| OCTOBER
News 2006 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Jon Dale, Nate Dorward, Lawrence English, John
Gill, Stephen Griffith, Massimo Ricci, Derek Taylor, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
In Concert: Guelph Jazz Festival
On Room40: Friedl
& Vorfeld / Davis & Jerman / Lloyd Barrett / DJ Olive
/ Samartzis & English / Samartzis & Inada
Luciano Berio
On DVD: Misha Mengelberg
VINYL SOLUTION: Chen Yi / Verfassung / Noxagt &
Ultralyd / Park Attack / Trockeneis / Gendreau & Lopez
JAZZ & IMPROV: Rose,
Abrahams & Thomas / Robin Hayward / Carchesio & Craig
/ Sun Ra / PdConception / Spin Marvel / Kaufmann, Moore, van
der Schyff
Bullock & Rawlings
/ Doug Theriault / Filip & Nakamura / Chang & Howard
/ Will Guthrie / Charles Mingus
CONTEMPORARY: Matt
Rogalsky / Nico Muhly / Dan Joseph / Tim Hodgkinson / Morton
Feldman / Hervé Boghossian
ELECTRONICA: Daniel
Menche / Hampton & Hess / Biffplex / Ethan Rose / Surface10
/ Forest Jackson / Coincident
Last month
|
September
has become a month of anniversaries, it seems. Firstly, and unavoidably,
9/11 (now apparently a Hollywood film.. remind me NOT to go and see
that one, thank you very much), which, albeit indirectly, prompted
this month's featured interviewee, violinist and composer Malcolm
Goldstein, to head north of the border from his beloved Vermont
and take an apartment in Montréal. Read the full story here.
And it's been a year since the levee broke in New Orleans (there's
a film out about that too, signed Spike Lee, but it lasts four hours
and I don't know if I have the stamina..). On the subject of which
- the hurricane, not the movie - I received this email a couple of
weeks ago: "Hi music friends, I have a special request about
Mr. Edward "Kid" [sic] Jordan. After hurricane Katrina hit
Mr. Jordan's house in New Orleans, the Arabi Wrecking Krewe helped
him September 2, 2006 cleaning up his house. Mr. Jordan asked them
for help and they did. After a whole day of wrecking a lot of precious
possessions were saved, but a lot of personal things were gone forever.
Well now through our relation with the AWK I heard about this all.
Our band the Hurricane Brassband set up a fundraise and the AWK was
one of the donated projects. Mr. Jordan lost a lot of his original
music, he composed. How can you or your readers help? 1) Do you have
sheet music of pieces composed by Mr. Jordan? Could you please scan
them and mail them to me? Mr. Armand "Sheik" Richardson
will take care of the pieces and give them to Mr. Jordan. 2) Do you
have any other information or pictures? If possible please scan them
too, so we can give him back probably precious memories. I hope you
can help us. Greetings, Hugo Kuijpers Hurricane Brassband http://www.everyoneweb.com/kidjordan/
www.hurricanebrassband.nl"
So there you are. If you can help out, Hugo would love to hear from
you. Meanwhile, bonne lecture. Big thanks this month to Nate
Dorward for his review of proceedings at Guelph, and to all our other
contributors, wherever they are.-DW
In
Concert: Guelph Jazz Festival
Guelph,
Canada
Various Venues
Sept 6-10, 2006
Photos
by Angel Stone
The
Victoriaville festival was skimpy on jazz and improv this year, alienating
many festival regulars; fortunately Guelph took up the slack, offering
one of its most impressive programs in recent years. Guelph has always
avoided the mainstream jazz acts that are the bread and butter of
most such festivals: it’s an uncompromisingly non-mainstream
event placing equal emphasis on jazz’s outer limits and the
European free improv tradition. This year’s program included
some left-field choices but concentrated on established names, including
festival faves Joëlle Léandre and Hamid Drake and a first-time
appearance by New Thing veteran Bill Dixon. During weekdays, the festival
ran concurrently with an academic colloquium – this year’s
theme was “Sounds of Hope, Sounds of Change: Improvisation,
Pedagogy, Imagination” – and concerts took place largely
at a performance/gallery space at the university. Weekend events shifted
downtown to two arts centres and a church. I contrived to miss virtually
all the colloquium in the interests of sleep, sanity and schmoozing;
the one session I caught was an eye-glazer but I’m genuinely
sorry to have missed a few things, including talks by Steve Coleman
and Greg Tate and Steve Lehman’s paper on Jackie McLean.
I arrived Wednesday evening, in time to catch a multimedia performance
by Bob Ostertag and Pierre Hébert. The primary focus was eyepopping,
stomach-churning visuals that were collaged together from multiple
sources: shots of horrifically mangled children in Lebanon, Israeli
flags, video games, and animated images of exploding babies and crosshairs
(which at one point rested pointedly on George W Bush and Condoleezza
Rice). The visuals were dazzling, the audio predictable – Casiotone
burbles yielding to explosions and thin screams – and I would
have welcomed a little more political analysis in place of the emotional
button-pushing.
 At a
now-notorious press conference at the 2002 Victoriaville festival
(preceding a damp-squib concert with Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley),
Bill Dixon (photo, left) was notably bitter about the infrequency
with which he’d been invited to play in Canada. As if Guelph’s
organizers had set out to prove him wrong, he was one of this year’s
headliners. He led a Thursday-morning workshop featuring three other
trumpeters – his protégé Gordon Allen, Alex Glenfield,
and surprise guest Rob Mazurek – and Jesse Stewart on drums.
Dixon, an inveterate talker and lecturer, at times got himself stuck
in a one-track monologue. The proceedings, however (unlike at Victo),
remained relaxed and cordial; the healthy ego (he remarked that his
music was “a body of work that is second to no-one”) didn’t
slip into obsessive bitterness about lack of recognition; and the
event offered useful insights into his workshop methods, though he
often bowed out when the music started to heat up.
Robert Marcel Lepage’s Pee Wee et Moi paid tribute to the one
of jazz’s most beloved mavericks, the oddball clarinettist Pee
Wee Russell. The four-clarinet front-line included Lepage, François
Houle, Lori Freedman and Paul Cram (a rather different set of faces
than played on the group’s Ambiances Magnétiques CD).
Lepage’s compositions offered a droll “what if?”
take on music history: one piece, for instance, memorably answered
the question, “What if jazz’s origins were Chinese rather
than African?” Cram and Freedman were perhaps a little too disruptively
outward-bound for this setting (the different line-up on the CD was
better balanced); the real hero, in any case, was guitarist René
Lussier, a multifaceted player whose contributions suited the music
to a tee.
A few years back, drummer Jerry Granelli was working on Sketches
of Ondaatje, which was intended as a followup to A Song I
Thought I Heard Buddy Sing, a suite of music written in response
to Coming through Slaughter. The second project seems to
have experienced a few vicissitudes, though, and has emerged under
the name Sandhills Reunion. The texts are the work of vocalist/narrator
Rinde Eckert, though they still have a distinctly Ondaatjesque ring.
In concert, Eckert’s contributions took up much of the available
space – a game of Twenty Questions with Billy the Kid was positively
arduous. The musicians concentrated on providing evocative soundscapes
for Eckert’s sepia-toned mythology and eroticism. But this was
too good a band to keep bottled up for long, and once they got to
an R’n’B episode things really took off, with excellent
work from baritone saxophonist David Mott and guitarist Christian
Kögel in particular.
At the church, Russian accordionist Evelyn Petrova gave a solo performance
that was taken from her calendrical songbook, Year’s Cycle
(Leo). Her singing was an acquired taste, playacting village quarrels
and gossip with charming but disconcerting gusto, but her accordion-playing
was superb, offering a dazzling combination of folk-dance rhythms
and tingly dissonances.
 Her
performance was followed by a concert in the church auditorium by
the thirteen-piece ensemble Bik Bent Braam, one of the most exciting
post-ICP, post-Breuker bands on the Dutch scene. Pianist Michiel Braam
(photo, right) doesn’t “lead” the band in the usual
sense of the word: in Bik Bent Braam it’s left to the musicians
to decide when to trigger musical cues, and they’re also encouraged
to rework his compositions as they see fit. The current program is
called Thirteen Concertos. During the concert the players literally
force their way to the front of the stage to direct their own “concerto”,
becoming soloist and conductor at the same time. As in any type of
game, the performers in this particular musical game are simultaneously
competitive and playful. The results are something like a Time
Bandits tour of music history, jumping comfortably from Jelly
Roll Morton to Sun Ra, Bach to rock’n’roll, not to mention
making Ra-like forays into 1950s exotica (they do a great cha-cha-cha).
This was one of this year’s knockout concerts, and I’ll
only single out a few felicities: bassist Wilbert de Joode’s
showstopping downwards spiral; Franz Vermeerssen’s raucous tenor
solo (another “what if?” take on jazz history: what if
Lester Young had played Ellington jungle music?); and Frank Gratkowski’s
alarming 180-degree turn from Konitzian cool to howling lunacy.
Friday began with a “Percussion Discussion” workshop involving
Jesse Stewart, Lê Quan Ninh, and two Brazilian drummers from
the São Paulo Underground (Richard Ribeiro and Guilherme Granado),
as well as pianist Paul Plimley. This was an uncomfortably diverse
group of musicians, but it prompted some of the more ponderable workshop
discussion that I heard, even if the music wasn’t by most standards
“successful”. After an opening free improv, one audience
member asked the musicians to do something explicitly pulsed. Lê
Quan (an entirely abstract, classically trained percussionist) attempted
to bow out, saying he didn’t think he could, but ended up participating
anyway and took the bull by the horns, smashing a gong repeatedly
into the drumhead.
The afternoon concert was a washout, marked by some strong work by
violinist Oliver Schroer and tabla-player Ravi Naimpally but scuppered
by Inuit throatsinger Tanya Tagaq Gillis, who came off as a cross
between a beatboxer and a mic-hugging pop diva.
 Lê
Quan Ninh began his solo set with long strips of reed in his hands,
whipping them about and making parts of them break off, until they
were short enough to use as brushes. As is his usual practice, he
had only a single bass drum to work with, turned face-up on a supporting
frame. It was like watching a soothsayer perform some tricky rite
of divination, as pinecones and stones were rubbed and whisked around
the circle of the drum-head. At times it was as if the air itself
were his instrument, crushed and stretched beneath his raised and
lowered cymbal. Despite a few dead spots, it was a remarkable performance,
which ended spectacularly when Lê Quan set a fleet of prayer
bowls jiggling across the drum-head, each of them containing a whirling
ball.
The evening featured a first-time duet between Bill Dixon and Joëlle
Léandre (photo, left). Dixon’s music is a Rorschach test
– amorphous, possibly random, and primarily interesting for
the wide range of reactions it elicits from observers. The basic materials
are minimalist: a sleepwalking procession of pitchless gasps, raspberries,
coughs, and sighs, plus the occasional slo-mo series of actual notes.
These sonic materials are augmented with heavy reverb and echo effects,
though Dixon isn’t interested in using electronics flexibly
to sculpt sounds: the FX settings were left unchanged throughout the
entire concert, in fact. Léandre’s ability to come up
with all kinds of lyrical counterweights and intensities in response
to Dixon’s wet blanket was little short of amazing, but the
concert was sorely lacking in meaningful, two-way dialogue.
The following concert by Vancouver’s Hard Rubber Orchestra was
vigorous but sounded dated: despite their professed openness to a
wide range of influences and styles they rarely strayed far from an
updated 1970s jazz-rock sound. It had its moments (notably a blues
by Jean Derome), but when an electric violin cadenza on “O Canada”
segued into “Manic Depression” I felt the only proper
response was to make a fast exit in search of a beer.
Suitably fortified, I returned for a storming set by Rob Mazurek’s
newest band, the São Paulo Underground. Like the Chicago Underground,
this is a flexible group that’s assembled around a stable core
of musicians. In this case, the core is Mazurek and Mauricio Takara
(on percussion, keyboards and electronics), who were joined on this
tour by Richard Ribeiro (drums) and Guilherme Granado (drums, percussion
and laptop). Together, they created an unmistakably urban music, reflecting
the city’s heated palimpsest of cultures and musical traditions:
rock, electronica, free jazz, and Brazilian music both old and new.
Mazurek’s delicate lines expertly threaded this particular avant/pop
labyrinth.
 Saturday
began with a trio performance by Paul Plimley (photo, right), bassist
Tommy Babin and drummer Hamid Drake. This was a dizzy stacking-up
of moves, countermoves and counter-countermoves, as intricate as grandmaster
chess but as speedy as basketball. In many styles of free improv,
the unwritten rule is that interaction should be oblique, emphasizing
independence as much as interdependence, but this was a reminder of
how exciting and musically satisfying it can be when players work
together as closely as possible. The busy network of visual cues and
unvoiced dialogues was fascinating to watch: you could clearly see
how Plimley’s kinetic dance at the keys elicited Drake’s
commentaries, and how in turn his deep grooves made Plimley shatter
and recombine familiar jazz idioms (there was even a trip through
“Third Stone from the Sun” at one point) while Drake and
Babin slyly assembled new grooves behind his back. The performance
continually surprised musicians and audience alike with its fresh
discoveries and eventful swerves. I didn’t come across a single
person afterwards who was unmoved: by common agreement this was the
festival’s best concert.
A performance by Larry Ochs, koto-player Miya Masaoka and cellist
Peggy Lee (stepping into Joan Jeanrenaud’s shoes) offered understated
power and severe beauty, in a program culled from their earlier album
Fly Fly Fly. A pity, though, that there were no new compositions
in the setlist. The FAB Trio (Joe Fonda, Barry Altschul, Billy Bang)
was in smoking form: Bang’s fiddling was enjoyably over-the-top,
and Altschul cracked away at his kit with extra-long sticks, like
a rock’n’roll version of a swing drummer. Fonda’s
joyous shuffle-dance with his bass pinned the whole thing together.
The highlight was a killer version of “Chan Chan” from
Buena Vista Social Club.
The evening concert was a rather oddly balanced double-bill that took
place in the swish environs of the Riverrun Centre. The opening act
was a duet of pianist György Szabados and drummer Vladimir Tarasov,
a continuous performance that unfolded like one of the Ganelin Trio’s
enigmatic multisection suites. Their interaction was perversely not-quite-together,
not-quite-apart, even during the fixed-meter episodes – it was
as if both were playing to the same unheard backing track rather than
responding directly to each other (not a criticism, just an observation).
The crappy rock-arena amplification was a nuisance – Tarasov’s
not a delicate player, but he still didn’t deserve this level
of gut-punching unsubtlety – but enough of Szabados’s
playing came through to suggest a genuine original: his clarity and
precision in the quietest passages was breathtaking. The following
set by Steve Coleman and the Five Elements, aside from the odd moment
of handsome polyphony, was grinding, interminable stuff. Coleman seems
to be writing out virtually everything these days – even hotshot
drummer Marcus Gilmore was hamstrung by all the darn charts –
and the music felt oppressively regimented. It was doled out in supersized
chunks, the first lasting over an hour, including detours through
“Klactoveesedstene” and a soured-milk “Body and
Soul”. It looked like the concert was finished, but when it
became clear Coleman was in fact just getting started the audience
began fleeing in droves. I eventually exited myself to clear my head
and hang out with dismayed fans and critics in the lobby. When I left
the building at 11:30, the band was still going.
 A
series of duets on a sunny Sunday morning and afternoon ended this
year’s festival on a quieter note. Mark Feldman and Sylvie Courvoisier
(photo) began their set with a piece of their own, “Lonelyville”,
then turned to Zorn’s latest cycle of Masada compositions, The
Book of Angels. Zorn’s stock-in-trade jump-cuts and quotations
were much in evidence, but the pieces were also marked by a vivid,
colouristic approach to harmony. While Zorn doesn’t head unequivocally
into mystical/religious territory à la Messiaen, the
music nonetheless had plenty of moments of unfeigned wonder and sublimity.
For marriages of the unearthly and the secular, Mark Feldman’s
your man – what he does with a violin is enough to make your
neckhairs prickle – and Courvoisier was similarly impressive,
not least in two solo spots where she whipped up a maelstrom at the
bottom end of the piano.
They were followed by a duet between Joe Fonda and the guzheng player
Xu Fengxia. (The guzheng is a zither-like Chinese instrument, quite
similar in appearance to the koto Miya Masaoka played the day before.)
I wasn’t sure what to expect from this unlikely pairing –
feathery exoticism? austere improv? – but their music turned
out to be hard-hitting, grooving stuff. Xu Fengxia rocked hard, and
sang with soulful authority. Along with the São Paulo Underground
this was the festival’s most successful example of cross-cultural
dialogue, a concert that was entertaining but also at times deeply
moving.
An afternoon workshop session by Léandre and Drake ended the
festival for me (there was one more concert in the evening by Autorickshaw
with Trichy Sankaran and Kevin Breit but I was on the bus home). These
two fervent spirits locked in together beautifully: Léandre
doesn’t need to play swinging lines to show that she’s
one of the grooviest free bassists, and the players’ shared
penchant for vocalizing led to some spirit-lifting vocal duets. The
Q&A session in the middle of the performance meandered a bit,
but it was great to hear Léandre reminisce about her discovery
of free jazz in the 1960s, and Drake talk about Fred Anderson, the
AACM, and his own beginnings as a free jazz drummer. It was a fine
way to end the festival, and an appropriate one. One of the main themes
of The Other Side of Nowhere (ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay
Heble), a volume of essays emerging from the Guelph colloquia, is
that jazz and improvisation are necessary acts of community-building.
I have mixed feelings about that proposition, but I do admire the
way the Guelph festival, with its workshops and colloquia (not to
mention the ubiquitous catering that encourages musicians and fans
to mingle freely), emphasizes the links between music and musician,
learning and creativity, rather than simply presenting packaged entertainment.
Utopian? Certainly. But if the calibre of the music is as high as
it was this year, I’m not complaining.–ND
Reinhold
Friedl / Michael Vorfeld
PECH
Greg
Davis / Jeph Jerman
KU
Lloyd
Barrett
MISE EN SCENE
DJ
Olive
SLEEP
Philip
Samartzis / Lawrence English
ONE PLUS ONE
Philip
Samartzis / Kozo Inada
h[ ]
Sound
artist and occasional PT contributor Lawrence English has certainly
been busy of late, and these six releases on his Room40 label are
just part of the story. Taken together they reflect the extraordinary
diversity of so-called "electronica" – once more,
a term woefully inadequate to describe the variety of today's electronic
music, but it looks like we're stuck with it – from spacious
drones (frankly, another dumb word, but we're stuck with that,
too) to processed field recordings to experimental turntablism. Not
that a spacious drone necessarily excludes the use of processed field
recordings and experimental turntablism, either, as these albums testify
all too well.
 But
it's not all electronica on Room40. Pech is the latest outing
from Berlin-based Reinhold Friedl (inside piano and prepared piano)
and Michael Vorfeld (percussion and, here, stringed instruments).
The last release that came my way featuring these two also included
Bernhard Günter (Message Urgent, on Günter's trente
oiseaux label), but here, without Günter's cellotar to thicken
up the mid registers, the paint is spread a little thinner, and the
subtle interplay between the glistening frost of Friedl's bowed piano
and Vorfeld's percussion is easier to follow. This is music of enormous
subtlety, generally slowmoving and studious to avoid extremes of dynamics,
but far from introvert and definitely not lowercase. Nor is it lacking
in surface incident: "Keks" fairly bristles with activity,
a whole ecosystem of tiny inside piano scrabblings, shakes and quivers
(one wonders what Günter would make of it, recalling his description
of much improvised music as "mice running around in a cheese
box"). Vorfeld, like Burkhard Beins, Christian Wolfarth and Steven
Hess (to name but three) is a fine example of the post-EAI percussionist:
it's no longer about percussion as much as friction. More bows than
sticks. Meanwhile Friedl's ear for sonority is as meticulous as his
piano preparations. Magnificent stuff.
 I've
often wondered if bugs and other small creatures that live on or under
the ground can actually hear. (I'm guessing they can, but
as I dropped science in school as quickly as I could, having had recurring
nightmares about the foetus pickled in a dingy jar at the back of
the Biology lab, you'll just have to laugh at my ignorance on the
subject..) Assuming they are able to hear the world around them, I
like to think that it sounds something like Ku. Greg Davis
and Jeph Jerman have been exploring the world of tiny sounds, culled
from both field recordings and close-miked natural objects –
twigs, stones, shells, pools of water, etc – for some while
now, and to quote Davis from a thread over at Bagatellen, Ku
is "put together from acoustic improvisations recorded on Jeph's
ranch in Cottonwood Arizona over the course of three years. Each piece
has layers or collage of several recording sessions on top of each
other. As for post-processing, there is a little. It is very minimal.
In the first piece, I used a little EQ to bring up the white noise
hiss on the recording and emphasize that blanket of sound. On the
second piece, I just distorted the final mix [with] some overdrive,
and on the third piece, there's a very subtle room reverb on it to
add some space and depth." Sounds simple, eh? Well, it is simple,
but at the same time remarkably rich and complex. I may think twice
before stepping on a centipede in future. I wouldn't want to spoil
its listening experience.
 It's
probably significant that Lloyd Barrett has chosen a French title
for his debut release on Room40, as his work, to quote the label website,
"draws on the concepts of filmic sound and exploring the possibilities
of philosophies suggested by authors and theorists such as Michel
Chion." It's a shame that Jérôme Noetinger has now
wrapped up operations with the Cinéma Pour L'Oreille series
on Metamkine, as Mise en Scène would have made a fine
addition to the catalogue (except that it's a full length album, not
a three incher): Barrett's theatre of operations is huge, and each
of these eight tracks is a real adventure, using a compendium of techniques
drawn from across the board in contemporary electronica (there are
even a few discreet beats in there, too). Not that his music
is in any way some kind of imaginary soundtrack – a frequent
misunderstanding of what "cinema for the ear" is all about
– but it's poetic and opulent, at times recalling the work of
another Chion-inspired sound artist, Lionel Marchetti. My only reservation
about this disc is that it's well nigh impossible for me to read the
names of the tracks and the other participants (though I can see Joel
Stern is among the guests, providing "bee guitar" –
is that what it says? – on "Canopy"), as the miniscule
white-on-mustard yellow printing is so hard to make out. But this
is not an album to listen to with eyes open anyway.
 DJ
Olive's Sleep was originally recorded towards the end of
2001 as a CDR "calling card" during an Australian tour.
Very much along the lines of his earlier (maybe later in fact but
it appeared earlier) Room40 outing, Buoy, this is
a splendid 48-minute brown burnished dronescape whose release to a
wider audience is certainly cause for celebration, though I wouldn't
go as far as the Room40 website does and describe it as "seminal"
(as in "highly influential in an original way / constituting
or providing a basis for further development" – for, as
our own resident drone connoisseur Massimo Ricci will tell you, there's
plenty of good stuff out and about in the genre, and, he would add,
a lot of shite too). If you listen carefully you'll find plenty of
subtle details in the mix – tiny snatches of piano arpeggios,
ticking clocks – but you might not get that far: the album title
is more of an imperative than a noun. Which means you could well fall
asleep before the end – and that's not in any way a criticism
of the disc as boring: far from it. Someone somewhere described Buoy
as a "sleeping pill" when it came out. If that's the
case, this is a potion, a thick warm syrup. Drink up, dreamers, you're
running dry.
 Back
at the end of the 80s, Philip Samartzis and Andrew Curtis broke new
ground in Australian electronic music with their pioneering duo Gum
(whose back catalogue was reissued last year by 23five, as diligent
PT readers will no doubt recall). One Plus One, the first
document of Samartzis's work in his turntable duo with Room40 main
man Lawrence English (which began back in 2002 with an impromptu half-hour
duo performance in Brisbane) marks a slight return to Gum's rough,
raw soundworld, where mangled snatches of all kinds of music –
Samartzis's two albums with Rasmus B. Lunding also come to mind –
hack their way through the crunch and grit of vinyl surface noise.
Not that English isn't responsible for some of the rough stuff either,
as he's equally adept at using and abusing the venerable tourne-disque
himself: you ask DJ Olive and Janek Schaefer (next up on Room40,
btw). Wonder whose idea it was to include the snippet of vintage ragtime
at the end of the disc, though. Special prize for anyone who writes
in with a positive ID.
 Those
more familiar with Samartzis's recent offerings (not that that's an
excuse for not checking out the Gum anthology, mind) might feel more
at home with h[], his second collaborative venture with Kozo
Inada, which makes a splendid follow-up to 2001's f[] on
Digital Narcis. The texture is sparer, the heartbeat slower, and the
crackle of (ab)used vinyl replaced by field recordings – including
tolling bells, distant voices, and cawing birds – in another
excellent reel of cinema for the ear. And at 20'33" this would
have been about the right length for a Metamkine mini-CD. Shame, but
Metamkine's loss is Room40's gain.
If, after all this, you still can't decide which one(s) of these to
invest in, you could plump for a compilation instead. Wire subscribers
already got one with the April 2006 issue, but there's another available
too, entitled Incidental Amplifications, featuring contributions
from, amongst others, Chris Watson, Domenico Sciajno, Terre Thaemlitz,
Brandon Labelle and Thembi Soddell. Go to http://www.room40.org/news.shtml
for more information.–DW
Luciano
Berio
THE COMPLETE SEQUENZAS, ALTERNATE SEQUENZAS & WORKS FOR SOLO
INSTRUMENTS
Mode
 Let
me start with a childhood memory. Once upon a time in the 1970s, when
there were only two RAI TV channels to watch and "culture"
hadn't yet become a word from a foreign language, Italians could,
if they so desired, enjoy a late night new music series hosted by
Luciano Berio, something unimaginable today. Fast forward to 2005
and I find myself horrified reading an article in an English "progressive"
magazine that puts the Maestro from Omegna in the same bag as lightweights
like Roberto Cacciapaglia and Franco Battiato (the latter much hyped
these days, but essentially a fraud, having invented a whole "experimental"
career by travelling paths that had already been well trodden years
before by illustrious forerunners, before returning to his squalid
Italian pop-song origins when he ran out of ideas to "borrow"),
so that non-experts might conclude that Berio is a sort of father
figure to the musical genres the rag in question calls "the strangest
type of spaghetti." This gorgeous 4-CD box should once and for
all open the eyes of anybody who still associates Berio with fourth-rate
copycats, or those who have probably heard about his music only in
a peripheral way ("Cathy Berberian's husband",
"Steve Reich's teacher"), and help them understand
why this man is an authentic and rare Italian treasure as far as modern
art is concerned.
Berio
chose the name "Sequenza" because these pieces, composed
from 1958 through 2002, were "built from a sequence of harmonic
fields from which the other, strongly characterized musical functions
were derived". To quote Sabine Feisst's liners, "the Sequenze
became seeds for a variety of new works", but the process of
transformation and cross-pollination was two-way (as it was in the
work of Ives and Mahler too, not to mention Frank Zappa's "conceptual
continuity"). A case in point is Sequenza IXa for clarinet
(here masterfully rendered by Carol Robinson) which derives from Chemins
V, a work Berio withdrew shortly after its premiere. This Mode
set represents the very first time in which all the Sequenze
(even the "posthumous" ones, notably Stefano Scodanibbio's
excellent transcription for double bass of the cello Sequenza
XIV) and the works for solo instruments have been gathered together
in a single release. Listening to the whole thing in one go is difficult
but not impossible, as Berio's articulately bright writing highlights
both the strengths and the less explored nuances of every instrument
while maintaining an evident intelligibility, a consequence of the
composer's interest in popular traditions and themes he often loved
to mix with more experimental and serial techniques. Virtuosity is
a necessity, never mere technical showing off; according to Berio's
instructions some of these scores should be played sempre molto
flessibile, quasi improvvisando ("always very flexible,
almost improvising"), a good example being the majestic Fa-Si
(tackled by Gary Verkade on the pipe organ). The performers, a veritable
Who's Who of great soloists including Irvine Arditti, Stuart Dempster,
Rohan De Saram, Isabelle Ganz, Ulrich Krieger, Seth Josel and Aki
Takahashi (to name but a few), contribute with heartfelt passion to
the success of the project. Each Sequenza is introduced by
actor Enzo Salomone reciting verses by Edoardo Sanguineti, one of
Berio's closest friends and collaborators.
Let's
try to sketch a path through this huge compendium. Sequenza VI
for viola features a scintillating performance by Garth Knox, who
executes the "formal study on repetition" with muscular
brilliance, in a fabulous cross between Paganini and Jon Rose. A cycle
of ten chords progressively expands until the twelve-tone chromatic
field is reached, with outrageous tremolos leading to a more tranquil
melodic exploration (which must come as enormous physical relief for
the player). Sequenza VII for oboe was written with the help
of its dedicatee Heinz Holliger, who presented Berio with a lot of
alternative and extended techniques used in the "virtual polyphony"
which was one of the composer's stated objectives when working with
monophonic instruments. Jacqueline Leclair applies her own touch of
magic, sustained by a female vocal drone whispered in the background
in another high-intensity moment of truth. Sequenza X for
trumpet in C (played by William Forman) is a poignantly lyrical exploration
of natural reverberation elicited by the trumpet's waves from an amplified
piano (the soloist is asked to play directly into the instrument),
with seriously dramatic results. Sequenza XII for bassoon
(another wonderful reading by Noriko Shimada) is, on a purely emotional
level, one of the most exquisite listenings on offer here, its fantastic
slow glissandi an impressive example of the virtuoso circular breathing
needed to play this score. Gesti, which Feisst rightly describes
as "a classic in contemporary recorder literature", is indeed
a fantastic concoction of instrument and voice interpreted with furious
enthusiasm by Lucia Mense, while Chanson pour Pierre Boulez
for cello, composed for its dedicatee's 75th birthday, starts with
Rohan De Saram playing a slow line that after a while mutates into
a Tony Conrad-like beneficial electrocution, a short yet engrossing
pleasure, not to mention a great birthday present.
Sequenza XI for guitar is a showcase for Seth Josel’s
extraordinary digital dexterity, as every conceivable form of guitar-related
fingering and technique derived from both flamenco and classical traditions
is applied with as much vigour as surgical precision. Although it's
one of the longest tracks on offer, listening to its wood, flesh and
metal is a pure joy, and not only for guitarists. The "folk"
element that characterized many phases of Luciano Berio’s career
is to the fore again in Stefan Hussong's accordion playing on Sequenza
XIII, which is one of the most accessible tracks, along with
Sequenza IV for piano (Aki Takahashi). The spectacular theatre
of voices performed by Isabelle Ganz in Sequenza III is typical
Berio / Berberian matter, but noteworthy for its avoidance of the
insufferable (at least for this writer) technical gadgetry usually
associated with the female voice in contemporary music (much of which,
ironically enough, was instigated by Berberian herself). Ganz’s
rendition is just superb – and surprisingly sober, giving the
work a real touch of class.
Listening
to veritable masterpieces such as these one gets a true sense of fulfillment.
It remains a mystery to me how presumably experienced listeners can
still be seduced by and give credence to marginal phenomena like those
mentioned at the beginning of this review. After many rewarding hours
spent with The Complete Sequenzas, my rage at how things
work in the music world grows more and more. At least I can console
myself with the thought that Luciano Berio never read that particular
article, and that he's probably smiling with irony in the hereafter.–MR
Misha
Mengelberg
AFIJN
ICP DVD
 Afijn,
I'm told, translates roughly as "whatever.." (as in "what
the hell.."), and it's a perfect title for a profile of the gently
anarchic Amsterdam-based pianist and composer Misha Mengelberg, who
recently turned 71 but whose ICP Orchestra is still for my money the
most exciting (and certainly the most entertaining) big band in contemporary
jazz / improv. Mengelberg's work needs little introduction to regular
readers of these pages, and I'm delighted to report that the interview
he was kind enough to give me back in 1996 is still getting plenty
of hits. (Wish I'd had a video camera with me that day, I can tell
you.. Misha arrived at the Bodega Keyzer, just next to the venerable
Concertgebouw – scene of the Mengelberg-inspired succès
de scandale in November 1969 when, along with Reinbert de Leeuw,
Peter Schat and Louis Andriessen, he noisily disrupted a concert conducted
by Bernard Haitink – and ordered a huge glass of milk, an espresso
and an open ham sandwich with a very runny poached egg floating on
top like a giant gob of phlegm. He attacked the food with gusto –
I still have dried egg yolk on the microcassette recorder to prove
it – but let the coffee go stone cold before pouring it unceremoniously
into the glass of milk. He also got through the best part of a pack
of Marlboro 100's. It was an unforgettable lunch.)
Afijn is a 78-minute documentary by Jellie Dekker featuring
plenty of great footage old and new of Misha in action, ranging from
a vintage snippet of a 1964 trio recorded in Utrecht's Persepolis
with Ruud Jacobs on bass and trusty sparring partner Han Bennink on
drums to shots of the ICP Orchestra during their recent North American
tour. There's also a smattering of the original ICP triumvirate of
Misha, Han and saxophonist Willem Breuker (before the latter jumped
ship to concentrate on his own Kollektief), and an all-too-brief snatch
of a 1980 incarnation of the Orchestra featuring Ernst Reijseger,
George Lewis and Steve Lacy. Not that the current line-up is at all
shabby, as Misha is the first to acknowledge. Fans of Mary Oliver
(violin, viola), Tristan Honsinger (cello), Ernst Glerum (bass), Ab
Baars, Michael Moore and Toby Delius (horns), Thomas Heberer (trumpet)
and Wolter Wierbos (trombone) will find much to enjoy, not only in
the documentary, but in the three bonus cuts featuring the Orchestra,
"Met welbeleefde groet van de kammel" ("With Sincerest
Regards From The Camel"), filmed live at the BIMhuis as part
of Misha's 70th birthday celebrations last year, "Kachel"
and "Baltimore Oriole", the old Hoagy Carmichael chestnut
gloriously arranged by Moore and recorded, it says here, in the Mahogany
Hall, Edam in November 2006..(!) There's a fine example of
the kind of wonderful cock-up Misha loves. The documentary is an affectionate
portrait of Mengelberg, both the pianist and the composer –
there's a sensational extract of his near-unplayable piano piece Left
Right, originally written for Frederic Rzewski but never played
on the grounds it was too difficult (for him?!), performed
by Tomoko Mukayama (dare we hope for a CD release one day?), and some
revealing asides from former avant-garde revolutionaries Louis Andriessen
and Wim Schippers, complete with footage of some of the wacky post-Fluxus
revolutionary mixed-media shenanigans that the Netherlands was (still
is) famous for. There's also some splendid archive film of two of
Misha's great heroes – Ellington and Monk – in full flight,
and some revealing comments on how Mengelberg's teacher at the Royal
Conservatory in The Hague, Kees van Baaren, showed him to revoice
traditional bop harmony into the kind of crunchy Monkish sonorities
that have characterised Misha's work throughout his career.
Also among the bonuses there are also two super duo cuts with trumpeter
Dave Douglas, who proves once more he knows Mengelberg's songbook
at least as well as the ICP footsoldiers do, a brief 1967 home movie
of the Mengelberg family cat Pief playing the piano (it ends suddenly
when another puss sabotages the performance in typical Misha style),
and – it's worth buying the DVD just for this – the legendary
"Instant Composition 5/VI/'72", on which he accompanies
his pet parrot Eeko. This originally appeared on the ICP 015 LP, something
of a holy grail for Eric Dolphy fans, as it contains a rare bootleg
of him playing Monk's "Epistrophy" with Mengelberg, Bennink
and Jacques Schols (the same quartet recorded Dolphy's Last Date
the following day), but here it's the soundtrack to an old home
movie shot chez Mengelberg. Pief and Eeko are not the only
featured animals on parade, either. The live version of "Camel"
features a rare guest appearance by Anthony Braxton, accompanied,
for reasons best known to Mengelberg (but which will probably have
Braxton purists climbing the wall in frustration), by footage of a
particularly lethargic Bactrian camel and a rather nasty looking hyena
in the local zoo.
The bonus section of the DVD is easy to navigate, but it's a shame
the documentary part isn't subdivided into separate indexed chapters
for easy reference. One can also regret there isn't more of the terrific
archive film on offer, but we shouldn't complain, especially since
the entire ICP vinyl back catalogue remains frustratingly out of print.
On his last visit to Paris a couple of years ago I asked Misha when
he might get round to reissuing some of those long deleted titles.
He didn't seem at all interested. "Anyway, I think I've lost
the master tapes," he said, shuffling off to the bar. Han Bennink,
who indulges in the kind of antics on stage that would get most ordinary
mortals a one-way ticket to a secure institution, is, in conversation,
wonderfully normal, and delightfully blunt: "[ICP] wouldn't exist
if it wasn't for Misha. Aside from that, he does fuck all." Not
so sure about that, Han: one thing that emerges most clearly from
this disc is how essential Misha Mengelberg is not only to the ICP
Orchestra but to Dutch new music in general. Without the benign madness
of the baseball-cap sporting, cognac slurping Mengelberg, the world
just wouldn't be as much fun. Well, my world wouldn't, at least. You
make up your own mind. As Misha says: "There are only two kind
of music: nice music and boring music." This is nice.–DW
Chen
Yi Commune
THE 1978 – 83
90% Wasser
 "The
Chen Yi Commune was founded in 1978 by about 20 women and men from
London and the surrounding area. The building of the commune, an old
school in Chelmsford, was located on vast premises and was encircled
by a wall. The aim of the commune was to create a closed subsystem,
a kind of subsociety and to narrow down its contact to the outside
world only on very few specific actions. Life in the commune was lead
[sic] hermetically closed. All circuits, the food, culture
and communication circuits had to be self-contained." Sounds
like fun, eh? Well, it was one way of coming to terms with living
in Chelmsford in Thatcher's Britain (pronounced Bwwwitain,
like Rick in The Young Ones, another legendary though admittedly
better known commune). Though Chen Yi (named presumably after the
Chinese communist leader) eventually dissolved and their house was
demolished in 1984, the six musicians who perform on these 14 tracks
remain true to their self-imposed anonymity by not revealing their
real names (they're all called Chen, if you hadn't guessed.. they
do have numbers though). But if CBS hadn't pulled out of
a projected recording contract – which came about thanks to
John Peel's enthusiastic championship of the group – maybe you'd
all be cuddling copies of the Chen Yi debut album The Rape
now (One wonders if that title had anything to do with their decision..).
Instead, all we got was a self-produced cassette, Hanging,
in 1981. But it's great to see this stuff out and about now: fans
of Crass, Swell Maps and similar groups at the wild fringes of English
post-punk will love the raw thudding drum machines, primitive keyboards
(dig the squarewaves), tape cut-ups and general DIY ya-don't-like-this-?-well-fuck-you
aesthetic. God knows what they're doing on "Rounder", but
there certainly seems to be a telephone ringing in there, so maybe
they weren't totally cut off from the outside world. And anyone who
produces music as good as this doesn't deserve to be. Check it out.
Various
Artists
VERFASSUNG
Hoerbar
 Hörbar
(which translates as "Listening Bar" – sounds rather
like The Scope in Pynchon's Crying Of Lot 49) is a forum
for experimental music performers, producers and consumers who get
together every Wednesday evening in Hamburg's B-Movie cinema /artspace.
Verfassung ("Constitution") is the collective's
third release, after the double CDR Prosit zur letzten Tide,
based on underwater recordings of the Hamburg harbour and recordings
of the empty B-Movie cinema itself, and Pero La Música
Continuará, a homage to former Hörbar member Jörn
Petersen. It contains 14 tracks by 14 different artists, including
Hamburg's best known explorer of alt.electronicmusic, Asmus Tietchens,
whose typically dour, impressive "GUU 69" is based on another
cheery quotation from his beloved E.M. Cioran. Elsewhere there are
the usual greyscale processed drizzly field recordings and mangled,
spazzed-out treated improvisations, accompanied by salient quotations
from, amongst others, Deleuze (sur-prise!), Nietzsche and.. Louis
Armstrong ("All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse
sing a song.."). Dunno what Pops would have made of Audible Pain's
"Staphylokkoen und Streptokokken", which consists of "mostly
self experienced pain waves being transformed into audible sound waves"
– and it sounds like it – or incite/ (Christ, these Hamburgers
certainly love those gratuitous punctuation marks) 's "bone-dry
minimal electronics, fragmented slomo grooves and broken rhythmic
arrangements", but if he's still checking out new music in the
hereafter, he's probably got his time cut out with What A Wonderful
World.. The most impressive offerings are [-hyph-] (aka Nicolas
Wiese) 's hypercomplex "fragmentation.itself" (and that's
not the full title), tbc's "disordering 6" (forget the Deleuze
blather and burn off your hangover with this) and the wild
Maso Yamazaki-meets-Sun Ra squiggles of Renoise's "Japanese Robot",
but there's plenty of interesting stuff throughout the album. Remind
me stop off in the Listening Bar for a pint next time if I ever get
to Hamburg.
Noxagt
/ Ultralyd
SPLIT LP
Textile Vynile Serie
 The
cover of this album is – no disrespect to Marie Caillou, thanks
to whose quirky artwork the Textile Vynile Serie is instantly identifiable
– not quite as much fun to look at as their outing on Load (that
should prompt a deluge of correspondence, heh heh) but their half
of this split LP is certainly fun to listen to, from the fucked up
Resonance FM session track where someone knocks the drumkit over to
the totally fucked up slamfest "BFTP", recorded
at Oslo's Kill Yr Ego, after which the only way to go is slow, as
in dead slow: "Drittstilk", a live recording for
WFMU New Jersey that no self-respecting Swans fan should be without.
Further proof that Norway might not be the heaven on earth Wire
editorials often make it out to be comes from Ultralyd on side B.
Track titles like "The Smell of Incest" and "Darkening
of the Stool" – and I don't suppose that's got anything
to do with furniture repair either – probably give you some
idea of what's in store, but these four grizzly outings recorded in
a (disused?) canning factory in Stavanger will still have you reaching
for the akevitt. If you can afford a bottle.. right now Norway's
the second richest country in the world, after Luxembourg. Thought
you might like to know that.
Park
Attack
HALF PAST HUMAN
Textile
 Textile
Records' head honcho Benoît Sonnette came up with the bright
idea of starting a label while he was living and working in Glasgow
a few years ago (which explains why the label's first release was
Bill Wells Octet date with Lol Coxhill, and good luck trying to find
a copy of that now, by the way), and the good people of Park
Attack – Rob Churm (vocals/guitar), Lorna Gilfedder (drums)
and Tom Straughan (synthesizers), here augmented by Jamie Grier on
electronics (Straughan has since left the group, it seems) –
are friends of long standing. Half Past Human is their first
full-length outing, following on from last year's Last Drop At
Hideout EP (OSCARR). It's a gloriously energetic, rough'n'ready
blast of early 21st century No Wave (bet these cats were first in
the queue to pick up their copies of No New York when it
re-emerged on CD) – Churm's vocals sound like the anguished
yelp of Lydia Lunch and David Thomas' bastard love child, and are
well-served by the dry, tight synth-heavy mix – but unlike the
vicious fuck-everything broadsides of DNA and Teenage Jesus, Park
Attack's songs are more.. well, structured. Sort of. Hell,
there are even some drum breaks in there. But be warned: conventional,
user-friendly indie pop this is not.
Trockeneis
5025 AD
Ehse
 "Trockeneis"
is German for "dry ice", and that's exactly what Baltimore-based
Catherine Pancake plays. How you play dry ice isn't all that
clear to me, but if you're interested there's a photo by Michael Anton
Parker of her doing it at http://www.bagatellen.com/archives/frontpage/001118.html.
In Trockeneis, she's joined by fellow "New Frictionalists"
– nice term, that.. think I'll start using it myself from now
on – Paul Neidhardt (percussion), Dan Breen and Andy Hayleck
(bowed metal), and Audrey Chen (voice). If you've been following developments
on John Berndt's Recorded label, you'll know by now that there's a
whole helluva lot more happening in Baltimore than John Waters might
have you believe. It's one of those tightly organised, dynamic local
improv scenes that have sprung up in major cities worldwide over the
past decade. Trockeneis is to Baltimore what BSC is to Boston or Phosphor
is to Berlin, if you like, and this album deserves to be filed away
next to Phosphor on Potlatch and BSC's Good on Grob
as one of contemporary improv's more exciting debut albums. It's uncompromising
stuff, especially at high volume (the only way to play it –
no point trying to listen to this as background music), even if the
LP pressing leaves a lot to be desired (but hell what's a little bit
of surface noise, for Chrissakes?). The strange metallic
squeaks and squeals complement Chen's ghostly / ghastly vocalisms
to perfection, painting a dark, forbidding landscape in thrilling
chiaroscuro. Maybe this is what Baltimore will look like in 5025 AD.
I won't be sticking round to find out, but if these cats ever play
a gig here in Paris, I'll be there with my scarf and gloves on.
Michel
Gendreau / Francisco López
SPLIT LP
Crippled Intellect
With
its all black label and all black information-free cover – what
a shame CIP couldn't have used black paper for the inner sleeve too
– you know you're in for a pretty austere experience
before you even hear the disc. "Drowning" is a typically
overcast and inscrutable offering from Michel Gendreau (ex-Crawling
With Tarts), all gloomy drive-belt hums and indistinct Eraserhead-like
factory rumbles. Can't help laughing at the blurb on the CIP website,
especially that bit about "Gendreau, a trained acoustician, used
extremely refined microphones.." Anyone familiar with CWT's work
– not that you're likely ever to be able to acquire the entire
back catalogue – knows how good Gendreau's ears are, but whether
he used "extremely refined microphones" or not (I'll take
his word for it), a lot of this sounds like a DJ trying to spin a
record made of mud. More or less the same could be said of López's
"Untitled #185", which, in addition to his trademark hi-fi
lo-fi hiss and hum, is full of pops and cracks, but that may just
be my copy of the album, which looks as if it's been deliberately
scuffed. I still like to think that people buy records because they
actually like listening to what's on them, but how you're
supposed to do that with this one is beyond me.-DW
Jon
Rose / Chris Abrahams / Clayton Thomas
ARTERY
the NOW now
 There's
a great bit in one of those old Richmal Crompton Just William
books which describes how the lovable little rascal gave his father
and sister a jar of boiled sweets and a book about pirates for their
respective birthdays, knowing full well they wouldn't want them and
give him them back. If you feel like trying the same trick yourself,
send a copy of Artery to Radu Malfatti. You'll get it back
by return of post. This is exactly the sort of improv Malfatti slammed
the door on back in the early 90s, dismissing it out of hand as "gabby".
It's hard to get more gabby than Artery's opening 19 minute
cut, "The Superior Mesenteric" (though I can offhand think
of a couple of Olaf Rupp albums). It's as if keyboard whizkid Chris
Abrahams is out to cast off the cobwebs that have accumulated on all
those rambles with The Necks. He seems to fallen very much under the
spell of hyperactive violinist extraordinaire Jon Rose's magnificent
Temperament, both in his choice of instruments – harpsichord,
positive organ and fortepiano – and in his fondness for alternative
tuning systems. The fortepiano is tuned in Kirnberger 3 – misspelt
in the liners btw – which, in case you're interested, is described
by tuning expert Pierre Lewis as follows: "One starts with a
pure major third from C to E, with the four fifths within it tempered
as in Aaron's meantone. With this pure major third, we have already
accumulated -22 cents, nearly all that we need to close the circle
(-24 cents – the two commas being conveniently nearly equal).
If we tune the remaining fifths pure, the last fifth that will close
the circle will be 2 cents flat (as in equal temperament). From E,
one conventionally tunes two pure fifths up to F# and, from C, five
pure fifths down to Db. The major thirds vary gradually from pure
(C-E) to Pythagorean (e.g. Db-F). A similar effect is observed for
the minor thirds which vary from nearly pure (e.g. A-C about 5 cents
flat) to Pythagorean (e.g. Bb-Db). The major triad on C is a meantone
triad, and the one on Db is Pythagorean." Right, now that's out
of the way, back to the music. As Keith Rowe once said, it's impossible
to imagine that free improvisation didn't exist back in medieval and
baroque times. It's not hard to imagine cats like Corelli getting
totally wasted on the local vino after yet another concerto grosso
and getting down and dirty in the music room for a free form freakout.
I'll bet it would have sounded something like this. If that's hard
to imagine, maybe Conlon Nancarrow comes close. Of course, not everything
on Artery is as frenetic as the opener – there's some
delicious harp work from Clare Cooper on "The Ascending Aorta"
– but by the time you've got past "The Great Gonadal"
and "The Elastic Lamina" you're heading for cardiac arrest.–DW
Robin
Hayward
VALVE DIVISION
Fringes
 Releases
by Berlin-based tuba player / composer Robin Hayward are few and far
between – I'm still sorry he never recorded anything with the
trio rar (lowercase please), with Axel Dörner and Radu Malfatti
– and as a result worth watching out for. He's just as good
at explaining what he does as he is at doing it, too – check
out his interview with Chiyoko Szlavnics, originally published in
Musicworks but also available for consultation on his website
at http://www.robinhayward.de – but ultimately, to adapt the
old proverb, beauty is in "the ear of the behearer" (RIP
Dewey Redman). The two shorter tracks on this latest CD on the ever-wonderful
Fringes imprint, "Dial" and "Coil", find Hayward
exploring the outer reaches of extended technique; the tuba spits,
hisses, barks, twitters and sounds like everything from a malfunctioning
outboard motor to a large and not particularly friendly aquatic mammal.
Hayward's concise and articulate liners describe his current work
as "abstract-narrative", meaning that "certain narrative
elements have been introduced, particularly involving the consideration
of expectation and surprise." (Maybe it's just me but that seems
to imply that he considers his previous work with the likes of Dörner,
Annette Krebs and Andrea Neumann to have been somehow lacking in surprise,
which I don't particularly find to be the case, but never mind.) This
seems to apply more to "Dial" and "Coil" than
to the title track, though Hayward disagrees, stating that "Valve
Division" also "shares an abstract-narrative aesthetic in
that the objective fact of the tuba’s unconventional tuning
is gradually unfolded over the course of the piece." It's a 24-minute
study in pure minimalist linear additive process, patiently and painstakingly
exploring intervallically expanding / contracting ascending / descending
melodic cells across the entire range of the instrument with a rigour
Tom Johnson would be proud of. And once you've figured out how the
incremental pitch shifts work – if you ever want to hear pure
microtonal logic in action, this is the one to go for – surprise
doesn't really enter into it. At least not in the bang crash wallop
sense of the word: what is surprising, astounding even, is Hayward's
technical mastery and musicality.–DW
Eugene
Carchesio / Leighton Craig
LEAVES
Naturestrip
 It's
the 11th of September. A date, as the saying goes, which will live
in infamy, though it's already five years since the images of Lucifer's
greatest artwork, as Karlheinz Stockhausen memorably and controversially
described it (to his cost) first filled our TV screens, and I'm walking
along a leafy alley in a quiet suburb of Paris in the early morning
sun listening to Leaves. On this latest offering from the
wonderfully-named Naturestrip label, which was originally released
two years ago as a limited edition of 30 on Craig's Kindling CDR label,
Carchesio and Craig follow in the footsteps of Brötzmann / Bennink,
Kuwayama / Kijima and Forge / Epinat, dispensing with the recording
studio altogether and making their music in the great outdoors –
in this case Craig's backyard in Brisbane – with leaves, bamboo
flute, parladote (that's a bird btw), keyboards, sticks, guitar, crows,
ektara (single-stringed instrument from the Indian subcontinent),
wind, chime balls, cicadas, violin, aeroplanes, finger cymbals, hammer,
toy xylophone, windchimes, bottles, clarinet and lorikeets (and other
feathered friends). There's none of the tree-whacking boy-scout festivity
of Schwarzwaldfahrt here, just a quiet, delicate communion
of man and nature, modest in its scope and touching in its directness
and simplicity. Quite simply the only thing to listen to on a day
like this.–DW
Sun
Ra
CONCERT FOR THE COMET KOHOUTEK
ESP-Disk'
 This
December 1973 recording, culled from a Town Hall performance, captures
the Arkestra at an extraordinarily fertile time, their free excursions
somewhat reined in and their career as a swing-era repertory big band
still some years away. Joining Ra are usual suspects John Gilmore,
Marshall Allen, trumpeter Kwame Hadi, drummer Bugs Hunter, reedman
Eloe Omoe, vocalist June Tyson and probably a late-stage Ronnie Boykins.
Planned for issue in part as ESP 3033 (this reissue includes a back
cover mock-up), Kohoutek remained unissued until the 1993
ZYX CD. This current incarnation, though it neglects to list the personnel
(go to http://www.dpo.uab.edu/~moudry/discintr.htm), does correct
the titles from the original and markedly cleans up the sound.
After a lengthy introduction by an unidentified "astronomer"
(who gets a rough ride from the rowdy audience), the band launches
into dense Bells-esque trills before June Tyson sings a soulful
"Astro Black," accompanied by lightly-swinging percussion.
"Discipline 27 (I)" is a fifteen-minute workout that includes
an extended Hadi solo (urged on by drummers Hunter and Alzo Wright).
Ra's feedback- and glitch-fueled Moog galvanizes the band into vicious
flight, and Gilmore takes a tenor solo full of feral multiphonics;
it seems as though he's joined by smeared brass, but more likely the
tones have split along their cosmic seam. There are also the expected
communal forays, like the vocal revue of "Enlightenment,"
and the heavy African vamp and auxiliary percussion on "Love
in Outer Space" would have made Bilal Abdurahman proud, as Ra's
distorted space-organ sallies forth across the rhythm-field in perverse
astral chunks. "Kohoutek" initially offers wistful romance,
beginning as an unaccompanied fuzzed-out lament before eventually
turning monstrous. A Love Supreme is recalled in the second
movement of "Discipline 27," as Ra and Tyson ask a question
as pertinent now as it was more than thirty years ago: "If this
is a planet of Life, why are people dying here?" Time, perhaps,
for another Kohoutek go-round.–CA
Pd
Conception
MISHRA
Fonorum
Martin
France
SPIN MARVEL
Spin Marvel
Two
CDs, linked by just one percussionist, Norwegian Terje Evensen, living
up to one of this writer's yardsticks of greatness, side one of Weather
Report's I Sing the Body Electric (remember when albums had
sides?), and proof that literate and innovative new European
jazz actually exists outside the egregious Stuart Nicholson's sandbox.
 The second
release by Norwegian/German electroacoustic trio Pd Conception tones
down the electronic "recomposition" element that made disc
two of their debut, Phrased Silence, so striking after the
first disc's acoustic set by pianist Ingvo Clauder, percussionist
Evensen and electronics guerrilla Anders Tveit. The band name comes
from their theory of music existing between pure improvisation and
treatment. This is a step on from the occasional nods to electronic
Cage on that first CD, and way beyond the fashionable noodlings of
people such as Leafcutter John. On the gorgeous "Mishka"s
Letter", Clauder's acoustic piano could even be an unusually
terse Keith Jarrett, with Evensen rustling around the extremities
of his kit. The electronics are subdued, the trio improv spacious
and assured, and the overall effect mesmerising.
 In
comparison, Spin Marvel could almost be Electric Ladyland,
but, hey, Weather Report followed Body Electric with the
sweaty funk groove of Sweetnighter, so…Drummer and
founder Martin France was one of Evensen's teachers during time spent
studying in London and Evensen has also acquired something of a mentor
in the form of Audun Kleive, one third of the divine Jøkleba
(more WR first sides) and his own demented techno alter-ego BITT.
Here, France and Evensen are joined by bassist Tim Harries and guitarist
John Parricelli, all four also credited with electronics. In their
more contemplative minutes they might be comparable to ECM stalwarts
such as Terje Rypdal (especially with Parricelli in lyrical mode),
or the tone poems of Barre Phillips – but, crucially, without
the dead hand of Manfred Eicher's signature novocaine production.
At others, on the furious "Gwig9", which flirts with heavy
metal and sampled mayhem, it could be the legendary This Heat risen
from the grave. Brainy stuff, best played loud.–JG
Achim
Kaufmann/Michael Moore/Dylan van der Schyff
KAMOSC
Red Toucan 9329
 These
thirteen musical vignettes were recorded on the trio's tour last fall
through the US Pacific Northwest, Chicago and Toronto. The group previously
appeared as an interesting subset of players on drummer van der Schyff's
Songlines release, The Definition of a Toy, in which two
tantalizingly brief trio episodes were placed amidst more lushly conceived
compositions. The songs here are mostly by pianist Achim Kaufmann,
who's a hard player to hard to pin down, though he has Misha Mengelberg's
ability to seamlessly shift between styles and knack for "where
have I heard that before" melodies. There are a few collective
improvs, including two with trombonist Wolter Wierbos, whose presence
initially seems to disturb the band's equilibrium until all parties
eventually converge for a spirited blowout. Other pieces are more
brooding; "Roadside", for instance, begins quietly with
Kaufmann's insistently repeated motif, Moore's counter-figure on melodica
and van der Schyff's cymbal slashes; the tension keeps building, until
finally Moore switches to alto for a moment of relief. It's an admirable
display of the trio's ability to smoothly go from a barely perceptible
tempo to frenzy and back in a short space of time. Kaufmann and van
der Schyff are in excellent form, and Moore in particular is outstanding:
his playing has never received the plaudits it deserves (an occupational
Clusone hazard of being the relative calm between hurricanes Han and
Ernst), but his work here is absolutely stunning: listen to how, at
the end of "Corybant", he takes the melody apart in a Lacy-like
manner, or to his Jimmy Giuffre-like clarinet on tracks like "Ghosts
at the Foot" and "Cuk".–SG
Mike
Bullock / Vic Rawlings
ON THAT WHICH IS BEST AND THE BEST THAT CAN BE DONE UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES
Fargone
 These
Bostonians certainly do like long titles. Maybe they all grew up reading
Henry James. After nmperign's In Which The Silent Partner Director
Can No Longer Make His Point With The Industrial Dreamer, here's
On That Which Is Best And The Best That Can Be Done Under The
Circumstances, the latest offering from Mike Bullock, on double
bass and tone generators (what's a tone generator, I wonder? doesn't
a double bass qualify as such?) and Vic Rawlings on cello, open electronics
and speakers (and if the album title wasn't enough check out some
of the track titles: "Duration, which is endless, could not be
but for the moment, which is too finite to be fixed" and "The
kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a householder who went
out early in the morning to hire laborers", to name but two).
It's their best so far too, five tracks of unremittingly extreme crunches,
crackles, buzzes, whines and low register growls – drone's too
nice a word for them. This is uncompromising, almost bleak stuff,
experimental in the best sense of the word, as Bullock and Rawlings
explore the inherently unstable qualities of their open circuit electronics
in pursuit of a music whose tension is palpable, ever threatening
to topple over the cliff into the void of unbridled and deadly feedback.
Difficult listening? You bet! Get with it.–DW
Doug
Theriault
ORANGE
Fargone
 On
Orange Doug Theriault plays "sensor guitar controlling
live electronics." Quite what that is isn't all that clear, but
this isn't the time or place to get bogged down in a nerdy list of
electrical gizmos (not that I've asked him to provide one) –
suffice it to say that there's a certain fragility, a sense of danger,
the thought that at any moment the whole thing could explode into
vicious noise. There are some distinctly aquatic gurgles in there
too about the 16-minute mark, so death by electrocution is also a
distinct possibility. This on-the-edgeness is a characteristic of
much US-based EAI (Theriault, Bryan Eubanks, Bonnie Jones, Vic Rawlings
and Mike Bullock..). If there is a historical precedent for it, perhaps
it would be Voice Crack. Early Voice Crack that is –
Norbert Möslang's recent work is a little smoother (though not
as smooth as, say, recent outings by Günter Müller or Jason
Kahn). But also semi-erased Voice Crack, as if someone had
got hold of the original masters and wiped off large chunks; the music
often plunges into mysterious near-silence. At 52 minutes it's a long
haul, but has much to commend it.–DW
Klaus
Filip / Toshimaru Nakamura
ALUK
IMJ
 Viennese
laptopper Klaus Filip is credited here as playing "lloopp",
which, as I found out when I asked Christof Kurzmann who also used
it on his excellent new Potlatch duo with John Butcher, is a Max/MSP
patch of Filip's own invention. Toshi Nakamura is, as always, on his
no-input mixing board. You probably knew that already. This is another
one of those albums that doesn't really surprise – Nakamura
tends to keep his surprises for the concert hall – but that
joins an ever-growing list of albums to be filed away under "EAI"
(I'm still not at all sure I know how to define EAI, to be honest,
but I'm doing my best to make the term stick). Allow me to quote from
a recent Wire review (saves me having to paraphrase it):
"one defining characteristic of so-called EAI (electroacoustic
improv) has been its conscious desire to shift the emphasis away from
traditional musical parameters such as pitch, rhythm and dynamics
towards timbre and event density. But if sudden, extreme changes of
volume and any semblance of regular pulse (Eddie Prévost's
"imperialist backbeat") are effectively verboten,
pitch still has a role to play. Pitch not as a question of notes functioning
within an established tonal system, but rather as reference frequencies
to articulate structure and provide aural coherence." That last
bit applies as much to this album as it does the one I was actually
reviewing (buy this month's Wire and find out which, haw
haw), especially the opening "Pace". Not so sure whether
that's Nakamura's doing or Filip's – the same acute ear for
pitch is equally evident on his excellent Creative Sources release
with Kai Fagaschinski, Los Glissandinos' Stand Clear - but
it sounds good. The two remaining tracks, "Stroll" and "Aluk",
don't add much new, but if you like the toothache you get after listening
to albums like Nakamura's Do with Sachiko M, this will do
nicely.–DW
Ed
Chang / Ed Howard
AGENTS AT MIDNIGHT
Quodlibet / Fargone
 Agents
at Midnight, eh? Sounds like the kind of film noir title
Barry Adamson might like. But the music doesn't: it's a collection
of raw, powerful improvisations for saxophone (Chang) and electronics
(and harmonica) (Howard), a fine example of how the fences that used
to separate Noise and Improv have been bulldozed into the dirt by
the younguns across the pond (and a few of them here in Europe too).
Chang's playing – alto sax, is it? not always easy to tell for
sure – is rough and gritty, recalling at times early Zorn. But
there are none of the Kartoon Komedy Kapers that characterized old
chestnuts like In Memory of Nikki Arane. This is more Sun
City Girls than Sin City, a kind of field recording from
another planet, and despite Howard's noble attempts to hurl him bellfirst
into a septic tank of noisy sludge it's clear Chang can actually play
the horn, and isn't averse to a spot of melody from time to time (though
not the kind of melody your granny could dig sitting in her retirement
home with the stuffed pussycat). Imagine John Klemmer ca. 1973 jamming
with Wolf Eyes. You can't? Well you need to hear this then.–DW
Will
Guthrie
BODY AND LIMBS STILL LOOK TO LIGHT
Cathnor
 If
distortion and overload are the grit that leads to the pearl in the
oyster, Will Guthrie's incisive editing hand offers a resolute knife-hold
to separate the gem from its clammy casing. Anyone who's seen Guthrie
live in recent times would be aware of how brutal his performances
can be, maxing the volume while unleashing rough, unruly swarms of
detourned electronics and manhandled percussion that move the air
in the room. More interested in grain than drone, privileging volume
and physicality over undemonstrative reductionism, Guthrie edits and
arranges for maximum impact. He's interested in dirtied sound, dropping
chunks of asphalt-texture feedback through Body and Limbs'
opening tracks "Taken" and "Peak", the latter
of which opens with the pedalling of the dial of a radio, the broadcasts
swathed with static. Towards the end of the disc's final piece "Withdrawal",
Guthrie scours away layers of sediment, allowing a recording of raspy
breathing to briefly assume centre stage. This gesture personalises
the tension in proceedings: though it sounds meticulously planned
and obsessively edited, Guthrie hasn't sucked the lifeblood out of
these three compositions, which lends them an exploratory, sometimes
anxious air. Indeed, as has been noted elsewhere, its searching nature
initially comes as a surprise after the brutish swagger of 2005's
musique concrete masterpiece Spear, released as a limited
CD-R on Guthrie's own Antboy Music label. I can't help but think of
Body and Limbs as content to Spear's form - the
latter as the decisive formal shift that allowed for the exploration
and elaboration of the former.–JD
Charles
Mingus
AT UCLA 1965
Sue Mingus Music/Sunnyside
 A
decade has passed since Sue Mingus launched Revenge Records to redress
the wrongs perpetrated by bootleggers on her late husband’s
discography. These grand plans sadly did not pan out, and Revenge
eventually sank from view after a single release. Page forward to
2006 and Mrs. Mingus is back, this time teamed with the Sunnyside
imprint to reissue of one of Mingus’s rarest albums. Taped at
UCLA by a student sound crew one week after a disappointing Monterey
engagement, the concert presents nearly 90 minutes of vintage Mingus,
warts and all. It comes with a nifty booklet that includes several
essays and even a reproduction of a Mingus-drawn comic strip promoting
his mail-order record club.
Like the Town Hall concert three years earlier, this set is has its
share of flaws and quirks, at least compared to the polish and preparation
one usually expects for a concert-hall jazz date. Edits, false starts
and speeches abound. Their inclusion makes for a fascinating listen
the first time through, but palls on subsequent spins. As in other
Workshop recordings of the era, Mingus regularly halts the action
to admonish or laud his musicians; at one point he even expels most
of the ensemble for “mental tardiness.” Only Dannie Richmond,
Lonnie Hillyer and Charles McPherson survive the cut, and on “Ode
to Bird and Dizzy” the resulting quartet ricochets through an
obstacle course of bop evergreens. Other pieces find Mingus trying
out various permutations of instruments in real-time. Critics denounced
the practice as a way of charging the public for rehearsals, but Mingus
believed it offered a necessary window on the creative process. The
octet is one of his most unusual ensembles, with McPherson’s
alto the only saxophone among all the brass. Mingus scuttles back
and forth between bass and piano – one of the album’s
attractions, in fact, is that it offers a generous sampling of his
work on the latter. Trumpeter Hobart Dotson, making a rare appearance
on record, is the album’s MVP: his clarion solos on “The
Arts of Tatum and Freddy Webster” and “Don’t be
Afraid, the Clown’s Afraid Too” prompt even the perfectionist
Mingus to sing hosannas. The set-closing “Don’t Let It
Happen Here” finds Mingus riffing on Pastor Martin Niemöller’s
poignant poem about complicity, indicting both the audience and himself
on charges of genocide. It’s a disconcerting but oddly inspired
way to end the concert, offering yet another instance of how Mingus
liked to challenge audiences rather than just entertain them.–DT
CONTEMPORARY
Matt
Rogalsky
MEMORY LIKE WATER
XI
 Matt
Rogalsky's work "focuses on the exploration of abject, invisible/inaudible,
or ignored streams of information", i.e. he takes fragments
of "space between the notes" – noise, sound or just
silence – and modifies them with different software programs
(including Kash and Sprawl, hence the track titles here) through
which he interacts with his playing partners. He's performed throughout
Europe and United States, presenting his own sound installations
and collaborating with instrumentalists such as Anne La Berge, Anne
Wellmer and Jane Henry, and he's a frequent associate of Phill Niblock.
Memory Like Water contains material dating from 1996, and
it's a fine selection of the variegated aspects of Rogalsky's music,
both live and in studio. The first disc contains "Resonate
(noise)" and "Resonate (tones)", the latter starting
with an infinite wash of something between water and metal, quite
static and relaxing, before flowing into a long section where granular
synthesis and sampled sources create a dramatic, if pretty consonant,
wall of chordal waves in constantly changing harmonic shifts. "Kash
(violin)" features Jane Henry playing with multiple bows made
of different abrasive materials, loops and particles arising from
the duo interplay taking on a life of their own. "Kash (guitars)"
is played by a trio of Rogalskys (Matt plus his brothers Benjamin
and Luke on acoustic guitars) improvising on a "few suggestions
as to overall structure", the outcome sounding not unlike Taku
Sugimoto and Burkhard Stangl played at 45rpm with a few background
disturbances. "Kash (radios)" appears on the second –
and better – disc of the set; starting from material sourced
from two radio talk shows, Rogalsky generates a long, progressive
convulsion of micro-utterances, accents and syllables that recall
an expanded version of Eno and Byrne's "Mea Culpa" on
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Vocals – by Luke Rogalsky
– are again featured in "Sprawl (western magnetics)",
an intriguing piece sounding like a supplication disturbed by the
whispered words of a dying man confessing a long-kept secret. The
record ends with the 31-minute "Transform", a harsh mix
of Rogalsky's own sounds and radios treated by a "series of
tunable delays which create strong harmonic resonances," a
flock of scary but lovable dwarf Glenn Brancas perched on Alan Lamb's
resonating wires.–MR
Nico
Muhly
SPEAKS VOLUMES
Bedroom Community
 I
have no idea whether or not Kyle Gann would describe the music of
Nico Muhly as "postminimalist", but, as Daniel Johnson's
liners to Speaks Volumes point out, the fact that Muhly was
"born well after the premieres of Reich's Music for 18 Musicians
and Glass's Music in Twelve Parts" means he certainly
is, at least chronologically speaking. It's also fair to assume that
during his studies at Juilliard (with Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano)
he devoured the back catalogue not only of Reich and Glass but also
the second generation of softcore minimalists like Paul Dresher, Daniel
Lentz, Wim Mertens and Michael Torke. Muhly has no qualms about acknowledging
his influences – Reich is especially recognisable in the marimba
flurries of Pillaging Music (a refreshingly frank title,
if ever there was one – there's also Clear Music, Honest
Music and Quiet Music) – but he's still very much
his own man. Clear, honest and (mostly) quiet this music might be,
but it never goes quite where you expect it to. The plot is thickened
by Valgeir Sigurdsson, who breaks all the rules of contemporary classical
album production, miking instruments dangerously close, adding "percussion"
tracks of his own assembled from miscellaneous bits of instrumental
noise, and making full use of multitracking to turn simple solos and
duos into whole chamber ensembles. His production on the final mutant
passacaglia Keep In Touch is strangely haunting and original,
thanks in no small part to the mellifluous cooing of guest vocalist
Antony Hegarty (without the Johnsons). It makes a change to come across
an album of contemporary music that's not merely a document of a "performance"
but a piece of creative recording in its own right.–DW
Dan
Joseph
ARCHAEA
Mutablemusic
 Ever
heard of Paul Smith? No, not the guy who designs the trendy suits,
I'm talking about Paul Smith the violinist and banjo player.
No? Doesn't surprise me. Back at the dawn of time – i.e. 1984
– California-based Smith had a three-man outfit called Ellipsis,
with guitarist William Pint and mandolinist (does that word exist?
it does now) Robert Kotta. They released one album on Flying Fish,
which sank without trace (not sure if flying fishes can actually sink,
but you see what I mean). Smith thought he was onto a winner by writing
music that was strictly minimal and yet strongly inflected by country
and bluegrass. I sent a copy of Ellipsis to John Peel and
of course heard nothing back. In retrospect that was a pretty dumb
move, as anything remotely resembling Art Music was, I imagine, quickly
frisbeed into the bin in Peel Acres. Reason I'm mentioning this now
is that Dan Joseph's music, though not at all country or bluegrass,
sounds not unlike Smith's, thanks to its jangly instrumentation –
the band includes harpsichord and Joseph's hammer dulcimer –
and its reliance on old school minimalist linear and block additive
process techniques. It's odd to think that people are still writing
music like this nearly 40 years after Phil, Steve and Terry first
hit the airwaves, but you can probably put that down to the fact that
a) Dan Joseph actually studied for a while with Terry (Riley) and
b) he's a freelance composer based in New York City. Which means he's
probably better off keeping on the right side of cats like Kyle Gann.
Mr. Gann would probably describe this as "postminimalism",
btw, but from where I'm sitting there's no "post" about
it. It's well written, well played (Joseph's band also includes violin,
clarinet, cello and percussion), well recorded and trots along pleasantly
enough. But I'm not sure how it fits in in 2006. Then again, what
does "modern" mean these days? I haven't got a clue. Time
somebody reissued Ellipsis, methinks.–DW
Tim
Hodgkinson
SKETCH OF NOW
Mode
 I
once got into trouble with Fred Frith by comparing one of his recent
pieces (not all that favourably, as I recall) to his old stuff with
Henry Cow. He had a point. So if you pick this up expecting it to
be another one of those colourful knitted socks, forget it. Clarinettist
/ composer Tim Hodgkinson has come a long way since "Nirvana
for Mice" – or rather, gone a long way, as he's
spent a lot of time out in the wilderness of Siberia researching shamanic
music and ritual. More recently he's been dusting off his improv chops
in the trio Konk Pack, with Thomas Lehn and Roger Turner (what
happened to Konk Pack, by the way?), and, as this splendid debut
on Mode reveals, concentrating on his composition. Three of the six
pieces on Sketch Of Now were recorded in Romania, with Iancu
Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram's Hyperion Ensemble. Hence the Romanian
translation of the title track Aici Schiteaza pe Acum, a
scary nine minutes of "accumulation and discharge" of sonic
energy for ensemble and tape. Hodgkinson plays the solo clarinet (and
bass clarinet) parts himself in Vers Kongsu II and Fighting
/ Breathing, the former an energetic tussle with the Romanians
(plus Vinny Golia, making a guest appearance on bass clarinet), the
latter a sparring match with pre-recorded percussion. The split-second
timing and fresh unpredictability of Hodgkinson's music owe much to
his skill as an improviser, but he's got a sharp ear for orchestral
timbre too, and puts it to impressive use. It's not easy listening
though; Fragor, for computer-modified cello and electric
guitar (both performed by the composer, it seems – there's no
mention of personnel in the booklet) is what my mother would call
"nasty modern music". In fact she calls just about everything
written after 1950 "nasty modern music", with the exception
of a few Benjamin Britten things, but in this case she's got a point
– De Yoknapatawpha is a thorny affair, brilliantly
executed (I use the word deliberately) by Jacques di Donato and Isabelle
Duthoit on clarinets and pianist Pascale Berthelot, but hard to love.
But they used to say that about Henry Cow, too.–DW
Various
Artists
FOR FELDMAN
OgreOgress
 Just
about any new Feldman disc is a welcome addition to the already sagging
shelves here at PTHQ, and since most OgreOgress releases come in lightweight
cardboard cases they don't present any great risk. But this one comes
in a slimline plastic case, because it's a DVD. Not, sadly, a film
about Morton Feldman (though surely there must be some tasty footage
around of the great, lumbering chain-smoking bear in action) but an
audio disc containing 95 minutes of music. A double CD would have
done me just fine, but I guess I should just move with the times and
hook the DVD player up to the hifi so I don't have to listen through
headphones. That said, listening with cans on is never a bad idea
when it comes to Feldman, and there are many beautiful details in
his 1956 Three Pieces for String Quartet that are worth exploring
without distraction. And more than once, too, which is probably why
they appear twice on the disc. The reason for this seemingly odd double-take
is simple: the first two of the Three Pieces originally appeared
(order inversed) as Two Pieces For String Quartet (1954),
and Feldman added a separate later work, For String Quartet
(1956) to form the third. But the Feldman pieces are just thin –
if delicious – slices of pastrami sandwiched between doorsteps
of claggy bread in a quadruple decker sandwich. The opening mouthful
is David Toub's MF (the letters obviously refer to Feldman's
initials but the composer admits that mezzo forte works just
as well, since the piece doesn't seem all that interested in exploring
dynamics), 13'30" of featureless grey chugging originally written
for brass instruments and arranged for the Rangzen Quartet at the
behest of violinist Christina Fong. The sustained sonorities and chromatic
harmony of David Kotlowy's of Shade to Light are more recognisably
Feldmanesque (Kotlowy used Schoenberg's Klavierstück Op 33b
as a reservoir of basic pitch material, a move one imagines Feldman
might have understood, if not necessarily approved of), but there's
a hell of a difference between Feldmanesque and Feldman. John Prokop's
New England, Late Summer is similarly innocuous. Oddly enough,
apart from the Feldman pieces, David Beardsley's As Beautiful
As A Crescent Of A New Moon On A Cloudless Spring Evening is
the most original piece on offer, despite its use of Just Intonation
(something MF had little time for) and its half-hour duration. But
one has to wonder what it's doing next to Feldman's fragile sonorities.–DW
Hervé
Boghossian
ARCHI.TEXTURE VOL.1
Cathnor
 If
you're wondering why the inaugural album on a new improv label –
Richard Pinnell's Cathnor – featuring notable improvisers John
Tilbury, Mark Wastell and guitarist / laptopper Hervé Boghossian
is reviewed here in the "Contemporary" section as opposed
to "Jazz / Improv", it's because Boghossian, in his liner
notes, specifically refers to himself as "the composer",
and the three tracks as "composed by" H.B. He also provides
them with rather dry New York School-y generic titles – "For
Piano and Computer", "For Cello and Computer" and "For
Piano, Cello and Computer" (en français dans le texte)
– which, along with the rather drab punning album title and
the added information that this is just the first of three projected
volumes, certainly sets a serious, even ascetic tone. Tilbury fans
expecting some of those exquisite Feldmanesque droplets might be somewhat
disappointed to find the pianist confined to the bottom octave of
his piano in the opening track (much as Maurizio Pollini's prodigious
talents were for the most part restricted to low end thuds in Luigi
Nono's Como una ola di fuerza y luz), but if that's what
you're after you can always slip one of his AMM CDs into your machine
instead. Boghossian's interest lies elsewhere (in point of fact Tilbury's
contributions could have been recorded by just about any other pianist
of modest technical ability with a sense of touch), namely in an exceedingly
careful and subtle recrafting of timbre. Improv aficionados, EAI connoisseurs
included, might find the music somewhat lacking in relief, but that's
about as daft as complaining that Mark Rothko can't draw as well as
Arshile Gorky or comparing Eliane Radigue (a Boghossian hero, and
it shows) to Pierre Henry. Apples and oranges. Boghossian's exploration
of the upper partials of Mark Wastell's looped cello drone is meticulous
and exquisite. And if that's not good enough for you, "the composer
invites the listener to use tracks 1 & 2 to create his own composition"
(or her own composition, he might have added).–DW
Daniel
Menche
CREATURES OF CADENCE
Crouton/Longbox
 For
an artist whose output is reaching Merzbow-like proportions the risk
of running out of ideas and repeating yourself is ever lurking –
not that Daniel Menche's extremely physical music needs too much to
achieve its goal, administering a powerful shock to anyone who tries
to come to terms with its overcharged ritual – but Creatures
Of Cadence, released to accompany Menche's first concerts in
the US Midwest, is a special treat. It's a 500-copy limited edition
(with a gorgeous artwork by Erik Stotik portraying multicoloured birds)
containing four long tracks in which Oregon's half-shaman half-metalhead
master of "vehement beauty" sets about a "systematic
deconstruction of drone and pulse" via percussion, cello, horns
and zither (this latter a new timbre for Menche, appearing in a hit-and-strum
raging raptus in one of the album's most virulent sections). Intersecting
concentric drum cycles in progressive augmentation create a backdrop
of tribal rhythmic patterns, so that involuntary beat substitution
(à la Reich's Drumming) soon destabilises
the listener. Upon this rough canvas Menche lays long, ill-sounding
instrumental moans, the harsher the better, which, once our brains
have adapted to their uneasy resonance, guide us through the urgent
scorching cello drones and blasts of delirious horns. It's like trying
to swim in rapids with a hard hat on: you're aware of the danger,
but, secure in the knowledge that your head is protected, gulp down
water and bash bones against the rocks as necessary acts of bodily
purification. What remains graven upon the memory is the inherent
force of it all; it's another fine example of glorious sonic workout
from a composer who (as his blog relates) finds inspiration by running
himself to exhaustion in the forest and feeling the blood flow while
he pumps iron. And he means it.–MR
Robert
Hampson and Steven Hess
UNTITLED
Crouton
 Robert
Hampson's music is best when negotiating the space between song and
non-song: his Main albums Motion Pool and Dry Stone Feed
exist in a liminal zone, buffering song structures with sheet-lightning
guitar, hypnotic bass and sandy, fossilised sound incident. The further
he moves from that area into the curiously faceless spaces of the
Firmament series or discs like Tau, the closer he
gets to an unengaging blankness, an electro-acoustician pottering
away on the margins. On this collaboration with percussionist Steven
Hess, Hampson's edits and rearrangements are gridlocked by their digital
sheen, each flicker of texture glossed with an overly familiar laptop
glint. When he brushes the digital against the considered, paced patter
of Hess's percussion, it's all "by rote", drones or cauterised
glitches predictably spiked by "real playing." But if that
partly spoils the opening sections, things resolve by the fourth,
lengthiest segment, where tensile percussive clatter gives way so
Hampson can zoom in on the hiss and spray of Hess's cymbals, stretching
their bruised metallics into clouds of gun-metal grey. While it's
unsurprising both in terms of mood and structure, and it doesn't mark
out new space for Hampson, this collaboration offers some pleasant
moments.–JD
BIFFPLEX
MUSIC FOR PIANO AND ELECTRONICS
Half Theory
 Biffplex
is Andrew Thomson and Joe Musgrove, two of Australia's more interesting
fringe musicians, who share a fascination with tonal grain and emotive
dronescapes. On this latest duo, which has been in the can since 2004,
they charge into the realm of piano and electronics. It's a field
overshadowed by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai's recent and
explosively popular Insen (Raster-Noton), but Music For
Piano And Electronics couldn't be more different. There's no
sense of chordal interplay here, no falling back on well-travelled
melodic pathways. Musgrove and Thompson tap away, with an innate sense
of the "non-skilled", playing what they can, and doing it
well, but it's their glossy processing that transforms such moderately
executed passages into truly engaging and vital sound mats, as the
piano emerges through long drawn-out breaths of delay and granular
stretching, the origin of the sounds often lost in a myriad of processed
layers. The broken melody and eventual pulsing noise of ‘III'
recalls their ‘Noun' a few years back, which like this, possesses
a depth of layering and interweaving that's both refreshing and invigorating.–LE
Ethan
Rose
CEILING SONGS
Locust
 Portland
Oregon-based artist Ethan Rose has commented on his love of "wonderful
accidents", and has already produced several small-run multiples
for the Locust label, with "automated musical sculptures"
listed amongst his source material. But his compositional hand tends
toward order, and there are no Tinguely moments of collapse or dysfunction
here: rather, Rose grabs drones and glitches and smears them across
a fibreglass canvas, the resultant pieces sounding oddly translucent,
and rather lovely. His favourite tactic involves piloting tiny melodies
and hesitant phrases through a fogbank of fuzzy, humming harmonics.
Not exactly new, but Rose is an eloquent composer, and while his work
occasionally catches in the throat, sounding like ambient Eno gone
Rugrats, it gingerly negotiates the space between childlike
and childish, and happily lands closer to the former. It must be those
music-box sonorities: too often a cheap signifier of nostalgia for
long-lost innocence, a romanticisation of the pre-linguistic world
of the infant by artists hopelessly stuck in denial-of-reality, they're
deployed here with intelligence beyond their usual trite application.–JD
SURFACE
10
SURFACE TENSIONS
DiN
 It
has been some time since a record like this has crossed my ears. California
based Dean De Benedictis manages to capture the classic post-Ambient
and trance qualities of 90s electronic music, but with some well-placed
edits refocuses the listener to hear them as unsullied sonic tools
rather than well-worn sound markers overloaded with memory and ill-fated
overuse. The tensions suggested by title resonate upon repeated listening.
While the mixture of Ambient cut-ups, vibrating rhythms and heavily
reverbed percussive hits has appeared on many a Basic Channel release,
the use of such elements in today's electronica requires a certain
ability to avoid production cliché, while remaining sufficiently
well-versed in the language of timbre to connect with audiences coming
across music like this for the first time. Even though the album's
central technical concern seems to be the use of reverb in varying
depths, its musical core is a little harder to pin down, and therein
lies its charm; there are themes that echo a familiar memory, rhythmic
passages you might think you recall from some 12" in your collection,
maybe even a hint of Aphex Twin there (specifically in "Phantom
Jack To Station MT"), but nothing heavy-handed in its delivery
or execution. What remains instead is a familiar record that is welcoming
without being overly generic, or, rather, one that borrows from so
many genres that it reinvents itself through what it is not as much
as through what it is.–LE
Forest
Jackson
CYMBALISM
Mosz
 Forest
Jackson, aka Hanno Leichtmann, as his biography confirms, has a background
in jazz, but on listening to Cymbalism it seems a long way
off, obscured by a variety of production techniques from various delayed
dub grooves to straight ahead electronica beat arrangements. But there
seems to be a gaping hole in the heart of this release, a lack of
muscle to push the creative blood round the system, as revealed in
the title track, whose lengthy hi-hat sequences tap away for no apparent
reason, and "Fiona Farley", which starts out with a pleasant
enough field recording before slipping into a somewhat underwhelming
percussion progression set against a series of rising string samples.
There are some strong rhythmic moments here, but heard alongside some
of the Friedman/Liebezeit exchanges or Warp’s more post-instrumental
outfits, the material simply doesn’t have the production detail
or compositional innovation required to take us to that place where
acoustic and digital threads are so finely entwined that we lose ourselves
completely in an audio-inspired suspension of disbelief.–LE
Marc
Behrens / Dave Phillips / Cheapmachines / Keith Berry
COINCIDENT
Entr'acte
Here's
something for you to try out with three friends of your choice (no
musical ability required): give them each a MiniDisc or DAT recorder
and tell them to hit Record at 7pm one evening, switching the machine
off four minutes later (four minutes and thirty-three seconds might
have been a more symbolic duration, but never mind). Take the machines,
bounce the tracks over to your hard disk and stick them on top of
each other in ProTools or SoundForge or whatever basic music software
you have to hand. If you release each track separately and end up
with all four played simultaneously, you'll have a cute little five-track
CD, and the chances are it'll be a damn sight more interesting than
Coincident. Apart from the rather pleasant drone of Keith
Berry's contact-miked hot water tank, which he himself says "sounds
like the beginning to Eraserhead", this is a perfect waste of
talent. Phil Julian, aka Cheapmachines, whose bright idea this was,
recorded his TV (if your idea of fun is listening to a French trade
union leader rabbiting on – in French – about plans for
a forthcoming street protest, well, this is for you, but where I live
I can hear this stuff on the radio every day and find it neither exotic
nor interesting), Dave Phillips submitted a muffled conversation (there's
no point turning up the volume or listening on headphones either,
because there's nothing interesting being said, but at least we're
spared the sound of him vomiting into a bucket or stapling his head
to a breeze block with a nail gun, or whatever he usually does for
a living) and Marc Behrens – who, like Berry, should really
know better than to get involved in a dull conceptual wank like this
– sent in a recording of a creaky chair. Hearing all four "pieces"
played simultaneously doesn't add much either. Save your money and
buy a real Behrens or Berry album instead.–DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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