| AUTUMN
News 2009 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Nate Dorward, Stephen Griffith, Marc Medwin,
Massimo Ricci, Michael Rosenstein, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
On Another Timbre: Mathias Forge / Phil Julian
/ David Papapostolou / Matt Milton / Léo Dumont / Paul
Abbott / Ute Kanngiesser / Jamie Coleman / Grundig Kasyansky
/ Seymour Wright
Laurie Scott Baker
Jim O'Rourke
Tetuzi Akiyama
VINYL SOLUTION: Frederik Croene & Timo van
Luijk / Curia / Will Guthrie / Hematic
Sunsets / Micro_penis / The New Black
/ Fred Nipi / Nokalypse / Neil Rose / Christian Wolfarth
JAZZ & IMPROV: Sophie
Agnel / Fred Anderson / Aporias Trio / Borah Bergman & Stefano
Pastor / John Blum / John Butcher / Audrey Chen & Robert
van Heumen / Marilyn Crispell / Ted Daniel / De Haan & Spruit
/ Die Enttäuschung / Hughes, Scherzeberg & Wiese /
Max Kohane & Anthony Pateras / Darius Jones / Eyal Maoz
& Asaf Sirkis / Harry Miller / Joe Morris
Andrea Neumann &
Ivo Palacky / Tim Olive / Andrea Parkins / Keith Rowe &
Sachiko M / SLW / Henry Threadgill / Turning Point / Thompson,
Holdsworth & Stevens / Franck Vigroux / Weasel Walter /
Wolter Wierbos / Wilkinson, Edwards & Noble / Jacob William
/ Wooley, Grubbs & Lytton
CONTEMPORARY: Tom
Johnson / Kernel / Duane Pitre / Music from Stanford
ELECTRONICA: Yves
de Mey / Richard Garet & Brendan Murray / Jeff Gburek /
Sam Hamilton / Jason Kahn / Leyland Kirby / Tu m'
Last issue
|
Here
at last is the Autumn 2009 issue of PT, in which we welcome aboard
Marc Medwin and send out special thanks to Luke Harley for allowing
us to use his interview with Larry
Ochs, to Bob Gilmore for sending in his with Richard
Barrett (and to Richard for editing it down), to all the photographers
whose images have been used (hope I haven't forgotten to credit anybody)
and to everyone who's sent music in for review over the past few months.
Instead of reading me rapping on about the usual stuff here , why
not check out this
link and read me rapping on about the usual stuff in someone else's
zine, in this case Bill Shoemaker's excellent Point of Departure,
where I was delighted and honoured to take part in a round table discussion
with Bill Smith and Chris Kelsey. French readers may also be interested
to learn that a two-part article by Jean-Michel van Schouwburg is
scheduled for publication in Improjazz magazine in November
and December. So that's enough of me. Now let's talk about someone
else's music. Bonne lecture.-DW
Mathias
Forge / Phil Julian / David Papapostolou
MESHES
AT-B05
Matt
Milton / Léo Dumont
SCRUB
AT-B06
Paul
Abbott / Léo Dumont / Ute Kanngiesser
LOITER VOLCANO
AT-B03
Jamie
Coleman / Grundik Kasyansky / Seymour Wright
CONTROL & ITS OPPOSITES
AT-B04
Since
the inception of the Another Timbre label a few years back, Simon
Reynell has been producing consistently absorbing and challenging
releases of European advanced improvisation with overlap into areas
of contemporary composition. While he has looked toward France, Spain,
Germany – and even the US for a recent recording by Kyle Bruckmann
and Ernst Karel – he has resolutely focused on music being made
in and around London. What makes London particularly intriguing at
the moment is the commitment toward exploration and cross-fertilization
of multiple generations of free improvisers, with the likes of Evan
Parker, Eddie Prévost, Max Eastley, Clive Bell and John Butcher
collaborating with Tom Chant, John Edwards, Rhodri and Angharad Davies,
Mark Wastell, and Graham Halliwell. And increasingly, a new generation
is starting to get some visibility. Seymour Wright, Jamie Coleman,
Sebastian Lexer, and Ross Lambert, who’ve been documented on
a handful of releases on Prévost’s Matchless label over
the last decade, are being joined by a number of musicians who are
settling around London. These musicians are finding an outlet at venues
like Café Otó, and small DIY series presented at churches
and store-fronts, as well as festivals like Freedom of the City and
Reynell’s Unnamed Music Festival.
They have come to London from many different locations, and to improvisation
from differing backgrounds. Phil Julian comments, “I think that
there are some very strong younger improvising players in London at
the moment and it's very interesting for me as someone slightly outside
of the environment to step in and be welcomed immediately. There's
no sense of 'well, who's this noisy laptop guy who's suddenly arrived?
not sure we want him around' – it's a very open group open to
new ideas, and that's exciting.”
For
many of them, Eddie Prevost's improvisation workshop, which has been
taking place in Southwark every Friday evening for over a decade,
now provides a central laboratory. Some are regulars while others
drift in and out. Grundik Kasyansky describes it nicely: “At
the workshop we play a bit, but mostly we listen to other people playing
(15 – 20 people playing mostly in duos and trios and we have
only two hours for all that). Anybody can arrive – a rocker,
a jazzman, a non-musician, a goofy “superstar”, a scholar,
a drunken clochard, so you learn to accept anything, and
deal with it. Slowly you learn to keep your mind open and concentration
high. You learn to agree, to disagree, to hold, to continue, to stop,
to wait, to listen, to push, to let things go and to bring them back.
It is constant challenge, hard work and serious fun.”
Reynell
has been a steadfast supporter of these musicians. He recollects that
“when I started the Another Timbre label I was very much aware
that a new generation of players was emerging within the UK, and they
interested me a lot. The new players were hardly represented on disc
and I was keen to present their work in two ways: either by linking
them on CDs with more established players (as on discs such as Hum,
Dun and Midhopestones) or simply playing with each
other on CDRs (CDs would unfortunately be financial suicide). So the
desire to profile the work of this new generation was fundamental
to the label from the start. Representing the music was quite tricky
because, firstly, the groupings are so fluid, and there are very few
longer-term groups, and secondly the music of this generation is constantly
changing and evolving in different ways. Over the course of 2008 I
did several recordings with the Coleman-Kasyansky-Wright trio (one
of the few long-term groupings), and each recording was very different
from the next; the musicians felt that the recordings had become out
of date within weeks. It happened that spring was a very slack time
for work for me, so I decided to use it to do several recordings in
London, and thought it could be interesting to issue a small series
of discs that would, together, give a kind of snapshot of that generation's
music at one particular moment.”
 It
is that notion of a snapshot that makes these CDRs so compelling.
The series was meticulously curated by Reynell over the course of
a few weeks in the Spring of 2009, selecting a handful of the London-based
musicians he's been following, and taking advantage of the fact that
French musicians Mathias Forge (photo) and Leo Dumont were passing
through London on their way back to France from the IandE festival
in Dublin to arrange a series of recording sessions over the course
of a few weeks in the Spring of 2009. Carefully choosing churches
around London that had favorable acoustics, he organised one concert
with an audience as well as two separate recording sessions (with
no audience present). Most of the groups were first-time meetings,
pulling together musicians Reynell thought would click. What is common
amongst the sets is a fascination of the timbral qualities of the
intersection of acoustic and electronic sound sources. But most importantly,
there is the notion that technique and vocabulary are not enough –
one must use those foundational elements for the formulation of a
personal and ensemble language.
 The
trio with Mathias Forge (trombone), Phil Julian (electronics) and
David Papapostolou (cello) does a nice job of capturing the process
of three musicians working out a collective sound. ”Floodlit
Iron Tracery”, recorded at a concert at St. Marks Church, is
preceded by “Long Nylon Oak,” which was recorded a few
days later at a recording session at the Church of St. James the Great.
The three had first played together the previous November when Forge
was visiting London, and each brings a unique approach to the table.
For Forge, the trombone mainly serves as a sound source. He's as likely
to conjure up metallic scrapes and rattles from the horn as he is
to use the slide and bore to amplify and modify his hisses, puffs,
and exhalations. Papapostolou’s approach to the cello is an
ideal complement. Using close miking, every nuanced scratch, popped
string, and overtone is placed against Forge’s breathiness and
percussive attack.
 From
this recording, you'd never guess that Julian has been playing harsh
noise/drone electronic music for the last decade under the name Cheapmachines.
Crossing paths with Papapostolou and Milton provided him with the
impetus to begin exploring collaborative improvisation using contact
miked surfaces and modular analog synths. His gestural percussive
clicks and flutters, along with judicious introduction of sine waves,
bridge the timbres of Forge and Papapostolou. One can hear the three
intently listening to each other and the resonance of their collective
sound in the two church acoustics. The live character of the room
comes through particularly well on the piece recorded at St. Marks,
with the musicians exploring the decay of the room as string abrasions
explode against breathy blasts and electronic spatters. If these two
improvisations are but snapshots of work in progress, one looks forward
to hearing how the three might grow together over time.
 Where
the trio on Meshes is formed around process and density the
meeting between percussionist Léo Dumont and violinist Matt
Milton is hyper-focused on timbral nuance and activity. Reynell reports
that “they played incredibly quietly at the concert and were
pretty much inaudible to anyone in the audience sitting further back
than the first two rows.” Throughout their thirty-minute improvisation,
there's a restless energy constructed from finely abraded textures.
While the dynamics may be restrained, the level of detailed motion
is anything but: Milton’s dry arco moves from scuffed and sawed
overtones to pattering, percussive drizzle to splintered harmonics.
Leveraging the vibrational qualities of snare drum, floor tom, and
cymbal, Dumont coaxes out flutters, groans, crinkles, and pops from
the bowed, rubbed, and scratched surfaces. The two immediately sync
into an arc of galvanized action. Avoiding broad gestures, they drive
each other with constantly shifting currents of meticulously constructed
detail. The two build a tensile energy broken by carefully placed
pools of stasis. Their careful listening is exemplified by the way
the piece finally resolves in waves of breath-like whooshes and looped
scrapes that drift in to silence.
Listening
to the trio of Dumont, Paul Abbott (electronics) and Ute Kanngiesser
(cello) it is hard to believe this was a first encounter. Though Abbott
and Kanngiesser are based in London, the two had only played together
as part of the weekly Workshop, and neither of them knew Dumont’s
music before they sat down together at the private recording session
at the Church of St. James the Great. The three musicians develop
an inextricable sense of ensemble at once: Dumont’s ruffled
sputters mesh so convincingly with the warm, woody resonance of Kanngiesser’s
cello and Abbott’s amplified fricatives and quavering sine waves
that it's hard to believe this isn’t a regularly-working unit.
The music has a charged dynamism combining pointillistic attack and
electrifying areas of dense agitation. Kanngiesser doesn’t shy
away from swooping bowed work and cascading arpeggios, playing off
of Dumont’s tuned, bent, and chafed textures and Abbott’s
spryly acrobatic electronics to great effect. Balancing intrepid focus
and energetic abandon, the trio spontaneously navigates their way
through a collective flow in a set bristling with discovery from the
first probing moments through to its explosive conclusion. The intimate
recording captures every detail with an even, spatial balance.
The
trio recording with Seymour Wright (saxophone), Jamie Coleman (trumpet),
and Grundik Kasyansky (electronics) stands apart from the other releases
discussed above, in several ways. Firstly, this is the only group
that is an ongoing concern – the three have been working together
since 2007. Secondly, there is the sheer length of this performance.
At 80 minutes, the long-form nature of the improvisation elicits a
different type of listening and interaction. Wright’s singular
sound continues to reveal one of the most striking approaches to the
saxophone in recent memory. Here, his language of masterful control
and astonishing range of inflection is in good company. Coleman’s
burred breathiness and pinched tones provide coloristic counter to
the saxophonist’s harder-edged attack and articulation, and
Kasyansky’s often strident electronics and mechanical activities
fit in like the final piece to a puzzle. Wright also weaves in wafts
of radio snippets which he controls with his horn, adding yet another
layer, as the piece unfolds across a linked series of events. As it
progresses, the listener becomes aware of how the three break up any
sense of immersive flow, weaving together skeins of active gesture,
striations of pulsating overtones and electronic whine, allowing momentum
and density to build before breaking off and allowing the ambience
of the room and sounds from outside to encroach (on one of the earlier
recordings Reynell made with the trio in a busy part of South London,
they insisted that they play with the windows wide open and microphones
pointing outside). It's demanding listening, but well worth the attention
required.
   
Considering
this series of recordings as a group, it's tempting to jump to neat
conclusions about a new "thing": a new scene, a new sound,
a new community. That is particularly true for those listening to
this music geographically removed from London. But Seymour Wright
responds cautiously when asked about whether these musicians, are
part of a particularly musical community. “Actually [there are]
many different communities – social, musical, moral… real,
and probably mostly, imagined, in London. The workshop is a nexus
for some of them, as is Café Otó at present. Yes, of
course there is a very warm social group around these two different
fulcra, but it is far more complexly knit and limber in its unity
than may be thought and imagined. There are, more helpfully, also
what I think of as schools of musical operation and it may be the
case that any three people playing together in one of these settings
are engaged in fundamentally different, albeit simultaneous, activities.
I am tempted to go as far as to suggest that the number of communities
and perhaps schools is a factor of the number of individuals involved,
but I am not sure.”
So
those looking for a harbinger of the next "new thing" can
keep searching, then. Everyone involved in these recordings cautions
about the codification and / or commoditization that can come from
documents which, by their very nature are a snapshot of a particular
point in time. A glimpse at the websites of any of these musicians
reveals that they've been playing in a broad variety of contexts with
increasing regularity, and haven't been particularly interested in
documenting their work. Many of them see the process of exploration
and discovery as more central to their music making than recording.
Even so, these four CDRs provide an essential dispatch from the front
line, from a group of musicians who are worth keeping on your radar.–MRo
[photos courtesy Fergus Kelly]
Laurie
Scott Baker
GRACILITY
Musicnow
 Bassist
Laurie Scott Baker sounds like the kind of bloke you'd love to hang
out with over a few pints down at the local – not many people
can boast a CV that includes stints with Robert Wyatt, Manfred Mann,
Alex Harvey and the Scratch Orchestra, not to mention its
later political spin-off ensembles, notably the Progressive Cultural
Association. Hailing originally from Australia, he had the good fortune
to be around in London at a particularly fertile time for British
new music – the late 60s / early 70s – and the appearance
of Gracility, four hitherto unavailable archive recordings
dating from between 1969 and 1975 featuring the Scratch Orchestra,
Derek Bailey, Keith Rowe, Gavin Bryars, Evan Parker, John Tilbury
and Jamie Muir is certainly cause for some kind of celebration (though
one wonders why it's taken so long to see the light of day). Wire
head honcho Tony Herrington even gave it a two-page review back in
May – and I can't remember the last time I saw one of those
(that said, I don't share Tony's enthusiasm – actually he wasn't
at all enthusiastic about one of the pieces on offer, Pibroch
1926, but more of that later – though I am happy to have
a copy on my shelves).
There are two main reasons why getting hold of a copy of Gracility
is something any self-respecting new music nut might want to do: the
title track itself, which is to the best of my knowledge the only
time Derek Bailey and Keith Rowe ever recorded together, and Circle
Piece, an 18-minute (incomplete? apparently the tape recorder
battery ran out) reading of a Baker graphic score performed by an
eleven-piece incarnation of the Scratch Orchestra, whose discography
is so small that any new recording is something to seek out and treasure.
The two CD set also contains the aforementioned Pibroch 1926,
for Evan Parker's soprano sax and tape delay, and Bass Chants
& Cues, a ramshackle 51-minute jam for Baker (bass, synthesizer),
Tilbury (Lowery T2 organ) and Muir (drums).
Gracility itself is a huge, sprawling piece – 71 minutes
long, and divided on the disc into ten intriguingly-titled movements
which follow on from each other without a break – scored for
Rowe and Bailey's guitars, Bryars on Fender Jazz Bass and Baker himself
on normal (?) double bass. It doesn't sound normal though –
in fact nothing does, as the score calls for amps set on the verge
of feedback, which leads to a few impressive spectral bumps and bruises,
though nothing as spectacular as David Behrman's Wave Train
and Robert Ashley's The Wolfman, which Herrington compares
it to. The problem with Gracility is simply that it goes
on far too long: there are plenty of exciting moments – "Port
Of London Atmos" really takes off (more so than "747 at
Keithrowe Airport", despite its title), and there's some sumptuous
Scelsi-esque harmony in "Breathing Of The City" –
but a lot of rather laid back twanging in between. Drop the needle
anywhere in the first 20 minutes or so and you'd be forgiven for identifying
it as something by Tetuzi Akiyama, or maybe Michel Henritzi. Anyone
expecting a titanic clash of personalities between the two guitarists
will be disappointed: both Bailey and Rowe stick to the score, and
it's often hard to tell who's doing what (I'm fairly sure Rowe's on
the right channel – a few give-away shudders here and there
– but I wouldn't bet my life on it). Hugh Davies's recording
("distortion on the original tape", Baker helpfully informs
us) of the event, which took place at his New Arts Lab in 1969, also
ends suddenly, which is a bit of a shock.
Clocking in at just under six minutes, Evan Parker's faux-bagpiping
on Pibroch 1926, extracted from a work composed to celebrate
the 50th anniversary of the General Strike, is mere fluff, and, along
with his aimless twitterings on Michael Nyman's "Waltz",
might just be the least consequential addition to the huge Parker
discography. Bass Chants & Cues, recorded in concert
at Goldsmiths in 1972 ("thankfully" notes Baker, but I'm
not so sure about that) may be fun as a historical curiosity, an example
of that letsgoforitwhatthefuckness that characterises times of great
artistic ferment, but it's hardly great music. Tilbury's sub-Riley
noodling is frankly embarrassing, and he can't build a solo to save
his life, despite some heroic supporting drum breaks from Muir. Tony
Herrington's description of it as "a juggernaut of malevolent
energy" makes me wonder if he wasn't listening to a completely
different piece. Not only does it take over 20 minutes to get going,
but it soon loses momentum when it does and ends with a strange squawking
coda, which one imagines is supposed to be some sort of cathartic
primal scream therapy but sounds vaguely ridiculous, as if Muir was
thrashing his floor tom with a seagull instead of a drumstick. Closing
the set, Circle Piece is a less dramatic but more rewarding
listen, and its value as a historical document unquestionable given
the dearth of Scratch Orchestra recordings, but one is left with the
distinct impression that this was something that had to be experienced
live. And you could probably say that for all the music on this flawed
but fascinating album.–DW
Jim
O'Rourke
THE VISITOR
Drag City
 From
the mid 90s up to and including his (surprise?) move to join the ranks
of Sonic Youth in 2000, Jim O'Rourke was arguably the hottest thing
in new music, a veritable man for all seasons, touche-à-tout,
equally at home as a performer in the worlds of what became known
as post-rock – originally at the epicentre of the scene in the
then most musically happening city on the planet, Chicago –
and free improvisation, both on guitar and laptop, the latter notably
with Peter Rehberg and Christian Fennesz in Fenn O'Berg. As a producer,
label manager (Moikai and Dexter's Cigar, with David Grubbs, his erstwhile
sparring partner in Gastr Del Sol) and all round catalyst of energy
and enthusiasm for championing new names (Rafael Toral, Kevin Drumm
and Thomas Lehn each owe him a pint or two) and reissuing older albums
that had slipped off the radar too quickly, or which had never even
been on there in the first place (Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba,
Folke Rabe's What??), Jim O'Rourke's been hard to beat. It's
fitting that his own music was spotted fairly early on by John Zorn,
who released Terminal Pharmacy on Tzadik back when that label
was still a vibrant and essential force and not just a repository
for substandard doodles by Jay Zee's ageing Downtown buddies, as it
was O'Rourke who effectively took up the torch as poster boy for the
avant garde when Zorn began to slip into comfortable Masada middle
age in mid 90s. And unlike Zorn, whose attitude towards journalists
has always been mistrustful if not downright hostile, O'Rourke was
immensely forthcoming, radiating enormous and infectious enthusiasm
for anything he came into contact with – check out that old
2001 Invisible Jukebox in The Wire. In retrospect, it doesn't
seem so surprising he ended up with kindred spirits and all round
new music nuts Sonic Youth.
That lasted until the middle of this decade when Jim relocated to
Japan, supposedly to concentrate on his latest passion, filmmaking.
I wondered whether O'R hadn't OD'ed on music (knowing only too well
how the exhilaration of receiving the latest releases from all over
the globe is tempered by feelings of frustration and inadequacy –
how can you find time to listen to all this music and, more importantly,
time to work on your own?) – in an email I got from him back
then he said he was "only listening to Masami [Akita, aka Merzbow]
and Derek [Bailey] these days." But old habits die hard, and
he hasn't been able to resist promoting the work of unsung heroes
such as veteran free jazz saxophonist Akira Sakata, and, most notably
perhaps, producing Joanna Newsom's pretty but somewhat overhyped Ys.
That album's obsession with vintage analogue gear and studio perfectionism
is still very much in evidence on The Visitor, a 38-minute
purely instrumental album and the first O'Rourke release under his
own name on Drag City since the so-called Roeg trilogy, Bad Timing,
(1997) Eureka (1999) and Insignificance (2001).
It's hard not to admire the skilful arrangement and production –
acoustic and electric guitars, banjos, piano, Hammond organs and percussion
are scored and mixed with breathtaking precision – not to mention
the ear for harmony and feel for song structure (albeit without words
– shame that, I rather like his singing voice), which reveal
a deep understanding of and abiding affection for a whole generation
of great songwriters. But I'm left with a nagging sense of déjà
entendu – the deliberate faux stop / start just minutes
into the piece looks back to Gastr Del Sol's self-conscious de(con)struction
of pop aesthetics, and those cunning hemiolas and shuffling maracas
reveal the same debt to Burt Bacharach that O'Rourke explicitly acknowledged
with his delicious cover of "Something Big" on Eureka.
Nothing wrong with that, you might argue – pop stars are expected
(and most seem to be happy) to dish up their old chestnuts night after
night, album after album to please punters and labels alike. The Scott
Walkers and David Sylvians of this world, who are ready to strike
out into more dangerous and experimental territory without knowing
whether the fans will follow them – though more often than not
they do – are few and far between. I see no reason why Jim O'Rourke
shouldn't join them, and I guess that goes some way to explaining
my being somewhat underwhelmed by The Visitor; I can't help
thinking that, given his encyclopaedic knowledge of just about every
significant development in new music that's taken place in his lifetime,
he couldn't have come up with something more.. spectacular
after so many years of patient work, a Wire Album Of The
Year mega-melting pot extravaganza of improv, noise, laptop, rock
and pop. Maybe that's still to come one day, who knows.–DW
Tetuzi
Akiyama / Gul3
NERO'S EXPEDITION
Monotype LP
Tetuzi
Akiyama / Éden Carrasco / Leonel Kaplan
MOMENTS OF FALLING PETALS
Dromos
Kato
Hideki / Tetuzi Akiyama / Toshimaru Nakamura
OMNI
Presqu'île
Guitarist
Tetuzi Akiyama has never been easy to pigeonhole. Though he first
came to our attention as part of the onkyo set, appearing on the hugely
influential (and long overdue for deluxe reissue) Improvisation
Meeting at Bar Aoyama (Reset, 1999), he's just as at home tearing
up extremely noisy rock riffs (that 2003 Idea LP Don't Forget
To Boogie has also been out of print too long) or attacking his
instrument with a samurai sword, notably on 2002's A Bruit Secret
release Résophonie. These three latest dispatches
from the globetrotting captain, recorded in Stockholm in 2006 (Nero's
Expedition), Córdoba (Argentina) in September 2008 (Moments
of Falling Petals) and Tokyo two months later (Omni),
are further proof of his glorious eclecticism.
 GUL
3 is a Swedish trio consisting of Johan Arrias (saxophone, electronics),
Leo Svensson (cello, organ) and Henrik Olsson (drums, piano and electronics),
whose work, like Akiyama's, wanders freely around, as they put it,
"the borderland between composition and improvisation, acoustic
and electronic, melodic and noise." The six tracks on Nero's
Expedition, with titles namechecking songs by Louis Thomas Hardin,
aka Moondog (another lone traveller if ever there was one), run the
gamut of contemporary improv, from the luminous bowed percussion and
breathy sax of the title track via the gloomy throb of "Failed"
to "The Water Hyacinths", which finds Akiyama back in Loren
Connors mode. On side two's centrepiece, "Denying Nero's Vessels
Passage", his dirty fuzz drone, electronically sandblasted by
the Swedes, reminds me of some of Mazzacane's noisier outings with
Alan Licht. The sound quality is better though – put that down
perhaps to Giuseppe Ielasi and Daniel Karlsson's impeccable mixing
and mastering – but what the music gains in clarity and volume
as a result it seems to lose in intensity. As a result, the elegiac
minimalism of the coda "Through The Sud of Nubia", with
its delicate strands of feedback and inscrutable rustles and thuds,
comes across more as afterthought than resolution; one feels the Swedes
would have felt more at home if Akiyama had stuck to the noisy stuff.
 If
it's noisy stuff you're after, go no further than Omni. In
the space of just three releases, Antoine Duluard's Presqu'île
imprint seems to be setting new standards in hardcore EAI; after two
kitten-torturing outings with Mitsuhiro Yoshimura, here comes
Omni, two huge smouldering slag heaps of user-unfriendly music
featuring Akiyama in the company of fellow compatriots, inputless
mixing board pioneer Toshimaru Nakamura and bassist / bass synthesizer
player Kato Hideki, best known perhaps for his Death Ambient trio
with Ikue Mori and Fred Frith (but he also released a truly gnarly
disc, Sieves, with James Fei on IMJ which nobody I know seems
to like, except me). It's hard to say who's doing what here, but I'll
hazard a guess that Nakamura is responsible for the clouds of vicious
insects swarming above the fetid swamps of distorted low-end sludge
and gritty feedback. Don't get me wrong here, folks: there's something
truly admirable about this music, and about the musicians' total refusal
to make the slightest concession either to each other or to anyone
else within earshot ("we visualized the three of us on separate
trains going through tunnels, rather than riding together on a linear
time-table" notes Hideki), and it exerts a curious fascination,
drawing me back for further listens. If, as Georges Braque once said,
"Art disturbs us; Science reassures us", this could be the
most artistic release to come my way in quite a while, but I'm not
sure I want to spend the rest of the year listening to it to figure
out exactly why that might be the case.
 The
good old, bad old conservatory-trained composer in me is more drawn,
I'll admit, to Moments Of Falling Petals, which finds Captain
Akiyama back on acoustic guitar in the world of recognisable, even
singable (yes!) pitches for a delicate and elegantly understated three-way
conversation with alto saxophonist Éden Carrasco and trumpeter
Leonel Kaplan. This could be a clue as to why I happen to find Akiyama
such an intriguing musician – returning once again to the less-is-more
world of Bar Aoyama and Off Site where he first made a name for himself,
I'm struck by what I once described elsewhere (referring to an Arthur
Doyle album, of all things) as "relaxed intensity". There
were only two ways out of Off Site: either by playing even less –
the Taku Sugimoto solution – or by playing more, which was Akiyama's
strategy. (Toshi Nakamura can't decide which way to go, which is fine
by me too..). There's an extraordinary tension to Sugimoto's work,
both improvised and composed – I well recall him sweating,
physically suffering to place those oh so few notes in just the right
place in a concert with Radu Malfatti here a while back – while
Akiyama in concert has never seemed to me to be in the throes of such
an existential crisis. Can music be intense without necessarily being
tense? I'd say it can, and Akiyama is a good example. Pursuing the
comparison for a while, that Connors / Licht duo once more comes to
mind, with Taku playing Connors, agonising over each sound, while
Akiyama sits back (Licht positively slumps back) and lets
the notes come – not that there are many more of them here than
there used to be on echt Akiyama outings like Relator,
or his wonderful duos with Jozef van Wissem, Proletarian Drift
and Hymn for a Fallen Angel. There's a real sense of tonal
– not in the traditional sense of course – interplay in
this 33-minute piece, with Akiyama's delicate chordal threads and
micro-melodies drawing Carrasco and Kaplan back into real pitch play
(rare these days, that), which counterpoints their more "extended"
techniques to great effect. It's glorious stuff, and strongly recommended.
Same goes for the other two too – but you may want to prepare
a secret tunnel out of your apartment if you want to play Omni
at the volume it deserves.–DW
Frederik
Croene / Timo Van Luijk
VOILE AU VENT
La Scie Dorée
Onde
PURPLE
Ondemusic
 As
no information is provided on the (beautifully produced) jacket as
to who's playing what on these four atmospheric and intriguingly evocative
pieces from this Belgium-based duo, you'll just have to guess. Not
that the instruments themselves are hard to identify: there's a piano
that sounds like it's been left out in the rain for a month, plenty
of percussion, from groaning rubbed drumheads to tiny pulsing triangle
(appropriately on "Triangle du Diable"), assorted woodwinds,
glistening organ, occasional dub-lite bass and much more, courtesy
Frederik Croene – who's a pianist, as far as I've been able
to discover – and Finnish-born Timo van Luijk. File under New
Weird, if you like. Though there are no vocals (thank God –
all you need to spoil this is some Tibet/Balance wannabe rabbiting
on about Aleister Crowley or some other occult bore), these are songs
of sorts, with recognisable repeating elements – bass lines,
pulses – and will appeal to fans of Finnish free folk and Nurse
With Wound-style surrealism alike. Gorgeous stuff.
 Van
Luijk also plays in Onde, along with fellow former Noise Maker's Fifes
Greg Jacobs and Marc Wroblewski. On Purple, the trio's third album
(the first, One, was an LP in 2007, the second was a limited
edition CDR), he's credited as playing electric guitar, with Jacobs
on violin and Wroblewski on metals, but there's enough studio jiggery
pokery and heavy use of effects pedals and rhythm boxes to fool you
into thinking there's a whole orchestra out there at times (I'll leave
you to figure out the difference between the two sidelong tracks,
"Vloed" and "Eb" for yourself – suffice
it to say the photograph on the label of someone doing a handstand
is a clue..). It's drone with attitude, midtempo ambient Doom, building
impressively over simple pulsing rhythms (triple time, curiously –
sounds like it could have been a heartbeat) which occasionally fade
out to allow Jacobs' violin (think Tony Conrad – or is it Henry
Flynt? – on bagpipes) to be heard to better advantage. Comes
in a sturdy gatefold with classy cover layout courtesy Meeuw.–DW
Curia
CURIA II
Headlights
 This
all-too-brief sequel to Curia's 2007 debut CD on Fire Museum was recorded
live by Etienne Foyer at the Instants Chavirés outside Paris
on the 15th of December that year, as part of a brief tour by the
Portuguese free rock quartet – Alfonso Simões on drums,
David Maranha on MIDI Hammond organ, Manuel Mota on electric guitar
and Margarida Garcia on electric bass. The recipe is still the same:
free floating, spacious, partially drone-based improvisation (it's
a wonder The Wire hasn't gone overboard on this group, since
its music, part improv, part New Weird, corresponds perfectly to what
that noble organ has enthusiastically championed for over half a decade),
beautifully paced and executed with consummate skill. Nobody pushes
anyone else around; there's enough room in the Curia cosmos for Simões
to flutter around his kit, Garcia to bow her bass with quiet concentration,
Maranha to tweak and twiddle his faux-Leslie speaker patches with
discreet glee and Mota to wah wah his way into guitar heaven. Only
100 copies of this divine platter out there – bom apetite.–DW
Will
Guthrie
SPIKE-S
Pica Disk
 Nantes-based
Aussie expat percussionist / electronician Will Guthrie is usually
filed away under EAI – put that down to his excellent solo outing
on Cathnor, Body & Limbs Still Look To Light, and a forthcoming
Erstwhile duo with Jérôme Noetinger, scheduled for next
year – but, as anyone familiar with his Antboy distribution
network will tell you, his tastes run far and wide (he did a great
interview with Roscoe Mitchell for PT a couple of years ago, which
for various reasons I still don't quite understand never saw the light
of day, alas). The two tracks on this lamentably brief seven-incher
– the same applies to the Wolfarth disc reviewed below –
find him thrashing all hell out of the kit on one side and mashing
all hell out of the same track on the other (there's apparently a
sample of Breton folk tune in there somewhere.. must be André
Breton). Great stuff, let's have some more.–DW
Hematic
Sunsets
AROMA CLUB PARADOX
Dekorder
 If
you like anagrams, try and work who's hiding behind Hematic Sunsets,
Achim Stutessen, Tussi Schemante, Assistent Meuch, Hans Tim Cessteu,
Mischa Suttense and Tina Tuschemess. Figured it out? Yep, Asmus Tietchens,
one of the great originals of German music in the past thirty years.
Maybe you're lucky enough to have heard Musik aus dem Aroma Club,
a 1998 Hematic Sunsets LP on Klang der Festung, maybe not (if not
the good people at Mutant Sounds can help you out). But if you're
familiar with Tietchens' old Sky albums, which have been lovingly
reissued by Die Stadt over the past few years, you'll know what to
expect. Though this dingy pale blue vinyl (I had a potty this colour
when I was a baby) clearly belongs on the same shelves as your old
Tangerine Dream and Neu! LPs, it's neither kosmiche or motorik.
Listen to it on acid and you'll fuck your brain for real; record it
on a good old C60 and stick it in the car stereo on the autobahn,
Kraftwerk-style, and you'll end up on a life support system in hospital
wondering how the hell you got there. Cheapo rhythm boxes tick merrily
away, synths toot and wiggle, but something about the music never
seems quite right – melodies don't go where you think they
should, chord sequences don't resolve, and odd metrical twists and
turns thwart any attempt to dance to it, not that you're likely to
want to try. We're talking unpopular pop music here, uneasy easy listening,
undanceable disco, annoyingly intrusive muzak. Not surprisingly, it's
impossible to say whether I like it or not. A paradox all right.–DW
Micro_penis
MICRO_PENIS
Doubtfulsounds
 Unfortunate
name for a group, you might think, until you remember that "micro"
is the French abbreviation for "microphone".. not that that
explains the penis bit. Based in Mulhouse, home to a very fine automobile
museum, an excellent jazz festival and very little else worthy of
mention, this a quartet consisting of Sébastien Borgo, Alexandre
Kittel, François Heyer and Claude Spendelauer (whoever he is
– the other three play in notable French alt.rock outfits),
who take obvious delight in poking their tiny members into the dirty
nooks and crannies of musique concrète, noise, horror movie
soundtracks, with insane glee (the press release even goes so far
as to state that these guys escaped from a mental hospital, but I'd
take that with a pinch of salt if I were you). There's a lot of screaming,
gargling, spluttering and groaning, liberally seasoned with free jazz
skronk, no-fi electronics and found sounds, and despite the puerile
gob-in-yer-eye attitude it's well crafted stuff, as much fun to listen
to as it is to look at, with its cool silkscreened cover and free
sticker and postcards.–DW
The
New Black
THE WHITE ALBUM
Rastascan
 The
enigmatically named The New Black brings together two stalwarts of
the San Francisco improvisation scene, percussionist Gino Robair and
guitarist John Shiurba, with two of their counterparts from LA, analogue
synth player David Rothbaum and guitarist Jeremy Drake. While Rothbaum
and Drake may not be as well known as their Northern California collaborators,
they share the same genre-agnostic approach to improvisation as well
as a scrappy, DIY sensibility: this is raw, collective improvisation
rooted back in practitioners like AMM and Company (whose influences
the members readily namecheck), but shot through with elements of
noise and glitch that the four musicians have picked up along the
way.
The White Album (ironic title - the two LP set comes encased
in jet-black album covers) documents three extended improvisations,
captured live-to-disk, along with one side consisting of of two dozen
locked grooves. The improvisations (untitled) are all about texture
and timbre, attack and sustain, density and velocity of activity.
The scrapes, whines, overtones and tinges of feedback of the two guitars
sidle up against Rothbaum's gritty rattles and oscillations and the
nuanced buzz and shimmer of Robair's percussion, not to mention his
usual array of detritus. The four musicians construct the improvisations
at a relaxed, intimate pace, approaching things more as the collective
accumulation of resonance and sonic color than through more conversational
methods of interaction. The music has a brooding character as it moves
across a soundscape defined by shifting layers of groans, glitch,
and clatter. Adding a bit of whimsy to the whole thing, each of the
three side-long improvisations is manufactured without the usual fade
cut; rather than end or drift off, the stylus butts up against the
vinyl and loops endlessly in place, often mid-phrase. If you want
more of that, simply flip to the locked groove side and drop the needle
into an infinite loop of sonic scrabble. With a pressing of only 200,
this one won't get around much so nab one if you're lucky enough to
come across it.–MRo
Fred
Nipi
QANNGIRPALIPPUQ
galeriepache.org
 Fred
Nipi describes his music on his homepage as "Harsh Noise Old
School from Paris" (another site styles him as the "grand
old man of French Noise", but if you're a grand old man at age
39 I must be a fucking dinosaur.. how depressing!). Elsewhere, he
describes a C.C.C.C. concert at the Instants Chavirés back
in the early 90s as a "revelation" – so that might
give you an idea of where he's coming from. If it doesn't, try this
for size, and within a couple of minutes you'll know. It doesn't take
long for the volume level to rise and the tasty low end gurgles from
Nipi's analogue synth and homemade sound generator to get buried alive
under layers of deadly distortion. There's plenty going on in there
though, snarling loops scattering across the stereo space –
wall noise this is not, even if Fred's pal Romain Perrot aka Vomir
also has an album (sold out now) on the same label – so much
so that when it's over you're rather looking forward to flipping the
record over and checking out side two. Except that this is a single-sided
LP. Ha! (Not that that should stop you playing the B side, which sounds
rather cool for about three seconds until the stylus skids onto the
label.) Don't worry, though: there's plenty and I mean PLENTY of great
and I mean GREAT noise to check out here: http://www.frednipi.com/audio.html.–DW
Nokalypse
REPEATED IN AN INDEFINITELY ALTERNATING SERIES OF THOUGHTS
Entr'acte / Absurd
 Athens-based
composer Themistoklis Pantelopoulos aka Nokalypse spent the summer
of 2006 trying to "thrill himself without the use of any melodic
elements, at a time when he was seeking non-emotional or gnostic stimulation"
(right on!), creating a "vast body" of music which he revisited
earlier this year, indulging in some heavy treatment and post-prod
and ending up with what Brian Olewnick described rather nicely over
at his Just Outside blog as a "messy lasagna" (though
moussaka might be more appropriate, I think). The first of the two
side-long tracks, "Everlasting Babylon Of Your Mind", is
somewhere between Daniel Teruggi's glistening glitzy remix of Xenakis's
Persepolis on that infamous and dreadful album that appeared
on Asphodel a while back and one of Jean-Luc Guionnet's organ albums,
a queasy stew of clusters and whirling glissandi. Side two's "Discerning
Eye Of Mystics" is more tonally stable, sounding like a Mecha
Orga drone left out in the rain to rust. Impressively crafted stuff,
but a little heavy on the special effects nutmeg and béchamel.
Have a glass of ice cold water and an Alka Seltzer (or a Howie Stelzer)
standing by.–DW
Neil
Rose
WILBUR WHATELEY / PSYCHOPOMPS
Onec
 Handsomely
produced in a limited run of 250 in a sturdy gatefold on Plymouth-based
Onec records, this is the work of local "sonic artist, lecturer,
film and trouble maker" Neil Rose. He describes it as a concept
album based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, whose Necronomicon,
a book namechecked in several of his short stories and novels, seems
to have exerted a strange fascination over a whole generation of alt.musicians,
John Zorn being among the latest. Though this mysterious tome was
just another figment of Lovecraft's wonderfully fertile imagination,
several notable scholars of the occult claim to have turned up copies
of the real thing – according to the colourful liners of this
album, Mr Rose came across one on a stall in Plymouth market. Well,
they're odd folks down there in the West Country. Remember Straw
Dogs. I'm willing to bet a dawn raid on Rose's pad would turn
up, in addition to the usual suspects from the Typhonian Ordo Templi
Orientis, a pile of good old IDM records – because, in addition
to the de rigueur doomy drone, dirty dub and strange, barely
intelligible muttered incantations, there are plenty of good old common
or garden beats. Don't forget Richard James came from that part of
the world too.–DW
Christian
Wolfarth
ACOUSTIC SOLO PERCUSSION VOL 1
Hiddenbell
 That
"volume 1" leads us to suppose that volume two (four are
projected, I understand) isn't far behind – hope so, because
these two tracks, "Skyscraping" and "Zirr", clocking
in respectively at 6'32" and 4'30", are fine as far as they
go, but leave one wanting more (you can always cheat and play them
at 33 if you like, though that's not what Wolfarth intended..), and
make it rather hard to assess the Swiss percussionist's progress since
his previous excellent full length outing on For4Ears appeared in
2003. "Skyscraping" is a luminous drone – imagine
a rather beefed-up Sean Meehan – while "Zirr" is a
more energetic workout for snare and cymbals, which sounds remarkably
like some of Sunny Murray's late 60s stuff. I await the next instalment
with interest. What's that camel doing on the cover?–DW
Sophie
Agnel
CAPSIZING MOMENTS
Emanem
 Pianist
Sophie Agnel has been responsible for several fine recordings –
notably Rouge Gris Bruit on Potlatch with Lionel Marchetti
and Jérôme Noetinger, and Tasting, a duo with
Phil Minton on Another Timbre – without quite becoming a known
quantity to followers of free improvisation, who are more used to
musicians releasing albums by the truckload. Capsizing Moments,
a 50-minute solo performance from Paris's Instants Chavirés,
finds her patiently infiltrating the piano's interior with styrofoam
cups, balls, ashtrays, fishing-line, and a battery of other objects.
Out of this pile of whimsical detritus emerges some genuinely dark
and uncanny music, and throughout Agnel remains impressively in command
of all these rattles, roars, buzzes, squeals and other less describable
sounds (and sounds-within-sounds). These aren't panoramic "soundscapes"
(that familiar cliché) but sound-terrains, across which the
pianist's and listener's slow progress feels entirely physical. If
the performance lacks that alarming stuck-in-someone's-head vibe of
(say) a Fred Van Hove or Keith Tippett solo recital at its most intense
and self-involved, it's nonetheless music that seems to gain in richness
and detail every time you listen to it.
The piece is divided into three parts, and, like Dante, Agnel puts
the inferno first: a deep subterranean cavern where shapeless vibrations,
zithery strums and a more intense percussiveness melt into each other
while various rattly dialogues take place on the top. The anvil-blows
and mutely pummelled rhythms thin out after 15 minutes into a really
lovely passage of bowed strings: again, the textures are lucid and
controlled even though there's a lot going on, as Agnel conjures up
a humming, singing choir of harmonics. Part 2 is a short Gothic nightmare
interlude in three segments – a banshee wail introduction, a
demented circular nursery-rhyme episode, and a passage involving dissonant
swipes across the strings, which start piling up until Agnel's flailing
around like a drowning swimmer. Part 3 is the longest, quietest and
most mysterious, and it demonstrates the pianist's ability to create
illusions of spatial and aural mediation: there were parts of the
earlier Rouge Gris Bruit where I assumed the piano was being
amplified through a tinny speaker or distorted by the other two musicians'
electronics, but it's clear from this disc that she is producing such
effects acoustically. Some of the most striking moments are the simplest
and bleakest, often recalling AMM's minimalist expansiveness (though
oddly enough Agnel's playing is actually more reminiscent of Eddie
Prévost than John Tilbury): the moment when she zeros in on
the buzzy, overextended jangle of a bell, or the gentle coda where
a bowed string's weirdly altered attack and decay give the impression
of time collapsing in on itself. Top-notch stuff.–ND
Fred
Anderson
21ST CENTURY CHASE
Delmark
 Neil
Tesser's on the ball mentioning Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray's 1947
classic bop tenor battle The Chase – and the influence
it had on the whole Beat generation – in his liner notes to
21st Century Chase. But it's still hard to believe that the
two tenors slugging it out here, 62 years down the road, were among
the kids who got their butt kicked by bebop first time round:
Fred Anderson, as part of whose 80th birthday celebrations this was
recorded in his Velvet Lounge in Chicago on March 22nd this year,
and Edward "Kidd" Jordan, at 74 a mere youngster in comparison.
Meanwhile, fresh out of kindergarten in the rhythm section are guitarist
Jeff Parker, bassist Harrison Bankhead and drummer Chad Taylor, who
on part one of the title track stir up wave after wave of groove –
at times hard stomping R&B (back when that meant Rhythm &
Blues, not the insipid flatulent post New Jack wack crap that goes
by the same name these days), at times positively Afrobeat –
for Anderson and Jordan to surf all the way home on for an astonishing
36 minutes. It doesn't take long for part two to get rolling either,
after a typically impressive brooding bass intro from Bankhead, and
Parker is soon pulled into the ring to go a few rounds with Kidd and
Fred himself. For all the free jazz fireworks, the bop heritage isn't
ever far away (spot the Coltrane quote in track two..) and there's
the strong gravitational pull of key, or rather mode, in both Jordan
and Anderson's soloing. Great Black Music: Ancient To The Future,
runs the well-known Art Ensemble slogan – listen to this and
you know exactly what that means.–DW
Aporias
Trio
ENTRE NOUS
Iorram
 On
the strength of this release, and the other fine outing that came
my way in the same envelope from Iorram records (the GIO and George
Lewis, Metamorphic Rock), the improv scene in Glasgow is
really cooking at the moment. Scottish new music has been on a roll
for a while actually, thanks to the energy of mavericks like George
Burt and Bill Wells, who've always pursued a more eclectic agenda
than they probably would have had they been forced to relocate to
London (those Scottish accents tend to get flattened out when they
head down south.. you just ask Tony Blair). And with local festivals
like INSTAL now well-established events, it's no wonder that Glasgow's
improvisers have taken advantage of available opportunities to play
and record with visiting musicians. Saxophonist Raymond MacDonald
and guitarist Neil Davidson are two of the hardest (net)working men
in Scottish improv, and their trio with visiting percussionist Tatsuya
Nakatani is a real treat. Those familiar with Nakatani's more lowercase
work in the From Between trio with Jack Wright and Michel Doneda,
or on the first nmperign album (wow, has it really been 11 years?),
might be taken aback at the ferocity of his playing at times –
Eddie Prévost makes those bowed cymbals sing, but Tatsuya makes
'em howl – but there's always been as much subtlety in his percussion
work as there is raw power. MacDonald is a muscular player (closer
perhaps to improv's origins in 60s free jazz than to what it's evolved
into during the last decade or so – he can do the spits and
fizzes as well as the next man, but seems more at home exploring the
melodic potential of his saxes), but Davidson's grit and Nakatani's
friction stop him from flying off the handle and turning it all into
just another fiery blowout.–DW
Borah
Bergman / Stefano Pastor
LIVE AT TORTONA
Mutable
 I've
never been all that happy about duos where one person's name gets
printed bigger than the other's, ever since I found out a few years
ago that Max Roach once apparently got paid fifteen times
as much as Randy Weston for a concert they gave together at a local
festival (nor have I ever understood why two people doing the same
job for the same company can earn wildly differing salaries –
one of reasons I suppose why I never became a Wall Street trader,
though I can think of plenty of others). OK, so pianist extraordinaire
Borah Bergman is the better known of these two, but Stefano Pastor's
muscular violin playing (normal strings aren't tough enough for him,
so he uses guitar strings instead, which explains that thick, heavy
sound) is just as impressive in these five tracks – three Bergman
compositions, two free improvisations – recorded at the Jazz
Fuori Tema festival in Tortona, Italy (the local church clock strikes
from time to time, punctuating "The Mighty Oak" beautifully
and rounding off "When Autumn Comes" in style).
Though he's often compared to Cecil Taylor – an occupational
hazard for any free jazz pianist, I guess, but such comparisons are
pointless, as nobody really sounds like Taylor – Bergman, to
quote Chris Kelsey's bio of him over at AMG, cites Tristano, Monk
and Powell as formative influences. But his playing has never been
as overtly Monkish as Misha Mengelberg's, nor as boppy and linear
as Powell and Tristano's. The one thing that invariably gets mentioned
when discussing Bergman is his ferocious ambidexterity: freed from
its tiresome traditional role as harmonic bookmark, the left hand
goes ballistic, frequently crossing over the other one to action-paint
the upper octaves, leaving the right hand to carry the tunes. And
tunes they are, anchoring the music, no matter stormy it gets out
in the harbour, to a clear tonal centre. Pastor is the perfect partner
here: this music simply wouldn't work with a more, umm, avant garde
fiddler. Like Leroy Jenkins and Michel Samson, he's a melodic player
first and foremost, and one I hope to hear more of in the years to
come – and see get equal billing with whoever he plays with.
What a terrific album this is.–DW
John
Blum
IN THE SHADE OF SUN
Ecstatic Peace
 It
says "John Blum" (and In The Shadow Of Sun, not
"Shade" - but it's Shade on the label website so we'll stick
with that) on the spine of the CD, but on the back tray the two musicians
the pianist is playing with get equal billing – hardly surprising,
since the bassist happens to be William Parker and the drummer Sunny
Murray. So, as David Gates writes in his liners, we're talking three
generations of free jazz here. Neither Murray (born 1936) nor Parker,
sixteen years his junior, need any introduction in these pages; as
for John Blum, who was born in 1968 and studied at Bennington with
Bill Dixon and Milford Graves.. well, he hasn't exactly flooded the
market with discs to date (as if that really matters), but what I've
heard so far has been well worth spending time with, from his tortured
debut Naked Mirror on Drimala to the storming Astrogeny
Quartet on Eremite. And hard on the heels of this trio comes
another solo album, Who begat Eye on Konnex.
The problem with In The Shade Of Sun is – and I can
hear the howls of indignation even as I type this – I honestly
can't figure out how Parker's perennially muscular and undeniably
impressive bass playing and Murray's thundering tom toms really interact
with Blum's piano playing. Throughout the album the pianist explores
a huge range of different techniques, from Pullenesque fisty cluster
rolls to thumping low register block chords to – on several
occasions – a kind of demented free stride piano, but behind
it all the bassist and drummer plough on merrily, doing their own
thing. I suppose this is what Sunny means by "freebop" –
the bop idea that the rhythm section just keeps on trucking through
the changes while soloists stretch out on top is still very much in
evidence; either that or they consider it somehow beneath them to
engage with the pianist at the harmonic or rhythmic level (not that
they can't do it: witness Murray's epoch-defining work with Cecil
Taylor or Parker's near telepathic interplay with Matthew Shipp in
numerous groups). Whatever the reason, the relatively restricted timbral
palette of both bass (what happened to Parker's awesome upper register
bowed work? the arco introduction to "Misanthrope's Dream"
sounds awfully tired) and drums (though to be fair, Murray's never
really gone in for a whole arsenal of gear, preferring to worry one
instrument to death at a time) seems to flatten this music out, steamrollering
the pianist on from one climactic moment to the next like a prizefighter
being pushed back into the ring between rounds. None of these pieces
ever really ends satisfactorily – you can hear Parker
and Murray heroically marching forward into the fadeout as if trying
to have the last word. But they've had their say plenty of times over
the years – and the history of jazz is so much the richer for
it – now's the time to let John Blum have his. Maybe that billing
on the spine makes sense after all.–DW
John
Butcher Group
SOMETHINGTOBESAID
Weight of Wax
 John
Butcher's music is inextricably linked to his unflagging dedication
to spontaneous improvisation, from his exemplary solo work to various
ad hoc and ongoing collaborations. But he's long been interested in
composing frameworks for group improvisation: think of the pieces
he wrote over the years for The Chris Burn Ensemble and Polwechsel.
This recording captures the performance of a piece commissioned by
the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2008; providing a
showcase for his approach toward constructing dynamic group frameworks.
Butcher used notated sections and predefined sub-groupings which grew
out of recordings he'd assembled, including voices left on old answering
machine tapes as well as multi-tracked wine glasses. Equally as important
is the ensemble he assembled, including long-time colleagues Chris
Burn, John Edwards, Thomas Lehn and Gino Robair as well as more recent
collaborators Clare Cooper, dieb13, and Adam Linson.
The ensemble makes the most of the open form structure. Whether working
through full-on density or breaking things open for sub-groupings,
each of the members maximizes the junctions and contrasts of the instrumental
colors, extending the palette of acoustic instruments (piano, harp
and guzheng, reeds, two basses, and percussion), electronics, analogue
synth and turntables, through shrewd pairings and overlapped layers.
The doubling of bass players and Cooper's harp and guzheng playing
off of Burn's prepared piano gives a distinctive quality to the sound
mix. While the music moves through sections of drone, burred textures,
and jagged intensity, there are plenty of open, playful moments, particularly
when the warped and processed tapes are woven in. While never taking
the spotlight, Butcher's own playing stands out, most notably in duo
sections with each of the bass players. There is also a surprising
use of tonal material, particularly during a trio section toward the
end with Butcher, Robair, and Lehn. The overall form holds things
together without hampering a sense of collective energy.–MRo
Audrey
Chen / Robert van Heumen
ABBATOIR
Evil Rabbit
 Do
a Google Images search for Audrey Chen and you'll find some very attractive
photos of the young Baltimore-based cellist / vocalist looking very
demure and elegant. But in the company of laptopper Robert van Heumen
– who's turned in some impressive releases this year, including
Whistle Pig Saloon (with John Ferguson), one of the strongest
outings yet on the insanely fecund Creative Sources imprint –
it seems she can turn into a veritable harpy, her yelps, gargles,
growls and squeaks ripped apart with carnivorous glee by van Heumen's
electronics. Yes, the album (and group) name gives you some idea of
what to expect, I suppose, from these six tracks – it's tempting
to listen to it as some kind of pro-vegan Meat Is Murder
horror story, with Chen playing the poor cow; but that would be overlooking
the extraordinary sensitivity of much of this music. Van Heumen's
treatments are often raw, even vicious, but never rough and haphazard,
and there's a great feel for structure and timing to Abbatoir's music.
And if you only know one version of "Endless Summer" (Christian
Fennesz's of course), you owe it to yourself to check out Chen and
van Heumen's track of the same name without further ado.–DW
Marilyn
Crispell
COLLABORATIONS
Leo
 For
those who think that Marilyn Crispell's recent playing has sacrificed
fire for melody, here's the elixir: send her with Paal Nilssen-Love
and other members of Atomic and friends to the Nya Perspektiv Festival
at the Culturen in Vasteras and hear what happens. This disc is the
result of that prescription, combining a quartet performance from
October 23, 2004, with a return quintet appearance from March 9, 2007.
The quartet begins with Nilssen-Love on brushes and fellow Atomic
member Fredrik Ljungkvist on clarinet before bassist Palle Danielsson
and Marilyn join in. Things quickly fall in place with a probing piano-bass-drums
interlude bristling with energy. Other combinations which stand out
are a clarinet-piano face-off with each playing rapid lines that fill
in all the available spaces, and a bass-drums section where Danielsson's
gorgeous tone is offset by a delicately clattering barrage of percussion.
The second half of "Aros" (a Danielsson composition) is
lyrically rhapsodic, evoking Keith Jarrett's European quartet of the
1970s; but the first half (with Ljungkvist on tenor) stands out, the
quartet building to a scorching intensity.
Crispell
and Nilssen-Love remain in place for the 2007 festival. Another Atomic
member, Magnus Broo, is on board on this occasion; his trumpet work
is often blisteringly hot, though he and Nilssen-Love end “Quintet
Collaboration 1” with a tender duet. Lars-Goran Ulander on alto
sax and bassist Per Zanussi fill out the group and they both play
strongly. The group interplay continues at a high level through two
collective efforts and Crispell's "Silence Again" from her
Amaryllis release (minus the "Again" appended to
the title), the latter song enhanced by Ulander's yearning solo brimming
with passionate sensitivity. The only disappointment with the 2007
set, really, is that the recording quality is much less impressive
than the 2004 date (and it’s also annoying that the volume levels
haven’t been EQ’d across the sessions, so you need to
crank the volume halfway through the disc). Still the excellence of
the first set by itself is enough to recommend this disc. Too bad
Atomic already has the excellent Håvard Wiik on piano, because
it would be fascinating to hear Crispell continue to work with them.–SG
Ted
Daniel
THE LOFT YEARS, VOLUME 1
Ujamaa
 The
"loft jazz" scene of 1970s New York yielded a significant
number of powerhouse saxophonists, and most of the trumpeters involved
set themselves apart from Don Cherry through following the incisive
model set by their reed-playing brethren. Though he was sparsely recorded
at the time, Ted Daniel's steely tone and razor-sharp phrasing made
him one of the brass heavies of the period. Recorded in 1975, The
Loft Years Volume One is a stripped-down follow-up to his self-released
1970 sextet juggernaut with saxophonist Otis Harris. Here, playing
multiple brass instruments, he's joined by bassist Richard Pierce
and drummer Tatsuya Nakamura. The set features two original compositions
culled from Sextet ("O.C." and "The Moor")
in addition to Ornette's "Congeniality" and Sunny Murray's
"Giblet."
It's a somewhat nervy proposition to present trumpet with bass and
percussion as the only support, but that's is a testament to how confident
Daniel was (is) in his approach to the instrument. These days he's
still exploring the format in his as-yet-unrecorded International
Brass and Membrane Corps. Though Cherry wasn't an influence, Coleman
had a huge impact on Daniel in the way he introduced the blues into
a non-chordal context; the heft of Coltrane and Ayler is also audible
here, as it is in the work of Daniel's contemporaries Earl Cross and
Raphé Malik.
The closing paean to Coleman, "O.C.," is recast here as
a thrashing trio conflagration, Nakamura merging tom jabs and cymbal
spatter like a taiko-inflected Sunny Murray. Daniel skitters atop
poly-directional percussion to let fly with thick, cupped vocal blasts
and throaty burrs. The final three minutes of the piece find him quoting
the bright march of Ayler's "Ghosts," a blur of metallic
whinnies and deep holler enmeshed in collective pitch and yaw. "Giblet"
is a familiar tune from Murray's eponymous 1966 ESP session, a twisted
nursery rhyme that Daniel would have been familiar with through working
in the drummer's Swing Unit. But rather than wide-open bray, his improvisation
is linear and probing, like a more unfettered Woody Shaw. Apparently
further volumes of Daniel's Loft Years will soon be available,
helping to further cement his vital place in the history of the period.–CA
De
Haan / Spruit
HOLLANDS LICHT
SCHOONHOVEN
Soul Shine Trough
 Guitarist
Michiel de Haan and turntablist Marc Spruit's MySpace page informs
us that they're based in Alphen aan den Rijn, which looks like a sleepy
town on the banks of the Rhine between Utrecht and Leiden. Not sleepy
for long though, if these two have their way: this is fun, high speed,
crunch'n'splatter improv, and fans of Martin Tétreault, Marcus
Schmickler and Otomo Yoshihide (on turntables) will find much to enjoy.
Hollands Licht contains no fewer than 28 tracks, the longest
just under three and a half minutes, the shortest lasting a mere 11
seconds. It comes (as does Schoonhoven) in a snazzy pop-up
folder with liners on onionskin vellum tucked away in a side pocket.
These inform us that the title is a reference to the light that inspired
generations of Dutch painters, and there are, I suppose, parallels
to be drawn between the exquisite pinpricks of light in Vermeer and
the music's intense concentration on tiny, hard sonorities. One wishes
some of the pieces would go on a bit longer – some of these
miniatures say all they have to say perfectly, others seem somewhat
cursory – which makes Schoonhoven, the companion release
on De Haan & Spruit's Soul Shine Trough imprint (should that be
"through" instead of "trough", I wonder?) more
satisfying. There's an artistic reference here, too: the title is
a homage to Jan Schoonhoven, leading figure in the Dutch informel,
Nul and ZERO movements (and postman by day – paging Michel Henritzi!).
The regularly (and not so regularly) repeating motives of his geometric
reliefs might seem to have little to do with de Haan and Spruit's
explosive clatter, but, to quote the pair's notes, "that idea
of creating art using rudimentary materials comes very close to the
way we use sound as the material for our music." This is fine,
strong, uncompromising work, and a great follow-up to 2007's self-produced
Radical Improvisations.–DW
Die
Enttäuschung
DIE ENTTÄUSCHUNG
Intakt
 For
those of you that still believe that a thorough grounding in traditional
technique still matters, it's worth recalling that the three most
highly acclaimed "extended technique" improv trumpeters
of recent times, Axel Dörner, Greg Kelley and Franz Hautzinger,
are just as good at playing straight (well, nearly straight) as they
are at conjuring forth the kind of noises that would have you barred
from polite society or send you racing to the phone to call the plumber.
But of the three, it's Dörner whose legit work remains closest
to jazz, most notably in the quartet Die Enttäuschung with bass
clarinettist Rudi Mahall, bassist Jan Roder and drummer Uli Jennessen.
"The rhythm is so.. dumpety dump," Keith Rowe moaned on
listening to a Mike Westbrook track in our Wire Invisible
Jukebox a while back. "I just had to get away from it."
One wonders if he discussed Dörner (and Hautzinger)'s ongoing
love – the word is not too strong – for the jazz trumpet
tradition when they recorded A View From The Window together
in Vienna back in 2003. Not that Jennessen's drumming is ever dumpety
dump, but much of it wouldn't be at all out of place on any of the
hard bop albums Dörner evidently admires so much. That said,
Jennessen's own compositions on this latest (and once more eponymous)
outing on Intakt (he and Mahall each pen five of the 14 tracks, Dörner
three and Roder one) go out of their way to put spokes in their own
wheels. This is tight, angular modern jazz pure and simple, an enthusiastic
and impressive display of individual and collective chops, clearly
and unashamedly influenced by Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman and
Eric Dolphy (the latter inevitably comes to mind on listening to Mahall's
insanely agile bass clarinet). Those who already in possession of
one or more of the quartet's four preceding albums (if anyone's got
an extra copy of their 1995 double LP debut, all Monk covers, let
me know) might be wondering what this latest offering adds to the
story so far; if "make it new" is your motto, then this
might just be a disappointment, which, oddly enough, is what the group
name translates as. But given the choice between "make it new"
and "make it good" I'll go for the latter every time. And
very good this is.–DW
John
Hughes / Lars Scherzberg / Nicolas Wiese
DISCARD HIDDEN LAYERS?
Schraum
 The
title is a question asked by PhotoShop before one deletes unseen picture
layers, but it refers here to the improvisational interactions of
bassist Hughes and saxophonist Scherzberg with each other and with
Wiese's electronic manipulations of their sounds. This is not the
first group to combine free improvisation and real-time electronics,
but this particular trio manages to maintain a high level of interest
throughout without a hitch, although the results are still short of
classic. The different experiences of the musicians – which
include names such as Jeff Arnal and Wolfgang Fuchs – are triturated,
chewed up and spit out in a concoction of difficult-to-handle realities,
vivid acoustic images and replicated daydreams, parts of a cryptic
lexicon where each meaning lasts for an instant prior to being entirely
subverted by succeeding occurrences. All of the above might suggest
this is a diverse record, and that's certainly the case, yet the music
can be annoyingly awkward and tangled, lacking the necessary distinction
between instrumental colours – which would be good to enjoy,
as Hughes and Scherzberg are unquestionably talented players –
and failing to reach a satisfying outcome. In a nutshell, this music
is merely and dispassionately "experimental", never really
taking off and flying, much less touching our heart.–MR
Max
Kohane / Anthony Pateras
PIVIXKI
Sabbatical
 Anthony
Pateras must have got fed up of lugging around a suitcase full of
nuts, bolts, sticks, stones and whatever the fuck else he uses to
prepare his piano with in the Pateras Baxter Brown trio – in
this new duo with grindcore drummer Max "Agents of Abhorrence"
Kohane the inside of the noble instrument remains unscathed: it's
the keyboard that he smashes the living daylights out of.
But as a fervent admirer of Pateras's compositions (2004's Mutant
Theatre on Tzadik still packs a mighty punch), and having got
used to the intricate tropical rainforest clatter of the earlier trio,
Pivixki sounds.. well, tame. I guess it's not meant
to sound tame, alternating slabs of binary ballbreaking rock, rare
groove, thrash and splatter in decidedly composed structures (songs,
if you like), but twenty years on from the first Naked City album,
this cut'n'splice stuff sounds pretty weary. Kohane is no Joey Baron
either. Nothing worse than rock drummers trying to play funk. And
I've got enough albums of people fisting a piano as it is. But maybe
it's just supposed to be a bit of fun, and I'm taking it all too seriously.
You tell me.–DW
Darius
Jones Trio
MAN'ISH BOY (A RAW AND BEAUTIFUL THING)
Aum Fidelity
 Two
generations of improvisation converge across the eight tracks of alto
saxophonist Darius Jones' Man'ish Boy – a debut that
draws on the playing and diverse experiences of drummer Rakalam Bob
Moses and instrument-maker, pianist and storyteller Cooper-Moore,
both thirty years the altoist's senior. As fellow Virginians, the
nominal leader and Cooper-Moore have an immediate rapport, and while
there's no sense in discounting Moses' contributions on the trap set,
Man'ish Boy could easily be credited to the pair as a cooperative
effort. Darius Jones' art has an incredible purity and directness
– what Cooper-Moore has called a "yes, sir" quality.
It's a quality he shares with Sonny Simmons, Marion Brown and Charles
Tyler, but the real connection is the respect instilled through absorbing
the tradition and living history of musicianship.
The set starts with an overture for diddley-bow, alto and mallets;
by turns solemn procession and overwrought soul, it crams a lot into
a minute. "Cry Out" begins with Jones unaccompanied, his
measured, throaty pleas, split tones, and liquid dips eventually joined
by chunky piano and Moses' dry, loose time. There's a similarly declarative
quality to the ensuing piano solo, and its workmanlike, blocky reach
is more gruff and grizzled than Jones' saccharine alto vocalizations.
Cooper-Moore's diddley-bow, an electric monochord struck and bowed
with a drumstick, gives a massive underpinning of slippery funk to
"We Are Unicorns," which begins with grubby string shrieks
and keening harmonics only to wheel and dive into fractured atomism
amid earthy pummels. "Salty" is a scrabbly trio that wanders
into kneaded circular breathing and Moses' concentrated chiaroscuro
of gongs and snare. Curiously, Man'ish Boy closes with a
ten-minute "hidden" track by the leader's regular trio (Adam
Lane, bass and Jason Nazary, drums) following the gorgeous lullaby
of "Forgive Me," a delicate ballad of equal parts honey
and graphite.–CA
Eyal
Maoz / Asaf Sirkis
ELEMENTARY DIALOGUES
Ayler Records Download
 If
you're planning to record a duet it's advisable to pair with someone
you can depend on. Guitarist Eyal Maoz has wide-ranging musical associations
including two Tzadik recordings leading the group Edom as well as
sporadic appearances with John Zorn's Cobra; but for this January
2006 project he turned to his hometown friend from Israel, drummer
Asaf Sirkis. Sirkis, who contributes the composition "Miniature",
which he previously recorded on his trio album The Song Within,
provides innovative rhythmic backing to complement Maoz's at times
prodigiously raucous yet unfailingly tasteful technique.
The eleven compositions range from two to six minutes and never overstay
their welcome. The disc initially captures the listener's interest
with the deceptively easy-going "Reggae", which starts with
a relaxed beat and infectious melody as a springboard for musical
explosions that might be considered flashy if they weren't so effectively
incorporated into the song. Maoz's other compositions are more intricate,
such as the somber "Duo" (very Masada-inspired) and "Sparse",
which features an underpinning jangly guitar drone rife with tension
that separates rapid-fire flurries of release. Interestingly, Sirkis's
"Miniature" is the most percussively understated selection,
with brushes providing delicate touches. Although Maoz composed the
remaining ten songs, they're very much collaborative performances.
A most satisfying recording with significant cross-genre appeal that's
easy to recommend.–SG
Harry
Miller's Isipingo
FULL STEAM AHEAD
Reel Recordings
 A
grab-bag of tracks dating from 1975 to 1977, Full Steam Ahead
complements the group's only official release (Family Affair,
Ogun, 1975) and the superb live set Which Way Now? that was
unearthed a few years ago by Cuneiform. Hazel Miller's liner notes
here give a useful account of her late husband's career and music
but don't say anything specific about the recordings' provenance,
which is a shame: since the five tracks come from three separate studio
sessions and a live gig from the London ICA, it seems likely there
would be further releasable material from these dates. In any case,
it's wonderful to have another CD's worth of music from this group,
especially since several tracks offer glimpses of previously undocumented
permutations of the sextet's lineup (though Mike Osborne and Louis
Moholo remain constant throughout). The 1975 sextet with Stan Tracey
is a very different beast from the later versions with Keith Tippett
or Frank Roberts, a freebop ensemble dominated by the pianist's distinctive
jabbing clusters, which are emphatic and often downright confrontational.
On the sunny midtempo swinger "Whey Hey!" the results are
fascinating but off-balance, and even the normally incendiary Osborne
sounds a little hemmed in (Tracey's solo is excellent, though). "Good
Heavens Evans!", featuring the same group, develops from a sonorous
fanfare/ballad into a tumultuous energy-music tussle – a bit
of a rarity in Isipingo's book – and there's much less of a
sense of colliding agendas. My problem with Tracey here is just that
his efforts work against the headlong fury of the Isipingo rhythm
section, but in any case the rest of the album offers three great
instances of the group in full flight. "Family Affair" finds
Tippett at his slipperiest, weaving in and out of Moholo's steamroller
beats; Malcolm Griffiths' pointed trombone solo contrasts nicely with
Osborne's heated alto sax playing, which often pushes at the bounds
of articulacy. "Children at Play" (with Rogers on piano)
is even better and more unhinged, especially when trumpeter Marc Charig's
clipped, assymetric phrasing rubs up against the rhythm section. My
favourite track, though, is the live version of "Dancing Damon"
(Tippett again), taken at a reckless tempo that at times nearly escapes
the musicians' grasp; Osborne's passionate solo completely overwrites
the tune's intricate multipart structure.–ND
Joe
Morris Quartet
TODAY ON EARTH
Aum Fidelity
 The
remarkable heft that Joe Morris has provided as a bassist in recent
years to the ensembles of Whit Dickey, Rob Brown, Matthew Shipp and
Dennis Gonzalez, as well as his recordings on banjo, make it easy
to lose sight of his work as a guitarist, composer and leader of a
long-running quartet. Even his guitar work of late has just as often
surfaced in netless improvisations with Anthony Braxton, Barre Phillips
and trombonist Tom Plsek. Today on Earth is the second of
two dates led by Morris this year for Aum Fidelity, and finds him
in the familiar company of bassist Timo Shanko, drummer Luther Gray
and altoist Jim Hobbs on seven tracks that offer perfect marriages
of slinkiness and caterwaul.
The Joe Morris Quartet plumbs the depths of postbop, building
off the skewed rapport between Hobbs and Morris: the guitarist's flinty
plucking and behind-the-beat chords are the left hand to the altoist's
acrid right. But just as often it suggests other musical traditions:
the ring-dance which opens “Embarrassment of Riches”,
for instance, sounds like the frenetically phased percussion music
of the Ivory Coast's Dan tribe, especially when mated with a pliant,
yo-yoing rhythm section. There are shades of Ted Dunbar in Morris's
improvisation, but his darts and flecks turn in on themselves and
burrow into the spaces between Gray's Blackwellian skips. Hobbs is
one of the most interesting alto saxophonists to emerge in the last
few years; his tone is direct and emphatically giddy, the tart inner
dialogues he constructs reminiscent of a young Carlos Ward. His phrase
logics often trail off even as ideas continue to burble underneath
the surface. By now Morris's longtime working group has established
a language wholly its own, an ideal springboard for spindly inversions
and lean fantasias.–CA
Andrea
Neumann / Ivan Palacký
PAPPELTALKS
Uceroz
 I
don't know if the city authorities in Berlin go around putting up
blue plaques British Heritage-style on walls to indicate where famous
people once lived and worked in the German capital, but it looks as
if Andrea Neumann is lobbying hard for one at Pappelallee 5, since
this is the second album this year whose title refers specifically
to her home address in Prenzlauer Berg. On Pappelallee 5
itself (Absinth), her neighbours, including trumpeter / partner Axel
Dörner, make cameo appearances (well sort of – you hear
them from a distance), but on Pappeltalks, originally recorded
just over three years ago and mixed and mastered the following year,
she's joined by Ivan Palacký, playing.. an amplified Dopleta
160 knitting machine. And very good it sounds too – though I'm
not always 100% sure which sounds are being made by Palacký
and which are coming from Neumann's customised inside piano –
there's much to enjoy in these five spacious, attentive improvisations.
I wonder though why they opted for the gimmicky packaging (be warned:
you have to rip the disc open, revealing a small string, which, when
pulled, bursts a pocket filled with of ink hidden inside the package,
creating your very own personalised purple smudge on the otherwise
white cover – make sure you aren't holding the damn thing too
tightly when you do, as you might end up like I did with ink all over
your hands.. damn, I wish I had another one) – maybe it's to
deter people from trying to sell off used copies. No danger of that
as far as I'm concerned: firstly because my own now looks a real bloody
mess, and secondly because the music is too damn good. Check it out
(with gloves on).–DW
Tim
Olive
THE SPECIALIST
EM
 Canadian-born
Tim Olive first came to my attention back in 2002 in a distinctly
lowercase duo unit with Jeffrey Allport, since when he's paired up
on a couple of notable releases with peeesseye's Fritz Welch (Sun
Reverse The Foot Pedal, on Evolving Ear) and Bunsho Nishikawa,
in the splendidly-titled Supernatural Hot Rug And Not Used. "Recorded
in real time via magnetic pickups and analog preamp" between
December 2008 and January 2009 in Olive's adopted homebase of Osaka,
The Specialist is his first solo album. As a sampler of the
sounds he can produce from, well, what is it? a guitar? it's impressive
enough, but unfortunately it never really sounds like more than that
– only two of the thirteen tracks on the disc get beyond the
three-minute mark, leaving one distinctly underwhelmed. Sure, some
of the noises he makes are absolutely intriguing (and remind me to
check out Leonid Soybelman's Surfing In My Bed again, haven't
given that one a spin for ages), but it would have been nice to hear
him develop the material at greater length. After all, anyone can
come up with crunchy new sounds – it's what you do with them
that matters.–DW
Andrea
Parkins
FAULTY (BROKEN ORBIT)
Important
 Originally
a ten-channel installation for New York's Diapason gallery space,
Faulty (Broken Orbit) explores what Mark Wastell used to
call amplified textures (i.e. sticking contact mics onto and into
everyday objects), feeding the results into what Andrea Parkins describes
as "a shifting and settling field of electric accordion and instrumental
processing" (that latter referring to Parkins' trusty laptop).
If you're a fan of her accordion playing, you may just be a tad disappointed:
it's there for sure in these six extended tracks, but remains half-buried
under a steamy moss of hisses, clanks and growls, as well as heavily
treated instrumental samples emanating from Laurent Buttin's clarinet
and Dragos Tara's double bass. But then again Parkins has never made
any attempt to compete with Guy Klucevsek – even in her long-running
trio with Ellery Eskelin and Jim Black her accordion was always morphing
into something (or someone) else. And she's getting to be a real whizkid
on that laptop – witness the recent splendid duo with Jessica
Constable, Cities and Eyes (Henceforth). This album is a
real treat, exploring the margins of EAI, lo-fi noise and musique
concrète with precision, curiosity and passion. If you're tempted
to moan at me for not reviewing it earlier – it has after all
been out for several months – well, sorry: I was too busy listening
to it. Still am. Great stuff.–DW
Keith
Rowe / Sachiko M
CONTACT
Erstwhile
 Innovators
often reach a point when they dispel all traditions but the one they've
created. That's overstating the case, perhaps, but listening to this
new duo disc from improvisation pioneers Keith Rowe and Sachiko M
drives the point home. Each gesture from these musicians is clear
and stark, but completely individual as it serves the music's aesthetic.
On offer is the live recording made in Tokyo at the AMPLIFY 2008:
light festival, when these two met for the first time as a duo,
and three studio tracks, the results being remarkably consistent where
timbre and environment are concerned. The music inhabits an even sparer
region than does Rowe's solo performance from the same event, released
as Erstlive 07, and is much quieter than his set with Taku Unami (Erstlive
06). Here, Rowe's near-silences interact beautifully with Sachiko's
immediately recognizable style, long stripped of excess, in some of
the most non-linear and reflective music each has made.
Even the denser moments in "Circle," where M forsakes sampler
for contact microphone, are spare compared to other projects the two
artists have featured in, such as the four-hour Erstlive 005 quartet
with Toshimaru Nakamura and Otomo Yoshihide. From the opening of "Square,"
where Sachiko's sine wave pierces Rowe's rustlings and remains suspended
above them for almost 20 minutes, there is a riveting sense of expectancy
and discovery as each moment emerges from that pitched background
to be engulfed again. When the volume of Sachiko's sine wave is brought
down, reaching a plateau and almost disappearing at 19'26", the
music opens onto another sonic plain, allowing full exposure to the
tiny ticks and whirrs that had been a timbral substratum. Similarly,
at 5'15" in "Circle," crystalline pluckings dialogue
with transient sampler bursts in finely detailed stereo interplay,
magical synchronicity defining overall progression.
Each infinitesimal occurrence proves monumental in the larger structure;
each guitar string, each minute aural exploration of a mundane object
assumes the importance of Emily Dickinson's fly, invading the moment
of death – but here, there is no terror, only an increasing
sense of quiet wonder.–MM
SLW
FIFTEEN POINT NINE GRAMS
Organized Music From Thessaloniki
 At
first I thought this was a kind of cheapo remake of Alejandro González
Iñárritu's dreadful melodrama 21 Grams (supposedly
the weight of a human soul, according to some very dubious "experiments"
carried out a century ago by one Duncan MacDougall), but it turns
out 15.9g is the weight of a CD (does a soul CD weigh 36.9g, then?).
Wow.. that means if I chuck all the jewel boxes and digipaks away,
my entire CD collection would weigh 74.5551kg. Do the maths to work
out how many discs that is. Following on from their debut on Formed
a little over a year ago, this is the second release by EAI "supergroup"
(not my words, the label's.. but I guess they're entitled to a little
hard sell) SLW: Burkhard Beins on percussion, Lucio Capece on soprano
sax and bass clarinet, Rhodri Davies on electric harp and "electro
acoustic devices" (which could, I suppose, mean anything), and
Toshimaru Nakamura on no-input mixing board. It's a 44-minute live
recording made at the NPAI Festival in Parthenay, France, on July
19th 2007 (Cathnor head honcho and occasional PT chronicler Richard
Pinnell was there, and goes into considerable detail about the concert
and the album here: http://www.thewatchfulear.com/?p=1593), which
means, like almost all live improv albums, there are occasional dips
and hollows. But not many. It's a strong, sometimes surprisingly loud,
piece – far too many EAImprovisers in recent years have taken
Uncle Radu at his word ("I want to know about the lull in the
storm") and rarely get above pianissimo as a result, but SLW
head right for the heart of the storm and sit there getting drenched.
SLW, as you may recall, stands for Sound Like Water. There are some
thrilling moments, many of them (I'm guessing here) coming from Nakamura,
who was on a real roll that month: a week later he was tearing up
the organ loft with Jean-Luc Guionnet (check out their Map
outing on Potlatch). My CD collection now weighs 74.55669kg, by the
way.–DW
Henry
Threadgill / Zooid
THIS BRINGS US TO, VOLUME 1
Pi
 At
last an end to the eight-year wait since Threadgill's last pair of
discs for Pi, and it's good to see the promise of more to come right
in this CD's title, especially since this particular instalment is
a mere 39 minutes long. The palette is softer and less outlandish
than his 1980s/1990s work (no pipa, oud, or massed cellos and French
horns), though the ear for colour is as acute as ever: sample the
guitar/flute voicings on "To Undertake My Corners Open",
for instance, which have the flavour of steel pans. And in any case
the music's air of stealthy abandon is echt Threadgill. The album
is bookended by two brief, deliberately unresolved tracks, of which
the first, "White Wednesday Off the Wall", is the most striking,
a splintered freeform ballad that dwindles into a beautifully hushed
free improvisation announced by Liberty Ellman's guitar harmonics.
The central four tracks, though, are quite zippy, benefiting enormously
from the interplay between Elliot Humberto Kavee's streamlined drumming
and the spindly, elastic guitar work of Ellman and (on acoustic bass
guitar) Stomu Takeishi; trombonist/tubaist Jose Davila provides the
most graspable thread in the weave, while the leader drops in and
out at key moments to add splendidly vehement alto sax and (more often)
flute to the mix. As so often with Threadgill compositions, the pieces
circle around in ways that feel entirely different from jazz's usual
rinse-and-repeat structure, nudging the listener step by step down
elegantly twisted harmonic pathways that are virtually impossible
to anticipate no matter how often you listen to them. Ellman is a
particular joy throughout, grabbing phrases out of the air with the
surprise of a Zen master chopsticking a fly; and Kavee is as wonderful
here, smoothly galloping over this tricky rhythmic terrain, as he
is making bumpier polyrhythmic going of it in his work with Vijay
Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa. Maybe the disc isn't the out-and-out
stunner we had reason to hope for after the long windup, but it's
well up to Threadgill's impeccably high standards.–ND
Turning
Point
CREATURES OF THE NIGHT & SILENT PROMISE
Vocalion
Danny
Thompson / Allan Holdsworth / John Stevens
PROPENSITY
Art of Life
Strange
bedfellows as they might seem, it's rather difficult to separate jazz-rock
fusion and free improvisation as cornerstones of progressive English
music. A cursory listen to the Canterbury-cum-Weather Report noodles
of Turning Point might seem anathema to ears weaned on Tony Oxley
and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, but bassist Jeff Clyne –
the UK's Charlie Haden in many respects – is a common voice
to all three settings. Clyne formed Turning Point with keyboardist
Brian Miller and vocalist Pepi Lemer (wife of sometime SME pianist
Peter Lemer) in 1977 after leaving Gary Boyle's Isotope. A fivesome
fleshed out by drummer Paul Robinson and saxophonist Dave Tidball,
they recorded two LPs for the Gull label in their short existence
while supporting Pip Pyle's National Health on tour.
 The
affinity for late-period Canterbury sounds is clear across Turning
Point's wispy sidelong suites and the taut rhythm section's galloping
inversions. "Better Days," the closer to Creatures of
the Night, seems pulled from the archetypal rounded corners of
post-Soft Machine/Gong fusion. Yet extracting such a tune from its
fantasia-like surroundings is a disservice; Miller's "Princess
Aura" pecks at a dreamlike stasis in its initial keyboard-voice
harmonies, soon clambering an edgier trail as Robinson's stuttering
rhythms erupt into thrash, toying with puckered synthesizer clang
and nasal soprano. Silent Promise is comparable, but the
arrangements are firmer, featuring explosive, hard-bitten reeds; the
contrast between Miller's glitchy left hand and groovy right on "May
Day Morn" makes for an intriguingly unsettled texture. When the
rhythm section lets fly with a frantic, sweetly bombastic groove,
it's a bit cloying – make no bones about it, this is incredibly
tight fusion, but Turning Point is still profoundly of its era. If
you've got a yen for backbeats and ethereal, Amanda Parsons-like vocals,
this group will be just your cup of tea.
 In
1978, the same year that Turning Point waxed Silent Promise,
SME ringleader John Stevens entered London's Island studios with bassist
Danny Thompson and guitarist Allan Holdsworth to record Propensity.
Though it's easy to forget, Holdsworth was no stranger to unfettered
contexts, appearing on two 1977 Stevens LPs (Touching On
and Re-Touch, View/Konnex) before joining pianist Gordon
Beck's Sunbird. "Jools Toon" is classic Stevens, the drummer's
hum, patter and yelps a constantly-shifting carpet only occasionally
catching on the bassist's pizzicato burrs. The SME was a unique outfit
in that it could reel musicians of nearly any caliber into its collective
orbit, whether schooled in post-bop or the unfettered freedoms of
the 70s. Holdsworth acquits himself well, his crisp twelve-string
flourishes giving way to pensive and contorted blocks that, while
ornate, contain a vicious and flitting immediacy surely a product
of SME openness. Holdsworth plugs in on "It Could Have Been Mono,"
a 15-minute piece rooted in freebop rhythms and gauzy semi-linear
blues, the guitarist's rusty tone and convulsed pace responding to
the rhythm section's dangerous clip. Though Derek Bailey and Roger
Smith are the usual models for guitar playing in English free music,
there's something to be said for the rapport Holdsworth's inventiveness
and jazz-rock tendencies have with Stevens' freer approach.–CA
Franck
Vigroux & Matthew Bourne
---- ME MADAME (GOOD NEWS FROM WONDERLAND)
D’Autres Cordes
 Hyperactive
Vigroux has been collaborating with several heavyweights recently
(Marc Ducret, Elliott Sharp, Joey Baron..), but I was a little surprised
to see his name associated with Matthew Bourne, the young anti-virtuoso
from Wiltshire who rescues abandoned pianos only to bang their keyboards
remorselessly. The outcome of the encounter is equally surprising:
if you had anticipated an archetypal improvising duo, think again.
---- Me Madame (the dashes cover the verb "call"
on the sleeve) might at first blush seem an acousmatic mishmash, but
closer attention reveals music that's captivatingly rocking, moderately
inhuman, and frequently arresting in its deliberate lack of refinement.
One of the best moments comes at the beginning of "Lièvre
de Mars", where unintelligible resonances, smudged electronic
pulses and looped records provide a disquieting background for ultra-quick
evolutions by Bourne, who plays analogue synthesizers besides electric
and acoustic piano while Vigroux is credited with "analogue synths,
electroacoustic [sic], guitar, turntables". Avoidance
of predictability seems to be the watchword throughout the record,
which also contains less pleasing episodes ("Have a Champignon"
is franckly terrible with its incoherently melismatic distortions)
and substantial amounts of naiveté. But when the guys manage
to catch the right segment to reduce to pulp, or juxtapose absurd
drum patterns with incoherent vocal mutterings amidst reiterative
orchestral samples ("Da King") or elongated soprano echoes
bathed in digital crunch ("Welcome in Wonderland"), things
get very funny. It may be ugly at times, but this music sounds genuinely
warped, which means it gets additional points from this commentator.–MR
Weasel
Walter
APOCALYPTIK PARANOIA
ugEXPLODE
 Even
if you didn't know that Weasel Walter, the mad driving force behind
the wonderfully vicious and perennially exciting (but currently on
sabbatical?) Flying Luttenbachers, is a musician singularly dedicated
to "speed, velocity and violence", you could probably guess
as much by looking at him on the cover of Apocalyptik Paranoia,
all decked out in studs and bullets. But pop the disc into the machine
with trembling hands and you may be surprised by the delicate spiky
acoustic guitar (Henry Kaiser, one of Weasel's most frequent playing
partners since his move to California a while back) and skittery toms
and woodblocks on the opening "Scintillations". Think Bailey
and Bennink – and that's a compliment. But by the time track
two – "Raging War" indeed – kicks in, you know
you're back on WW's familiar battlefield. Kaiser's on this as well,
but here he's gone electric and plugged himself into something simply
monstrous. Sounds like cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm has too. Not that
the fourth member of the quartet, trumpeter Forbes Graham, can't handle
it all. It's a trumpeter's treat, this album: as well as Graham, Peter
Evans (whose lips by rights should be insured for about as much as
Jennifer Lopez's ass) and Greg Kelley (no slouch when it comes to
blowing himself silly either) also make appearances. Nor is it all
apocalyptik: on "Still Life" and "Threnody" -
a nod to Penderecki there? - Weasel and Kaiser return to the acoustic
intricacy of "Scintillations", while Kelley and Evans huff
and puff each other's houses down. Of course, if it's too nice for
you you can always skip forward to "Mass Erection" and burn
your own house down – or crank it up loud enough and wait for
the neighbours to come and do it for you.–DW
Wolter
Wierbos
3 TROMBONE SOLOS
Dolfijn
DEINING
Dolfijn
 Dutch
trombonist Wolter Wierbos has been a reliable source of pleasure in
countless ensembles, whether jousting with Michael Moore in the best
ever edition of Gerry Hemingway's group, or jumping into the swing-to-out
big band stylings of the ICP and Bik Bent Braam. He's made few recordings
under his own name, though, a situation he's begun to rectify with
the creation of his own Dolfijn label. These days the trombonist and
his companion Fieke Broekhuizen own a houseboat dubbed "De Drie
Gebroeders", where they curate an occasional series of concerts,
and the cover of 3 Trombone Solos shows the trombonist in
his element: out on the water, a huge splotch of seaweed draped over
his head. The disc's title may be generic but the music is superb
from first to last, staking out Wierbos's place in the solo-bone pantheon
alongside greats like Albert Mangelsdorff, George Lewis and Paul Rutherford,
while sounding very little like any of them. The trombonist states
that his playing has changed in recent years in response to his switch
to a vintage 1933 Conn Vocabell: "It is hard to handle. That
is what I wanted – to play with more resistant and stubborn
material. What I lost in flexibility I gained in tone quality and
projection." That depth of sound is readily apparent throughout
two long pieces from a 2005 tour of the US – as well as Wierbos's
ability to hold onto a given idea tenaciously but fluently, patiently
turning new facets to the light and developing it at the exact length
it calls for. He does extraordinary things with multiphonics (check
out the opening of "Portland", where his soft droning overlays
suggest a church choir humming a spiritual) but his control of articulation
and timbre have so much expressive complexity that there's just as
much contrapuntal activity going on in even the simplest passages
– even in single held notes. The last track, from a later concert
in Amsterdam, is actually two separate short pieces (so the disc's
title is a bit of a misnomer) and features some of his nuttiest playing,
like the gross Donald Duck outbursts in the first half, though it's
also got one of his most inventive demonstrations of on-the-spot riffing.
This is actually one of the most swinging solo horn discs I've heard,
though that's precisely because Wierbos doesn't try too hard to be
a one-man band: it's just that the entire disc is suffused with the
kind of relaxed, soulful, utterly personal time feel that tells you
you're listening to a great jazz musician.
 The
cover of Deining shows Wierbos pointing out the sights from
the deck of his houseboat to a troupe of fellow musicians –
Mary Oliver, Ab Baars, Franky Douglas, Han Bennink and Wilbert de
Joode. It's a bit of a trick, since that's the only time they're all
together on the disc, which is a set of duets (plus one trio) recorded
on various occasions throughout July 2006. Inevitably it's an album
of bits and pieces – the tracks are largely three minutes or
under – though it does start off with an excellent encounter
with de Joode, split into six tracks but in fact a continuous 19-minute
improvisation. The pair's radical mood-changes are exhilaratingly
whimsical and brutal, and there's some great open-form grooving near
the beginning; in the slower bits the textural match between Wierbos's
everywhichway trombone and de Joode's monstrous low bowing is perfect.
The rest of the CD is unfortunately pretty inconsequential considering
the fine players involved, though I always get a kick out of Bennink's
freakish ability to play just about anything: on Misha Mengelberg's
"Peer's Counting Song" (a ballad delivered with a lopsided
grin) he joins Wierbos and Oliver on sopranino sax, giving it a Bechet
touch before signing off with some nutty doodles.–ND
Alan
Wilkinson / John Edwards / Steve Noble
LIVE AT CAFÉ OTO
Bo'Weavil
 A
frequent complaint about live recordings is that they don't really
capture the essence of being there. I'm not sure how appropriate that
is for this one, because listening to it is an unrelieved joy for
its 40 minutes. It's not like Alan Wilkinson is an unknown quantity,
having blasted down the doors with his baritone sax in a variety of
settings including the John Law Quartet, a trio with Paul Hession
and Simon Fell, and meetings with Peter Brötzmann and Eddie Prévost.
So hearing the opening baritone shriek on the 31-minute "Spellbound",
you tend to batten down the listening hatches for a visceral experience
along the lines of The Horrors of Darmstadt. But this is
different – possessing a certain X factor that interests the
listener in an unexpected way. A more exhilaratingly fun kind of way.
Much of this is due to the superb contributions of bassist John Edwards
and drummer Steve Noble, creating a rhythmic playground for Wilkinson
to scamper around in. There's nothing particularly extreme in anything
they play in terms of innovative technique; it's more that it flows
so naturally and organically that at some point the listener blinks
and thinks, "How did they get from there to here?" Noble's
rock background serves him well in this setting and Edwards plays
as excellently here as, well, everything else he's ever been part
of. When Wilkinson switches from baritone to alto (interspersed with
some spirited scat-screaming which is oddly not irritating and even
strangely fitting) the tempo initially increases markedly, seemingly
in recognition of the smaller horn. The trio ebbs and flows through
a series of motifs until Wilkinson drops out briefly before returning
on the big horn to bring the song to a spirited conclusion. The eight-minute
"Recoil" is more of the same only with Wilkinson on alto
and screaming, a continuation of the trio's fluid motion through a
range of themes that deservedly triggers that audience's wild applause
at the end. Reviewing recordings requires multiple listens that can
get cumbersome at times; this disc sounded as fresh after the last
spin as when the shrink-wrap was first split.–SG
Jacob
William Quartet
SECONDARY DEVIATIONS
Ayler Records Download
 There's
an art to selecting a lead-off cut for an album, and "Welcome
Steps" probably wasn't the best choice, but once the disjointed
individual tempos have melded into a dog-chasing-its-tail frenzy,
it gets a lot more appealing, culminating in guttural blasts from
alto saxophonist Jim Hobbs and the braying trumpet of Forbes Graham.
The other pieces here are much more convincing. Jacob William plays
the syncopated bass line of "Palm Dance" with such insistence
throughout its 13 minutes that when he finally drops out for a drum
solo by Croix Galipault (who begins the track with woodblock and light
cymbal taps, working gradually up to fevered press-rolls) you feel
the absence. Hobbs and Graham's exchanges over this potent rhythmic
brew are consistently inventive: Graham, in particular, has a Steve
Lacy-like tendency to repeatedly deconstruct his own lines, though
at other times his playing has a brashness recalling Lester Bowie.
"Rishi Dance" is 22 minutes long yet keeps interest from
flagging by varying its motifs constantly, and is anchored by William's
two beautiful bass solos at its centre. "Upload Method"
features harshly percussive playing by the altoist, while the rest
of the group alternately works in tandem with him or in counterpoint.
On the brief, sprinting "Repetition" the horns play near-parallel
lines that converge sporadically on extended unisons, with the rhythm
section clearing the way; it makes for a thrilling conclusion to the
record.
So who do these guys sound like? An immediate point of comparison
would be a contemporary group like the Empty Cage Quartet, but (though
perhaps it's excessively high praise) I'm most consistently reminded
of early Art Ensemble recordings collected in the Nessa box, way before
they added "of Chicago" to their name. Plus, if the liners
didn't indicate otherwise, I could believe this was recorded in somebody's
basement.–SG
Nate
Wooley / David Grubbs / Paul Lytton
SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN
Important
 Originally
commissioned for Dave Douglas' FONT Festival in New York and based
on the namesake book by Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain
is a record whose layers, superimposed and stretched, disclose an
underworld of unexpected revelations while also fulfilling Nate Wooley's
intention of making "a piece that had a certain feel of the ecstatic
to it". This is the first of what Wooley has planned as a seven-part
project using this instrumentation, namely a trio plus taped sources
(on this occasion an air conditioner, a piano and mostly unintelligible
voices); yet it's anybody's guess if it will reach completion, given
these artists' exceedingly busy schedule. What's truly impressive
here is how "composed" this 38-minute performance sounds,
despite the virtual nonexistence of rehearsals prior to the trio's
debut performance, except for the soundcheck. The musicians worked
with a few sketchy directives concerning Lytton's percussive drive
(when applicable) and Grubbs' droning harmonium, but basically the
music is a simple arc structure. It begins in extreme calm, as low
vibrating hums emerge from bushes of humid whispers; movement gradually
increases in the central section, first with sparse notes, delirious
mutterings and sinister noises, then with Lytton swinging furiously
over Grubbs' static chords, while Wooley brings a touch of madness
to the situation, roughening the textures with his gargling hoarseness
and abraded clumsiness. The finale brings everything back to (still
charged) peace, giving us a chance to cauterize any bleeding wound
with a relatively balmy ending. What about the aforementioned ecstasy?
Not sure that my immediate desire to repeat the listening experience
to better focus on the murkiest particulars qualifies as such, but
what I do know is that any release which raises more doubts than it
offers certainties is music to my ears.–MR
Tom
Johnson
COUNTING KEYS
Edition Wandelweiser
 In
case you're surprised to find a Tom Johnson album on Wandelweiser
– after all, I reckon there are more actual notes on Counting
Keys than on the rest of the albums released on the über-redux
label put together – it's worth remembering
that Tom Johnson and Wandelweiser prime mover Antoine Beuger know
and greatly respect each other's work. This collection of four pieces
spanning nearly three decades of Johnson's career is one of the composer's
more accessible (though no less rigorous, mathematically) releases,
and a good entry point into his oeuvre for those not familiar with
it.
The title track is good, honest, Music As A Gradual Process
minimalism, the pleasure of listening to it derived from simply figuring
out and following what's going on. Once you've worked out what the
process is, you know where the music's heading, and when it gets there,
it stops, simple as that. But the mathematical procedures behind the
later works on offer – Organ and Silence for Piano
(2002) (it sounds better on piano than it did on organ, but then again
you know what I think about organs), Tilework for Piano (2003)
and Block Design for Piano – are more elusive, and
it takes many patient and rewarding listens to work into the deep
structure of the music. If you usually head to Wandelweiser for peace
and quiet, you might find this all a little too busy, but if, as it
should be, you're in search of craftsmanship, compositional rigour
and exemplary performance (hats off to pianist John McAlpine), you'll
find much to enjoy.–DW
Kernel
KERNEL 2 (SECOND VERSION)
D.R.
R.O.S.A.
 You
might expect a review of Kasper T. Toeplitz's music to appear in the
Electronica section of this ragzine, but, like last year's The
Deep, these two latest dispatches from the laptop trio Kernel,
– featuring, in addition to KTT himself, Eryck Abecassis and
Wilfried Wendling – definitely count as compositions in my book.
You can consult the scores over at Toeplitz's website, http://www.sleazeart.com
(I said that last time, too). The fact that Kasper also bills himself
as playing "bass computer" in performance is significant:
in Kernel the laptop is an instrument, no different from a trombone
or a clarinet. Not that this is particularly new, of course (it's
not as if laptops haven't been around in music for more than a decade,
after all), but while the majority of musicians who perform with them
still seem to see them as glorified samplers, vast memory banks full
of great sounds to dip into and muck about with at the click of a
mouse using snazzy software, Toeplitz, Abecassis and Wendling concentrate
instead on the machine's unique capacity to effect extremely gradual
changes of timbre and dynamics with the kind of precision even the
most seasoned specialist performer would have difficulty emulating.
This is musical geophysics, immense tectonic plates of sound slowly
colliding and buckling upwards to produce peaks and plateaux of Himalayan
grandeur.
 Kernel
#2 has appeared before on disc, on R.O.S.A. a couple of years
ago, but Toeplitz presumably thought it had rushed by too quickly
and decided to produce this longer version (that earlier album still
rocks – the piece is revisited not because there's anything
"wrong" with the 2007 version, but simply because the score
has potential.. after all, you don't bitch if you find six different
versions of the same Morton Feldman piano piece in your local record
store, do you?). D.R. brings together Toeplitz's Dust
Reconstruction, originally premiered at the GRM in 2007 by the
composer, Ulrich Krieger and Stevie Wishart, and Abecassis's own Drowning
Report (shame Wendling couldn't have chipped in with a D.R. of
his own..), which explores the same austere, post-Xenakis frozen tundra
with a little (a little) more alacrity. Kernel music is forbidding,
even fierce, but consistently impressive and rewarding. Check it out.–DW
Duane
Pitre
LIVE AT ROULETTE
Quiet Design
 As
you've probably realized by now, I'm a sucker for genuine drones (Niblock
to Mirror to Organum, in decreasing order of orgasmic consequence)
as opposed to workstation-fuelled, fake-guru dilettantism. Duane Pitre
is a composer who deserves to be kept under close observation, since
he's been developing a highly personal style even though one can recognize
a number of influences in his work. The 40 minutes of this disc offer
a realization of a so-called long-tone composition named "ED09",
recorded on December 4, 2008 at New York’s Roulette by a group
of 21 musicians (playing violins, violas, cellos, contrabasses, flute,
clarinets, saxes and trombone) plus the leader himself conducting
and occasionally applying an eBow to the strings of a guitar. The
piece is partially composed, making use of fixed pitch classes, yet
includes several unrehearsed decisions, often determined by "spontaneous
conduction", hand gestures adjusting the overall flow in different
directions. Niblock is evoked during static passages (though with
less clashing of the upper partials and a higher degree of concordance),
but this stuff also breathes slowly and crawls gracefully towards
climaxes, where stirring clusters and overlaid suspended chords induce
moments of temporary amnesia, a hundred white-winged Tony Conrads
pointing fingers at an imprecise region of the sky above. Music to
cause recurrent states of virtual enlightenment, conscious acceptance
of otherwise unendurable events, it's the best I've heard from Pitre
to date.–MR
Various
Artists
541: MUSIC FROM STANFORD, VOL. 3
Innova
 Innova
Recordings has released the third volume in its documentation of 541,
a concert series highlighting new music from Stanford University students
and faculty. The series has maintained a very high standard, which
the present disc upholds. Three of the six compositions are performed
by the excellent Los Angeles-based ensemble Inauthentica, whose deployment
of multifarious textures and thorny temporal relationships is remarkable.
Jason Federmeyer’s inward / echo (2007), Bruno Ruviaro’s
three-movement Anomia (2007) and Per Bloland’s Negative
Mirror II (2006, rev. 2007) all benefit from their understanding
and virtuosity. Of these complex and often hectic works, Negative
Mirror II is the most meditative, brief clusters of ensemble
activity contrasted with the glassy drones of an acoustic piano from
which sounds emerge via electronic means. In its use of sustain, it’s
similar to inward/echo’s multitimbral iterations of
the pitch D. Around, over and under the held and repeated tone, Federmeyer’s
music ripples, leaps and scurries in keeping with the layered psychological
implications of its title. Anomia’s writing may sound
the most traditional on first hearing, especially in some nearly diatonic
passages from its second movement. However, brass and pizzicato pointilism
abounds in this miniature, radical tempo and dynamic shifts maintaining
freshness and interest, not to mention some beautiful microtonal relationships
in the last movement.
The three other works explore smaller ensemble and solo territory,
but even Christopher Trebue Moore’s Anima, Limbus (2006)
for solo violin gives the illusion of a soloist/ensemble juxtaposition
through fully integrated electronics. Marisol Jiménez’s
percussion/electronics soundscape Guijarros-Humaredas (2006)
inhabits a similar sonic world, both partially indebted to Boulez’s
…explosante fixe in the blurring of boundaries between
electroacoustic and acoustic sound. Far from mimicry, these new works
explore more forbidding terrain, in which they are joined by the multiphonically
harsh Floors and Walls by Kristian Ireland. It’s an
acoustic piece whose depiction of the various physical and psychological
states engendered by a stone tower is given a riveting if somewhat
disconcerting performance. The myriad extramusical concerns behind
each work demand more study than I can provide here; suffice it to
say that these are richly detailed compositions that reward repeated
listening and reflection.–MM
Yves
De Mey
LICHTUNG
Line
 Belgian
composer Yves De Mey, a former cinematography student, has mostly
used his skills as sound engineer and designer in the areas of modern
theatre and dance. Lichtung is the score for Antoine Effroy
and Anne Rudelbach's dance of the same name, premiered in 2008 in
Hamburg. This is one of those cases in which it would be helpful if
the aural experience came with a visual component. The first minutes
of the CD, for instance, introduce the listener to little more than
a collection of adjacent planes, replete with electronic shadings
(plus some Badalamenti-like guitar twangs), which do little to lodge
themselves in the listener's memory. Yet as the flux continues, the
energies become better channelled and the work gains in individuality,
offering moments of exquisite internal vibrations and rumblings informed
by a refreshingly sugar-free melodic fragmentariness, then travelling
across lands of droning semi-stillness until the piece's termination.
Not enough for a "must" status, but this is a record to
evaluate attentively several times before selling it at $1.70 on eBay.
Fans of KTL might welcome it, despite the lack of outpouring guitars.–MR
Richard
Garet / Brendan Murray
OF DISTANCE
Unframed
 Two
apparently remote meteors collide in Of Distance. While Richard
Garet is primarily renowned for understated spatial structures and
rarefied soundtracks for installations released on labels such as
Nonvisualobjects, Leerraum and Winds Measure, Brendan Murray stuck
yours truly to his couch last year with the engrossing underworld
of Commonwealth on 23Five. This joint effort blends all these
different factors in cunning layerings of incisive frequencies and
tape-derived echoes from the real world, for the most part successfully
thanks to the composers' maturity and restraint. This is particularly
manifest in the 27-minute "In Parallel", in which various
disturbances attempt to sabotage a liquefied stupor, the whole ending
in a combination of mute uproar and discernable pitches – stabilization
is finally achieved but not without difficulty. The white noise discharges
at the beginning of "The Tyranny of Objects" are just a
minor variation before the piece starts an escalation developing out
of static electronics and indistinct found sounds, including what
sounds like a bit of shortwave radio. The results are like meditating
in a downtown apartment with the windows open, the filthy soul of
the city inexorably covering the purest thoughts with grime and smog,
terminal beeps and blips serving as sinister reminders of hospital
machinery. Not an encouraging prospect.–MR
Jeff
Gburek
REMOTE PROVINCES
Aural Terrains
 Over
the past few years, Jeff Gburek has slowly but steadily been releasing
an impressive body of work, either online, notably as streams on his
own Orphan Sounds netlabel, or in limited editions on bijou imprints
such as Absurd, Nur Nicht Nur and Triple Bath. This latest dispatch
from the composer, who's currently based in Poznan, Poland, on Thanos
Chrysakis's Aural Terrains label, is for my money his best yet: three
carefully sculpted slabs of intriguing electronica collaging found
sounds, snippets of radio broadcasts and classical music, and haunting
original loops, all immaculately sequenced and impeccably mixed into
one of the year's strongest and most satisfying releases. Gburek is
a shrewd observer of the scene and an experienced space traveller
in the new music cosmos, orbiting the dark star of EAI close enough
to pick up and master the nuances of its vocabulary (as a guitarist
he's performed with Keith Rowe, Tetuzi Akiyama, Annette Krebs and
Pascal Battus) while remaining within the gravitational field of contemporary
composition, which he's studied with Helmut Lachenmann. This fabulous
little album is proof that you can have the best of both worlds.–DW
Sam
Hamilton
SOOTY SYMPOSIUM
Tumblingstrain
 Anybody
reading this remember The Sooty Show, Harry Corbett's cult
glove puppet show starring Sooty, smart ass magician yellow bear,
Sweep, anarchic red welly-wearing bovver boy dog, kind of canine Mr
Punch, and Soo, cute panda who gets a hard time from everyone, especially
Sweep (and, if you remember the pre-1976 version of the show before
Corbett retired and handed over the business to his son Matthew, there
was also Butch, a tough little talking bulldog, and Ramsbottom, a
snake with a heavy Lancashire accent)? I guess not. But my heart leapt
when I saw the title of this album, with images of heavy duty academics
discussing things like "Gender Issues In The Sooty / Sweep /
Sue Infernal Love Triangle".. well, no. What we have instead
is even better, a glorious collection of pieces from Auckland-based
Hamilton, who seems to be able to play just about any instrument you
care to mention (we've got Farfisa organs, guitars, tenor horns, accordions,
all kinds of percussion instruments and electronic effects boxes and
gismos too numerous to list), mixing them with field recordings from
Peru, Colombia and Brazil to produce six tracks of splendid diversity,
from fuzzy drone ("Epoch of Snares") to luminous, thrumming
and strumming post-rock ("O0O0O0O" – hmm, had fun
typing that in – and "Editions", both all too brief).
Fans of David Grubbs, James Blackshaw, Jozef van Wissem, but also
Skaters, Axolotl, Emeralds and Raglani sit up and take note. Shame
Harry Corbett passed away in 1989 – maybe he'd have liked a
copy. I've never forgiven Matthew for getting rid of Butch, so he
can buy his own.–DW
Jason
Kahn
VANISHING POINT
23five
 Having
released one myself, I have something of a soft spot for albums named
after films – not that you need to have seen the movie concerned
to appreciate the music (despite being an inveterate cinephile, I
admit I still have to see Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing, Eureka
and Insignificance but that certainly hasn't stopped me enjoying
Jim O'Rourke's trilogy) – though I rather doubt Jason Kahn had
Richard C. Sarafian's 1971 cult road movie in mind when he settled
on Vanishing Point as the title for what might be his most
accomplished and impressive work to date. Barry Newman's amphetamine-stoked
mystery man Kowalski, racing westwards across the desert with a squad
of cop cars in hot pursuit seems a long way from these exquisitely
crafted, slowly evolving soundscapes – yet the sublime vastness
of the landscapes through which his Dodge Challenger goes careering
does seem to connect to Kahn's shimmering mirages of cymbals and electronics.
And the Zürich-based American ex-pat steers his music forward
with the same sure sense of timing and feel for his equipment that
Kowalski would have appreciated, if he'd lived long enough to hear
it (yes, happily the album doesn't end in the same way as the film
does). If you don't know it, check it out – and that applies
to the album as well as the movie.–DW
Leyland
Kirby
SADLY, THE FUTURE IS NO LONGER WHAT IT WAS
History Always Favours The Winners
 Check
out some of these track titles, man: "when we parted, my heart
wanted to die", "the beauty of the impending tragedy of
my existence", "and as i sat beside you i felt the great
sadness that day", "tonight is the last night of the world"
– and this, from the press blather: "[it's] about the fragility
of existence and about those times when we pace the streets for answers
when the ground under our feet is not so stable, those times when
we feel invisible to all those around us as we continue to walk, searching
for signals and connections, at a loss to our situation and looking
for a new pathway forward." Ow wow Rick man that's really heavy
man.. this couldn't possibly be by the same bloke who said "everybody
slags Elton but you get cunts like Merzbow and Autechre hiding behind
bullshit and pretence, with Elton what you see is what you get, a
fat twat with a wig making shit pop with no pretence or apology for
his output", could it? Seems so. Leyland (sounds more "artistic"
than his first name James, which he's dropped for this project) Kirby,
also known as The Caretaker, has come a long way from that nasty smelly
V/Vm pig farm, and seems to have spent a lot of time recently listening
to Satie, Budd and Basinski before dishing up this, another triple
CD / triple 2LP's worth of reverb-drenched spaced out muzak (he found
his way into that ghostly ballroom in The Shining for sure,
but has never managed to get out of it). Whether it's a heartfelt
move into melancholy midlife crisis or just savvy marketing, Sadly,
The Future Is No Longer What It Was (away with those old clichés!
let's have some new clichés!) seems tailor-made to ride the
wave of so-called hauntology (simple nostalgia for guilty childhood
crushes on pretty punk singers cunningly repackaged as pretentious
Derridian twaddle) to media glory. The Caretaker recipe was simple:
rip cheap vinyl from local fleamarket, load into basic music software,
pitchshift down a few semitones, sprinkle lightly with distortion
or similar token "weird" effect and bathe in reverb until
it all becomes the aural equivalent of a David Hamilton photo. It
can be fun when the objet détourné is a dreadful
Wurlitzer reading of the "Méditation" from Thaïs,
but this dreary sub-Satie piano noodling plugged in to silky synths
soon outstays its welcome. And three and a half hours of it really
tries the patience.–DW
Tu
m'
MONOCHROMES VOL 1
Line
 Over
the past few years Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli, perched
on their mountain top in Città Sant'Angelo, Pescara, Italy,
have surveyed the landscape of contemporary electronica in all its
diversity, swooping down like birds of prey into the fields of glitchy
post-techno and dreamy J-pop to grab tasty morsels from the undergrowth.
On Monochromes Vol.1 they stick to the sky above in four
spacious, contemplative tracks, characteristically elegant and polished,
content to let their sounds fly like kites instead of chopping them
up into bits and stitching them back together into amazing technicolor
dreamcoats. The disc comes with a quotation from Jean Cocteau ("a
poet has too many words in his vocabulary, / a painter too many colors
on his palette, / a musician too many notes on his keyboard"),
which might lead some folk to expect a move into Sachiko M less-is-more
territory on the part of our Italian adventurers. Not at all –
the music is as rich and colourful (I wonder about the album title
though) as anything Tu m' have released in their career so far: it's
just more leisurely and serene. Looking forward to Vol.2, lads.–DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
|
|