to CD-R if you ask nicely.–SG
Papajo
SIMPLE GAME
Cadence
 Connecting
this music with the semi-insane sparkle of Schnack is like trying
to find an association between children running wild in a garden
and the polite enthusiasm of spectators at a Wimbledon final. Simple
Game, the latest outing by Paul Hubweber, Paul Lovens and John
Edwards, is a fairly conscious attempt to look well-dressed while
maintaining the exploratory traits of unadulterated free improv.
From the very first seconds we detect a propensity to the enhancement
of "softly booming" frequencies in the equalization, as
the persistently colloquial stance of the trio disobeys to the exaltation
of solipsism, privileging purposeful ensemble work. There are no
train wrecks, no squeals, no burps and groans; for the most part,
the musicians let their sound emerge somewhat gradually, only rarely
commanding attention for a truly noticeable dynamic change (it happens,
though: for example, about eight minutes into "Smell it").
The fine texture generated by this combine of interplaying virtuosos
is something to hold dear, a remedy against the obsolescence filtering
through too many of today's jazz-derived trio outfits. Edwards'
bass is a fat smiling Buddha embracing the nether regions of the
mix like a big mamma, all girth, goodness and grin. Lovens explores
new methods of rhythmic proliferation without relying on regular
pulse, resolutely attentive to every single blip, a 24/7 radar station
capable of homing in on just where "that" accent should
fall next. Hubweber remains the joker (of sorts) of the group, yet
in this particular instance the unpredictable transcendence of his
smirking technique is somehow bound to relative restraint, which
is even more agreeable in a context where a polyhedral attitude
is a must. For the listener, too.–MR
Daniel
Jones / David Papapostolou
LEAVING ROOM
Adjacent
 Here
are six graceful, spacious offerings of classy EAI featuring ex-pat
French musician (now based in Hackney.. veuillez accepter nos
plus sincères condoléances) David Papapostolou
on mixing desk feedback, laptop and pickup, in the company of Daniel
Jones (turntables, dulcimer, guitar). Papapostolou's blog describes
it as the first official release on his CDR label Adjacent, but
there is a predecessor, a solo album called One and Two
from 2006 featuring him on guitar, cello and soprano saxophone (not
all at the same time). Leaving Room is more accomplished
and original, and more imaginative than its individual track titles
("le", "av", "in", "gr",
"oo" and "m") might have you believe. The album
title itself, however, is good, and works with the music on a number
of levels. Both players leave plenty of room for each other to operate
in, delicately positioning their fragile sound events on cushions
of silence. At the same time the title might also be taken as a
plea to listen to the music through headphones – i.e. leave
the room behind you – in order to experience its many nuances.
It could also, at a pinch, given the French nation's chronic inability
to pronounce the short "i", be a horrible pun on "living
room". But wherever and however you choose to listen to it,
listen carefully: there's a wealth of subtle detail to enjoy.–DW
Anthony
Pateras / Sean Baxter / David Brown
INTERFERENCE
Emd.pl
 Gauticle
on Synaesthesia was one of the best albums heard from an improvising
trio in a long time, and with Interference, Pateras, Baxter
and Brown continue to raise the bar. The instrumentation is the
same – prepared piano, prepared guitar and drums – as
is the approach: reciprocal stimulation and unusual rhythmic combinations
generate new patterns of knowledge and harmony which unaccustomed
ears might refuse to submit to on first listen. Face it, these guys
don't really propose tranquil engagement with the audience, privileging
instead outbursts of clattering can-on-the-string whirlwinds ("You
Can Do It Pimp Lucius") and episodes that suggest gamelan players
falling down a stairway and struggling to regain position while
massaging their bumps. Only rarely does the music become a stationary
target for our attention to hit, yet soon enough it yields to rumbling
dissonance and repeated, percussive trips to the low regions of
the piano. When the trio sets its sights on the interstices between
silence and noise – as on the Cageian "What A Fool Believes"
– the creepy atmospheres, where every sound is a one-punch
knockdown, tangibly demonstrate how the relationship between vibration
and its absence constitutes the basis of incomprehension among so-called
evolved beings. The body reacts to each event, the instrumental
call-and-response as accurate as needlework, all senses fully alert
- think "watchdog late at night". The return to regulated
chaos in the fourth track acts as the introduction to a gorgeous
finale, "Troo Kvlt In C", where a landslide of rolling
and tumbling metals comes within a hair's breadth of incoherence
but rewards the patient and attentive listener. An unforgiving record,
perhaps too full of substance for its own good, but outstanding
as ever. –MR
Odean
Pope
WHAT WENT BEFORE, VOLUME ONE
Porter
 When
I first saw the title of the newest release in tenorman Odean Pope's
discography, my heart did a little jump. Pope's recent work has been,
if not exhaustively documented, at least made available through labels
like CIMP, Soul Note and Half Note. Yet he's been on the scene in
Philadelphia since the late Fifties, working with Jimmy Smith, bassist
Jymie Merritt, pianist Hasaan Ibn Ali and Max Roach. He also co-led
the plugged-in ensemble Catalyst in the mid-Seventies. What Went
Before is more recent archival history, however, combining tracks
from two out-of-print (but still findable) trio discs, 1995's Ninety-Six
(Enja) and 1999's EBIOTO (Knitting Factory). He's joined
here by regular bassist Tyrone Brown and drummers Mickey Roker and
Craig McIver on seven of his own compositions and the standard "For
All We Know."
It's no surprise that Roach chose Pope to occupy the saxophone chair
in 1967 and again in the early Eighties; his lines are florid, he's
got a steely high-register keen, and a lacy, breathy way with the
nooks of a phrase. When the situation calls for it, he can produce
split-tone growls that align him with, say, Billy Harper. "You
Remind Me," from the EBIOTO sessions, finds Pope, Brown
and McIver trading unaccompanied volleys at the outset, the bassist's
pizzicato strum and Pope's seesawing between throaty skronk and detailed
scalar runs giving a hint of the free-bop gallop to come. His worrying
of phrases can leave one breathless, even when he's rocking through
the Dewey Redman-esque "Knot it Off," but "For All
We Know" is dusky velvet with bright edges, underpinned by Brown's
telepathic sketchwork and Roker's pared-down brushes. For those who
don't have the original discs, this first installment of What
Went Before is an excellent, re-mastered addition to the shelf.
We can only hope that the next volume unearths some gems that shed
more light on his early career.–CA
Praed
THE MUESLI MAN
Creative Sources
 An
unsettling sleeve, featuring photos of terrified looks, cruel punishments
and sadistic facial expressions, hides a somewhat strange album by
Praed, aka Paed Conca, of Blast fame, on electric bass, clarinet and
electronics and Raed Yassin, best known as a playing partner of trumpeter
Mazen Kerbaj, on double bass, tapes and electronics. It's a patchy
collection, hypothetically divided into two "sides" like
an LP (the whole clocks in at LP length – 45 minutes –
too). The schizophrenic suite "The Man Who Lost All His Friends
(With Japanese Subtitles)" consists of 34 short episodes in which
effective tape work and looped splinters form the nucleus of a music
without respite in its continuous development. And when the illusion
of repose appears, tricky manipulations, cantankerously inharmonious
figurations and percussive exploitation of the strings keep the senses
ever primed for action. The remaining tracks more or less follow the
same pattern, with effective use of TV and radio morsels by Yassin,
who incorporates popular themes and Arabic melodies into the duo's
crusty disfigurations of veracity. The overall sound quality is pretty
medium-fi, but you can consider that a plus, since Praed steer well
clear of modishness and lacquer, wallowing in mud and dirt instead.
The result is a sonic mumbo-jumbo that's relatively distinctive, if
not exactly pioneering.–MR
Sten
Sandell / Mattias Stahl
GRANN MUSIK (NEIGHBOUR MUSIC)
Clean Feed
 Swedish
pianist Sten Sandell, in addition to his own trio, has become known
through working in Mats Gustafsson's electro-acoustic ensemble Gush.
Classically trained and with an arsenal of extended techniques (in
addition to preparation and electronics, Sandell uses his voice),
he's able to coax a huge array of sounds from his instrument, though
often his choice of co-conspirators can make for an overly deliberate
approach to "free" music. Mallet percussionist Mattias Ståhl,
on the other hand, has explored the musical language of Ornette, Carla
Bley and Jan Johansson in his freebop quartet Ståls Blå.
The result of this linguistic pairing—cascading, bop-inflected
runs and extended architecture—is somewhere between the sparser
forays of Les Percussions de Strasbourg and the fluid poise of the
Khan Jamal-Bill Lewis duets (The River, Philly Jazz 2, 1977).
The tension between severity and playfulness is apparent from the
get-go, on "Lundburgs", where Ståhl flits about in
the vibraphone's upper register as Sandell roils in the lower depths
of his instrument, his sustained blocks of sound like bricks underneath
the glassy rolls and filigree. The pair initially seem to be hurling
their bags at one another in a wary gesture before a communicative
dance is reached. Cascades of piano and marimba pelt alongside Sandell's
right hand to close the piece in a delicate upward arc. Ståhl
marks time and space in the marimba's middle registers on "Gröndals
Deli", though the pianist makes jagged and deep inroads at the
outset, before lightening his touch and letting the music spread out
a bit. The improvisations are all rather short (the longest just over
seven minutes and most around five), and it's illuminating to hear
how, over the course of a few minutes, Sandell and Ståhl are
able to reconcile their approaches into a music balanced between organic,
circular rondos and slinky, charcoaled lines.–CA
John
Stevens/Evan Parker
CORNER TO CORNER / THE LONGEST NIGHT
Ogun
Spontaneous
Music Ensemble (John Stevens/Trevor Watts)
BARE ESSENTIALS 1972-3
Emanem
 Another
of the fabled classics of free improv returns with the John Stevens/Evan
Parker duo album The Longest Night (1976), a pair of LPs
now reissued by Ogun in conjunction with Corner to Corner (1993),
recorded a year before Stevens's death. The drummer's brief liner
notes to the first album have a certain pissed-off assertiveness,
and indeed one thing I love about The Longest Night is the
way it puts a real angriness at the core of the music, most obvious
here in the frenzied momentum of "21.25" and "21.47"
(the track titles reflect the hour of the night when they were recorded)
– performances where intensely empathetic dialogue and brutally
snapping at each other's heels turn out to be one and the same thing.
Stevens's ability to turn every sound of his kit into a distinct event
is astonishing, giving every tap and hi-hat shiver a quiddity that
punctures the musical continuum. Parker sticks to soprano on both
sessions: his sound is quite varied on the 1976 session, his husky,
acerbic scribblings occasionally (as at the start of "22.18")
thinning out into something like finely shredded Lacy or Coltrane.
Corner to Corner is a reunion album of sorts, and its chew-things-over
pace and free-floating, circling dialogue are a beguiling contrast
to the earlier date. Aside from the stylistic changes across 17 years,
the pairing of the two sessions offers a case study in how recording
style affects free music's impact. The first session's scrabbling
urgency is underlined by the close, ultra-dry recording, which clips
off every squeal and chitter. The 1993 session is more natural-sounding
but less vivid (accentuating Parker's latterday habit of eliding
the beginning and end of lines), the recording bringing out the room
acoustic and the music's dynamic range – Stevens's loudest snare-drum
hits strike like darts.
 The
Stevens/Parker duo partnership actually goes back much further, to
the period documented on the Spontaneous Music Ensemble CD Summer
1967 (recorded just after Interstellar Space, incidentally
– though it couldn't have been a direct influence, as the Coltrane/Ali
album wasn't released until 1974). Stevens's other major duet
partner over the years was Trevor Watts (though let's not forget Dudu
Pukwana: anyone else remember the great 1987 album Radebe?),
and the Stevens/Watts album Face to Face (1973) is another
landmark to set beside The Longest Night. Emanem has now
supplemented it with Bare Essentials, a generous two-CD selection
of Watts's cassette recordings of live gigs from slightly earlier
in the duo's history. Sound quality is purely documentary but surprisingly
decent considering the source material; it's a bit swishy for headphone
listening, perhaps, but sounds OK on the stereo.
I'd
previously thought of the duos with Parker as spartan in the extreme,
but hearing this stuff is a corrective. It's amazingly stripped-down,
to the point where it's sometimes hard to think of it as "music"
in any usual sense of the word. At times these performances conjure
up the stately pointillism of a Noh play accompaniment; at other times
they yield to a raw play of voices that's half Beckett endgame,
half Bob Cobbing yawp (there's a lot of Stevens's trumpet here, as
well as yowly vocals and growls from both players). There's a ritualistic
quality to Stevens's drumming on these tracks which, along with the
use of a conventional kit rather than the snares-and-double-hi-hat
setup of the recordings with Parker, reveals a debt to Ed Blackwell's
avant-tribal beat. Like Parker, Watts plays soprano throughout, in
a style that's every bit as percussive and pointillist as the drummer's,
and just as sensitive to changes in the emotional weather. The more
you listen, the more the saxophonist's restricted sonic palette seems
enormous, ranging from gruff remarks to slender lyric morsels to ear-blistering
intensity.
More
than Face to Face, this collection shows the many different
directions these players were exploring, some looking back to free
jazz or even (like Ayler) to earlier, pre-bop musics, others pointing
towards current trends in ultraminimalist improv (as is underlined
by Martin Davidson's titling one track "Lowering the Case").
Above all, this music still has the capacity to surprise, unlike so
much by-the-books improv: as exhibit A, sample the seven brief "Open
Flower" tracks, all deriving from an identical ultra-minimal
sound-study but shooting off in strikingly different directions, including
a scorching Watts cadenza on "Open Flower 3". The most astonishing
track, despite being a little dimly recorded, is "For Phil,"
a half-hour improvisation recorded the day the great British drummer
Phil Seamen died. It begins as a sorrowful, minimalist funeral march
and reaches a grisly climax two-thirds of the way through, before
Stevens turns to trumpet for a furious Aylerian elegy and soft farewell.
It's the capstone of a rich, illuminating collection of music; there's
a certain eat-your-vegetables severity to it all, to be sure, but
Mom was right: veggies really do taste better than junk food.–ND
Mark
Trayle
GOLDSTRIPE
Creative Sources
 The
"Projects" page of Mark Trayle's website mentions a 1999
multimedia installation entitled ¢apital magneti¢
which explored "the musical possibilities of the credit card.
Participants in the installation use their credit cards and bank cards
to compose pieces of music in cooperation (or competition) with other
participants." Seven years down the road, Goldstripe
uses data read from the magnetic stripes of credit cards (we're not
told whose) "to create a set of musical conditions for improvisation".
This is another one of those projects, along with Yasunao Tone and
Florian Hecker's Palimpsest and Mathieu Saladin's Stock
Exchange Piece, where the concept behind the music is more interesting
than the music it produces, which in this case consists of the kind
of distinctly listener-unfriendly bleeps, swoops, stutters, noisy
screes and unstable drones you've heard all too often. In today's
digital world just about anything, from family snapshots to phone
bills and bank statements, can be "translated" into sound,
but just because it can be done doesn't necessarily mean it's worth
doing. It might be more interesting if Trayle told us exactly how
he transformed that mag stripe data into sound, and whether the process
could somehow be reversed so I could forge my own credit
card and explore its musical possibilities by using it to buy myself
something really worth listening to.–DW
Seymour
Wright
SEYMOUR WRIGHT OF DERBY
Self Produced
 "Seymour
Wright of Derby." It's something you can imagine seeing as a
handpainted sign over a Victorian shop front. It's got a certain ring
to it, y'know, like "Lydon, Jones, Cook and Matlock, Cobblers
to the Queen." There's a touch of antiquated craftsmanship to
the packaging, too; the paper used is an 18th century pattern produced
in Cambridgeshire by Payhembury Marbled Papers, we're told. A refreshingly
original concept for four slabs of pretty challenging solo saxophone
improvisation. The sounds all come from the saxophone itself, but
Wright doesn't physically produce them all in the good old fashioned
way (i.e. by blowing into or onto the thing). Not directly,
anyway. The first thing you hear in fact is a blast of tinny funk
coming from a small battery-powered radio placed inside the instrument.
Surprised? You shouldn't be – after all, Keith Rowe's been playing
his guitar with a tranny for decades, so why shouldn't someone play
a sax with one too? The funk soon retreats into an intriguing haze
of hisses, rustles and pops, which (the latter) seem to be controlling
the on/off switch of the radio. Though it's hard to say. On track
two, a montage of disarmingly simple polyrhythmic clicks is occasionally
disrupted by strategically placed puffs of air and penetrating squeaks.
Sounds like a two-year-old having fun with a box full of wooden toys
and inadvertently clobbering the family cat in the process. On the
album's centrepiece, a 26-minute tour de force recorded live
in the Great Hall at Goldsmiths College London, Wright uses an assortment
of reeds and prepares his horn with fans, pens and tin cans, focusing
on sustained sonorities. Most of these seem to be mechanical in origin,
coming from vibrating tools placed in and on pieces of the disassembled
saxophone laid on the floor. It's a riveting listen, superbly paced
and genuinely exciting in places, especially when punctuated by piercing
high register squawks, as if a large, fierce bird of prey had accidentally
flown into a metalwork lab and couldn't find its way out. Best of
all, it's not without a sense of humour, both verbally – the
four track titles pun on Seymour's surname ("In the Wright place
at the Wright time", "REED'N'WRIGHT", "The Wright
balance" and "Wright-O!".. I live in hope of a future
duet with his namesake Jack entitled "Two Wrights can't go wrong"..)
– and visually: it's impossible to listen to this without imagining
what Wright's set-up might look like (Heath Robinson comes to mind).
The additional dedications – if that's what you can call them
– of each track to other musicians (well not to but
after..) is also a fascinating touch. "After" in
what sense? It's not as if Wright is setting out to produce his own
version of existing pieces by Steve Lacy, Keith Rowe, Tetuzi Akiyama,
Pepper Adams, Ahmed Abdul Malik, Billy Higgins, Eddie Prévost,
Trevor Bayliss and Evan Parker, like a painter basing his work on
an old master (Bacon after Velásquez, for instance). Maybe
he's simply referring to the next rung on the saxophone's evolutionary
ladder. For those of you who wonder what can still be said on (in?
through?) the venerable instrument after John Butcher, Michel Doneda,
Katsura Yamauchi and Stéphane Rives, this little gem is definitely
one to get.–DW
James
Zitro
ZITRO
ESP
 For
all the praise that's deservedly heaped on recordings like Albert
Ayler's Spiritual Unity and Bells, or the early
works of Marion Brown, Paul Bley and Milford Graves, there are a lot
of hidden gems in the ESP catalog. The leadership debut of Bay Area
drummer James Zitro is one of the finest. Along with a number of other
west coast musicians, Zitro came to New York briefly in 1966-7 to
work with altoist Sonny Simmons and trumpeter Barbara Donald (documented
on Simmons' Music from the Spheres, ESP 1043). The drummer
is joined here on three tracks by saxophonists Bert Wilson and Allan
Praskin, trumpeter Warren Gale, pianist Mike Cohen and Aussie bassist
Bruce Cale (who worked with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble while in
England).
"Freekin'" took up all of side one on the original LP, the
leader starting off proceedings with meditative mallets on toms and
crash cymbals echoing the "Nothings" of Milford Graves (like
Graves, Zitro also studied tabla and non-Western hand percussion).
Harmonics from Cale's bass signal the ensemble's collective entry,
Zitro's constant thrashing and Cohen's lower register comping reminiscent
of the Tyner-Jones juggernaut. Gale is the first soloist, here a crushed
metallic buzz that in a few years' time would be featured in Stan
Kenton's orchestra. The rhythm section is an egalitarian rustle, Cale
offering a plucked poem preceding several choruses of teenage vigor
from young Allan Praskin's alto, a mix of ebullient volleys and steadily
rising puckered squeals. Bert Wilson cuts like the proverbial buzzsaw,
high-register shouts and manic overblowing at the center of his angled
tenor yelp. Little-documented, Wilson's heavy blowing was key in recordings
by Smiley Winters and the Now Creative Arts Jazz Ensemble, as well
as Simmons' aforementioned second ESP volume. Wilson fronted the group
Listen in the early '70s, which didn't properly record, but the nexus
can be heard in his composition "Happy Pretty," recorded
here. It's a comparatively lighthearted and buoyant theme, erupting
from late Lee Morgan into collective freedom. Cohen voices bright
chords against a lickety-split backdrop, the composer out of the gate
with jubilant, fractured energy, while Gale's mix of classical poise
and street scumble finds easy footing at maddening tempos. Trying
to follow Praskin's whims is like trying to chase a fly; hence, Zitro
and Cale drop the rhythm into loose free time until they can get a
bead, if only briefly. Though there's nothing here that changed the
course of the music's history, James Zitro's debut offers fierce,
inspired playing and contagious collective energy from six top-notch
improvisers in their prime.–CA
Malcolm
Goldstein
A SOUNDING OF SOURCES
New World
 As
John Peel once memorably said after playing a track (I can't remember
which one it was, sorry) in one of his Radio 1 shows early one January,
"is it too early to name this Album of the Year?" The Malcolm
Goldstein discography is far from enormous, but everything he's released,
especially since the turn of the century, has been absolutely outstanding.
If you only buy one CD this year, make sure it's this one. The word
"organic" is bandied about much too glibly nowadays, and
stuck on everything from washing powder to baked beans, but it's still
the best adjective to describe Goldstein's work. When he uses a map
of the rivers and streams of rural Vermont as a score for his The
Seasons: Vermont, Malcolm Goldstein knows just what he's doing
– you will recall
he bought a plot of land in the woods there in the mid-60s and built
his own log cabin from scratch.
"At night in the darkness of his cabin, and the silence of the
woods, when Malcolm brings out his violin and starts to play for you,
you gain a deeper understanding of where his music comes from,"
writes Peter Garland, in a splendid essay accompanying the disc –
detailed and informative liner notes are a New World speciality, and
this is one of the best booklets I've seen in a long time, also including
an essay by WDR studio director Klaus Schöning, Goldstein's notes
on the works, extensive artist biographies, a bibliography, selected
discography and reproductions of the composer's immaculately hand-written
scores.
Garland writes with precision and passion on how Goldstein's music
effortlessly blends composition and improvisation, but the music does
it even better. Configurations in Darkness (1995), derived
from Bela Bartók's transcriptions of folksongs from Bosnia-Herzogovina,
appears here in two beautifully recorded versions, one for Goldstein's
solo violin from a concert in Boulder, Colorado, in 2002, the other
for five-piece ensemble – in which the composer is joined by
flautist Philippe Racine, clarinettist Philippe Micol, cellist Beat
Schneider and trombonist Radu Malfatti – recorded in Berne,
Switzerland, six years earlier. Both performances are exemplary, and
it's especially wonderful to hear Malfatti actually playing the hell
out of his trombone too, something we don't get to do much these days.
If composition and improvisation fuse perfectly in Goldstein's work,
so do past and future; this isn't just great music, it's acoustic
anthropology. In Ishi / timechangingspaces, a tape work originally
broadcast by WDR Cologne in 1988, he plays along with scratchy loops
of 1914 wax cylinder recordings of Ishi, the last surviving Yahi Indian
who emerged from the woods of Northern California, in a truly moving
"imaginary encounter" between two men separated in space
and time. "Ishi has taught me something deeply about things in
our human way and illuminated for me sensitivities within myself as
well as in other people," Goldstein writes. "I am thankful
to the sound of Ishi's voice. It taught me actually to hear qualities
in his voice to affect the tuning of my violin, so that the violin
began to sound in new ways I'd never heard before."
In Ishi / "man waxati" Soundings (1988), Goldstein
explores some of those "new ways", particularly a retuning
of the violin's A string up a quarter of a tone and its D string down
just over a major third to sound an octave below the A string. This
striking scordatura not only changes the timbre of the instrument
considerably, but also allows him to play his characteristic inimitable
figurations high on the second string with the open third string as
an underpinning drone. From a purely technical point of view (take
my word for it, I've spent more than half my life trying to learn
how to play the violin) it's fuckin' mindblowing. Nobody
else in the world sounds remotely like Malcolm Goldstein. What's more,
this version of Ishi / "man waxati" Soundings was
recorded in the naturally resonant acoustic of Europe's largest cave
system, the Grotte de Lombrives in Ussat-les-Bains in the Pyrenees,
and Goldstein's understanding and incorporation of the natural reverb
of the space is simply stunning. It's as if the cave itself has become
part and parcel of the work itself, and the composer, like the Zen
monk in the famous tale, has painted a landscape so perfect that he's
walked into it and disappeared. Get hold a copy of A Sounding
of Sources at the earliest available opportunity, and disappear
into it yourself.–DW
Chris
Newman
PIANO SONATAS NOS. 1, 4, 6, 10
Mode
 Chris
Newman was born in London in 1958 and now lives and works in Berlin,
where his activities include painting, writing (poetry and prose),
installation and performance art. According to the potted biography
in the liners, translating the poetry of Mandelstam and Khlebnikov
was "an experience that proved important for his later work",
though the names that are more likely to spring to mind on listening
to these piano sonatas are Clarence Barlow, Misha Mengelberg and maybe
even John White (a reminder that a decent release of some more of
White's piano sonatas – how many are there now, 131? –
is long overdue). "I was using conventional tonality literally
but in a non-conventional way," writes Newman of his first Sonata
(1982), "using historical styles in a non-historical way, putting
them to the forefront – preclassical / Janacek / Ives / homemade
Beethoven." A few years ago, this stuff would have been described
as "postmodern", but since postmodernism has now been with
us longer than modernism and the term has been bludgeoned into meaninglessness
through overuse, maybe we should find some kind of substitute, not
that I can think of any. Newman repositions the left and right hand
parts of a CPE Bach sonata in his Sonata No. 4 (1990) ("a
way of fucking up the chronology to put it into a kind of solid-state
with itself"), combines material from his own Third Symphony
with Beethoven's Op. 90 (Sonata No.6, 1997) and incorporates
rhythms from Varèse's Amériques and pitches
from Schubert's Winterreise (Sonata No. 10, 2004)
not as exercises in "quotation or cultural reference [..] but
[because] they provide the best material for the job, i.e. to build
models for existential phenomena." Fair enough, but whether you
call it quotation or not, taking your musical raw material from a
repertoire people are so familiar with is a risky business. There's
always an element of irony involved, on the part of both composer
and listener. We find Barlow and Mengelberg's "wrong" notes
funny because we know from experience what the "right" ones
should be, but Newman's non-resolving chord sequences, disappearing
trills and sudden stops, aided and abetted by Michael Finnissy's splendidly
deadpan reading (someone should persuade him to record some Satie)
soon lose their power to amuse – not that amusing the listener
is what he purposefully set out to do – and listener fatigue
soon sets in. This is a disc to dip into, a sonata at a time, rather
than play from beginning to end.–DW
Maja
S.K. Ratkje
RIVER MOUTH ECHOES
Tzadik
 River
Mouth Echoes is a reminder that Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje
(the "SK" is part of the package, like the "L"
in L. Ron Hubbard and the "J" in J. Edgar Hoover) is not
only an acclaimed performer on the noise circuit but also a bona fide
conservatory-trained composer. Indeed, the 20-minute title track would
have made a splendid submission as a show-me-what-you-can-do final
year comp assignment (having said that, no Music Faculty I know of
would have specified the instrumentation of four-piece viol consort).
It does take some time to find out where it's heading, though, the
first twelve-and-a-half minutes jumpcutting from threads of folksong-like
melody to airy, fluty harmonics, skittering col legno, snapping
Bartók pizzicati and quite a bit of ugly scraping
– once frowned upon, but now kosher since Lachenmann –
before settling on some ethereal trills which herald the start of
a slow build-up towards the "surprise" scordatura
ending (not a surprise at all if you know Penderecki's Second
Quartet, and I'll bet you a Norwegian kroner or two
Maja does). Essential Extensions (1999), scored for accordion,
alto sax and double bass, is another impressive if not particularly
attractive exercise in standard Euro avant-garde instrumental technique,
all gnarly clusters, ugly multiphonics and wailing glissandi, but
like the viol quartet seems to lack some overall motivic coherence;
the composer's sympathies seem to lie more with the spectralists than
the serialists, and 2005's Øx, once more for Rolf-Eric
Nystrøm's alto sax, this time accompanied by Ratkje's own processing,
is more convincing in its exploration of the undertones – Hugo
Riemann would be thrilled – of the piercing top C that dominates
the piece. The earlier Sinus Seduction Moods Two (1997) also
moves in spectralist territory – Scelsi and Radulescu both come
to mind at times – but the sax writing seems a bit laboured
and Torben Snekkestad's playing tense and uptight. Paging Mats
Gustafsson, white courtesy telephone please. Likewise, anyone
familiar with the flair and subtlety of Ratkje's live electronics
might find the textbook post-WWII orchestration of Waves IIB
rather staid and fusty, despite a sensitive reading by the Oslo Sinfonietta
under the baton of Christian Eggen. The piece that sounds freshest
on the whole disc is Wintergarden, the one featuring Ratkje's
own extraordinary voice, an amazing instrument somewhere between Annick
Nozzati, Diamanda Galas and Joanna Newsom ("tell me darrrling
did you taste his food?"). With the Tzadik album under her belt,
can we now look forward to a Ratkje outing recorded by Steve Albini,
produced by Jim O'Rourke and arranged by Van Dyke Parks? That'd
be something.–DW
Samuel
Sighicelli
MARÉE NOIRE
D'Autres Cordes
 Among
the startlingly high number of remarkable acousmatic records recently
received by this delighted addict, Samuel Sighicelli's Marée
Noire undeniably stands in my personal top three, possibly fighting
for higher honours. That's right, it's that good: a flawlessly designed
piece, all the resources and materials holding individual nature while
functioning magnificently in a broad-spectrum milieu. And, last but
not least, it lasts only half a hour, which is more than enough when
the ideas are clear from the start. The young composer (1972), principally
a pianist, studied with Gérard Grisey; Marée Noire
was a commission from INA-GRM. So, what did Sighicelli use to achieve
such quality? In his own words: a ball game, airports, the sea and
different environments as external source material, with piano, organ,
synthesizer and sampler, and electric and acoustic bass (courtesy
Bruno Chevillon) as timbral substance in the studio. The rest is vision,
cinematic temperament, ability to interconnect and shuffle the procession
of events – and insight. Plus a profound sensitivity that, despite
my poor knowledge of the French language, is expounded by certain
concerns in the liner notes, about a world "drugged by oil":
the album title means "oil slick", and the blurred black-and-white
visuals adorning the cover are self-explanatory.–MR
Alva
Noto
UNITXT
Raster-Noton
Byetone
DEATH OF A TYPOGRAPHER
Raster-Noton
 For
someone interested in "[presenting] art pieces where you lose
your identity as an artist", as he told The Wire back
in 2003, Carsten Nicolai has done a pretty good job of micro managing
an aesthetic solely traceable to his eight fingers, opposable thumbs
and never-tiring laptop. Nicolai's language takes software's binary
codes and merges this on-off duality with the conceptual fortitude
of good sound art (seemingly implausible, I know), and each of his
Noto and/or Alva Noto records address similar concerns: electronica
stripped of all affect; mathematics as a branch of science as a branch
of conceptual art.
For a while there, each of Nicolai's projects seemed to increase the
alienation effect, an intensive exploration of electronic austerity:
"my use is funkless", indeed. If his Trans cycle
from a few years ago felt like a breakthrough in terms of artistic
malleability (if not actual quality therein – the three Trans
entries were frustratingly spotty), Unitxt is both more holistic
and more fleshed-out, the productions feeling beefed up: while still
cut to precision, here Alva Noto goes for corporeal impact, reconciling
the physical and technological. These terms are relative, true, but
Unitxt isn't emaciated; it's at times positively fleshy, even
as Nicolai's compositional signature is exacting as ever. And while
it's easy to map out his sound – door-knocking rhythms that
pulse like pistons, bleeps that range from high-pitched cracks in
the system through to juddering low-end phenomena, noise that scrubs
the cochlea, unpredictable rustling through digital flora –
Nicolai's placed this lexicon in service to some of his most architecturally
funky, full throttle impact moves yet. Only the final few minutes
of Unitxt, which document the transformation of data to aiff
format, feel superfluous, their formal integrity and nakedness not
offering much beyond the momentary intrigue of a quizzical digital
disobedience.
 The
body-blows that most of Unitxt lands attest to an accessibility
that's also evident on label co-runner Olaf Bender aka Byetone's Death
Of A Typographer, suggesting Raster-Noton are going through processes
of rapprochement – in the case of Byetone's "Plastic Star",
edging significantly closer to the dance floor. If you were ever fond
of Pan Sonic at their most propulsive, "Plastic Star" touches
on similar zones of rhythmic intensification, grasping at pure tones,
riding out bass riffs that lunge and punch, with a snare/hi-hat mnemonic
that's pin-sharp. The swarm of drone that unleashes at the three-minute
mark sounds like a gentrified mentasm riff: the unseemly energy of
hardcore/techno pared back to intransigent, infernal buzzing. Nothing
else on Typographer is as exciting, but it's still a structurally
stylish document, working up to a peak mid-way through, thanks to
"Black Is Black"'s hard-cranked intensity, before the levitating
drones of "Capture This (Part I)" usher in a final third
that's all slow motion pulsation: electronic driftworks tied to beats
that prowl stealthily and steadily. Unsurprisingly, the devil's in
the details: clipped hi-hats take on erotic properties and jolts of
white noise cleave the cranium while drones warp and furrow.–JD
Asher
INTERVALS
The Land Of
The
Green Kingdom
LAMINAE
The Land Of
 The
mission statement of this pretty young label, founded by Justin Hardison
aka My Fun, consists of "exploring the subtle detail and beauty
in everyday sounds". No easy task, given the increasingly overpopulated
zone of action. Field recordings and electronics, as I've been saying
for a while, are an all-too-easy way into making music (or art, or
both) without having a clue of what playing an instrument or composing
means. To extract significance from this ground one has to possess
gifts, first and foremost of which should be insight and sensitivity.
Asher, who hails from Somerville, Massachusetts, is an ideal paradigm
of the discerning human being, his output being a rare case of value
increasing in direct proportion with the number of releases. Intervals
contains the qualities that led me to appreciate his work in
the first place – the rarefied introspection, the focus on the
solitary experience, the degraded-yet-fascinating quality of the aural
picture – but here they're fragmented into short pieces, each
lasting no longer than 90 seconds, for which the composer recommends
the "shuffle play" mode. The overall concept derives from
theologian Augustine of Hippo's assertion that "when we measure
an interval of time, what we are really measuring is in the memory",
hence the conclusion that "time is something in the mind"
obviously connected with our reminiscences. Asher juxtaposes outside
elements – recorded on a college campus in Vermont and including
walks, birds, crickets, planes, rain and that unbelievable "breath"
of life, the ever-present soft rumble that wraps silence – with
indoor recordings characterized by meagre tolling piano notes. Blurred
in foggy murmurs, they elicit sad reflections on the human quest for
framing the unexplainable through useless and hollow dialectic.
 The
Green Kingdom is the moniker of Michigan-based graphic designer/sound
artist Michael Cottone. The structures and colours of his music are
more evident than Asher's, constructed as they are on intersecting
melodic elements – you might even call them tunes – processed
into frequently morphing shapes from the post-Ambient galaxy. Environmental
material is used too, but merely as a minor ingredient, never the
focal point of a piece (though in "Indigo Afternoon" the
crackle of thunder appears distinctly in the middle of a sampled/synthesized
landscape). Laminae is pleasing to the ear, unremittingly
soothing, but lacks a bit in profundity: it's more a collection of
relatively uncomplicated miniatures than a record inspiring philosophical
ruminations. Which, oddly enough, considering what I wrote above,
could be a plus.–MR
bran(...)pos
COIN-OP KHEPRI
CIP
 I've
been trying for the past three months to hawk a review of this tasty
little combo platter to The Wire. In vain, alas (at least
this way you get the consolation prize of a PT review), but I wonder
what they'd have said if I'd sent them an unmarked CD-R of it and
told them it was the latest Nurse With Wound.. Maybe that weird name
put them off – though wacky punctuation never seemed to do irr.app.(ext.),
si-{cut}.db and :zoviet*france: any harm, did it? Anyway, the éminence
grise behind bran(...)pos is Jake Rodriguez, who's been bran(...)possing
away for over a decade already, as well as designing sound for Bay
Area theatre groups – his website lists numerous productions
for the Art Street Theatre, Berkeley Rep, American Conservatory Theater,
California Shakespeare Theater and others – and, under the name
Soundcrack, designing software to run it (Cricket).
As usual, CIP's Blake Edwards' press release is so on the money (pun
intended) that it deserves to be quoted: "Come explore the Valley
of the Dead as casino with bran(...)pos, gambling wildly with life
issues as you teeter on the precipice of securing a good afterlife
or another horrid reincarnation. Mix an aural palette that encompasses
such disparate elements as the Residents in the late 1970s, Dick Hyman,
Stockhausen, Runzelstirn and Gurglestock, and maybe Emerson Lake and
Palmer ca. Brain Salad Surgery. Assemble this palette with
the compositional complexity of Ennio Morricone and Beethoven and
you're getting close." Well, hardly. They've probably all sold
out now, but the first 50 copies of Coin-op Khepri came in
a "silkscreened gambling bag that comes with Egyptian currency,
bran(...)pos poker chips, playing cards, buttons, and other accoutrements."
Didn't get one of those myself, unfortunately, but the CD'll do just
fine. It's a wonderful, spazzed out (but carefully planned and meticulously
executed) mix of disparate elements, including delightfully cheesy
EZ listening drum machines with disembodied sci-fi vocals ("1-Armed
Yank With Sekhem Em"), riotous Mr Bungle oompah polka ("Inseguimento
Degli Spiriti") and, on the album's masterpiece, "Nephthys'
Nightboat", an extraordinary journey from the rainforest to the
groaning timbers (and timbres) of the aforementioned goddess of death's
ship. Khepri, by the way, was another Egyptian sun god, but with the
head of a dung beetle. Appropriate, because this, as they say, is
da shit.–DW
Bulbs
LIGHT SHIPS
Freedom to Spend
 The
recent interest in minimal techno within underground/noise circles,
spearheaded by characters such as Neil Campbell (Astral Social Club)
or John Clyde-Evans, is a highly reassuring development. It's no great
conceptual leap to find similar approaches to spatial/sensorial delirium
and textural attention in, say, Wolf Eyes and Jeff Mills; what's cool
about this recent turn of events is how the relationship feels natural.
It also flags one highly significant matter – whether techno,
electronica, or noise, you could probably tie everything back to three
influences: Throbbing Gristle, Kraftwerk, and K/Cluster.
Bulbs has the right pedigree – while guitarist Jon Almaraz is
a relative unknown from Bakersfield, drummer William Sabiston was
a formative member of higher-mind drone dreamers Axolotl. What's surprising
is the eloquence of Light Ships; for a debut album, it lands
fully formed, the duo having thoroughly marked out their turf. While
they're working parallel to figures like Neil Campbell and Axolotl's
Karl Bauer, Bulbs' languorous weave of electronica and free music
touches on all kinds of unexpected bases – the primitive, flashing
noise-tronics of early Severed Heads, the mutable, glassine pop-improv-techno
of Cologne's A-Musik scene, and Nuno Canavarro's hand-crafted electro-acoustic
miniatures all flit through the mind at various points. Almaraz's
guitar is processed to buggery, which dislocates it from expectations,
and its shivering, metallic burr drops like hand-plucked stalactites
and stalagmites, streams of notes spooling like light pulsing from
a flicker film reel. Sabiston's drums, whether electronic or, later
in the set, acoustic, sketch around pulses, their irregularity hinting
at some ghostly form of techno that's just out of reach. Everything's
inferred, as though the duo is perpetually sketching around the edges
or contours of more explicit compositions. This macro effect is highly
suggestive, but what's happening at the micro level is just as winning:
replicating, miniaturised life forms; amoebas quivering in the downstream
rush; circuits and wires caught in amorous embrace. It's strangely
intimate, as though earworms are quietly tickling every hair in your
ear.–JD
Kyle
Bobby Dunn
FRAGMENTS & COMPOSITIONS OF KYLE BOBBY DUNN
Sedimental
 My
wife and I often recall the good old days when musicians turned out
masterpieces at a post-pubescent age. There's still hope for us, though,
when people like Nico Muhly or this brilliant young man here, Kyle
Bobby Dunn, can make us smile again after years of bleeping cell phones,
Playstations and too many idiot recordings that sound like a Commodore
64 failing in the summer sun. Dunn is only 22 – he was born
in Toronto in 1986 – but he already seems to know how to rub
the magic lamp of creativity in the right way. Between 2005 and 2007
he recorded a host of academically trained instrumentalists, before
reconfiguring their orchestral hues into utter radiance through masterful
processing. The easiest definition of the compositional method is,
once again (climb aboard, label-seekers), minimalism. No mathematical
formulae, geometric intersections or skeletal materials, though: this
is a work that makes the most of slowly unfolding near-immobility
bathed in melancholy and dejection, a record so full of regret that
someone tuning in at the right (or wrong) moment could be devastated.
Touching on issues such as "…the nothingness of being,
indifference, the ephemeral, the bleak and the misery of mid-winter
and mid-summer", Dunn explores one of this writer's favourite
areas of sound-related human examination, that special place where
even the slightest scent of a flower can transport us back to the
long-gone joys of childhood discovery. The whole album reflects this
mental disposition, but if you were to single out a track as "exemplary",
it would have to be "An Extension", a veritable cross between
Eno ca. Discreet Music, Basinski's crumbled memories and
a heartbreakingly mournful Roedelius (listen to that desolate, from-the-other-room
piano). Exactly calibrated nuances, precisely weighed ingredients.
The future for this composer looks bright indeed. –MR
Emeralds
SOLAR BRIDGE
Hanson
 As
someone immediately suspicious of anything heralded as the next coming
of Kosmische, an alarm-bell scenario bringing forth synaesthesic memories
of incense and patchouli, Julian Cope side projects and analogue synth
geekdom, I was wary of Emeralds' Solar Bridge, even though
it was released on Aaron Dilloway's reliable Hanson label. We already
have Kluster and Tangerine Dream to get us through the long, dark
night of the Moog – do we need more slow-bloom synth bumbling?
But Solar Bridge dashes my concerns, its beautiful analogue
radiance one of the most convincing arguments for the ongoing relevance
of the merging of austere German modernism and punk/noise takes on
patch bay romance.
Solar Bridge is admirably concise, running under half an
hour, split almost evenly between "Magic" and "The
Quaking Mess". "Magic" fades into earshot riding a
deep, rich drone, contracting and expanding in great, slow pulses
while gathering momentum; by mid-way, it's full-bodied and alive with
microtonal variation. Going through various generative phases, it's
deliriously engaging; at every point monolithically static, yet teeming
with energy, it's almost textbook perfect in its evocation of Kosmiche
Music's most fractal sides. "The Quaking Mess" gives more
breathing space to Mark McGuire's guitars, which he strings together
in delay-drenched loops of bulbous, bobbing notes, before pealing
a lackadaisical, melancholy melody from the instrument. Floating around
John Elliott's and Steve Hauschildt's electronics, the guitars make
for lovely counterpoint to the magnesium, light-fitting buzz of the
synth drones. It's incredibly simple music, yet pregnant with possibilities,
as though the trio's near-oxymoronic meditative hyper-awareness could
birth new galaxies of tone and timbre from their rudimentary kit and
historical consciousness. Beautifully recorded, bathed in the warm
glow and singe of righteous circuitry, Solar Bridge is a
shoe-in for my favourites of the year.–JD
GAS
NAH UND FERN
Kompakt
 Bundling
together four albums released by Wolfgang Voigt's GAS alias between
1995 to 2000, Nah Und Fern is public service at its most
benign: possibly the most significant body of work in electronic music
during the second half of the 1990s returned to life, after years
of eBay auction action. Originally released on Mille Plateaux, and
out of official circulation since that label went bust earlier this
decade, the reputation of these GAS records has steadily increased,
largely I suspect due to the combination of their influence (they
can be heard through plenty of current ambient and drone-based electronica)
and their singularity: no-one's come close to touching their peculiar
character.
Voigt's always been one for conceptualising his output, from the steady
stream of Studio 1 and Freiland minimal techno singles he released
in the 1990s, through the populist mechanics of Love Inc, the experimental
techno on his (just resurrected) Profan imprint, the weekly Kreisel
singles from 1999, and beyond. At a certain point, he must have realised
everything needed to "fit", needed its concept – one
wonders if this was his eventual undoing, given his relative silence
between the release of GAS's final instalment Pop in 2000,
and his recent reappearance on the scene during 2007 and 2008. But
he's also obviously learnt that conceptualising streak from Detroit
techno, and if Voigt's fondness for schematics reminds of anyone,
it's Richie Hawtin's Concept series (the two were peers), and Underground
Resistance's X-102, X-103, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood's Waveform
Transmissions, and so on.
Underground Resistance combined a kind of abstract militancy (in Simon
Reynolds's words) with exploration of racial politics, the history
of military development, and a decidedly astral/galactic bent; like
Sun Ra before them, they were after outer-spatial realignment. In
comparison, Voigt's reductionism is telling, both of his own interests
and of this strand of German techno. His desire to boil down the character
of German music (Wagner, Berg, schlager..) to find an "essence"
of "German soul" had him against the wall in the 90s from
left-wing German journalists. In one interview from the 1990s, Voigt
claimed his music had "nothing to do with politics", and
while that's a bit hard to fully get behind, listening back to the
music collected on Nah Und Fern ("Near and Far")
you're reminded that there was something magical – and possibly
post-political – to Voigt's distillation process, his
alchemic touch.
Having said that, it's hard for an alchemist to leave well alone.
Anyone familiar with the first GAS album will be surprised by Voigt's
decision to replace the first and third tracks with different recordings.
These shift the album's overarching mood closer to its companions,
which allows for greater conceptual and sonic consistency. But I can't
help but feel GAS should have played out unaltered, as there was clearly
a moment of clarity reached somewhere between 1996's GAS and 1999's
Königsforst, a trajectory only fully traceable with
the historicising context of an unchanged GAS. On the original
GAS, some of the tracks are closer to the concussive minimal
techno Voigt was styling as Grungerman or M:I:5, where loops ran amok
across each other, their points of return wildly out of sync, such
that the four-to-the-floor downbeat felt arbitrary, with waves of
noise, drone, clatter and skip pulsing away in 6/8, 5/4, and other,
far less measurable patterns. This made for bracingly disorienting
listening, a kind of defrocked techno.
While there are traces of this approach through all the GAS albums,
by Königsforst Voigt had nailed his raison d'être.
The alchemising process he was undertaking, borrowing from German
classical music and simmering these samples down to their very essence,
was at its peak here, and the music reflects this: Alpine quiescence,
wintry discontent, great thickets of string drone, rushing puffs and
gusts of grey noise, sometimes hinged to an unrelenting, somehow dampened
4/4 pulse. The second album, Zauberberg (appearing here with
an extended penultimate track) features the odd block of sound that
feels a little under-utilised, but by Königsforst, everything
fits. Immersive and endlessly drowsy, it's at times almost uncomfortable
listening – so vast it's inhuman, so dense it's impenetrable,
its climate simultaneously stuffy-humid and snap-freeze chilling.
But listening back to all four records, I'm reminded that it was always
the final instalment, Pop, that I returned to the most. It's
not just because the opening few tracks break forth like spring morning:
dewy-eyed, misty, wind hissing through flora, with soft white noise
gushing like water, they're welcoming where Zauberberg (for
example) can be a bit intractable. If GAS is indeed about distillation
and alchemy, Pop is where you catch the result, the transmutation
of lead into gold. It's no surprise the original cover for Pop
was brilliant and multi-hued, where its predecessors were dark and
dim. Here you're shot out into the light, and even though Pop's
final two tracks turn to look back at the chillier climes of its companions,
the overarching mood of the record is one of redemption. In its inhabitable
ease, it reminds me of the first Aphex Twin album, Seefeel's Quique,
or Bark Psychosis's "Pendulum Man".
None of this should imply the entirety of Nah Und Fern isn't
100% gratifying. I can think of few bodies of work from the past fifteen
years that have given me such unending, rejuvenating pleasure. But
it would be nice to see a companion piece released some time soon,
compiling GAS compilation contributions like "Klang" (from
Profan), "Heller" (from In Memoriam: Gilles
Deleuze), "Oktav" (from Modulation & Transformation
4), the "Modern" (Profan) and "Oktember"
(Mille Plateaux) singles, the absolutely breathtaking remix of Markus
Guentner's "Regensburg", those missing cuts from GAS, and
the vinyl-exclusive track from Königsforst. Wasn't there
also a contribution to one of those EMiT compilations? Just to make
the whole thing complete, you know, for us Voigt-heads. Even without
that, though, Nah Und Fern is monumental, a reminder of what
Voigt was capable of when working at his peak.–JD
Giuseppe
Ielasi
STUNT
Schoolmap
Claudio
Rocchetti
ANOTHER PIECE OF TEENAGE WILDLIFE
Die Schachtel
Two
more shots from the Italian underground, both artists part of the
3/4 Had Been Eliminated crew, with Rocchetti directly involved in
3/4HBE and Ielasi one of the scene's key figures and collaborators.
Each of the players in the 3/4HBE orbit has an individual voice, but
they're linked by an approach to rock that's distinctly "meta-",
to the point where the rock's often an ideological outline rather
than generic foundation. Post-rock from the 1990s, particularly the
American variant, talked a good talk but never really came through
with the goods, misreading polymath creativity as license to go fusion,
but these Italian artists make good on post-rock's failed promises.
There are no Mogwai or Tortoise clones in this collective, for which
we should be eternally grateful.
 Ielasi's
recent string of solo albums, starting with Plans (Sedimental),
followed by a series of sides for Häpna and recently topped by
August (12K), made for gorgeous music that was refined and
eloquent, yet at times deliriously woozy. Ielasi was in the process
of constructing his own universe, one where guitars float weightless
through scrums of noise, wood-and-wire drones and lurching turntablism.
With Stunt, the first in a trilogy of 12" EPs for Schoolmap,
Ielasi focuses on the turntable, in the process moving his practice
closer to the techno/house/dub of figures like Pole, something reinforced
by Rashad Becker's presence on the cut (Dubplates & Mastering
are the go-to people for heavy bass weight in Berlin). Ielasi dials
through micro-edits of his record collection, weaving them together
in clattering stitch-symphonies that recall Canadian micro-sampling
house merchant Akufen; indeed, the real surprise in Stunt
is how it unexpectedly links Ielasi with a continuum of modern cut'n'pasters,
headed by Todd Edwards, whose intricate carve-ups dance samples across
your skin like knitting needles tapping on kitchen sinks. Ielasi's
not particularly focused on forward motion, though, and the sideways
logic of his editing, splitting audio material down the middle and
threading it across blurry dronology or compulsively quaking glitch-work,
drops Stunt in some weird zone that's indirectly linked to
so much that's good regarding re-threaded musical material: Plunderphonics,
remixology, clicks'n'cuts, but also musique concrete, and the outer
reaches of dub. Maybe it's just the shock of the new, but this is
my favourite Ielasi record since Plans, and like that album,
its obsessive detailing doesn't over-egg things.
 Rocchetti's
disc is far less surprising, consisting as it does of slow drone constructions
and edgy tape-edited non-rock in the now-patented Italian style. Which
is not to say it's disappointing or anything, more that if you have
any historical grasp on what these people are up to, you'll not have
to stretch your thinking to figure Another Piece Of Teenage Wildlife
into any mental maps you may be working on. Rocchetti leans on loops
to propel his compositions, but the recording quality (simultaneously
crystal clear and deeply dub) blurs their edges, so these pieces never
fall foul of predictability; you can tell the beginning and end points,
but they interweave gracefully, building quite monolithic constructs
of drone action at times. It's lovely, laminar stuff, and possessed
of an uncommon beauty that reminds me a little of what C-Schulz and
Hajsch were up to last decade. Massimo Carozzi's guest credit for
"ghost electronics" makes sense, too: Another Piece
Of Teenage Wildlife often adopts an aesthetics of disappearance.
This can be found both within the pieces and the artist's character
– Rocchetti disappears behind his gorgeously maintained chamber
drones, curlicues of female vox (from Madame P and Margareth Kammerer),
field recordings, waterlogged piano, etc. It's a beautifully organised
and recorded album, and one of the secret highlights in this particularly
fertile phase of post-This Heat, liminal rock aesthetics.–JD
Zbigniew
Karkowski / Lin Zhiying
SWITCH
Emd.pl
 There's
a moment in Frank Zappa's "The Central Scrutinizer" on Joe's
Garage Act 1 where "cruel and inhuman punishments"
are being prepared for those who will dare to continue making music.
Those adjectives nicely describe the sonic matter contained on Switch,
articulated (sort of) through two long pieces where Karkowski and
Zhiying give the green light to the forces of evil. In the first part
we're immediately assaulted by radical distortion and snippets of
"regular sounds" triturated, chewed, spat out and redeployed
according to a "survival of the fittest ear" law. But if
you wear headphones something changes: the impressive mass of guerrilla
violence reveals a surprising inner logic, a game of hidden sequences
and bubbling combustibility. If Iannis Xenakis had promised his soul
to Merzbow at the crossroads, this could have been the result. The
second half starts a little less vehemently, alternating discharges
of white noise and pulsating electrostatic throbs and, on the whole,
shows more dynamic shaping of the fruits of dismemberment. Don't look
for neighbourliness, though – the attitude remains scathing,
the composers' fortress of cynicism absolutely inviolable, the record
ending in the same sneering coldness. Testing membranes and nervous
resistance alike, this CD is the definitive repellent for the insects
buzzing around the mellifluous syrup of Easy Listening. It remains
to be seen if it can enhance the functional mechanisms of the brain
or it's just another step towards well-deserved mental and social
isolation. –MR
Stephan
Mathieu
RADIOLAND
Die Schachtel
 My
father was a shortwave radio fanatic: I remember seeing the SW radios
set up in his self-constructed tin-shed workshop down in our backyard,
and thinking they looked somehow eerie – magical appliances
that yielded their secrets slowly and patiently. Of course, I had
no idea what he was really doing with those radios, beyond the bleedingly
obvious (uh, listening to them); what was the purpose of his obsession?
I'd say it was partly in their construction and their wiring, but
I always wondered about the audio outcome, what you'd end up hearing.
Shortwave radio always makes me think of channelling, as though the
SW enthusiast is a conduit for the world's knowledge: figures on the
margins tapping into international broadcasts, they act as lonely
receptors, the radio a strangely de-personalised, or maybe de-personalising,
connection with the outside world. With Radioland, Stephan
Mathieu has snatched those signals from the air, processed them in
real time and corralled them into seven compositions of misty, mysterious
beauty, an unashamedly gorgeous music that transfigures everyday materials
into glorious stuff: clouds of gold-spun tones, gusts of air puffing
between the headphones, the eternal ringing of the tuning fork of
the universe.
In its somewhat contradictory humble grandeur, Radioland
recalls Wolfgang Voigt's GAS project, uncovering some primordial or
primeval audio heartbeat, or an ancient strand of DNA. Like GAS, Radioland
has no recourse to melody, little reliance on traditional dynamics,
rather focusing in on an ever unfurling now; it's remarkably
present. I guess there's a lot of drone music out there,
whatever its origins, but plenty of it dates quickly. I can't see
that happening with Radioland – rather unlike Mathieu's
earlier frequencyLib which was very much of its time, particularly
in its references to consumer electronics. Ultimately, Radioland's
key concerns aren't its sources (radio and processing) but rather
its effects – sehnsucht, the indefinable taste of memory,
pastoral melancholy – a shift in focus that serves Mathieu's
growing compositional confidence exceptionally well.–JD
Rick
Reed
DREAMZ/BLUE POLZ
Elevator Bath
Jim
Haynes
ERALDUS/ERAVALDUS
Elevator Bath
 Rick
Reed's music has an ineluctability that renders it instantly indispensable,
a necessary reminder of the place where we all come from, known by
no-one, probably non-existent. No surprise then that these tracks
were originally conceived as soundtracks to visuals, by Ken Jacobs
and Fred Worden respectively, for giving sonic abstraction a pictorial
element can be a method of exorcising remote fears while coming to
terms with our infinite ignorance, only heightened by our presumption
of being "superior". The first of these two transcendental
enigmas generated, according to the press release, by an EMS Synthi
A, a couple of sine wave generators and a shortwave radio, "Dreamz"
is built upon a series of wavering drones whose resonant allure acts
on the psyche like a snake charming its charmer; convinced we've grasped
what's going on after a few minutes, we're sucked in by a vortex of
inexplicable doubts, sounds suggesting an amalgam of darkness and
luminescence rather than physical phenomena. "Blue Polz"
starts like an advanced scientific investigation of synthesized emissions,
but things calm down with the introduction of suspended electronic
tones, even if the stability still contains a good measure of mystery.
The occasional vinyl pop 'n' crackle – it's a limited edition
(260) picture disc, folks – is the only drawback; otherwise,
gorgeous stuff all the way.
 Jim
Haynes' Eraldus/Eravaldus is also a picture disc adorned
with the author's treated photographs. Haynes' penchant for "rusting
things" is once again commendably evident in music derived from
a series of field recordings, "agitated objects and amplified
spaces". Words of praise are pointless when dealing with aural
art of such subtlety and sensitivity; this is for connoisseurs. Unlikely
to cause an instant enthusiastic reaction, it implants its memory-carving
cells little by little, until the listener is progressively swallowed
up in shades of husky bewitchment. The mixture of resounding metallic
aura and rumbling menace is a trademark of this San Francisco-based
soundscaper, who camouflages any sentimental implications under a
muddy crust of impenetrability and makes but extremely rare concessions
to hallucinatory expressivity. But Haynes is modifying concrete sounds
– his sources include, amongst other things, a lighthouse, wind-whipped
high tension wires and a pile of sand – and their textures remain
palpable throughout, leaving a sonic residue like the white-salt patina
that sticks on the skin when sea-water has dried. A scarcely visible
stimulus that nevertheless makes us feel alive and willing to resume
fighting while everything else seems to crumble. No apparent earthly
future, an inestimable sheen waiting for our awareness. Somewhere.–MR
Janek
Schaefer
EXTENDED PLAY
Line
 Men
are basically helpless when it comes to putting pen to paper to convey
their deepest feelings, and when trying to do so the consequences
are preposterously light – and trite. Fortunately, sounds exist
as a vibrational account of what moves inside our corporeal unit and
– especially – our memory, that hard disk that decides
whether grief or glee underscores each moment of our existence. Janek
Schaefer ranks high among the "memory specialists" who in
recent years have endeavoured to set into music our quest for framing
reminiscences (I'm also thinking of William Basinski and Philip Jeck),
with a body of work showing consistency and skill. After the arrival
of his daughter Scarlett in 2005, Schaefer, weighing that event against
the circumstances of his mother's birth in Warsaw in 1942 smack dab
in the middle of World War II, was struck by the awareness of "how
lucky we all are", and devised an installation to celebrate "hope
and new beginnings, for child survivors in all situations around the
world." The musical component of the work was based on a phrase
extracted from the popular Polish song "Tango Lyczakowskie",
which was broadcast by the BBC World Service on the day Schaefer's
mother was born (it was one of the many songs used in the "Jodoform"
system of secret musical messages during the war). With the help of
arranger Michael Jennings, Schaefer wrote a ten-minute piece that
was recorded by, respectively, violin, cello and piano onto dubplates
which were played in the installation by modified "retro"
decks that stopped and started according to the movement of the spectators
in the space, producing unexpected glissandos. In the first three
tracks on the album these instruments are heard individually, playing
extremely simple and painfully slow airs – one also detects
the mechanisms of the machines at work and the dirt on the vinyl –
not particularly poignant though definitely not cheery. Everything
clicks in the long fourth part, when the elements are brought together;
I swear that the sorrow is almost tangible in a piece that's easily
on a par with the Gavin Bryars's most painfully introspective works.
It's a stunning track, worth the price of the whole disc, which is
appropriately enough brought to a conclusion by the original version
of "Tango Lyczakowskie", more or less garbled amidst the
characteristic noise of a 1940s radio.–MR
Riccardo
Dillon Wanke
CAVES
Sedimental
 Although
currently based in Lisbon, Riccardo Dillon Wanke is a young artist
from Italy (born in Genoa, resident in Milan from 1982 to 2005). A
multi-instrumentalist – piano, sax and guitar – he started
composing experimental music in 2000, collaborating with, amongst
others, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stefano Pilia, David Maranha and Margarida
Garcia. Caves is his second recording after Medves
(Fringes), and its five tracks are (it says here) centered on exploring
"binaural beats in musical composition", which in practice
is more like an out-and-out analysis (not excessively deep, perhaps)
of the physical and emotional resonances generated by the juxtaposition
of minimal elements. Wanke uses acoustic and electric guitars, saxophones
and natural sounds, extrapolating a crumb of each source's essence
and offering it to the god of processing: a piece might start as a
single-note repetition morphing into a Lucier-like juxtaposition of
upper partials ("E") or involve successions and superimpositions
of looped materials ("Jest"). Despite the clarity of the
design, it all functions sporadically at best, the reason being a
too obvious simplicity of selected constituents, which the press release
tries to sell as "folk sensitivity" but to my grizzled ears
sound too snug and warm. The best moments here, on the other hand,
call up that sense of quasi-disbelief we feel when confronting an
unknown sonic feature that nonetheless seems strangely familiar –
the splendid whooshing drone in "Old Man" is a fitting example.
When music like this materializes from scarcely recognizable colours
the CD becomes much more interesting. Though not a masterpiece by
any means, Caves contains several intuitions that leave us
waiting for future developments. –MR
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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