| OCTOBER
News 2004 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Nate Dorward, Richard Hutchinson, Vid Jeraj,
Guy Livingston, Nick Rice, Wayne Spencer, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
On Die Stadt: Organum / Asmus Tietchens / John
Duncan / Kontakt der Jünglinge
Festival Roundup: Messiaen
at the Proms / New Music at the Edinburgh Festival
On Creative Sources: Schwimmer
/ Tidszon / Rodrigues, Mota, Paiuk
On Improvised Music from Japan: Yumiko
Tanaka / Samm Bennett / Masahiko Okura / Tetuzi Akiyama &
Martin Ng
Festival Roundup: Gaudeamus
MuziekWeek
w.m.o/roundup: Mattin & Junko / Heliogabalus
/ Mark Wastell / Bruce Russell
JAZZ: Die Enttäuschung
/ Brötzmann, McPhee, Kessler, Zerang / Jimmy Giuffre Trio
/ Groundtruther
IMPROV: Charles, Tétreault,
Labrosse, KK Roll / Television Power Electric / Scrape / London
Strings / Eugene Chadbourne
CONTEMPORARY: Ellen
Fullman / Peteris Vasks / Luciano Berio / Lee Hyla
ELECTRONICA: Coelacanth
/ Scott Smallwood
Last month
|
A
warm welcome this month to two new contributors to Paris Transatlantic:
Nicholas Rice has been out and about at the Edinburgh
Festival and the London Proms
— who says we don't cover classic events?— and, across the
pond, Minneapolis-based Clifford Allen has been talking to Dave
Burrell, an often overlooked major figure in the world of free
jazz piano. Also back by popular demand (which roughly translated
means three people asked me about it) is an interview
given to Crouton Music's Jon Mueller back in 2002, and no longer online
at the Crouton site. It's about time I updated the PT Audio
Archive too, but there are still plenty of tasty sounds up there
if you haven't checked them out yet. PT regular readers will notice
that the Electronica section is rather thin this month, for which
apologies are due: too much precious time was spent fighting a ferocious
battle with a veritable army of unwelcome pests on the home computer
system. (We won.) So a bumper crop of Electronica reviews comin at
ya next month, OK? Meanwhile, over to Clifford: "Born September
10, 1940, pianist/composer Dave Burrell occupies an interesting spot
in the jazz piano vanguard of the 1960s. Stylistically close neither
to Cecil Taylor nor Paul Bley, Burrell's unique blend of pastoral
melodicism, volcanic density and an infectious rhythmic sense owing
more to early jazz piano styles made him the perfect choice for such
eclectic groups as those of Archie Shepp and Marion Brown. Not content
to be only a unique voice on his instrument, Burrell has worked tirelessly
on his jazz opera Windward Passages, and is active as an educator
and historian while continuing to engage both the music of Jelly Roll
Morton and free improvisation." Now
read on.. bonne lecture.—DW
Organum
VACANT LIGHTS / RARA AVIS
Die Stadt DS 62 2CD
Asmus
Tietchens
IN DIE NACHT
Die Stadt DS 72
John Duncan
DA SICH DIE MACHTGIER..
Die Stadt DS 65
Kontakt der Jünglinge
FRÜHRUIN
Die Stadt DS 69 3"CD
 Die
Stadt label manager Jochen Schwarz's championship of the music that
emerged from the post-Nurse With Wound underground in the early 1980s
is as unswervingly loyal as it is invaluable for students of the work
of The Hafler Trio, The New Blockaders, Mirror and others, particularly
Asmus Tietchens and David Jackman. Jackman, a foot soldier in Cornelius
Cardew's Scratch Orchestra long before he started releasing spacious
drone-based music under the Organum moniker, is often described as
"obscure" - along with "underground" a much-overused adjective that
people (journalists, mostly) love to throw about when talking about
"legendary", "mythic" and "weird" figures such as NWW's Steven Stapleton,
Current 93's David Tibet, when in fact they're perfectly normal human
beings who simply value a little privacy - but, in the couple of interviews
with him available for consultation online, comes across as refreshingly
direct and straightforward. "I ride motorcycles, stare out of the
window and have a nice time with my friends. And like a lot of people,
I go to work in the morning. You know, just a normal life." His description
of the recording of Vacant Lights, in the Die Stadt press release
is equally to the point. So much so in fact that I might as well stick
it in here verbatim (a whole lot of record reviews swipe great big
chunks of accompanying press releases, after all - the difference
here is I admit to doing it): "recorded live in the backyard of long-gone
IPS Studio, Shepherd's Bush, London. Performed by Dinah Jane Rowe
and David Jackman, with Steven Stapleton and Peter McGhee at the controls.
Four recordings were made. Two survive and are presented on this CD.
Originally released as an LP on Jon Carlson's Dom America label in
the late 1980's, the CD version has been carefully re-mastered from
the original reels. It was one of the easiest and most trouble-free
Organum albums to make. Jane and I went to IPS on a sunny 20 August
1986, did the music in an hour and a half, went home. It was ordinary,
a normal day." Nothing could be more normal than the not-so-distant
rumble of passing London traffic that forms the backdrop to Jackman's
occasional flute arabesques and the assorted jingles from the musicians'
assorted impromptu percussion instruments (sounds like someone left
a whole toolbox full of spanners, hammers and brushes in the yard)
but closer listening reveals the cunning sleight of hand of Stapleton
and McGhee.
Three of the five brief tracks that make up Rara Avis have
also appeared before as 7" singles (though good luck finding them
now): "Iuel" and "Wolf" also came out on Dom America, and "Hibakusha"
on Syntactic. These versions are slightly embellished by Jim O'Rourke
(who added some guitar to "Iuel") and Christoph Heemann (microphone
feedback on "Wolf"). "Obon (Version)" is a remix by O'Rourke and Robert
Hampson of earlier IPS material, and the title track "Rara Avis" is
an outtake of 1990's Aurora sessions, which also featured O'Rourke,
Dinah Jane Rowe and Eddie Prévost. Jackman's breathy flute on "Iuel"
is far away from the Crowley-spouting 666 leather, blood-and-bondage
weirdness often associated with England's Hidden Reverse (to quote
David Keenan). Mix down those odd metallic squeaks after the two-minute
mark and it could easily pass as background music for a wildlife documentary.
"Wolf" is more muscular and jarring, a reminder that Jackman attended
the weekly AMM sessions in the early 70s. ("I really owe them a debt
of gratitude - one of the world's great bands. I think it was through
them that I really began the process of learning how to listen. At
about the same time, the ritual music of Tibetan Buddhism also had
an impact. I liked the music because it appeared to be totally relying
on texture for coherence. Note relationships didn't seem to have anything
to do with it.") It's all delicate, direct and unpretentious, but
"Obon (Version)" is rather slight (imagine a heavily sedated Clive
Bell in duo with Werner Dafeldecker), and one wishes "Hibakusha" and
"Rara Avis" could go on for thirteen or thirty minutes rather than
stop just after three and a half. The total duration of the disc is
under 20 minutes - both CDs together could fit comfortably on one
disc with nearly half an hour to spare. Still, I'm not complaining.
Limited edition of 600, so get your skates on.
 Recorded
just four years before Vacant Lights, the deliciously clunky
synths and drum machines on Asmus Tietchens' third album for the Sky
label, In Die Nacht, sound almost prehistoric today. The lovingly
fussed-over reissue comes with a photo of the interior of Tietchens'
Audiplex Studio A as it was back in 1982 (looks like something from
Doctor Who), and after barely two seconds of the brutal binary bash
of "Mit Zebras rennen", complete with tritone bass riff and tinny
snare patch, you know damn well what year it is. Tietchens is refreshingly
open in his liner notes about what he considers to be the inadequacy
of the album's four longer cuts: "It is really not possible to create
pieces of six minutes or more from ideas which are only adequate for
tracks of three minutes, unless one is willing to risk musical redundancy
or, worse, long-windedness." If only Tangerine Dream and the dozens
of others who followed in their wake had been as self-critical. The
fact is, though, that Tietchens went ahead and did the album - whether
he now regrets the cheesy, queasy cabaret chromatics of "Höhepunkt
kleiner Mann" and the lo-fi spaghetti western chaconne of "Spanische
Fliege" I can't say, but he must be happy to see the punchier short
tracks out and about again, from the cold wave noir of "Kopfüber
in den Gully" ("Headfirst into the drain") - replace synth bass with
Jah Wobble and presto! PIL! - to the Devo / DAF toytown shuffle
of "Unter fliegenden Tassen". The four bonus tracks are, if anything,
even more interesting than the album itself. "Aus dem Tag" takes a
banal I-VI-IV-V chord sequence and sends it out into territory only
The Residents might recognise, while "Würgstoffe" reconfigures the
whole tone scale of Debussy's impressionism into a groaning horror
movie soundtrack. I wish my German was good enough to understand what
Tietchens (?) is rapping on about in the final "Lebende Regler", but
alas, it remains a mystery.
 Such
talk of incomprehensible texts brings us neatly to Da Sich Die
Machtgier…, a more recent collaborative work between Tietchens
and John Duncan. Though Tietchens ended up, for reasons of his own,
not wishing to accept credit for his involvement in the project, his
contribution was essential, in that it provided the basic source material.
This consisted of a already electronically treated recording of Tietchens
reading from one of his favourite authors - E.M.Cioran - a cheery
little extract from "Learning from the Tyrants", part of which reads
as follows: "The scattered human herd will be united under the guardianship
of one pitiless shepherd, a kind of planetary monster before whom
the nations will prostrate themselves in an alarm bordering on ecstasy."
Sounds suspiciously like a Prince concert to me, or a pro-Osama
Ben Laden rally, and for can actually be understood of the text (with
the possible exception of the brief third movement "Das Ich macht..")
he might as well be reading an Al Qaida tract or the lyrics from Sign
O' The Times. Whatever Duncan did to the recording - some sort
of snazzy Plug Ins seem to have been involved - he certainly manages
to embody the fatalistic gloom of Cioran's text (if that was what
was intended), but it all sounds rather arid and fails to hold the
attention. A classic case of the concept being more interesting than
its realisation, or what Robin Holloway once memorably referred to
as "getting the sound and the sense out of alignment." Duncan's concepts
in the domain of visual and performance art are brilliant, often daring,
even terrifying - but few of those he realises as works of music ever
actually sound very interesting, and this isn't one of them.
 One
collaboration that Tietchens happily put his name to was (I use the
past tense because the appearance of the Frühruin box
would seem to indicate it's all over) his duo with Thomas Köner, the
man who did for European electronica what Albert Collins did to the
blues: froze it over, from his debut Nunatak, retracing the
fateful end of Captain Scott's polar expedition, to Permafrost
(no comment) and beyond. The duo's adopted name, punning on the titles
of two bona fide masterpieces of Elektronisches Musik, Karlheinz Stockhausen's
"Gesang der Jünglinge" (1956) and "Kontakte" (1960) isn't as ironic
as it might seem, as I'd be prepared to argue that the body of work
that Tietchens and Köner have produced - four 45-minute live CDs and
a 15' studio session - can, when taken as a whole, stand as one of
the major achievements in electronic music (not only from Germany)
at the turn of the new century. The fact that the four full-length
albums, numbered 1, 0, -1 and n respectively,
were recorded live might lead you to describe KdJ's work as EAI -
gaaah, the dreaded term reappears.. I'd better stop apologising for
using it from now on, as we seem to be stuck with it - but it isn't.
In concert Köner uses a laptop (so God only knows what he's doing)
and Tietchens prepares his material in advance of the shows and "merely
presses 'play' on a DAT player and looks serious", to quote one review.
No matter: the music is awesome. As serious as one would expect, coming
from Tietchens' fatalistic music-is-no-more-than-what-it-is asceticism
and Köner's 'Asthetik der Untergang', it's beautifully paced, immaculately
recorded and utterly compelling from beginning to end.
Though billed as their first encounter, the show at Bremen's Lagerhaus
on December 17th 1999 that was released as 1 wasn't in fact
their first collaboration. According to Vital Weekly's Frans de Waard,
that that took place in The Netherlands in 1988 (an extract apparently
made it to Sinkende Swimmer). Never mind: 1 is stupendous,
a looming yet luminous monster of a piece heavily sourced in Tietchens'
recordings of water - the balance between the two men tips slightly
in Tietchens' favour here. The pair's second outing, recorded nearly
14 months later at (in?) MS Stubnitz, a boat moored in the harbour
of the north German port of Rostock, is darker, with Köner's post-Basic
Channel techno animal poking its head out once or twice from underneath
the pillows he's trying to suffocate it with. Tietchens and Köner
took some of the submarine claustrophobia back to the Lagerhaus in
Bremen two and a half months later, when -1 was recorded on
April 28th 2001. Of the four live sets this is the crunchiest, a clanking,
groaning assemblage of machine noises that serves to remind us that
Köner, despite that fascination with desolate polar wilderness, remains
firmly attached to life in the city. "I would never move to the country,"
he told The Wire's Biba Kopf. "It's sometimes nice to visit,
but after three weeks I have to go to the nearest town, sit down and
get some good diesel engines and scraping metal sounds." He waxes
lyrical about the post-industrial landscape of his hometown Dortmund:
"When you walk through these abandoned industrial fields, there is
this silence, but with very powerful motorised sound reproducing units
in the distance." This is the atmosphere that permeates the fourth
album, n, recorded in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum on May 18th
2002. If Tietchens' hand was more evident in 1, n sounds
more like a Köner outing than one of Asmus' austere menge series.
After four such monumental slabs of music, the puny little three-incher
called Frühruin might seem rather insulting (especially when
you see how much it costs, though it's obviously destined for hardcore
KdJ fans who want the cute white box to stash the entire collection
in), but to a certain extent it's what all the fans wanted all the
way along: a Tietchens / Köner studio recording. Not that it sounds
any different from the other four outings: the only complaint I'd
make is that it's just not long enough. A whole album of evanescent,
elusive magic such as this would certainly not go amiss. Meanwhile,
it seems the party's over; the box has the definitive look of a tombstone.
But maybe someone can persuade our two protagonists to take to the
road again, at some stage. Next time they could call themselves "Hymnen
der Telemusik", or something. And if they came to a venue near you,
you'd be there, wouldn't you? I would.—DW
Messiaen
in a Contemporary Context
Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, London
23rd July - 6th September
Edinburgh
Festival
23rd - 28th August 2004
By
accident or design, this year's Proms featured a retrospective of
works by Messiaen. Of the six concerts in the series, four provoked
a reassessment of his achievement, now that twelve years have passed
since his death. These were George Benjamin and the Ensemble Modern
(23rd July, Royal Albert Hall), David Robertson and the London Sinfonietta
(13th August, Royal Albert Hall), Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Emily
Beynon (30th August, Victoria and Albert Museum) and Sir Simon Rattle
and the Berlin Philharmonic (6th September, Royal Albert Hall).
The Benjamin concert, as one might expect from the Ensemble Modern,
was thoroughly disciplined and professional. Both conductor and performers
had mastered all aspects of the repertory involved, unsurprising given
that Benjamin is a former Messiaen pupil and had composed or orchestrated
all the compositions in the first half himself. The result was a certain
lack of adventurousness, with Benjamin perhaps too immersed in the
interpretative traditions of this music to be able to produce a truly
original performance. Nevertheless, this also highlighted some of
the more routine elements in the music itself. All the pieces on show
were technically brilliant reworkings of previous ideas, but the reworking
does not seem to have produced anything particularly fresh. Messiaen's
continual reliance on older techniques is nowadays regarded as deeply
problematic, and the most unusual feature of Benjamin's approach was
that he seemed to embrace Messiaen's attitude to reworking just as
wholeheartedly. The title of his pieces in the first half, Palimpsests
I & II, underlined his predicament: a palimpsest is a seventeenth
century word meaning a manuscript, frequently a sacred one, on which
one text has been written over another text underneath. This brings
to mind not only images of a recycled composition, but also of a juxtaposition
of unrelated material: much of the problem with Messiaen's reworked
ideas is that they pass through little extensive development, meaning
that they cannot revitalize themselves. Themes are rarely cross-fertilized,
resulting in a static reiteration of material. Although Benjamin's
approach is a little more flexible, the basic forms were recognizable
from his teacher's music: a central chorale, with complex harmonic
and rhythmic ornamentation. Some of the "shock chords" in Palimpsest
I even recalled another Messiaen pupil, Boulez: the work was in
fact written for a Boulez tour with the LSO. Benjamin extended the
link to the seventeenth century by prefacing these pieces with his
own orchestration of Nicolas de Grigny's Récit de tierce en taille.
De Grigny was a French composer who died aged just 32 in 1703, and
his Baroque chorales and ornamentations are strikingly similar to
forms favored by Messiaen and Benjamin. Des canyons aux étoiles…,
the Messiaen work featured in the second half, emerged as part of
a classic French tradition, extending through organists like Franck
to the medieval composers. Messiaen felt particularly close to medieval
music, both for its radical innovations and for its religious changelessness,
but his connections to the warmer-hearted French Romantics were equally
obvious: his collage technique and exoticisms reminded one of Saint-Saëns,
albeit in a highly modernized form.
These themes were developed extensively by the London Sinfonietta,
but with somewhat different results. Instead of placing Messiaen in
a strictly European tradition, the programme concentrated more on
his links with world music, in particular the music of the East with
which he is so often associated. The UK première of a quadruple concerto
by Bright Sheng, The Song and Dance of Tears, preceded a performance
of the Turangalîla Symphony which dazzled with technical mastery
and stylistic aplomb: Robertson brought a truly Dionysiac energy to
the work which offset Benjamin's limpid, Apolline approach. In fact,
this is the score of Messiaen's which consistently sounds the most
Indian, the most daring and improvisatory, and it formed a perfect
foil to the analytical separation of textures in the Chinese concerto.
Despite an excellent performance by Yo-Yo Ma and his compatriots from
the Silk Road Ensemble, the latter inevitably fared worse than the
Turangalîla: the writing for cello and piano was pretty but
unadventurous, while the two Chinese instruments were too soft to
allow for any blending with the orchestra. This meant the work was
divided into sections where the concerto instruments played practically
without accompaniment and sections in which the orchestra played without
the soloists. Dramatic development was consequently not high on the
list of priorities, and the work eventually suffered from a lack of
cross-fertilization - again, a feature of Messiaen's less successful
compositions but certainly not a flaw in the case of the Symphony.
Cynthia Millar and Paul Crossley (another Messiaen pupil) relished
the exchanges with the orchestra and seemed fully attuned to the composer's
humorous extravagances, while Bright Sheng's potentially entertaining
mix of East and West allowed itself to stagnate in postmodernist pastiche.
The
Aimard concert took us away from China and reminded one of Messiaen's
links to American music. Le merle noir, a short piece for piano
and flute, was coupled with Ives's Concord Sonata, which in
Aimard's hands grew into a virtuoso masterpiece with curious affinities
to composers like Prokofiev. The portraits of the American transcendentalist
philosophers invoked a musical mysticism that reminded one not just
of Messiaen, one of Aimard's mentors, but also of Prokofiev's forebear
Scriabin. By comparison, the Messiaen sounded thin on the ground,
despite the expansive patchwork of both men's work. Robertson, a Californian,
had already exposed the quasi-American brashness in the Turangalîla,
while Benjamin was a fine exponent of Messiaen's "wide open spaces":
Des canyons aux étoiles… was inspired by the landscapes of
the West, depicted here by unconventional instruments such as wind
machines (often favoured by American composers). However, it was Aimard's
program which made the necessary conceptual leap, and one can only
look forward to an occasion when someone will couple a piece by Messiaen
with a similarly eclectic offering by a composer like John Adams.
The
final concert of the series developed the American connection still
further, albeit more disappointingly. Éclairs sur l'au-delà…
was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, but, despite some beautiful
birdsong passages, the work has dated badly: the repetitive style
becomes chronic at times and all the daring of Messiaen's earlier
years slumps into portentousness. Much the same could be said of the
performance with Rattle and the Berlin Phil: Rattle seems to see himself
as Leonard Bernstein these days, and although the work was commissioned
for Bernstein's orchestra, Rattle permitted an absence of detailing
and a sentimentality that not even the late American conductor would
have allowed himself. However, the soloists in the birdsong were impressive
and, as ever, one was left wondering what the orchestra could do with
the work if they performed it, say, with Jonathan Nott, whose recent
Ligeti recordings with the Berliners have been so remarkably successful.
No one expects Rattle to transform Éclairs into a masterpiece,
but he could at least make it a more convincing example of the postmodernism
to which he so ardently adheres.
The
Edinburgh Festival has always been a staunch supporter of contemporary
music. This year alone there were ten events dominated by modern repertoire,
of which I was able to attend five: Sciarrino's La bocca, i piedi,
il suono (XASAX, 23rd August), Birtwistle's Night's Black Bird
and The Shadow of Night (Franz Welser-Möst, Cleveland Orchestra,
25th August), Lachenmann's Wiegenmusik, Guero, Ein
Kinderspiel and Serynade (Marino Formenti, 25th August),
Nono's Al gran sole carico d'amore (Johannes Harneit, Hanover
State Opera, 26th August) and Goebbels's Eraritjaritjaka (André
Wilms, Mondriaan Quartet, 28th August).
Birtwistle is currently enjoying a great vogue in British concert
halls: this year marks his seventieth birthday, and there is a substantial
retrospective of his work in the autumn at the Royal Festival Hall.
The Proms, however, are celebrating the occasion rather differently,
integrating it with Maxwell Davies's seventieth as well as the seventieth
anniversary of the deaths of Elgar, Delius and Holst. This juxtaposition
of their works raises the usual questions about the role of continuity
in British musical history: it is relatively easy to relate the Manchester
Group to Holst, but to what extent can we talk of connections with
Elgar and Delius? Although the two pieces in the Usher Hall concert
failed to provide any direct answers, they formed a suitable platform
from which the ongoing debate could proceed. Night's Black Bird,
a work for full orchestra, was followed by its companion piece, The
Shadow of Night, with John Dowland's lute song "In Darkness Let
Me Dwell" serving as an intimate interlude between the two. Despite
the contrast in forces, Birtwistle has stated that the song was an
important influence on both compositions, along with one of his persistent
fascinations, Dürer's Melancolia I. The connection is twofold.
Firstly, the opening to the song consists of a series of tentative,
dispirited seconds, an interval on which much of the thematic material
for the Birtwistle is based. Secondly, Dowland was a key player in
one of the most remarkable periods in British art, a period in which
both of Birtwistle's works are immersed. The title "The Shadow
of Night" comes from the writings of George Chapman, a contemporary
of Shakespeare's and a leading figure in the "school of night", a
crucial influence on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The melancholy
that Birtwistle invokes was a vital source of inspiration for the
radical artistic activity of the times, a radicalism that would only
find a parallel in the Modernist period, as Stravinsky acknowledged
in his homage to Gesualdo. Moreover, this artistic activity was fuelled
by the theatre, both in Monteverdi's operas and in Shakespeare's plays,
and would help inaugurate the non-conformist tradition in British
drama. It is to this tradition that Birtwistle has most consistently
appealed, just like his predecessors, including, of course, Delius.
Although the two composers might superficially have little in common,
both played very similar roles in their respective periods. Just as
Delius was one of the last of the progressive Romantics, so Birtwistle
is one of the last progressive Modernists. The accumulated richness
that occurs at the end of a tradition is evident in the work of both
composers, particularly in the Cleveland's selection of Birtwistle:
the pieces shimmered with post-Stravinskian rhythms, wind and percussion
writing worthy of Varèse, and a full range of harmonic techniques
from before and after the war. The title of the first piece perhaps
even alludes to Messiaen's Le merle noir, and although Messiaen's
collages are nowhere in evidence, the work has a similar virtuosity
and sumptuousness. As ever, Birtwistle's form, like Delius's, is sui
generis, and it is easy to see why their "primitive" elements endeared
them less to Britain than to the Continent. Delius spent a good proportion
of his life in France and came from German stock; Birtwistle has a
home in Lunegarde and had a strong exposure to Germanic music at university
through Goehr. Both spent the earlier parts of their lives in Northern
England, and the Northern attitude to art as craft lies at the centre
of both men's work, refining it and even, arguably, inhibiting it,
which is perhaps my only objection to both men's work and certainly
my only objection to these night pieces in general. Although everything
in Birtwistle's current output is immaculate, the melodic material
and drama are perhaps too tightly repressed, undermining a necessary
sense of surprise. Although on a certain level the compositions of,
say, Boulez are equally controlled, Boulez's methods of development
are sufficiently heterogeneous to permit more striking juxtapositions
of material. This was unfortunately a point Franz Welser-Möst did
little to rectify: despite scrupulous attention to rhythm, orchestration
and counterpoint, his sense of melodic line was frequently flat. Although
some praised his laissez-faire attitude to the orchestra, it is clear
that Dohnányi did not achieve such excellence in this music by merely
commissioning pieces, sitting back and watching the Cleveland bluster
them through. That said, the orchestra seemed brilliantly attuned
to the repertoire: it was only four days since the world première
of Night's Black Bird and already they had mastered it as fully
as The Shadow of Night, which was commissioned by Dohnányi
for the orchestra over three years ago. Posterity's judgment of Birtwistle
remains to be seen, but it is likely the Cleveland will play an important
role in it.
By
comparison, the events featuring Nono and his pupil Lachenmann had
a greater sense of adventure, despite their varying lack of refinement.
This may partly be explained by the element of populism in their works:
social issues are central to both men's music, and at its best the
music featured here has much in common with the spirit of the South
American revolutionaries. Sections of Lachenmann's piano music harked
back to Villa-Lobos, with cluster chords producing suitably martial
sounds. Guero was an imitation of the eponymous South American
percussion instrument: throughout its length, the pianist does not
depress any of the keys, instead exploiting glissandi along the surface
of the keyboard and noises made by tapping the wood or plucking at
the strings. The whole of Nono's "scenic action" is one long hymn
to Marxism, introduced by a quote from Che Guevara: "Beauty does not
oppose the revolution". Despite its serialist radicalism, Nono tried
to model the work on Bellini, and one suspects he may also have been
inspired by the apocalyptic bombast of composers such as Penderecki.
The libretto consists of key texts with no discernible stage directions
or plot, deliberately encouraging the director to make an active "commitment"
to the work. Peter Konwitschny's response to the challenge was mixed.
Throughout the evening, the set was superb. The first part opened
with Fourier's utopian glass house, a dwelling whose inhabitants are
visible from the outside and hence have to be free from any malice
or crime. In this case, it houses a bedroom of two reasonably innocent
children, interrupted in their play by "The Spectre of Communism"
(a fairy godmother dressed in white), who introduces them to an educational
journey through the world of the Paris Commune, including a lecture
by Lenin, a Punch and Judy show and arias from Che Guevara's lover
Tania Bunke (a fine performance from Janina Baechle). The second part
concentrated more on the mother than on the child, Mother Russia of
1905, to be precise, with heavy borrowings from Gorky and Brecht.
The setting is more adult and claustrophobic than the first part:
the cramped flat of the opening soon turns into a factory whose walls
move together to crush rebellious workers. This "commitment" to Nono's
bombast was matched by the performance, although one occasionally
wished it could have had more of the subtlety of the set, particularly
in the heavier polyphonic sequences. The chief letdown of the production
was the movement on stage: the singers had a good grasp of Nono's
coarse lyricism, but their actions rarely reflected the gestures in
the orchestra. Above all, both production and performance required
better pacing, as well as fewer technical blunders from the Edinburgh
Festival Theatre. Nono may have dismissed the piece as an "elephant",
but there is no doubt that it is a more dignified elephant than this.
The same could occasionally be said of Marino Formenti's performance
of the Lachenmann: despite a total command of the music and an awe-inspiring
technique, he sometimes succumbed to shades of Pierre-Laurent Aimard's
circus tricks in the complete Ligeti Études at the Wigmore
Hall last autumn. Formenti was more convincing in the straightforward
absurdism of Ein Kinderspiel than in the tortuous dramatic
complexities of Serynade, a thirty-minute epic with all the
fascinations and flaws of the longest of Stockhausen's Klavierstücke.
The massive tirade of forearm clusters at the climax is a technical
section which Formenti had mastered thoroughly yet one which threatened
to derail the piece. Perhaps the finest readings of the recital were
inspired by the earlier works, Guero and Wiegenmusik.
The latter was particularly suited to the late-night darkness of the
Usher Hall: Lachenmann said he gave it the title of "Cradle Music"
because he felt it sounded like a child fighting the urge to sleep.
Formenti was instantly possessed by its febrile world and, as ever,
his mastery of Lachenmann's revolutionary pedaling was complete. It
is Lachenmann's seventieth birthday next year and one hopes that the
Proms will grant him a retrospective; but, alas, he may be doomed
to the fate of Ferneyhough, who, sixty this year, had not one piece
performed at the Festival.
The
work of Sciarrino and Goebbels formed an interesting contrast to the
modernist manifestoes of their predecessors and compatriots. In particular,
Sciarrino's exotic sonorities and minimalism frequently reminded one
of Nono, particularly in his later, barer guise, although there are
remarkable differences between their aesthetics. Nono's pieces are
designed to appeal to an ordinary audience, but they do not include
any room for ordinary performers. La bocca, i piedi, il suono,
by contrast, exploits the talents of 100 saxophonists who emerge half
an hour into the forty-five minute piece and do nothing but tap their
keys and play the occasional harmonic, all with more than a hint of
randomness. This approach lies at the heart of the divide between
modernism and postmodernism: the ritualism of Al gran sole
initiates the average listener into higher mysteries which he has
no power to alter, whereas La bocca, i piedi, il suono creates
a hieratic atmosphere through a mélange of expert and popular forces.
The performance was boosted by its extraordinary setting, the huge
rectangular neo-classical entrance hall of the Royal Museum, complete
with two galleries running right round its circumference and room
for the audience to position themselves as they pleased. The purity
of the space was enhanced by its predominant whiteness and by the
presence of two fish pools right at the centre. The members of the
XASAX quartet stood either side of these pools and spent the first
twenty minutes building up sounds out of nothingness, starting off
with a simple repeated note and then punctuating the silence with
flutterings and squawks. After twenty minutes, the intervals grew
wider and wider and the interruptions broadened into a wistful minor
chord. The quartet played together for roughly ten minutes and then
subsided slightly for the entrance of the other saxophonists, 150
in this performance, who wandered along a walkway and among the audience,
making inadvertent noises with their feet as well as their instruments.
It is this particular effect that gives lie to the work's title, "The
mouth, the feet, the sound". Although the work is not nearly as long
as, say, the piece by Tavener at this year's Proms, the uncompromising
subtlety of its contemplative atmospherics caused many members of
the audience to make an early exit: Sciarrino, after all, is not as
straightforward as Pärt.
The
same could not be said of Goebbels, however, whose links to the modernist
tradition are less obvious than Sciarrino's. Goebbels started off
life in a rock band, and the material for Eraritjaritjaka consists
entirely of quotations, literary ones from Elias Canetti and musical
ones from a series of compositions for string quartet by Shostakovich,
Mossolov, Oswald, Lobanov, Scelsi, Bryars, Ravel, Crumb, Bach and
Goebbels himself. The piece began in the Royal Lyceum Theatre with
the Mondriaan Quartet accompanying André Wilms as he recited a series
of aphorisms dressed in a writerly three-piece suit. Wilms and the
Quartet moved around the stage constantly, Wilms through a square
of white light at the centre and the Quartet through the darkness
in the aisles by its sides. This sense of movement and the austere
dialogism of the medium of the quartet mirrored Canetti's texts to
reasonable effect, although one was frequently left longing for something
which would unsettle the listener as much as the disorientating texts
themselves. That moment finally arrived in a brief interlude: Wilms
positioned a model house centre-stage, and the square of light disappeared.
During the ensuing blackout, the house was seen as if from an aeroplane,
giant-sized in comparison to the roads running around it. The lights
of the house in the midst of the darkness augmented the air of consolation
in solitude. The idea was extended when Wilms left the theatre and
took a journey by taxi to an Edinburgh flat, all of which was filmed
and projected onto the back wall of the stage. This wall was later
revealed to be the outer wall of the flat, and the play ended with
Wilms absorbed in his writing, accompanied by the Mondriaan, who were
by now inside the house. Although the piece was perfectly effective,
it suffered from an inability to match the startling elegance of the
quotations. Nevertheless, Goebbels's theatrical and musical sensitivity
were everywhere in evidence, and the audience were more entertained
than during the Sciarrino, which perhaps suffered from an opposite
inability to relax; but, as Canetti points out, "Try saying to Shakespeare,
'Relax!'"—NR
Schwimmer
7X4X7
Creative Sources CS013
Tidszon
UNSK
Creative Sources CS014
Ernesto Rodrigues / Manuel Mota / Gabriel Paiuk
DORSAL
Creative Sources CS012
In
the second half of the 1990s, the new "reduced" aesthetics pursued
by Radu Malfatti and others threw down a fundamental challenge to
the world of improvised music. Within a few years, a number of the
original explorers of "reductionism" had begun to move beyond the
principles and practices that had initially defined this austere musical
movement. In issue 89 of Musicworks magazine (Summer 2004) the Berlin-based
tuba player Robin Hayward observed that "by 2000 I was feeling in
a cul-de-sac with the much reduced, static music I was producing"
and explained how he subsequently sought to break his self-imposed
rules by, amongst other things, including an element of narrative
structure. More generally, the question of how a viable and relevant
musical improvisation for the start of the 21st century should be
approached in the light of the aesthetics, techniques and insights
of reductionism (and their limits) has arisen not just amongst those
identified (usually by others) as 'reductionists' but also a number
of thoughtful musicians across the improvised music spectrum. To a
degree, each of the three latest releases on Lisbon's industrious
Creative Sources label can be seen as a response to this musical problem.
 From
the heart of Berlin's reductionist community comes Schwimmer, a quartet
comprising Alessandro Bosetti (soprano sax), Michael Thieke (clarinet),
Sabine Vogel (flute) and Michael Griener (percussion). In recording
7x4x7, the group utilized an unusual method. To quote Bosetti's
sleeve notes: "a player (clarinettist Michael Thieke) played and recorded
a seven minute long solo. A second player overdubbed a seven-minute
long solo over this statement while listening to it. A third musician
overdubbed onto the two previous tracks a third segment and so on
in a chain reaction that leads to a longer structure (which could
be reconstructed by those willing to do so, through the amazingly
detailed graphic description on the CD jacket, an artwork in itself)".
The effect of this procedure is to destroy any element of contemporaneous
collective interaction; moreover, the task of ascertaining at any
given moment who is alive to whom and who is merely providing a backing
track surely imposes too great a cognitive burden to be compatible
with enjoyment of the music. In consequence, the listener must abandon
any hope of detecting and appreciating any substantive element of
ongoing group interchange and collaboration and turn instead to the
work as a mere sonic artifact. It's something of a surprise to find
that the sound object so laboriously constructed rather resembles
that of an ordinary improvisation (except, of course, without any
element of extemporaneous collective engagement to be entered into
by the listener). The sleeve notes indicate that the work was intended
to explore the musical dimension of space by means of both the recording
method plus "close miking, multiple miking, spreading many loudspeakers
throughout the room [and] the virtuoso and massive use of noise and
extended techniques", but none of this succeeds in opening interesting
spatial dimensions within the recording. The reductionist vocabulary
of exhalations, flutters, scrapes, etc. is duly employed in various
combinations and densities, but what emerges seems uninspired, stilted
and somewhat rambling. It also on occasions falls back into arrangements
that resemble the quieter end of 1970s groups such as the Spontaneous
Music Ensemble. For his part, Bosetti evidently regards the recorded
contributions as commendably "detached and out-of-synch", but together
they can hardly be distinguished from the sound of an improvisation
that has simply failed to cohere.
 The members
of Tidszon are Birgit Ulher (trumpet), Martin Küchen (soprano and
baritone saxophones, mutes and pocket-radio), Lise-Lott Norelius (live-electronics)
and Raymond Strid (percussion). The group's sound is another variant
of 1970s free improvisation dispensing with agitated crescendos and
incorporating elements of the extended techniques and spaciousness
associated with reductionism. The fusion is not entirely convincing:
the reductionist playing seems relatively perfunctory and Strid, generally
a rather busy percussionist, gives the impression of being sorely
tempted to inject some alien propulsion into the music. More importantly,
can the challenges and impasses of reductionism be resolved simply
by absorbing isolated elements of the music into the paradigm it superseded
in order to create what one might describe as 1970s free improvisation
with the lid on? That would seem to be more of a conservative recuperation
of reductionism than a vibrantly contemporary refashioning and deepening
of its radical approach to musical space and time in conditions of
"fast capitalism", to borrow Ben Agger's phrase.
 For
me, the most successful of the new discs is Dorsal. The music
is not as radical as some that has appeared on the label: Ernesto
Rodrigues brings his usual startlingly extended techniques to bear
on the violin, but Gabriel Paiuk's playing inside and outside the
piano owes much to contemporary classical music and Manuel Mota's
guitar seems relatively conventional in comparison with the work of
Keith Rowe, Annette Krebs and other cutting-edge reinventors of the
instrument. If music is to explore beyond the miniscule fraction of
the universe of possibilities regarded as legitimate by the arbitrary
presuppositions of conventional western music, it would seem necessary
to adopt much more radical approaches to sound generation than Mota
and Paiuk bring to their respective products of the bourgeois era.
Notwithstanding this, as a collective the trio succeeds in creating
some captivatingly capacious improvisations that are characterized
by responsive and creative collaboration amongst the musicians. It's
not all entirely successful, and Paiuk's occasional introduction of
jazzy touches into his playing drags the music back towards musical
ideologies the group is straining to surpass; but the best of the
trio's work points to some of the improvisational virtues and spacio-temporal
approaches that a radical post-reductionism would arguably do well
to adopt and makes the disc well worth acquiring.—WS
On
Improvised Music from Japan
Yumiko
Tanaka
TAYUTAUTA
IMJ 507
Samm
Bennett
SECRETS OF TEACHING YOURSELF MUSIC
IMJ 516
Masahiko
Okura
TIME SERVICE
IMJ 518
Tetuzi
Akiyama / Martin Ng
OIMACTA
IMJ 519
 Tayutauta
is the long overdue debut solo album by gidayu-shamisen virtuoso Yumiko
Tanaka - after five brief solo tracks featured in the IMJ 10CD box
set (now out of print, but you might get lucky) - and was recorded
"in her four-and-a-half-tatami-mat room in Yashiro, Hyogo prefecture."
A nice detail, but an important one - though known outside Japan for
her appearances with Ground Zero (until the mythic group disbanded)
and, more recently, in Heiner Goebbels' Hashirigaki, Tanaka
is an associate professor of Japanese music history at Hyogo University
of Teacher Education, and has written numerous scholarly articles
and essays on the subject. Despite its investigation of extended techniques
and preparations and its exploration of repetitive elements, there's
a timelessness to her music that comes from familiarity with musical
traditions spanning several centuries. Her patient and magical exploration
of harmonics on the opening "Furuike ya" is as deceptively simple
as it is beautiful, but she's not averse to showing off the roughness
of the instrument: the gritty friction of "Chirei" (shades of Tetuzi
Akiyama's dobro) and the bold scordatura of "Ruten" are as
uncompromisingly experimental as the work of her erstwhile boss Otomo
Yoshihide, and it's not hard to see why she has been sought out by
the likes of John Zorn and Butch Morris.
 The 19
tracks on percussionist Samm Bennett's Secrets Of Teaching Yourself
Music were recorded - superbly - in concert at various different
Tokyo venues, including watering holes whose names will be familiar
to improv junkies (Off Site, Shinjuku Pit Inn..) and edited together
very craftily to form a continuously running suite - for once, the
word's historical associations with dance are appropriate - alternating
relatively simple and at times downright foot-tapping grooves with
more experimental sonorities. The album cover photo shows Bennett,
originally from Alabama but resident in Tokyo since 1995, with a giant
stethoscope inserted into his ears. Along with the snappy 1950s ad
style "you'll be amazed how easy it is!" text inside the gatefold
it sets the tone for the album. There's always an element of fun,
or at least theatre, to a solo percussion concerts, acoustic or otherwise,
and Samm certainly sounds to be enjoying himself here. With one notable
exception, the eerie theremin-like swoops of "Erasing the inevitable",
the pieces are short - 13 of the 19 tracks clock in at under two and
a half minutes - and feature, in addition to the par-for-the-course
contact mics and drum machines, a crank toy with portable karaoke
mic, various vibrators, beepers and effectors (go figure) and something
called a bumble ball (toothbrush is not listed, though I am 99% sure
he's using one on "I'm in no mood").
 Saxophonist
Masahiko Okura's Time Service, like Stéphane Rives' Fibres
on Potlatch, is a case study in music as acoustic research. If you're
no great fan of raw extended techniques, you might want to leave this
one in the racks, though don't scoff and say the guy can't play -
Okura leads a double life with his decidedly funky post-jazzrock outfit
Gnu (check out Suro on Cubic Music). Anyway, back to the lab..
after the opening basso profundo snore of the bass tubes on "Lavnta",
Okura takes up the alto on tracks 2 - 4. "Sylome" alternates quasi-electronic
blasts of half-pitched noise with silence, "My Cabin Home" explores
more expressionistic upper registers (though we're a long way from
the traumatic wails of Masayoshi Urabe), and "Indice" explores a world
of Geiger counter clicks. At 10'40" it certainly tries the patience,
and the booming rustle of the following "Gorillatoast" comes as a
welcome surprise - quite what Okura has inserted into or onto his
tubes to make them sound like a cross between a snare drum and a Harley
Davidson is a mystery, but even its complex timbres sustain interest
only up to a point. Fortunately the album goes out on a high - well,
no, actually, as the last track is for bass clarinet, but you know
what I mean - "Safety" patiently explores the delicate fluffy clicks
of instrument's rich, woody lower octaves.
 Oimacta
is the latest offering from the remarkably prolific globetrotting
guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama, this time partnered by turntablist Martin
Ng in a studio session - just their second meeting - recorded in Sydney
(so much for Improvised Music from Japan, but never mind) in July
2002. It's a slow, thoughtful and haunting set, from the shifting,
glistening drones of the opening "Kyua Scattered" to the metallic
bottleneck twang of "Silver-Brown" and "Dolphin Hotel", slipping in
and out of pools of sine wave stasis. The dedication of the third
track "Lost Angels" to Henry Flynt might have listeners familiar with
Akiyama's gloriously self-indulgent Don't Forget To Boogie (Idea)
expecting a return to the hinterland of pop. Instead the music remains
in the world of mildly unsettling microtonally-inflected drone, Akiyama's
gently pulsing chordal clouds floating above a low amp hum. If it's
pop you're after, try and hunt down a copy of Akiyama's awesome seventeen
minute cover of "Wild Horses" - CDR, Playback 09 commune@mpd.biglobe.ne.jp
- meanwhile Oimacta is splendid, even if (like me) you can't
work what the letters in the album title stand for.—DW
Gaudeamus
MuziekWeek
Amsterdam, September 2004
 |
musiscoop projection |
Some of the best performances during this
week of world and Dutch premieres from an international line-up
of
young composers came from France’s Ensemble Aleph, well known
for their quirkiness and dedication to thorny new music. Their back-to-back
concerts in the Ijsbreker offered a sense of completion heard only
rarely during the week – the ensemble had spent all summer working
on their programs and recorded a CD, released the same day and offered
(free!) to all members of the audience, complete with a lively Logbook.
Interviews with the composers, trendy photos, and serious musical
analysis make this an impressive souvenir, and make their effort on
behalf of the eleven featured young composers well worth it. Highlights
of the Aleph show included trumpeter Lutz Mandler’s simultaneous
performance on two alphorns (connected to a single mouthpiece),
Mayke Nas’ Musique qui sent la table et la pantoufle,
a good example of the humorously serious work of this up and coming
Dutch composer, and the pun and a grin of Dmitri Kourliandski’s Pas d’action (“action step” or “no
action” depending on how you choose to translate it).
The Insomnio Ensemble presented an interesting program of electroacoustic
music, with impressively seamless integration of electronics and
live
sounds, complemented by skilled –though rarely virtuosic – instrumental
writing. Rather than consisting of odd or unexpected sounds which
could only be generated electronically, the electronic
element sounded distinctly acoustic in origin, reflections of and
variations on real instruments, a maddening subtlety that made
for
a rather conservative-eared program, though a few pieces shone
for their acoustic writing. The new instrument highlight of the
week was
a metal device called the Waterphone, performed with flair by Insomnio
percussionist Claire Edwards. Heavily amplified, the Waterphone
contains
water in a metal disc 1 foot (about 35cm) in diameter at its base,
from the centre of which a handle extends upwards, which Ms Edwards
held in her left hand, while bowing metal rods forming a cone from
the base to the top of the handle. These vibrated in sympathy with
one another, and were bowed, beaten, and swung. The instrument
was
used to great effect in Lute of Aquarius, by Polish composer
Katarzyna Glowicka, and the electronics made a fast and frenzied
counterpoint
to the performer’s athletic gestures (listen to a sound
sample). Melissa Mazzoli and Juan Sebastian Lach Lau co-wrote
Broken, a long slow ostinato of broken sounds, of plucked,
staticky strings, jerky double bass, fluttering mandolin, and guitar,
all trying to catch their breath, with occasional resolutions in the
harp: marvellous, tense, and mystical (listen to our sound
sample).
The philosophical conundrum of the week was posed by two pieces
that were (by a process of convergent evolution?) from completely
different
spheres, yet resembled each other in wonderful and perplexing ways.
In each composition a virtuosic soloist played with – and above
and against and in contrast to – a western European new music
ensemble: Appalachia, written by Giel Vleggaar and performed
by the Nieuw Ensemble with Wiek Hijmans on acoustic steel-string guitar,
was straight out of Tennessee, at least on the surface, and had an
engaging lilt. It was immediately followed by Khara Khorum
by Mongolian composer Sansargereltech Sangidorj, which also featured
a traditional guitar-like instrument, the Morin khuur, performed by
Purevjav Sambuu (listen to the sound
sample). At what point does composition become colonialism, at
what point is it tourism? Over a glass or two of Genever (the quintessential
Dutch juniper gin, necessary after every new music concert), Vleggaar
explained that he wanted not to create the actual sound of Appalachia,
but rather the atmosphere, the groove. He added that finding the correct
notation (also a problem for the Mongolians) was extremely difficult:
easily playable guitar riffs are agonizing to notate on a classical
stave. The pairing of these two travelogues was odd and intriguing,
and would have been more so had the program also featured the music
of Kagel or one of the Russians who has worked with issues of nostalgia
/ expatriatism / colonialism.
 By way of delightful antidote to the seriously establishment feeling
of Gaudeamus week, “Musiscoop”, which I caught during
the Utrecht Dutch Film Festival, was full of humour and proof of the
power of low-tech equipment used creatively. Divided into 4 pieces
– Lines, Moiré, Switch, and Sand – this was a
show written for Magic Lanterns (dating from the 1850s!) plus viola,
trombone
and contrabass flute. In the dark, film artist Ida Lohman, whose
lively pastel visuals recalled Paul Klee, and assistant wriggled
and shook
and stretched and rolled gels and slides through the projectors
(no motors, no computers: only a lens and a light bulb) while the
musicians
performed in direct, cheeky and punchy ensemble. Thoroughly enjoyable,
even without the Genever. Check out their website at www.musiscoop.nl —GL
Bruce
Russell
LOS DESASTRES DE LAS GUERRAS
w.m.o/r 11
Heliogabalus
TOURETTE IS NORMAL (EXCERPT 2)
w.m.o/r 12
Mattin
/ Junko
PINKNOISE
w.m.o/r 13
Mark
Wastell
VIBRA #1
w.m.o/r 14
These
four new releases from w.m.o/r provide further indications that Basque
sound artist Mattin's label is busily mapping the hitherto unimagined
no man's land(s) between lowercase improv and mind numbing noise,
rambling free rock and dry, austere minimalism. And if those sound
like irreconcilable differences, remember that Mattin's the guy who
professes equal admiration for Whitehouse and Radu Malfatti. In the
same sentence. Pinknoise is the companion album to last
year's Whitenoise outing with Malfatti, and as Mattin's apparently
still not hooked up with Whitehouse's William Bennett (not that I
have any idea whether he's actually tried to do so) he's settled instead
for the inimitable "voice" of Junko Hiroshige of Japanese noisemeisters
Hijokaidan. Popping a CD in your machine and seeing it display a total
duration of only 30'54" might annoy some folk, but believe me 30'54"
of this is quite enough. Suffering from a nasty hangover? Don't fart
around with aspirins and OJ, go straight for the last seven minutes
of this and turn the wick up as high as you can get away with without
getting yourself evicted. Though perhaps not quite as harrowing as
Junko's solo LP Sleeping Beauty (Elevage de Poussière EPP09,
2002) - to a certain extent Mattin's wall of screeching computer feedback
serves to camouflage the naked terror of Junko's screams - Pinknoise
is nonetheless one hell of a cathartic blast of an album. If you're
teaching a course in acoustics in the near future and need to find
a few good examples of difference tones in action, skip the Tony Conrad
stuff and head straight for this.
 Visit
Mattin's website in search of biographical information on Heliogabalus
(a New Zealand-based duo whose real identities remain a closely guarded
secret, apparently) and you'll come across David Magie's 1924 translation
of Aelius Lampridius' biography of Elagabalus Antoninus, aka Varius
Avitus, a wondrously gory tale of rape, buggery, torture and sacrifice,
complete with lions, leopards and bears, which will probably take
you as long to read as the album will to listen to. Tourette Is
Normal (Excerpt 2) is a perfect piece of real estate smack in
the middle of w.m.o. territory - neither evolving very much over the
course of its 26 minutes nor sitting still long enough to be called
a drone, it's a strange mixture of broadly tonal but breathtakingly
lo-fi free form psychedelic folk improv and late 60s minimalism, the
kind of thing Alan Licht would be happy to acknowledge (there's praise
for you), and though it's hardly as exciting as having your anus gouged
out and being dragged through the streets by a pack of bloodthirsty
centurions, it's certainly entertaining and enjoyable.
London-based
lowercase improviser Mark Wastell has been in commemorative mood recently;
not content with dedicating a piece to the memory of Who bassist John
Entwistle (see below), he's also embarked on a series of compositions
using instruments belonging to the late Roger Sutherland (formerly
of Morphogenesis), to whose memory Vibra #1 is dedicated. It's
a 24-minute composition that delicately explores the sonorities of
a hand moulded Italian tam-tam, and deserves to take its place in
the tam-tam top ten (well, six) along with La Monte Young's
"Studies in the Bowed Disc", Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Mikrophonie
I", Mathias Spahlinger's "entlöschend", Rhys Chatham's "Two Gongs"
and Tobias Liebezeit's outstanding reading of James Tenney's "Having
Never Written a Note for Percussion" (on the New World double album
Postal Pieces). Gong fans - the instrument, not the group, dummies
- will love it.
The
real pearl of this set is Bruce Russell's Los Desastres De Las
Guerras, an album haunted by the duende of Federico Garcia
Lorca's "Theory and Function of the Duende", a text from which guitarist
Russell extracts several quotations to illustrate his own essay "Practical
Materialism: Lesson Three". This is one of three tracts accompanying
this release, the others being Matthew Hyland's "Disasters of Peace",
a Marxist analysis of Al Qaida's claiming authorship of the Madrid
bombings on March 11th this year, and Mattin's own musings on the
mass protests that took place in the Spanish capital two days later.
That same day, Russell recorded the three magnificent and desolately
throbbing guitar improvisations that open the album, Lorca poems once
more providing their titles. The danger implicit in the concept of
duende - the noun is untranslatable, combining the notions
of evil spirit and inspiration - has long been a central element of
Russell's work both as a solo performer and with The Dead C. "The
duende resides in the guitar, in the electrical circuitry,
in the exigencies of the performance itself. All these variables can
conspire to seek to overcome me. [T]he performance is in a real sense
a wrestling bout with an implacable foe." As foes go, there are few
more implacable than Mattin himself, unleashing a torrent of terrifying
feedback from behind his computer without batting an eyelid. On the
album's title track, a thirty-minute duo recorded in Christchurch's
Physics Room, Russell's mournful strums are suffocated by clouds of
howling feedback in a slow-building electrical storm of hums and buzzes
that might have a made a fitting epitaph to the bombings had it not
been recorded a fortnight before they occurred. To quote Russell once
more: "When the duende comes to the door of the bar 'dragging
her wings of rusty knives along the ground' (Lorca), there is only
one way to respond to the apparition - we play." She was there all
right on February 26th.—DW
Die
Enttäuschung
DIE ENTTÄUSCHUNG
Crouton 25 LP
Look closely and you'll see Thelonious Monk lurking in the abstract
expressionist photo montage of Frankenstein movies, 50s-style fitted
kitchen ads, 60s girl groups, dancing bears and hardboiled eggs (?),
a reminder that Die Enttäuschung's debut double album on Two Nineteen
consisted solely of Monk covers (which also featured prominently on
their Grob CD, released in 2002 but recorded five years earlier).
This time round all the material is penned by group members - bass
clarinettist Rudi Mahall contributes five pieces, trumpeter Axel Dörner
four, drummer Uli Jennessen three and bassist Jan Roder one - but
reveals the same fondness for the angular, Third Stream-like quasi-serial
structures beloved of early 60s pioneers on Prestige and Blue Note.
Mention Dörner to most folk and they'll immediately think extended
technique, circular breathing, icy blasts of breathy noise, sub-bass
growls and all manner of noises that you'd normally expect to find
in a sawmill or a sewage works. However, as an Invisible Jukebox for
Signal To Noise magazine a while back revealed, Dörner is well versed
in jazz, namechecking Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Roy Eldridge,
Rex Stewart, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Kenny Dorham, Clifford
Brown, Miles Davis and Tony Fruscella as among his favourites. And
Booker Little, whose "Man Of Words" he identified in seconds. It's
Little who comes to mind most often on this date, particularly - thanks
to that bass clarinet - the Little of the 1961 Five Spot dates with
Eric Dolphy. Of course, there's no piano here (friendly relations
do however exist between the group and Alex von Schlippenbach), and
though it's probably unfair to compare Roder and Jennessen to the
Richard Davis / Edward Blackwell dream team that graced those legendary
recordings, Roder attacks his solos with the verve and melodic forthrightness
of Charles Mingus, and also has a nice line in Slam Stewart-style
singalong bow solos, while Jennessen punches the music forward most
effectively (Roy Haynes comes to mind). The horn players are, needless
to say, superb throughout. The only doubt I have is to why they settled
on the name Die Enttäuschung, which if my German is correct (that's
a big if), means "The Disappointment". Because this most definitely
isn't.—DW
Peter
Brötzmann, Joe McPhee, Kent Kessler, Michael Zerang
TALES OUT OF TIME
Hatology 589
The
idea, according to producer John Corbett, was to record what used
to be called a "ballad session". (No, I'm not making this up.) Of
course, it's not the only such attempt to get Brötzmann's tender side
on disc (cf. Fourteen Love Poems and Songlines), but
by most musical standards even scaled-down Brötzmann is still pretty
bruising stuff. In the event, the album's mood is closer to stark
elegy than to balladry: it includes a series of memorials to bassists
Fred Hopkins, Peter Kowald and Wilbur Morris, a pair of "Stone Poems"
in tribute to the late Irving Stone (a much-loved enthusiast and supporter
of the New York avant-jazz scene) and his widow Stephanie, and an
Aylerish reading of the hymn "Blessèd Assurance". The Hopkins tribute,
"Master of a Small House", is a stunner, its slow, majestic opening
throbbing so beautifully and dangerously you just know it's going
to explode - and, yep, it does, with some full-throated tenor from
both horns and a delicious, snaking groove from Kessler and Zerang.
It's the one genuinely dark and piercing moment on the album. There
are a few vigorous Brötz and McPhee brawls - vivid enough, though
missing the wildness of their best work - and some intriguing pieces
like "Cymbalism" and "In Anticipation of the Next" that work a seam
of quiet minimalism one hardly associates with Brötzmann. Kessler
and Zerang offer solid, though restrained, support. On balance it's
a fine disc, and comes recommended - but make sure you get the right
disc: the first pressing of Tales Out of Time had a mastering
glitch on "Master of a Small House", and though Hat Art has since
fixed the bug and issued a new version, a few of the old copies may
still be hanging round the shops. While you're there make sure you
also pick up the recent Live at Spruce Street Forum on Botticelli,
a hell-for-leather encounter between Brötzmann and the Eneidi/Ellis/Krall
trio that'll put a smile on your face.—ND
Jimmy
Giuffre, Paul Bley, Steve Swallow
EMPHASIS & FLIGHT, 1961
Hatology 2-595
Hard
on the heels of the Jimmy Giuffre Trio's triumphant reunion in the
1980s came the ECM reissue of their first two discs and a surprise
from the Hat Art label: the belated release of tapes from the group's
1961 tour of West Germany on the CDs Flight (1992) and Emphasis
(1993), now reissued as a handy twofer. The most historically significant
release is Flight, recorded on 23 November 1961 in Bremen.
By that point in time their first album, Fusion, had receded
into the distance: the trio plays only "Cry, Want" from it. They play
five pieces from their second album, Thesis, recorded in August
but not yet released at the time of the concert. But there is also
a fascinating glimpse of new repertoire - Giuffre's "Call of the Centaur",
"Stretching Out (Suite for Germany)" and "Trance", and Carla Bley's
"Postures" - that otherwise went undocumented, since the trio's furious
pace of self-reinvention meant that by the time they recorded their
third and last album, Free Fall, in 1962, they'd already left
the pieces behind. The second disc, Emphasis, is a recording
of a Stuttgart concert two weeks before Bremen. It includes another
"Stretching Out (Suite for Germany)", but otherwise the repertoire
is familiar from the studio albums: four pieces from Fusion,
three from Thesis.
Despite the glimpse of new repertoire on the Bremen disc, in some
ways Emphasis is the more startling of these two discs. Paul
Bley is the dominant player, at times virtually unbalancing the group
with his jangling attack and rattly preparations. Giuffre plays more
simply as a result, rarely seizing the foreground - he drifts through
the seven and a half minutes of the bluesy "Emphasis" like he's half-singing
to himself - and often verging on microtonality. On Flight
the balance of the group is more even, though Swallow is strongly
featured, notably on a version of "That's True, That's True" that
comes in at double the length of the studio version and leaves the
"So What"-ish theme far behind. The discs are a goldmine for obsessive
cross-referencers like myself: compare, for instance, the tremulous
piano at the start of "Sonic" on Thesis with the lengthy, nervous
morse-code opening to the reading on Emphasis (Swallow playing
arco), and then switch to Flight to hear the same tune again,
now grounded more comfortably in Swallow's steady (pizzicato) pedal
point. Tracks like "Venture" or "Carla" (both on Emphasis)
have a raucous, jittery vibe you'd hardly anticipate from the studio
renderings, and "Jesus Maria" (Emphasis again), stately and
serene on Fusion, has a stronger south-of-the-border flavour
in the live version. At the Bremen concert "Flight" retains the fluttering,
birdlike quality of the studio version, but the theme itself has a
newfound violence, with Bley delivering body blows to the piano's
interior.
Like just about any classic album from the 1950s/1960s jazz avant-garde
you care to name, Emphasis and Flight are among other
things great blues albums, linking the earliest recorded examples
of the blues - Giuffre's clarinet has the yearning, elemental sound
of an old-time blues singer - to modern reworkings like Kind of
Blue (note the affinity between "Jesus Maria" and "Flamenco Sketches").
Reference books may call the Giuffre Trio's music "abstract" or "cool",
or discuss it largely in terms of its subsequent influence on European
free improvisation, but they're missing the point: it's a music as
authentically blues-drenched as Ornette Coleman, and like Ornette's
early work its power seems clarified and sharpened rather than diluted
by every passing year.—ND
Groundtruther
LATITUDE
Thirsty Ear THI 57150.2
Latitude
is the first part of a trilogy of releases - Longitude and
Altitude are to follow - featuring the double act of percussionist
Bobby Previte and guitarist Charlie Hunter, with special guest Greg
Osby on alto sax (one assumes the second and third chapters of the
project will feature different guests). The inner sleeve goes to pains
to inform you that "what you hear is played 99% live... and 100% improvised",
presumably because the polished post M-Base surface of many of the
album's eleven cuts might lead you to think it was all scripted long
before the musicians arrived at the studio in Brooklyn. But no, listen
more closely and you can hear the music putting itself together as
it goes along. Hunter's work is not surprisingly more abstract than
on his Blue Note outings, and Osby snakes along in his inimitable
fashion while Previte - an all-too often overlooked original when
it comes to building and driving a groove - is consistent and impressive,
but once the final "South Pole" has faded away you'll be
hard pressed to recall a single theme, harmonic progression or riff
from the album. I've heard it five times and am frankly mystified
by how forgettable it is, despite being well played, superbly produced
and not uninteresting to listen to. There's plenty of latitude, to
be sure, but perhaps not enough attitude.—DW
Xavier Charles, Diane Labrosse,
Kristoff K. Roll, Martin Tetreault
TOUT LE MONDE EN PLACE POUR UN SET AMERICAIN
Victo CD 090
Recorded during the 20th Festival International
de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville, Canada last year, this CD features
five musicians from various backgrounds: French reed improviser Xavier
Charles, former feminist activist Diane Labrosse on sampler, fellow
Ambiances Magnetiques stablemate conceptual-artist-cum-turntablist
Martin Tétreault, and the French live electronics duo of Carole Rieussec
and Jean-Christophe Camps, aka Kristoff K. Roll. The concert starts
slowly with bleeping and clicking, low level tones and contact miked
textures evolving into a hum broadening throughout the stereo spectrum,
with noises emanating from the background while Kristoff K Roll's
kitchen percussion holds the front line. A passage of white noise,
punctuated by Labrosse's sampler, opens up a very slow, and almost
casual, bass-beat that serves as a fine bottom-line for Charles' splendid
array of tongue and throat extended techniques, until Tétreault's
tumultuous feedback envelopes the horn's itchy sound. The second piece
begins with a much more severe drone, a brighter and airier noise
in the speakers, until the ensemble settles for electric antics and
analogue glitches à la Quintet Avant. As silence tries to re-establish
itself, the background echoes with distant feedback enriched by filtered
sounds of the spoken word, a "new electro-acoustic improvisation"
between turntable and saxophone. The tension is subsequently raised
to the max with Labrosse's loud helicopter samples. Chamber manoeuvres
in the dark are all that's left. Put it down to Labrosse's activist
history, or take it as a reference to critique of our militarised
times, a damn good way to end a record.—VJ
Television
Power Electric
2
Kuro Neko KN02
Recorded
originally in November 2002, at Chicago's Splinter Group, these four
improvisations that make up the second release by Television Power
Electric, Chicago-based TV Pow (Todd Carter, Michael Hartman here:
Brent Gutzeit doesn't seem to be performing but is responsible for
three of the remixes) plus guests Efzeg's Boris Hauf (Austria's most
frequent flyer into the windy city), Ernst Karel (of EKG) and Toshi
Nakamura (who needs no introduction here). Instrumentation isn't listed
but it's very much a laptop affair, apart from Nakamura who sticks
to his trusty no-input mixing board. The eco-friendly packaging (tree-safe
elephant and giraffe dung papers it says on their website, though
it looks remarkably like the wallpaper in my great aunts' old terraced
house in Bury, Lancashire) doesn't quite prepare you for the chilly
bleep'n'buzz of "Title Track", which accounts for more than half the
total duration of the album. "Seguros y Pasajes" is a little more
combative, especially after it explodes into noise at about 1'11".
The closing "Storks International: Chicago Chapter" pulses grimly
on until the static spitting monster suddenly retreats into its lair,
to sneak out once more. Whether it claims a victim or not isn't clear,
as Gutzeit pulls the faders brutally at the 6'44" mark. Enigmatic
and intriguing stuff.—DW
Scrape
SCRAPE
Shambala 04011
Guitarist
Marc Sens teams up with percussionist Cyril Bilbeaud to deliver nine
slabs of noisy improv on his second full-length outing for Shambala.
Sens, as his earlier Faux Ami revealed, comes at improv from
the noisier end of leftfield (witness his occasional duo with Noir
Désir's Serge Teyssot-Gay) - think Moore, Grey and Haino - and the
louder and more fucked-up he gets, the more fun it is. Bilbeaud's
stylistic influences are harder to pin down, but seem to be more improv
than rock, friction as well as percussion. Unlike Sens, who's all
over the guitar, he sounds curiously hesitant at times ("Workers");
his grating metal is gritty enough on "Point of Origin", which builds
spectacularly thanks to Sens who gradually inserts vicious cross accents.
A bit of all out power drumming wouldn't have gone amiss (someone
send the lad a Chris Corsano CD). Sometimes plugs get pulled just
when they're warming up ("Mantra"), while elsewhere, perversely, tapes
continue to roll when they should probably have been switched off.
The, um, imaginatively-titled "First Fist Fucking Experience", the
album's longest cut at 9'12", consists largely of Bilbeaud doing something
squelchily obscene with what sounds like a rubber glove (though you
can put that flight of fancy down to the track title.. had they called
it "Blood Sucking Swamp Monsters" I'd have written something about
a giant leech, anyway, you get the idea). It rather overstays its
welcome, so it's just as well the album goes out with a bang with
"Bastard Connection". This features a double bass, or at least a recording
of one, and a vocal sample (sounds like a TV) which the dynamic duo
blast to smithereens. Ouch.—DW
Angharad
Davies / Rhodri Davies / Phil Durrant / Mark Wastell
LONDON STRINGS
AbsinthRecords 004
After
Berlin Reeds, Berlin Strings and Berlin Drums,
Absinth Records' Marcus Liebig has decided to abandon his distinctive
format - four 3" CDs in a stitched 20 x 20cm sleeve - which means
that London Strings will, sadly, not mark the beginning of
a trilogy of London releases (it's not the end of Absinth though,
happily - an Axel Dörner / Robin Hayward duo is in the works). The
four protagonists here will no doubt be familiar to aficionados of
what Ben Watson once dubbed "New London Silence" - violinists Phil
Durrant and Angharad Davies, her brother Rhodri on harp, and the ubiquitous
Mark Wastell, this time on double bass as well as his customary Nepalese
singing bowls. Both violinists explore slowly bowed sustained tones,
but while Davies' instrument is prepared, with its upper spectra rich
and reinforced, Durrant explores the raw sonority of the instrument,
those "in between sounds" that result from tackling ferociously difficult
double stops and tricky harmonics. Rhodri Davies' "Perdereau" belongs
more to the domain of composition than improvisation - though, as
I've argued on numerous occasions, the distinction is becoming ever
less important - using no fewer than four players (the other performers
are John Wall, Jonathan Dunstan and Taku Unami), Davies' objective
was to sound as many strings as possible, 40 out of a possible 47,
and record the resulting clusters from inside the soundboard. The
first section plays on the idea of decay, and the latter half of the
piece concentrates on sustain through the use of e-bows. It's a solemn
slab of music, in keeping with its dedication to the memory of French
new music promoter and journalist Jacques Perdereau, whom Davies met
at the Rencontres Européennes de Musiques Improvisées in Paris in
1998. In point of fact, Phil Durrant's "almost", is the only work
on offer here not dedicated to the memory of someone; Angharad Davies'
"Tri swn" is marked "in memorial of Charles-André Linale" and Wastell's
21 minute offering is entitled "For John Entwistle 1944 - 2002". Virtuoso
violinist Linale would surely have found much to marvel at in Davies'
work, but quite what the late lamented Who bassist would have made
of Wastell's piece is open to question (perhaps it's the first episode
of a Who tetralogy - if so, I can't wait for Keith Moon). With its
various timbral permutations of a low D - A flat tritone punctuated
sporadically by quiet resonant pings on the Nepalese bowls, it's a
sombre, ritualistic funeral march of a piece, a discreet but curiously
haunting work closing another fine Absinth set. As always, these come
in limited editions of 200, so once again it's a question of buy now
or cry later.—DW
Eugene
Chadbourne
HONKY-TONK IM NACHTLOKAL
Leo CD LR 406
Has it really been nearly a quarter of a century since There'll
Be No Tears Tonight, Eugene Chadbourne's first self-styled album
of free improvised Country & Western be-bop? Yes, I suppose it has.
But the good Doctor Chad is still touring the world with geetar, banjo
and travelling bag full of CDs, CDRs (the KKK Mart, he calls it) and
C&W sheet music. This latest outing features four different Chadbourne
pick-up bands and was recorded between 1996 and 2002 in various locations,
ranging from the French Basque country to London's prestigious Purcell
Room. If you haven't already had enough of Chadbourne's slightly skewed
covers of Country favourites (and the odd pop standard) you might
enjoy it, but I'm led to wonder exactly how many Chadbourne albums
one actually needs in life. This one is frankly not a patch on 1998's
Insect Attracter (Leo), or The Acquaduct, the hilarious
outing on Rectangle with daughters Molly and Lizzie (who are now probably
old enough to thoroughly regret having recorded it), and Tears,
24 years on, still remains pretty untoppable. The difference between
the musicians who joined Chadbourne on that epic date - John Zorn,
Tom Cora, David Licht..- and the noodlers he hangs out with now is
that those Downtown cats really knew how to play the right wrong
notes. A lot of this sounds as if it's trying to be weird for weird's
sake, and unfortunately it quickly tries the patience.—DW
Ellen
Fullman
STAGGERED STASIS
Anomalous NOM 29
Memphis-born drone queen Ellen Fullman's been getting some well-deserved
coverage recently, notably in a fine piece written by Gino Robair
for this autumn's Signal To Noise, but a lot of it has been directed
at her ventures into the world of song on Ort, her collaborative
album with Berlin's Jörg Hiller on his Choose label, which means that
Staggered Stasis, documenting Fullman's groundbreaking work
in the late 1980s, has slipped off the radar somewhat. Shame, because
it's a splendidly recorded presentation of Fullman's work with her
own Long String Instrument. (Further information on this splendid
creature is available at Fullman's website - www.ellenfullman.com
- though devotees of excited string music by the likes of Paul Panhuysen,
Arnold Dreyblatt and Alvin Lucier will probably have had it bookmarked
for ages already.) The three-part title track was commissioned by
Deborah Hay's dance company in Austin, Texas, where Fullman set up
her 100-foot-long monster in an unfinished office block from 1986
to 1989. Thanks to the harmonic configurations of the instrument as
much as Fullman's chosen pitches, it's a fantastically rich piece
- compared to the monastic austerity of Lucier's epochal "Music On
A Long Thin Wire", "Staggered Stasis" is as dramatic and colourful
as a Mahler symphony. In contrast, "Duration", the second piece, gives
the C overtone series one of the best workouts it's ever had, and
in case anyone's in a hurry, recaps the whole 23-minute process in
just two and a half in the closing "Speed Duration". Why anyone would
want to speed through this magnificent music is beyond me, though:
as La Monte Young says, the best drones are the ones you can get inside,
and that takes time. There's no point putting this baby on while you
go jogging round the park or clean the bathroom floor - it's a sit
down and pay attention affair.—DW
Peteris
Vasks
STRING QUARTET NO. 4
Nonesuch 79695
Luciano
Berio
THE STRING QUARTETS
Montaigne 782155
According
to a recent New York Times article by Adam Shatz ("Quartets Changing
With the Times They Changed"), between them the Kronos and Arditti
Quartets have commissioned nearly 1000 new works for string quartet
since forming in 1973 and 1974 respectively. Back then the Second
Vienna School was a touchstone marking both as "avant-garde," but
in recent years only a handful of composers have been recorded by
both quartets - Gubaidulina, Lutoslawski, Saariaho, and Berg. There
is very little overlap between the two any more. "I think they're
playing very light stuff," commented violinist Irvine Arditti on Kronos.
Clearly the two groups are not competing in the same avant arena anymore,
and have come to represent two divergent strands in contemporary music:
one tonal and populist, the other unremittingly abstract, carrying
on the high modernism of the mid-century - in short, the postmodern
and the modern. Nor are the two arenas of equal size: the PoMo tendency
is more accessible and has a larger audience, meaning the Arditti
is outflanked geographically, focussing on works from Western Europe,
while Kronos plays works by the American minimalists and the Eastern
European "holy minimalists".
The two styles are perfectly captured in recent recordings of Luciano
Berio by the Arditti Quartet and Peteris Vasks, the Latvian composer,
by Kronos. Vasks' String Quartet No. 4, commissioned and first
performed by Kronos in May 2000, is a five-movement piece of about
30 minutes. The closing Meditation, the longest movement at 11'35",
features a long violin solo for David Harrington. Lyrical and elegiac,
it's not exactly highly original, but has excellent models: the composer
declares that the second and fourth movements, Toccata I and Toccata
II, are "in a spirit close to that of Shostakovich's style" - "aggressive,
and at times, ironic," and in a notable departure for him namechecks
Shostakovich's 8th Quartet. The first, third and fifth movements (Elegy,
Chorale and Meditation), are, however, in the style Vasks is known
for, the so-called holy minimalism of Pärt and Gorecki, with Latvian
folksong motifs and romantic gestures that some might find to be overly
ripe. He draws on one other influence here - the climax of the central
Chorale movement closely parallels that of Barber's Adagio.
Referencing this and Shostakovich's 8th (dedicated to the victims
of war and fascism), both emotionally direct and powerful works, certainly
makes sense in a work the composer describes as a reflection on the
20th century, in which "[t]here has been so much bloodshed and destruction,
and yet love's power and idealism have helped to keep the world in
balance."
The Arditti Quartet's superb set of Berio's complete works for string
quartet (Arditti Edition #38 on Montaigne, and one of the finest)
could scarcely be more different. Performed with the AQ's usual startling
precision and energy, these are complex, knotty works with no easy
reference points for the tonally oriented ear. The two long quartets,
Notturno (1993) and Sincronie (1963-4), are presented in
that order, and followed by two shorter works, Glosse (1997)
and Quartet No. 1 (1956). Heard after the others, the 1956
work sounds the most random, the purest example of using the then
new serialist language to utterly pulverize all conventions, leaving
a fragmented pointillism. Several years later, with Sincronie,
Berio produced a masterpiece, an 18-minute work with a clearly perceptible
form based not on pitch, but on timbre, clusters, and "gestures,"
both sonic and formal. It represents the emerging innovative voice
that the composer would develop in the solo works known as sequenza,
and the elaborate concerti of the chemins series. The two 1990s
works, written in a style that incorporates Berio's intervening interest
in folk music and his synthesis of the pre-modern with the high modern,
make a fascinating contrast with his earlier music. Notturno's
lyrical and tonal passages, emerging from and returning to dense complexity,
could be perceived as a compromise with, or even expression of, postmodernism,
but are better understood as the maturation of modernism. In other
words, there is more than one type of polystylism; Berio, like Carter,
remains true to both the spirit and the form of modernism while becoming
less rigid and more catholic. Both composers have the strength to
broaden their palette without losing their vision or becoming eclectics,
let alone reverting to earlier styles. One can only hope that some
of the Kronos' larger (and more predominantly American) fan base will
stretch their ears towards some of the amazing music being performed
by the London-based Arditti Quartet. Minimalism and world music/classical
fusion are no longer new, but there is still a strange wonderful world
waiting to be discovered in that corner of the map marked BEWARE:
COMPLEX, ATONAL MONSTERS LURK HERE!—RH
Lee
Hyla
TRANS
New World 80614 (2004)
It’s tempting for writers on contemporary
music, in an attempt to broaden the appeal of esoteric music appealing
only to the Elect, to use flashy analogies that they think will make
the music sexy and exciting. Reading about this disc, I was bombarded
with such references as “raucous rock-and-roll,” “source
materials ranging from the Art Ensemble to Alban Berg,” “jagged
honking and barking,” “avant-garde jazz, rock and even
punk.” For better or for worse, the music of Lee Hyla, chairman
of the composition department at the New England Conservatory, here
performed superbly by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project conducted
by Artistic Director Gil Rose, is nowhere near as eclectic as all
that, and takes its place amongst the best of modernist visions, from
Olivier Messiaen to Magnus Lindberg, alongside fellow Americans Elliott
Carter and Roger Reynolds.
The Concerto for Bass Clarinet and Orchestra (1988), a short
(10’52”) dramatic piece, does indeed feature some “jagged
honking and barking” from Tim Smith, but it’s a highly
controlled work lacking any sign of improvisation; rather than indulging
in any long cadenzas, the bass clarinet is the pivot for complex maneuvers
by the orchestra. While the Carteresque intertwining lines of the
title piece, Trans (1996), a maddeningly elusive 18-minute
work for orchestra in three movements, lead the listener deep into
the heart of a modernist vision, the Violin Concerto (2001)
turns in a different direction. More accessible and vivacious, its
most obvious influence is Olivier Messiaen: the recurring brass theme
could have been lifted straight out of the Turangalîla-Symphonie,
and Hyla even uses percussion, strings and winds to evoke.. bird song!
It’s surprising Messiaen is neither mentioned nor credited in
the title or the liners. Laura Frautschi’s violin sounds naïve
and pastoral, with several extended passages featuring long, bent
notes in a folk idiom, summoning up Bartók. With such stylistically
diverse source material the work arguably does approach a postmodern
style, but Hyla’s polystylism is hardly likely to appeal to
imagined legions of free jazz/punk hipsters. Even so, he deserves
far wider recognition, and this fine disc should be heard by all those
devoted to contemporary music.—RH
Coelacanth
MUD WALL
Helen Scarsdale HMS 003 CD
Coelacanth,
as well as being the name of a fish previously thought to be extinct,
is a duo comprising what the press release fondly (and accurately)
describes as "audio speleologists" Loren Chasse and Jim Haynes. Chasse's
work with the Jewelled Antler collective, Thuja, The Blithe Sons and
the Dielectric Minimalist All Stars will doubtless be familiar to
many readers (if not, it ought to be, as he's certainly prolific enough),
and Wire readers will no doubt have come across Haynes' astute
writing on leftfield electronica and what that magazine delightfully
calls "Outer Limits". Mud Wall is the pair's third outing (though
a shorter version appeared on Mystery Sea), after last year's excellent
The Glass Sponge on 23five and The Chronograph, also
on Helen Scarsdale. Sourced from a performance the two men gave in
2002, it's just under an hour's worth of dark, churning sounds, many
of which sound like they were recorded at the bottom of a mine shaft,
or in a diving bell. Exactly what the source sounds are is hard to
figure out - intentionally so, one imagines - which adds to the mystery
and poetry of the experience. Talking of poetry, the disc comes with
three square moss green cards, whose texts read, respectively: "I
had seen it once before many years ago, rising suddenly before us
from that inlay floor, set high in its surface", "Of glistening lines,
shadowy pits and canals was a convexity - an amber bubble - behind
which a light not of our afternoon, our world even, swam with shapes"
and "I can describe it in no other way than this: in that moment,
I was certain there ancient forces listening… in a silence like fossils."
Voilà: I think that describes the experience better than I can do.
Wear potholing helmets and carry breathing equipment in case of
subsidence.—DW
Scott
Smallwood
ELECTROTHERAPY
Deep Listening DL 29-2004
This is a collection of 13 pieces sourced in sounds emanating from
early 20th century electrical devices (induction coils, UV ray oscillators,
diathermy machines..) belonging to a Mr Pete Barvoets. Goodness knows
what he does with his sectorless wimshurst machine, whatever that
is, but Smallwood certainly seems to have had a ball recording it.
I am however led to wonder to what extent the original acoustic identity
of the objects is respected by morphing their sounds into cheap, tinny
technoid titbits like "Electreat". If the name of the game is to create
a virtual glitchy drumkit, Stefan Betke or any number of musicians
on the fällt label can do it better; for elusive and imaginative loops,
go to Autechre; for surprising and impressive use of antiquated equipment
as sound source, check out Brutum Fulmen's Flesh Of The Moon;
for a more satisfying and evocative field-recording based outing from
Smallwood, see his Desert Winds: 6 Windblown Sound Pieces and Other
Works from a couple of years ago.—DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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