Hilton
Palace. Sounds cool, eh? Think again. Hilton Palace was – maybe
still is, I haven't been back to find out and don't intend to –
a squat in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, not far from
the Parc Montsouris, which was for a brief while one of the French
capital's itinerant new music venues. I first played there about three
years ago in an impromptu trio with Daniel Erdmann and Bertrand Gauguet
– violin and two saxophones, I recall it sounded rather nice
– at which time the place was being run / squatted by well-intentioned,
enthusiastic and polite (if poverty-stricken) arty types. But the
second time I went to Hilton Palace it was another story. The buildings
had been taken over, or rather overrun, by punks – as in bright
pink mohawks, green Parkas, yellow teeth, serious attitude and fucking
vicious dogs. It was a day that will live in infamy, as they say.
I can't remember if I went there to play at all – don't think
I did – but I do recall Taku Unami, huddled over his laptop
in a corner of an upstairs room, literally terrified to go downstairs.
His extremely quiet concert was hilariously sabotaged by what sounded
like a pack of dogs at least a hundred strong barking, snarling and
running up and down the rickety steps next to where we all sat, panic
stricken. My other abiding memory is of a visit to the (communal)
loos on the ground floor during which I was accosted by one of the
local inhabitants who grabbed me in a bear hug, told me his breath
stank – he was right – and blew a huge gob of phlegm up
both my nostrils as a gesture of friendly solidarity. Just thinking
about it now makes me retch. Also scheduled to perform that day was
a duo consisting of Gert-Jan Prins (on electronics) and Thomas Ankersmit
(saxophone.. don't recall he had any electronics with him), but Gert-Jan
took one look at the locals downstairs and refused to bring his (fragile
and probably expensive) gear in the place. Someone finally persuaded
him to do the gig using a borrowed drum kit. I left before the end
of their set, feeling sick. It wasn't their fault.
Next time I saw Thomas was June 2004 when he played a solo set at
the Instants Chavirés, though I didn't say hello (I certainly
didn't want to remind him of the Hilton Palace event). He was opening
for Tomas Korber, Norbert Möslang and Günter Müller,
with whom I was stuck in conversation at the bar. So it was a pleasure
to run into Mr Ankersmit recently in the Sankt Georg Kirche in Cologne,
where I'd been dispatched by The Wire to interview Phill
Niblock for the March 2006 issue, especially when Thomas told me about
a recent interview he'd given
to Martin Haanstra, which I'm delighted to be able to include
here. Ankersmit is apparently
working on some directional loudspeakers to beam sound at specific
targets, and, since SOUNDS CAN KILL, as Stockhausen once said, I'm
hoping that one day I might be able to invest in a pair for self defence.
Or even a preventive strike, if I ever have to make a return visit
to Hilton Palace. Bonne lecture.-DW
Ran
Blake
ALL THAT IS TIED
Tompkins Square
Charles
Gayle
TIME ZONES
Tompkins Square
 "Ran
Blake is a genius." Here beginneth the liner notes, courtesy
John Medeski (no mean keyboard player himself, and a former student
of Blake at the New England Conservatory where the pianist, now in
his 71st year, has been teaching since 1968). All That Is Tied
is Ran Blake's 35th recording (it says here), which might sound
like a lot but isn't when you remember the The Newest Sound Around,
his landmark duo album with Jeanne Lee, was recorded back in 1961.
So the appearance of any new Blake album is always something to write
home about, especially when it's as good as this. What his work, and
All That Is Tied in particular, reveals most forcibly is
the world of difference between classical and, for want of a better
word (because I'm not always sure it applies to Blake) jazz technique,
both in terms of the music itself and how it's recorded. The incorporation
into jazz of harmonic procedures derived from twentieth century classical
models – can't really say European classical either, because
there's as much Ives in there as Messiaen – would make for a
fascinating thesis / book, if anyone had the time to write one; think
Ellington and Debussy, Getz and Bartók (if I was handling the
late Hungarian composer's estate I'd be chasing up long overdue royalties
from Focus.. but maybe I'd be after arranger Eddie Sauter
as much as Getz himself), Miles Davis and Stockhausen, not to mention
Cecil Taylor. And Ran Blake would deserve a chapter all to himself.
Transcribe any of these twelve exquisite tracks and there'd be enough
for a bunch of Music Theory sophomores to chew on for a whole semester
(though I bet they'd be taken aback by "Field Cry"), not
that that should give you the impression that Blake's work is as dry
as an Allen Forte K/Kh complex. It's no surprise perhaps that Medeski
has penned the liners, because Blake is – watch out, here comes
the cliché – very much a pianist's pianist. His total
mastery of the pedals will have any pianist nodding admiringly for
starters. Shame he hasn't recorded Stockhausen's Klavierstück
X. And quite apart from the extraordinary paths down which he
lets his melodic and harmonic ideas roam, there's the simple question
of how he hits the keys themselves. Which takes us back to the earlier
point: the difference between a Blake fortissimo and one played by
a classically trained concert pianist is enormous, and is made all
the more clear by the recording itself (no "classical" sound
engineer would dare place the mics as close to the action as they
are here – check out the whoosh of the pedals.. good job Blake
doesn't groan like Keith Jarrett). Whereas concert pianists are taught
to hit it and quit it, as it were, leaving the string free to vibrate
as soon as possible after it's been struck by the hammer, Blake (and
a whole lotta jazz pianists – Monk of course, but Misha Mengelberg,
Howard Riley and Stan Tracey also come to mind) tend to press down
more, leaving the hammer in contact with the string just long enough
to bend the pitch of the note slightly. It gives a distinct metallic
edge to the sound, a grittiness that most conservatory piano professors
would scream at you about (unless you happen to be studying Bartók's
Allegro Barbaro, and even then I have my doubts). It's a
sound that means business – every one of Blake's notes is there
for a reason. But there's as much purpose and refinement in one of
his delicate pianissimos too. Genius isn't a word I like to bandy
about much – I've always preferred JB Priestley's line –
"no genius but a hell of a lot of talent" – but for
once I reckon Medeski isn't wide of the mark. And Ran Blake hits the
bullseye every time.
 If
All That Is Tied reveals a knowledge of the piano repertoire
that goes way beyond the confines of jazz, Time Zones, only
the second solo piano recording by Charles Gayle, is, like its predecessor
Jazz Solo Piano (2001, Knitting Factory), steeped in blues,
stride, boogie and bop – though unlike the earlier outing, there
are no covers on offer here. Gayle remains best known for the unbridled
excesses of his tenor sax playing, which established him as something
of a cult figure in the eyes of wild rockers such as Henry Rollins,
who released Gayle's Delivered on his 2.13.61 imprint, but
his piano playing has always revealed that the roots go further back
in time than the expressionism of 60s free jazz. He's not averse to
whacking the ivories if needs be, but anyone coming to Time Zones
in search of a pianistic equivalent of the stuff Forced Exposure
used to rave about should probably look elsewhere. True, there are
a few passages that recall Cecil Taylor (hardly surprising since Gayle
is a former CT sideman), notably the jagged left hand octave figures
that shoot through "Rush to Sunrise", but the track's flirtation
with the stacked fourth harmonies of McCoy Tyner and its unabashed
if fleeting quotation of the old chestnut "Doo Dah" are
about as far from Taylor's crunchy set theory as you can get. Though
Gayle likes to set his left hand challenges – trying to play
high octane bop in octaves with the right on "Rhythm Twins",
for example – if left to its own devices it happily falls back
to the parallel tenths of Art Tatum and the elemental boogie of James
P. Johnson, rather than the bare sevenths and odd angles of later
stylists such as Monk and Nichols.
Oddly enough, the pianist that came most often to mind upon listening
to this was Oscar Peterson, whose playing also owes much to Tatum.
Of course, Gayle is no Oscar Peterson – nor would we expect
him to be – but what makes Gayle's take on Tatum so different
and exciting is how he's not in the least bit afraid of pushing his
technique beyond its limits, while Peterson's stays well within his.
The Mighty Oscar's virtuoso runs up and down the keyboard are truly
dazzling, and you don't have to be a pianist to feel your jaw drop
in admiration, but there's never any danger of the piece falling apart,
whereas the cascades of "wrong" notes in Gayle's breathtaking
right hand surges are truly thrilling. And they're not "wrong"
notes at all – or if they are they're the right wrong
notes, if I might be forgiven once again for quoting Robin Holloway.
The exact same passage on a Peterson CD would certainly cause eyebrows
to rise (I can even imagine some die-hard snobs returning the album
to the store in a huff claiming that Oscar had "lost his touch"),
but it's precisely these deviations from the norm that breathe life
into Gayle's music, even when he deliberately sets out to explore
that most hallowed of forms, the blues. "Blues in Mississippi"
is a drop dead masterpiece, and the vein of tough lyricism Gayle taps
into throughout these seven originals is rich and deep. To cop someone
else's line: Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future. -DW
Susan
Alcorn
CONCENTRATION
Todd
Whitman
ZEPPELINS ERSTE GROSSE FAHRT
Recorded,
like several notable outings on John Berndt's label of the same name,
at Baltimore's High Zero Festival (which is fast becoming one of the
most important free improvisation moots in the United States), these
two albums showcase particular artists performing in diverse instrumental
/ vocal groupings. PT readers may remember Joe McPhee's Mister
Peabody Goes To Baltimore, documenting his appearances at High
Zero 2000, and Jack Wright's Open Wide, from HZ 2001, and
now there's Concentration and Zeppelins Erste Grosse
Fahrt, both from the 2004 edition of the festival, the former
featuring the exquisite pedal steel guitar of Texan Susan Alcorn in
the company of Karen Stackpole, Lê Quan Ninh, Joe McPhee, Audrey
Chen, Andrea Parkins, Jesse Quatro, Jason Willett and Todd Whitman,
and the latter Whitman himself, also with McPhee, Chen and Parkins
but joined as well by Jackie Blake, Dan Breen, Sabir Mateen, Stanley
Schumacher and Bob Wagner.
Concentration's opener finds Alcorn in the company of a supremely
lyrical McPhee and a percussion dream team of Stackpole and Lê
Quan. It's as spacious as its title, "Four Mountains, Four Rivers",
and there's plenty of room for sensitive interplay between Ninh's
horizontally mounted bass drum and Stackpole's metal, as well some
tasty exchanges between McPhee's soprano and Alcorn's guitar –
though the best of these come on the album's closing track "And
Who Could I Ask If It Wasn't You?", a little gem of a duet. The
four following pieces, whose titles I can't resist quoting ("Silence
Like a Breaking Glass", "The Silence Was Your Grey Butterfly
Urine and Bedsores", "Olivier Messiaen's Morning Conjugal
Death Waltz" and "The Queen Is Always Pregnant".. go
figure), team Alcorn up with cellist / vocalist Audrey Chen and (excepting
the first one mentioned above, on which Quatro adds "voice and
processing") the sampler, piano and accordion of Andrea Parkins.
It's an attractive and lyrical set, and even if Parker's accordion
squeezes Chen to the back of the mix somewhat, it's easy to follow
what's going on. Not sure the same can be said of "Time Was Nothing",
on which Alcorn is joined by saxophonist Todd Whitman – at last
recordings of this influential but hitherto undocumented player are
emerging – Jesse Quatro and Jason Willett (helpfully credited
as playing "anything"). It's an odd but engaging search
for common ground, which the musicians manage to locate but not exactly
inhabit; Whitman and Alcorn sound curiously reticent, leaving Quatro's
spooky vocalisms to contend with some unsettling percussion. Willett
or Whitman? It's hard to tell when you're playing "anything"..
Todd
Whitman, the man responsible for pointing Jack Wright in the direction
of improvised music over a quarter of a century ago by introducing
him to the work of Evan Parker and Peter Brötzmann, is, as Berndt
writes, "one of the most distinctive – and sonically extreme
– reed improvisers", yet this long awaited first CD under
his name begins with a track that features no saxophone at all, but
a wild, gnarly collection of wails, scrapes and crashes from "amplified
metal, bow, saw and cones". On "Rompin and Stompin"
the party gets into full swing with exuberant gargles and shrieks
courtesy Audrey Chen and (trombonist) Stanley Schumacher, accompanied
by a raucous three-man horn section of Whitman, Sabir Mateen and Joe
McPhee, the electric bass and percussion of Dan Breen and (once more)
Parkins, thickening the plot with sampled blasts. She's more in the
foreground at the beginning of the following "Broadway Melody"
(Broadway melody indeed.. put this kind of stuff on Broadway and watch
the costume jewellery fly as your audience races for the exits), a
patchwork quilt of styles that finally settles into somewhat introspective
gloom after about three minutes before Whitman's baritone kicks it
back into life. "Thursday1" is another stylistic ragbag,
combining rather lackadaisical piano doodling from Jackie Blake with
some distinctly spiky percussion from Bob Wagner and forlorn wails
from Schumacher. "Light Flight" brings the "Rompin
and Stompin" band back for a fastmoving assemblage of swoops
and crackles punctuated by all manner of splats and fizzes from the
(admirably restrained under the circumstances) horn section. "Jackie"
starts out with some uncharacteristically plaintive bluesy alto sax
from Jackie Blake before Wagner comes crashing in after two and a
half minutes, and Whitman's baritone and Parkins' electronics attempt
– without success – to crush Ms Blake under a pile of
twisted metal. Throughout the album as a whole, Whitman himself remains,
as he has done for over two decades, pretty much in the shadows –
but listen carefully and you can hear how significant his contributions
are. And you really do need to listen to this one a few times before
you can figure out what's going on.–DW
Hugh
Davies
TAPESTRIES
Ants
 The
importance of musicians is not something to be judged by the size
of their discographies. The death of Hugh Davies at age 61 on New
Year's Day last year deprived the new music world of one of its unsung
heroes. A list of some of the musicians Davies studied / performed
/ worked with would be quite long, and would include major names –
Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose assistant he became in 1964, succeeding
Cornelius Cardew), Derek Bailey, Evan Parker (with whom he recorded
in the Music Improvisation Company with vocalist Christine Jeffrey
and percussionist Jamie Muir) and Borbetomagus (he appears on 1981's
Work On What Has Been Spoiled) – as well as a whole
host of lesser known but influential figures, including electronic
music visionary Daphne Oram, composer Jonathan Harvey and, umm, Talk
Talk. (The fact that Borbetomagus is listed above as a major name
and Talk Talk isn't is further proof of this website's unswerving
dedication to difficult music. And you still wonder why we don't carry
advertising?)
As a pioneer in the use of live electronics – the world has
now come full circle and many of the techniques Davies pioneered in
the late 60s are now part and parcel of the standard improviser's
arsenal – one of his many inventions was the shozyg, which he
self-effacingly described as "a collection of amplified metal
knick-knacks inside the covers of an encyclopaedia, SHO-ZYG, an encyclopaedia
degutted to substitute direct experience for learning". Such
a open, no-frills, no-bullshit attitude to innovation might have led
to his being considered as yet another lovable English eccentric,
but only by those unfamiliar with his music. This posthumous collection
of five tape compositions spanning his career – from 1976's
Natural Images to 2000's From Trees and Rocks –
is proof, sadly overdue, that Hugh Davies was a composer of enormous
talent who deserves to take his place alongside the major electronic
music masters of his generation. The album comes with an authoritative
accompanying booklet featuring detailed background notes on each work
by the composer, and a hugely informative essay on the man and his
music by David Toop (a heavily edited version of which was published
as an obituary in The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1426693,00.html).
It's easy to forget that Hugh Davies had a thorough grounding in academic
music theory and composition, studying at Oxford with the talented
if conservative symphonist Edmund Rubbra. But by the time he went
up there he'd already gulped down a huge lungful of air from another
planet in the form of Stockhausen's seminal Gesang Der Jünglinge
("Song Of The Youths)". His traditional composition chops
came in handy when scoring Stockhausen's epic Momente in
1964, but the real epiphany for Davies was his experience later that
year operating the potentiometers in Mikrophonie I, Stockhausen's
six-man live electronic assault on a tam tam. Davies's subsequent
exploration of live electronics, and how it led him into the brave
new world of nascent free improvisation, is well documented in Toop's
essay. But though his work with Gentle Fire with Richard Bernas, Graham
Hearn, Stuart Jones and Michael Robinson has assumed almost legendary
status (it doesn't make it any easier to get hold of, by the way),
his activities as a composer have, until now, been largely and unfortunately
overlooked.
In 1966 Davies was a researcher at the GRM in Paris, and, as early
as 1968, founded and ran the Electronic Music Studio at Goldsmiths'
College, London (he remained there until 1986). So by the time he
came to create Natural Images in 1976, to a commission for
the EMMA dance company, he was already a highly experienced and resourceful
composer. Natural Images is a minor masterpiece of musique
concrète whose "natural sounds" are cunning
transformations of more mundane objects: a squeaky breadbin lid becomes
whale song, a train whistle the howling of wolves. And wait until
you hear the mating dance of the bees – you may never eat honey
again. (One blast of this vicious buzzsaw attack and you'll understand
immediately the logic behind a Davies / Borbetomagus encounter.) 1982's
Tapestries was also created for a dance company, this time
Bridget Crowley's Dancers Anonymous. Unlike Natural Images,
however, it exploits the potential of the then state-of-the-art equipment
in Davies's studio at Goldsmiths', but don't let that put you off
– in stark contrast to the rather chilly studio works coming
out across the Channel at the time, Davies's music is refreshingly,
even alarmingly, warm and direct. No question of trying to blind the
listener with science here – this was a man for whom explaining
the world of electronic music to a group of children was as important
as writing a high-level research paper.
Davies's interest in environmental sound – he was an unsung
hero of sonic ecology to boot, drawing up plans for numerous urban
sound art projects – dates back to the same period, though the
piece that best represents this aspect of his work here is From
Trees and Rocks, which was commissioned by the Diözesanmuseum
in Cologne (ha, irony – the cradle of pure Elektronisches
Musik!) for the portable exhibition guide Walkmen in 2000. Sounds
of hammering, chiselling and sawing are beautifully sequenced and
structured with typically composerly attention to detail. By way of
contrast, Vision (1985) and Celeritas (1987) were
made using one of the early Fairlight Series digital synthesizers,
the latter work using a microtonal tuning first explored by Stockhausen
in 1954 in which a 28 semitone span is divided into 25 equal steps.
The music, once again, sounds nowhere near as forbidding as the above
description might have you think: Davies drew his dynamic and timbral
envelopes directly with a light-pen, and the work retains the freshness
of the bold brushstroke. Even if some of the timbres now sound a little
dated – oddly enough, the more "primitive" Natural
Images sounds more modern to 2006 ears – these two pieces,
notably the 17 minute Vision, still stand proudly as fine
examples of the work of a major and now sorely missed figure of British
contemporary music. Essential.–DW
Roel
Meelkop
>MOMENTUM<
Richard
Garet / Dale Lloyd / Jos Smolders / Ubeboet
TERRITORIUM
Richard
Chartier
TRACING
 At
first sight Heribert Friedl's Non Visual Objects label looks remarkably
like Bernhard Günter's trente oiseaux imprint, typeface included,
which isn't all that surprising since Friedl and Günter have
already worked together (on the exquisite Ataraxia), and
a cursory list at the musicians whose work Friedl has released includes
several names that will be familiar to Günter punters. But even
in the rarefied world of micro-electronica there's plenty of room
for a multitude of different approaches, as these three releases testify.
For a start, Roel Meelkop's music can hardly be easily filed away
under "lowercase": >Momentum< follows hard
on the heels of 5 (Ambiences) on Intransitive, and is just
as impressive. As is increasingly the case these days, the disc is
a CD document of works originally conceived as gallery installations
– it's based on his work in the medium over the past eight years
– but patient editing has paid off: unlike many recent outings
which can tend to sound somewhat dry if heard out of context, these
six tracks stand up perfectly well on their own. Meelkop's work is
discreet, generally low volume (though there are some notable surprises
in store for anyone who pumps up the volume and plays this as background
music – watch your tweeters at 6'16" in "am Birkenwald")
but not without tension, even drama. "Sub version with high end",
as its title implies, is another opportunity for you to put your stereo
system to the test. I'm wondering if somewhere along the line the
track titles haven't been mixed up a bit, as the obsessive loops of
track five, marked on the disc as "NU", sound more like
what you might expect from "LocGroove", which is the title
of the preceding track, but maybe I'm wrong. No doubt though about
the final "sined" – a sustained and chillingly beautiful
exploration of sine waves.
 The
four-way split Territorium is another fine example of how
today's new electronic music blurs the distinction between natural
and artificial - those old ideological battle lines drawn up between
Paris and Cologne seem increasingly irrelevant. The "AT"
in Dale Lloyd's "Anamorphic_AT" stands for "Artificial
Terrain", and the composer is at pains to point out that though
some use is made of field recordings, what might sound like insects
and amphibians is in fact purely electronic in origin. In terms of
overall pace and basic material it has much in common with Richard
Garet's "Circle", which combines treated field recordings
made in South America and Garet's current home New York City (including
on the subway) to create a subdued if tense montage of hums, drones
and crackles. The three brief tracks by Ubeboet, aka Madrid-based
Con-v label boss Miguel Tolosa, are as evocative as their titles –
"The Wait", "Doubts" and "Waking Up Misty"
– but tend to leave one wanting more (luckily there is more
at http://www.earlabs.org/label/LM/LM028.asp?titleID=1296). The most
impressive piece on offer is Jos Smolders' "Aiolos (Vangsaa Exterior)",
which as its title makes clear is sourced in recordings of wind made
outside a cottage in Vangsaa, Denmark, delicately woven with flecks
of distant birdsong, passing aeroplanes and "tiny bell like anomalies"
into a rich and remarkably moving sonic tapestry.
 Running
these articles through the spell checker as I often do, I see that
"elusive" is an adjective that pops up quite often in the
electronica pages. Remind me to consult a thesaurus next time. But
elusive is most definitely the word to describe the music of Richard
Chartier, painter / graphic designer / composer and co-founder of
the Line label. There's a fine essay on Chartier's work by Will Montgomery
in the lavish new book / DVD from Sound323, Blocks of Consciousness
and the Unbroken Continuum (if you can find / afford a copy that
is – review coming next month in these pages to whet your appetite,
all being well). Montgomery is right to point out the influence of
Feldman (who "saw his work as reaching an accommodation between
this unstructured 'time canvas' and the linear demands of musical
time"), but Chartier's music isn't traditionally notated and
not in the least concerned with recognizable (and often repeated)
units of pitch / harmonic information. With its fondness for almost
imperceptible changes of texture and colour, Tracing has
more in common perhaps with the music of Eliane Radigue, an influence
that's perhaps more apparent in Chartier's early works – cf.
Archival 1991 on Crouton – but one that seems to have
resurfaced here. Unlike Radigue's music, which benefits from being
played back at relatively high volume over a good speaker system,
Chartier describes his ideal listening conditions as "closed
headphones – the kind that shut out the world – or an
otherwise silent environment." Radigue's music – like Phill
Niblock's – takes shape and reveals its form by interacting
with the architecture of the listening space itself, while Chartier's
often gives the impression it wants to withdraw from the world entirely.
Introvert it might be, but it's not inaccessible. This 41'36"
span of superbly paced and immaculately mixed music is as good a place
to start as any if you're unfamiliar with Richard Chartier's music.–DW
John
Butcher / Phil Durrant / Radu Malfatti / Paul Lovens / John Russell
NEWS FROM THE SHED
Emanem 4121
 Emanem’s
been dipping into the Acta back catalogue again, following last year’s
reissue of SME’s A New Distance. This reissue of News
from the Shed’s only recording, first released on John Butcher's
label in 1989, is something of a madeleine for this reviewer, who
caught the group in Toronto in the early 1990s near the end of its
lifespan (though trombonist Radu Malfatti was already gone, due to
ill-health or incipient ultraminimalism). It must have been a pretty
miserable experience for the musicians, performing in a drab, windswept
public square for an audience left over from an earlier Boss Brass
concert (which beat a hasty retreat once the music started), but it
was still a revelatory glimpse of a newer UK improvising scene –
the so-called “second wave" – just beginning to get
exposure in North America. The album itself remains something of a
classic of 1980s improv, a little neglected perhaps because it was
issued on LP just as the CD era was getting going. It’s basically
an expanded version of the Butcher / Durrant / Russell trio (responsible
for the earlier Acta release Conceits and two later albums,
Concert Moves and The Scenic Route), expanded to
a quintet by Malfatti and drummer Paul Lovens (he of the “selected
and unselected drums”). Much of the pleasure here is in hearing
music that’s on the verge of something else, halfway between
olde-style improv and the more minimalist forms in the offing, but
ultimately it’s very much a musical world of its own. There’s
a watchmaker precision to the improvisations – tracks are short,
often further subdivided like miniature suites, and there’s
not a wasted note to be found – yet there’s no cautious,
slow-motion playing or austerity: the results are, however small in
scale, quite busy and vivacious. Each sound is as concrete as a pen-scratching
on paper, and has its own force and direction, independently of the
individual musician: indeed it’s virtually a rule here that
if a given musical gesture is started by one musician, it’s
finished by another. John Butcher’s sax multiphonics flit briskly
between sonic outcroppings, only rarely dropping into one of his trademark
in-depth explorations of a single split tone; Durrant’s subtly
FXed violin rubs up against Russell’s acoustic-guitar needlings;
and there’s an unusual low-key but anarchic sense of humour
at times, most noticeable in Malfatti’s witty and garrulous
trombone, and in the way Lovens’ discreet pointillism yields
to the odd percussive spasm. Music of this delicacy was never ideally
served by LP, and in this edition, with four excellent bonus tracks
to boot, it’s like encountering it anew, with even the tiny
creaks and clicks at the end of “Everything Stops for Tea”
now clearly audible.–ND
Billy
Bao
ROCK'N'ROLL GRANULATOR
wmo/r
 You
never quite know what you're in for when you pop a Mattin disc into
the machine (though, admittedly, if he's sharing the bill with Taku
Unami or Radu Malfatti you can probably have an educated guess), and
that applies to quality as much as content. Having found his Song
Book singularly awful – and I can't help wondering if he
didn't intend it to be, though perhaps the fact that I don't speak
the language he's singing in means I'm missing out on something dreadfully
important – I'll admit I was a bit alarmed at the prospect of
a Mattin punk album called Rock'n'Roll Granulator. That said,
the last album with the word rock'n'roll in the title, Norman D. Mayer
and Hugo Roussel's Rock'n'Roll Motherfucker on the Priscilia
label (RIP?) was what it said it was: a motherfucker. And so's this,
even if it isn't really a punk album. Or rather it's a post-punk album.
No, not even that – Simon Reynolds will write in and complain
– erm, a post-post-punk album? Whatever it is it's terrific
stuff. Mattin is joined by Alan Courtis, Xabier Erkizia, Alberto Lopez
and Pablo Reche – and Billy Bao himself, who appears to be a
Nigerian refugee stranded in Bilbao. A likely story, that –
until presented with photographic evidence to the contrary, I'm more
inclined to think he's another creation of the ever fertile mind of
Mattin himself. Well maybe he'll write in and tell us one day. Three
of the four tracks start out pretty rocky (post-rocky? aagh, don't
start that again), all binary thrust and skronking clangy guitars,
but they don't stay that way for long. Well, "Dame Kritmo"
more or less does: it could just about be an Ex outtake (ca. Instants).
"Evapogoration" is trucking along just fine until Mattin's
laptop starts mashing it to shit at 0'38", the track literally
splintering apart into shards of vicious glitch before emerging phoenix-like
by 1'17" only to fuck up again just before the end. "El
grado zero del pulso" (which my pidgin Spanish seems to indicate
means "the degree zero of pulse".. that figures) doesn't
get anywhere near punk. Though then again I suppose you could argue
that it does, since it's all about mindlessly regular rhythmic
drumming. It lasts 18'41" and consists of 193 repeated drum strokes
roughly five seconds apart. After a couple of minutes wisps of other
sounds drift in. There's a little guitar squeal at 4'45" and
the texture thickens by the 12-minute mark, but the drums thud inexorably
on. I wonder if Mattin know's Mathias Spahlinger's Ephémère,
the central section of which calls for a percussionist to play sixty-five
slow rimshots "as regularly as possible". The difference
is that while Spahlinger's attempts at sameness result in difference
– the performer can try to repeat exactly the same sound but
s/he's doomed to fail, as the exposed nature of the sound makes clear
to the attentive listener – Mattin's thuds sound maddeningly
identical (sampled?), if very slightly irregular in their spacing.
It's an extraordinary listening experience. So is the closing "Para
ahuyentar ratas, humanos y ortos insectos", which starts out
chirpy enough but soon descends into a cavern of sub bass rumble and
never manages to climb out. It all certainly challenges our notions
of what "rock" is – or even "music" itself
– is, and if that isn't what punk's all about I don't know what
is.–DW
Ab
Baars
KINDA DUKISH
Wig
 It
takes balls to tackle a whole album of Ellington covers, even if you
try and protect your back by appending the word "kinda"
to each track, but if anyone can do it it's clarinettist and tenor
saxophonist Ab Baars. As a veteran (make that young veteran)
of Misha Mengelberg's ICP Orchestra and notable participant on Misha's
"Ellington Mix" (on Bospaadje Konijnehol, ICP 028)
he's certainly qualified, and with Joost Buis on trombone, Wilbert
de Joode on bass and Martin van Duynhoven on drums he's got the right
men for the job. His selection of Duke material – and the way
he's sequenced it on the album – is also astute and original:
in addition to chestnuts such as "Solitude", "Caravan"
(mustn't forget co-writer Juan Tizol) and "Prelude to a Kiss",
there are lesser known compositions, including "Mr. Gentle and
Mr. Cool" (originally on 1952's Live at the Blue Note,
and co-credited to Harold Baker), "Half The Fun" (from 1957's
Such Sweet Thunder), "Aristocracy à la Jean Lafitte"
and "Portrait of Wellman Braud" (both from 1970's New
Orleans Suite).
Opening with "Solitude" might sound like a risky move, especially
a reading as fragile and intense as this one, on which Baars starts
out tremulously like Ayler and ends up fluffy as Webster, but it's
the perfect prelude to the wild, spiky reading of "Aristocracy
à la Jean Lafitte", after which the perky swing of "Jack
the Bear" comes as much needed light relief. Well, for 38 seconds
at least – until de Joode takes it right out into a free arco
solo. "Kinda Caravan", as you might expect, is a perfect
vehicle for Buis' trombone and he drives it hard and straight, but
not without a few crafty nods in the direction of Tizol. Meanwhile,
"Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool" sounds daft enough to be a Mengelberg
composition. Baars' arrangements are skilful, and appropriately enough
for the music of Ellington, his preference for the clarinet over the
tenor serves to shift the focus away from bop to swing. And there's
nothing the Dutch like to do better than swing (so no prizes for guessing
who wrote the liners for this one – Kevin "New Dutch Swing"
Whitehead himself), and Duynhoven and de Joode can swing like hell,
either uptempo or in the slow dirge of "Kinda Braud". Duynhoven
also turns in a magnificently melodic drum solo on "Kinda Harlem"
("Drop Me Off in Harlem"). Dannie Richmond would have been
proud of him. But what makes it all so good is that however well the
four musicians know their Tizol, Nanton, Brown, Hamilton, Bigard,
Procope, Braud, Blanton and Woodyard, this is no fusty, crusty play-it-straight
homage, but a vibrant, dangerous and thoroughly sparkling update of
a great tradition.–DW
Talibam
TALIBAM!
Evolving Ear
 Nice
to hear something new from ex-Storm & Stress drummer Kevin Shea
(who I had the pleasure of splitting a release with a while back),
but I'd really like to know what he, Ed Bear (feedback saxophone)
and Matt Mottel (synth) have against The Doobie Brothers, because
my copy of this awesome CDR comes inside a homemade cover butchered
from an old LP copy of Minute To Minute. It also comes with
a slab of vinyl hacked out of what is clearly a mid 70s WB album,
though whether or not it's Minute To Minute will remain forever
a mystery, because, dear reader, I have no intention of fucking up
my stylus trying to find out so I can tell you. (As if you
care – your copy might come in a Bee Gees cover anyway.) After
all, Talibam's music is fucked up enough as it is. I was going to
say this sounds like a cross between Painkiller and Tony Williams'
Lifetime, except that even in his wildest moments Zorn still sounds
like he's playing a saxophone, while Ed Bear could be playing anything.
And unlike Tony Williams, who could storm and stress beautifully himself
while remaining solidly inside some unfathomably complex 15/8 or something
like it time signature, Shea is more inclined to go for all out energy
until Mottel pens him in with some mindnumbingly repetitive riff.
Gonzo jazz rock fusion at its most inspired. Someone send a copy to
Michael MacDonald, quick.–DW
Wade
Matthews
ABSENT FRIENDS
Sillón
 After
the Doneda and Rombolá outings on Sillón reviewed in
these pages last month, you might be forgiven for expecting more of
Wade Matthews' work on bass clarinet and flute (especially if you're
familiar with his two Creative Sources releases Aspirations &
Inspirations and Dining Room Music), but no: Absent
Friends is subtitled "Seven Electronic Improvisations"
and finds the French-born American improviser using Reaktor software
to turn a G4 Powerbook into a virtual analog synthesizer. For the
benefit of trainspotters his setup consists of "four audible
multiple wave oscillators, a white noise generator with dedicated
two-pole resonating filter, three low-frequency oscillators (which
can control amplitude, frequency and/or filter depth, cut-off, etc.)
a main filter that can be controlled by the LFOs, a bunch of secondary
filters and a four-oscillator chorus unit." So now you know.
It's not surprising that Matthews goes into detail here, as he studied
electronic music with Mario Davidovsky at the mythic Columbia-Princeton
Electronic Music Center, where his doctoral dissertation consisted
of three pieces for improvisers guided by electronic sounds. "I'm
not a woodwind improviser who's just moved into electronics because
they’re 'in' right now. My electronic experience goes back almost
a quarter of a century," he points out.
These seven tracks come from a set of 19 real time improvisations
Matthews recorded while on holiday in France last summer. "I
built a 'patch', just as I would with an analog synthesizer, then
began to play it, listening to its character and altering its parameters
as I went along. I can honestly say it was the easiest recording experience
I’ve ever had," he admits. Though the pieces may have emerged
in a spate of activity, it's clear he's spent long hours fine-tuning
his equipment and perfecting his individual sounds. And despite all
the technical info above, this is by no means arid, cerebral music:
it's at times vibrant, thrilling, haunting, moving, even disturbing
– but consistently impressive. More of Matthews' electronic
work is scheduled for release shortly on Creative Sources, in the
form of a duo project Mørske-Lys with Ingar Zach.
If it's as good as this I can't wait to hear it.–DW
MTKJ
Quartet
DAY OF THE RACE
Nine Winds 258
 One
of the more quietly eye-opening releases of 2004 was Making Room
for Spaces, the Nine Winds debut of this Los Angeles-based group.
Their music reflected their absorption of many influences, none more
so, to these ears, than the Braxton/Wheeler/Holland/Altschul quartet
from the 1970s. Their newest release continues that trend, but with
some extra assurance and risk-taking. Composition credits are shared
between reedist Jason Mears and trumpeter/flugelhornist Kris Tiner;
Mears’ pieces tend to be drivingly uptempo, Tiner’s more
introspective, at least until you get to the final cut, Tiner’s
delightfully rousing “I Hate Your Teapot”, which manages
to successfully incorporate wood flutes in a barn-burner. Mears’
solo work on alto saxophone is well-constructed and admirably free
of obvious influences; he’s also adept on clarinet, as in “Attack
of the Eye People”, and at times adds the flutes for colour.
Colour is also important for Tiner, who makes shrewd use of mutes
and growls in his solos and in ensemble playing. Ivan Johnson on bass
provides the complex time-changes and contrapuntal arrangements with
a steady rhythmic foundation, and drummer Paul Kikuchi clatters away
rambunctiously in the manner of the Vandermark 5's Tim Daisy, keeping
time while shaking things up every so often. This is the type of release
– small label, no recognizable names – that tends to get
overlooked. As with the Respect Sextet, there is plenty of substance
behind the appealing façade, and the group deserves wider exposure.
They’ve also removed one minor obstacle to their becoming a
household name since this disc appeared: according to their website,
the band name is now the more phonetically pleasing Empty Cage Quartet.–SG
Vinny
Golia Quartet
SFUMATO
Clean Feed 036
 Bronx-born
and Los Angeles-based reedman and composer (not to mention proprietor
of the West Coast’s major documentary label, Nine Winds), Vinny
Golia seems to engage as many different ensemble palettes as he does
instruments, making him one of the most consistently invigorating
improvisers in North America. On these nine original compositions,
he's joined by trumpeter Bobby Bradford, bassist Ken Filiano and percussionist
Alex Cline, a mainstay of Golia’s small groups of the 70s and
80s, who appears on the first Nine Winds release (now sadly out of
print), Spirits In Fellowship, a quartet with bassist Roberto
Miguel Miranda and clarinettist/saxophonist John Carter. Bradford's
own well-documented quartet with Carter turned the then-new Ornette
Coleman model on its head with spacious, colourful collective improvisations,
stately ballads and rare tonal combinations.
It's a line that Sfumato is well-placed to develop, but Golia's
quartet stands a way apart from the Carter-Bradford model, notably
in the biting trills that make up several of the heads on offer. (“All
Together Now”, with its rising chromatic gritty bass clarinet,
trumpet and arco bass, seems to have culled its theme from the Coursil-Murray
warhorse “Angels and Devils.”) Bradford, always more mercurial
and acrid in execution than Don Cherry, sounds closer here to Bill
Dixon or Alan Shorter, but with a dash of hardbop cayenne thrown in.
And though "Ayleresque" is rarely a word used to describe
Golia’s music, there's more raw Cleveland swagger in his bass
clarinet squawks than one usually finds in Los Angeles. Meanwhile,
“NBT” presents his muscular soprano, building terse Lacy-like
statements of (“Repetition” might be Lacy’s “Hit”
in another guise) into a dense sonic wall. Filiano and Cline are a
jagged, forceful pair, digging into slinky vamps only to dissect them
moments later. Their rhythmic approach is worlds apart from the supple
daubs and ethereal swing drummer Bruz Freeman and bassist Tom Williamson
applied to Carter's New Art Jazz Ensemble. Cline’s kit has evolved
over the decades from an assortment of gongs, woodblocks and chimes
to a standard drumset, a fleet, dry sound well suited to the ensemble’s
approach. Sfumato might be one of Golia’s strongest
recordings to date, striking a beautiful balance between metallic
poise and broadly applied colours. Lean yet full, vibrant and chiaroscuro,
these apparent contradictions are the hallmarks of great improvised
music.–CA
Roland
Ramanan
CAESURA
Emanem
 Liner-note
exposition is brief on trumpeter Roland Ramanan’s second Emanem
effort, the sign of a musician confident in his music’s capacity
to field any important talking points. Three years have elapsed since
the release of his debut Shaken, the title a play on the
name of his father, the great Shake Keane (best known as a member
of Joe Harriott’s quartet). In the fall of 2003 Ramanan reconvened
the same crew – cellist Marcio Mattos, bassist Simon H. Fell
and drummer Mark Sanders – to record Caesura, a surefooted
blend of jazz, improv and chamber music like its predecessor. Ramanan’s
Milesian and Cherry dialects appear on “Bloom’s Blues,”
as he moves from muted to open bell passages within a grayscale context
of dour bowed strings and metallic percussion. Mattos and Fell show
an uncommon amount of rapport, developing harmonic lattices accented
by the detailed patter from Sanders’ kit. Ramanan plays wooden
flute on “One Sty Bone”, its dry twittering contrasting
with the squelch of Mattos’ electronics. “In a Different
Circle” serves up a frothy stein of free jazz with Ramanan’s
brassy bursts volleying across chattering drums and snapping-turtle
strings. A switch to flute signals what sounds like an avian treetop
colloquy. The leader lays out on “Marcel Duchamp,” a Fell
solo improvisation stocked with stirring harmonic overlays, and “Post
Part,” a dense duet for Fell and Mattos. The only misfire to
my ears is the lugubriously discursive finale “Waiting for En
and En.” Overall, the interplay on Caesura keeps to
the quieter side, but without any loss of tension or depth, and the
music is good enough to make one hope that the next Ramanan release
won't be as long coming.–DT
Hamid
Drake / Assif Tsahar
LIVE AT GLENN MILLER CAFÉ
Ayler 025
 Openness
and empathy are paramount to the duet format, whether the crepuscular
tone poems of Alex Cline and Jamil Shabaka (Duo Infinity,
Aten, 1977) or the muscular displays of Rashied Ali and Frank Lowe
(Duo Exchange, Survival, 1972). It takes a pared-down language
to truly portray a musician, even a well-known figure like Hamid Drake,
whose pedigree stretches a mile long from reggae and funk groups in
the 70s to more recent highly acclaimed work with reedmen Fred Anderson
and Peter Brötzmann. Recorded just over three years ago at Stockholm’s
showcase for adventurous improvised music, the Glenn Miller Café,
this second volume of duets between Drake and Israeli-born tenorman
Assif Tsahar (the first was Soul Bodies, Ayler 024) provides
an hour’s worth of tight, dialectic-smashing conversations of
stately Newk-Trane phrase wringing, jubilant calypso and funk salvos
– they even close with “St. Thomas”. With similarly
West Indian ebullience, Peter Kowald’s composition “Mother
and Father” evokes both Rollins and Don Cherry, as Tsahar’s
visceral, skunky verses make clear. “Warriors of Stillness”
features a more typically heavy backbeat performance from Drake, but
jagged skronk is as much part of the equation as he and Tsahar make
a run for a rather vast conceptual palette, from biting free exchanges
on “Praying Mantis” to the mean multiphonics-laced blues
of “Handling Clouds,” on which Drake settles into an easy
swing of cross-rhythms and momentary stalls. Strong and highly nuanced
tenor-drums interplay, worth investigating by both fans and converts.–CA
John
Butcher / Eddie Prévost
INTERWORKS
Matchless
 As
titles go, Interworks isn't as bland and dull as Trio
Playing (John Butcher's 1995 outing with Oren Marshall and Derek
Bailey on Incus, which wasn't bland and dull at all despite its truly
hideous cover art), but it does sound rather anonymous, like the name
of some small hi-tech company based on an industrial estate in Slough
("Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! / It isn't fit for
humans now / There isn't grass to graze a cow"): "Interworks
– For All Your Business Solutions." The kind of place where
you get put on eternal hold with Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto.
A cursory glance at the track titles – "Out Work",
"Work Shy", "Work Flow", "Work Up",
"Shift Work" and "Work In" (Wot? No workout?)
– isn't all that inspiring either, and gives little indication
of the treasures in store when you actually get past the jewelbox
and press play. It goes without saying that Butcher and Prévost
are major league players when it comes to improvised music, and unless
they arrived at this website by mistake while looking for an online
travel agency I can't believe there's anybody reading this who doesn't
own at least one album on which they appear (though this, amazingly
enough, is the first one they've appeared on together). Going
back to Trio Playing for a moment, if there weren't those
telltale immaculate multiphonics to give the game away, you might
be fooled into thinking it's the work of a completely different saxophonist.
Extraordinary how Butcher's playing has evolved over the past ten
years – interesting comparisons could be made with the work
of Michel Doneda and Jack Wright, two other saxophonists whose playing
has changed considerably in response to the arrival of lowercase and
EAI trends in the music. What's most apparent on Interworks is
the near total absence of pulse-based rhythm; there is rhythm, of
course, both harmonic rhythm and large scale structural rhythm (pace,
if you like), but Prévost concentrates almost exclusively on
his tam tam and bowed cymbals. Even thuds on the big bass drum are
few and far between, and most of them appear on the closing "Work
In". As a result Butcher can do with Prévost what he did
with Toshi Nakamura on Cavern with Nightlife, sit on a tone
and explore its inner workings with tiny nuances of fluttertonguing
and multiphonics without fear of being bounced in another direction
by his playing partner. (Another intriguing comparison could be made
between this and Prévost's 2004 duo outing with Evan Parker,
Imponderable Evidence..) The level of concentration throughout
is outstanding. This is not easy music, but it's far from forbidding.
All it requires is that you buckle down and learn to survive in a
harsh environment. Like living in Slough.–DW
Lou
Gare
NO STRINGS ATTACHED
Matchless
 I'm
getting pretty damn fed up of hearing people say "Oh yes I love
AMM.. but I don't like Lou Gare." The late Cornelius Cardew seems
to have been placed on an impossibly high pedestal in recent years,
notably by Keith Rowe and John Tilbury (who are perched high up on
a column themselves, come to think of it), and AMM's heartbeat, percussionist
Eddie Prévost, is held in justifiably high esteem, but no-one
seems to want to recognise that Gare's tenor saxophone was an important
piece of the AMM puzzle between 1965 and 1977. The duo incarnation
of AMM with Prévost was a fascinating example of the road not
taken, as demonstrated clearly on At The Roundhouse (Anomalous)
and To Hear and Back Again (Matchless).
This set of five leisurely tenor solos was recorded at Prévost's
invitation following one of Gare's rare trips up to the smoke last
year. His appearance at horn_bill, a concert at London's 291 Gallery
on February 9th 2005 featuring a stellar line-up of reedmen –
John Butcher, Nat Catchpole, Kai Fagaschinski, Evan Parker and Seymour
Wright (who penned the magnificent liners to No Strings Attached)
– was released as part of a double CD on Matchless (Matchless
63), and was followed four days later by the first of two sessions
recorded a week apart at Firefly Studios, Throwleigh, down in deepest
Devon, where Gare relocated in 1977.
Prévost was right to describe his work with Gare in AMM's mid-70s
incarnation as "decidedly non-jazz", but there's no denying
where Lou Gare is coming from, even if he's arrived at a destination
well off jazz's beaten track. Wright is on the ball when he hears
distant echoes of Tubby Hayes, Warne Marsh and Lester Young, not to
mention Sonny Rollins (to whom Gare dedicates one of these five tracks),
but free from the tyranny of the backbeat Gare is free to stretch
out in a way no jazz rhythm section would ever allow. It's a classic
example of what improvised music does best, namely taking an idea
and running with it, following the music into whatever corner it leads.
It's the same kind of eternally unravelling logic as a Misha Mengelberg
piano solo, but while Mengelberg is well known for reaching the brick
wall of boredom and banging away at it until it gives way, Gare manages
to backtrack and take another direction so skilfully you don't even
realise he's done it. So bloody what if he doesn't care a jot for
the arsenal of twitters, flutters, spits and clicks that constitutes
today's hip improv saxophone playing. In twenty years this will still
sound as inventive and musical (you got a problem with the word "musical"?
I haven't). Not just matchless, timeless.–DW
Marit
Schlechte
PIANO SOLO
Nurnichtnur
 Pianist
Marit Schlechte, currently based in Berlin, studied composition with
Berthold Tuercke and Friedrich Goldmann before assuming an important
role in the new music scene in Stuttgart, where she founded the ensemble
Unterton and organized various events and concerts, as well as performing
with the likes of Boris Baltschun, Alessandro Bosetti, Alfredo Costa
Monteiro and Michel Doneda. The nine tracks on her debut album, the
last three short inside piano explorations, are fine examples of what
the NNN press release describes as "short motives and intervals
[..] repeated consciously – repetitions are altered just in
the moments when they start manifesting themselves". The "regular"
improvisations often start from tenuous if obstinate repetition of
one or two notes, setting out towards a destination we lose soon sight
of as the addition of more tones complicates matters and provokes
unpredictable harmonic shifts. What begins as a series of innocent
droplets is soon transformed into a squall of dissonant minimalism,
impenetrable in its sombre asymmetry yet demonstrating a rare flair
for instant composition. A case in point is the chordal-cluster resonance
study "1 1/2", which confounds the laws of expectation and
resolution and leaves grey shades and metallic ambiences to fight
for our attention. The bowed strings and overacute multiplications
of the closing inside piano miniatures indicate there's much to look
forward to from Schlechte in future.–MR
Civil
War
THE BRUTALITY OF FACT
Longbox
Dropp
Ensemble
INGEN TID
Tonschacht
It
says this was recorded by a certain Nathan Moomaw of Bigfoot Sound,
Sharon, Wisconsin, but if that sounds too good to be true you just
wait till you hear the music. After last year's debut EP on Longbox,
Civil War – Amy Cimini (viola) Adam Sonderberg (percussion)
and Katherine Young (bassoon) – are back. Well, in fact they
never went away: this six-movement work (Prelude + Parts I-V) was
also recorded in the same abandoned grain silo that's as much part
of Civil War's unique sound as the musicians' contributions (imagine
a blind date between Eddie Prévost and Giacinto Scelsi). There's
also apparently enough material in the can for a third instalment
next year, which is something to look forward to. Whereas a lot of
American improv is delightfully multidirectional – not a criticism,
that, either: without a "long tradition" of improvised music,
festivals like No Idea and High Zero are more dangerous and often
more exciting affairs than, say, London's Freedom of the City –
Sonderberg has always peered over the fence at the immaculately mown
lawns of contemporary classical music. And if the music and the title
weren't serious enough, there's Nick Butcher's "sinister"
cover art. But don't be put off. Like Bigfoot, this is well worth
hunting down.
Civil
War's Cimini and Young are also part of Sonderberg's "all star"
project, the Dropp Ensemble, whose line up here also includes Steven
Hess on percussion, Aram Shelton on alto sax (I think), Ken Vandermark
on what sounds like bass clarinet and Sonderberg's frequent collaborator,
the reclusive Sam Dellaria, who's co-credited with recording and assembling
the two brief tracks on this 7" single. As usual it's a limited
run of 500 in Tonschacht's trademark austere all black format, but
as the quote from Sound Projector magazine on Tonschact's website
explains, "500 copies is hardly what you'd call a limited run.
The vast majority of artists are probably lucky to sell that many,
and I'm talking about the Chocolate Hitlers and Bum Trumpets rather
the Lustmords and Merzbows. And a collectable, because that is what
these are whether by accident or design, is only ever as good as its
content. The proof of the pudding is the eating, as they say."
Indeed, but these two sober studies in sustained tones are more of
an amuse gueule than a pudding; let's hope a more substantial
serving will be dished up soon. Meanwhile, you can still track down
a copy of the earlier DE outing, The Empire Builders, if
you're hungry.–DW
Anla
Courtis
TRIBUTE TO CALCIUM
Tonschacht
 Also
on Tonschact is this magnificent brooding montage of menacing drone
courtesy Anla Courtis (formerly of Reynols). Layers of high frequency
scrabbles from Courtis's pocket Toba violin – this is his first
release using the one-string instrument native to the Indians of North
Eastern Argentina – are trodden into the sludge and hiss of
his tapes by ominous, regularly pulsing guitars. It's thrilling, disturbing
stuff, and yet again one wishes it would go on for four times its
total length of twelve and a half minutes. But then again, as the
bloke behind the late lamented Enlightened Tobacco Company will tell
you (remember Death Cigarettes?), good things often come in small,
black packages. And disappear just as quickly. Move fast.–DW
John
Clair / Andrew Sosis
FILIGREE
Arrival
Recorded
in the summer of 2004 up in Westchester NY and released in a limited
edition (150) on Arrival in an envelope masquerading as an airmail
letter, Filigree consists of three leisurely improvisations
by John Clair (tenor sax, portable feedback guitar, cymbal, piano
and harmonica) and Andrew Sosis (electronics and psaltery). It's a
slightly uneven set, but attractive in its willingness to take risks
– which is more than can be said for many of the musicians whose
work seems to have inspired Messrs Clair and Sosis – long stretches
of tense silence are peppered with extended techniques splutters,
quiet but menacing gritty guitar scrapes and the odd screech of feedback,
which keeps both musicians and listeners on their toes. The outer
and inner sleeves are adorned with anatomical / scientific diagrams
presumably lifted from an old textbook, and Clair also adds one of
his poems. "strangled jasmine drowse reef jaundice aboriginal
regatta amidst mauve translucent filigree soot" runs the last
stanza. His poetry works exactly the same way as the music: it's a
colourful and syntactically ambiguous assemblage of seemingly unrelated
words, which may or may not have been chosen at random, or for their
sound alone. I'm wondering is what a "portable feedback guitar"
is, though. I thought all guitars were portable.–DW
Joel
Stern / Jim Denley
TAPE AND PAINT GAME
Split
Recorded
in a number of improvised sessions over 2003 and 2004, this duo release
from two of Australia’s more eclectic improvisers is a largely
an exploration in texture and varying degrees of density. Both musicians
have an innate understanding of the possibilities of acoustic texture:
Denley’s sax playing continues to develop his alternate language
of click, pops and gurgles, whilst Stern’s work with electronics
and processed field recordings evokes an equally personal language
of secret sonic worlds. When their personal approaches are combined,
their complimentary nature is obvious, notably on "Non-Reflective
Orange Hens", which finds Denley sitting in an electronic cage
of Stern's creation generating warped sounds as if to scratch a way
out through the bars, and "End Game", whose gritty electronic
pulses and masked sax snippets creates genuine intensity from a surprisingly
small number of sonic devices. At its most vivid, this record reflects
a clear ability of both musicians to evoke the unfamiliar from the
seemingly familiar – an increasingly difficult task in this
age of audio plenty.–LE
Luca
Miti
JUST BEFORE DAWN
Ants
 The
longest piece on offer in this idiosyncratic recital of piano music
played by Luca Miti is Terry Riley's late 60s Keyboard Study #II,
and even if Miti tends to rush over the phase shifts a little it's
still one good reason for getting hold of a copy of this album. I
can think of two more: Sylvain Chauveau's Radiophonie, in
which Miti's clanging piano chords are accompanied by blurred fragments
of radio broadcasts (there's even a snatch of Coltrane in there),
and his reading of Tom Johnson's Long Decays ("this
piece consists of only seven events / a soft chord containing one
high note and three middle-range notes / a soft low note / a soft
high chord containing two notes / a soft high chord containing seven
notes / a soft chord containing three high notes and three middle-range
notes / a soft middle-range note / a soft high chord containing one
low note and four middle-range notes"). The other pieces on offer
are slight affairs, both in duration and substance. The name of the
game is minimalism, but we're talking the lightweight pastel stuff,
not high-intensity drone bruisers like Niblock and Conrad; in their
concern for simple gestures using unashamedly tonal harmony, a lot
of the pieces hark back to the glory days of English experimental
music – Ana Guidi's era tanto tempo che non mi succedeva
could be a bar of early 80s Bryars or Skempton. The slowmotion carillon
of Francesco Michi's Passatempi e giochi d'attenzione n° 3
is touching, as is the title track, a one-minute haiku of a piece
by Welsh composer Paul Burnell (who's done some rather cool things
with scores in the form of musical squares – check out http://homepages.tesco.net/~musicalsquares/msqset1.html),
and Gigi Masin's crunchy harmonies on Tootle make a welcome
change from the bland twiddles of Gilbert Delor and Enrico Piva (par
for the course scale / arpeggio figurations with incremental changes,
been there, done that). One wonders though why Miti saw fit to include
just one of György Kurtág's 12 Microludes. All
twelve wouldn't have taken up much space, and we could have done without
the first of Laurie Spiegel's Two Cyclic Scores, which consists,
as you might imagine, of 39 (or did I lose count?) repetitions of
an already repetitive (12/8?) bar. Still, shouldn't moan. The music
is tastefully played and well recorded in Studio V38, with the exception
of Alvin Curran's A Room in Rome, which was recorded in Miti's
own flat in the Italian capital. If this album sells well, he may
even be able to afford a piano tuner.–DW
David
Monacchi
PAESAGGI DI LIBERO ASCOLTO
Ants
 A
list of composers and performers who've taken to recording and using
natural sound in their work would be about five times as long as this
review, but although "field recordings" is a term that pops
up increasingly on albums of new music – both composed and improvised
– there are as many different ways to use them as there are
fields to record. Hildegard Westerkamp and Loren Chasse both like
to poke around the Pacific seashore but their respective compositions
are worlds apart; there's also the question of hi or lo (or no) fi:
there's one hell of a difference between Eric La Casa's meticulous
montages and Aki Onda's grainy old cassettes.
As far as sound quality goes, Italian composer David Monacchi's recordings
are superb, and he spares you no detail when it comes to listing the
equipment he uses to make them. Ciclo Circadiano (1993),
like several sound art pieces from Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien
No. 1 to Chris Watson's Weather Report, is an exercise
in compositional sleight of hand, compressing a single day (24 hours)
in the Montefeltro Valley into 24 minutes. From the magnificent song
of what I imagine is a nightingale – sorry I can't confirm this,
the only birds I see round these parts are bloody pigeons, and I got
fed up with and sold my copy of Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux
ages ago – to frogs crickets owls roosters ravens flies des
grillons des sillons des buissons des poissons des clochettes des
brochettes des pâquerettes des fourchettes des barils du persil
des chenils des fournils du crotin du boudin du rotin du terrain
it's a real treat if natural sound is your bag.
Acqua (1992) is, unsurprisingly, sourced exclusively in recordings
of water, from babbling brooks to stormy seas, the plop of a stone
thrown in a well to the whitenoise adrenalin rush of a dam breaking.
Monacchi doesn't process his field recordings – who'd want to
when the sounds are as acoustically rich and complex as these? –
but he's not averse to shuffling them around and making them play
contrapuntal games. The canonic treatment of drips and splashes is
cute, but sits rather uncomfortably with the acoustic ecology aesthetic
he also seems to subscribe to (he's recorded for the World Soundscape
Project and undertaken work for Greenpeace in the Amazon) –
if the sounds of the natural world are so beautiful, why squeeze them
into man-made polyphonic structures? Of course, such sonic topiary
is nothing new – remember Stockhausen's duck quacking out the
Marseillaise – but as with real topiary you end up admiring
the gardener more than the bush. Similarly, the fact that 1990's La
Selva degli Orologi ("The Clock Forest") comes with
a rather snazzy listening score complete with exploratory key ("a
sound that pulses every 4 seconds obtained by slowing down the original
tape to 1/4 its speed then treated with an echo with a frequency of
3 beats per second for two seconds" etc.) allowing you to follow
the work's tripartite structure seems to be designed to impress as
much as explain. For my money, I prefer Intorno all'Origine ("Around
the Origin"), which despite its rather forbidding liner notes
and their reference to granular synthesis, algorithms and filtroterodines,
is a highly listenable and eclectic exploration of everything from
infinite glissandi to "Frère Jacques". Beautiful
and beautifully done.–DW
Morton
Feldman
COMPLETE VIOLIN / VIOLA AND PIANO WORKS
OgreOgress
 Ever
had a feeling of "déjà lu"? A couple of years
ago I wrote: "the only good reason for digging up and releasing
what can be described as juvenilia is that it might in some way hint
at an artist's mature work to come, and with the best will in the
world that can't be said of Morton Feldman's First Piano Sonata."
Well, the same applies to his Violin Sonata. Dating from
1945, it's just as indebted to Bartók as the piano piece –
competent but unexceptional. But for the sake of completion, it has
to be included here, if only to cock a snook at Mode Records' Feldman
Edition Volume 3, Marc Sabat and Stephen Clarke's Complete Music
for Violin and Piano. Which isn't complete anymore, because here
violinist Christina Fong also includes two late solo pieces, 1981's
For Aaron Copland and 1984's [Composition], which
Sabat was either unaware of when he released his Mode set or chose
not to record, perhaps considering them to have been shelved by the
composer for a reason. ([Composition] seems to have been
abandoned in favour of Violin and String Quartet, with which
it has much in common harmonically. There's a splendid article online
by Sabat himself on this very subject http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=4210,
which also goes into some fascinating detail on Feldman's enharmonic
notation.) If [Composition]'s continuous double stops are
something of an anomaly – debate is still raging over whether
the composer intended his enharmonic notation to be microtonal –
For Aaron Copland is even odder, consisting of purely diatonic
white notes, something quite out of character given late Feldman's
preoccupation with adjacent semitone-derived harmony. But whereas
the Sonata is a ball of teenage fluff, these two late miniatures
are real discoveries.
There's little to choose between Sabat and Fong's (we shouldn't forget
pianist Paul Hersey either) respective readings of 1950's Piece
for Violin and Piano, but as we move forward through Feldman's
career – significant that the last piece he wrote for the combination
of instruments, 1982's For John Cage was over thirty times
as long as the first – the differences between the Mode and
Ogre sets become slightly more apparent, especially in terms of recording.
(I'm telling you all this just in case you haven't got either and
want to choose; if you already own the Mode set, you ought to consider
getting this too, unless of course you're a Feldman completist in
which case you probably already have). Another difference is that
this is rather grandly billed as Complete Violin / Viola and Piano
Works, but we only hear Christina Fong's dark, velvety viola
on one piece, 1970's The Viola In My Life 3 (VIMLs 1,2
and 4 were ensemble or orchestral works). It's almost worth
getting the set for, though, because it's so luscious – plus
you might have a hard time tracking down one of the other two recordings
of the work, both of which I suspect are out of print.
Because Feldman wrote works for violin and piano throughout his career,
the first CD of this set in particular represents a fascinating cross-section
of his compositional evolution, from the pointillism (distinctly Webernesque,
here) of the early 1950s pieces Projection 4 and Extensions
1 via the suspended sonorities of Vertical Thoughts 2
(1963) to the unashamedly lyrical Viola In My Life 3 –
damn, the man was in love and it shows – and the odd angular
weave of Spring of Chosroes, one of Feldman's tougher and
technically difficult pieces from the late 1970s. Fong is especially
impressive here; oddly enough she sounds more challenged by some parts
of the early sonata, but that's probably because it's not all that
well-written for the instrument.
Reviewing albums of late Feldman nowadays is rather like studying
form at the races. In the For John Cage Stakes Yashushi Toyoshima
and Aki Takahashi come trailing in last at 97'40". Sabat / Clarke's
version on Mode comes in fourth at 81'56", Paul Zufovsky and
Marianne Schroeder third at 77'10", Josje Ter Haar and John Snijders
come racing in at 69'12" but the winner is – Fong and Hersey,
66'00"! Of course, it's not as simple as that. But the fact that
one currently available version of the piece can be over half an hour
longer than another certainly raises some serious questions about
Feldman's notation. OgreOgress's Glenn Freeman is by and large correct
to state that faster tempi correspond better to the composer's indications
in the score, but does that necessarily mean that those with the Takahashi
version should throw out the jewel box and use the discs as beermats?
I hardly think so: Takahashi did after all premiere the piece on March
13th 1982 (with Paul Zufovsky on violin) and one imagines Feldman,
who was never backward about coming forward, would have told them
in no uncertain terms if he thought it was too slow. But would he
have found Fong and Hersey's reading too fast? Some of the double
stop passages in the later sections of the work do sound a little
uncomfortable, but you can put that down to the fact they're bloody
difficult to play, not that they're being attempted at too fast a
tempo. For myself, I'm happy to have three versions of For John
Cage, and am not prepared to put my head on the block when it
comes to choosing one. I tend to appreciate the one I happen to be
listening to. In any case, the Fong / Hersey set is most definitely
worth checking out, and not only for the 1980s solo pieces and the
delicious viola cut.–DW
John
Hudak
SOTTO VOCE
Conv
 Devotees
of John Hudak's other recordings, which have originated in sound sources
as diverse as underwater insects, birds, grass, motor traffic and
answering machine messages, might be surprised by this one. Its sounding
material consists of recorded pizzicato cello pitches played on a
sampler, MIDI-triggered by a Max/MSP audiofile conversion of recordings
of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce reading their own work. As such,
it is, as Mark Pauwen notes in the liners, "an undeniably 'post-modern'
take on modernism: the unrelentless [sic] and self-consuming presence
of the original art of which these pieces are derived [..] has now
taken a much more diluted and yet more immanent form." It's also
another one of those paradoxical works that are constantly changing
while remaining instantly recognizable. Once you've heard it you won't
forget it, but you'll never be able to repeat it, unless you're Dominic
O'Brien (check this out, this'll blow your mind http://www.msoworld.com/brain/mental/mso4memory.html).
But if you've ever read Stein (or tried to) and "balked at her
soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding
catalogues on numbers," to quote Edmund Wilson, you'll recognise
and appreciate Sotto Voce's gentle quasi-iteration. "We
cannot retrace our steps, going forward may be the same as going backwards.
We cannot retrace our steps, retrace our steps. All my long life,
all my long life, we do not retrace our steps, all my long life, but.
(A silence a long silence)"
What Stein and Joyce are to modernism, John Cage is to post-modernism,
I guess. There's nothing today's sound artists, improvisers and composers
like to do more than namecheck Cage, but more as a cultural liberating
force than as a composer, rather in the spirit of Schoenberg's famous
assessment of his former student: "He's not a composer, he's
an inventor of genius." But Arnold was wrong (not for the first
time, either – remember all that twaddle about serialism assuring
the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years?): Cage was
a composer, and even if his most famous work is the infamous
4'33", his early music is no less worthy of attention.
In both its concern for process and its restricted vocabulary of just
a handful of diatonic pitches, what Hudak's work recalls most strongly
is Cage's early piano and toy piano pieces. In fact, if it were scored
for prepared piano, people would have been quick to spot the connection.
As it is, not many people have. But then Hudak has always specialised
in exploring the sonic boundary lines, and once more a beautiful and
discreet release of his has slipped out under the radar. Sotto voce,
indeed. Perhaps Gertrude was right after all: "Everybody gets
so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."–DW
Dion
Workman/Mattin
S3
Formed
 More
inscrutable chilly micro-electronics from Mattin and Dion Workman.
If you enjoyed their earlier outing Via Vespucci on Antifrost,
you'll probably like this. The first time I listened to it was on
a Discman on a train coming back from Cologne, speeding through the
flat, empty countryside of Northern France on a pitch black night.
In retrospect a pretty dumb thing to do, since I had to crank the
volume up to the max (a dangerous move with a Mattin offering because
you never know when he's going to let rip with a vicious blast of
noise), trying in vain to drown out a bloke sitting five rows behind
me who was negotiating the final details of the purchase and refurbishment
of an Indian restaurant with someone somewhere in Belgium. You have
no idea how much I hate mobile phones. The second time I
tried it, knowing more or less what to expect – the 41 minute
piece contains no major explosions as such, just a slow build-up of
low rumble and a cloud of ultra high frequency hiss until it starts
falling apart in stutters and clicks at the 21 minute mark –
was on a quiet Sunday afternoon at home, but that was spoiled by someone
a couple of floors above hammering nails into the wall. And I don't
mean four or five nails, either. I have about as much affection for
Sunday DIY freaks as I do for mobile phones. I tried again two days
later but by then the real builders were making so much noise in the
back courtyard of the building I had to abandon the attempt altogether.
And I'd been listening with headphones. Since then I've managed two
further playthroughs, one with cans on and one without, and have come
to the conclusion there's no perfect listening environment for this
piece at all. I hope you have more luck, because it needs your full
attention to reveal its cold beauty.–DW
Robin
Fox / Clayton Thomas
SUBSTATION
Room 40
 Substation
is a rather banal title for this set of uncompromisingly dense but
thrilling reworkings of Clayton Thomas's double bass (and "objects")
by the live processing of Robin Fox. Though you've got to stick with
it: the clatter and clutter of the opening "Direct Couriers"
might not exactly whet your appetite, and those who frisbee their
CDs into the out tray if nothing spectacular happens after three minutes
will be missing out on something. Things hot up on "Shuffle",
which sounds like a fight to the death between Richard Barrett and
Brian Ferneyhough using a clone army of Barry Guys, but it's nothing
compared to the album's centrepiece, "Dust On The Diodes",
which takes one of the late Peter Kowald's pet sounds (rapid scrabbling
between the strings of the bass near the bridge using the frog of
the bow) and transforms, multiplies and superimposes it to create
a web of manic marimbas under which Thomas's raw sub bass tremolos
growl menacingly. It's so packed full of information it's hard to
work out exactly how many tracks are mixed together, but I'll hazard
a guess there are well over a million notes over the course of the
track's 27'37". Listening to it all the way through at correct
(i.e. high) volume can be either wonderfully exhilarating or bloody
annoying, depending on your mood, but however it comes across it's
a hard act to follow. "Bird Song" and especially "Between
Downpours" wisely concentrate on sparser, more austere textures,
but "Substation (Reprise)" – funny, didn't see the
track come round first time, so where does that reprise come from?
– is a nasty poke in the ear of spastic glitches and splatters
to finish (you) off with.–DW
Steinbrüchel
OPAQUE (+RE)
Room 40
 In
2003 Swiss composer Ralph Steinbrüchel was invited to provide
music for a Surround Sound installation for the Taktlos festival,
and responded with "Opaque", a ten minute "audio sculpture"
combining his exquisite sprinkles of digital dust with warm electric
piano sound. The "RE" stands for remixes (or reworking or
reappraisal or readjustment or rearrangement or reassessment or recontextualisation,
take your pick), but it's a remix project with a twist: each of the
participants – Necks pianist Chris Abrahams, feedback sculptor
Ben Frost, sweet glitchmeister Taylor Deupree, guitarist and gastronome
Oren Ambarchi and Toshiya "where have you hidden the contact
mic this time?" Tsunoda – was given only three of Opaque's
constituent soundfiles, and had no idea what the original work sounded
like. If you pop the disc into the computer and spend a bit of time
jumping about from track to track on your media player you'll be able
to hear more or less who got what, but not all the time. The result
is a wonderfully diverse collection of pieces, from the gentle kitten-on-the-keys
keyboard capers of Abrahams, via the freezing fogbank of Frost (all
puns intended) to the cosy glow of Deupree and Ambarchi's offerings
and the final typically inscrutable Tsunoda finale.–DW
John
Duncan/Paolo Parisi
CONSERVATORY (SAN SEBASTIANO)
Allquestions/Maschietto (CD+Book)
 Those
familiar with his Paris Transatlantic
interview in March 2005 will recall John Duncan mentioning Conservatory,
an installation which at the time was nearing the end of its exhibition
life. Nearly twelve months on, those who couldn't attend can get an
idea of what it was like through this package, a sober grey box containing
a photo booklet of various perspectives of Paolo Parisi's work with
cardboard, multicolour PVC tubes and wall paintings, and a CD of Duncan's
soundtrack for the event, itself lodged in a white booklet adorned
with the author's handwritten annotations. The above mentioned PVC
conduits constitute the basic timbral filter in a 70-minute piece
sourced, like several recent Duncan works, in the sounds of the human
voice. Through holes in the tubes the voices are transmitted to small
speakers that help the sound to propagate throughout the "network",
yielding a "presence" of ghost entities in the live installation,
an aspect of great interest for the composer, who pushes the vocal
emissions to the limit in wave upon wave of sighs, moans and (involuntarily)
hypnotic chanting drones. What sounds like audience members walking
around and commenting is also audible at times, but fortunately pretty
low in the mix. Through headphones it's pretty much a medium-to-low
frequency daze; it's better through loudspeakers, preferably in a
large bare room.–MR
Will
Montgomery
WATER BLINKS
Selvageflame
 Anyone
who's read Will Montgomery's fine perceptive journalism, notably in
The Wire magazine (his article on Richard Chartier in Blocks
of Consciousness and the Unbroken Continuum was also mentioned
above, in fact) will be pleased to learn that he's just as good at
making music as he is at writing about it. The title of this debut
release on Montgomery's own Selvageflame label – whose website
also informs us that he was part of an electronica trio called Frank
Blood (go Google and you'll come across one album Star Repair,
on Eli, but no further details about who the band members are and
where they come from) – is a popular name for Montia fontana,
a flowering plant also known as Annual Water Minerslettuce, Bronkruid
and Fountain Candy-flower. And each of the ten tracks is named after
a flowering plant (though perhaps Montgomery chose the names because
they sound good – after all, "Lapsana" is much more
evocative than "Nipplewort", n'est-ce pas?). Anyway, check
out Mrs M. Grieve's A Modern Herbal at http://botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/mgmh.html
if you're interested. There's plenty of discussion of hermaphrodite
flowers and rhizomes there, and as an electronic music specialist
Montgomery must have come across plenty of rhizomes himself over the
past few years (they were all the rage a while back, and artists and
labels were falling over each other to quote Deleuze / Guattari. Mille
Plateaux, anyone?). Most electronica albums these days reveal
their source influences within seconds of hitting the play button,
but the most impressive thing about Water Blinks is that
it manages to reference its influences discreetly. It's clear Montgomery
knows his Pan Sonic well, and though he tends to avoid explicit grooves
("Vetch" is the closest we get to one), I'll hazard a bet
that if you raid his place looking for other strange herbs you'll
come across plenty of Raster Notons too. There's a lot of information
packed into each piece, and the way it unfolds is original, unexpected
and convincing. Maybe even rhizomatic. Keep the room you're listening
in cool, though, as the leaves of the plant "can turn bitter
in summer, especially if the plant is growing in a hot dry position."–DW
Falter
Bramnk
SOUNDTRACKS / STORIES
Snowdonia
 Falter
Bramnk is a thinly disguised anagram of Lille-based sound artist Frank
Lambert, but one wonders why he bothers to use the pseudonym, since
his real name is clearly audible in the first of these soundtracks
/ stories, 15 beautifully executed and sequenced miniature montages
of original music and extracts from movie soundtracks, recorded and
mixed between 1995 and 2003. That might sound like it should be some
kind of plunderphonic pillaging of the local record library's OST
collection, but it isn't. Lambert's knack at encapsulating the essence
of the film as impressive as his taste in cinema – the disc
namechecks some pretty major league flicks by Corneau, Egoyan, Fellini,
Friedkin, Godard, Kubrick, Malle, Melville, Pasolini, Reisz, Tarkovsky
and von Trier – in barely three minutes "Working life"
manages to get to the heart of Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning, from the raw anger of Albert Finney's tough working
class hero to Olivier Benoit's cunning reworking of John Dankworth's
cool jazz backdrop. Famously disturbing spoken extracts – the
little girl screams of Friedkin's Exorcist in "In or
out", the tearful protestations of the unwilling copophragists
in Pasolini's Salo in "Il girone della merda" –
are set against wonderfully (and alarmingly) banal music. "Alex
is happy" revisits the world of Kubrick's Clockwork Orange,
with a deliciously tacky rescoring of Purcell's Funeral Music
for Queen Mary – perfectly in keeping with Walter Carlos's
famously kitsch Moog reorchestrations of Beethoven – accompanied
by blasts of Malcolm MacDowell's "Singing in the rain" from
the film's notorious rape scene. If some of the cuts recall mid-1980s
Zorn classics such as Godard and Spillane, it's
probably because there are plenty of references to good old film
noir and nouvelle vague in Lambert's work too, from
Louis Malle's L'ascenseur pour l'échafaud via Godard's
A bout de souffle and Alphaville and Jean-Pierre
Melville's magnificent Le samourai to Alain Corneau's Série
noire. But even JZ would have been proud to sign something this
good.–DW
Black
To Comm
RÜCKWÄRTS BACKWARDS
Dekorder
Dekorder
label head Marc Richter obviously has a penchant for collecting vinyl
– or that’s at least what this debut release under the
moniker Black To Comm suggests. Compiled from an epic array of vinyl
sources ranging from obvious traditional/classical to psychedelica
and distorted free jazz, Richter revitalises his abstracted sources,
seeking out loops and fragments to create new swirling arrangements.
Like many records involving the use of vinyl, the album ebbs and flows
in a predictable but suitably rewarding way; Black To Comm continues
in the vein of many contemporary turntable users, processing the sources
heavily. Texture remains a reference to the origins of this session,
rather than the purpose of investigation itself. Surface noise is
an important element, but never quite resolves to become the central
focus of any one piece. With the odd field recording thrown in, this
record is an genuinely enjoyable listen. From dronescape to detail,
it’s simple but well crafted and efficiently executed.–LE
Pimmon
CURSE OF EVIL CLOWN
Meupe
It
has been sometime since Pimmon marked as a blip on the release radar,
evidently caught up in a range of other projects that have left little
time for CD documentations. The three selections collected here offer
some insight into Paul Gough’s current musical endeavours, and
the seriously minimal and effective jewel-case packaging of this limited
edition 3" CDR from Perth's increasingly interesting Meupe label
is well worth a look at. The opening "Stumbling" is a joyously
melodic work that gently shifts and tilts through a series of gentle
processes. Almost static for the most part, it pulses with a minimalist
sensibility
that makes for a strong contrast with the following "Dream Clown",
an eerily oppressive dronescape with electronic insects chewing on
cables at the back of the mix. By the time higher and eventually mid-range
tones emerge, you’re already lost in what feels like a bass-loaded
wasteland, features warped and blurred through a haze of low-end hum.
The final "Zero Gravity", its title no doubt inspired by
its generous slow building second half, rounds out the disc with a
less ominous sensibility. Its spacious texture reflects an almost
Ambient side to Pimmon’s compositions, something he will hopefully
explore further in future efforts.–LE
Tim
Coster
LANDING
Half Theory
One
of a number of CDR focused labels emanating from Australia, Half Theory’s
issue of Tim Coster’s Landing is a rewarding one. Coster’s
work on this recording is based essentially in the realm of field
recordings, instruments and a variety of electronic devices. Detailed
and refined in its approach, it sits neatly in the realms explored
by labels including and/OAR and Apestaartje. Ambient tones, melodic
offcuts and scattered electronic dust gust together with surprising
delicacy and movement. When melodic elements are introduced, there
is a clear shift of focus, the ear drawn to alternative tunings –
the repeating phrases on the title track referencing some distant
echo of folk, or some Henry Flynt-style drone experiment drained of
volume and rhythmic energy. Coster’s choice of material for
this record suggests a divergent palette that is beginning to bloom
and will no doubt become more developed in future editions. A welcome
addition to the already impressive New Zealand sound underworld.–LE
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
|
|