| JULY
News 2006 |
Reviews
by Marcelo Aguirre, David Cotner, Nate Dorward, Massimo Ricci, Nick
Rice, Derek Taylor, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
From the Archives: The Sound Of Silence: The
Music and Aesthetics of the Wandelweiser Group
Going Fragile: Mattin
/ Malfatti
Scott Walker
In Concert: MaerzMusik
2006
In Concert: David Robertson at Carnegie Hall
JAZZ & IMPROV: Trio
3 / Thomas Chapin / Bruise w/ Derek Bailey / Tetuzi Akiyama
/ Nels Cline & Jeremy Drake / Howard Riley / Brand, Perkis,
Robair, Shiurba & Sperry
Joe McPhee / Eddie
Prévost / Henry Kaiser / Sextessence / Lacey, Vogel &
Wastell
CONTEMPORARY: Warren
Burt / Arditti Quartet / Musica Futurista / Icebreaker
ELECTRONICA, POST ROCK ETC: Kiyoshi
Mizutani / Afflux / John Duncan & CM von Hausswolf / Crawling
With Tarts / Function / Loscil / Nightmares on Wax / Vetiver
/ Sleeping Moustache / Arastoo
Last month
|
If
you scroll down the old PT homepage you'll see, in the right-hand
column under the photo of Alan Licht, a thing called "Quote of
the Day", which changes, logically enough, every day. Don't ask
me how it works; I didn't put it there. I just selected some favourite
quotes from early PT interviews and webmeister Guy Livingston did
the rest. (One day I might learn how to do that myself. Maybe. In
any case it's about time we had some new quotes up there.) A few days
ago I happened to notice that one of these quotations was from the
French composer Brice Pauset,
complete with a link to the interview from which it was extracted.
Except that the link didn't work because the interview, which dates
from 1997, that happy time before Paris Transatlantic went online,
had never been formatted in html and posted on the site! But it's
up there now – so do
go and have a look. It hasn't aged all that badly, and, since it appeared,
some of Monsieur Pauset's music has finally appeared on disc (there's
a very good disc on Aeon called Préludes).
Continuing the "blast from the past" theme, to accompany
the Radu Malfatti review below, I've dug up and reposted an article
on the Wandelweiser Group that originally appeared in Signal To
Noise magazine. It's reprinted here with kind permission of STN
editor Pete Gershon, who also asks me to tell you that he has a pile
of back issues of that particular issue cluttering up his garage,
just in case you're interested. Thanks as always to our contributors:
new man in Berlin Marcelo Aguirre burning the midnight oil in pursuit
of music theatre, Nick Rice concluding his sojourn in NYC with yet
another trip to Carnegie Hall – watch out for an interview coming
next month with celebrated critic John Rockwell – and regular
prose warriors Dorward, Cotner, Ricci and Taylor doing the business.
Bonne lecture.-DW
The
music and aesthetics of the Wandelweiser Group
This article originally appeared in Signal To Noise, and is reprinted
with the kind permission of Pete Gershon
Composers
on both sides of the Atlantic are usually independent, even solitary,
characters and rarely meet, let alone discuss with, other composers
outside of board meetings at university faculties and research facilities
like Paris' IRCAM or Amsterdam's STEIM. The famous "school"
that formed at the Darmstadt summer courses in the years immediately
following the trauma of World War II fell apart at the end of the
50s as its principal figures – Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Maderna
et al.– went their separate ways, often refusing to speak to
each other for years on end. The so-called New York School that formed
around John Cage at about the same time (including Morton Feldman,
Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and David Tudor) was more successful
from a personal relations point of view (there were no bust ups and
ego trips), but was more a loose coalition of like-minded spirits
than a structured organisation committed to the publication and performance
of its members' work. Back then, of course, putting out albums was
no easy business – only a maverick like Sun Ra went the whole
distance and threw himself into the creation of a truly independent
record label with its attendant problems of logistics and distribution
– half a century on, with the advent of desktop publishing,
powerful and effective digital recording technology and distribution
systems geared to internet and email, composers are no longer at the
mercy of the traditional publishing houses and profit-driven major
labels. In 1992, Dutch-born composer/flutist Antoine Beuger and German
Burkhard Schlothauer (composer/violinist) created the Wandelweiser
Group, a collective of composer/performers dedicated to the performance,
recording and publication of their own music. In 1993 Swiss clarinettist
and composer Jürg Frey was invited to join, followed by Austrian
trombonist Radu Malfatti
the following year, then American guitarist Michael Pisaro, Swiss
pianist Manfred Werder, and more recently American trombonist Craig
Shepard (Korean-born Kunsu Shim was an early member but later left
the group; other Wandelweisers include Germans Carlo Inderhees, Markus
Kaiser and Thomas Stiegler, Brazilian guitarist Chico Mello and Japanese
pianist Makiko Nishikaze). The group runs its own publishing operation,
Wandelweiser Edition, and its own record label Timescraper. Schlothauer
also runs the sister Zeitkratzer label and ensemble with Rheinhold
Friedl.
If you haven't heard of the Wandelweiser Group, don't be surprised:
even if, without realising it, you had the good fortune to be in a
room with one of the group's albums playing in the background, you
might not even notice it – for, to quote Radu Malfatti, Wandelweiser
music is about "the evaluation and integration of silence[s]
rather than an ongoing carpet of never-ending sounds. Even though
each individual approaches the problem from a different angle, we
seem to have an overall consensus of how "real avant-garde music"
should or could sound." It's quiet. Very.
 What
is silence, anyway? Opinions can differ on the subject (even within
the Wandelweiser Group). For Burkhard Schlothauer (photo, left), "it's
necessary to hear the beginning, the being and the end of a sound.
It's necessary to have time to forget the sound and create a space
in the mind for a new one with its coming, being and going. It's a
way of showing them respect." Jürg Frey speaks of "many
different silences: silence between sounds, before you hear a sound
and after you've heard a sound. Silence which never comes into contact
with the sounds, but which is omnipresent and exists only because
sound exits. Silence is a material. And material is useful to make
pieces with." Michael Pisaro turns the traditional notions of
sound and silence around: "We become aware that each moment is
completely filled with sensations and thoughts. Silence is (for me
anyway) far more packed with experience, far more complex than anything
we can produce with sound. Paradoxically, it is sound which is (or
at least can be) empty. For example, a sustained sound, just barely
audible, can be forgotten. It hangs around so long that we get used
to it and stop paying attention. At the same time there is just enough
to cover much of what would be revealed by a silence. So the sound
is there acoustically, but not always mentally. Its presence is finally
noticed again only when it disappears. And it leaves a trace –
not really a specific memory, just an awareness that something was
once there." For Antoine Beuger, silence "has nothing to
do with calmness or quietness. It cannot be found in nature. It occurs
as an event, as a rupture into the situation one is in. It's not necessarily
nice or beautiful, it may well be quite horrifying. In any case it
evokes a strong awareness of what is taking place at all, a direct
– not symbolic or imaginative – encounter with reality,
which means with contingency, singularity, emptiness. Silence in my
music always is encounter with reality, enforced by the event of a
situation being disrupted without any reason."
John Cage is still a figure of central importance to the Wandelweiser
composers. Beuger traces the roots of his music to Cage: "his
decision to consider silence in a non-functional way, implying a radically
different way of dealing with intention, structure, time and (musical)
experience. Contrary to most current thinking, I consider 4'33"
as the beginning – not an end – of a serious involvement
with silence as an autonomous musical phenomenon." Cage's notational
innovations also remain influential. Michael Pisaro notes that "the
heritage of Cage (and the other American experimentalists) is that
each idea (each piece) requires an independent notational solution.
I think this comes from a sense that notation is not a form of communication,
but an incitement to action (or at times, non-action). The character
of that action comes in response to the score. There are many beginnings
in Cage, many unfinished ideas, many ideas with implications far beyond
what he had time to explore." Burkhard Schlothauer puts it more
bluntly: "The only composer I'm really interested in is Cage."
We all know now, half a century on from Cage's infamous 4'33",
that real silence doesn't exist. Or so the oft-repeated tale goes
of JC sitting in Harvard's anechoic chamber and being able to hear
his nervous system ringing and his blood circulating, thereby coming
to the conclusion that he was involuntarily making music all the time
without hitherto realising it. If by "silence" one means
"a total absence of sound", then Cage's observations are
(undoubtedly, one assumes) acoustically correct. Most people visiting,
say, the Grand Canyon or Death Valley for the first time come away
with a very clear idea of what "silence" sounds like: it
is the sound of the acoustical space we find ourselves in once all
other sounds – man-made or otherwise – have ceased, or
become inaudible to the human perceptual apparatus (a clear night
out in the desert may seem pretty silent to us ordinary mortals, but
it could be mighty noisy for the local bat population).
In 1960, LaMonte Young wrote a piece entitled Poem for Tables,
Chairs, Benches, etc. which required these heavy objects to be
dragged across the floor according to timings determined by his piece
Vision, which "described with insistent precision"
(Cardew) eleven sounds to be made over a duration of thirteen minutes.
How is silence perceived in these works? Given that Young's sounds
are so harsh, so noisy, they impress themselves into the aural memory
in a manner analogous to the retinal afterburn experienced after looking
at an intensely bright light for a brief moment – they may not
be physically audible anymore but they continue to exist in memory.
They colour the silence that follows them – Young's silence
then is not the same as Cage's. In Radu Malfatti's string quartet,
das profil des schweigens ("the profile of silence",
Timescraper EWR 9801), the sounds, when they appear, are rich in noise
– the timbres of bowed wood – but devoid of pitch and
rhythmic identity. They do not impose upon the silence that surrounds
them – if anything, like tiny pencil lines on a large sheet
of white paper, they serve to articulate the perception of silence
as an integral element of the work's form.
 "I
don't need the silent piece anymore," Cage wrote later in life,
presumably meaning that both he himself and attentive listeners to
his (and other composers') work had assumed the desired listening
practice, a kind of actively contemplative openness-of-ear to all
sounding events, be they written in the score or occurring simultaneously
within (or outside) the performance space. Before studying Cage, the
scratches, hisses and plonks that peppered my old vinyls of his music
were extremely annoying – now I can enjoy my battered CRI copy
of Maro Ajemian playing the Sonatas and Interludes just as
much as a pristine new CD version. Curiously though, I've systematically
replaced my lp copies of Stockhausen, Ligeti, Boulez and Nono with
compact discs, presumably assuming that they wouldn't consider surface
noise and static crackles as being as "important" as the
music they've written.
Listening to the music of the Wandelweiser group, I'm led to wonder
if any of the members of the collective would agree to bring out their
music on vinyl, especially since each release on their own Timescraper
label also includes some text (sometimes longer than that accompanying
the music itself) describing in detail the technical difficulties
encountered during the recording (choice of acoustic, microphones
and their placing, and so forth). "In the first concerts we did,
I was very dissatisfied that there was no "silence" in the
places where we played," recalls Burkhard Schlothauer. If the
music places extreme demands on your concentration, it also calls
into question traditional conventions of performance space and duration.
The daswirdas collective chose to record John Cage's Branches
(EWR 9901), a rarely-heard 1976 piece calling for Mexican poinciana
seed pods and amplified cacti, inside an enormous concrete dam in
Switzerland. For a Timescraper album it's quite action-packed, filled
with myriad rustlings and crackles (perhaps the performers had to
keep themselves busy to combat hypothermia: the temperature inside
the dam was a constant 6°!). In contrast, Antoine Beuger's calme
étendue (spinoza) begins with no less than nine minutes
of silence (be aware, before you run back to the store to exchange
it). For this work, the most monumental spoken-text composition since
Cage's Empty Words, Antoine Beuger (photo, above) extracted
all the single-syllable words from Spinoza's Ethics and read
them slowly one by one, interspersed, of course, with silence. A complete
performance of the piece – yes, there has been one – lasts
180 hours (the CD version lasts a mere 70 minutes..). At the opposite
extreme, Kunsu Shim's Chamber Piece No. 1 (EWR 0104) is all
over in four seconds! Manfred Werder's 1998 stück ("piece")
lasts anything from twelve seconds to four hundred hours; his bassflöte
bassklarinette viola violoncello 1998 is more modest, its maximum
duration being a mere 72 minutes (the version just released, also
on EWR 0104, clocks in at under nineteen minutes).
 The
necessarily contemplative listening that this music demands has led
to the group being branded as quasi-mystics, to which Beuger responds:
"We do our thing with utmost integrity and seriousness, with
confidence and trust. We take it totally seriously, even if we can
joke about it. There is this German word heiterkeit (in English
something like: cheerfulness, serenity) which implies: clarity, calmness,
joy, brightness, ease, fulfilment. This is exactly the word, which
comes to my mind all the time, thinking about what we are doing."
Burkhard Schlothauer adds: "For me it's fantastic to be a composer,
but also a father, friend, man, not a stupid specialist. I enjoy the
freedom of singing kitsch melodies and playing electric violin in
pop music." Such an attitude is close to the down-to-earth common
sense notions of Zen that Cage so admired. Nevertheless, attentive
listening to this music instils in the listener a state of concentration
not dissimilar to what is normally associated with the practice of
meditation: the body is still, but the mind is fantastically alive
and alert. Hence the title of the guitar piece by Michael Pisaro (photo,
above left): Mind is Moving (EWR 0106), a performance of
which changed Craig Shepard's life and ultimately led him to join
the Wandelweiser group: "At the time I was reading about the
way the native American Hopi Indians approached time in their language.
I was excited about how I perceived time while listening to Michael's
performance. It warped and stretched. It was like waking up after
a good sleep and being unable to tell what time it is. That's disorienting
and refreshing."
The mind is alert not only to the music, but to the myriad sounds
that surround us in everyday life, sounds that would otherwise be
filtered out by the brain as either uninteresting or irrelevant. As
I write this, with Antoine Beuger's Die Geschichte des Sandkorns
("the sand grain's story", EWR 9602) in my headphones at
11.30pm, the low hum of a restaurant kitchen ventilator is present
as an aural backdrop to the sustained tones and delicate rustlings
of Edwin Buchholz's accordion. A car goes by, a dog barks somewhere.
Cars, dogs and fans have no doubt been at it all evening, but my perceptual
apparatus didn't consider them as worthy of attention until I put
the Beuger CD on.
If the listening experience is utterly engrossing – it is –
what of the after-listening experience? You know the old
cliché, the public spilling out onto the Broadway sidewalks
humming the last show-stopping tune (not only Broadway either: remember
Anton Webern once confidently asserted that the milkmen of the future
would one day be whistling his music!).. Because the sound material
of Wandelweiser music is so modest, so self-effacing, what remains
after the piece has finished is not a precise musical memory (sound,
pitch, melody..), but rather a feeling of intense satisfaction, a
sense of having spent an hour or so of your life fully engaged in
something, the pleasure of having experienced the world afresh.–DW
Mattin
/ Malfatti
GOING FRAGILE
Formed
 I'm
as big a Radu Malfatti fan as anybody, having had the pleasure of
playing with the Vienna-based trombonist and composer myself and premiering
one of his pieces, but I have to admit to feeling a bit uneasy about
an album that comes adorned with quotations from the man himself (not
to mention his playing partner here, Mattin, and the annoyingly quotable
Walter Benjamin), as if the music it contains is to be heard as a
kind of illustration of the accompanying manifesto. Radu does indeed
have some very important things to say – and I'm delighted to
report he says many of them in the
interview he gave Paris Transatlantic a few years ago –
but if I'm given the choice between reading about music and listening
to it you know damn well I'll opt for the listening every time. Going
Fragile contains two tracks, one (41'43" long) recorded
in Amann Studios in Vienna (where else?) on October 16th last year,
the other, just under 21 minutes in duration, from five days later
in concert in Tarcento, Italy (what seems to be another brief extract
of this event has been available for a while as a free download at
Mattin's website). The live track has the added interest of audience
noise, or at least a backdrop of warm ambient hiss for M&M's ultra
reductionist puffs and wisps of sound to drift across. If you like
hardcore lowercase improv you'll find it an agreeable, if somewhat
arid, listen. But when you get into reading the blurb you begin to
wonder if you're missing out on something of monumental importance.
"People are innovative when they are outside of their warm shit,
outside of the familiar and comfortable... I don't know exactly what
I want, but I do know exactly what I do not want," writes Malfatti.
But open up the gatefold and Mattin's own text seems to be hinting
at something slightly different: "To be open, receptive and exposed
to the dangers of making of improvised music means exposing yourself
to unwanted situations that could break the foundations of your
own security." (Italics mine.) This would seem to imply that
while Mattin is ready for anything (and his own sprawling discography
would seem to bear that out, including as it does teeth-grating harsh
noise outings with Tim Goldie and Junko, fucked-up punk with Billy
Bao and decidedly tacky if not downright awful lo-fi faux-pop songs
in the Song Book), Malfatti isn't. My own fond memories of
playing with Radu, while I've scribbled on elsewhere, notably in the
chapter I recently contributed to Blocks of Consciousness and
the Unbroken Continuum, include a rehearsal prior to our concert
with pianist Frédéric Blondy which Radu prefaced with
a little talk explaining exactly what he didn't want to hear (he'd
heard about some of Fred's more exuberant piano bashing exploits from
Axel Dörner and wanted to make sure that our forthcoming improvised
set would not suddenly catapult him back through time to the gnarly
high energy of his early FMP albums). To my admittedly down-to-earth
dumb way of thinking then, it seems that the two aesthetic positions
described above are at least partially unreconcilable: either you
are open to unwanted situations – and that could mean your playing
partner suddenly throwing a C major arpeggio at you, or a snippet
of some dreadful TV theme tune (I'm thinking of Steve Beresford here)
– or you aren't. I could be way off the mark (it wouldn't be
the first time), but I seriously doubt Radu would have chosen to work
with Mattin so often if he hadn't managed to persuade him to leave
the loud and fast stuff well alone. In the same way that it was made
crystal clear to Fred Blondy that any attempt to sound like that other
Fred, Van Hove, would not have been welcome, I'm prepared to wager
a small sum that Mattin was politely requested to steer well clear
of Pinknoise.
So sentences like "what I would like to explore here are the
moments in which players leave behind a safe zone and expose themselves
in the face of the internalized structures of judgment that govern
our appreciation of music" might lead you expect something a
tad more dramatic than the music on the disc. If you are already familiar
with Malfatti and Mattin's earlier wmo/r release Whitenoise,
or their collaboration with Klaus Filip and Dean Roberts on the Grob
album Building Excess, or with any of Malfatti's post-1993
work and Mattin's quieter outings with the likes of Taku Unami, Taku
Sugimoto and Mark Wastell, what you'll hear on Going Fragile will
hardly come as a surprise. To return to Malfatti's quotation above,
it might not be all that comfortable (for some), but it's certainly
not unfamiliar.
One of the central tenets of Malfatti's PT interview was the distinction
he made between progression, stagnation and regression: "Some
people think they own the field and never want to leave it: maybe
they'll even fight for it. (Stagnation: Peter Brötzmann, Evan
Parker, Derek Bailey and many others.) Some people get bored and do
the worst thing they can do, which is go back to the initial field
or even beyond. (Regression: Gavin Bryars, Ligeti, Barry Guy and many
others.) Some people leave the old 'new' field and go further, keeping
the momentum of the initial searching and exploring. (Progression:
Nono, Coltrane and not many others!)." And, presumably, Radu
Malfatti. But one of the dictionary definitions I've found of "stagnant"
is "showing little or no sign of activity or advancement; not
developing or progressing; inactive", which, as descriptions
go, is quite appropriate for Going Fragile. With the exception
of the last eight minutes of track one, where things get remarkably
busy (by Malfatti standards five or six notes a minute is positively
verbose), sonic events appear reasonably regularly – after four
or five listens I found I was able to anticipate to within four or
five seconds more or less when the next sound would appear, not to
mention more or less what it would be: Malfatti has pared what was
once a truly prodigious technique on the trombone down to a few slow
intakes of brassy breath and some lovely, velvety low register pouffes
of sound, while Mattin's computer feedback is clearly recognisable
to those familiar with his earlier outings, even if here it's rather
grandiosely billed as "gnu/linux computer feedback".
"When we talk about stagnation and progression there is just
one instrument to help us explain what we mean, and that is time,
history," writes Malfatti here, in what again I interpret as
a veiled claim to membership of that small and exclusive club of progressives.
(And who can blame him? I can't think of many improvising musicians
out there who don't believe that what they're doing is in some way
progressive – and I know of nobody who would stand up and be
counted as a "regressive" or a "stagnant", with
all its attendant associations of fetid water..) But this is the old
"standing the test of time" argument, the artist so far
ahead of his time that he's misunderstood and reviled by all but a
handful of his contemporaries, before – miraculo! –
his creations are dug up and hailed as works of genius by enlightened
souls at some stage in the (hopefully not too distant) future.
Don't get me wrong here, folks: I'm not saying I don't like Going
Fragile – in fact I find it a very attractive and remarkably
musical piece of work by two musicians I have great respect for –
but I think that the deadly serious steel grey manifesto plastered
all over the album makes claims for it that it are not borne out by
my listening experience. To be blunt, I think it's rather a good example
of the stagnation Malfatti is so critical of – but as I can
still get just as much pleasure from listening to Derek Bailey, Barry
Guy and Ligeti as I can from Nono and Coltrane, I don't mind that
at all.–DW
Scott
Walker
THE DRIFT
4AD
 How
should pop music grow old? And how should we who have grown up listening
to it grow old with it? When Lou Reed released Magic and Loss
back in 1992 it was described, rather well I thought, as "pop
music for grown-ups" by one French journalist (can't remember
who exactly, maybe Philippe Manoeuvre but on second thoughts it sounds
too serious to be him). As we all get older, go grey, lose teeth and
have to spend all night long trying to do what we used to do all night
long, it's only natural, I guess, that pop's timeless obsession with
getting laid and getting high should be replaced by disease, decay
and death. After all, as I've said before somewhere, there's nothing
so patently ridiculous as watching Mick and Keef (sorry, Sir Mick
– and that knighthood's patently ridiculous for starters) prancing
round the stage as if they were still in their late teens. But, as
most of my English students here will confirm, it's hard to tell the
difference between "sixteen" and "sixty" on a
bad phone line. Actually, I can think of something as patently
ridiculous as a Rolling Stones concert: British Chancellor of the
Exchequer and Prime Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown pretending to
like the fucking Arctic Monkeys. Gimme a break. Almost as cynical
as the leader of the Tory party choosing Benny Hill's "Ernie
The Fastest Milkman In The West" on Desert Island Discs.
I just wish that smarmy bastard could be sent off to a real desert
island and forced to listen to Benny Hill until the end of his days.
Why can't people act their age, and not their shoe size, to quote
the Purple One?
Scott
Walker is 63 now, but don't let that bother you. Even if he didn't
look older than his twenty something years back in the 60s when he
went AWOL from the Walker Brothers and nipped off to study Gregorian
chant in a monastery, he certainly sounded older. And songs
like "Rosemary" on Scott 3 and "Rhymes of
Goodbye" on Scott 4 were definitely miles away from
the prevailing zeitgeist of "Good Vibrations". But it is
tempting to make comparisons with that other 60s wunderkind-turned-recluse,
Brian Wilson, who had half a ton of sand dumped in his studio so he
could play the piano barefoot and pretend he was at the beach. Nearly
half a century on, on The Drift, Scott Walker's first real
album since the eminently disturbing Tilt (the Pola-X
soundtrack pales in comparison), the imagery is altogether darker,
not surprisingly, but having his long suffering percussionist Alasdair
Malloy thwack the shit out of a side of meat to get just the right
dull thud for "Clara" (the morbid if oddly touching tale
of Mussolini's lover Claretta Petacci, who chose to die with him and
whose body was also strung up by the heels in the Piazzale Loreto
in Milan – "The breasts are still heavy / The legs long
and straight / The teeth are too small / The eyeside is green / The
hair long and black") is the kind of literalism Wilson would
surely understand.
If Reed's Magic and Loss tells of a personal tragedy, The
Drift seems to address nothing less than global catastrophe,
a nightmare world of dictators and torturers. And it's a world whose
dark alleyways Walker has been exploring for three decades. "Buzzers"
("Polish the fork and stick the fork in him") looks back
to "The Electrician" on Nite Flights, and there
are plenty of cross connections to 1984's Climate of Hunter
and 1995's Tilt. Of course, the recording by Walker's long
time associate Peter Walsh is superb, and the booklet of lyrics as
chillingly beautiful as a Hafler Trio album. Unlike Tilt,
which came out on Fontana (and I'd love to know what the folks in
charge of the label really thought of it), The Drift is on
4AD. The downside of releasing your shit on that particular label
is that some idiot is going to start comparing you to The Cocteau
Twins and Dead Can Dance, but the upside is you get Vaughan Oliver
to do your album cover – and this one's a real beauty.
Jonathan
Dean begins his review of the album over at Brainwashed (there's a
whole helluva lot of reviews of The Drift out there for your
perusal, go Google..) as follows: "I would like to claim that
the central rift of opinion on the solo career of Scott Walker falls
between those who think that the aging crooner's music has become
ridiculously pretentious, and those who think he's a genius. Actually,
though, this would be inaccurate, as even those who love Scott Walker
and think him a genius are also likely to find him pretentious. The
only difference between admirers and detractors is that admirers can
look past Walker's many pretensions, and the detractors either refuse
to or can't." Good point. So I went to my online dictionaries
for a definition of the P-word and came up with "making usually
unjustified or excessive claims (as of value or standing)" and
"expressive of affected, unwarranted, or exaggerated importance,
worth, or stature." Whether Walker's opaque musings on subjects
as diverse as the atrocities of Abou Ghraib and Elvis Presley's stillborn
twin brother Jesse are "justified" or not I leave for you
to decide, but "excessive" and "exaggerated" are
certainly adjectives that spring to mind when that bombastic late
60s-style string glissando cluster angst à la Gorecki
/ Penderecki comes screaming in. It's about as subtle as bashing a
five foot cubed wooden box with a breeze block (you get to hear what
that sounds like too on "Cue"). And if something's
worth doing, it's worth doing twice, so most of the album's "special
effects" come round again. This is pop music anyway – that
old verse / chorus structure isn't far away – or at least it
started out as pop music. Actually, I don't know what the hell it
is.
If,
as one wag once wrote, the ECM label releases jazz for people who
don't like jazz, there's a case for saying perhaps that Scott Walker
produces opera for people who don't like opera. Firstly, there are
those lyrics, whose modernist multiple allusions have more in common
with The Waste Land than they do with Wasted. Like
Eliot in his famous notes accompanying his 1922 poem, which always
struck me as being more about the writer wanting to impress the reader
with his knowledge, it would seem that Walker isn't exactly backward
about coming forward with explanations. If lines like "Neath
the bougie a thimble rigger slyly rolls the pea" and "jigger
raps pits" will have you scratching your head, Walker has, this
time round, been unusually forthcoming about the origins of some of
his material, both textual and musical. The whispered "Pow! Pow!"s
that pan left to right throughout "Jesse", apparently symbolize
9/11's World Trade Center double whammy (and are neatly mirrored in
the two chord riff of "Jailhouse Rock", here transposed
and slowed down to become a spaghetti western dirge). Elsewhere, "The
Escape" juxtaposes the pedal steel octave glissando that opens
a Warner Brothers cartoon with a chord Walker thought was penned by
Hungarian composer György Kurtág (the Mr K of the dedication)
until he discovered he had lifted it himself from, appropriately enough,
Charles Ives' Unanswered Question. (I think I'm right on
the Warner Brothers twang thing – what other explanation could
there be for the crazy Donald Duck impersonation later in the song?
Pure madness? Evidence of a sense of humour? Who knows?). And by now
everyone's read about how the lyrics of opening "Cossacks Are"
were culled, Burroughs-like, from newspaper cuttings; "medieval
savagery and a calculated cruelty" is Carla Del Ponte on Slobodan
Milosevic (who also gets a namecheck later at the opening of "Buzzers");
"I'm looking for a good cowboy" is George W. Bush's "real
backhanded compliment" (as Walker described it to The Wire's
Rob Young) to Jacques Chirac; and "You could easily picture this
in the current top ten" could be from anywhere but certainly
doesn't apply to The Drift.
Such snippets of knowledge shared with the listener serve several
purposes – firstly they might help explain why it's taken over
a decade for The Drift to see the light of day ("Scott
hasn't been writing a hell of a lot, but he's sure been reading"),
and secondly, the fact that Walker feels the need to inform us, on
the outer protective cardboard box no less, that "during the
Middle Ages people afflicted with the skin disease psoriasis were
known as the silver people," as well as "Srebrenica had
been the richest inland city in the Balkans, a cosmopolitan mining
town – its very name meant silver" establishes a link between
what would otherwise be considered as separate, if adjacent, songs
("Buzzers" and "Psoriatic"), inviting us to listen
to the album as a whole – an opera rather than a collection
of arias.
And then of course there's the voice – which in true operatic
style sings every line with the same precision and concern for detail,
be it "BAM BAM BAM BAM" or "I'm the only one left alive".
While I'm not sure I agree with Dean when he writes "Walker's
painfully affected vocals invite derision, especially the older and
more wilfully obscure he gets", I do think he has a point when
he says "you've got to admit that no one else's voice would work
nearly as well on a Scott Walker album." (Well, yeah, though
David Bowie did do a fucking ace cover of "Nite Flights",
you will recall). In a tantalising little video interview over at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpwhMiFNPcI Walker describes The
Drift as even more "shaved down" than the album that
preceded it, and indeed the sparsity of the arrangements – the
bare ocarina and drums accompaniment during the verse on "Clara",
the almost comical honking of a shawm later in the piece – is
as impressive as the wailing wall of dense snarling strings. Shaved
down it might be, but there's enough extraordinary music and poetry
on The Drift to keep us all busy until the next Scott Walker
outing. Let's hope we don't have to wait another eleven years –
by that time Scott will be 74, and not even Sir Mick will be taking
to the stage when he's 74. At least I bloody well hope not.–DW
MaerzMusik
Festival
Berlin, Various Venues
March 16th - 26th 2006
 Celebrating
its fifth anniversary, Berlin’s annual leading contemporary
music festival focused its latest edition on the complex undercurrents
between Japan and the West and the ubiquitous concept of intercultural
expression among music and arts, with a typically multifarious program.
Ten days of Dionysian excess, 33 concerts to submerge both mind and
body in myriad situations of critical awareness, reflection, analysis
and ultimately, educational value. This being my fourth time, I was
also prepared for ten days of less sleep, fast food, beer and smoke,
running against the clock from one place to another, and plenty of
after hours discussion and socializing. As Jens Brand amusingly described
the not yet surpassed highlight of MaerzMusik 2004 (covered in these
pages by Philippe Simon), "a wellness with drinks and music".
This year’s edition, presenting as usual a roster of the most
renowned composers and interpreters in today's music, perhaps tipped
the balance too far towards contemporary (academic, written) music,
and less towards experimental new music. The emphasis was on music
theatre, with four such productions, two of them commissioned works.
Chinese
composer Cong Su was educated in Beijing after China’s Cultural
Revolution at the end of the 70s and then in Munich during the 1980s,
and has been based in Germany for a while. His "computer opera"
Welt im Quecksilberlicht, with libretto based on the poetry
of exile Gu Cheng, offered a multitude of elements that merged in
a fragmentary architecture of complex events. Moments of disturbed
beauty resurfaced in the mix of video footage of Maoist China, projections
of the translated texts, Chinese actor-singers and multi-channel computer-assisted
composition. The Berlin-based multimedia ensemble Die Maulwerker,
created around the teachings of eminent Fluxus composer Dieter Schnebel
(certainly one of music theatre’s most disparate forerunners)
contributed theatrical antics and vocalizing. However, the dialogue
between the plasticity of movement and the sophisticated declamations
of both Yanan Li and bass Dong-Jian Gong and the less expressive,
somewhat formalist contributions of Die Maulwerker proved incongruent,
and the music, despite its effective sampling of field recordings
and traditional Asian folk music, seemed irresistibly fond of preset-like
sounds. As a critical observation of interculturalism, this first
encounter was less than satisfying.
Former
Stockhausen and Boulez associate, Hungarian born Peter Eötvös'
"sound-theatre" As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams was
originally premiered in the prestigious, establishment new music festival
Donaueschingen. Based on the 11th century Japanese diaries of Lady
Sarashina, it created a dreamlike atmosphere indeed, with its texts
delivered in a David Tibet-like recitative, sparse lighting and minimal
scenery. Its illusory, shifting transparent squares and quiet vocalising
were mildly soporific, but the music managed to subliminally entice,
with its sparse cello intro, live ensemble of actor / musicians gracing
the libretto with trombones, sousaphone and piano, submerging the
audience in a lethargic tone poem.
 The
collaborative work between pianist Aki Takahashi (photo, left) and
German sound artist Rolf Julius, turned composer for this occasion,
seemed an intriguing proposition. A visual score hanging on the wall,
large enough to be seen by the audience, consisted of 164 imperfect
black painted circles, with another six red ones placed randomly between.
It translated into a desolate language of clusters and isolated notes,
separated by abysses of dead air and fierce keyboard attacks, in a
realization by Takahashi that was musically as disconcerting as the
score’s enigmatic language. In sharp contrast, and without warning,
the stony clatter of Akio Suzuki hidden in the crowd caught the public's
attention as he inaugurated his new installation tsu ra na ri
No. 2, which focuses on the sound of stones collected by the
seaside in his home town, Tango. It was a short intermission that
was effective in its concise palpability. Since
Takahashi was the laureate “pianist in residence” (sic),
there would be two other subsequent attempts at deciphering Julius’
enigma, but meanwhile there was the delight of enjoying her very precise
playing in her own specialised field, namely the mid-20th century
repertory. Her reading of Cage’s The Perilous Night
for prepared piano was remarkable in its rhythmic, nuanced playfulness,
while Feldman’s abstract isolated repetitions and relentless
overlap in Extensions 3 were followed by Scelsi’s magnificent
Suite No. 10 KA, whose dramatic ebbs and flows rarefied the
air – and our perception of time with it. The second part of
the concert featured works by Japanese composers including Tôru
Takemitsu, Akari Nishimura and Somei Satoh, in a programme that seemed
to be more about the similarities between musical hemispheres than
their differences.
Meanwhile Rolf
Julius went back to his trademark insect music in a pairing with younger
Tokyo-born sound artist Miki Yui. Both artists work in a similar aesthetic
field, redirecting our perception towards small sounds, the grain
of electronic circuitry, and piezo speakers in visual sound environments.
Their duo was an hour of buzzing static drones extracted from their
usual installation ecosystem and diffused through six speakers encircling
the audience. It worked quite well in concert, though about halfway
through one had the feeling that everything had already been said,
which imparted a sense of redundancy to the rest of the proceedings.
Getting
to the matinee concert on the first Sunday morning after having been
up late the previous night was difficult, but we were rewarded by
Berlin-based Walter Zimmermann's trance-like Das Irakische Alphabet,
interpreted by the Russian flautist and vocalist Natalia Pschenitschnikova,
who played and dramatically recited words of Joachim Santorius to
each letter of the Iraqi alphabet, projected on a screen and controlled
by a foot pedal, to astonishing effect. The matinee was further enlivened
by events by George Brecht, Cage and an absurdist tap dancing piece
by Dieter Schnebel called Stimm-Füße.
 In
the so-called Sonic Arts Lounge, Otomo Yoshihide (photo, left) was
backed by his New Jazz Orchestra (ONJO) in a program spread over two
nights, the first dedicated to 60s-70s TV theme composer Takeo Yamashita,
who passed away last year at the age of 75. (His soundworld had already
been visited by Otomo on a record released on the P-Vine label in
1999.) Despite the charismatic presence of singer Kayoko Ishu, Yamashita’s
original diva, it was difficult to put all the pieces of the puzzle
together, but Otomo played MC and entertained the audience with childhood
anecdotes ("Yamashita used free jazz music to the scene of a
fighting robot, but we didn’t know anything about the free jazz
scene") and the group did their best to sound intense. One was
left waiting for more substance from the next night, the homage to
Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch, the album that had fed
the young Otomo’s dreams of revolution in the jazz kissa.
The ONJO, joined by Germans Axel Dörner and Alfred Harth, delivered
a confrontational yet respectful reading of Dolphy’s classics,
which, in absence of a commanding soloist, were revitalized instead
by the inclusion of Sachiko M's sinewaves and the shô (Japanese
bamboo mouth organ) played by musician extraordinaire Kô Ishikawa.
Ishikawa
was also involved in the program played by ensemble on_line vienna,
highlighting the overlay in composed (Western) music that deliberately
trades elements of Japanese culture (and vice-versa). Ishikawa’s
simplicity and engagement in performing – sublimely –
traditional shô music, Cage’s Two3 (for shô
and shell horns) and ensemble pieces by Gerhard Stäbler, Christian
Utz and Yûji Takahashi, were a real delight, his whole being
aligned with the ancient, crystalline psychoacoustic tones of his
instrument. Meanwhile, composers Peter Gahn and Steffen Schleiermacher
favoured Gagaku-inspired pieces transcribed for Western forces, incorporating
the shakuhachi into an ensemble of strings, percussion, piano and
clarinet with varying results that seemed rather to highlight irreconcilable
aspects of both cultures.
Italian dhrupad singer Amelia Cuni, who trained her voice during more
than 10 years living in India, presented the premiere realization
of her long-standing engagement with John Cage’s Solo 58
from Song Books (1970): 18 Microtonal Ragas,
with the assistance of Cage specialist Ulrich Krieger. Staged in the
rustic surroundings of the Sophiensæle, it also included dance
and small theatrical actions. She was flanked by two percussionists
who filled most of the 70 minutes with frantic tabla rhythms or spacious
and assorted percussion, while drone composer Werner Durand, Amelia
Cuni's regular accompanist, spun subliminal spider webs of diffuse
charm, strangely present and distant at once. Like an open game, the
18 Microtonal Ragas followed one another in controlled, elegant
improvisation (not a common feature of Cage’s music), reaching
a balance between chance events and gradual evolution.
Some
of the best concerts happened to be somewhat peripheral and poorly
attended, as was the case with the brilliant Ictus Ensemble from Brussels,
who performed in the octagonal, immaculate sounding chamber music
hall of the Berlin Philharmonic. Starting with Misato Michizuki’s
cycle Etheric Blueprint Trilogy, the ensemble revealed how
capable it was at adapting to divergent and demanding material. Having
worked with both spectralists and minimalists (Georges Aperghis, Tristan
Murail, Jonathan Harvey, Steve Reich, Thierry De Mey…) they
superbly translated the scientific metaphors in Michizuki’s
piece into statements of visible expressionism, making use of extended
techniques and unconventional instruments mixed with flute, clarinet,
violin, viola, piano, trombone, percussion, double bass and live electronics.
Works by Oliver Schneller (Clair-obscur), and Murail protégé
/ IRCAM alumnus Yan Maresz (Entrelacs for flute, clarinet,
vibraphone, piano, violoncello, double bass) counterbalanced a symmetrical,
inspired program.
 Moving
further into the chamber music domain, it was now the turn of the
postmodern Italian ensemble Alter Ego, who defiantly strode out to
meet Finnish electronics wizards Pan Sonic (photo, left) . Microwaves
was a joint venture in which four composers – Yan Maresz,
Atli Ingólfsson, Giovanni Verrando and Riccardo Nova –
wrote pieces (frankly undistinguishable from each other) based on
Pan Sonic material, which were then interpreted by both groups live.
Many if not all the compositional elements remained submerged in Pan
Sonic's amorphous miasma of static and vibrating, physical sub-bass,
reminding us how devastating Xenakis's Persepolis would have
been if he'd had today's resources available. More
disparate – and fastidious – was the soundalikes project:
the return of 80s Neue Deutsche Welle plagiarists and pop parodists
Der Plan, backed by the Brandenburg Orchestra and a children's choir
claiming Copyright is Slavery, mocking everything from pop
classics to popular children’s TV theme tunes and even the fact
they'd managed to get a (not so good) orchestra to perpetrate such
an action. Composers Peter Ablinger, Christian von Borries and Michael
Iber also worked around the idea of appropriation, the former inviting
his students to write parodies of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Boulez,
Stockhausen, Ligeti and Nono, while Iber/von Borries concocted a mélange
of Ennio Morricone, Afrika Bambaataa and Bernd Alois Zimmerman, transcribed
for orchestra.
The
closing evening was sumptuous: Morton Feldman’s Trio
in the National Gallery Hamburger Bahnhof, with a stellar line-up
consisting of pianist Aki Takahashi, violinist Marc Sabat and cellist
Roham de Saram in a brilliant but very slow rendition (the programme
announced a duration of 75 minutes – in fact it lasted more
than 100). Despite my devotion and enjoyment to Feldman's work, I
realised I'd started to reach saturation. It didn't however stop me
enjoying the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin in the Berliner Festspiele
performing Tôru Takemitsu's magnificent soundtracks to Kurosawa
and Teshigahara. Takemitsu's music was a particularly fine example
of the studied and critical confrontation of the Japanese with the
Occident, the amassing of foreign culture reaching a critical mass
all of its own. Japanese contemporary music has long embraced non-Oriental
elements with radical fervour, appropriating forms to be blended and
regurgitated with more passion than premeditation, an idea that has
reached its paroxysm in Japanese noise culture (conspicuous in its
absence in the programme’s attempts at approximation). In the
2006 edition of MaerzMusik, however, this was perceived instead as
an updated version of the exotic and innovative, the aim of grasping
the essential of a distant culture and its values transformed into
a commodity of the new century.–MA
In
Concert: David Robertson at Carnegie Hall
 Although
folk music has long been associated with the unadorned beauty of the
natural world, the musicians who play it have often found themselves
in the teeming environment of a big city, either enjoying success
in bars, clubs and concert halls, or roaming with their instruments
on the subways and sidewalks on the lookout for a little money or
a passing agent. Speakers of the world's popular musical languages
have been drawn to New York City, and it has from time to time opened
its doors in return, as was eloquently demonstrated on May 18th in
conductor David Robertson's contemporary hymn to world folk music,
"Naturale". This was the last in a series of six Perspectives
concerts that Robertson (photo, above left) curated for Carnegie Hall’s
Zankel Hall annex. The Perspectives events allow individual artists
present their own personal vision anywhere within the Carnegie Hall
complex, but Robertson’s state-of-the-art take on folk music
was especially suited to Zankel’s intimate wood-paneled interior,
and he also took full advantage of The Zankel Band, the hall’s
resident contemporary music ensemble, whose line-up includes Dov Scheindlin,
the former violist for the Arditti String Quartet.
The band’s star viola player that evening, however, turned out
to be the French master Christophe Desjardins, who joined percussionist
Daniel Ciampolini to open "Naturale" with a piece of the
same name by Luciano Berio. Robertson explained in an amusing introduction
(complete with mock Italian accent) how the late composer was keen
on developing the untapped sounds of unusual instruments, most famously
in his solo Sequenzas, one of which Robertson said he forced
out of Berio by sending him a virtuoso on the bassoon, an instrument
the Italian had previously dismissed. He had no such problems with
the viola, though, writing not just a Sequenza, but also
three concerti, the last of which provided him in 1985 with the Sicilian
folk material for Naturale. This resembles a soundtrack for
a 20-minute short about the mafia, with the viola strumming like a
guitar in a provincial village, spreading short, sharp chords across
its strings like the whooping of hunting horns. Cowbells and chimes
echo through sun-baked streets, the silence of the bare, drought-stricken
soundscape occasionally broken by a wailing folk singer or the rattle
of gunfire. Desjardins and Ciampolini were cinematic but appropriately
artless, making Naturale into a scene an Italian New Wave
director would set to blank, existential stares from root-chewing
farm labourers. By way of a bonus, the singing was declaimed in a
pre-recorded cameo by master folk puppeteer Peppino Celano.
Once the applause had subsided, Robertson returned to introduce and
conduct György Ligeti’s five-movement Piano Concerto.
The Zankel Band, with pianist Eric Huebner, started out slightly stiff,
like a toy army trying to march to an impossible beat, but soon relaxed
enough to deliver more than the mere mechanics of the maniacal rhythms.
Completed just three years after the Berio, Ligeti's concerto, which
the 83-year-old Hungarian has described as his most complex score
to date, dates from a period when melody, much like figurative painting,
was coming back into vogue, and it borrows as much from Central European
folk song as it does from the virtuoso drumming of sub-Saharan Africa.
It sounds like a Transylvanian road-trip through the jungle, with
potholes in the first movement, noisy owls in the second, swarming
flies in the third, sputtering engines in the fourth and sad farewells
on the way back home in the finale. As the work progressed, the ensemble
discovered more and more lyricism, particularly in the shy, sensuous
hoots of the second movement, and Robertson’s gestures became
a little less tense.
Equally beautiful, and even more folksy-yet-modern, was British composer
George Benjamin’s Antara, which constituted the 20-minute
second half of the program. This was written between 1985 and 1987,
at the same time as the two pieces that preceded it, but unlike them
was one of the first flagship products of Paris’s electro-acoustic
research center, IRCAM. In a pitch-perfect summary, Robertson, who
was director of IRCAM’s Ensemble InterContemporain from 1992
to 2000, recalled the centre as a forbidding underground vault in
which musical scientists dressed in white would delight at the results
of hours of labour which often amounted to no more than a noise roughly
transcribable as "gloop!" As he toiled away at an IRCAM
summer course in 1984, Benjamin, then a wunderkind in his mid-twenties,
would emerged every day to the sound of South American buskers playing
panpipes, known in the Inca language as antara, in the shadow
of the Pompidou Centre (co-designed incidentally by Luciano Berio’s
close friend Renzo Piano). As the sound of the Javanese gamelan refreshed
Claude Debussy after the grand theatrical meanderings of Wagner’s
"music of the future" at Bayreuth and helped kickstart modern
music in the elusive irony of Prélude à l’après-midi
d’un faune, so Benjamin achieved a postmodern cultural
parity, composing a dialogue between the "sophisticated"
Western flute that opens the Prélude and the "primitive"
South American panpipes he heard outside IRCAM, whose sound is replicated
in Antara by even more "sophisticated" synthesizers.
These synthesized panpipes turn out to be much more agile than the
two flutes, which resort chiefly to a catchy four-note pop motif.
The synthesizers also "genetically modify" the panpipes
they are simulating, varying their size from a few millimetres to
20 metres in height. With its backing of trombonists, percussion and
strings resembling a cosmopolis under construction, Antara is
a tribute to the power of cultural levelling, and Robertson conducted
it like a man converted.–NR
Trio
3
TIME BEING
Intakt
 We're
all living to ever riper old ages these days, at least in this part
of the world, which I suppose is good news for architects like my
wife whose employers have got an order book full of prospective projects
for specialist daycare centres and old people's homes in provincial
France. In fact, if I ever get as far as retirement age and have the
misfortune to be diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer's – the
wife already has her doubts – there's an outside chance I'll
end my days in glorious oblivion in a room she's designed. But hopefully
it won't come to that. Now, umm, what was I saying? Erm.. oh yes –
even jazz musicians, who in the past were rather more prone to early
death, thanks to that deadly combination of drugs, alcohol and general
wear and tear, are producing great work at an age when most folk are
shuffling around in carpet slippers. (And it's hard to imagine today's
bright young things succumbing so readily to the same temptations
that wiped out many of their predecessors. Despite her glossy album
cover photos and meaningful, sideways trying-hard-to-be-sexy gazes
at the camera, I bet the most dangerous thing Diana Krall has ever
put in her mouth is a piece of sushi.) Andrew Cyrille, Oliver Lake
and Reggie Workman, with a combined age of 200, are still kicking
out the jams (I caught Lake in concert last year with Meshell Ndegeocello
and he even blew Steve Coleman off – quite a feat), and the
ten tracks on this excellent outing, all originals, superbly recorded
by Peter Karl in Brooklyn in March last year, are thrilling and vibrant
proof that jazz musicians, unlike pop stars (with very few exceptions:
see the Scott Walker piece above) can go on well into "middle
age" creating strong and impressive music that cuts through arbitrary
boundaries of style and genre. Though these three men cut their teeth
in 60s / 70s jazz, this is no dreary exercise in nostalgia for bygone
days; there are no painfully inadequate covers of Coltrane and Ayler
(very few covers of Coltrane and Ayler aren't painfully inadequate),
no bleary homages to Malcolm, Martin and the Panthers, just three
superb experienced musicians doing what they do best, making music
that I like to think I might still be enjoying as I trundle round
the Maison de Retraite on my Zimmer frame.–DW
Thomas
Chapin Trio
RIDE
Playscape
 Has
it really been eight years since Thomas Chapin died? Yes, I guess
it has. And can it be true that I've never reviewed a disc of his
here? Yes, I'm afraid it is. But many of the discs that move me the
most are the ones I don't feel like writing about. There are enough
vapid clichés and glib platitudes here as it is without my
adding more, but as Chapin's work has slipped off the radar somewhat
since his untimely death, the appearance of this live recording from
the North Sea Jazz Festival on July 15th 1995 by the great Chapin
trio with Mario Pavone on bass and Michael Sarin on drums serves as
a timely reminder to those of us who might have forgotten what a monstrously
good saxophonist and flautist Chapin was. Whether negotiating the
tight, funky curves of "Anima" or out-Rahsaaning Roland
Kirk on flute on "Aeolus", or just blowing wild and free,
Chapin was an exceptional musician who combined razor-sharp musical
intelligence with outstanding technique, and it's quite simply thrilling
to hear him again in full flight with such a superb rhythm section
behind him all the way. That's all I have to say, really. This isn't
the moment to go into some weepy eulogy for the many artists who died
too soon, bemoaning what might have happened if they'd lived longer.
Ride is not about that – it's 100% action, energy,
life. In fact it's what I'd describe as a truly life-affirming experience.
How's that for a vapid cliché? You can see why I don't review
albums I like as much as this all the time.–DW
Tony
Bevan, John Edwards, Ashley Wales, Mark Sanders, Orphy Robinson, Derek
Bailey
BRUISE WITH DEREK BAILEY
Foghorn
 Sonically
this is maybe not the best document – a straight-to-DAT recording
from a gig at London’s 291 Gallery, acoustically somewhat muddled
though quite acceptable – but it’s essential listening
for Derek Bailey fans. As usual, the guitarist sought out the company
of younger players – in this case, the acoustic/electronic (not
“electroacoustic”) quintet responsible for Bruised,
one of last year’s best and most overlooked improv records.
The new disc is, among other things, the final chapter in the longstanding
relationship between Bailey and bass saxophonist Tony Bevan. It’s
hard not to hear real poignancy in Bevan’s playing here, which
is stripped down so far it’s as if he’s trying to make
an entire musical language out of achingly isolated notes. There’s
also the tickle of hearing Bailey with the blue-chip UK free-improv
rhythm section of John Edwards and Mark Sanders. The off-balance recording
makes it harder to parse the electronic input from Orphy Robinson
and (especially) Ashley Wales, but they’re certainly responsible
for the haunting, elusive soundscaping (I was also surprised at the
closeness in timbre between Robinson’s steel drums and Bailey’s
distorted guitar).
Derek Bailey was the kind of player an Oulipian would love, someone
for whom obstacles were occasions for necessary creativity. By the
time this disc was recorded in August 2004 he was already suffering
from what was initially diagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome but later
turned out to be degenerative motor neurone disease. In response,
he simply went calmly about refashioning his entire approach to the
instrument. I’ve always loved the spacious, floaty interludes
that occur on his discs, when isolated sound-events – a slow-swelling
discord, a quiet scrape over the length of a string – are dropped
into silence like pebbles cast in a well. His playing throughout this
album is like an album-length exploration of that particular corner
of his music. His tone on the instrument is much softer than before
– by this point he was playing without a pick – and his
improvisations are constructed out of quiet, separately twisted fragments.
There’s nothing overtly valedictory about the music –
the three tracks are called “Search”, “Locate”
and “Destroy”, after all – but it is nonetheless
hard not to be moved by a few moments here. Bevan’s soft-spoken
duet with Bailey near the end of the album, in particular, serves
as an achingly beautiful farewell to his mentor, so much so that it’s
almost a relief when the full band regroups for a final pummelling
blowout.–ND
Tetuzi
Akiyama
TERRIFYING STREET TREES
Esquilo
 These
Esquilo releases from Portugal are as wonderful as they are hard to
find, and this is no exception. The single CDR containing the 32-minute
title track comes in an edition of 110 copies, and the special edition
twofer is even rarer – just 70 (and by the time you read this
they'll probably have all gone, but we'll press on regardless). Terrifying
Street Trees is part of an "official bootleg" series
of Akiyama albums (it's often paired in reviews with Striking
Another Match on Utech – haven't tracked a copy of that
one down yet) and the 32-minute title track itself is one of the guitarist's
more dirty, dangerous outings, whose musical thrills and spills more
than make up for its rather duff sound quality. Meanwhile, after 2003's
snazzy vinyl Don't Forget To Boogie on Idea and last year's
Headz CD Route 13 To The Gates Of Hell, the bonus disc Pineapple
Stomp is another bottleneck bending, hard hitting riff-fest.
For those unfamiliar with Captain Akiyama's boogie outings, the basic
recipe is as follows: take one electric guitar, set up deliberately
scuzzy lo-fi recording conditions, choose favourite hard rock / blues
riff and repeat ad infinitum at ferocious volume. Extraneous noise
from ecstatic audience, buzzing amps and tuning the guitar is all
part of the fun, so leave it in. If you are the proud owner of the
above mentioned albums, you probably don't really need this unless
you're a hardcore Akiyama completist (in which case you'd better have
a chat with your bank manager, because the Captain is nothing if not
prolific), but if you haven't heard him rock out in style, do yourself
a favour and get down and boogie.–DW
Nels
Cline / Jeremy Drake
BANNING + CENTER
EMR
 Recorded
January 10, 2005 (on a bill that also featured the Ahimsa Orchestra,
featuring Vinny Golia, Sara Schoenbeck, Alex Cline and Harris Eisenstadt)
at the dearly departed linespaceline salon – this time at its
downtown Los Angeles location at the Café Selah rather than
the claustrophobic fount of inspiration that was the Salvation Theater,
ultimately turned into a boutique for couture both
chic and chichi), what theoretically is a duet between
two guitarists in different stages of artistic development proved
to be a study in astral projection and the conquest of Fear the Mindkiller.
Fearlessness has turned the Inner Eye, the Fear has passed and only
Cline and Drake remain, as shortwave radio mixes with less precise
blasts of static and ephemeral ghost-tones in a deft and telling exposé
of how the dark matter of sonic space is as much something to be wielded
in music as harmony and dissonance. Not so much the guitar itself
but rather the dream of a guitar, thirty minutes of elemental
triumph that feel like ten. Hey, you know what I'd do if I were Nels
Cline at a Wilco rehearsal? I'd so totally start counting numbers
in German into my amped-up guitar pickups and Jeff Tweedy would get
so mad! Mo-ho-ho-lded!!!–DC
Howard
Riley
TWO IS ONE
Emanem
 Howard
Riley remains a bit under-feted among the first wave of free-improvising
pianists, maybe because he is, as Duke Ellington (a Riley touchstone)
put it, “beyond category”: comfortable with total abstraction
(cf. the classic 1960s/1970s Riley/Guy/Oxley trio and, later on, his
crucial role in Guy’s LJCO) but also a thoroughly individual
jazz pianist. He has frequently performed solo, and also is one of
the few players to favour the piano duo format (records with Keith
Tippett and Jaki Byard, even a trio with Tippett and John Tilbury).
Two is One is a logical extension of these concerns: an album-length
set of overdubbed conversations with himself. Where some players approach
overdubbing projects schematically, Riley kept the procedure simple
and spontaneous: “I recorded the first piano as if it were a
solo recording, then immediately added the second piano while reacting
to the playback of the first.”
The music leans towards the pianist’s jazz side, a set of ingeniously
offcentre variations on barrelhouse piano, Monk, Cecil Taylor and
the many shades of the blues that sometimes suggests a cutting-contest
between James P. Johnson and Borah Bergman. The music’s constructedness
is central to the listening experience – playback and response
are panned hard left and right, so there’s no simulation of
a live piano duet (this is one disc where headphones offer an utterly
different experience). Riley’s ear for witty polytonal side-trips
à la Paul Bley is strongly in evidence, but the central issue
here is repetition – its flavours, moods and possibilities for
expression and structure. For Riley repetition is the medium for a
kind of cubist fracture or archeological dig; an idea is presented
in multiple versions, left and right, often overlapping awkwardly
though sometimes separated by long pauses (which are often more jolting
than the notes). It’s the kind of effect that would be hard
to achieve in a live two-man format: Riley places a phrase just a
little “off”, rhythmically and/or dynamically –
particularly striking on the inverted Monk blues “Osoiretsim”
– or closely mimics and fractures phrases from the other track
in a way that would prompt a live interlocutor to square up the rhythms
or get out of the way.
More than most albums, this is one where the music happens inside
the listener’s head as much as in the actual notes played, and
that can be an uncomfortable and (even for veteran fans of “difficult”
music) novel experience. It’s also one of the freshest rethinkings
of the common ground between free improv and the blues I’ve
heard for a while – aside from the Monk track, sample the remarkable
(and aptly named) “Unique”, an apocalyptic octopus-handed
blues with enough tremolos and pianistic bravura to raise the ghost
of Earl Hines.–ND
Gail
Brand / Tim Perkis / Gino Robair / John Shiurba / Matthew Sperry
SUPERMODEL SUPERMODEL
Emanem
 Gino
Robair invited British trombonist Gail Brand to San Francisco in 2002
after hearing her work on the first Lunge album. Supermodel Supermodel
is the second Emanem release from her West Coast sojourn, following
Ballgames & Crazy with vocalist Morgan Guberman. In addition
to Robair in his varied role as percussionist, daxophonist and Styrofoam
manipulator, the ensemble includes several familiar faces from the
Limited Sedition/Barely Auditable circle: electronics specialist Tim
Perkis, guitarist John Shiurba, and, poignantly, bassist Matthew Sperry,
who was killed in a road accident just months before the final recording
session. The CD cover shows a woman's face cropped down to a slit
from which frightened-deer eyes peek out, suggesting a hijab or mask
(oddly enough I listened to this the same day I watched Georges Franju’s
elegantly macabre Yeux sans Visage), and though I’m not sure
what it all has to do with the decidedly unglamorous world of free
improvisation, the doubled-up titles of the disc and its thirteen
tracks (“Twiggy Twiggy”, “Kate Kate”, “Naomi
Naomi” and so on) seem somehow appropriate, turning high fashion
into the jingling of a children’s rhyme. This is improv where
the musicians seem to delight in the sheer quiddity of sounds, surfaces
and textures, producing a kind of overall democratic scribbliness
that’s too good-humoured to get really abrasive. In some sense
all the instruments here are “percussion”, and even when
played relatively conventionally often sound like toy instruments,
or odds and ends picked up in a rummage sale. Supermodel Supermodel
is an album of small but constant pleasures, albeit a little short
on the hair-raising moments of sheer rightness that really lift a
free-improv album – though the eerie trio “Cindy Cindy”
is certainly one of them. Excellent work from both Brand and Sperry,
though the most striking contributions are probably Robair’s
funhouse percussion and the nasty electrified tandem of Perkis and
Shiurba.–ND
Joe
McPhee & Survival Unit II with Clifford Thornton
LIVE AT WBAI'S FREE MUSIC STORE
hatOLOGY
 One
of my favorite Joe McPhee anecdotes concerns his first recording date
as leader. Rather than enlist sidemen sure to be sympathetic, he sought
out a clique of musicians who had previously rebuffed his overtures
to play. This counter-intuitive strategy is indicative of McPhee’s
determined, lateral-thinking personality and his abiding belief that
those who don’t comprehend where he’s coming from will
eventually catch up. His distinctive personality is well in evidence
on this nearly eighty-minute airshot taped at a Manhattan radio station
in the fall of 1971. Aside from McPhee himself, the other big draw
is the presence of brass doyen Clifford Thornton, McPhee’s mentor
and a woefully scarce presence on record. The rest of the Unit consists
of little-known players: saxophonist Byron Morris, pianist Mike Kull
(who holds his own with his rhapsodic Tyner-influenced piano) and
drummer Harold E. Smith. Chris Albertson’s politically charged
liners take pains to set the sociocultural stage by delivering a census
of U.S.-sanctioned atrocities. The opening rundown of “Black
Magic Man”, a duet for tenor and Smith’s ballistic drumming,
roars with righteous indignation and release, and McPhee’s politicized
aesthetic is also evident on “Nation Time”, though this
version leavens the fist-pumping free funk of an earlier live reading
with greater structure and nuance. The ballads “Song For Lauren”
and “Harriett” give plenty of scope for the leader’s
signature pathos. Touted as the concert’s centerpiece, “The
Looking Glass I” is a circuitous sound-on-sound composition
for pre-recorded tape and ensemble that occasionally loses focus but
does point towards McPhee’s future explorations with electronics.
Peter Pfister’s 2005 mastering improves on the cavernous sound
of the previous Hat edition, but I miss the earlier cover art featuring
a youthful bearded McPhee staring defiantly into the distance. This
set has its flaws, but fans of classic free jazz will definitely want
a copy.–DT
Eddie
Prévost
ENTELECHY
Matchless
 "The
supposed vital principle that guides the development and functioning
of an organism or other system of organisation". That's the Oxford
Dictionary definition of "entelechy", referring to which
Eddie Prévost writes that "...in composed music, a score
is that guiding principle, but to me, whether this principle exists
as a notated score or as an idea in the improviser's mind is irrelevant".
Indeed, improvised or not, I
think of Entelechy as a 70-minute composition in five movements.
We've recently been on the receiving end of a stunning one-two combination
by Mark Wastell, Vibra #1 (w.m.o/r) and Vibra #2
(Longbox), both exploring the resonant features of the tam-tam, and
essential listening for getting lost in the sea of metal stasis. With
Entelechy, Prévost adds his own contribution to the
instrument's literature, but largely by erasing the "strictly
human" factor; the entire title track and a part of the opening
"Mixt" derive from a rotation of wire threads – set
in motion by a battery-driven electric motor – which raise overtones
that vary with the progressive gentle oscillation of the gong. Needless
to say, these are the moments in which minimalist aficionados will
prick up their ears: irregular dynamics and counter-sentimental harmonics
create a tangible aura whose staying power shines until the battery
runs out. This cryptic castle of timbral glimpses is almost consonant
when compared to the self-explanatory "Scraped" and "Bowed",
which bring us back to Prévost's harsher side, conjuring up
ghosts of rusty wheelchairs and strangled seagulls, all the while
maintaining a total coherence with his artistic forma mentis.
You realize how powerful a message made of a few well-placed statements
can be. Far from any kind of sophistication, Eddie Prévost
is able to make us think – hard – with a slap in the face
both rational and disturbing.–MR
Henry
Kaiser
DOMO ARIGATO DEREK SENSEI!
Balance Point Acoustics
 At
least Henry Kaiser's honest: if it hadn't been for Derek Bailey he
probably wouldn't have picked up a guitar in the first place. ("Would
you have become a scuba diver instead?" wonders Damon Smith.)
So there are few people better placed to curate a Bailey tribute album
than Kaiser, especially since, just glancing at the photos in the
digipak interior, it looks as if he's got every record the man ever
made, including of course his (Kaiser's) own duet outing with Bailey,
the splendid Wireforks (1993, Shanachie). In addition to
three fine solo tracks, Domo Arigato consists of duets and
trios featuring Kaiser and a host of guests: Kiku Day (shakuhachi),
Sang-Won Park (changgo), Toshinori Kondo (trumpet), Greg Goodman (piano),
percussionists Andrea Centazzo and Charles K. Noyes, bassists Smith
and Motoharu Yoshizawa, saxophonists Henry Kuntz, Larry Ochs, John
Oswald and Mototeru Takagi, and guitarists Davey Williams.. and Bailey
himself. Wait a sec, how come Derek Bailey gets to play on his own
tribute album? Easy – because his track was recorded in 1993.
In fact, as you've probably guessed while casting your eye through
the list of featured musicians, many of whose names come as something
of a blast from the past (Centazzo, Noyes..), the pieces on offer
span Kaiser's entire recording career, from 1978 – the duos
with Kondo and Centazzo – to this year's duo with Smith and
"Metalanguage Trio" with Goodman and Ochs. As well as doing
a pretty nifty Bailey imitation when he wants to, Kaiser has also
adopted the late guitarist's habit of telling a story while he plays,
so that the album is as much a spoken tribute to Bailey as a musical
one. For the most part the spoken bits are of the order of fan mail
("So what does Derek Bailey mean to you? What do you get from
him?" he asks Smith), and Kaiser can't resist having a go at
the Ben Watson biography (though he recommends people read it nonetheless),
but the music is what matters most. There's some fabulous playing
here, most notably of course by Kaiser, who despite being a self-professed
Baileyphile has always cultivated his own idiosyncratic approach to
the instrument. A fresh and touching act of homage to a great musician.–DW
Bennet
/ Bryerton / Butcher / De Gruttola / Kaiser / Smith
SEXTESSENSE
Balance Point Acoustics
 Seems
tribute albums are in the air over at Damon Smith's Balance Point
Acoustics. Sextessense is "a tribute to John Stevens and the
SME" (the title refers of course to the two albums Stevens recorded
with the Derek Bailey, Kent Carter, Evan Parker and Trevor Watts line-up
of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1973, Quintessence 1 and
2). Stevens was one of the prime movers and arguably the most
important catalyst in improvised music as it emerged in late 1960s
London, and his SME remains one of free music's mythic acronyms, along
with AMM, ICP, FMP, LAFMS and LMC. It's fitting then that Smith's
tribute should notch up a few points of authentic Stevens street cred
by recruiting former SME saxophonist John Butcher, who joins a stellar
cast of West Coast improvisers – Aaron Bennet (sax), Jerome
Bryerton (drums), Danielle DeGruttola (cello), Henry Kaiser (guitar)
and Smith himself on bass – on these nine, lean, mean workouts.
It's rare to hear Butcher in the company of another saxophonist, so
it's a special treat to hear him trade licks with Bennet. If the music
seems pretty agile and spiky, altogether in a different ballpark from
the more pared down stuff Butcher's been getting into in recent years,
it's not surprising – it was recorded way back in 1999. You
might wonder why it's taken so long to see the light of day, but you
should certainly rejoice that it has.–DW
David
Lacey/Paul Vogel/Mark Wastell
LIVE AT I-AND-E FESTIVAL 1 APRIL 2006
Confront Performance Series
This
is the first release in a new series presenting "quasi instant"
recordings of concerts played by artists associated with Confront's
aesthetics, a 30-minute artefact in a plain metal box with no artwork
and credits in small print on a business card-sized insert. Recorded
at Dublin's Unitarian Church – you can clearly hear the distant
voices of the visitors at the beginning and end of the performance
– this offering, in its responsiveness to non-existent silence,
should put the term "reductionism" out to pasture once and
for all. Everything derives from a few sources, yet the subtle intersections
between Lacey's eBowed monochord and the computer/mixer feedback activated
by Vogel and Wastell soon become nodal points at which the music raises
its head like a traveller awakening from sleep by a dusty roadside.
The constitution of this three-way dialogue is further reinforced
by enthralling halos of ride cymbal by Wastell (courtesy of what Pete
Townshend would call "his supple wrists"), while Vogel adds
sparse clarinet shapes to a unique architecture that sounds both delicate
and perfectly synchronous with everyone's intentions. It's a "respectfully
profane" invocation – in a sacred place, no less –
which culminates in a concluding section where the slowly tolling
cymbal becomes the natural substitute of the church bell that would
never dare interrupt such intense communion. If this is just the beginning,
we're in for a lot of great new things from this exemplary label.–MR
Warren
Burt
THE ANIMATION OF LISTS AND THE ARCHYTAN TRANSMISSIONS
Experimental Intermedia
 There's
something of a contrast between the diverse career moves of Warren
Burt and the extreme purity of the music he creates for self-built
just intonation tuning forks. After university, Burt moved from the
United States to Australia to pursue an interest in interactive electronics
and microtonality, exploring connections between other disciplines
along the way. He has contributed greatly to the development of microtonality
both through his writings on the subject and, more concretely, by
helping to reconstruct Percy Grainger's Electric Eye Tone Tool, a
light-controlled synthesizer originally developed in 1961. Burt's
previous outing, Harmonic Colour Fields (Pogus) was a fine
example of his research in such areas.
This double album is a perfect introduction to Burt's world of chance-determined
resonance. Commissioned by Phill Niblock in 2002, The Animation
of Lists and the Archytan Transmissions was played in its entirety
by the composer and Catherine Schieve on hand-held or mounted sets
of aluminium forks whose bass and treble range varies depending on
their size. They're hit with different beaters, and peculiar resonators
(plastic sewer pipes of varying length) are used for the bass ones.
The "limpid clouds" Burt generates by superimposing pitches
(with the aid of a computer and multitracking) represent a shift from
"wrong" listening habits and saccharine-drenched temperamental
boredom to a sudden repulisti of the ears. These strangely
familiar flows of beating frequencies are seemingly unobtrusive, yet
impose their presence with gentle yet firm authority. It's like removing
a cardboard box from the head to finally enjoy a true spatialization
of sound. Rhythm, the movement of the forks through the space and
phrasing are essential for the correct functioning of what William
Duckworth defines as "sonic colors that momentarily hover here
and there". Random sequences can sound fully notated, microtonal
rainbows can be conjured forth from a mere handful of notes. Such
infinitesimal differences in pitch are the key to unlock the brain
from its tacit acceptance of (equal temperament's) rules, rules that
do not necessarily fit its predisposition – are you ready to
unlock yours?–MR
Arditti
Quartet
MEXICO
Mode
 If
I say "Mexico" what images spring to mind? (If you're Mexican,
you can skip this paragraph.) The 68 Olympics, if you're old enough
to remember them (I'm not)? Moustachioed peasants in spaghetti westerns
tilling the fields and managing to keep those shirts and pants impossibly
white? The bleary-eyed consul staggering up the Calle Nicaragua in
Under The Volcano? Bloodthirsty Aztecs sacrificing young
virgins on a pyramid in a sweaty jungle? A bowl of chili? (Or is that
Tex Mex?) Forget it. If the music on this CD is anything
to go by, Mexico might just be the most exciting country in the world
of contemporary composition. A stupid claim, that, and not one I'm
likely to able to back up, so put it down to unbridled enthusiasm
on my part for this magnificent disc by the (insert the superlative
of your choice HERE) Arditti Quartet.
The six works featured are by (in order of age, oldest first) Hilda
Paredes, Hebert Vásquez, Germán Romero, Juan Felipe
Waller, Iván Naranjo and Rogelio Sosa. Three of them are for
string quartet – Paredes' Uy u'tan, Naranjo's Uno
and Vásquez's Quartet No.1 – and three
for Irvine Arditti's solo violin, with amplification (Romero's Ramas),
added electronics (Sosa's Espasmo fulgor) or nothing at all
(Waller's De jaque, sal, gala y luna). The twenty-year difference
in age between the oldest and youngest featured composer is reflected
in the music; the terse motivic workouts of Uy u'tan and
the Vásquez Quartet look north to the thorny dramaturgy
of Elliott Carter, while the vicious scratches and scrapes, raw microtones
and brutal cut'n'splice of Uno and Ramas seem to
be gazing across the Atlantic to where the ghost of Iannis Xenakis
(Romero and Sosa studied at UPIC) is partying with Walter Zimmermann
and Mathias Spahlinger, both of whose music is specifically referenced
in Ramas (another link perhaps being the elder statesman
of Mexican new music, Julio Estrada, who studied himself with Xenakis
before going on to teach Romero and Sosa.) This is a truly magnificent
selection of strong, well-written, uncompromising new music –
get yourself a copy and you'll never listen to El Salon Mexico
again.–DW
Various
Artists
MUSICA FUTURISTA – THE ART OF NOISES
LTM / Salon
 “A
74-minute audio anthology combining original period recordings by
(Filippo Tommaso) Marinetti, (Luigi) Russolo and others with contemporary
performances of works by key Futurist composers and theorists.”
Swiftly catching up with Sub Rosa and Alga Marghen as a venerable
treasure trove of past masters, LTM presents this beautiful and serene
re-examination of explosive thinkers and the bombs they loved. It’s
strange how these things ultimately affect the world: had it not been
for Marinetti, we would not currently be able to enjoy Tom Jones’
version of “Kiss”, or Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Seal
or 808 State (courtesy ZTT Records, founded in 1983 by NME scribbler
Paul Morley, producer Trevor Horn and wife Jill Sinclair and named
after Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb, a book describing
war whose title describes the sound of a machine gun). Even if you
don’t understand Italian, these old recordings of Futurists
ranting about their brilliant illuminations are still amazing for
their passion and energy. Featured here but often ignored elsewhere
are Francesco Balilla Pratella, Aldo Giuntini, Luigi Grandi, Silvio
Mix, Franco Casavola, Alfredo Casella, Matty Malneck and Frank Signorelli.
Also included is Marinetti’s “Definition of Futurism”
and his story of “The Battle of Adrianopolis” (complete
with multiple zang tuum tuums), Luigi Russolo and his brother Antonio
with their intonarumori noisemaking devices (the loss of
which is nearly on par with the thoughtlessly discarded Duchamp “Fountain”),
Luigi’s theory of the “six families of noise” and
plenty of photos of the Futurists themselves, people you often read
about but whose faces, eyes and expressions you never see. The piano
passages of the recent recordings recall Aldo Ciccolini’s landmark
recordings of Satie, and – this should be a longer review, but…fuck
it, I can’t even write about this record anymore.
You just have to go out and get it. One of the most important records
released this year. No further comment.–DC
Icebreaker
CRANIAL PAVEMENT
Cantaloupe
 With
its Hoketus-inspired instrumentation of double flute / picc / panpipes,
three saxes, two keyboards, percussion, guitar and bass guitar (plus
violin, cello and accordion), Roy Lichtenstein-style cover art and
production courtesy Bang On A Can heavies Michael Gordon and David
Lang, you know damn well you're in for another helping of loud, fucked-up
postminimalism (and I can't believe I just wrote that). So if your
bag is New Complexity, spectralism or Wandelweiser-style next-to-nothingness,
I should tell you now that you're not going to like this,
because it's not exactly subtle. Nothing wrong with that as far as
I'm concerned, but Cranial Pavement is the most uneven Icebreaker
album so far. Artistic Director James Poke's arrangement of Conlon
Nancarrow's Study #2B is fine as far as it goes, but at 2'09"
that's not very far. John Godfrey's Gallows Hill is about
eight times as long, eight times as dramatic and eight times as uninteresting,
but it's still more convincing than Yannis Kyriakides' Blindspot,
which comes across as a classic example of a composer hamstrung by
the forces he's been asked to write for. Poke's vision of Icebreaker
is as clear as it is uncompromising: it's about creating an ensemble
that's instantly recognisable even if the music it's playing isn't.
That's fine, but no matter how sharp the recording and snazzy the
packaging, nondescript music will always sound nondescript. The novelty
of Richard Craig's cluck-cluck-clucking Chook soon wears
off, his Mrs B's Love Triangle sounds like it's OD'ed on
Gavin Bryars, and the electric strings on Tango To The Death
are about as vulgar as the title. As titles go, In Memoriam Brutus
(The Thai Curry) wins hands down, but the music doesn't. Nice
video, shame about the song, as they used to say.–DW
ELECTRONICA,
POST-ROCK ETC (ETC)
Kiyoshi
Mizutani
SCENERY OF THE BORDER: ENVIRONMENT AND FOLKLORE OF THE TANZAWA MOUNTAINS
And/OAR
 Once
a member of Merzbow, in recent times Kiyoshi Mizutani has shifted
the focus of his work towards field recording, capturing the reality
of almost forgotten, obscure signs of life. I became aware of his
recent output through the fantastic collaborations with Daniel Menche,
Garden on Auscultare Research and Song of Jike on
Niko, on which the Japanese soundscaper weaves a timestretching mantle
of environmental recordings around the shoulders of his American partner.
So Scenery of the Border is not only a safe bet – it's
a spiritual initiation. Tanzawa is a Japanese mountain region whose
desolate beauty is finely documented by the author's photos in the
exquisite cover artwork (more pictures are available on the enhanced
second disc). He applies the same basic principles to his recordings:
between November 2002 and February 2004 he took 24 aural snapshots
of these territories, translating broken silences, sacred ceremonies,
background energies and his own self-imposed solitude into a wholeness
we can observe respectfully while remaining in awe of acoustic phenomena
that ignorance might define as "normal" but which are essential
for the organic life of our being, even when taken out of their original
context. Birdsong, for example (one of Mizutani's best albums, Bird
Songs on Ground Fault, consists of little else): chirps and whistles
are captured with such mastery you can almost see the morning light
through the branches and feel the dampness around you. Other impressive
segments feature the rustling noise of feet on fallen leaves, the
poignant mumble of passing airplanes (another favourite sound in this
writer's emotional archive), the humming of power plants and substations
and the ominous severity of the wind brushing on the microphone. But
what really seems to be omnipresent is water: a continuous flow of
rain, waterfalls, streams and rivers, a moisture you can almost smell.
The path to awareness starts here.–MR
Afflux
BORDEAUX TNT
And/OAR - Alluvial
 The
ability of a CD to satisfactorily recreate the experience of walking
through a sound installation is limited, to say the least, yet labels
like Dale Lloyd's And/OAR and Alluvial keep going against the odds,
releasing important documents that more often than not approach "masterpiece"
status in this particular area. In this instance, Eric Cordier, Jean-Luc
Guionnet and Eric La Casa recorded a live performance at La Manufacture
des Chaussures in Bordeaux, six hours of sounds specifically conceived
to be used in the inner zones of Bordeaux's TNT Cultural Centre. The
artists decided to mix prerecorded sounds together with those of the
urban surroundings, extending cables throughout the Centre, installing
condenser and contact microphones and channelling everything to a
mixing desk manned in real time by La Casa, who modified and filtered
the incoming results. The mix was played in TNT's concert hall by
eight speakers, the three men working on the first floor of the building
while people walked and listened on the ground floor. But none of
this theoretical babble will prepare you for the uncertain weather
of Bordeaux TNT, a 51-minute piece where the manipulation
is almost undetectable, all sounds maintaining their basic attributes
even in the most unpredictable moments. Screaming children and barking
dogs are engulfed in a nocturnal dimness amalgamating the noise of
traffic and the scary silence of a blind alley. The pulsing complex
structure of vibrations (Guionnet is credited with "long string
recording devices") had me thinking of Paul Panhuysen flying
a miniature plane sitting on a café terrasse. Every once in
a while a passing car roars louder, yet everything is organically
linked in an obscure but perfectly functional mechanism of sonic circulation,
a perfect example of how such projects should be realised. Above all,
Afflux succeed in reminding us of the beauty of long-distance urban/industrial
murmur, inviting us to leave our mental windows open, to change the
air a little bit.–MR
John
Duncan / Carl Michael von Hausswolf
OUR TELLURIC CONVERSATION
23five
 This
exquisitely produced offering on the ever classy 23five label consists
of a CD containing three extended tracks, "...Like a Lizard",
"Entry (Enhanced)" and "Yet another (very) abridged
and linear interpretation of the history of our planet as we know
it" and a 40-page booklet containing a transcription of an extended
conversation between Messrs Duncan and Hausswolf, with occasional
prompts from Jim Haynes. In the domain of sound art, a description
of the concepts behind the works is often more interesting to read
than the works themselves are to listen to – perhaps the fact
that one can admire something without necessarily enjoying it is what
the artists are setting out to explore – but that doesn't apply
here: this is some of the most satisfying and, dare I say it, musical
work the two men have produced for some time. That said, the
book doesn't provide any information about the works on the disc,
not even the origins of the Burroughs-like story Hausswolf tells on
track one of a man who travelled to Egypt to acquire sacred knowledge
of cobra venom (plus a trip to Thailand to learn how to speak the
language of the gecko..). Instead there's a wealth of detailed discussion
of the pair's more celebrated projects, including Duncan's legendary
Scare, TVC 1 and Radio Code, and von Hausswolf's
experiments with NATO-monitored pirate radio in Iceland and his The
Will of Tupi-Tupi, the Rooster, and GK, the Dove (if you're a
paid-up member of the RSPB, you'd better give this last one a wide
berth). All in all, a fascinating and thought-provoking read and a
damn good listen to boot.–DW
Crawling
With Tarts
OCHRE LAND, BLUE BLUE SKIES / GRAND SURFACE NOISE OPERA NR. 7: THE
DECADENT OPERA (ROCOCO)
Pogus
 These
two suites, running slightly longer than 30 minutes apiece, were created
by “small motors and turntable mechanisms, mostly performing
with one-off transcription discs cast by others in the middle of the
last century, or cut in (Michael) Gendreau’s studio using a
decrepit lathe.” Those one-sided, unlabeled records you find
in antique stores with the strange holes at the centre of each one?
Those are the discs of which the Tart speaks. Crawling With Tarts
are a turntablist duo in the strictest sense – that they operate
in a parallel universe working with the ins-and-outs of record players
in Oakland and the Bay Area the same time as Invisibl Skratch Piklz
and DJ Shadow is far too tempting a hernia-inducing stretch to pass
up. Additionally, Gendreau and wife Suzanne Dycus-Gendreau performed
radio improvisations on KZSC 88.1 in Santa Cruz throughout the mid-80s
(around the same time Negativland pursued similar greenish pastures
on KPFA 94.1 slightly to the north in Berkeley). Michael’s work
has also encompassed collaborations with hallowed NPR commentator
Andrei Codrescu, the Spanish Indiana Jones known as Francisco López,
and turntablist David Kwan in 1995 in a re-enactment of John Cage’s
“Imaginary Landscape Nr. 1” for record players, cutting
the vinyl to replace one of the lost discs of that composition quite
possibly on the same lathe that you hear now. As for the sounds on
this disc: yes. No. Yes. I heard that one. Yeah, that one, too. I
think I hear that one. I think…nope. Was that one? Hearing tests
blossom alongside the metallic rustling of flora growing in that ochre
land.. there’s rain on the outstretched steel leaves of each
plant.. possibly some glitter on the C-beams near the Tannhauser Gate..
It’s reminiscent of something gorgeously organic despite the
creaking and languorous clanging – a field of beer can wind
chimes or perhaps just a robot’s imagination? Announced as a
release on the ASP label as far back as 2001 and begun in September
1994, the noise opera of the second track presents glassy high tones
and toy piano, barely audible fuzzed-out snippets of broadcasts, language
lessons with samples like “the ‘oi’ in ‘noise’”,
and the overwhelmingly comforting sound of vinyl scratches, crackling
and dirt. This ultimately segues into the surface cultural noise of
70s strings, fashion commentary and psychedelia, heading onward towards
organ music, various voices and an overwhelming sense of civilization’s
sprawl unmatched in even the most catholic of all possible Breaks
N Beats 12”s. It all ends with that toy piano, pushing the limits
of what opera can be, like Superman pushing the Earth backwards so
he can travel back in time and save it: significantly.–DC
Function
THE SECRET MIRACLE FOUNTAIN
Locust
 London!
Brooklyn! Kyoto! Venice! Australian Matt Nicholson has traveled the
globe to bring together such disparate figures as Deep Listening Band
trombonist Stuart Dempster and venerable Indian vocalist Lakshmi Shankar
for a deceptively gentle aesthetic gang-bang of sheer talent. Good
move: including the lyrics to the songs; best couplet of the past
six months: “Look at all the poor creatures suffering the me,
me, me / Despite their fervent involvement in the New Age catastrophe”
on “The Red Hook Overview”. ZOW! BING! Nicholson even
reworks a Rilke poem in the opening song and there's no shortage of
serene and float-y instrumentals descending from on high to round
out the record. Like the Crawling With Tarts disc above this album
took multiple years to complete – and it shows. There’s
an overarching sense of quality and investment emanating from it.
If it were playing on the radio, you’d tune in. If you had the
CD booklet, you’d look more closely at those liner notes. If
it were given to you for your birthday, you might not immediately
trade it in for credit on that Earth, Wind & Fire Greatest
Hits compilation (awesome). Not to put it too terribly groovily
but yeah – surprisingly good. A little hippie-dippie, though.–DC
Loscil
PLUME
Kranky
 A
sequel of sorts to the previous Loscil effort First Narrows
(Kranky, 2004), British Columbia native Scott Morgan proves that the
‘Couv’s a groove with this latest electronic shot over
the bow of dreamless sleep. Vaguely New-Agey, smoke moving across
the sleeve like a William Carlos Williams poem and titles like “Rorschach”,
“Zephyr”, “Steam” and “Halcyon”,
Morgan asserts, “they started with a harmonic root from which
sounds were processed into a loose structure over which the live players
could improvise.” The players being Josh August Lindstrom on
vibes and xylophone, Krista Michelle Marshall and Stephen Michael
Wood on EBow guitars, and Jason Anthony Zumpano (also on First
Narrows) on Rhodes. If you were a cooler parent, you might consider
replacing the classical music regimen you’ve put your fetus
on with Plume – fool your kid into thinking s/he’s entering
a better world than that of the amniotic sac! It's reminiscent at
times of a softer version of mid-80s soundtrack cues for psychological
thrillers and dystopian urban film commentary, but whereas other music
might help make plants grow, this record at times sounds like plants
growing themselves. Except that orchid – you need to stop watering
it so much. Oh, all right, you want something to use for a good press
quote? “Multisubjectival tranquility par sexcellence.”–DC
Nightmares
On Wax
IN A SPACE OUTTA SOUND
Warp
 Mission
statement: “This fifth album continues as part of globetrotting
producer / DJ George Evelyn’s personal legacy to bring forth
his successful formula of positivity, sunshine and medicinal soul
in music.” Yeah, I just got diabetes, too. Regardless! Leeds
is an interesting city if it’s given us everything from George
Evelyn to The Wedding Present to Cosmonauts Hail Satan and the Termite
Club. This latest disc from Evelyn, aka DJ EASE (Experimental Sample
Expert), offers an immutable slab of comfy chill-out grooves, cool,
not cold. (How cold is Cool? Anyone ever figure that out?) There's
reggae, funk, soul, hip-hop, Afro-Caribbean rhythms and muted Soul-Singin’
Diva™, in varying degrees with strings, bells and synths besides.
Unchallenging – and not in a pejorative way – and uncomplicated
music to escape the rat race with by standing to one side in the maze,
romance young women and / or men with a modicum of taste and flair,
or otherwise spruce up the drab and ordinary, if only for a little
while. More Animal House than That House on the Outskirts,
these Nightmares are in name only except when it comes to Dissonance,
Disharmony and just plain Disses in general.–DC
Vetiver
TO FIND ME GONE
DiCristina Stairbuilders
 “Vetiver
(Vetiveria zizanioides) is a clump-forming grass up to 2
meters in height with roots that can penetrate to 3 meters deep. Vetiver
is closely related to other fragrant grasses such as lemongrass (Cymbopogon
citratus) and palmarosa (Cymbopogon martinii). Vetiver
is most easily propagated vegetatively due to the fact that most cultivars
produce limited amounts of viable seed while others do not flower
at all. Vetiver is a long-lived perennial and can survive up to 50
years or more. For the folk band, see Vetiver (band).” Okay,
what do we get? A follow-up to 2004’s Vetiver, which
featured Hope Sandoval from Mazzy Star and chirpy Joanna Newsom as
guests. This time out, you get extortionately well-produced folk-rock
with fantastic dynamics – and by dynamics I mean that the guitar
is as interesting to listen to as the percussion and I can hear each
instrument well and listen to both or either if I want to –
but now that the New York Times is paying attention to this substrata
of alternative culture, are we going to have a Manson moment coming
up here? Not hoping, just asking. There are already rumblings in the
press about the terrors of communal living – a situation implicit
in the N.W.O.S.F.H. (New Wave of Shaggy Folkie Hippies) currently
spurring record labels' rush to sign any group with an acoustic guitar
or harmonium and a subscription to Arthur Magazine. They come up with
screaming headlines like “Hippie Dippie Bang Bang” when
someone at the commune goes crazy-8 bonkers with his drill and sex
and blows someone away. I don’t want to come off like Al Capp
here but you 'heads should be circumspect about the sacrosanct. You
never know when another Altamont or Woodstock ‘99 is going to
rear its perfunctorily ugly head. And I know you’re going to
say “aw, lighten up – it’s all about the music!”
but this is music attempting a levitation of boring old postmodern
Western culture, so questions have to be asked. Not that Vetiver,
Devendra Banhart and Ben Chasny are likely to spur psychick violence
because, coming back to the original many-moons-ago point of this
trope, my eyes may be blinded with the astigmatism of skepticism but
my ears hear a very fine pop record with an irretrievable sense of
exploration and voyaging behind it. Not, as the press called 2001:
A Space Odyssey, “the ultimate trip”, but nice one,
eh.–DC
Waldron
/ Stapleton / Sigmarsson / Haynes / Faulhaber
THE SLEEPING MOUSTACHE
Helen Scarsdale
 With
a line-up consisting of Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound), Sigtryggur
Berg Sigmarsson (Stilluppsteypa), Jim Haynes (Coelacanth), Matt Waldron
(irr. app. (ext.)) and R.K. Faulhaber (about whom I've been able to
find very little apart from a link to a rather wonderful watercolour),
this could be the leftfield electronica equivalent of the Traveling
Wilburys, except that with Messrs Dylan, Harrison, Lynne and Petty
(not forgetting old Lefty Wilbury, aka Roy Orbison) it was pretty
clear who was doing what, whereas on these ten tracks it's just about
anybody's guess. That said, I'll hazard a guess that Stapleton is,
if not the éminence grise behind much of it, at least
the village elder, as both the graphics – five letterpress prints,
one per artist – and the music (not to mention track titles
like "A Bottomless Black Eye" and "Woolen Pubic Hair")
are right at home in NWW's surrealistic world, in which field recordings
and voices sit cheek by jowl with all manner of squeaks, rumbles and
growls. Or, as my fellow Wire writer Haynes puts it admirably,
"an epiphany of controlled disorder, a convulsion of beauty,
a cascade of thought from delirious minds". Talking of The
Wire, it's no surprise that The Sleeping Moustache ended
up in their "Outer Limits" bag, as it's well-nigh impossible
to pin it down to any particular genre, which is exactly what you'd
expect from the artists involved.–DW
Arastoo
THREE
Isounderscore
 Trawling
around Google for info on Arastoo – there isn't much on the
disc, once more black on black (seems to be an Isounderscore speciality)
– I came across the information that 25-year-old Oakland-based
Arastoo Darakhshan was (is?) one of the Dielectric Minimalist All-Stars,
whose [!] was definitely one of the coolest outings of 2004.
But as the name didn't ring a bell I went back to have a look who's
playing on that one and came up with Jason Levis, the ubiquitous Loren
Chasse and someone called Die Elektrischen. Unless Arastoo joined
the DMAS after [!] I guess he might be Die Elektrischen himself.
Maybe someone can enlighten me. [Stop Press 12/7/06: Massimo Ricci
has enlightened me: Die Elektrischen is in fact Dielectric
label boss Drew Webster..] In any case, these three chiaroscuro, resonant
atmospheric dronescapes are as well worth seeking out as [!] was
(is?). On the strength of this I'd also be curious to hear Arastoo's
earlier CDR outing on Dielectric, Warmth In Digital, but
as that appeared in an edition of 50 with the kind of fetishistic
packaging I just love (petal-shaped wax-sealed vellum..) I suppose
it disappeared quickly. All the more reason for investing in this
one, the best Three since Archer Prewitt's.–DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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