| YULE
News 2009 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Nate Dorward, John Gill, Stephen Griffith, Marc
Medwin, Natasha Pickowicz, Massimo Ricci, Michael Rosenstein, Dan
Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
In Print: Noise & Capitalism
Time and Anthony Braxton
/ Herbie Nichols: A Jazzist's Life / Jah Wobble: The Memoirs
of a Geezer
Nikos Veliotis: Cello
Powder
On Mikroton: Günter
Müller / Kurzmann, Genovart, Courtis & Reche / Jason
Kahn & Asher / Dafeldecker, Kurzmann, Tilbury & Wishart
On DVD: Sunny's Time
Now / Han Bennink Hazentijd
POST-SOMETHING OR OTHER: 39 Clocks / Black To Comm
/ Blues Control / Cardboard Sax & Wasteland Jazz Unit /
David Daniell & Doug McCombs / Heavy Winged / Mouthus /
Nine Rain / Nihilist Spasm Band & Sun Plexus 2
JAZZ & IMPROV: Rodrigo
Amado / Luigi Archetti & Bo Wiget / Samuel Blaser / John
Blum / Lester Bowie / Anthony Braxton & Joëlle Léandre
/ Peter Brötzmann / Christian, Milton, Prévost &
Saade / Cremaster / Zé Eduardo / Agusti Fernandez, Derek
Bailey & Barry Guy / Dennis Gonzalez / Groder & Greene
/ Grutronic / Barry Guy, LJCO & Irène Schweizer /
Haptic
Vivian Houle / Sebastian
Lexer / Manuel Mengis / Seijiro Murayama & soundworm / Lucas
Niggli & Xu Fengxia / Mike Olson / Keith Rowe & Toshimaru
Nakamura / Charles Rumback / Rupp, Pliakas & Wertmüller
/ Paul Rutherford / Ted Sirota / Wadada Leo Smith / Burkhard
Stangl & Kai Fagaschinski / Yclept
CONTEMPORARY: Fernando
Benadon / Olivier Capparos & Lionel Marchetti / Decentred
/ Bernard Donzel-Gargand / Christopher Hobbs / Kawaguchi &
Yamaguchi / Phill Niblock / Roger Reynolds / James Tenney
ELECTRONICA: Kim
Cascone / Bruce Gilbert / Robert Hampson / Russell Haswell /
Stephan Mathieu & Taylor Deupree / Ogrob / Paul Schütze
Last issue
|
I
was sad to learn a month or so back that Bagatellen was finally
shutting up shop – Al Jones threw in the towel at the end of
summer, under the weight of various family commitments, and it seems
Derek Taylor has followed suit. Maybe the fact that he's just got
married (congratulations to him and his missus) has something to do
with it. In any case, Bags was a great site and I enjoyed numerous
online verbal fistfights there over the years with the likes of Joe
Milazzo, Adam Hill, Michael Anton Parker, Joe Morris and Jon Abbey.
The URL still works, and all the Bagarchives remain open for consultation,
and I believe you can still post comments if you want, but somehow
it won't be the same.
Meanwhile, Paris Transatlantic soldiers on into the second
decade of the century, and, who knows, might even make it as far as
the end of the world, which, as we all know, will take place on December
23rd 2012 (bang goes any chance I ever had of listening once more
to all the albums in my collection). In the meantime, this issue welcomes
aboard Natasha Pickowicz, bringing the noise from upstate New York,
and special thanks go out once more to our man in Amsterdam, Bob Gilmore,
for sitting down with one of my favourite composers, Clarence
Barlow, for an extended interview (thanks also to Clarence for
editing and supplying photographs). Bonne lecture et bonnes fêtes
à tous.-DW
Anthony
Iles / Mattin (Editors)
NOISE & CAPITALISM
Kritika 192pp
 I
was wrong when I described Guy Debord as a "much overrated Situationist
maître penseur" in a recent Wire review,
and reading Bruce Russell's Towards a Social Ontology of Improvised
Sound Work – probably the best written and certainly the
most informative of the eleven essays (plus an introduction by editor
Anthony Iles) gathered together in Noise & Capitalism
– serves to remind me of the fact. Russell's concise summary
of the Situationist key concepts – spectacle, psychogeography
and constructed situation – backed up with apposite quotations
from Marx and Lukacs, is both clear and clearly relevant to his own
practice as an improviser.
Eddie Prévost's Free Improvisation in Music and Capitalism:
Resisting Authority and the Cults of Scientism and Celebrity,
complete with de rigueur quotations from AMM playing partners
Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury and sideswipes at poor old Stockhausen
(once more the inevitable moans about the absurd excesses of the Helikopter-Streichquartett
and the "composition" of Mikrophonie I) is a characteristically
sober restatement of ideas previously elaborated at greater length
in his books No Sound Is Innocent and Minute Particulars
– if you haven't read those this will do just fine as an introduction
to his thought, but if you have you might have a distinct feeling
of déjà lu.
Indeed, there seems to be a bit of recycling going on here (though
I imagine maybe the editors would prefer to call it détournement):
Ray Brassier's Genre Is Obsolete originally appeared in Multitudes
#28 in 2007, and Mattin's liner notes to Going Fragile, his
2006 Formed album with that well-known Noise musician Radu Malfatti,
are reprinted in their entirety, with one additional paragraph. No
point in recycling my own review
of that album, then, since I stand by what I wrote back in July 2006.
 Standing
by what you write is the springboard Ben Watson uses to dive into
a typically vigorous exposé of his ideas in Noise as Permanent
Revolution or, Why Culture is a Sow Which Devours its Own Farrow.
Taking issue with The Wire's Sam Davies for trashing an Ascension
gig in Bristol in 1994 only to remember it fondly 13 years later (being
able to change your mind and admit that you're wrong is obviously
anathema to Ben's militant aesthetix), he comes up with some splendidly
quotable lines (how about "the courage of youth enables it to
look directly in the face of things.. [i]ts folly is to imagine that
no-one else has ever done so" and "people who talk about
the problems of modern music without talking about capitalism and
commodity fetishism are themselves one of modern music's problems"?),
though one wishes he'd spent more time explaining the subtleties of
Giambattista Vico (see photo)'s Scienza Nuova – a work
I'm not at all familiar with but for which this article has most definitely
whet my appetite – than taking potshots, albeit amusing and
well-aimed, at his former employers at Wire HQ. Watson writes
well – he's one of the few contributors to this book whose voice
you can really hear from reading his prose – but quite why Jaworzyn's
Ascension is "THE answer to dilemmas facing anyone discontent
with the musical ready-meals dished up by commercial interests"
isn't explained, and what Tony Oxley, Fernando Grillo, Iancu Dumitrescu
and Ana-Maria Avram are doing in a thesis ostensibly about Noise is
anybody's guess.
 Matthew
Hyland's Company Work vs. Patrician Raiders can be boiled
down to its penultimate paragraph: "Thanks to Ben Watson and
the late Derek Bailey for producing (amongst other crucial things)
the book digressed from here. BUY IT!" Watson's Bailey biography
has been discussed at great length in
these pages already, and not surprisingly the best quotes in Hyland's
essay are extracted from it. "When someone says they'd rather
work in a factory than play music they don't like, it means they've
never worked in a factory." Well, quite. If that weren't the
case Mattin would still be making pies in Poole.
Howard Slater's Prisoners of the Earth Come Out! makes some
interesting points, ironically many of them about silence, but to
find them you have to wade through a swamp of abreaction, endocolonialism,
bios and libidinal skin over which quotation marks swarm like mosquitoes.
Actual discussion of music is thin on the ground and the vocabulary
is sloppy: Slater might know what abreaction means, but phrases like
"the overlong intervals of a Morton Feldman piece" indicate
he doesn't understand what an interval is. And lumping together groups
with very different histories and working methods – AMM, MEV
and Morphogenesis – to make some point about the "real
subsumption of labour" is as woolly as his prose style.
One of the central problems of this book is that it doesn't (can't?
won't?) provide the reader with clear definitions of either Noise
or Capitalism. The latter is tricky, for sure, but it seems clear
that the word means something different now, in today's Googling,
Twittering short-memory-even-shorter-attention-span world from what
it did barely a decade ago. And depending on which article you read,
Noise can be anything from Throbbing Gristle to Lendormin, from Merzbow
(mentioned once or twice, en passant) to Nobukazu Takemura
(!).
 Mathieu
Saladin's Points of Resistance and Criticism in Free Improvisation:
Remarks on a Musical Practice and Some Economic Transformations
is like his music: conceptually elegant but flat and dry. The quotations
about music – Free Improvisation once more, not Noise –
come mostly from Bailey (the inevitable "idiomatic" discussion
from the indispensable Improvisation: its Nature and Practice
in Music) and Cardew via Prévost, and are far less interesting
than the extracts from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's New Spirit
of Capitalism, a book I expected to see quoted more often in
these pages. Instead, throughout the book, we get the usual suspects
– Debord, Deleuze, Lacan, Foucault (one intimidating footnote
refers us to page 1431 (!) of his Dits et écrits II)
and Attali (not as much as you might expect, which is just as well
as his Noise is – and here I'll stick to my guns –
much overrated) – but, interestingly, no Lyotard (photo),
one of the philosophers who actually talks some sense about music
(check out Driftworks, Semiotext(e), 1984).
The worst offender when it comes to pretentious namechecking is Csaba
Toth, whose Noise Theory contains several priceless passages
like the following: "Noise, at the very least, disrupts both
the performer and listener's normal relations to the symbolic order
by refusing to route musical pleasure through the symbolic order (symbolic
relations are defined here as an aggregate of guilt, the law, achievement,
authority figures). We can call this musical pleasure anti-teleological
jouissance, achieved by self-negation, by a return to the pre-subjective
(the stage that precedes ego differentiation) – which, in our
context, is a sonorous space." I seriously wonder how many people
reading that can put hands on hearts and say they fully understand
it. And that includes the author, especially when, two pages further
on, you come across a gem like the following: "Noise music, in
its many alterations, ruptures conventional generic boundaries: it
is often not music at all, but noise" (you don't say!) and meaningless
drivel like this: "if one intrudes into the program itself as
Ikue Mori does, one can get totally inside the electronics behind
the sound and thereby overcome routinisation (hollowing out) of her
intervention and continually shatter the listener's expectations by
not sounding one expects her to sound." [sic] Seems
to me there's more missing in that last sentence than the word "like".
This vague waffle would be bad enough in some teen fanzine, but coming
from a Professor of History at an American university, it's frankly
inexcusable. Toth may be able to rap on in the college bar about jouissance,
but he doesn't seem to have a clue about what Noise is, or if he does
he's certainly unwilling to venture a definition. But in contemporary
academe if you can't get over the barbed wire fence of hard fact you
can at least decorate it with exotic plants and flowers (rhizomes,
dispositifs, performative teleologies..) and pretend it's not there,
by throwing in (out? up?) as many names as possible to blind the reader
with science: Christian Marclay, DJ Spooky, Philip Samartzis join
Lightning Bolt and Wolf Eyes and White Mice and Muslimgauze and Merzbow
and Masonna and Einstürzende Neubaten and Throbbing Gristle and
Z'Ev and.. you get the idea.
 At least
Ray Brassier, in his Genre is Obsolete, can cite specifics,
though the two outfits he comes up with – Tom Smith's To Live
and Shave in L.A. and Rudolf Eb.er's Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock
(photo) – are hardly typical Noise acts, and both men, Brassier
admits, "disavow the label 'noise' as a description of their
work – explicitly in Smith's case, implicitly in Eb.er's. This
is not coincidental: each recognises the debilitating stereotypy engendered
by the failure to recognise the paradoxes attendant upon the existence
of a genre predicated upon the negation of genre."
Brassier's text is a tough read, but a rewarding one: and he actually
describes real albums and performances with enthusiasm and affection
as well as extrapolating on their philosophical implications. But
lines like "the lack of imagination that characterises much of
noise music", "the crowd-baiting outright aggression (however
ironic) of most power electronics" and the "slap-dash, jumbled-together
mix of a misplaced genius-complex and self-absorption that characterises
much of the Noise scene" in Nina Powers' Woman Machines:
the Future of Female Noise make you wonder whether Ms Powers
wants to write about the subject at all. Unlike Brassier, I doubt
she'd find anything particularly jouissif about watching
Randy Yau throw up into a contact-miked bucket, or Lucas Abela slice
his lips to a bloody pulp on a pane of broken glass. Chucking in lines
like "Jessica Rylan is the future of noise, in the way that men
are the past of machines" would be fine if we were actually given
some background information about who Jessica Rylan actually is ("tall,
slender, politely dressed, bespectacled" doesn't cut it, sorry)
and how her work relates to the Noise scene. But no, we're all supposed
to know that already, in the same way that we're all supposed to have
well-thumbed copies of Grundrisse, La Société
du Spectacle, Philosophie der neuen Musik, Le Séminaire
and Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit
lying around on our coffee tables.
 It's
a welcome relief then to finish the book with some real discussion
of the issues involved – including free software and the dubious
small print of the MySpace contract – in Mattin's Anti-Copyright:
Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property
(I never thought I'd see George Bernard Shaw quoted in a Mattin text
– a nice surprise), but one still closes the book with a feeling
of frustration, not so much for what it says but for what it doesn't.
Instead of trotting out quotations from books we've all read (Bailey,
Cardew, Prévost..) and many most of us are hardly likely to,
I'd have preferred a probing interview with Carlos Giffoni on the
politics and economics behind his No Fun festival, and a seriously
critical discussion of how Noise is being quietly absorbed into the
mainstream of trendy culture. Instead of waxing lyrical about squats,
it might have been instructive for at least one of the writers to
visit and report from one, explaining the day-to-day function of a
viable alternative economic structure. And how about a detailed investigation
of the technological détournement (sampling in Plunderphonics,
the recycling of analogue instruments) and a serious analysis of the
implications – moral, financial, aesthetic – of download
culture? Above all, what's lacking most in this book is a musicologically
coherent definition of what Noise actually is.–DW
Stuart
Broomer
TIME AND ANTHONY BRAXTON
Mercury Press 176pp
 Stuart
Broomer has been turning out thoughtful jazz reviews for years, not
least as an occasional contributor to this site, but he's typically
at his best when taking the longer view rather than simply dealing
with the immediate exigencies of the toppling "to review"
pile on the desk. His specialty is a kind of speculative musical history,
full of quietly audacious propositions about buried historical links
and phenomenological implications, and drawing on his well-stocked
but idiosyncratic trove of information and quotations. His old columns
from Coda (from back in the days when Bill Smith never ran
single reviews, commissioning massive review-essays instead) would
be well worth reviving, but in the meantime it's a pleasure to finally
have his first full-length work of music criticism in existence.
Anthony Braxton's music has long been a touchstone for Broomer –
indeed, the only other living musicians he's written about with comparable
persistence and empathy are Evan Parker and John Butcher – and
many chapters here first appeared as reviews or liner notes. Yet the
book doesn't feel like conveniently repurposed material: it simply
reveals that these various writings were always part of Broomer's
continuous, decades-long critical dialogue with Braxton's music, even
as the latter developed in new directions, from his decision to explore
standards repertoire in bulk (occasionally as a pianist), to the onset,
efflorescence and eventual sublation of the Ghost Trance Musics, up
to his yet-to-be-unveiled Sonic Genome project.
At one point in David Lodge's Small World the hero proposes
writing a study, not of Shakespeare's influence on T.S. Eliot but
of Eliot's influence on Shakespeare – thus pushing Eliot's own
claim in Tradition and the Individual Talent that the really
new work of art retrospectively affects the entire canon to the point
of postmodern topsyturvydom. For Broomer, Braxton is a figure of that
sort: the book's first section, "Groundings and Airings",
is implicitly an attempt to reconsider the entirety of jazz history
in light of Braxton's work. When he talks about Miles Davis's 1955-56
quartet, it's clear that Broomer hears it with ears equally attuned
to the collaged themes and pulse tracks of Braxton's 1980s quartets:
"The special genius of the Davis band was that it accommodated
multiple styles (and times): the tensely anticipatory and restrained
balladic time of Davis, the headlong rush of John Coltrane to the
last note in the system of triadic harmony, the articulate pulse of
bassist Paul Chambers and the celeste-like decoration of pianist Red
Garland. The various members of the group often line up differently
with Jones' rhythms, creating a composite kind of music" (p.22).
The book's main theme is time, the essential medium – or is
it substance? – of music, and the nod in its title to Henri
Bergson and Wyndham Lewis suggests both Broomer's range of interests
and discreet sense of humour. His major achievement here is the way
he puts such ineffable concepts in dialogue with the specifics of
Braxton's music, with results that can be provocative, illuminating
or even a bit overreaching (not necessarily a problem: the book is,
in part, about the gaps between what we can say and what we perceive,
what we can intuit versus what we can know). There's a remarkable
passage on musical stuttering and its relation to Braxton's jazz repertory
projects which is a good example of all three, perhaps:
"...at times Braxton will double-tongue every note against the
rhythmic propulsion, creating a kind of stutter. In the stutter-line,
each note seems to guess at its identity. ... It's also a conscious
doubling of the improviser's line, the expression of time's duality
of freedom and constraint; more specifically, it's a deliberated representation
of the two-places-at-once involved in working through historical repertoire.
... What is most striking about the stutter is the way it seems to
both double and interrupt Braxton's articulation – it is the
thing both twice said and unsaid, marking both loss and recovery,
the impossibility of repeating history and Braxton's own (apprehensive)
apprehension of it. We are given a perspective on the tradition, but
not a facsimile, Braxton's stutter step seeming to insist on the structural
gap between ourselves and the past." (pp.52-53)
 Like
Braxton's own multidirectional compositions, this passage branches
off into other themes that run through the book. An especially important
one is jazz's relationship to a mechanized, computerized, incredibly
sped-up modernity. The music has responded to that historical condition
in turn by itself speeding up decade by decade, whether by slicing
rhythmic subdivisions ever finer or layering further polyrhythms.
In one cheeky five-page chapter, "Velocity: A Principle, or a
Short Fast History of Jazz", Broomer sets out a history of speed,
beginning with incredibly slow performances by (clarinettist) George
Lewis, and then pursuing a lineage of virtuosos extending from Louis
Armstrong to Evan Parker, all under the sign of Chuck Berry's demurral
in "Roll and Roll Music": "I got no kick against modern
jazz, / unless they start to play it too darn fast." Another
musical collision between the human and the mechanical comes in the
form of repetition – another kind of stuttering. Broomer's discussion
of the repetitions of Ghost Trance Music expands to take in everything
from the locked groove that ends Carla Bley's Escalator Over the
Hill to the guitarist Grant Green, who had a "genius"
for "repeat[ing] a phrase as exactly as possible against (literally
in contradiction of) the moving harmony of a song... frequently managing
to sound like a skipping record" (pp.128-29).
Broomer's survey is most luxuriantly detailed in its accounts of recent
Leo releases, but it manages to cover all the major areas of Braxton's
endeavours, and (more importantly) sketches out larger frameworks
for thinking about them. Part Two, for instance, is a side-by-side
consideration of the solo saxophone music from For Alto onwards
(some of Braxton's earliest and most celebrated music) and its shadowy
"other", the solo piano compositions he was writing at the
same time, which went virtually unrecorded in their original form
until the recent efforts of Hildegard Kleeb and Geneviève Foccroulle.
Part Four's consideration of the classic 1980s/1990s quartet with
Crispell, Dresser and Hemingway positions it carefully at a difficult
moment of his career, following the termination of his extraordinary
tenure with Arista Records and at the point where jazz was developing
its own form of Reaganism in the neo-conservative movement of Marsalis
et al. Braxton's solo piano compositions and orchestra works had little
chance of being recorded in this environment; his response was to
devise a collaged performance practice drawing piecemeal on these
scores and many other materials. Broomer sees this as a "group
practice that is very close to life writing, his group playing multiple
compositions that, by 1985, had spanned at least 17 years, most of
his adult life" (p.76). "The quartet music becomes an increasingly
complex form of self-representation, a kind of multiple signature,
while the individual identities of the compositions became at least
temporarily less defined. ... These performances may stand as a radical
form of autobiography" (p.80).
There's much more that could be said about the book, which is extremely
succinct but has more useful – usable – ideas
than many more ponderous volumes that have been (and will be) written
on Braxton. Broomer is not given to showy prose – his most striking
phrases are often in asides (like his casual encapsulation of Ayler's
music: "heated, squealing, fog-horn improvisations on themes
that sounded like major-key drinking songs") – but even
the most abstractly ruminative excursions here always touch base with
the listener's experience of the music. If you want a primer on Braxton
circa 2009 – everything from his marching-band obsessions to
the cultural significance of the cardigan – it's the ideal place
to go.–ND
[photo of Braxton seated courtesy Ziga Koritnik]
Mark
Miller
HERBIE NICHOLS: A JAZZIST'S LIFE
Mercury Press 224pp
 Mark
Miller's recent selection of his jazz criticism – drawn largely
from his long tenure at The Globe and Mail – is called
A Certain Respect for Tradition, a title that teeters between
blandness and pointed irony: how much, exactly, is a "certain"
respect? As a perusal of that book shows, he takes a dim view of the
ways "the tradition" has become a deadening weight or promotional
tag in the jazz world, and in fact his work as a historian in books
like Such Melodious Racket: The Lost History of Jazz in Canada,
1914–1949 (yes, there was lots of jazz in Canada before
Oscar Peterson) and Some Hustling This! Taking Jazz to the World,
1914–1929 (on the early history of jazz expatriates) is
a quiet rebuttal of Burns/Marsalis-style "Great Man" jazz
history. The pianist Herbie Nichols (1919–1963) is perhaps modern
jazz's quintessential "neglected genius", and while Miller,
unlike his fellow Canadian Stuart Broomer (see above), tends to keep
his larger themes implicit in his writing, his new biography of Nichols
nonetheless suggests his continued preoccupation with questions about
the ways individual creativity has been nurtured and recognized (or
not) within the jazz scene.
The irony of Nichols' career is that while his deep knowledge of jazz
history and classical music and stylistic adaptability were his making
as a gigging musician, they also ended up – in combination with
his quiet, unassertive demeanour – as something of a handicap
when he tried to assert his own identity as composer and leader. Though
he moved in the circles of New York's bebop intelligentsia and is
the author of one jazz standard ("Serenade", which entered
Billie Holiday's repertoire with her own lyrics as "Lady Sings
the Blues"), Nichols rarely got the chance to perform his own
music in public, instead spending most of his life toiling in obscure
Dixieland and R&B bands. Professionally identified with an older
style of music, but an adventurous modernist himself, he seems to
have been nobody's first-call choice of pianist whatever the style
of music. After ten years of begging Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records
for a record date, he finally got his chance in 1955-56, setting down
three albums' worth of trio sides that contain some of the most unusual
(and hard-to-play) tunes in modern jazz, among them "The Gig",
"2300 Skiddoo", "House Party Starting", and "The
Third World". A further date for Bethlehem followed in 1957,
but the records barely made a ripple among fans and critics, and he
never recorded again as a leader before his early death from leukemia.
 Nichols'
life is sparsely documented; till now, everything known about him
was via a handful of sources, notably A.B. Spellman's Four Lives
in the Bebop Business and the writings of the pianist's most
dedicated protégé, the trombonist Roswell Rudd. Miller
is an experienced sifter of archives, and has done fresh interviews
with Nichols' surviving friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Despite
the difficulties in writing about such an elusive figure, and the
many remaining unanswered questions, Miller has produced a book that
usefully fleshes out one's sense of the man and the music.
One key theme that emerges is Nichols' perpetual outsider status even
among jazz outsiders. This began at birth: his parents were immigrants
from Trinidad, and Miller discusses at some length the cultural tensions
at the time between West Indians and African-Americans. Nichols' musical
talents were evident early on, but his hankerings to make his name
as a classical composer (Prokofiev was his first role model) eventually
came up against the inevitable realization that a classical music
career wasn't an option for a young black man at the time. A voracious
reader, serious chess player, amateur poet and painter (the art is
now lost, but Miller quotes several poems – undistinguished,
alas, but the mix of whimsical Ogden Nashery and darker musings is
revealing), Nichols seems to have felt out of place even among his
jazz peers, not least because his abstemiousness was a mismatch for
the drug-riddled bebop scene. He participated in jam sessions at Minton's
and was part of Floyd "Horsecollar" Williams' band at Monroe's,
bebop's twin birthplaces, but as the pianist noted in an interview,
"I guess my playing was too far out for even [the beboppers],
and most of them felt I couldn't say anything. ... Of course in those
days I must have looked kind of like a professor, with a starched
white shirt. I used to talk about poetry almost as much as I did about
music." Saxophonist Sahib Shihab in 1945 remarked with perplexity
after hearing Nichols play, "You sound like you're in a third
world"; the pianist in turn repurposed the phrase as a personal
motto, eventually using it as the title of one of his best-known pieces.
One sign of his unusual slant on the jazz scene was his brief career
in the 1940s as a music journalist for African-American papers. If
bebop was an insider's music, Nichols put himself in a virtually unprecedented
liminal position by writing about it publicly – it was very
rare for professional jazz musicians at the time to write about the
music. His two articles on Thelonious Monk are fascinating reading,
not least for the way they suggest a respectful but uneasy relationship
between the two men. There's a curious aside in the first –
"(Don't ever praise Monk too much or he'll let you down.)"
– while the second details a visit to Monk's apartment, a friendly
exchange in which Monk invites his guest to sit down at the piano;
at the end, the pianists agree to swap arrangements of their compositions
(though only Nichols fulfills his end of the bargain). Miller quotes
judiciously from the various pieces, whose jaunty, free-associative,
name-dropping prose gives a taste of Nichols' personality and occasionally
offers a phrase worth considering in tandem with his music, as when
he states that the "perfect jazz pianist" must have "a
mad and grandiose sense of the dramatic value of a musical sound and
phrasing."
 Though
the composite portrait of Nichols' personality that emerges here is
clear enough, the details of his personal life remain somewhat obscure.
He lived with his sister and her family in his later years, a situation
that can't have been very happy, since they had no piano; he seems
to have often simply wandered the city, riding endlessly on public
transit or dropping in at friendly lofts and musicians' studios. He
never married, and his lovelife seems to have been often hesitant
or one-sided, judging from Nichols' remarks in liner notes and composition
titles like "It Didn't Happen". Miller infers a brief relationship
with the older pianist/composer Mary Lou Williams (who later debuted
Nichols' compositions, recording four of them in 1951-53) from one
intimate (though very ambiguous) letter addressed to her by Nichols.
Miller's efforts at recovering the period from Nichols' formative
years to his prime, when his native energy, optimism and talent all
shone through, are especially valuable as a corrective to the portrait
in Spellman and Rudd's accounts, which derive from his final years.
The last section of the book is sometimes depressing reading –
at one low point, Nichols tells a fellow pianist: "Music is a
curse" – but I found myself simply admiring the man's ability
to maintain his integrity and creativity even as the gigs degenerated
into a perpetual round of scuffling.
Like many musicians of the bop generation, he seems to have felt both
intrigued and threatened by the coming of free jazz in the 1950s.
There's a revealing anecdote here about his visiting the bassist Buell
Neidlinger's loft and witnessing Cecil Taylor at the piano. Neidlinger:
"The look that came across Herbie's face! You know the look of
a kid who has just gone in the water at the beach and all of a sudden
a 10-foot wave hits him? That was the look: not only of surprise,
but of physical dismay. He realized that once again he had been passed
by." As Steve Swallow (one of the most valuable of the interview
subjects quoted here) puts it: "Ornette had just arrived in New
York, and Cecil was making his mark as well. Players were in a mood
to throw off the shackles rather than deal with the constraints placed
on them by a structure as demanding as what Herbie's tunes provided."
Yet avant-gardists like Neidlinger, Rudd and Archie Shepp were drawn
to Nichols, rehearsing his music with him during his lifetime and
posthumously championing it.
Nichols' contribution to jazz extends well beyond the small body of
recordings: numerous unrecorded compositions have come to light –
Miller puts the total oeuvre at an astonishing 170 tunes,
of which about 120 survive – and an increasing number of musicians
have tackled the challenges of this repertoire, notably Misha Mengelberg
and his ICP associates in Europe, and Frank Kimbrough, Ben Allison
and other members of the Herbie Nichols Project in the US. There's
still more work to be done in recovering Nichols' legacy – I'd
put top priority on getting whoever owns the Bethlehem archives to
issue the six rejected titles from the Love, Gloom, Cash, Love
session – but Miller's biography is an essential step in this
process of recovery and celebration, consolidating and adding to what's
known about one of the most compelling figures in postwar jazz.–ND
Jah
Wobble
THE MEMOIRS OF A GEEZER – MUSIC, MAYHEM, LIFE
Serpent's Tail Books
 A
recent Wire review of a PiL live recording for the John Peel
Show in 1979 claims that it sets a "high water mark" for
what Simon Reynolds has allowed us to call "post-punk".
This writer (and perhaps Simon Reynolds too) might claim that the
likes of The Pop Group and This Heat were far better bellwethers for
the extraordinary potential of the era, but as this almost recklessly
candid memoir explains, PiL's wayward bassist was halfway out of the
door already, and PiL themselves – at least the first, iconoclastic
edition – were coming apart at the seams.
Wobble has been working on this text for some years now, and in conversations
with this writer suggested that the original mss was perhaps twice
or at least half as long again as what we see here. Whatever was omitted
in the editing process – and this fan could have read more about
what transformed the accidental bassist John Wardle (a drunken Sid
Vicious gave him the nickname and it stuck) into the Jah Wobble who
has played with Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit, Bill Laswell, Sinéad
O'Connor, Harry Beckett, U2's The Edge, Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Primal
Scream and others – what we get is the authentic voice, pulling
no punches, even when aimed at himself, and perhaps lining up a few
pompous targets for brisk deflation.
If we don't get a sense of what turned him into the sort of musician
who could earn the admiration of a Bill Laswell, perhaps that's because
it was a largely intuitive process. His first feeling for the instrument,
tantalized by the big bass noise of dub reggae, was feeling himself
inside the sound the instrument made, and amping it up for PiL Version
One and his own projects into a noise that could make buildings, well,
wobble. Admiration and accident led him to the doors of Czukay, Liebezeit,
Budd, Laswell, et al. Given that this text must have been read either
by a libel lawyer or a libel-savvy editor, we can take as non-litigious
his descriptions of the grisly, greed-and-smack-fuelled end to PiL
I, his confessions to (continuing) tearaway behaviour, his alcoholism
and his adoption of a DIY mix of Buddhism and Taoism, and, best of
all, his run-ins with the upper class nitwits he meets in the music
industry. Peter Gabriel, wearing his WOMAD crown, comes across as
a disagreeable member of an arrogant pop squirearchy, while Wobble
skewers Eno, with hilarious understatement: "there are no flies
on Brian Eno".
Nor, it seems, on John Wardle, either, contentedly and creatively
tending his own garden a quarter of a century after PiL I imploded.
The faux Cockney voice (my London streetplan puts Wobble's Stepney
birthplace out of hearing range of St-Mary-le-Bow Church bells in
the City) is at times wearing, but this is Wobble writing in character
for political reasons, and you can't help loving The Cheeky Chappie
Who Could. It might just as easily have been titled Memoirs of
a Survivor.–JG
 By
now you've probably heard about Nikos Veliotis's Cello Powder
project, but in case you haven't, and since I'm getting behind with
my self-imposed reviewing schedule, let me remind you (quoting from
http://www.cellopowder.com): "Cello Powder (The Complete
Works for Cello) is a 'durational' project in two parts,"
Veliotis informs us. For the first part, the recording, "the
sonic range of the cello is divided into 100 quarter tones. Every
quarter tone is recorded for one hour. During this hour volume and
timbre change from soft to very loud plus pure tone to noise and back.
The 100 one hour drones will be mixed into one audio file –
all 100 files will sound simultaneously – called The Complete
Works for Cello and pressed onto a limited amount of CDs."
In performance, "the cello used in the recording will be destroyed
(turned into powder) in front of a live audience while The Complete
Works for Cello is played back through speakers. The powder will
be used to fill jars of approximately 250ml labelled, numbered and
sealed. Every jar will be accompanied by a Complete Works for
Cello CD. The number of discs available will be equal to the
number of jars, the rest of the CDs will be destroyed in front of
the audience."
I would have loved to attend the performance at the INSTAL festival
back in April, and haven't received my little jar yet (not that I
really want one – I feel the same way about Nikos's sawdust
as I do about those relics you find in little display cases in dark
corners of Gothic cathedrals, you know, a lock of the Virgin's hair,
St Patrick's toenail, whatever..), but the CD(R) is one hell of a
trip.
 Anyone
who's heard Nikos Veliotis play live will no doubt have been blown
away by his ability to sustain a double, triple and even quadruple
stop drone using his specially designed BACHbow, and his distinctive
tones have graced several fine albums, both his own (Radial on
Confront remains a favourite) and other people's (check out Headz
CD The Harmless Dust with David Grubbs and, if you can find
a copy, Radu Malfatti's Indiscrete Silences on Bremsstrahlung).
But in these works the pitch field is easy to navigate, and the occasional
slight irregularities of timbre and dynamic originating in the bow
changes add depth and colour. In The Complete Works for Cello
with a 100-note cluster, they're impossible to detect. You've heard
about Wall Noise, I suppose? Wait till you hear this: its sheer overwhelming
power has to be experienced to be believed. Imagine playing all your
Phill Niblock records at the same time and you're still nowhere near.
Even at normal neighbour-friendly volume, this'll have your furniture
moving around the room; crank it up and it sucks all the acoustic
life out of whatever space you happen to be in – try screaming
out yourself and listen to your voice disappear. On (good) headphones
it's the perfect travelling companion, totally blocking out the perennially
annoying sounds of fellow voyagers' mobile phones and leaking iPods,
not to mention all traffic noise (in short, I wouldn't recommend it
if you're riding a bike – I've tried it and it's fucking scary..).
And when it stops, suddenly, it's as if the ground has fallen away
from under your feet. Then, miraculously, the ear, having been blasted
open for a full hour, suddenly discovers the extraordinary world of
sonic detail in the world around us. Curiously, then, Veliotis's 60-minute
wall of sound ends up doing exactly what John Cage wanted his
4'33" of "silence" to achieve.
The little jars of powder are for the collectors out there (they were
going for 60€ a pop, last time I heard), but I guess it's a worthy
cause: Nikos has to pay for his instrument somehow. After all, unless
he finds some rich benefactor, he's unlikely to spend the rest of
his career grinding up cellos. Which makes The Complete Works
for Cello all the more worth seeking out. I do hope he didn't
destroy all those discs. Try and get hold of one, and change your
life.–DW
Günter
Müller
CYM_BOWL
 "Cymbals
and a singing bowl were recorded and processed during 2007-08, mixed,
compiled and mastered in Autumn 2008 at Remisch Lupsingen. All music
and artwork by Günter Müller." The title too, presumably
– looks like Günter has caught the underscore virus from
Norbert Möslang (Lat_Nc, burst_log, Header_Change,
Sound_Shifting.. though the infection probably dates back
to poire_z) – a limp pun worthy of Emanem that does
this subtle and intriguing music something of a disservice. Müller's
music in recent years has been somewhat overlooked by commentators
(a slapped wrist here too – I haven't been able to review everything
of his that's come my way, but I've enjoyed them very much), probably
because there's been so much of it: compilations, boxsets and DVDs
included, he's appeared on more than 80 releases since the turn of
the century. Add to this the fact that, like his occasional playing
partner down the road, Jason Kahn, he's not a musician who sets out
to reinvent the wheel with each subsequent release, preferring instead
to concentrate on a small area of expertise – electronic treatment
of sounds sourced from percussion – and fine-tune what has always
been an impeccable ear for detail. One criticism I've seen levelled
at him is that his music is, to quote the ever watchful Richard Pinnell
once more, "pretty and (god forbid) relaxing." "Pretty"
is a rather damning-with-faint-praise adjective in my book, its adverbial
connotations of "moderately" and "fairly" having
rendered it more ineffectual and shallow than "beautiful"
(it also conjures up images of Julia Roberts and Richard Gere which
are best forgotten), but, leaving God out of it, I have no problem
with "relaxing", provided it doesn't mean "switching
off". Of course, all you have to do of course is listen –
and there's a wealth of detail in these four tracks which, if played
at the correct volume (quite loud), you'll find immensely rewarding.
Alan
Courtis / Jaime Genovart / Christof Kurzmann / Pablo Reche
PALMAR ZÄHLER
 Christof
Kurzmann has been a frequent visitor to Latin America for a while
now, so it's no surprise to see him popping up on clarinet, voice
and lloopp (Klaus Filip's Max/MSP application) in Buenos Aires for
a studio session with locals Genovart ("recording, synth, soft"
– go figure), Reche ("minidisc, ipod, alesis nanoverb,
korg MS10") and Courtis ("homemade violin, contact mic,
mp3, tapes and processing"). Palmar Zähler is a
collection of six elegant, spacious soundscapes, a beautifully engineered
and eminently listenable addition to the discographies of all involved,
in which Kurzmann's plaintive clarinet chalumeau ("Uranio Agreste")
and melancholy vocal détournement of pop classics
– here the Rolling Stones' chestnut "As Tears Go By"
in "Berilio" – serve to counterpoint the rather predictable
swathes of gloomy feedback and digital rustle. The musicians seem
to be more at ease when they allow themselves to stretch out, which
makes one wonder why the decision was taken to edit three longer spans
of music into six smaller tracks – to facilitate radio play,
perhaps? In any case, "Einklang" and "Uranio",
the only two that go beyond the ten-minute mark, are the choice cuts
here.
Jason
Kahn / Asher
PLANES
 If
you're a Jason Kahn fan, the past few months have been cause for celebration
(though perhaps your bank manager might disagree): in addition to
the splendid Vanishing Point on 23five, he's inaugurated
Bill Ashline's Celadon label with Ryu Hankil (Circles), teamed
up with Richard Francis on another new label to watch, Monochrome
Vision, and returned to Creative Sources with Olivia Block, Ulrich
Krieger and Mark Trayle (Timelines Los Angeles) – not
forgetting a pair of fine free downloads, Room to Room at
Compost and Height and Stimmen over at Bagatellen (RIP).
And there's this rematch with Asher – their Vista
was one of the most enjoyable releases on the and/OAR label last year.
If you're expecting me to come down in favour of one particular album,
think again: they're all good. But if you're prepared to take the
time and accept that there aren't likely to be any nasty surprises
(this is Kahn, not Karkowski), Planes' assemblage of pale
analogue synthesizer drone and drizzle and ever-so-discreet field
recordings (birdsong and children's voices are identifiable, but,
as is often the case with Asher's music, much remains mysterious)
is a rewarding listening experience. And a moving one – there's
something melancholy about this music, a late autumn / early winter
feel of grey skies, bare branches and dead leaves trodden underfoot.
Hard to imagine listening to it sitting by a swimming pool on a hot
summer's day with a long cool drink.
Werner
Dafeldecker / Christof Kurzmann / John Tilbury / Stevie Wishart
DAFELDECKER / KURZMANN / TILBURY / WISHART
 I'm
always rather embarrassed when I re-read old reviews at how often
I use the word "lugubrious" to describe the bass playing
of Werner Dafeldecker, but it's still the first adjective that springs
to mind on listening to these 2007 live recordings from Vienna and
Wels, a quartet in which he's joined by Christof Kurzmann (once more),
John Tilbury and Stevie Wishart. It's an intriguing line-up from the
point of view of timbre, combining Tilbury's soft mid-register clusters
(I'll refrain from calling them "Feldmanesque" again, in
the light of the above remark, but, well..), Wishart's acrid whining
hurdy gurdy, and Kurzmann (and Dafeldecker's) laptop hums and fizzes.
Wishart tends to stand out in the mix, not only because of the distinctive
sonority of the hurdy gurdy but because she's the only musician in
the group to fully exploit her instrument's melodic potential, tempting
Tilbury up out of the bottom octave on "Wien 1" to complement
her lines with the odd forlorn arpeggio. The electronics are more
in evidence on the second track, but Wishart's spidery drone still
dominates the musical foreground. In terms of pace and event density
this music is undeniably spacious, but it also feels strangely claustrophobic
at times, as if struggling towards a common ground it knows it can
never reach. Fred Frith once coined the phrase "tense serenity"
for one of his pieces – I think I'll steal that to describe
this. Makes a change from "lugubrious" anyway.–DW
Antoine
Prum
SUNNY'S TIME NOW
Paul Thiltges Distribution
 By
rights, I shouldn't be reviewing this double DVD at all, as I was
involved in it myself (though my activities as "music consultant"
– sounds awfully important, that – consisted merely of
sitting down for an hour and half's chat with drummer Sunny Murray
in the Plug In Studios near his flat in the XIIIème arrondissement
of Paris), but it's such an outstanding piece of work I just can't
resist. Luxembourg-based filmmaker Antoine Prum has produced an essential
documentary, not only for anyone interested in Murray, the man and
the musician, or in free jazz, but in music, full stop.
The secret of Prum's success, apart from his skill as a director and
his passion for the music (both of which go without saying), is quite
simple: money. The budget for his 108-minute film must have been pretty
astronomical, allowing Prum, assistant director Boris Kremer and a
whole film crew with a truckload of gear to follow Murray all over
the place for over a year, accumulating footage of the maestro in
action on no fewer than six occasions: a duo gig with François
Tusques at Le Triton outside Paris, a sextet with Rasul Siddik, Richard
Raux, Sonny Simmons, Harry Swift and Bobby Few at the Atelier Tampon,
a date at London's Red Rose with Tony Bevan, John Edwards and Spring
Heel Jack, a couple of gigs in Vienna with Fritz Novotny and pals,
and, the cherry on the cake, a 12-piece Murray All Stars big band
in Luxembourg with, amongst others, Sabir Mateen, Odean Pope, Grachan
Moncur III and Henry Grimes (the budget for that concert alone would
probably keep you in dope and booze for the rest of your life). Frustratingly
but inevitably, not a lot of this live material actually makes it
to the final film, and none of it makes it to the bonus DVD. Which
means that Antoine, or someone in Luxembourg, is sitting on a goldmine
of archive material. Let's hope more of it sees the light of day before
we all die.
Meanwhile, the film also features interviews with, amongst others,
William Parker, Cecil Taylor (scoop! munching crackers with Tony Oxley!),
Grachan Moncur III (dig the story of Sunny being carried shoulder-high
through the Half Note by Coltrane and Elvin Jones), Fritz Novotny,
As Serious As Your Life author Val Wilmer, The Wire's
Tony Herrington and Edwin Pouncey (not exactly essential, I'd say,
but it gives Murray a bit of added street cred with the "young
punks", as Herrington calls them), Robert Wyatt (a bit too much
of him, to be frank – did we really need the background story
to End Of An Ear in the film proper? there is after all a
39-minute interview on the bonus disc), and a whole host of French
aficionados who got to know Murray and his music back at the end of
the 60s, including pianist François Tusques, Jacques Bisceglia
(who took many of the great BYG Actuel photos), Daniel Caux (who produced
two albums featuring Murray on his legendary Shandar imprint and to
whose memory the film is dedicated), Bernard Loupias and Charlie
Hebdo's Delfeil de Ton, whose anecdotes of the mythic Amougies
festival are truly hilarious.
And of course there's a lot of local colour: shots of punters in the
Red Rose (is it my imagination or did I spot Chris Corsano in the
crowd?), Richard Raux trying (without much success) to get the Luxembourg
big band to rehearse his charts, an amazing couple of minutes
of Henry Grimes on violin (no explanation given, and no explanation
needed – the guy looks totally possessed) and two film extracts,
one (uncredited) from Michael Snow's terrific New York Eye And
Ear Control, the other from William Klein's terrible Mr.
Freedom (Donald Pleasence as Dr. Freedom: "Let me tell you
about the French – they are 50 million mixed-up, sniveling crybabies
who haven't stood on their two feet since Napoleon, and that wasn't
yesterday" – hmm, good job Mr. Prum lives across the border
in a rich tax haven). The Murray interview footage is saved for the
bonus DVD – and as I was technically responsible for that one,
I'll refrain from comment – along with extended interviews with
Wyatt and the late, lamented Daniel Caux and some scorching footage
from the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969.
The great thing about this film is that it doesn't bend over backwards
to trumpet Sunny Murray's musical achievements (the archive film and
comments from those involved do that perfectly well); nor does it
try to view the man and his daily life through rose-coloured spectacles
(witness the stories told by Val Wilmer, Cecil Taylor and Murray's
son Oforie). Make no mistake: despite Edwin Pouncey's assertions that
the future for Murray is whatever he wants it to be, Sunny is still
scuffling to make ends meet. But, as Tony Herrington puts it so charmingly,
he's still a motherfucker, and can still play his ass off –
check out the Red Rose set. It's been a great pleasure and privilege
to know him, and I sincerely hope that this magnificent documentary
brings in enough work to keep him thrashing those cymbals for another
73 years. And an Oscar for Antoine Prum.-DW
Jellie
Dekker
HAN BENNINK HAZENTIJD
Data
 Jellie
Dekker's 70-minute portrait of Dutch drummer Han Bennink goes nicely
with Prum's Sunny Murray film reviewed above. In addition to numerous
quotable interviews with Bennink's playing partners over the years
(pianist Misha Mengelberg is notably absent – one imagines he
was invited to participate and forgot to show up), there's plenty
of splendid footage of the irrepressible drummer in action, both at
home outside Amsterdam (check out his wonderful drum clinic for some
local schoolkids) and abroad. The film crew follows Bennink –
and Mengelberg's ICP Orchestra – to a residency in Banff, Canada,
where Han coaches a snare drum class and knocks his own to the floor
with impish glee, peers into boxes of sand outside people's houses
and even approaches a screeching marmot on all fours in a nearby field.
His ever shiny shoes and encyclopaedic knowledge of flora and fauna
are featured prominently, and his work as an artist and sculptor is
also showcased to great effect, not only the inimitable ICP album
covers but also the Max Ernst-like assemblages of doorknobs and drumsticks.
Dekker's deft montage shows how the distinctive imagery of his artwork
is deeply rooted in Dutch landscape and architecture, with revealing
glimpses inside Bennink's immaculate home and beautifully handwritten
teenage scrapbooks, and a trip out on the local canals in his rowing
boat. (Amusing anecdote: when Bennink, normally remarkable for his
punctuality, failed to show up for a Wire jukebox prior to
his concert with Sonic Youth and Peter Brötzmann at the Cité
de la Musique here in Paris a couple of years ago, we called him up
on his cellphone and heard the gentle splashing of water in the background
– he'd mixed up the dates in his diary and gone fishing!)
I've always preferred Han Bennink the drummer to Bennink the showman
– though anyone who's witnessed his onstage antics will be able
to confirm that they're highly entertaining, and always closely related
to the musical activity at hand – so the archive footage of
him swinging his ass off behind Johnny Griffin in the mid 60s is a
real thrill. There's plenty of live action in the bonus features menu:
a Mengelberg / Bennink duo from 1980 (awesome!), a Toby Delius quartet
cut from Le Dynamo in Paris in 2007 (I was at that gig and it rocked),
two tracks with the ICP Orchestra, an all-too-brief duo with Guus
Janssen and more. When we finally rescheduled that Jukebox, by the
way, Han cycled 50 miles into Amsterdam to do it – not bad for
someone who'd celebrated his 65th birthday that year – so get
on your bike and cycle down to the local emporium and treat yourself
to Hazentijd for Christmas. Or if you're as lazy as Misha,
go to: http://www.subdist.com and order one online.–DW
POST-SOMETHING
OR OTHER
39
Clocks
ZONED
De Stijl
 For
a band as little-discussed (especially on the American side of the
pond) as 39 Clocks, a quick Internet dig results in a hefty preceding
reputation: unsettling Joseph Beuys at Dokumenta in Kassel in the
early 1980s (no surprise, considering how cruddy Beuys' musical
ruminations were), regularly getting kicked out of clubs for damaging
property under a hailstorm of white noise, and the like. Though
their shambolic twang and visual image – two lanky fellows
in dark glasses and dark clothing going by the monikers J.G. 39
and C.H. 39 (Jürgen Gleue and Christian Henjes) – recalls
the Velvets, 39 Clocks erupted out of the Hanover punk scene and
their music was quaintly coined "Psycho Beat." A handful
of LPs and 45s were released between 1981 and 1987 on tiny labels
like Psychotic Promotion, No Fun, and Flickknife (home to some of
Nikki Sudden's projects) before they went their separate ways. Though
a CD retrospective did surface in 1993, The Original Psycho-Beat
(What's So Funny About? Records), a fresh digital look had to wait
until this year. In addition to Zoned's historical overview,
Germany's Bureau B label has also recently reissued their debut
Pain It Dark LP.
The most compelling tracks here might be the extended psychedelic-tinged
jams culled from Subnarcotic (1982), cheap drum machines
and keyboards supporting feedback-drenched guitar jangle and earnest
chants on "Past Tense Hope & Instant Fears on 42nd Street"
in a Messthetic paean to Lou Reed and Doug Yule. "Dom"
recasts night-driving motorik a la Neu! into bleak claustrophobia;
echoes of the most unsettling moments of Suicide are here, too,
but the Clocks' "Dom" is far more severe. "Heat of
Violence" is another nod, albeit clinical in its verbiage,
to the S&M night-world that the Velvets evoked, albeit with
a wash of musical slop. They seem more comfortable with pre-programmed
drums; when a real percussionist sits in to drive the boat, things
can quickly fall apart (as on "New Crime Appeal"). An
entirely different sensibility casts itself on the darkwave chamber
music of "Rainy Night Insanities," cello and clarinet
doing their best surly Third Ear Band raga to accompany occasional
vocal missives and keyboard drone.
The six tracks represented from Pain It Dark are perhaps
a little more "primitive" than those on Subnarcotic,
and the recording quality is rougher. "39 Explosion Heats"
melds fuzzy jangle and slink with an obnoxious canned woodblock
beat that's oddly compelling; "Psycho Beat" is a soiled,
home-recorded variant on Dusseldorf pop minimalism whose lyric snippets
reference "sunglassed hipsters in the room, crawling out of
sewers" (that might give you an idea where their minds were).
Rüdiger Klose's drumming on "Test the Beat" and "Shake
the Hippie," provides an unwavering dry crack that results
in the Clocks' most straightforward rock tunes, amazingly without
a hint of disaster. The production values of their 1987 swan song,
13 More Protest Songs, are a slight affront – "My
Tears Will Drown the World" is a Jacobites-esque busker accompanied
by air raid sirens and marching jack-boots, while "You Can't
Count the Bombs" is the Clocks' stab at bar rock – but
ultimately, these later tracks are strong if dated efforts. If anything,
Zoned whets the appetite for reissues of the entire catalog,
as scouring the Internet rarities marketplace will quickly empty
your wallet.–CA
Black
To Comm
ALPHABET 1968
Type
 Hamburg-based
Dekorder head honcho Marc Richter's latest offering under the Black
To Comm moniker has enjoyed some well-deserved publicity lately,
thanks presumably to Richter's description of its ten tracks as
more song-based than his earlier more drone-inflected work, including
a full-page pullout review in The Wire, no less. Not surprising
perhaps since The Wire seems hell bent on redefining (resurrecting?)
the idea of the pop song, though the term doesn't mean much to me
any more, at least not in the area of music this magazine covers,
and hasn't done for nearly two decades. Then again, you could argue
that a song doesn't need lyrics – we can look as far back
as Mendelssohn nearly two hundred years ago to back up that hypothesis
– and it certainly doesn't need more than one chord, if that
(examples too numerous to mention). Whatever you want to call them,
these pieces are beautifully crafted and eminently accessible –
you can even hum along to its dreamy pianos ("Jonathan")
and tinkling metallophones ("Trapez"), so I guess they
could qualify as songs after all – with discreet nods to everything
from 1980s grand pianola minimalism ("Musik für alle")
to gamelan ("Rauschen"), from the enchanted woods of Wolfgang
Voigt (the veiled backbeat of "Forst") to Erik Satie (there's
a distinct feeling of Gymnopédie to the closing
"Hotel Freund"). It's lovely stuff, check it out.–DW
Blues
Control
LOCAL FLAVOR
Siltbreeze
 How
deliciously contrary that Local Flavor, the third full-length
record from American duo Blues Control, doesn't have any sense of
regional specificity. In the final throes of preparing for a summer
European tour – and shortly afterwards, a two month-long trek
across the United States – Lea Cho and Russ Waterhouse decided
to relocate from Queens, New York, where they had resided for over
a decade, to Richmond, Virginia, where Cho grew up. Geographically
and temporally ambiguous, Local Flavor is a rich document
of that transition.
The record benefits from its relatively speedy completion. Released
in July on the Philadelphia noise-rock label Siltbreeze, it's the
purest distillation yet of Blues Control's increasingly captivating
space-jam aesthetic. They've had a few years to refine their style:
the eponymous debut LP for Holy Mountain (2007), with its amorphous
cat scratches of sound, contorted itself into a squiggle on a blank
piece of paper. Their follow-up, Puff (Woodsist), was dotted
with leitmotifs and contained by circular logic, sculpted like a glimmering
ring falling into oblivion. Yet the terrain of Local Flavor
plays like a single straight line – a 24-hour romp into the
subversive mutterings of their guitar frets and junkyard players –
and the linearity of this approach suits them well.
Local Flavor is roughly divided in half – daylight
omniscience ("Good Morning," "Rest on Water")
and nighttime creeps ("Tangier," "On Through the Night").
On the 1920s Weimar-esque cabaret manqué "Good Morning,"
Kurt Vile takes what may be his first unintentional Kurt Weill turn
with a guest trumpet appearance (one of Vile's Violators, Jesse Trbovich,
guests on sax). The opening track is barely a song, more like a blazing,
maximalist vamp that bleats fiercely and then fades into the ether
of "Rest on Water." A saxophone cleverly approximates the
swells and pooling of water (Trbovich again), while undistorted Kay
Gardener-esque arpeggios burble around swaths of drone like hives
of drugged bees.
Cho and Waterhouse are as willfully anachronistic as they come, a
tricky game in the current glut of lo-fi basement acts. But rather
than appearing trendy, the result is a uniquely organic spectrum that
radiates Tangerine Dream and ZZ Top alike. Crude drum machines blare
alongside reverberating handheld percussion, while Waterhouse’s
penchant for the leering guitar raunch of the 1980s aligns nicely
with Cho’s hazy analog synth. The deviant Komische-conga splay
of "Tangier" is pure magic – and potentially one of
the catchiest non-songs of the year – and should be erected
in the BC singles pantheon alongside "Boiled Peanuts" and
"Always on Time."
A vertiginous, space-prog suite of the highest order, closer "Through
the Night" is the album’s eeriest moment. As Cho's cathedral
organs coalesce into a pitchbending drone – not unlike the roaring
of a jet engine or, say, Morton Feldman by way of Gary Numan –
the Doppler Effect dread is barely tolerable. Local Flavor is
the aural rendering of hypnagogia, the trembling negative spaces that
dance from wakefulness to sleep, yet the way Blues Control traverses
the various states of consciousness is crystal clear.–NP
Cardboard
Sax / Wasteland Jazz Unit
Community College Records
 Due
in no small part to the influence of Wolf Eyes, woodwind instruments
are making significant contributions to contemporary American Noise.
In the Midwest, two of its most promising acts, Wasteland Jazz Unit
and the John Olson-helmed Cardboard Sax, have spat out a split LP
on the Ohio-based Community College Records, home also to Being, Body
Collector, Swamp Horse and Plasmic Formations. An abrasive, hermetic
vision of the possibilities of the saxophone (an instrument at which
John Olson is no slouch), the record's single-mindedness rewards meditative
listeners.
Comprising Olson, Daniel Dlugosielski and Holly Young, Cardboard Sax’s
A side contribution is their first release outside of American Tapes,
and their debut on Community College. Throughout, saxophones and electronics
navigate a wintry terrain devoid of structure or predictable flow.
To an inattentive listener the skeletal piece might feel incomplete,
maybe one-dimensional, but despite its harsh textures, it's quite
atmospheric for Olson (the post-apocalyptic haze of Dead Machines,
his side project with wife Tovah, also comes close). Restraint nudges
feelings of dread, loss and solitude to the fore: it's frequently
quite scary, with howling winds, lost whale song and whistling gales
punctuated by frigid interference like a lonesome radio tower struggling
for a signal in Arctic tundra. Those seeking the hypnotic industrial
frenzy of Wolf Eyes are advised to look elsewhere.
Wasteland Jazz Unit, the Cincinnati-based duo of Jon Lorenz and John
Rich, think more about unrelenting positive space than the heavy-quiet
dynamic of the A side. Drawing from euphoric free jazz as much as
discomforting noise, their 15-minute piece (both tracks are untitled,
as is the LP itself) shoots up obliterating walls of feedback like
sulfuric geysers between the morphing pools of amplified sax and clarinet
damage. It's far more amorphous and unvaried dynamically than the
A side. Vaguely abusive, dense and all-consuming, good luck clearing
your head long enough to figure out why you like it so much.–NP
David
Daniell / Doug McCombs
SYCAMORE
Thrill Jockey
 It's
fitting that guitarists David Daniell (San Agustin) and Doug McCombs
(Eleventh Dream Day, Brokeback, Tortoise), who met in 2006 during
a tour as part of Rhys Chatham's scaled-down guitar army, would find
a collaborative calling somewhere in the landscape of instrumental
art rock. Both players have perfected a clean sense of continental
drift in their respective outfits. Tortoise, while likened to an endless
rhythm section, really owes much of its textural deftness to McCombs'
sharp tone and inquisitive pacing. San Agustin, while on the surface
a dust-blown, improvisatory space-rock outfit, piles on atmospheres
until they exert force and motion. Sycamore is the logical
extension of both approaches. Though the central focus is the leaders'
guitars and electronics, the four improvisations here are augmented
by light, loose percussion from fellow Chicagoans Frank Rosaly, John
Herndon and Steven Hess.
The
active soundscapes here recall San Agustin, Brokeback, and Bundy Brown's
Directions in Music (a beautiful and underrated entry in
the post-rock canon). A sense of the wide-open is key – a pace
that finds McCombs and Daniell inextricably paired across vast landscapes,
knit together by rhythms and soft electronics. The fifteen-minute
"Vejer de la Frontera" finds them in gauzy, hanging counterpoint,
McCombs slowly peeling back thick groups of notes as Daniell's trebly
flecks goad from afar. Hess and Herndon jettison the expected motorik
for organic, gradual interplay, lobbing volleys in steady, deliberate
motion. The washes that appear midway through threaten to steamroller
the landscape, but the musicians' particulate density ensures that
the thread-count, while steadily increasing, remains distinct. The
lush opening of "Bursera" is almost symphonic: taut additive
stammers and skitters enveloped by organ and crystalline daubs, while
Rosaly adds overlapping detail. A burst of feedback and junkpile percussion
is a brief reminder of Daniell and McCombs' rock background. But where
Sycamore really shines is in its insistent clarity.–CA
Heavy
Winged
WAKING, SHAKING
Aurora Borealis
 Since
the group's inception in 2004, Heavy Winged have been steadily popping
out records for cultish American labels like Not Not Fun and Three
Lobed. Their last full-length, the acclaimed Alive In My Mouth,
lurched between aggressive cave rock and metallic drone. Waking,
Shaking, the trio's most recent LP and first for British noise
and metal imprint Aurora Borealis (vinyl only, and in an edition of
500) is one of their warmest and most unrestrained works yet, unfurling
over 45 minutes and divided into two instrumental pieces, "Tidal
Blackness" and "Morning Flesh." Together, they represent
a glimpse into the thorny, tangled sprawl of Heavy Winged's acid-forest
noise.
Like many of their peers, improvisation is the spark and seed at the
center of Heavy Winged's tundra-drone discourse. But Heavy Winged
doesn't rely on the formal freedoms of improv, and happily forego
noise clichés for a sense of willful expansion and controlled
exploration. Fragments are built, and then dismembered; themes are
inspected, and then abandoned. Psychedelia, Krautrock, No Wave skronk,
instrumental post-rock, free jazz, and industrial noise ring around
Heavy Winged like Stonehenge bedfellows, and Waking, Shaking
at its highest crest summons a supreme elemental flow. It's startling
how organically the album unfolds.
The trio's set-up is straightforward: Unstructured and wonderfully
loose drums (Jed Bindeman) clatter behind dense guitar (Ryan Hebert)
and bass drone (Brady Sansone). But Waking, Shaking has an
intricacy and thoughtfulness that evades other improv-driven musicians.
In "Tidal Blackness," buried melodies lurk within a whistling
grove, while barely recognizable guitar moans whip around like the
wind, beckoning like a siren call. Despite the drums, the atmosphere
is strangely ambient, but as the 23-minute track develops, disorientation
mutates into devastation, ending with a compelling clash of textures:
imagine hordes of cicadas flying through clattering, popcorning shingles,
a sequel to Sonic Youth's rain on tin. It's a magical moment.
"Morning Flesh" is weakened by a passage of earnest guitar
riffage that drifts into questionable Metal territory. The appropriation
of those tropes in the context of Aurora Borealis would be forgivable
if we didn't know that both Sansone and Hebert can do far more intriguing
tricks with stringed instruments. It's not nihilistic, but it feels
more than a little hollow, and thankfully doesn't last, a Sightings
or Mouthus-worthy matte-finish clangor reigning until the track grinds
to a halt with the slow beep of a heart rate monitor. Heavy stuff,
indeed.–NP
Mouthus
DIVISIONALS
Ecstatic Peace!
 As
listeners press pause to re-evaluate 2009, many will pin Mouthus'
latest LP, Divisionals, as one of the finest works of the
year, and a fine addition to their extensive catalog, which includes
releases on nearly every contemporary noise label of worth, including
Three Lobed, Troubleman Unlimited, Important, No Fun, Load and their
own microlabel, Our Mouth Productions. It's the Brooklyn-and-Baltimore-based
duo's second full-length LP for Ecstatic Peace!, the boutique label
run by Noise's Vito Corleone, Thurston Moore, who discovered the pair
in the roaring squalor of one of their shows on the NYC club circuit.
"He came to see us in this basement in Bushwick," recalls
drummer Nate Nelson. "The ceiling was only about seven feet high
and he really had to stoop down there. There was a sewage problem,
and there was shit coming out of the floor – toilet paper and
puddles."
Mouthus' rising star in the last five years has led to a predictable
fetishization of their subway clatter and fetid drone, but they plow
through their popularity like moles, unseeing, burrowing ever deeper
into the nasty sonic dirt the world has yet to hear. Unremittingly
loud and unapologetically brutal, there's also a foreign grace at
play here, perhaps residue from their 2007 psyche-rock masterwork,
Saw A Halo (Load), which explored the relationship between
traditional songcraft and abstraction with a sensitivity not seen
before.
On Divisionals' four tracks ("The Duration Myth,"
"Rotary Sends," "In the Erase," "Telescoped
Histories") Nelson continues to clarify his percussion arrhythmia
with live electronic manipulation, while guitarist Brian Sullivan
incorporates processed vocal chants, plucked bass lines and indecipherable
loops into his heady drones as if he were standing before a loom,
shuttle in hand. On "The Duration Myth," the percussion
can be heard remotely, like doors being slammed four floors away.
Nelson is performing aural construction work, pounding nails into
a wall, hammering a building into existence: it's not destruction,
but creation. As heavy breath exhales through gas masks at the start
of "In The Erase," we're in more toxic industrial terrain,
with sighing whistles, bittersweet bells and steam engine clouds cutting
through fog like beams from a lighthouse.
For better or for worse, Nelson and Sullivan's approach to music has
become increasingly deterministic. Seemingly randomly generated elements
are actually governed by a set of rules, mathematical processes known
to them, and secret from us. The fried drone can get occasionally
ponderous – at worst, frustratingly opaque – but the adherence
to their vision is almost monastic. As a listener, the game is sifting
through the layers of abstraction in hopes of unearthing possible
narrative. To quote Wallace Stegner: "He does not have to know,
with his conscious mind, exactly what he is doing. He is fishing in
obscure depths, he is a dealer in mysteries, a witch doctor not always
easy with the forces he evokes but acutely aware of them while they
are present." It's exhausting, but shouldn't it be?–NP
Nine
Rain
QUE VIVA MEXICO!
Independent Recordings
 Although
the two have only ever been seen together live in their native Mexico,
Nine Rain's imagined soundtrack for Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished
1930 film could, with luck, be lashed together with its subject by
juggling the existing fragments of the film available on YouTube with
this CD, as some pieces are virtually cued for specific scenes. (If
you've noticed the absence of the Spanish opening inverted exclamation
mark in the CD title, the film doesn't have it either.) Otherwise,
whether you know the film or not, this works as a ghost soundtrack:
you have to imagine the movie. Saxophonist Steven Brown has said that
he would like to include more jazz and improvisation in his work,
and this is the jazziest – and freest – Nine Rain recording
to date, perhaps because here sound has to accompany vision. The wilder
exoticisms of earlier Nine Rain recordings give way to more sombre
moods, perhaps in reflection of the text at hand (Eisenstein's rather
Orientalist reading of Mexico as a "kingdom of death", with
Day of the Dead fiestas, bullfights, travelogues and the film's lengthy
"Maguey" revenge tragedy section), although some feistier
material is shipped in with earlier Nine Rain pieces such as "Rainy
Jaranero" and "Alex's Torture Song". Tracks such as
"Mexico Woke Up" have uncanny unintended political resonance
with the film, but Nine Rain's lyrical and poignant contribution can
work equally well as a stand-alone CD.–JG
NSBSP2
NO VICTORIA
Bimbo Tower
 This
riotously raw double album documents a memorable encounter between
the Canadian free music pioneers of the Nihilist Spasm Band and the
French group Sun Plexus 2, and comes with hilariously awful liner
notes attributed to one Bruce Lee Galanter (yep, there's only one
"l" there, lest you fall into the trap of believing that
the Downtown Music Gallery's indefatigable boss could have written
anything so horrendous), which describes with what Robert Wyatt once
called "painful sincerity" the Frenchmen's intestinal problems
on the way to the gig ("they have to stop every 50 kilometer
because have piss and poo problem particularly Sun Plexus 2 because
of infamous canadien food they make alot of diarrhoea inside the van"
etc. etc.). Just as well they talk about that, as the music is, unsurprisingly,
impossible to describe. NSB have been confounding expectations for
more than four decades already, not so much breaking down as blithely
ignoring any supposed barriers between high and low art, good and
bad music, technical expertise and utter ineptitude, and will, it
seems, go on doing so until they're all dead. "As long as you're
angry, you're alive. When you stop being angry, you're dead!"
intones Bill Exley on "Angry Old Men" – well, quite.
When there's no longer anything to get angry about, there's no point
going on, and there's plenty here to raise your hackles, even if you're
not Bruce Lee Gallanter.–DW
Rodrigo
Amado / Kent Kessler / Paal Nilssen-Love
THE ABSTRACT TRUTH
European Echoes
Rodrigo
Amado / Miguel Mira / Gabriel Ferrandini
MOTION TRIO
European Echoes
Does
an aficionado of jazz need another tenor trio recording? If it's to
hear something that expands the boundaries of the genre, the answer
to that would probably be "No", but if the aim is to discover
an interesting new voice in a setting that's proven ideal for showcasing
improvisational prowess, these two discs on the Portuguese saxophonist's
label might be for you.
 The
Abstract Truth, its title a homage to the paintings of Giorgio
De Chirico, is the follow-up to the live Teatro 2004 recording
that marked the first time the trio played together. Listeners familiar
with Kessler and Nilssen-Love's playing in Ken Vandermark's orbit
shouldn't be surprised that they're very simpatico to a sax player
who wends his way between rhythmic motifs. But that's only part of
the story; Amado has a big warm sound, like Sonny Rollins in its fill-up-the-room
expansiveness in the lower register, with huge smeary legato passages.
He doesn't resemble Vandermark as much as his associate Dave Rempis
in terms of fluidity, but even that doesn't paint the complete picture.
The opening cut, "Intro/The Red Tower", begins with Nilssen-Love
laying down a fragmented beat as Amado enters with trills and Kessler
bows away. Gradually the trills morph into rhythmic lines as the drums
and bass play a charging rockish beat until the sax drops out, leaving
Kessler and Nilssen-Love to wind things down to a loping pace at which
point Rodrigo returns to bring things to a satisfying close. Lots
going on in a 4'42" cut. The longest of the eight songs is just
7'15" but they all contain enough shifts and turns to keep the
listener engaged. The real treat is on "Universe Unmasked"
when Amado breaks out the baritone sax, plumbing the depths of the
big horn as if determined to break through to bass saxophone territory
as Kessler and Nilssen-Love urge him on in a scintillating performance.
 Motion
Trio gets off to a rousing start with "Language Call"
as drummer Gabriel Ferrandini lends a sparser but effective backing
with nimble cellist Miguel Mira. The lighter sound of the cello seems
to dial back Amado's tenor approach while still producing a feeling
of barely contained tension, although he still cuts loose at the beginning
of "Testify!" before a herky-jerky rhythmic interlude interrupts
the momentum. "Radical Leaves" features an extended duet
of rapidfire tenor lines against cello scrapings, with Amado never
straying far away from deceptively familiar motifs. The remaining
cuts seem more appropriate to an album with "abstract" in
the title. Both of these discs are easy to recommend to anyone wanting
to hear a new voice in a familiar setting; if forced to choose between
the two, the baritone cut gives the edge to The Abstract Truth.–SG
Luigi
Archetti / Bo Wiget
LOW TIDE DIGITALS III
Rune Grammofon
 Luigi
Archetti, born in the Italian city of Brescia but long resident in
Switzerland, and Norwegian Bo Wiget have arrived at the creative summit
of their partnership with the third instalment of the Low
Tide Digitals series. Like previous chapters, the record
explores the fertile grounds connecting the purity of acoustic instruments
(cello for Wiget, guitar and mandolin for Archetti, whose surname
ironically translates as "little bows") with the superimposition
of now inhospitable, now ear-cuddling landscapes making restrained
use of electronics, handled by both artists. The basic principles
behind these investigations are clearly audible: movement is scarce,
weak tranquillity suddenly destabilized by sepulchral hums and hollow
spaces conscientiously probed in partially inimical atmospheres, with
occasional stabbing distortion and dissonance woven in, as if Archetti
and Wiget wanted us to appreciate their angelic creature's evil side.
When these worlds are properly intertwined – as in the Eno-meets-lowercase
broken silences of "Stück 26", the ravishingly undressed
grace of the skeletal masterpiece "Stück 27", the shifting
drones of "Stück 31" and the glorious ascension of
"Stück 37" – we feel sheltered, privileged even.–MR
Samuel
Blaser Quartet
PIECES OF OLD SKY
Clean Feed
 Pieces
of Old Sky marks the second disc in barely as many years by trombonist
Samuel Blaser's quartet. The only returning member is bassist Thomas
Morgan; Blaser is joined on these seven original compositions by percussionist
Tyshawn Sorey and guitarist Todd Neufeld. The trombonist's pedigree
is strong – Swiss-born and working in both Brooklyn and Berlin,
he's won the Benny Golson and J.J. Johnson prizes and occupied trombone
chairs in the European Radio Big Band and the Vienna Art Orchestra.
One would assume that the natural choice following those exploits
would be to assemble a top-rank contemporary hardbop group and play
the shit out of some Jazztet-like charts. Not so Blaser; in addition
to this staunchly open (albeit not "free") quartet, he's
also released a disc of extended solo playing in the tradition of
'bone abusers like Paul Rutherford and Günter Christmann, and
performed in duo with veteran Swiss drummer Pierre Favre. Blaser's
tone is crisp and clean, but he has a strong command of multiphonics
and a tendency to work long, low tones like a bass trombonist or tubaist.
Neufeld's guitar playing here has a dustbowl sensibility suggesting
filmic folk-rock, and stands in stark relief to the slush and poise
of the leader's phrasing; the results recall the grainy distance of
the Nels Cline Singers. The lengthy title piece offers a field of
mournful strums, mallet wash and loose pizzicato outlines, a windblown
landscape that sets the stage for an oddly precise bluesiness. Following
the leader's cleaned-up "Everywhere"-like statement, guitar
and bass draw around each other, teasing out Spanish-tinged moments
and borough skitter. Sorey's suspensions and bombs are placed with
muscular exactitude, a grand component of this modern tone poem. Blaser's
sound is totally his own, rich and deep and with a curiously Latinate
musk; his heady and romantic storytelling fills in the atmospheric
holes left by the ensemble.
"Red Hook" is given a knotty run-through, before Sorey and
Morgan untie those knots and make new ones of their own. Sorey is
one of those drummers who changes moods with such deftness and speed
that one might miss the initial structure of an idea, since it's quickly
replaced by its reconfigurations. All that technique might be tiring
if it weren't part of a larger purpose, and the duet he performs with
Blaser midway through is full of such natural, song-like flutter that
mere "exactitude" doesn't matter. "Mandala" returns
to the approach of the opener, blues-rock flecks fleshed out with
a bit of Mangelsdorff growl that falls away into spare, front-porch
detail. Unlike a lot of young upstarts with jazz chops to spare, Blaser
is equally convincing working in more exploratory, collectivist forms
of improvisation, and the results on Pieces of Old Sky are
thoroughly convincing.–CA
John
Blum
WHO BEGAT EYE
Konnex
 It's
been seven years since pianist John Blum's solo debut Naked Mirror
on the late, lamented Drimala label, and he doesn't sound better.
Not better as a pianist, I hasten to add – technically,
Who Begat Eye is pretty outstanding (though a more resonant
acoustic and a less tinny instrument would have done the music more
justice, in my opinion) – but better as in less anguished, less
stressed-out. His ferocious assault on the keyboard reminds me of
that old Gerard Hoffnung cartoon entitled "Boulez" that
showed a pianist standing triumphantly above the wreckage of a grand
piano, whip in hand. There are vestiges of long lost jazz piano tradition
in there – a fondness for a kind of crazy stride, sort of James
P. Johnson meets Giuseppe Logan, and some florid right-hand runs reveal
distance traces of bebop – but by and large the attack is relentless
and exhausting, fingers bunched together in fury (seconds and thirds
abound, but you won't hear many sevenths and octaves). Maybe I'm reading
this all wrong and it's a joyous, life-affirming experience, or, as
Steve Dalachinsky says in his liners, "a celestial bridge we
all must cross in order to beget music in its purest and most radical
form" – but the unremitting intensity is, though easy to
admire, hard to love.–DW
Lester
Bowie
ALL THE NUMBERS
Nessa
 With
Chuck Nessa's monumental (and essential) box set The Art Ensemble
– 1967/1968 out of print, it's great to see that Nessa
is now reissuing the core albums it contains. First up was Congliptious,
credited to The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. Now comes All the
Numbers, which documents the full sessions originally released
as Numbers 1 and 2, which were recorded over two days in
August, 1967. While credited to Lester Bowie (Mitchell was under contract
to Delmark at the time), this was the first commercially released
recording of the group soon to be known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
The original LP was planned to document two pieces, each around 22
minutes in length. "Number 1," a trio improvisation with
Bowie, Mitchell, and Malachi Favors, clocked in at just over 25 minutes.
But during the quartet session that added in Joseph Jarman, the group
performed a brilliant take of "Number 2," a Mitchell composition,
which ended after just 14 minutes. After a break, the group convened
for a wild free improvisation that led in to a reading of Mitchell's
form. For the LP, Nessa and crew decided to edit the two takes together
and this became the second side of the release. Here, as on the box
set, the full takes are presented in their entirety along with a trio
reading of "Number 2" an interrupted alternate quartet take,
and a short warm up.
The trio collective improvisation is the embodiment of improvisation
as collective ritual and discovery, building from magisterial long
tones in theatrical crescendos featuring Bowie's trumpet blasts and
smears, Mitchell's sputtering flute and insistent alto, and Favors'
propulsive bass, along with vocal interjections and crashing cascades
of percussion, cymbals, gongs, harmonica, and kazoo. Bowie even throws
in some sweet ballad playing for good measure. The multiple takes
of Mitchell's "Number 2" provide an opportunity to hear
how the reed player's structuralism served as launching pad for spontaneous
interplay, biting humor and loose melodic invention. The trio has
a potent directness, but with the addition of Jarman's reedy bassoon
yawp and multiple reeds, things are taken to a different level. This
is particularly evident on the opening furor of the final take, a
blaze of barely-contained energy. Forty years after its initial release,
it is astonishing how fresh and vital this still sounds.–MRo
Peter
Brötzmann
LOST & FOUND
FMP
 The
cover shows a bulging burlap bag lying at the edge of the seashore
like flotsam, though perhaps appropriately it also has a distinct
resemblance to a severed tongue. Something's been lost, anyway, and
something found, evidently – think of the title as a succinct
way of describing the way this music swings between grotesque melancholy
and sullen ecstasy. Unlike Brötzmann's previous solo discs, this
one was recorded in concert; the austere exhibition of chunks of stylized
aggression that typified a studio disc like No Nothing is
replaced here with a freewheeling approach that can slip into frowsy
serenades or fall into lengthy chains of scribbles that suspend narrative
direction for a kind of frenzied tailchasing. On the tarogato feature
"Universal Madness" the impression is of watching a moth
beat itself against a lampshade: a seemingly endless series of frenzied,
fluttering phrases, each lasting as long as a breath but articulated
with disconcerting on/off abruptness. The other tracks weave such
self-perpetuating intensities in and out of actual rough-hewn melodies,
including some elemental blues choruses on "Lost & Found"
(on clarinet) and a thoroughly unexpected (and uncredited) reading
of Monk's "Crepuscule with Nellie" (tenor sax). It's wonderfully
human music, at times forbiddingly obsessive in its musical fixations
while at others (like the brief closer, "Turmoil") verging
on total distractability, and Brötzmann's throaty sound conveys
an emotional range rarely touched on in jazz of any kind, from the
downcast to the sluggish to the outraged.–ND
Anthony
Braxton / Joëlle Léandre
DUO (HEIDELBERG LOPPEM) 2007
Leo
 It
seems hard to believe that Anthony Braxton and Joëlle Léandre
had only performed together once before they made this live recording,
since they have much in common. (That was back in 1988 as part of
a Braxton sextet performance at the Victoriaville Festival, documented
on Ensemble (Victoriaville) 1988.) Both are consummate listeners,
constantly seeking out new settings in which to develop an encyclopedic
strategy toward music making that encompasses through-composition,
jazz tradition, and an open approach to improvisation. They've also
both defined seminal improvisational languages which have influenced
countless musicians.
This 2CD set contains two extended improvisations and a short encore
captured at the Heidelberg Café in Loppem, Belgium in the Spring
of 2007. The pair waste no time, diving in with Braxton's alto flurries
over Léandre's churning bowed bass. Their distinctive voices
come through at once, with the saxophonist's meticulous phrasing and
melodic lines gelling perfectly with Léandre's rich timbre
and formidable sense of line and pace. Braxton switches between sopranino,
soprano, alto saxophones and contrabass clarinet like a pianist jumping
across the octaves of a keyboard, and Léandre responds with
dark tones, richly resonant arco and forceful pizzicato, adding occasional
vocal colorations to extend the collective palette. The music is freely
improvised, but melodic motifs are woven in to serve as structural
guideposts throughout, with the structural mastery that can only come
from improvisers of this caliber. Anthony Braxton has always been
somewhat reticent about free improvisation, but when he does choose
to play free, he's astute in his choice of partners, particularly
in duos. This meeting with Joëlle Léandre is amongst his
best in that vein.–MRo
Nicholas
Christian / Matt Milton / Eddie Prévost / Bechir Saade
A CHURCH IS ONLY SACRED TO BELIEVERS
Al Maslakh
 Eddie
Prévost seems to enjoy writing about what he does almost as
much as he enjoys doing it, and several recent releases, not only
those on his own Matchless imprint, have come with copious and informative
liner notes, this quartet outing on the splendid Lebanese Al Maslakh
label with bassist Nicholas Christian, violinist Matt Milton and bass
clarinettist Bechir Saade (the Lebanese connection) being no exception.
Prévost's text gives reviewers like me (and others who enjoy
quoting liner notes and press releases – call it laziness if
you like, but I've learnt more about music from reading the backs
of albums than I ever did in 14 years of music school) plenty to get
their teeth into: in this case it tells the story of the genesis of
his Friday night workshop, that hotbed of activity and breeding ground
for new talent – including these musicians – in the already
fertile field of improvised music in London, of whose importance much
has been made lately.
"If it is becoming 'a church' (and co-incidentally the weekly
London workshop takes place in the school room of a Welsh chapel)",
the percussionist writes, "then it is extremely open and tolerant
of all approaches. All it seems to abhor is unthinking responses and
intolerance itself." Fair comment, though I do detect in this
release – and in the series of CDR snapshots of the new London
scene (I'll refrain from capitalising the "new".. we already
had New London Silence and that didn't last too long) that Simon Reynell's
Another Timbre released earlier this year – an emerging consensus,
a search for a lingua franca. The emphasis is placed firmly
on overall group sound, on fitting in, on being part of one of those
communities whose virtues Eddie extols in No Sound Is Innocent
and Minute Particulars, rather than in asserting an individual
point of view.
I've recently been listening again, for the first time in years, to
Stockhausen's Aus den Sieben Tagen cycle (prompted to do
so by Richard Barrett's description of it in these pages as "one
of the pinnacles of achievement in improvised music"), that rather
notorious collection of hippy-trippy verbal scores dating from 1968
(when else?), and was pleasantly surprised by Kommunion the
other day during a quiet lunch break at work. One of the instructions
for that particular piece is "play or sing a vibration in the
rhythm of the molecules of one your fellow players", but the
contrast between the Stockhausen ensemble's 1969 recording and the
communal activity of A Church, which, as alphabetical order
would have it, was cued up to play right after it on the trusty mp3
player, was striking. While I have no reason to suspect that the members
of Karlheinz's band weren't trying to follow his instructions as faithfully
as possible (!), there's still a clear sense of individuals resolving
(or not) their differences, a real musical argument, which is harder
to find in Eddie's congregation. Not that Church is risk-free,
pale and unadventurous – far from it: much of its texture is
uncompromisingly rough – but one longs for more in the way of
friction than Milton's scratches and Prévost's scraped cymbals.
I know it's dreadfully passé and old hat these days
to wax nostalgic over real notes, but the most aurally satisfying
moments on this disc occur when pitch – either high-end, from
the bowed metal, or low-end, from Christian's Scelsi-like bass –
asserts itself, imposing a harmonic identity on proceedings and reining
in Milton and Saade's coarser sonorities. At such moments one really
feels the presence of a fifth member of the group: the group itself.
You might call it playing in the rhythm of each other's molecules.–DW
Cremaster
NORANTA GRAUS A L'ESQUERRA
Monotype
 It's
been a while since Ferran Fages ("feedback mixing board, pick-ups")
and Alfredo Costa Monteiro ("objects on electric guitar")
graced us with a Cremaster album – was the last one really as
long ago as 2003? (Infra, on Antifrost) – but these
four splendid slabs of raw electronic power and howling feedback,
recorded between 2004 and last year and hammered into shape this summer,
are solid proof that they haven't lost their touch. Where to draw
the line between Noise and EAI is a question that's preoccupied many
of us for a while now, and recent outings by the likes of Carlos Giffoni
and John Wiese are making it ever harder to answer; Cremaster discs
usually get filed away under "EAI" – though not in
my house, where they sit in a teetering pile of things loosely referred
to as "electronica" – but there's no reason why these
lads shouldn't be tearing it up at No Fun next year. Listening, Carlos?
Check it out!–DW
Zé
Eduardo Unit
A JAZZAR – LIVE IN CAPUCHOS
Clean Feed
 The
trio of bassist-composer Zé Eduardo, drummer Bruno Pedroso
and powerhouse tenorman Jesús Santandreu has been active on
the Iberian scene for the better part of a decade, primarily as a
vehicle for the leader's arrangements of folk and popular song into
open improvisational settings. Their Clean Feed debut, A Jazzar
no Zeca (2002), was a setting of the anti-fascist songs of José
Afonso; other recordings have focused on Portuguese cinema, and Live
in Capuchos retains the cinematic tradition by including themes
from cartoons The Simpsons and Noddy. I'll confess
a slight gag reflex was triggered by seeing Danny Elfman's tune in
the setlist, but it's rendered barely recognizable across the track's
seven minutes, Santandreu digging into his Newk/Trane roots in a rollicking
solo over a jolly, pliant bounce. There's a shade of Rollins' "I'm
an Old Cowhand" here, and in fact the tongue-in-cheek trotting-out
of a fairly insipid recent popular song is something Eduardo has in
common with Rollins and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
"Grandola" opens with a weighty plod before bass and tenor
soar in delicate interplay; Eduardo's bass takes a more central role
than on previous dates, exhibiting affection for high-pitched pizzicato
strumming, effortlessly shifting from fluttering abstraction to supple,
folksy lilt. Pedroso, a longtime fixture on the Lisbon scene and a
highly in-demand drummer, dissects marches into stabbing freedom,
yet carries a loose backbeat just as easily. Thirty-odd years ago,
a player cobbling together mainstream and free-jazz tenor influences
wouldn't have been something particularly interesting, but somehow
the honesty of Santandreu's approach is refreshing – especially
because he's not a technical showman but a compellingly virile student
of the music. His sand-blasted honks and blats in "Dartacão,"
coupled with fleet fingering and wide leaps, are an exciting reminder
of what solid modern-jazz tenor playing is all about. Eduardo coined
the verb "jazzar" to define what his group does –
to make jazz, make immediate the legacy of popular and folk
song, translating even the hokiest numbers into personal artworks.
Live in Capuchos is a fine example of the Zé Eduardo
Unit at work.–CA
Derek
Bailey / Agustí Fernández
A SILENT DANCE
Incus
Agustí Fernández / Barry Guy
SOME OTHER PLACE
Maya
Over
the course of the last two decades, Barcelona-based pianist Agustí
Fernández, despite a background in composition (he studied
at Darmstadt with, amongst others, Iannis Xenakis), has been steadily
building a reputation as an insightful and inventive improviser, working
with such luminaries as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Peter Kowald, Barry
Guy, William Parker, and John Butcher. These two new releases show
how resourceful and sensitive a player he can be.
 The
story behind A Silent Dance is a poignant one. Derek Bailey
first played with Fernández in 2001 and the pair formed a close
friendship after the guitarist moved to Barcelona in 2003. This live
recording from May 2005 documents the guitarist's last public performance.
Bailey, clearly slowed by illness, pensively doles out resonant craggy
clusters with his inimitable timbre and timing, while Fernández's
jangling, strummed and struck prepared piano intertwines with the
guitarist's somewhat spare playing. Unable to use a plectrum, Bailey
plays with softened attack, but his control of density and sustain
is more acutely thought through than ever. Over the course of 45 minutes,
the piece builds with intimate intensity, the improvisation developing
at a sure and unhurried pace as notes and tones hang with pregnant
tension. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the musicians begin to up the
ante as their playing becomes spikier and more percussive, building
to an explosive conclusion. The follow-up ten-minute improvisation
picks up from there, bristling with prickly textures. While perhaps
not one of the essential Bailey recordings (of which there are many),
it's a fitting coda to his brilliant body of work.
 Fernández
and bassist Barry Guy have recorded together in a trio with Ramón
López, a quartet with Paul Lytton and Evan Parker, and in Guy's
New Orchestra and Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. But this duo
outing, Some Other Place, reveals a different side to the
pianist's playing, in ten pieces ranging in duration from three to
nine minutes, each a study in balancing quiet lyricism and vigorous
dynamism. Working from compositional forms, the two build thematic
material, moving between lush melodicism and spirited freedom. This
brings out the more lyrical side of Fernández's playing, and
some of the pieces float along with a haunting beauty. But the pair
also push things into areas of percussive, pointillistic intensity,
with lines and textures hocketed back and forth in tight, conversational
interaction. It's always great to hear Guy in intimate settings like
this and his rich tone and impeccable sense of pacing are fully complemented
by his playing partner.–MRo
Dennis
González
A MATTER OF BLOOD
Furthermore
 Among
the spate of recent discs by trumpeter/cornetist Dennis González
this one stands out for its lovely, distinctive atmosphere: the scent
of night blossoms, the slow pulse of blood. Free jazz as mood music?
There's a certain ECM flavour (which is NOT a put-down) – pianist
Curtis Clark has the requisite harplike touch and scrunchy voicings,
the chords fanned out delicately note-by-note – but the music's
a good deal more robust than that would suggest. González's
lines are minimalist and drawn-out, his appealingly old-fashioned
growl and vibrato suffusing everything with receding TexMex melancholy.
He's central to these performances, less a soloist than a rock washed
over by the rhythm section's waves. Veteran bassist Reggie Workman's
contributions are amazingly elastic, more like a vocal line than anything
resembling conventional bass accompaniment, a moaning, thrumming undertow
that drags and clutches at the music. Michael T.A. Thompson's drumming
(oddly but appropriately credited here as "soundrhythmium")
is similarly impressive: loose and loping, relaxedly stretching Latin
grooves out towards infinity while conversely packing them with fervent
little beat-clusters. The principal tracks here build slowly and languorously
over longish durations, but they're woven together with brief interludes
by each of the players. It's an unusually well-structured album as
a result, slowly accelerating the pace from the smoky balladry of
the opener "Alzar La Mano" (written by González's
friend, the Mexican saxophonist Remi Álvarez) and ending with
a dive into the abyss, in a final stretch that compasses the Aylerian
"Anthem for the Moment" and the whirling free improvisation
"Chant de la Fée".–ND
Brian
Groder / Burton Greene / Rob Brown / Adam Lane / Ray Sage
GRODER & GREENE
Latham
 After
taking octogenarian saxophonist Sam Rivers on one of the most exciting
rides of recent years on 2006's Torque, trumpeter Brian Groder
has teamed up with another iconic figure of free jazz, pianist Burton
Greene, for nine magnificent musical adventures recorded, appropriately
enough, in Greene Street Studios NYC in October 2007. Without wanting
in any way to downplay the importance of Groder's limpid and remarkably
inventive trumpet and fluegelhorn playing, or alto saxophonist Rob
Brown's technically and musically outstanding contributions (there's
no point in even saying that, as everything Brown has committed to
record in his lifetime has been technically and musically outstanding),
the date belongs to Greene, not because he deliberately pushes everyone
else to the sidelines, but because his contributions as both soloist
and especially accompanist are so startlingly original that they command
attention, from the inspired octatonic riffery of "Landfall"
to the inside-piano investigations of "Amulet", from the
virtuosity of "Cryptic Means" to the spiky comping of "Nigh".
Sometimes it's all a bit over the top ("Hey, Pithy, Can You Thropt
the Erectus?" owes much more to Greene than its punning title),
but, hey, I'd rather it was like that instead of some earnest MOR
Clean Feed outing where everyone is so afraid of walking on anyone
else's toes that nobody moves at all. Greene has worked before with
bassist Adam Lane – notably on 2004's Isms Out (CIMP)
with Roy Campbell and Lou Grassi – and it shows: Lane is acutely
aware of the pianist's left hand, and its tendency to provide the
low and mid-register harmonic information, and concentrates accordingly
on the more melodic upper octaves of his instrument. Which is not
to say the pianist rides roughshod over Lane when the latter takes
a solo – far from it: Greene's ear and sense of space is as
acute as ever. In such ebullient company, a flamboyant drummer (like
Han Bennink) would probably sink the ship altogether, so it's just
as well Ray Sage is on hand to keep the beats tight and the music
on course to its final destination. This is a truly splendid album,
easily the best thing Burton's released in years, and one of the freshest
and most enjoyable releases of the year.–DW
Grutronic
ESSEX FOAM PARTY
psi
 English
improvised music has always had a sly sense of humour. Not the wacky
custard-pie-in-Monk-face humour of the Dutch, or the heavy (heavy-handed,
more often than not) cabaret belly laugh of the Germans, but something
stranger, more subversive. Think Derek Bailey's dry spoken commentaries
on his own playing, the anarchic stylistic melting pot of Alterations,
the disturbing weirdness of the Bohman Brothers and Hugh Metcalfe.
Grutronic, a four-piece electro improv ensemble (Stephen and Nick
Grew, Richard Scott and David Ross), augmented for the occasion by
guests Orphy Robinson (vibes) and Paul Obermayer (sampler), have taken
the last four decades of improvised music on board, swabbed the decks
with it and served it up seven frothy pints of the stuff on what could
be my favourite album of 2009. Quite simply, it rocks – not
as in boom boom boom (though regular pulse is by no mean taboo here,
and a few decidedly funky beatboxes box their way through the crowd
from time to time), but in the same way that Rafael Toral's recent
music does, with that wicked sense of asymmetrical swing that will
have your feet tapping without knowing why. Put that down perhaps
to the musicians' openness to other areas of new music – Nick
Grew works with Ballistic Cabaret and Newvacuum, and David Ross has
been the drummer in Kenny Process Team since the early 90s –
and a willingness to experiment and, to use Derek Bailey's favourite
word, play. The sounds are simply irresistible, not because
they're "funny" or "silly" (though there are plenty
of delightful squelches and swoops) but because they're put together
with such affection and instinctive precision. I read in the liner
notes that Ross "found a path to free improvisation, inspired
by Ornette Coleman records, watching maestro Roger Turner and talking
to Keith Rowe about Steely Dan" (ha! remind me to talk to Keith
about Steely Dan myself next time we meet) – with such an impeccable
pedigree, how could you possibly go wrong? Essex Foam Party
is pure delight – get yourself a copy as soon as you can.–DW
Barry
Guy / London Jazz Composers Orchestra / Irène Schweizer
RADIO RONDO / SCHAFFHAUSEN CONCERT
Intakt
 In
August 2008 composer and bassist Barry Guy talked to Bill Shoemaker
about the ten-year hiatus of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra:
"A year passed and another year passed, and people began to ask,
'What happened to the LJCO?' ‘Well nothing really.' And then
ten years passed." It hardly seems like a decade since the group
was last heard from; that's partly because in the intervening years,
Guy convened the New Orchestra, a stripped-down but still massive-sounding
unit. Another part of it – and Guy alludes to this as the basis
for Radio Rondo – is that the participants still frequently
work together in other, overlapping ensembles. In a way, it's not
like the LJCO really "went" anywhere. But for the 2008 Schaffhausen
Jazz Festival, Guy reconvened the 18-piece orchestra – with
Irène Schweizer, a frequent LJCO collaborator, on piano –
for a performance of the 1989 piece Harmos and the newly
commissioned Radio Rondo. The resulting CD combines Rondo
with a solo improvisation by Schweizer. The LJCO now incorporates
all the players from the New Orchestra, including reedist Mats Gustafsson,
tubaist Per Åke Holmlander, and trumpeter Herb Robertson; drummer
Lucas Niggli was also present for the occasion.
Compared to Guy's earlier concertos for Schweizer and Marilyn Crispell,
Radio Rondo is much more open-ended, though there's still
a strong composerly sensibility in evidence. The piece hinges on contrasts
between large masses of sound in either static or extremely vibrant
motion, and smaller, sometimes hushed group interplay, frequently
with Schweizer at the center. Opening with seasick full-ensemble trills,
the piece shifts its centre, as motives flit between percussion, piano,
flute and soprano. Woodwinds and brass then repeat and bend those
motives into slushy cacophony before dying away into pinched harmonics.
As the sound masses thin out, Schweizer has more room to stretch,
working architecturally, stacking and repeating for emphasis. Her
playing is often highly rhythmic, but it has a strong "tonal"
romantic streak as well, which she and tenorman Simon Picard extrapolate
for one of the prettiest moments of the piece. In the last twelve
minutes, the orchestra expands out from and contracts back to lush
pedal points at regular intervals, the textures ranging from popping
detail to Rothko-like sonic envelopment. Conceptually, Radio Rondo
is fairly straightforward once the piece's back-and-forth nature reveals
itself, but the trades between orchestral mass and Schweizer's dynamic
drive are a treat to listen to.
The pianist's solo piece – placed first on the CD – apparently
actually followed the Rondo in concert, and to some extent seems to
respond to the weight and measure of the full orchestra. Her trilling
runs appear to be hauling a roomful of ghost improvisers along; the
abrupt decelerations and shifts in tempo have the weight of an accompanying
bass drum or reed-like whack. Not that Schweizer needs a band behind
her – that rolling barrelhouse can handle itself well enough
– but her jagged, upper-register chunks often suggest one side
of a dialogue. And if there were a second musician, the occasional
wry turn into a hearty Monkish ballad might throw a partner for a
loop. After all, though she's often in the fiercest kinds of musical
situations, Schweizer is one of the most lyrical of postwar European
pianists, handling fleet action with glassine delicacy. Here, she's
both orchestrator and orchestra.–CA
Haptic
TREBUCHET
Entr'acte
 This
seventh offering from Chicago's premier exponents of EAI (hmm, let's
see if anyone writes in to complain about that one), namely
Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills and Adam Sonderberg, joined on one
track by Sonderberg's elusive Dropp Ensemble playing partner, Salvatore
Dellaria, is another finely crafted exploration of rich, predominantly
low, slowly evolving textures. Containing just three tracks (the second
and third of which are entitled "Three" and "Four"
– pick up a copy of The Medium if you want to find
"One" and "Two"), or rather two with a tantalisingly
brief intro, as the opening "Counterpoise" disappears frustratingly
after barely three minutes, it could be Haptic's most accomplished
release to date. The title could refer to anything from a medieval
siege tower to a ducking stool, a Marcel Duchamp readymade to an unwinnable
position in a chess game, and how the music cunningly blends acoustic
and electronic instruments and field recordings ("no helicopters
were harmed in the making of this album," Hess notes wryly on
Brian Olewnick's blog) is just as hard to figure out. Richard Pinnell,
over at The Watchful Ear (it's always fun to compare his
and Brian's comments, since they very often cover the same albums)
wonders what the sound of a children's playground in the final seconds
of "Four" might signify. I haven't the faintest idea myself,
but it's a magical ending to a most impressive album.–DW
MORE
JAZZ & IMPROV
Vivian
Houle
TREIZE
Drip Audio
 Jesse
Zubot's Drip Audio imprint continues to document the activities
of Vancouver's vibrant improvised music community with dedication
and enthusiasm with this excellent set of duets pitting vocalist
Vivian Houle against thirteen local talents, including cellist Peggy
Lee, pianist Paul Plimley (on spectacular free stride form as usual),
guitarist Ron Samworth (sounding rather Frisell-like, but we won't
hold that against him) and Zubot himself on violin. Houle is a splendidly
versatile performer, as good at actually singing as she is at producing
the kind of demented twittering and gasping we've come to expect
from improvising vocalists, and adapts her instrument to the character
and timbre of her playing partners' with extraordinary virtuosity:
spiky and taut with Zubot, silky smooth (and rather Annette Peacock-like)
with pianist Lisa Miller, squeaky and throttled with percussionist
Kenton Loewen, airy and evanescent with saxophonist Coat Cooke.
The only time she seems to struggle is with (against, rather) Brent
Belke's grungy guitar, but she redeems herself in style in the closing
track with Stefan Smulovitz's atmospheric electronics. A great set,
well worth checking out.–DW
Sebastian
Lexer
DAZWISCHEN
Matchless
 It
goes without saying that, for improvising pianists, John Tilbury casts
a long shadow, not only as arguably the only pianist of his generation
to pull the piano out of the orbit of free jazz (echoes of which continue
to haunt the work of all his contemporaries) but also as an eloquent
spokesman for areas of new music – and politics – that
have assumed greater importance over the past two decades. It's inevitable
that his name should come up in discussing Sebastian Lexer's long-awaited
solo album, as he also provides (along with Eddie Prévost and
Ian Stonehouse) liner notes for the set. But Lexer, as this collection
of six pieces shows, is very much his own man both on and inside the
piano, routing its sounds through a Max/MSP application of his own
design (hence the "piano+" appellation) to explore nuances
of pitch and timbre with scientific precision and painterly elegance.
Along with Blasen, his Another Timbre duo outing with frequent
playing partner Seymour Wright, it's Lexer's finest work to date.
Get it.–DW
Manuel
Mengis Gruppe 6
DULCET CRUSH
Hatology
 Swiss
trumpet player and band leader Manuel Mengis's debut Into the
Barn made many Best Of lists back in 2005. Then things went quiet
for three years until the follow-up, The Pond, was released.
So it's great to see this new one out so soon. The recipe is much
the same: quirky tunes full of serpentine twists and turns nailed
with aplomb by the trumpet, dual reed, guitar, bass, drums line-up.
The leader's lithe trumpet and Flo Stoffner's skronky electric guitar
are instantly recognizable, and Marcel Stalder's free funk electric
bass and Lionel Friedli's feisty drumming propel the music through
the hairpin time changes with spirited yet relaxed momentum. Newcomer
Reto Suhner's alto and clarinet pairs with Roland von Flüe's
tenor and bass clarinet, sneaking out for sprightly solos and weaving
back in to the ensemble flow. Mengis's charts mix-and-match post-bop
inflection, infectious rock-tinged pulse, sputtering angularity and
smoky melodicism, with figures kicking off one piece and then slyly
injected midway through another. He knows his musicians well enough
to take advantage of their individual strengths, push them hard and
still leave room for ensemble interplay. Manuel Mengis and crew continue
to deliver.–MRo
Seijiro
Murayama / soundworm
SPACE AND PLACE
Ftarri
 Nothing
to do with Donald Byrd's 1975 rare groove masterpiece Places and
Spaces, alas, but sound engineer Shoji Hiromitsu, aka soundworm
(unfortunate pseudonym if you ask me, though maybe the association
with fungal and parasitic infections – ringworm, tapeworm..
– is deliberate on his part) could be EAI's answer to Larry
(or Fonce) Mizell. On the four "Compositions for Recordings"
that form the centrepiece of this CD, he positioned microphones inside
and outside (the studio?) at Koganei, Japan, switching them on and
off according to instructions in Seijiro Murayama's score while the
percussionist improvised in real time on top. The multiple mic set-up
reminds us of numerous collaborations between Eric La Casa and Jean-Luc
Guionnet, both of whom are frequent Murayama playing partners here
in France (Guionnet and Murayama's Le Bruit du Toit, on Xing
Wu, was one of 2007's highlights for this reviewer), and the montage
of man-made and natural sounds is austere and impressive. As a percussionist
Murayama belongs to the same crew as Burkhard Beins, Sean Meehan and
Jason Kahn, preferring continuous sonority – bowed metal, notched
dowels rubbed energetically back and forth across the edge of his
snare drum – to traditional bang and crash. The four compositions
are bookended by two extended improvisations recorded (by Vincent
Rioux) in Le Corbusier's Monastery of Ste. Marie de La Tourette outside
Lyon, whose resonant spaces sound as beautiful as they look. Christ,
it's enough to make you want to take holy orders.–DW
Xu
Fengxia / Lucas Niggli
BLACK LOTOS
Intakt
 Black
Lotos is the first collaboration between Chinese-born guzheng
and sanxian player Xu Fengxia and Swiss drummer Lucas Niggli. Fengxia
worked in world-traveler Peter Kowald's trio Global Village, as well
as with Wolfgang Fuchs and Joe Fonda. Free music is part of her resume,
though she may be better-known in contemporary composition and Chinese
traditional music circles. Niggli's interests go far beyond the European
Free Improvisation pages as well; he was born in Cameroon, his mother
is Chinese-born, and his percussion ensembles draw on Asian and African
influences.
The title track begins sparsely, primarily featuring solo guzheng
with rumbling, knocking accents from skins, mallets, and gongs. Though
forceful, Fengxia nevertheless exhibits coiled control of the instrument,
as well as belting out vocals that are a cross between theatrical
poise, poésie sonore and mountain ballad, outlining
a range of vivid emotions more complex than English-weaned ears can
easily parse. "Fish-Lips and Duck-Feet" finds her making
broad impasto clusters, like a feral version of Alice Coltrane, while
Niggli's scattershot brushwork is an update on Ben Riley. Fleet scribbling
whirls on sanxian, in tandem with toms and guttural lament, open "Ride
over Blue Sky," before the pair settles into a twangy groove
that borders on soulful grit with its thin, galloping chant. Despite
the hell-bent-for-leather power, the music is still as "accessible"
as any Brotherhood of Breath recording. Black Lotos grooves
mightily even when lopsided, ideas flowing faster than the tempo can
hold, reckless but endlessly rejuvenating. When Fengxia and Niggli
explore sparse, textural structures, their physicality and humanity
comes through whether bowed guzheng strings are volksmusik
or not. The results are remarkable and thoroughly uncategorizable
music.–CA
Mike
Olson
INCIDENTAL
Henceforth Records
 Minneapolis
composer Olson writes/assembles fragments for his ensembles, here
an eighteen-piece of strings, brass, guitars, keyboards and rhythm
section, which the composer then breaks down and reconstructs on his
Mac, similar to the computer process music of Bob Ostertag. On this
CD the pieces are like cinematic incidental music – hence the
title – "because it reminds me very much of incidental
music". The result is a storm of ideas ranging from a wild harmolodics-like
opening, to wide-open airy Ligeti-ish string pieces, deep jazz-rock
groove in the manner of early Weather Report, interruptions from hardrock
guitar, big band buffoonery reminiscent of the Willem Breuker Kollektief
or early Carla Bley, all treated through the composer’s computer
and accompanied on his trusty Moog. What impresses most here is the
ambition of Olson’s vision – as well as similarities to
Ostertag, you can also hear Ives and Cage, as well as TV cop show
car chases and ghost movie atmospherics – perhaps we have to
wave hello to Holger Czukay as well. The whole may not entirely hang
together (perhaps by the very nature of the "incidental"
enterprise) but for sheer breadth and scope, it resembles a miniature,
electroacoustic Escalator Over the Hill.–JG
Keith
Rowe / Toshimaru Nakamura
ErstLive 008
 All
four of Keith Rowe's performances at the AMPLIFY 2008: light
festival in Tokyo have now appeared on Erstwhile: one solo (ErstLive
007), and duos with Taku Unami (ErstLive 006), Sachiko M (Contact,
which also features recordings made in the same performance space
two days later) and, rounding off the set, this one with Toshimaru
Nakamura. The decision to release them all was presumably taken well
in advance of the festival itself, which isn't in itself all that
surprising (these days most improv concerts are recorded, and many
end up getting released, which is understandable when documenting
the work of musicians who live hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles
apart and who only get together and play once or twice a year), but
must have put the musicians at AMPLIFY under a certain pressure
– knowing that any sound you make will be preserved for posterity
on one of today's most influential new music labels is not something
I'd like to have to deal with myself, to be honest.
It doesn't seem to have been much of a problem for Keith and Toshi
though, if this splendid set is anything to go by. Sure, there are
a few odd dips, moments when I'd have liked the music to go in a different
direction (not as many of them as in the Unami duo, in my opinion
– but given this music's extraordinary resistance to objective
value judgement and the fact that informed commentators on the scene
frequently disagree about the merits or lack thereof of particular
albums, I know many won't share that opinion), but the vigorous interplay
and exhilarating texture of the set as a whole more than makes up
for it.
Erstwhile's Jon Abbey is right to recommend that the four albums belong
together (well, he would say that, wouldn't he?): it's as if Rowe,
great lover of classical music that he is, had consciously set out
to record a four-movement symphony: an epic Mahlerian first movement
(the solo), a scherzo (the Unami duo), a slow movement (with Sachiko)
and this ebullient finale. I know, I know, it's far-fetched, and the
fact that the Unami set happened the day before the solo kinda fucks
up the analogy (the slow movement usually comes before the scherzo
too, but not always), but try them in the order I suggest and see
what you think. In any case, you need all four, regardless of what
order you choose to play them in.–DW
Charles
Rumback
TWO KINDS OF ART THIEVES
Clean Feed
 There
has long been an interesting cross-pollination between Chicago's younger
jazz and improvising musicians and the "post-rock" scene
that developed in the early 1990s, out of bands like Tortoise and
The Sea and Cake. Chicago's Thrill Jockey label has hosted releases
from Rob Mazurek's Chicago Underground projects and Exploding Star
Orchestra (one of which was a collaboration with trumpeter-composer
Bill Dixon), as well as veterans Fred Anderson and drummer Robert
Barry. Stalwart Chi-town blues and jazz label Delmark has, likewise,
released the music of Mazurek and Tortoise's Jeff Parker alongside
more strictly "jazz" young lions. Less well-known than some
of his peers, percussionist Charles Rumback (originally from Wichita,
Kansas) is one of the busiest avant-rock sidemen in the area, playing
with L'altra, Via Tania, and the ambient-improvisation duo Colorlist;
Two Kinds of Art Thieves is his debut as a leader.
One might expect the gauzy, filmic textures of Colorlist to work their
way into Rumback's quartet music, so it's somewhat surprising that
Art Thieves is decidedly a jazz record, though the emphasis
is on spare group improvisation. Rumback is joined here by alto saxophonist
Greg Ward and tenorman Josh Sclar (and for two tracks, bassist Jason
Ajemian) on six original compositions. Ten years ago, when Rumback
was based in Lawrence, Kansas, his approach showed the influence of
such diverse but equally intense sources as Brian Blade, Ben Perowsky
and Han Bennink. The antics of bash have given way to a disappearing
act, the drummer making laconic use of brushes and sleigh-bells, continually
piling up economies around dovetailing alto and tenor. Sclar and Ward
are an updated, free-time analogue to Warne Marsh and Gary Foster,
cotton purrs and squeals merging into a singular voice. On "Manifesto,"
gooey long tones from Ajemian's bass bolster the pair as Rumback knits
the air with mallets and bells. "Four Ruminations" merges
slinky repetition in a dark groove behind the saxophonists' unkempt
keening, Ward's alto rising quickly out of the ambience to chortle
and declaim. One couldn't ask for a stronger debut, and Two Kinds
of Art Thieves is a welcome addition to the landscape of young
Chicago improvisation.–CA
Olaf
Rupp / Marino Pliakas / Michael Wertmüller
TOO MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH
FMP
 Though
I'm as big a fan as the next man (or woman) of the traditional brain
fry, and have in the past thoroughly enjoyed guitarist Olaf Rupp's
exhausting workouts – Kernel Panic on Musica Genera
with Joe Williamson in particular – and Pliakas and Wertmüller's
appropriately-named Full Blast (2006) with Peter Brötzmann,
not to mention Wertmüller's own fiendish New Complexity compositions
on Die Zeit, Eine Gebrauschanweisung (2004), there's something
about Too Much Is Not Enough that's, well, too much. Hard
to say what it is, actually – the album is extremely enjoyable
at dangerous volume through headphones if I'm trying to cycle my way
through rush hour traffic, but somehow doesn't hold my attention when
I sit down and listen to it carefully. It's not the electric bass,
either as an instrument – I have no problems with Bill Laswell
in Arcana with Derek Bailey and Tony Williams (though I know The
Last Wave isn't often raved about by Bailey fans) – or
as played by Pliakas, and Wertmüller's hyperactive timbale pummelling
is thrilling, if exhausting. So I'm forced to conclude that Rupp is
the weak link here, but that's a bit like saying John Cena is the
weak link in a three-way dance with The Undertaker and Batista when
he can still probably knock your brains out through your ears quicker
than you say "Ein halber hund kann nicht pinkeln". Even
so, it's to the higher-pitched instrument that the ear is naturally
drawn, and sometimes Rupp has to struggle to make his presence felt
over Wertmüller's rolling thunder and Pliakas's ecstatic scrabble.
Funny, Sonny Sharrock never had a problem with this, even with Brötzmann
blasting beery breath up his ass in Last Exit, and Bailey acquitted
himself well against Williams and Laswell. Back in the realm of the
living, Alex Ward slays in N.E.W. and Henry Kaiser can really give
Weasel Walter what-for when he wants to. Anyway, whatever. Maybe that's
why I find the quieter, sparer tracks (yes, there are a few: the menacing
"Böller Ballade I" and the spiky "Stoppare"
are my favourites) more satisfying, probably because Rupp sounds at
times as if he'd be more comfortable on acoustic, but I doubt he'd
last a minute in the ring with Pliakas and Wertmüller if he were.–DW
Paul
Rutherford
TETRALOGY
Emanem
 More
evidence of Martin Davidson's knack for digging out archival material
of interest to fans of vintage British free improv, in this case four
miscellaneous sessions by the late trombonist Paul Rutherford. Truth
be told, only one of them is prime-cut Rutherford, a 1978 solo set
performed in the unusual acoustic of Pisa's open-air Giardino Scotto
Theatre. The density of event is extraordinary, the ideas cut into
each other at a bruisingly rapid clip and every so often squashed
down in half-strangled protestations, as Rutherford spars joyously
with the quirky amplifying properties of his surroundings –
though there's also a bizarre but fetching detour into a kind of grisly
stasis, the trombonist's aggrieved moans peppered by microwave-popcorn
sputters. Though there's already a lot of Rutherford solo material
available on Emanem, this is as good as any I've heard.
The other solo set is a less typical performance, a 1981 London concert
where Rutherford makes extensive use of electronics – self-controlled,
apparently, though they often seem to have a daft life of their own.
The computery bloops and whistles have a lo-tech charm but are maddening
to listen to at length, and the penumbral ringing that's sometimes
audible gave this reviewer tinnitus flashbacks. On the other hand,
Rutherford is in really fiery form here, popping off brusque, unexpected
sallies in a stop-start rhythm very different from his acoustic work.
He also makes great use of the voice mic to amplify his hums and growls
(it's the one electronic element here that really works). Wonderful
playing – but it's still hard work unless you're adept at mentally
bracketing out the more annoying elements.
From a few days later at the same event, the ACTUAL-81 festival, comes
an equally unusual and more satisfactory session, a brass quartet
of Rutherford and George Lewis (trombones), Martin Mayes (French horn)
and Melvyn Poore (tuba). The all-out tug-of-war passages tend to be
the best, with Lewis and Rutherford in particularly skittish mood,
throwing off delightfully contrary ideas. The talky sotto-voce passages
don't do a lot for me, but the queasy quasi-drone episodes and veering
chorales are quite effective. The set also includes a 1982 studio
session by Rutherford's trio with bassist Paul Rogers and drummer
Nigel Morris, predating their sole album Gheim by a year.
Rutherford is recessed in the mix, but his drolly inventive monologues
are as pertinent and ideas-rich as ever. The engine-room balance seems
a bit off though, with Rogers in total melodic/rhythmic hyperdrive
and Morris hooking up with him only occasionally, but the three tracks
are a worthwhile addition to the trio's small body of work.–ND
Ted
Sirota’s Rebel Souls
SEIZE THE TIME
Naim
 Like
all of drummer Ted Sirota’s work with his band, the Rebel Souls,
Seize the Time is politically engaged jazz, overtly paying
homage to Max Roach and Charles Mingus’s fiery 1960s musical
polemics, even if the results are rather less stormy. Indeed, the
disc is essentially about exploring and celebrating the ways that
music serves to lift the spirits in dark, violent or confusing times,
whether it’s jazz or politicized pop music from all over the
world. Tenor saxman Geof Bradfield made a splash a few years back
with his trio disc Rule of 3, which also featured Sirota;
he’s been a Rebel Soul since the band’s previous disc,
Breeding Resistance (Delmark, 2003), and has become a key
contributor to the book, notably a gentle arrangement of Stephen Foster’s
“Hard Times” that makes ironic commentary on the current
global downturn (as Sirota notes, this 1855 tune “might be the
first hit song written about an economic crisis”). Indeed, the
breadth of the repertoire here is refreshing. Sirota pays homage to
his household gods in the form of Mingus’s twisty “Free
Cell Block F, ’Tis Nazi USA” and a drum solo, “Viva
Max!”, and his passion for reggae gets a showing on “Killa
Dilla” – guitarist Dave Miller has a ball here, slathering
spacey, reverberant overdubs across his spindly solo lines. Caetano
Veloso, Miriam Makeba and even the Clash figure into the mix, the
band turning “Clampdown” into a yearning epic. Bradfield
and alto saxophonist/bass clarinettist Greg Ward make a superbly passionate
and buoyant front line; bassist Jake Vinsel is a discreet presence,
but Miller is a constant source of pleasurable surprise, brushing
sharp little details into the music’s corners, and shapeshifting
as occasion demands from fleet Kurt Rosenwinkelisms (“Clampdown”)
to smoky Leslie-amped minimalism à la Ribot (“Little
D”) to fuzzed-out McLaughlinesque rancour (“Polo Mze”).–ND
Wadada
Leo Smith
SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS
Cuneiform
 Wadada
Leo Smith has been well-served lately by the Tzadik and Cuneiform
labels. Between the two, he has had the opportunity to document his
constantly evolving ensembles on a fairly regular basis. This new
missive is a 2CD set, capturing live performances by his (mostly)
acoustic Golden Quintet and a (mostly) electric nonet titled Organic.
The Golden Quintet has evolved from a quartet with Anthony Davis,
Malachi Favors, and Jack DeJohnette to its current line-up with Vijay
Iyer on piano and synthesizer, John Lindberg on bass, and the dual
drums of Pheeroan AkLaff and Don Moye, a canny pairing that Smith
leverages to build the music from the bottom up. The leader's plangent
trumpet sings out over Lindberg's melodic bass, Iyer's shard-like
clusters and flurries, and the roiling undertow of the two drummers.
His muted musings are pointed and focused as ever, with each note
placed with clear intention, tinged in places with subtle shadings
of reverb. Iyer follows Smith's lead, fitting in his harmonic refractions
with a sense of economy, filling the texture out with occasional synth
flourishes. Lindberg plays as key a role in the thematic flow of the
music as he does in its propulsive momentum. On the final "South
Central L.A. Kulture" his elastic electric bass (harking back
to his days with Bobo Shaw's Human Arts Ensemble) adds in an infectious
sense of heady free funk to the mix as Smith drives the voodoo down
over the slashing drums and piano stabs.
The Organic disc kicks off with the same tune, but this time Smith,
Lindberg, and AkLaff are joined by four electric guitars (Michael
Gregory, Brandon Ross, Nels Cline, and Lamar Smith), Okkyung Lee on
cello, and Skuli Sverrisson on electric bass. Recorded in crystal
clear detail at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, CT, this set recalls Smith's
Yo Miles! project with Henry Kaiser. While the allusions to Miles
Davis' electric bands are undeniable, this is more than just nostalgic
knock-off; the pieces simmer and groove against the funk underpinnings,
but the group also knows how to let things open up into coloristic
abstraction. Smith's compositions provide a framework to build improvisations
from shifting textures and melodic kernels. "Organic" slowly
gathers force from the free tracers of electronics, as riffs are built
up, hocketed between guitars and cello, and then exploded to leave
the two bass players to stretch out. Check out how Smith's placid
lines that open up "Joy: Spiritual Fire: Joy" set the stage
for guitars, trumpet, and cello to daub colorful smears over a freely
looping groove. Spiritual Dimensions offers a welcome view
into the current state of Smith's evolving ensemble vision.–MRo
Burkhard
Stangl / Kai Fagaschinski
MUSIK - EIN PORTRÄT IN SEHNSUCHT
Erstwhile
 The
title of this magnificent album, which could be the most accessible
title released to date on Jon Abbey's Erstwhile imprint (excluding
the two ErstPop outings, of which more below), is a reference to an
album entitled Sehnsucht – Ein Porträt in Musik
by Alexandra, née Doris Treitz, a German popular singer
in the 1960s who died in an unfortunate car accident aged just 27.
Not an album I'm familiar with, I'm afraid, but one I'm rather tempted
to seek out, as guitarist / pianist / percussionist Stangl and clarinettist
Fagaschinski are fond of slipping sly references to pop culture into
their work: Kai's email address puns on Kylie Minogue, and one of
the tracks on this album is a hilarious double homage to Prince and
Morton Feldman (!), entitled, yes, "Sexy M.F."
Jon Abbey has confirmed that one of the reasons for not releasing
this on his ErstPop sublabel, where it would have joined two other
releases by Neuschnee (Stangl and Christof Kurzmann) and The Magic
I.D., was the music's lack of lyrics, but as we've seen above with
Black To Comm, that doesn't necessarily rule out these delicious pieces
as Lieder ohne Worte. The ear for pitch and feel for harmonic
progression – and stasis – is exquisite, and one could
easily imagine one of Kurzmann's wistful vocals floating into earshot.
But no; instead the real world makes a number of guest appearances,
in the form of field recordings courtesy Klaus Filip, dieb13 and Bernhard
Gal. Sehnsucht is hard to translate into English: "longing"
and "yearning" are OK, but the Portuguese saudade
comes closest, which A.F. Bell defined rather nicely as "a vague
and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot
exist ... a turning towards the past or towards the future."
This album is precisely that, the thing that "does not
and probably cannot exist" being the EAI pop song (though I argued
elsewhere that The Magic I.D. came close), and its search
for musical beauty that is both rooted in the past but aimed resolutely
towards the future is wonderful to experience.–DW
Birgit
Ulher / Ariel Shibolet / Adi Snir / Roni Brenner / Michael Mayer /
Damon Smith / Ofer Bymel
YCLEPT
Balance Point Acoustics
 From
the first meaty whoomph of Damon Smith's arco bass, one is
keenly aware of a strong connection to bassists like Peter Kowald
and Buschi Niebergall. There's a workman-like physicality of horsehair
on strings, as well as a muscular and bodily presence that, despite
its massiveness; is almost balletic in its motions. Oakland-based
Smith readily acknowledges the influence of the German bassists; his
first audio experience of freely improvised bass was Kowald's FMP
LP Duos: Europa. With percussionist Weasel Walter, he's crafted
an approach that balances perilously between careening expressiveness
and exacting detail. But the "violent rage" that characterizes
a Walter disc is only one facet of Damon Smith's work. Witness Yclept,
his latest collaboration with Tel Aviv saxophonist Ariel Shibolet
and Hamburg trumpeter Birgit Ulher, herself a master carver of miniscule
brassy flutters and gut-wrenching wails. The three are joined across
seven improvisations by a group of musicians little known outside
Israel: guitarists Roni Brenner and Michel Mayer, percussionist Ofer
Bymel and saxophonist Adi Snir. Groans, flutters and stuttering yelps
jab and dive at one another across these sonic canvases, supported
by long, crisp howls of bowed harmonics. Smith is the most identifiable
colour here, a craggy yet humanistic brown amid the whitish-silver
flecks of reed (?) chirps and brassy pops and clucks. The guitars
seem to be prepared, contributing feedback and electrified plinks;
like Bymel's snare and thick brushes, they fill the soundscape with
spiky, pointillist gestures. The sixth section is certainly the most
traditional, guitar scrapes and towel-damped toms shadowing urgent
long tones. It's something ineffable that makes an "improv"
recording (i.e., not jazz or free-jazz) sing – one
just knows when that sweet spot gets hit. Yclept is definitely
an example of the indefinable "it."–CA
Fernando
Benadon
INTUITIVO
Innova
 Fernando
Benadon is a composer, saxophonist and music theorist at American
University whose academic interests bridge the divide between jazz
and contemporary composition, as does the music on Intuitivo,
his debut disc. Benadon recorded solo improvisations by seven musicians,
each unaware of the others' contributions, then layered the results
in an attempt to demonstrate synchronistic similarities in rhythmic
and melodic approach. Such cut-and-paste techniques have little novelty
value, but the results are quite engaging and often exciting.
The seven musicians were given no guidance, and Benadon did not subject
their improvisations to the sorts of studio manipulations that would
change their fundamental character. Consequently, the album has a
live ensemble feel throughout; minimalistic elements are introduced,
and the texture is often hectic, but commendable mixing and mastering
ensures that even the densest passages exhibit remarkable clarity
and detail.
The opening moments from "Vidrios," examined in depth, illustrate
the relationships on offer which, as Benadon's liner notes aptly state,
form a "spontaneously coherent whole." Rapid-fire arpeggiations
shared by various ensemble members point to commonalities in rhythmic
language and overall approach, such as Kurt Rohde's viola and Marco
Mazzini's clarinet figurations that then give way to a similar duo
exchange between bassist Michael Formanek and violinist Courtney Orlando.
Their chosen tonal centers are related, and their sense of timing
is so similar that it's easy to forget their disparate origins. Then
there are the few pregnant pauses, such as the one where all the instruments
hit a G and halt. This brief respite interrupts an intricate drum
and clarinet exchange similar to those discussed above, the viola
snapping the G for all it's worth and some tasteful reverb ensuing.
So many of these pithy moments occur that cataloging them would be
futile. The music defies exclusivity, bordering on tonality and atonality
while allegiant to neither. When "World" music or "free
music" tropes appear, as they do simultaneously in the sparkling
and transparent "Japanese Cups," they are nevertheless sublimated,
no single gesture being overdramatized. There are solos of all lengths
and varieties, such as the gorgeous bass passage that opens "Quim
Font" or the motoric and constantly morphing violin work that
underpins "Continuo," but much of the playing is collective.
And collectivity, after all, is what Benadon highlights and seeks
to redefine; in doing so, he creates music of interest, depth and
beauty.–MM
Olivier
Capparos / Lionel Marchetti
EQUUS (GRAND VEHICULE)
Pogus
 Lionel
Marchetti's music, not only his collaborative projects with fellow
composer and poet Olivier Capparos, has always been haunted by the
past, particularly the radio – through which a whole generation
of musique concrète pioneers discovered the sound
world around them – in the form of what he calls "divers
hasards radiophoniques". Sounds of childhood (a magical time,
a voyage of discovery Marchetti took with his own children Adèle
and Hadrien on last year's album of the same name) – chiming
grandfather clocks, the wheeze of an old accordion, snatches of old
chanson and movie soundtracks (here Grace Kelly and James
Stewart from Rear Window – of course Marchetti is familiar
with his mentor Michel Chion's essay on Hitchcock's use of sound in
that film) – combine with Latin incantations, fragments of poetry
(notably the rolling r's of Ezra Pound's Canto XLV) and the
distant muffled sound of galloping hooves in 33 minutes of magnificently
crafted musique concrète realised by Marchetti and
Capparos in the studios of INA/GRM in Paris in 2001 and 2002. Marchetti
has often compared his pieces to poems, so it's fitting that the disc
comes with three of them by way of liner notes. Eric Vuillard's lines
"the gallop of horses on the earth is like the first thought
of man" and "the dreams of men are the decomposing thoughts
of the dead" are curiously appropriate, as is Capparos's tale
of a little girl sitting at a table in a clearing in a forest. "You're
here at last. I was waiting for you. You're looking for the animal
you have lost. I'm trying to create one." Masterly.–DW
Tom
Chant / Angharad Davies / John Edwards / Benedict Drew
DECENTRED
Another Timbre
 This
is a gorgeous and well-recorded disc that brings improvised and composed
forms together in a satisfying way. These four musicians introduce
eclecticism and insight to pieces by John Cage, California-based composer
Michael Pisaro and to two purely improvised structures; the best part
of it all is that their respective vocabularies are so distinctive
and versatile that each work is delivered with insight and spontaneity.
The two quartet improvisations certainly contain many clichés
of the Euro-free improv variety, but these are just as often supplanted
by the lush electronic drones more often associated with EAI. Witness
the rather chatty but still sparse opening of Activation,
with its pointillist dialogue gradually falling silent as jagged high-frequency
sustains come to the fore. The much more restrained long tones then
become an integral part of the piece, informing the quicker exchanges
on their return.
This permeability of tempo and dynamic boundaries is reflected in
the juxtaposition of individual timbres and motives in all of the
music on offer, whether improvised or composed. The album's centerpiece,
the quartet's performance of Cage's Four6, has a structure
open enough to incorporate both Tom Chant's rich multiphonics and
Benedict Drew's remarkably varied and emotive electronics. Premiered
in the summer of 1992, it constitutes one of Cage's number pieces,
which were constructed of time bracket notation. Four6's
score stipulates that each player chooses twelve sounds, with fixed
overtone structure and amplitude. The freedoms inherent in the score
can be abused—witness Sonic Youth's rather juvenile version
which relies more on repetition and novelty than on the subtlety and
interplay that defines Cage's music. This quartet adheres to its choices
while also embracing the silence where appropriate, but each musician
finds enough diversity to ensure that the music develops over its
thirty-minute duration.
The Cage and Pisaro works complement each other beautifully, both
relying on the use of indeterminate structures, developing sustains
and relative silence. The three Pisaro duos presented here are taken
from his Harmony series (2004-2006), which was initially
inspired by James Tenney's Swell Piece. Comprising 34 pieces,
each using a poem as inspiration and to determine its structure, the
series is a vast and stunning exploration of the intricacies of sound
relations that we call harmony, for lack of a better term. As with
the Cage, the scores are meant to allow freedom of choice, but the
instructions are quite detailed regarding the sorts of timbres that
should be used and their placement. The results can be startlingly
diverse, as with the brief Flux which ends the disc. It's
a stark series of quasi-pitched alternations joining Drew's electronics
with wispy utterances from Edward's, the two performers even managing
to match pitches despite Drew's white noise! The duo realizes the
last line of the verbal score effectively, matching noise and pitch
with astonishing subtlety. By contrast, Reader, Listen presents
declamatory pitch complexes that sometimes give the illusion of more
than two instruments at work, exactly the intricate overtonal relationships
that imbue so much of Pisaro's work.
The disc is well programmed, the constant contrast between the busy
improvised pieces and the slowly morphing compositions lending unity
to the whole. Better still, there is a sense of discovery throughout;
as with Pletnev's recordings of Beethoven piano concertos, the composed
material is presented with the freshness of improvisation, and I find
these solutions engaging and persuasive.–MM
Bernard
Donzel-Gargand
STILL TO BE A STORYTELLER
Monochrome Vision
 Funny
that you have to go via Moscow, where the splendid new Monochrome
Vision label is based, to discover the musique concrète
of Bernard Donzel-Gargand (he didn't even get a mention in Eric Deshayes
and Dominique Grimaud's L'Underground Musical en France,
which either makes him sub-underground or says something about that
book, probably the latter), who's been quietly plying his trade in
the picturesque city of Annecy in Haute-Savoie for quite some time.
Not so sure about that "quietly", actually, as some of the
music on this disc – eight pieces spanning a compositional career
of a quarter of a century, from 1984's Ambivalence to 2007's
Un Ailleurs Perdu – is quite boisterous. And, hardly
surprisingly, very French, not only in its incorporation of the mother
tongue, both sung (Par la main) and spoken (though if you're
not fluent in the language it won't spoil your enjoyment of the music)
and local colour (yes! frogs! accordions!), but in its evident familiarity
with and loving recognition of the musique concrète
repertoire. Pierre Henry gets a namecheck, but there's François
Bayle's ear for shimmering digital precision and a flair for the dramatic
worthy of Michel Chion and Lionel Marchetti. Eloge de la folie
(1994) is terrific. "A lot of musicians who stopped by [Pierre
Schaeffer's] Studio d'Essai in the early days said there was no future
in musique concrète," said Eliane Radigue in
our recent Wire Invisible Jukebox. Well, they were wrong:
Donzel-Gargand's music positively sparkles with life and imagination,
and I look forward to hearing more of it before too long.–DW
Christopher
Hobbs
SUDOKU 82
Cold Blue
 As
well as trying to listen to three or more albums of new music a day
and watch as many films as I can get my paws on, I'm a compulsive
sudokiste, as they say here in France, and was delighted
to discover recently that fellow Paris-based composers Tom Johnson
and Eliane Radigue (do forgive me for putting myself in such distinguished
company) are too. To the best of my knowledge, neither of them has
yet based a composition on one of those eternally frustrating 9x9
grids (though I bet Tom has considered the idea), but Christopher
Hobbs, Scratch Orchestra vet and leading light of English Experimental
Music for four decades now, has written no fewer than 125 (!) of them.
That said, if you didn't know that this latest "maxi single"
on Jim Fox's cool Cold Blue label was one, you'd probably not be able
to guess – more on Hobbs's method later..
It's not hard to see why Sudoku might appeal to minimalists like Johnson
and Hobbs (Christopher may well raise an eyebrow at being so described,
but much of his oeuvre can be traced back to the unashamedly tonal
systemic procedures of late 60s American minimalism that the English
Experimentalists latched on to as a way out of the cul de sac of total
serialism) – after all, doing a Sudoku puzzle is nothing less
than composing by block additive process (swot up on your terminology
here). And there's a potentially
infinite number of possible ways to "translate" the numbers
and their permutations on the grid into musical material. You could,
for instance, assign a note – or a sound, or a duration –
to each of the nine numbers, a pitch region to each of the horizontal
rows, a dynamic or a timbre to each of the vertical columns, and still
end up with a staggering number of possible realisations based on
how you read the grid, from move to move.
Exactly how Hobbs has chosen to render the puzzle audible is, I'll
admit, a mystery to me. "I choose the sounds I want and the overall
duration, but then let the numbers determine what goes where,"
he writes (supposedly helpfully). You might expect a lot of silence,
with all those empty squares, but this particular piece is scored
for eight pianos (not eight pianists: it's Brian Pezzone playing with
himself, if you'll pardon the expression), each of whose material
is as delicately wistful as an old sepia photograph. You might spot
the influence of Satie in there, which is not surprising when you
recall that it was Hobbs and Gavin Bryars who gave Vexations
its UK premiere – I bet if the maître d'Arcueil
was still around, he'd be into Sudoku too.–DW
Takahiro
Kawaguchi / Shinjiro Yamaguchi
HELLO
Ftarri
 "There
are three parts here: two tuning forks of slightly different pitch,
which are bowed; and a single guitar tone. The parts use the same
score, and begin a minute apart from one another. In each part there
is a one-minute rest between sounds, and the duration of each successive
sound is increased by one minute – a minute, two, three –
all the way up to five minutes. After that the order is reversed –
five minutes, four, three, two one – and the piece is over."
So writes Toshiya Tsunoda in a brief liner-note essay that also manages
to namecheck, though I'm not so sure why, Straub-Huillet, Cézanne,
and a whole host of conceptual artists. A little misleading too, his
explanation: it gives the impression that the five-minute section
is repeated, whereas the actual structure, starting with a minute
of silence (indicated here in parentheses) is: (1) +1 (+1) +2 (+1)
+3 (+1) +4 (+1) +5 (+1) +4 (+1) +3 (+1) +2 (+1) +1 (+1). That adds
up to 35, and as the three voices enter a minute apart, add two for
a total duration of 37'00". You might not notice the additive
/ subtractive process on a casual listening, though you can identify
the arch structure by listening to the guitar part: for his first
minute, Yamaguchi plays his low F# every ten seconds, for his second
two-minute section it's every five seconds, and so on, twice as fast
each time, with the result that his central five-minute stretch (from
16'00" to 21'00") is a rather energetic Guitar Trio-like
strumming. Kawaguchi's bowed tuning forks (a tone apart, E and F#..
musique spectrale, quoi) aren't capable of such rhythmic nuances,
but, being bowed, their timbre does change slightly. Just as well:
pale, stable sinetones à la Narthex in a piece like this would
be deadly. As it is, Hello, like much of the Sugimoto / Encadre
school stuff, is a pleasant listen, nothing more. And that's fine
by me.–DW
Phill
Niblock
TOUCH STRINGS
Touch
 Bill
Meyer puts it very nicely in the December issue of The Wire:
"It makes no more sense to play [Phill Niblock's music] on earbuds
or little computer speakers than it would to look at a reproduction
of a Rothko on your mobile phone screen." Allow me to replace
that "Rothko" with "the Pyramids of Egypt" –
Niblock's compositions are the sonic equivalent of those ancient wonders,
huge, imposing structures that appear structurally straightforward
when viewed from a great distance (i.e. played at wimpy musique
d'ameublement volume level – dumb idea) but which on close
inspection (i.e. as loud as you dare, moving around your listening
space while you listen – great idea, but invite your neighbours
to join you first) reveal a wealth of surface irregularities, angles,
corners, nooks and crannies. And, once you venture inside, you'll
find mysterious dark recesses and, if you're lucky, hidden treasure.
I stuck my head in a corner of the living room I hadn't dusted for
about a year and half and found a $20 bill! The three pieces on this
fourth Niblock outing on Touch – Stosspeng (for Susan
Stenger and Robert Poss's guitars), Poure (for Arne Deforce's
cello) and One Large Rose (for the Nelly Boyd Ensemble of
Hamburg, here consisting of violin, cello, ebowed bass guitar and
bowed piano) continue to the follow the straight line that Niblock
drew back in 1974 with 3 to 7 – 196, but, as PT's own
Bob Gilmore (bless him) notes in the booklet, are different in conception,
the latter being adapted from an extant orchestral work, Three
Orchids, and consisting of four superimposed 46-minute live recordings.
"An extraordinary achievement by the musicians," indeed.
There is very little else to say, really: describing how a Niblock
piece sounds is as daft as describing a pyramid.–DW
Roger
Reynolds
EPIGRAM AND EVOLUTION
Mode
 This
double disc brings together all of Roger Reynolds' music for piano
– either as a solo instrument (disc one) or in chamber / orchestral
settings (disc two): eight works in all, ranging in duration from
3'33" – the enigmatic miniature imagE/piano (2007),
which bookends the first disc with its companion piece imAge/piano
(2007) – to 35'07", the concerto-in-all-but-name The
Angel of Death (2001) for piano, chamber orchestra and computer-processed
sound. The recordings date from as far back as 1970 – Fantasy
for Pianist (1964) and Traces (1968), both performed
by Yuji Takahashi (along with flautist Karen Reynolds and cellist
Lin Baron on the latter, which was formerly available on an old CRI
LP), who also provides liner notes for the set, of which more later
– and, despite impressive cleaning up by Joseph Kucera, are
still a tad hissy, but that's a price worth paying for Takahashi's
extraordinary virtuosity. At times he sounds so out of control you
could swear he was making it all up as he went along (his recordings
of Xenakis's Herma and Eonta are legendary), but
no. But Takahashi isn't the only virtuoso in town: Eric Huebner and
Marilyn Nonken are on splendid form too, as are Jean-Charles François
and Delores Stevens on Less Than Two.
Reynolds' music is often gritty and uncompromising, but its dramatic
character and strong sense of shape on both the micro and macro level
makes it relatively easy to access. It's a shame though that, for
once, the accompanying essay in the booklet, written by Takahashi,
doesn't go into more detail on the compositional technique. Most people
in whose hands this disc is likely to end up will have some basic
grasp of serial-related theory concepts, and it would have been helpful
to have some meat instead of sushi. But listen carefully to what's
going on in Variation (1988) and despite the piece's ferocious
complexity (check out the "textural plan" chart in the booklet,
and get a magnifying glass before you do) you'll soon be able to spot
recurring melodic fragments and hear how the composer develops them.
As Joëlle Léandre said elsewhere, who says this is difficult
music?–DW
James
Tenney
SPECTRUM PIECES
New World
 Though
James Tenney never intended the eight Spectrum pieces (the
first five dating from 1995, the last three from six years later)
to be played back to back as a set, here they all are, beautifully
recorded and executed with customary consummate skill by Amsterdam's
Barton Workshop, in the latest double whammy from New World. I wouldn't
play them all in one go, though: as listening experiences go, this
is a tough one, not because the music is overwhelmingly dense, texturally,
or stuffed with notes, but because its microtonal nuances –
the liner notes (by.. yes, Bob Gilmore!) explain the composer's tuning
system clearly and in detail – need some getting used to. In
order to get the tuning spot on (which often means pitching notes
to within a hundredth of semitone.. Bob says it can be done, but I
sometimes wonder), vibrato is verboten for the strings, the
piano and harp have to be retuned, and the woodwinds sound, well,
if not off, shall we say, unfamiliar at times. The music
is predominantly melodic, the instruments weaving through the upper
partials of the harmonic series, but I'll buy you a gold clock if
you can sing along to it. In short, this isn't a disc I'm likely to
want to play non-stop for the next six months, but I'll be delighted
to find it on my shelves when I choose to return to it.–DW
Kim
Cascone
ANTI-MUSICAL CELESTIAL FORCES
Störung
 An
intriguing proposition from Cascone, founder of Silent Records and
former assistant music supervisor to David Lynch in Twin
Peaks. Clocking at a perfect 27'50", Anti-Musical
Celestial Forces is an enjoyable, occasionally inspiring
release making selective use of treated field recordings, initially
as a background for a spoken text describing nocturnal atmospheres
and nightmarish visions. After about seven minutes, when the first
doubts of potential boredom are starting to knock at the mind's door,
Gary R. Weisberg's narration fades out, permitting the listener to
focus undivided attention on the succession of evocative aural snapshots.
The sources are fairly mundane – urban echoes and conversations
from the other room – but Cascone assembles them with great
skill, suffusing them with a murky haze that adds to the disc's inscrutability.
The results are vastly superior to the depressingly predictable work
of countless "go-around-the-town-with-a-minidisc" dilettantes.
Choice episodes: a muezzin call amidst gathering seagulls and a short
but splendid section based on a masterfully played cimbalom.–MR
Bruce
Gilbert
OBLIVIO AGITATUM
Editions Mego
 This
record makes me recall the early stages of my naïve enthusiasm
for esoteric ambient back in the early 1990s, when all that was needed
for bliss was slow-moving repetition ricocheting amidst cavernous
echo. Almost two decades later I find it difficult to get too excited
about Oblivio Agitatum, which marks Bruce Gilbert's
return to action as a solo artist after several years. Not that it's
bad; it's just a little superficial-sounding, despite its attempts
to probe the dark waters of cyclicality. The album's backbone is the
lengthy "Zeroes", which immerses treated guitars and other
ingredients in flanging reverberation and subjects them to a modicum
of interference. It works for a while, but doesn't transmit much to
the emotional system. The title track is an unkindly purring preamble
of sorts, and the best chapter is saved for last: the three and a
half minutes of "Isophyre" seem to breathe deeper, existing
in an underwater world whose remote corners might well hide a nasty
surprise. A shame that it's not developed at greater length. I'll
have to stick with Soliloquy for Lilith when I
want to revisit my innocent drone-loving youth. Too little Agitatum
here, and definitely headed to Oblivio.–MR
Robert
Hampson
VECTORS
Touch
 The
days of Main are long gone, that project having introduced receptive
listeners to the delights of drone-informed guitar modification with
several spellbinding milestones, Hz being perhaps
the most praiseworthy. But Robert Hampson's music keeps radiating
an enigmatic aura which is all the more perplexing – yet always
most welcome – given his recent work's increasing use of concrete
sounds. Vectors, arriving after a long silence, gathers
three fine electroacoustic episodes from 2006-2008, two commissioned
by Radio France, the third created for a festival in Poitiers. "Umbra"
recalls the composer's past glories, a splendid piece that makes the
room quiver with sympathetic frequencies, as unintelligible pseudo-biotic
interferences induce a feeling of helplessness in the listener amidst
miasmic damp and nocturnal doubt. "Ahead – Only the Stars"
opens the lungs a little, luminous electronic wakes introducing elements
of hypermodernity systematically intercut with sporadic intermissions
of digital energy and subsonic threat. "Dans le lointain"
is a succession of snapshots in which polychromatic figures are filtered
by computer-generated settings, transforming everything into a black-white-and-grey
nerve-racking unease. Impressive stuff, and the worthy conclusion
to a tremendous record that testifies to Hampson's status as a master
of the genre.–MR
Russell
Haswell
WILD TRACKS
Editions Mego
 Snazzily
packaged with extensive notes on how, when and where its fifteen tracks
were recorded – they open out into a A2 size poster to stick
on your bedroom wall – this is a fun collection of unadorned
field recordings, whose titles in dramatic block capitals need little
explanation (with the possible exception of High Force and Summerhill
Force, which are both waterfalls in Teesdale, County Durham): "EXCEPTIONALLY
LOUD PROPANE GAS CANNON BIRD SCARER", "JAMAICAN BLOWHOLE",
"ANT COLONY (FEATURING EUROFIGHTER TYPHOON F2 FLYBY)", "WASP-WAR
(FEATURING APACHE AH Mk 1 DUET)", "HELICOPTER TRIP (EDIT)",
"A HORDE OF FLIES FEAST ON A ROTTING PHEASANT CARCASS (EXTRACT)",
"ELECTROSWAT (PLAYLIST RE-EDIT)", "LOCAL GAMEKEEPERS
SHOOTING A FEW FIELDS AWAY", "MISSING / HITTING BEER CAN
TARGET", "ROCKET LAUNCH", "HIGH FORCE FROM ABOVE",
"SUMMERHILL FORCE FROM INSIDE GIBSON’S CAVE", "TRAPPERS
BAIT DIGITAL CALLER", "FALLING SNOW #4 +20dB (EXTRACT)"
and "DRAMATIC WHINING WIND."
You can probably guess what most of these sound like already, but
the ant colony, falling snow and electric fly swatter might surprise
you, and if, after reading "WARNING: Extreme Dynamic Levels –
listeners' experience may change during playback" (well, I should
damn well hope so!), you're worried that the EXCEPTIONALLY LOUD PROPANE
GAS CANNON BIRD SCARER might fuck up your speakers and blow you across
the room to boot, don't. In fact it sounds rather tame. Unless you
happen to be a pigeon, I suppose.
I'm fond of sticking my (crappy little Sony) mic into strange places
too, but can't resist tinkering with the field recordings once I've
got them on the hard drive. A bit of editing wouldn't go amiss here,
methinks: some of these tracks, the ants and the wasps in particular,
overstay their welcome somewhat (the latter presumably because Haswell
also happened to be recording as two Apache attack helicopters flew
over – hence the liners' helpful references to Apocalypse
Now and The Thing). And, if you're a connoisseur of
field recordings, you may experience a sense of déjà
entendu too – Toshiya Tsunoda recorded bird scarers to
great effect on his Lucky Kitchen masterpiece Pieces Of Air,
and Chris Watson's highly-acclaimed Outside The Circle Of Fire
featured the sound of vultures feasting on a rotting zebra carcass
(in comparison, Haswell's decomposing pheasant seems rather low budget).
But, who's complaining? In its cute little carrying case this is the
ideal Christmas present for some unsuspecting small child.–DW
Stephan
Mathieu + Taylor Deupree
TRANSCRIPTIONS
Spekk
 The
story of this first collaboration (among 2009's highest points for
this reviewer), including interesting technical specs and compositional
hints by the artists, can be found over at the Spekk website. Originally
intended for release on Taylor Deupree's 12k imprint, the album gradually
accumulated further layers of material via Mathieu's laptop-processed
array of old records and wax cylinders, to which Deupree added guitar
and synthesizer textures. Knowing the process of construction though
doesn't begin to explain how this piece touches such emotional depths;
one could easily rave about the mysteries of harmonic stasis, or the
gritty charm of the album's ever-changing halos of adjacent overtones
and inexplicable hisses, but this would be missing the point. Transcriptions works
transformations on a sonic substance originating many decades prior
to our era, and whose fundamental essence is still available for manipulation
– it's as if the duo is attempting to recapture the energy of
a dying body without letting it dissipate, turning it into another,
equally significant vital force. The music's hard-to-fathom moodswings
– myriads of one-second eternities, spanning a range from quietly
perturbed vacillations to ductile unorthodoxy – are but one
of the various reasons for its psychic impact. The others lie within
you, dear listener.–MR
Ogrob
EIN GEISTESKRANKER ALS KÜNSTLER
Ronda
 There's
neither space nor comma between the "o" and the "grob",
so this is not a woeful exclamation bemoaning the disappearance of
Felix Klopotek's record label, but rather "Borgo" spelt
backwards, Borgo being Sébastien Borgo of Sun Plexus (and numerous
other French free rock outfits) fame. And there's more to his work
than bouts of diarrhoea on the tour bus with the Nihilist Spasm Band
(see elsewhere in this issue for sordid details), as these fourteen
soundscapes make abundantly clear. Spanning a period of 15 years,
they run the gamut from coruscating grunge to eerie metallic drone
(with one track, "Le Temple du Rock", featuring the snoring
of a visitor to a 1994 installation – though how anyone managed
to nod off to such music is beyond me), ending up in the sludgy rainforest
of "Radio Onde Furlane", with semi-regular shortwave croaks
and chirps sounding like malevolent nocturnal wildlife. Just before
the end there's a snatch of fuzzy guitar (or is it harmonica?) which
could be a clue as to what's going on, but it crunches into silence
before we have to chance to figure out what it might be. Who cares?
Sounds great to me.–DW
Paul
Schütze
SOUNDWORKS V.1
TOKYO/OSAKA LIVE
www.paulschutze.com downloads
 This
review should really have been subheaded "plus twenty-four others",
as these two new releases spearhead a re-release in download form
of some twenty of Paul Schütze's earlier, frequently hard or
impossible to find, releases, as well as four free downloads of recent
works. The free downloads include the electronic/ambient genius's
piece for sculptor James Turrell's Roden Crater project,
a five-hours-plus work here edited to twenty minutes of very slow
listening inspired by the sonic resonances of Turrell's light-aperture
sculpture carved out of a dormant volcano in Arizona.
Soundworks V.1 is a collaboration with Andrew Hulme of discreet
avant moodists O Yuki Conjugate (Schütze also collaborated with
Hulme on the exotic Fell of 1996), originally heard, in mangled
form, as part of the soundtrack to the Channel 4 drama, Red Riding
1974. Like much of Schütze's work, this is music written
on the edge of perception, drifts, pulses, booms and gongs heard across
windy distances, sudden eruptions of tape carnage, icy sustained drones.
Played quiet or loud, it's mesmerizing.
 His
subduction (tectonically speaking) of two Japanese concerts with collaborator
Simon Hopkins veers closer to the Schütze we know from New
Maps of Hell and similar works: hints of Eastern percussion,
Pat-Metheny-at-16rpm guitars, slowly bowed strings, long bell tones
and, late on, a sultry rhythmic workout casting an eye towards the
funk alarums of his supergroup Phantom City.
With the twenty re-releases, dating back to 1990's Annihilating
Angel, this is a timely point to consider the quarter-century
or so of Schütze's work (his work with fellow Australians Laughing
Hands dates back into the 1980s). He has always been candid about
his influences, to the extent of punning on Can's Future Days
for "Future Nights" on Site Anubis (1996), but
what Schütze does with them is alchemical, marked by an uncommon
subtlety, elegance and Zen-like cool. Never mind my earlier PT suggestion
that he's a Brian Eno for the twenty-first century; Paul Schütze
is the Gil Evans of whichever planet Sun Ra currently inhabits.–JG
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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