| HALLOWEEN
2008 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Jon Dale, Nate Dorward, Mark Flaum, John Gill,
Massimo Ricci, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
In Concert: AMPLIFY 2008: light
On Another Timbre: Davis,
Milton & Saade / Algora, Rombola, Zach / Hugh Davies / Bohman,
Wastell, Patterson, Davies
On Drag City: Jim
O'Rourke / Osorezan / The Red Krayola / David Grubbs
Smiling Through MyTeeth
On DVD: Olivia Block,
Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder / Lee Hangjun & Hong Chulki
(POST-?)ROCK: Hair Police / Lars Hollmer / Nine
Rain / Irmin Schmidt & Kumo / Scorces / Mark Stewart / Walter
& Sabrina
JAZZ & IMPROV: Angeli,
Rothenberg & Parker / Ab Baars & Ken Vandermark / Bik
Bent Braam / Bishop, Eisenstadt & Roebke / Lucio Capece
& Sergio Merce / Davies, Lacey & McNulty / Arek Gulbenkoglu
& Adam Süssmann / Greg Kelley / Byard Lancaster / Thomas
Lehn & Marcus Schmickler
Denman Maroney /
Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath / Michael Moore / Evan
Parker / Schlippenbach Trio / SLW / Fred Van Hove / Zingaro,
De Joode & Regef
CONTEMPORARY: Bernard
Bonnier / Michael Byron / Luc Ferrari / Gordon Mumma / Eliane
Radigue
ELECTRONICA: Cristal
/ John Levack Drever / Peter Rehberg / Zilverhill
Last month
|
 I
never really got into The Simpsons until Max (10) did about
a year ago, but am now a big fan – though I still think Matt
Groening should stick to cartoons and rock festivals instead of spouting
off about Cage, but anyway – and in honour of that series' time-honoured
tradition of the annual Halloween special (my own personal favourite
is "Treehouse Of Horror V".. remember "The Shinning"?),
here's a new issue of PT to browse through while you munch your chocolate
coffins or pumpkins, or whatever you do at this time of year. There's
not much scary music as such covered here – though maybe that
depends what you think of Hair Police – but the world is scary
enough as it is right now, even if, like 99.999% of the people on
the planet, you don't understand the nuances of credit default swaps.
(Actually, I'm feeling rather proud of the fact that my cousin Peter,
a well-respected economist and former adviser to Britain's Chancellor
of the Exchequer no less, predicted this market meltdown in his book
Debt And Delusion a decade ago. It's now back in print, but
you'd probably need to sell a few shares of your own to buy a copy
here http://www.amazon.com/Debt-Delusion-Peter-Warburton/dp/0140277528.
Go Google and read the glowing reviews nonetheless! Support the Warburtons!)
Meanwhile, thanks to this month's contributors, especially Lou Sterrett
for travelling out to Oberlin Ohio to talk to Aaron
Dilloway and Mark Flaum for risking earthquakes and monsoons to
journey to Tokyo for AMPLIFY 2008: light. And to Nate Dorward
for additional editing, and for forwarding the following mail from
the similarly eagle-eyed Martin Davidson at Emanem:
"I've just caught up with your review of Bare Essentials
in Paris Transatlantic – for which many thanks. One small point: It's
wrong to say that [John] Stevens used a conventional kit. The
components were roughly equivalent to that of a standard jazz drum
kit, but they were all smaller and hence quieter and less resonant.
He used to let me play it in informal sessions, and every time one
hit something, the sound died instantly. I therefore have extra insight
into how great he was to make such music on such an unforgiving kit. His
original idea (1967) was to have a kit that would not drown out other
unamplified instruments such as guitar and double bass."
Voilà – so now you know. Bonne lecture.-DW
In
Concert
Various
Artists
AMPLIFY 2008: light
September
19th – 21st 2008, Kid Ailack Art Hall, Tokyo
AMPLIFY 2008: light, the sixth festival in the Erstwhile Records
AMPLIFY series, took place in the last days of summer in
Tokyo's Kid Ailack Art Hall, a black-box style theatre space with
no stage and room for an audience of perhaps 40. Co-curated by Erstwhile's
Jon Abbey and his wife Yuko Zama, the festival focused on the Japanese
scene, with the notable addition of British guitarist and Erstwhile
mainstay Keith Rowe. The Tokyo improv scene is one of the major axes
of the electro-acoustic improvisation world, and was my personal gateway
into this area of music at the beginning of this decade, through the
work of Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura. Their ability to draw
out intimate, tender sound from such severe sources has been extremely
influential on my listening habits, and this isn't the first time
I've traveled to hear them perform. The chance to hear them both
in their home country, solo and in collaboration with Keith Rowe,
one of the elder statesmen of the improvisation world, was too great
to pass up, not to mention the bonus of seeing musicians less often
encountered outside of Japan: Ami Yoshida, Taku Unami, Mitsuhiro Yoshimura,
and Katsura Yamauchi. So I took my first trip to Tokyo, half
expecting some brave new insight into the origins of the Tokyo improv
sound. And I did have some interesting listening experiences
before arriving at the festival itself – John Cage meets Sun
Ra on the stereo of a tiny café, crows calling through the
raindrops in the park in Kichijoji, a road crew digging their way
through concrete at a dance floor rhythm, a politician crackling with
distortion as he addressed a massive crowd in Shinjuku – but
nothing that evoked the subtle energy of the music I came to Japan
for, and found in Kid Ailack Art Hall.
DAY 1
 The
first set of the festival was a solo saxophone performance by Katsura
Yamauchi, who's been part of the free jazz and improv scene in Japan
for a while but has only recently made forays into collaboration with
electronic improvisers, including work with the Swiss Signal Quintet
and a duo with Mitsuhiro Yoshimura. He started on alto, with long,
breathy phrases that allowed pitch to creep in towards the end. The
whispery multiphonics combined well with the gentle tones, but after
a brief pause he began adding rhythmic valve-stops that turned the
piece into a pulsing, chord-cycling sort of Club Med drum circle.
He tried a couple of other approaches, including one that began with
hard-nosed free jazz bluster, but seemed to realize they weren’t
leading anywhere and stopped. His second piece took off in a much
more satisfying direction, a double-toned drone that resonated throughout
the room, vibrating the space and creating a delicate abstract series
of pulses in the inner ear. For the last piece, Yamauchi switched
over to his sopranino and flurried up to a similar strong drone, which,
though just as interesting, seemed somewhat unnecessary, as if he
was only continuing so as not to leave the sopranino untouched for
the night.
The Keith Rowe / Taku Unami duo that followed was one of the festival
highlights. Rowe's work should be well known to most readers here,
though it’s worth mentioning that he arrived in Tokyo with a
new guitar, different from the instrument he used on his latest solo
album The Room. Unami brought a guitar as well, a weirdly-strung
double-necked acoustic monster, and also a mandolin, but his instrument
of focus was his computer-controlled set of small motor devices mounted
on plywood on the table before him.  Rowe
focused on scratching and scraping the strings of his guitar with
a metal sponge, a butter knife and a hand-held fan, creating sounds
full of texture, which he amplified into bursts of noise as the moment
required. He also had his laptop onhand, apparently running Reaktor
as a CPU load to start the miked automatic fan, and using the mouse
directly on the keyboard to generate sympathy between the sounds.
The thick drone foundation, something of a Rowe trademark over the
last few years, was nowhere to be heard – interesting because
Unami’s instrument in some ways assumed that role. Though the
control system Taku was using through his laptop was not visible,
he was able to determine when his devices would operate and at what
frequency they would spin, and affect the power distribution manually,
as well as changing the timbre slightly by adjusting the position
of the plywood. The mode of interaction between Rowe’s focused
scratches and Unami’s robotic spinning motors was intriguing,
with Taku assembling frames around Keith’s noises, then breaking
them down into pauses, which Keith built into or crushed through as
fit the moment. In addition, Unami occasionally reached down and strummed
the guitar or the mandolin to add a touch of color, somewhat similar
to what Rowe has done in past performances. Overall, it was a vibrant
and surprising set full of challenge and respect.
 The
final set of the first night was a duo of two Tokyo mainstays, no-input
mixing board innovator Toshimaru Nakamura and vocalist Ami Yoshida,
and was in fact the first time the two had played together. Yoshida
was very much to the forefront, both sonically and physically, and
her focus was impressive, eyes closed with her whole attention devoted
to placing her next sound. Working somewhat in spurts, her voice was
so fragile it seemed to waver between breaking into a moan and disappearing
completely. With each breath she seemed to lose her place in the room,
and needed a few moments to find her way back in. Nakamura, on the
other hand, was constantly active yet subtle, building through a number
of careful drones, some pure tone sinewaves, others fuzzier and more
noisy, as if to coax Yoshida gently, spiking up through her silences
and warming around her sounds. In a way, it came off as Nakamura playing
accompanist to Yoshida, who kept the audience rapt both with her striking
sounds and the physicality of her performance.
DAY 2
The second night of the festival was devoted to solos, the first featuring
Mitsuhiro Yoshimura. Something of a newcomer on the scene, with only
two recordings available on his own (h)ear rings label, his performance
consisted of placing a microphone in the room space and manipulating
feedback through a pair of headphones. How he did so during this particular
set wasn’t obvious, since he was performing in near darkness,
headphones held low in front, almost motionless. The sounds he created
were largely continuous narrow tones of feedback – feeling like
a throwback to the early days of so-called onkyo, when sinewaves were
the focal point of many performances – which he modulated, releasing
bursts and spikes of noise at each transition, as if he had to relinquish
control of the sound momentarily in order to change it, before pulling
it back into a drone. The tones were pleasing, filling the room precisely
or buzzing quietly to themselves, but the spiky transitions between
them detracted from the experience for me, and came across more as
lapses of concentration rather than conscious decisions.
The second set was one I was most looking forward to: Sachiko M soloing
without her mainstay sinewaves. Using just contact mics – four
of them and a mixer on a table in the corner of the performance space
– a sound source she'd apparently not touched in some three
years, it was very much an exploration, a discovery of exactly what
her tools were in performance, moving the microphones carefully around
the table to produce pops, scrapes and wheezes, rubbing them with
wires and fingers to create gentler sounds, and pressing them against
the table top to subtly modulate the background hiss. Every action
felt as haphazard as it was necessary, in a performance with all the
dramatic tension Yoshimura’s set had lacked.
Like his duo with Unami the night before, Keith Rowe's solo performance
moved away from the foundation drones that have characterized much
of his work. For this show he selected extracts from four pieces of
baroque music – the slow movement of a Marcello oboe concerto,
two motets by Cassanea de Mondonville, and arias from operas by Rameau
and Purcell – which he played from his iPod in a pre-determined
order. Even though, as he explained later, the pieces had very specific
connotations – one represented profundity, another death –
in performance he made no attempt either to interact with or respond
to them. Instead they created an environment in which other, separate
music occurred. The laptop was now closed, though the steel wool,
butter knife, and electric fan still figured prominently, their scrapes
and rumbles supplemented by the music and captured radio signals –
fiery spikes, careful whispers, erratic rhythms of distant chatter
and crosstalk – played from a headphone into the guitar which
served as an antenna. It was a unique departure from Rowe's past solo
performances – reminiscent perhaps of his duo with Julien Ottavi
at ErstQuake 2 in September 2005, which ended with both musicians
walking offstage and classical music playing on quietly on a spotlit
radio – and one that also recalled Graham Lambkin’s Salmon
Run, in which the listener is invited to listen as much to the
musician as to what the musician is hearing. Making use of recorded
music in the context of an improvised music festival might seem slightly
subversive, but it provided valuable and subtle insight into the way
Rowe himself listens, and the way we listen.
DAY 3
The third night began with the duo of Sachiko M and Keith Rowe, who
set to work at once with his scrabbling and scraping, making heavy
use of the metal sponge, and doing something with a charcoal pencil
that sounded a little like digging through light gravel (resulting
in something looking almost architectural on the worksheet he had
laid out beneath his guitar). Once more, the laptop remained closed.
I was reminded of Jeph Jerman’s work with crumbled leaves and
branches, though Rowe had no organic material visible on his table.
Sachiko returned to her more familiar sinewave generators, working
in a vein closer to her Salon de Sachiko (IMJ), with pops,
spiky beeps, and only occasional extended high frequency tones. She
extended her palette of sounds by loosening the wires between the
sine generators and moving the generators themselves around. It was
fascinating to see her bring some of the technique she showed with
the contact mics to her sinewave performance, something she hadn't
done in June last year when I saw her in Houston. The interaction
between the performers was intricate, if somewhat oblique, with Rowe’s
careful textures providing an ideal staging area for Sachiko’s
sudden sounds. Perhaps the most charming moment of the festival was
the moment the two of them made eye contact with the almost simultaneous
realization that the set was complete, and broke into broad smiles.
 The
next set was for me the least successful. Mitsuhiro Yoshimura and
Katsura Yamauchi provided the only performance that really set acoustic
instruments against electronics. No longer in the dark, Yoshimura
took to the side of the stage to control the feedback from his room
microphone. His performance this time was stronger than his solo set,
more serene but also more confident, holding the sounds longer and
transitioning between them more smoothly and carefully. Yamauchi,
on the other hand, did not live up to the set which had opened the
festival. Instead of finding a focus and exploring it alongside his
playing partner, he seemed merely to run rapidly through his sonic
vocabulary, as if searching for the right sound to match Yoshimura's
drones. Hurrying through squelchy burbles, breathy half-valved notes
and clacky flurries of finger sounds, he ended each phrase with a
rushed, loud intake of breath that bookended his sounds in a way that
didn’t seem at all appropriate. As a display of technique it
was interesting, but he didn’t stumble upon anything that met
Yoshimura’s sine tones until the very last moment, when he came
up with a gorgeous multiphonic whisper that filled the spaces around
the narrow tones with vibrant texture. Unfortunately he elected not
to explore that particular sound further, and the set came to a natural
end soon after.
The festival concluded with a performance by Keith Rowe and Toshimaru
Nakamura, a duo active for much of the past decade. This was their
first show together since 2006, and both seemed very excited to be
playing together again, picking up at once with high energy and fierce
charge, crashing through noisy bursts, sputtery swirls, and spikes
of high and low frequency waves. Rowe clearly demonstrated that his
new table of equipment was more than capable of piling up the characteristic
thick textured foundational drones, which Nakamura matched with blustery
bubbles and pops, sharp high frequency stabs and crunchy drones of
his own. It was somehow appropriate that a festival subtitled "light"
should close with such heady intensity.
And so came to a close the sixth AMPLIFY festival, and the
second to take place in Tokyo. The first was back in 2002, subtitled
balance and documented in an Erstwhile box set. Whereas
that event served as a broader encounter between European and Japanese
improvisers, and a showcase for Erstwhile (nearly all of the participants
and most of the groupings having already appeared on the label), only
one of the duos at AMPLIFY: light, Keith Rowe and Toshimaru
Nakamura, had recorded previously for Abbey's imprint (on 2001's Weather
Sky, a live set included in the AMPLIFY 2002: balance
box and 2005's between). Three of the festival's seven participants
have yet to appear on Erstwhile. AMPLIFY: light was
both more focused, and also more speculative – several of the
duos are expected to release records in the near future, some with
their first recording sessions planned for the week following the
festival. One reason for this is that the maturity of the music has
permitted a somewhat riskier program, without concern that the musicians
won't find the delicate balance of contrast and complement that Jon
Abbey has always provided as a label manager and festival curator.
And that balance was certainly achieved, if anything more confidently
than in the 2002 festival. Additionally, the great understanding
of the Tokyo improvisation scene that Yuko Zama added provided this
year's festival with a deeper connection with both the musicians and
their performance space. The performers seemed quite comfortable
with their new partnerships and the risks they were taking, a feeling
which crossed over to the audience and provided me with the most intimate
and absorbing series of performances I have ever attended.–MF
Thanks to Yuko Zama for permission to use her photographs, though
they look a darn site better over at her flickr site unsullied by
PhotoShop - DW
Matt
Davis / Matt Milton / Bechir Saade
DUN
Esteban
Algora / Alessandra Rombolá / Ingar Zach
…DE LAS PIEDRAS
Hugh
Davies
PERFORMANCES 1969-1977
Hugh
Davies + Adam Bohman / Lee Patterson / Mark Wastell
FOR HUGH DAVIES
 Dun
is an album whose fecundity is inversely proportional to its lean
constitution, which at various times takes us back to the early days
of EAI when "reductionism" wasn't yet an over-abused definition,
or an outright banality. Trumpeter Davis and bass clarinettist Saade,
having already established their improvising personalities through
a string of considerable collaborations and projects, are joined here
by violinist Matt Milton for a three-way exchange that never strays
from the zone where dynamics fluctuate between p and ppp.
Eviscerating the secluded parts of their tools, they wander across
godforsaken peripheries of uneven vibrations, liquid fluttering, weakened
harmonics and enlightened reclusiveness, with Saade's undulating partials
and Davis's reticentoff-the-record statements interspersed with sections
where all one perceives is a sound of termites gnawing at the wood
of a vacant house, creaking noise and nocturnal movement asphyxiated
by the all-pervading murmur of an insuppressible isolation. Milton's
approach to the violin, which in part recalls Ernesto Rodrigues' infinitesimal
viola inspections, is definitely not extraneous to this threadbare
simulacrum of acoustic decay. Davis is also credited with "field
recordings", but you'd be hard put to say where the actual playing
ends and the pre-recorded sounds begin.
 The
sound of stones is attractive for many people and there are artists
– Stephan Micus comes to mind – who've built a sizeable
portion of their fame and fortune upon it. In …de las piedras,
flautist Alessandra Rombolá, besides gracing the improvisations
with her facility on the main instrument, is also heard manoeuvring
a "tiles installation" that contributes a relatively physical
quality to several sections of an outing which, for its very nature,
is possibly the closest thing to certain Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening-related
recordings that Another Timbre has published to date. Accordingly,
the fact that Algora mainly offers dissonant swells of accordion bathed
in the natural reverb of the Eremita de la Anunciata in Urueña
(Spain) – a stone building, if you had any doubts – is
not irrelevant to the overall mood, which maintains an aura of inscrutability
and suspension across its six tracks. We're at a safe distance from
celebrated models of "relaxing music", though; the harsh
beating between divergent frequencies occurring throughout the marvellous
"Galena" and Zach's earsplitting zings clashing with Algora's
low-register moans and Rombolá's well-placed flute stabs represent
an ideal display of the musicians' disinclination to abandon a fighting
stance – but we're talking martial art rather than trading punches.
This is seriously considered, finely executed on-the-spot composition
in a truly consecrated environment.
 In
the brief history of free improvisation, the importance of Hugh Davies'
experimentations based on self-built instruments is undeniable, and
three years after his death he's celebrated by a pair of releases
on Simon Reynell's label. Taken by itself, Performances 1969-1977
is just an oddity for collectors, especially due to the not exceptional
audio quality which furnishes the tracks with a patina of poverty
that, in this case at least, affects the importance of the gesture.
Although a mid-70s unaccompanied performance at Ronnie Scott's is
interesting evidence of how the man managed to sustain, all alone,
the attention of relatively unsuspecting spectators,
and everybody should be curious to find out about a duo of "Shozygs"
(one of the many peculiar creatures fathered by the protagonist),
the only plausible method to accurately assess this archival material
would be with the aid of (unfortunately non-existent) footage of Davies
in action. Otherwise, the greater part of the substance contained
by this limited edition CDR is nearer to scarcely appealing noise
– mostly of the metallic variety – than music.
 For
Hugh Davies, a homage to the English pioneer by Adam Bohman,
Lee Patterson and Mark Wastell, is another matter. Manipulating respectively
a prepared balalaika, amplified objects and cello, they decided to
bring into play the recordings of the abovementioned Performances,
interacting with portions of the early tapes, respecting the essential
concept yet at the same time adding their own sauce. The pieces were
made using all the possible combinations: Wastell is the Chosen One
who's featured in a "solo duet" with the original tape,
then we have Bohman/Patterson v. Davies and the rest of the tracks
feature all three v. the Old Master until the final trio minus Hugh.
The record is an exercise in attentive listening, the timbres meshing
in ways that don't really surprise but still manage to rub the listener
the right way most of the time. A careful sense of spacing and the
ever accurate choice of the moments in which the harsh must replace
the faint (and vice versa) represent an impartial testimony of the
players' admiration for the craft of this resourceful sonic artisan.
It's perhaps best experienced at low volume, ears pricked up to catch
infinitesimal vibrations and small cracks amidst the umbrae of a cautious
materiality.–MR
Jim
O'Rourke
TAMPER
Osorezan
MIMIDOKODESUKA
The
Red Krayola
FINGERPOINTING
David
Grubbs
AN OPTIMIST NOTES THE DUSK
 It's
hard to hear Jim O'Rourke's first CD Tamper now, 17 years
after it was first released and a good 14 years or so since I first
encountered it, and try to recall its immediate context. By wrenching
it from the clutches of history through reissue, Drag City are performing
a good deed, but they're also stripping the album of surrounding evidence;
O'Rourke means differently now, which is why reviewers have been clutching
for Wilco parallels instead of discussing Tamper's process.
While the album is about signification, these days we'd like to think
we are much more culturally savvy, having cottoned on to the way the
socio-cultural function of music blinds our ears to the "purity"
of the sounding of a clarinet, or oboe, or etc. In 1991, O'Rourke's
brief was to address this thorny issue by removing instrumental "definition"
from sound – in his head, that meant peeling away the instrument's
attack and mapping the instruments through cross-fades that remove
the moment of instigation from the essence of sounding. This tactic
only partly works, though arguably you could only tell "Ascend
Through Unspoken Shadow" features violin and cello due to liner
notes telling you they're there: your hearing of violin and cello
is predicated on textual referents (including instrumentation details
in the liners is both O'Rourke's great undoing, and his finest conceptual
sleight of hand...). If all you're left with is sound, though, it's
a good thing O'Rourke's ear was clearly already well-developed. You're
not surprised to see Christoph Heemann and David Jackman's names appear
in the thanks section, as O'Rourke's language is that of the more
liminal end of early 1990s dronology. HNAS at their coolest, Organum
and Morphogenesis all serve as vague reference points, and like O'Rourke,
those artists have made great effort to focus on sounding as opposed
to playing. Listening now, with the benefit of having heard a little
more music since my first encounter with Tamper in 1994,
I'm wondering how much of this is indebted to Alvin Lucier or James
Tenney. The ever-climbing tones of "Ascend Through Unspoken Shadow"
feel like an acoustic equivalent of Tenney's For Ann (Rising),
while the acoustic alienation effect O'Rourke's aiming for is reminiscent
of Lucier: slowly ascending acoustic instrumentation passing through
pure tones, the better to map their moments of synchronicity and duality.
This broader context helps save Tamper from its occasional
shortcomings: sometimes O'Rourke's treatments now seem a little dated
at times, but in a recent interview with Josh Ronsen, O'Rourke seems
resigned to the temporal fixity of the work.
 Drag
City have also excavated Mimidokodesuka by Osorezan, the
trio of O'Rourke, Chris Corsano (drums) and Darin Gray (bass). It's
especially thrilling for the reappearance of Gray, whose St Louis
Shuffle solo disc on Family Vineyard is one of the most unfairly
underrated improv records of the past ten years or so, but the disc
is also a good reminder of O'Rourke's grounding in free improvisation,
something we've not really heard him do for some time. Particularly
with this level of activity – in this context, I've tended to
plump for O'Rourke in collaboration with Günter Müller or
Eddie Prévost, players who push him in other directions, but
here his playing is spiky and the better for it, erupting occasionally
into blasts of feedback that remind you why he was so impressed by
Ray Russell. Corsano is on typically fine form, and the trio lock
together quickly and graciously. I could do without O'Rourke's stringy,
plastic guitar tone at times, but that's a pretty small quibble.
 O'Rourke
also appears on Fingerpointing, the nine-years-coming release
of his alternate mix of The Red Krayola's Fingerpainting.
One of the best in The Red Krayola's 90s run of releases, Fingerpainting
paid direct tribute to their debut, 1967's The Parable of Arable
Land, particularly structurally, something reinforced by its
titling schema – see the five "Freeform Freakout"s
contained herein. Head Krayola Mayo Thompson rejected O'Rourke's mix
back in 1999, and I have to say I understand why; listening to O'Rourke's
version is a profoundly dislocating experience, even by Red Krayola
standards. This is not to say it's less than an excellent listen;
like pretty much every Red Krayola album since Thompson's second wind
came through in the early 90s, it's an intriguing web of non-pro pop
and free sound. The complex negotiation between Thompson's projected
ideal of Krayola noise and the shifting line-up's interpretation of
his conceptual parameters makes for a keen tension you can hear in
the non-linear development of both the freakouts and the songs. It's
cool to hear another version of first-wave Krayola obscurity "Vile
Vile Grass", and some of the other songs are particularly potent
renderings of Thompson's logically illogical writing process, "There
There Betty Betty" being a particularly classy example. Call
it purposeful dislocation, if you want, or plotted/planned fragmentation
– but the pop-not-pop thinking inherent to Thompson's best creations
still makes for a goddamn marvellous blast of non-consensual song-noise
shot from the sidelines.–JD
 O'Rourke's
erstwhile partner in crime (Gastr del Sol, Dexter's Cigar etc.) David
Grubbs has cut back on his touring of late – no doubt a teaching
position at Brooklyn College and the arrival of little Emmett Bowman-Grubbs
are in part responsible – but he's back on top form on An
Optimist Notes The Dusk. No question of Grubbs either mellowing
or whatever the opposite of mellowing is in middle age, for everything
he's released since The Serpentine Similar has sounded if
not exactly middle aged at least grown-up, from the bookish intricacy
of his lyrics, invariably printed in the accompanying booklet as poems
in their own right, to the carefully voiced, rhythmically free-floating
minor ninth and major seventh guitar chords he hangs them on. As a
songwriter, Grubbs has always followed (Mayo) Thompson's First Law,
namely Any Lyric Can Be Made To Fit With Any Melodic Line, however
abstruse the former and angular / unsingable the latter, and "An
Optimist Declines" here is an especially fine example of their
perverse cohabitation. "Holy Fool Music" gives drummer Michael
Evans something more to get stuck into, but Grubbs can't resist sticking
spokes in the wheel, inserting pauses like punctuation marks, which
eventually derail the song altogether and send it segueing into the
luminous chord sequences of the following instrumental, "Storm
Sequence". David has always had a soft spot for lowercase improvisers
– see his Taku Sugimoto epiphany in the October Wire
– and after a fruitful collaboration with cellist Nikos Veliotis
(The Harmless Dust, Headz, 2005), this time it's trumpeter
Nate Wooley who's piped aboard the Good Ship Grubbs, to trace fine
lines around the singer's black squares on the opening "Gethsemani
Night" and add chilly blasts of metal breath on "The Not
So Instant", whose austere drones close the album on a more sombre
note (is that Wooley at the four minute mark or are they whistling
kettles? I'll have a cup, David). Like all Grubbs albums, Optimist
doesn't outstay its welcome, clocking in at under 38 minutes, but
there's enough here to keep you entertained and enthralled for the
rest of the year.–DW
Various
Artists
SMILING THROUGH MY TEETH
Sonic Arts Network
 Coming
as always in an 18 x 18cm booklet, tastefully illustrated this time
with engravings culled from an old medical encyclopaedia, or made
to look as though they were (shades of the original Incus edition
of The Topography Of The Lungs), this latest offering from
the Sonic Arts Network is curated by Vicki Bennett, aka People Like
Us, and sets out to explore "humour in sound art." Is there
something in the Sonic Arts Network contract that forces those curating
its albums to include as much music as possible by resorting to snippets
from longer works? David Cotner's Otherness compilation last
year was already bursting at the seams with excerpts, and no fewer
than nine of the 32 tracks on Smiling Through My Teeth are
edits from longer works.
Compilations are by definition wide-ranging, but this one is particularly
bitty and frustrating, all the more so because several of its tracks
seem to explore the same territory. If the name of the game is playing
well-known tunes in which a silly noise – buzzer, bell, burp
– is assigned to each pitch of the melody, there doesn't seem
to be much point including both Spike Jones's' "William Tell
Overture", classic though it is, and Paul Lowry's "I Got
Rhythm", when the latter does the job much better. But we get
not one but two versions of the Rossini overture, the second by the
Viennese Seven Singing Sisters. Similarly, do we really need both
Ground Zero's "China White" and "Motha Fuck Mitsubishi"
by Otomo Yoshihide and Yamantaka Eye (alias DJ Carhouse and MC Hellshit)?
Personally, I'd trade them both for the Vomit Lunchs (aka Hironori
Murakami) "Total Pointless Guidance Mix (Stock, Hausen and Walkman)",
a tour de force of mashed-up McCartney and metallic madness.
More fun than DJ Brokenwindow / David Chandler's montage of Dukes
of Hazzard sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane (misspelled Roscoe here)
and Kit Clayton's clicks'n'cuts. I guess the heavy emphasis on mix'n'mash
was only to be expected, though, given Bennett's own background in
plunderphonics. Thankfully, the old school class acts still shine
through: John Oswald and Christian Marclay's superbly paced and deliciously
witty recontextualisations of Count Basie and Maria Callas haven't
aged a day since they appeared in 1987.
Witty, yes. You certainly can't say that of Rank Sinatra's death metal
karaoke revamp of A-Ha's "Take On Me", which is easily as
hideous as the original, or M.A. Numminen, Tommi Parko and Pekka Kujanpää's
"Eleitä Kolmelle Röyhtäilijälle", whose
offering (as indigestible as its title) consists of little more than
belches. Sorry, but I'm well past the age where listening to someone
fart or burp out the National Anthem (or any melody you care to mention)
makes me giggle. Same goes for Gwilly Edmondez screaming "cock!"
and the track that follows it, entitled "Spaz", by someone
called, umm, Spaz.
 Hearing
other people laughing isn't always all that funny, either. The extract
from 9.11 (Desperation Is The Mother of Laughter) –
title's not exactly amusing for starters – a 58-minute work
by Thomas Liljenberg and Leif Elggren (Swedish conceptual artist and
reigning monarch of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland) is strangely
disturbing. And if you think there's something hilarious about Justice
Yeldham (photo, right), whose performances consist of squashing his
face into an amplified piece of plate glass until it breaks and showers
the audience with blood, you're one sick puppy. Nor am I falling off
my chair listening to Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck 's "Eel
Dog Rap Mix", but then again I never find much to enjoy in all
that Shimpfluch actionist stuff, to be honest. Maybe Vicki Bennett
doesn't either, and has included the track, along with the resolutely
unfunny Nihilist Spasm Band rant that follows it, merely as a warning
to artists not to take themselves too seriously. The NSB's "Going
Too Far" certainly sounds daft in context, bookended as it is
by Mark "Zatumba" Gillespie's dreadfully inept gargling
and Bennett's own magnificent "Air Hostess" (with Ergo Phizmiz),
an utterly irresistible slab of lounge pop plunderphonics featuring
Nelson Riddle's "Lolita" and Bing Crosby's "Shadow
Waltz" riding some killer mambo grooves. There's more delightfully
twisted lounge in "Dark Days Bright Nights" by The Freddy
McGuire Show, a West Coast trio featuring Anne McGuire, Don Joyce
and Jon Leidecker, who also goes by the name Wobbly, which is a pretty
good description of their offering here.
Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and Dave Soldier's search to write the
world's "most unwanted song" (about which you can read more
at http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/04/a-scientific-at.html) was an
obvious choice, but the two brief edits included here, complete with
de rigueur bagpipes, tubas, rapping opera singers and duelling
banjos, though predictably awful, just don't make me laugh. There's
something oddly clinical about the whole exercise, in fact. I suppose
Vicki finds it funny, though. Fair enough – it'd be a pretty
bloody miserable world if we all shared the same sense of humour after
all, wouldn't it? – but it's still hard for me to figure out
what led her to select some of the material on offer here. You could
be forgiven for thinking that the excerpt from Nurse With Wound's
 "You
Walrus Hurt The One You Love" had been chosen only for its title
– quite why Bennett chose this particular minute from The
Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion when there are many funnier moments
elsewhere on the album (the piece on the B side's called "Great
Balls of Fur", by the way) is something of a mystery. Elsewhere,
there's plenty of hot air around, with some serious raspberry blowing
on Adachi Tomomi's "Lippp" (fortunately, more interesting
examples of his work with Waiswisz-like tilt sensors are on offer
on YouTube), balloon blowing on Bill Morrison's "Single Breath
Blow" (a reminder that just because something's weird doesn't
necessarily mean it's funny), and bellowing blather from Christian
Bok, whose "Ubu Hubbub" is far too smart for the assembled
company, but the album eventually runs well and truly out of steam
with Xper. Xr.'s "Ride On Time" – someone please tell
me what's supposed to be funny here – and the seemingly interminable
nine minutes of Richard Lair and Dave Soldier's "Thai Elephant
Orchestra Perform Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony First Movement."
This tries ever so hard to follow in the footsteps of the late, great
Portsmouth Sinfonia (a word of advice: don't) with a flaccid brass
band reading of the Beethoven chestnut plus, yes, elephants playing
Lair's specially designed instruments. It raises an occasional smile,
but little more.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Smiling Through
My Teeth is entertaining enough, but only scratches the surface
of a deep and complex subject. What about Gerard Hoffnung, P.D.Q.
Bach, Haydn's string quartets, Luc Ferrari's Music Promenade,
John Cage's Credo in US, Erik Satie's parodies of Chopin,
Mozart's Musical Joke, Mauricio Kagel (RIP)'s Ludwig
Van, Alterations, Eugene Chadbourne, John Zorn's Morricone and
Misha Mengelberg's Monk? Or what about some of the pieces Kembrew
McLeod mentions in his rather stodgy accompanying essay and which
don't appear on the disc (something from William Shatner's The
Transformed Man, Yngwie Malmsteen's Prophet of Doom,
or the Nirvana / Destiny's Child "marriage made in hell",
Smells Like Teen Booty)? There's plenty of scope for a sequel,
in any case, and with the proliferation of cheap music software and
ever easier filesharing facilities on offer, you could probably make
your own humour-in-music compilation without much difficulty. Have
a go: I bet you could come up with something as funny as this.–DW
Olivia
Block / Sandra Gibson / Luis Recoder
UNTITLED
SoSEDITIONS
Lee
Hangjun / Hong Chulki
EXPANDED CELLULOID, EXTENDED PHONOGRAPH
Balloon & Needle
The
problem with watching experimental cinema on DVD is quite simply that
the screen's too small, as I said once before here.
With a "normal" movie, we suspend disbelief, get "into
it", and tune out the visual distractions of the outside world
– the plant pot on top of the telly, the family photos on the
wall behind, the colour and pattern of the wallpaper, and so forth.
But with the more abstract world of experimental video, with no visual
or aural narrative element to draw us in, we become more aware of
our surroundings. It's a bit like the near silence of the Malfatti
school (I think Radu would now grudgingly accept he's started a "school"
of sorts, even if he didn't back in 2001), which raises sound events
in the outside world to the same level of perceptual importance as
the music itself. The images on these two fine DVDs are beautiful,
impressive and at times genuinely moving, in a mysterious way, but
one senses that the work of filmmakers Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder
and Lee Hangjun is best appreciated on a big screen in a gallery space.
Gibson and Recoder, either working individually or in collaboration
under the name of Presstapes, are especially sensitive to site-specific
considerations, and I have no doubt that, on the other side of the
planet, Lee Hangjun is too. But the fact they've all consented to
allow their work to appear in DVD format is not to be overlooked.
So, unless you're lucky enough to catch their work live one day, these
discs will have to do.
 Gibson
and Recoder's Untitled is a 42-minute black-and-white film
consisting of a white rectangle (set in a grey frame which drifts
in and out of focus during the first half of the film) on a black
background, gradually bombarded by specks of light that appear to
originate behind the frame but which soon break out of its confines,
before eventually blurring and fading into darkness. The rectangle
itself is not uniformly white, but morphs constantly into dappled,
quivering blotches that sometimes suggest a film being projected somewhere
behind a translucent window pane (or maybe that's just me playing
at Hermann Rorschach). Watching it is a pleasant if not exactly mindbending
experience – though as a Bridget Riley fan I do appreciate the
way the frame appears to move forwards and backwards, giving the illusion
it's hovering somewhere between the viewer and the screen –
sensitively complemented by the elegant drones and processed field
recordings of Olivia Block's music. And that's the problem: the music
and the image work so well together, evolving at the same stately
pace and changing at the same moment – the arrival of the flying
specks occurs roughly halfway through and is accompanied by a crescendo
of crackles, and both music and image fade out hand in hand at the
end – that there's little sense of the friction between media
that I expect from a collaborative venture. It's all very consensual,
very accomplished, but one longs for one or two moments of real surprise,
a sudden shift of focus or emphasis to throw the whole structure into
relief. Needless to say, Block's music is splendid – and like
Toshi Nakamura's soundtrack to 2006's AVVA with Billy Roisz
(see above) it could easily stand as an album in its own right –
and I could happily sit in silence in a cinematheque and watch Gibson
/ Recoder videos all night, but, it seems to me, the thrill of mixed
media work is how it exposes and explores the cracks between the different
perceptual mechanisms involved. Film and music both play with notions
of time and rhythm, but very differently: there's a very strong sense
of rhythm to a film like Béla Tarr's Sátántangó,
for example, both on the macro and micro level, but a piece of music
structured according to the same durational scheme – seven hours
divided into twelve long sections, each subdivided into "shots"
of about two minutes' duration – would be tedious in the extreme.
Long-haul musical works like the Rowe / Nakamura / Otomo / Sachiko
four-hour concert from AMPLIFY 2004 (ErstLive 005) are far more subtle
and ambiguous. Don't get me wrong here: there's nothing frustrating
or unsatisfying about Untitled (the only frustration I feel
is not being able to assemble the packaging correctly: the disc comes
with three pieces of pre-folded stiff brown card that most normal
human beings of average intelligence should be able to assemble into
a cute little box, but I'll be buggered if I can do it) – but
in terms of what can be done with the DVD medium I think it's just
scratching the surface.
 Scratching
the surface is what Lee Hangjun and Hong Chulki do very well, the
former playing with degraded, scuffed and generally fucked-up film
stock (shades of the Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine), the latter
with his turntables. Expanded Celluloid, Extended Phonograph
features two half hour pieces, The Cracked Share and Metaphysics
of Sound, plus footage of a live performance in February this
year (well you don't actually see Hong Chulki manhandling his gear
but you get some idea of what the event might have looked like from
the back of the gallery), and comes with a beautifully produced 20-page
booklet complete with still photographs and stillborn (though well
translated, it seems) text courtesy filmmaker Kim Gok. Lee Hangjun's
films split the screen into two, drawing the eye inevitably to the
vertical line that separates left and right, as images scatter and
splatter on either side. Most of them are abstract, rips, gashes,
holes, burns and all manner of corroded degradations flying past at
high speed, but from time to time recognisable images – cars,
faces, clouds – appear. Hong Chulki's ferocious turntablism,
itself a corrosive mix of feedback squeals and disturbing crunches
and scratches (Otomo fans will love it) makes no attempt to follow
the film (how could it?), even when the images take an occasional
break – Metaphysics falls into distinct chapters –
leaving more room for viewers / listeners to make the connections
themselves. Which is as it should be.–DW
(POST-?)ROCK
Hair
Police
CERTAINTY OF SWARMS
No Fun
 To
be honest I don't know what this review is doing in "(Post-?)Rock"
or post anything, except perhaps post mortem, which is probably
what anyone weaned on "classic rock" – now there's
a stupid term for you – will need after this latest splendid
offering from Messrs Beatty, Connelly and Tremaine. But as David
Keenan in a full page pullout in The Wire – no less
– makes a mighty persuasive case for Certainty Of Swarms
as a potential kick in the ass for rock (though as far as I'm concerned
it's been dead for well over a decade, maybe two), here it is. Well,
I couldn't really put it alongside Arek Gulbenkoglu now, could I?
(Might make more sense though than alongside Lars Hollmer and Steven
Brown, but never mind, such is the joy of alphabetical order..)
Keenan's argument is quite convincing, not least because Hair Police
actually play real instruments, like guitars and drums. Well, in
the same way that Genesis P.Orridge plays guitar, you might say.
Funnily enough, Throbbing Gristle have an odd habit of popping up
whenever Hair Police are mentioned – understandable maybe
since the lyrics of Kentucky's finest are, apparently (I can't confirm
this because I can't honestly make many of them out) concerned with
the same kind of dark matter as TG, and titles like "Intrinsic
To The Execution" and "Freezing Alone" should give
you some clue as what to expect. And there is a real sense of pulse
in tracks like "Mangled Earth" – nothing you could
get down and boogie to, but certainly something that could help
a serious workout in the gym – but it's almost entirely buried
alive, along with just about everything else, under layers of toxic
noise. There are nods to various kinds of metal, from death to stoner
to molten to rusty, and the slower tracks recall the Swans' murkier
moments, but "On a Hinge" makes "Raping A Slave"
sound like Leonard Cohen. Classic rock, indeed.–DW
Lars
Hollmer
VIANDRA
Cuneiform
 One
of this writer's wet dreams, in all likelihood destined never to
be realized, is a DVD containing footage of the 1992-93 version
of Lars Hollmer's Looping Home Orchestra, with Olle Sundin, Lars
Krantz, Eino Haapala, Jean Derome and Fred Frith. At least that
band was immortalized on Door Floor Something Window (Victo),
which is among the most rewarding live records I've ever heard (get
yourself a copy). The originator of Samla Mammas Manna is an artist
with incontestable transparency of intent, and Viandra,
arriving eight years after the unspectacular Utsikter (Krax),
is great; perhaps not on the masterwork level of the above-mentioned
live album or 1997's Andetag (Krax), but pretty close.
Hollmer's aesthetic remains consistent: childish candor enhanced
by a harmonic sagacity equally indebted to Bach and Scandinavian
folk music, boosted by the intricacy that made SMM stalwarts of
Rock In Opposition. The compositions on Viandra unleash
a Wonderfalls-like series of surprises via cuddly melodies and intricate
counterpoint which make your day without necessarily eliciting cheeriness:
Hollmer knows how to astonish through dissonant activity on the
periphery of apparently innocuous lullabies. The music is finely
rendered by Hollmer, Michel Berckmans, Santiago Jimenez and Andreas
Tengberg, as well as occasional participants such as original Samla
guitarist Coste Apetrea on mandolin and a trio of little ladies
(presumably nieces, given that two of three are named Hollmer) tenderly
delivering a sing-along of sorts in "Lilla Bye" and "Alice".
Best of all is the superb triptych of "Påztema",
"Prozesscirk" and "Konstig (Strange)" at the
CD's midpoint: prototypical specimens of the Swede's craft, these
pieces alternate mystifying compositional devices (with Berckmans
adding pinches of UniversZero-esque, bassoon-fueled mystery) and
sudden openings onto poised consciousness, a poignant backwards
look toward an unrepeatable, long-gone merriment.–MR
Nine
Rain
VI
Independent Recordings
 The
bewilderment caused by probably the most bizarre Nine Rain recording
to date panics the flailing critic into suggesting comparisons to
Ives, Cage, Lee Scratch Perry and that "Bali Ha'i" moment
in South Pacific... Their sixth album is dominated by the systems-music-inspired
electronics of notional leader Steven Brown's collaborator Nikolaus
Klau. While the Central American folk themes of percussionist Alejandro
Herrera and guitarist José Luis Domínguez remain, this
is more reminiscent of Brown's transgressional gem Half Out
than the spooked Latinisms of earlier Nine Rain. Klau's electronics
conjure up Cabaret Voltaire carwrecks, crazy gamelan, Tuxedomoon theatrics,
Forbidden Planet sound effects, even Kurt Weill-like lurching
waltzes. Brown concentrates on Surman-like reeds, and we get to hear
little of his ravishing Ellingtonian acoustic piano. Outrageously,
on "Gordon Blue", they actually attempt a piano-heavy dubbed-up
bluebeat/rocksteady reggae tune reminiscent of the Tighten Up
compilations of the 1960s. And succeed. On "Resurrection",
with its louche rhumba and wailing female choir, they conjure up "Bali
Ha'i", the Road To… movies, and maybe even the
original King Kong. (We should also remember that Brown sang
Claire Trevor's "Moanin' Low", from John Huston's Key
Largo, on Half Out.) "Serbia" is possibly
the key to this recording. Brown wouldn't come clean with the truth
about his composerly intentions even if you jabbed him with a cattle
prod, but the tsunami of counterpointed themes in this piece has Charles
Ives written all over it. You can't dance to it, but it's just possibly
Nine Rain's cleverest outing yet. Slip the CD into a computer and
the view-list menu reveals a host of multimedia works, including a
series of videos featuring footage of terrifying events from the shortlived
people's republic of Oaxaca (Brown lives there, and was involved in
the uprising). A stunning short film shows Mexican artist Gabriela
León, an iconic diva clad in rubber and a barbed-wire necklace,
single-handedly confronting a line of shield-wielding riot cops as
her enraged response to state brutality.–JG
Irmin
Schmidt & Kumo
AXOLOTL EYES
Spoon Records
 This
pairing of former Can keyboard player Irmin Schmidt and electronics
maverick Kumo (aka Jono Podmore) debuted live in Britain at the Can
Solo Projects event at the South Bank Centre in London in 1999, where
they fought an exhilarating and funny improvising duel between keyboards
and electronics. For anyone mourning the passing of Can (and, in 2001,
Can guitarist Micky Karoli) or too young to have caught them live,
this duo is perhaps the nearest you'll get to the spirit of classic
Can – or more specifically, on this follow-up to their 2001
debut Masters of Confusion, to the era of 1974's Soon
Over Babaluma. While Axolotl Eyes is firmly based in
electronica, the exquisite trumpet of Australian Ian Dixon places
it in the jazz-ambient zone of Jon Hassell and Nils-Petter Molvær,
though it's far superior to Molvær's hippy post-Miles noodlings;
indeed, Dixon's crystalline pealing tone is more reminiscent of Kenny
Wheeler or Lester Bowie. And unlike Molvær, the music plumbs
great dark depths of weird post-Stockhausen operatic grandeur, while
also remaining compulsively funky. Which, in a way, describes classic
Can. The CD also comes with a complementary 112-minute DVD of the
duo's 2001 multimedia installation at the Barbican Centre in London,
Flies, Guys and Choirs, which is simply the weirdest music
film I have seen since The Residents' cult classic Whatever Happened
to "Vileness Fats"? As Renaldo and the Loaf memorably
misquoted Sinatra, songs for swinging larvae indeed.–JG
Scorces
I TURN INTO YOU
Not Not Fun
 Scorces
are the duo of Christina Carter and Heather Leigh Murray, who share
between them pedal steel, electric guitar and voices. Some may know
Carter as one half of long-serving American outfit Charalambides,
and may also recall Murray’s tenure during one of the group’s
brief phases as a trio, around the time of the Joy Shapes
and Unknown Spin albums. (There were also some neat CD-Rs,
like CHT and Live Hand Held, which are worth hunting
down.) Murray’s history is a little more all over the shop –
starting in Ash Castles Of The Ghost Coast with her then-partner Shawn
MacMillen, she briefly retired from performance (except for time in
a Gamelan orchestra), returning with a breathtaking solo album Cuatro/Vocal
Recordings. After doing time with Charalambides, she relocated
to Glasgow and started playing in Taurpis Tula with David Keenan and
Alex Neilson, and continued recording and performing solo. Carter
has also released scores of solo CD-Rs on her Many Breaths Press,
and sometimes records with Andrew MacGregor as The Bastard Wing. Charalambides
made some of their greatest formal leaps when Murray was part of the
group – their Joy Shapes album is unparalleled both
within Charalambides’ body of work, and perhaps within the last
ten years of underground activity in America. Heavy with electricity,
dense and emotionally draining, Joy Shapes’s strongest
suit was the way it pushed the playing of the trio (also including
Tom Carter) far from their early, song-based craft; here was a glimpse
of another way of working which respected the skeletal structure that
props up song while simultaneously negotiating new terrain for six-string/pedal
steel improvisation. Listening again to Joy Shapes recently,
it struck me that it’s in some ways closer to the microtonal
attention to detail of some modern composition, combined with the
non-idiomatic anarchy of the best improvisation currently extant –
all wrapped up with the heft and grunt of great free rock.
I Turn Into You apparently has been sitting on the shelf
for a while – I’m not sure exactly when it was recorded,
but from correspondence with main players I’d gather it’s
been awaiting release for a few years. It feels correct, then, to
suggest it’s the long-awaited successor to Joy Shapes,
for within I Turn Into You, Carter and Murray tap into the
same near-religious/eschatological fervour that marked the earlier
album's most intense rides into the sun. But more importantly, here
Carter and Murray flip that simplistic, still-circling equation that
volume/activity equals intensity – most of I Turn Into You
is relatively minimal; there are stretches of near-silence, or periods
where Carter and Murray worry over the same clutch of notes for minutes,
near-obsessively, the better to unlock every nuance from their interactions.
There is a point, near the end of “Coming To A Forgotten Part”,
where they stay "still", one member plotting two repetitive
pitches, while the other works over a clutch of notes, the two patterns
slipping in and out of relation – it’s an exceptionally
evocative moment, as though you’re watching the players cleave
in and out of each other’s orbit, their bodies winding together,
limbs reaching for points just beyond their grasp.
The durational aspect is significant: because Scorces allow their
(non-)songs to unfold over extended periods, they can deal with whole
different ratios, different dynamics. A rupture in volume is all the
more startling for its emergence from a few minutes of quiet, determined,
low-level playing, and when vocals appear, they’re often intensely
surprising, even as they sometimes seem to slide unbidden from their
creators’ mouths – in this context, the figures singing
are flashes in landscapes, not centre foreground. While this isn’t
exactly a new thing, what I’m impressed by here is the relative
erasure of hierarchy in most of these performances – in instrumental
music, one instrument often takes pride of place, is fetishised (Keiji
Haino’s voice, Toshimaru Nakamura’s mixing board, uh,
Gene Simmons’s ass), but it’s harder to make those kinds
of claims about instrumental priority in Scorces’ music. This
is important because, although you can tell who’s on
pedal steel and who’s on electric guitar (largely due to liner
notes, mind), both the effects of duration and the nature of the playing
ultimately mean you’re no longer listening for those referents.
But neither does this music mesh or blur into a sea of indistinct
noise. If this seems confusing, that’s because it is
– countless listens later and I’m still figuring out what’s
going on the four sides of this double album, exactly how everything
works, even as giving in to its access of a "semiotic
world" becomes near-irresistible. And when you can trace the
lyrics, as on “Romance Is Not A Thing Of The Past”, which
is perhaps the record’s fulcrum, their content – personal
relations, physicality, the psychology of sensation, the dissolution
of the self into the other – somehow lock perfectly with the
record’s overarching approaches. Murray’s vocal performance
on this track is seriously zoned, and Carter’s playing on the
pedal steel staggering, all ricocheting drops into the void, stretched
and strained tonal action, and weightless, centre-less, reverberating
buzz and sigh.
This is one of the few recordings I’ve heard this year that
has dared to advance the possibility of unique ways for humans to
interact through music. Unrelentingly heavy, but not oppressively
so, it’s one of the most demanding listening experiences of
the year, and one of the most richly rewarding. Its one fundamental
leap is all-important: whether entirely successful or not (and I would
say it is), I Turn Into You suggests there could be yet another
approach to the language of communication via sound, though that approach
will always be in flux, in process, hard to pin down. It’s overwhelming,
yet intensely human, and in its own odd way – and this is the
clincher for me, the thing that really elevates I Turn Into You
– actually quite humble, and humbling.–JD
Mark
Stewart
EDIT
Crippled Dick Hot Wax!
 For
those of us blessed to have been around to have caught them live,
The Pop Group and their singer Mark Stewart were, along with This
Heat, the ultimate example of the thrilling possibilities that post-punk
offered, and the likes of Simon Reynolds, in his excellent Rip
It Up and Start Again, agree. Nearly thirty years on, the solo
Stewart – here releasing his first recording in twelve years
– is just as wild, inspired, and angry as ever, and the politics
of As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade don't seem to
have mellowed that much. He's still up to his old tricks: smeared
and scratched dub workouts, police sirens, TV samples and musique
concrète, Ballardian or Burroughsian apocalyptic pronouncements,
and plenty of down-and-dirty funk that just begs to be compared to
James Brown, Sly Stone or Parliament/Funkadelic (no surprise when
you remember that Stewart fell in with the Sugarhill Gang's Keith
LeBlanc, Skip McDonald and Doug Wimbish – rap's answer to Sly
and Robbie, and the powerhouse trio behind "The Message"
and "White Lines (Don't Do It)" and, later, On-U Sound's
Adrian Sherwood – back when The Pop Group played the New York
No Wave scene – and they all appear in Tøni Schifer's
documentary, ON/OFF: Mark Stewart, from The Pop Group to The Maffia,
singing his praises). All, of course, "edited" through Stewart's
radical vision of sound manipulation and how to mess up a dance beat
with a storm of howling noise, including some amusing examples of
what Brian Eno called "antique Minimoog" sounds. The politics
are still there too; not least the rants about world poverty ("27
million people enslaved across the globe today") on "Strange
Cargo" – actually the name of an an anti-slavery campaign
he got involved with, and nothing to do with the Frank Borzage movie
– a dizzying mix of high life, calypso and dub. Strangest of
all, however, is the cover of The Yardbirds' "Mr. You're a Better
Man Than I", when you'd think he'd have gone for "For Your
Love". And all of it Mouli'd in a kitchen Stewart shares with
the ghost of John Cage. He always was a weird kid.–JG
Walter
& Sabrina
JUNG AHH FLEISCH
Danny Dark
Walter & Sabrina / Dietrich Eichmann Ensemble
DEMONS!
Danny Dark
I
set out to shed some light on Walter Cardew and Sabrina (Stephen)
Moore, but I hereby declare myself trounced by the intricacy of their
subplots. A solitary, apparently unconnected consideration, more literary
than musical, grazes this listener's mind when attempting to hook
up the different parts of the conundrum: the cryptic essays decorating
every item churned out by multimedia artist and psychoacoustic sonic
researcher Andrew McKenzie, better known as Hafler Trio. Unlike McKenzie's
calculated circumventions of normalcy, Moore's merciless lyrics offer
the audience a quest for the reasons for human helplessness, a lookout
for hope of sorts. Still, when trying to focus the attention on the
words' cultivated sleaze it's easy to get sidetracked by the exceptional
quality of the instrumental material, since, unlike Hafler Trio, Walter
& Sabrina dress words with something more than drones. Their output
is expertly designed to disturb the disturbed and stymie those searching
for the missing link between the music and their ignorance. Forget
the sordid pictures adorning the sleeves of the duo's releases and
the fact that all human beings must every once in a while come to
terms with ungovernable impulses, especially sexual. Everything else
causes perplexity, too: the duo's façade actually hides a chamber
group; the porn elements coexist with some of the most notable playing
of the last twenty years; and the lyrics are frequently submerged
by the music, or slashed by ruthless, stabbing noise. What are we
looking for, besides being aware that Jung Ahh Fleisch and
Demons! are the second and third part of a trilogy that began
with We Sing for the Future?
 In Jung
Ahh Fleisch's liners, there's a partial answer: "We are
lonely, don't want to be; we need to give people clues, ways into
our art." The only discernible clues are to be found in the extraordinary
complexity of the music, scored for reeds, brass, strings (including
guitar and double bass), piano and percussion, and including vocal
parts for two counter-tenors (Peter Crawford and Samuel Penkett),
a soprano (Celia Lu) and a contralto doubling on cello (Ayanna Witter-Johnson)
plus Moore and Gunnar Brandt. Sections where the orchestration is
confined to a three-semitone span suddenly open out into marvelously
stern counterpoint, on a par with the sharpest offerings by Art Bears
or Thinking Plague, yet the dissonant idiom makes this much harder
to take. An urge for redemption underscores the entire CD, intellectualism
partially forgotten in favour of a systematic rejection of whatever
logical explanation one might try and find. "Kat's Fitting In",
the strongest track, is a superbly designed if distressing patchwork,
a blend of virtuosic theatre and unforgiving reality – picture
a cross of early Art Zoyd and Motor Totemist Guild – that will
upset any pitiable listener eager for a lazy Sunday morning. The record
is tough as nails, the final tracks "HP" and "Is That
Nice?" (both featuring the Dietrich Eichmann Ensemble - more
about that later) dealing with not-so-secret relationships via devastating
clangor and raving desperation.
 Demons!
is a longer project – 116 minutes on two CDs – and the
words are mostly delivered this time by Moore himself, his often hysterical
yet polished recitation a challenge for those hoping to discover new
sources of post-Henry Cow methodological complication. Dietrich Eichmann
– composer, musicologist, pedagogue and founder of the Oaksmus
label, who has studied with Alexander Von Schlippenbach, Frederic
Rzewski, Garrett List and Walter Zimmermann – would appear a
most unlikely partner for W&S's tales of human failure, even though
the members of his ensemble, Gunnar Brandt-Sigursson, Michael Griener,
Alexander Frangenheim and Christian Weber, are no slouches themselves
in highlighting this kind of obsessed response through sheer procedural
brilliance. The soundtrack to Moore's performance includes autistic
repetitiveness, expressive hostility, neurotic patterns, percussion
whenever a hole becomes available and a pair of magnificent double
basses rumbling in the crucial moments. Make no mistake, this is as
uneasy listening as it comes, and Walter & Sabrina caution that
the digital distortion disfiguring the voices and instruments "shouldn't
be mistaken for faults". Funny, then, that during the first playback,
a power shortage in my house caused the disc to fizzle in the player
and grind to a halt with an error message. Fiendish stuff, indeed!
Lovers of avant-garde theatricality, or those who still revisit the
spoken segments of Zappa's 200 Motels, will have no problem
with this, but greenhorns may find it tests their endurance.
So, we're back to square one. Distortion eats chunks of text in Demons!,
and the instruments are often louder than the singers in Jung
Ahh Fleisch's mix. Does this mean that the artists prefer us
to be acquainted with just a fraction of the story? Are we supposed
to pick up on the available clues and formulate a private narrative?
Should we listen to the music watching a silent hardcore movie for
enhanced comprehension? Is this just a big hoax? Words, I'm convinced,
are a deception, incapable of bridging the millions of conflicting
points-of-view of human existence. These two CDs, results of a collision
between spiteful malice and craving for salvation, are in any case
nourishing fare for the attentive listener.–MR
JAZZ
& IMPROV
Paolo
Angeli / Evan Parker / Ned Rothenberg
FREE ZONE APPLEBY 2007
Psi
 The
2007 Appleby Jazz Festival must have been a pretty cheerless sight,
coming as it did amidst massive rain and flooding, and it's even
more dispiriting to hear that that disaster plus funding problems
have caused the 18-year-old festival to fold. So Free Zone Appleby
2007 is the last recorded example of the series that Parker
has curated at Appleby every year. Past FZAs have mostly been in
the vein of Parker's latterday enthusiasm for large-ensemble improv,
but in 2007 he convened an untypically small group: just himself,
Ned Rothenberg on alto sax and clarinets, and (a new name to me)
the guitarist Paolo Angeli. Angeli plays a modified Sardinian guitar
that doubles as a cello, getting a rich, raspy bowed sound that
wouldn't be out of place in a Renaissance viol consort; he also
uses it as a resonator for percussion, and occasionally adds a bit
of rock'n'roll distortion and Keith Rowe-style airwave-sampling.
From the open Angeli-Rothenberg duo, which falls into a bustling
lockstep (not quite a groove), it's clear that an overt rhythmic
drive, an emotional briskness and alertness, and a sense of droll
humour are important elements of this music. The following Parker/Rothenberg
duo confirms this: yes, there's the expected whirligig intricacy,
but Rothenberg's shrewd, slightly sardonic tone pulls Parker towards
a greater immediacy and bite than usual nowadays. The trio performances
that follow are exciting, excitable stuff – the scrambling
sense of mutual oneupmanship on "Shield (Blue) Trio 2"
has a comic timing so perfect it'd grace a 1930s screwball comedy,
and there's a marvellous sense of grotesquerie on "Trio 3",
as Parker's soprano mock-laments confront Rothenberg's tonguewagging
bass clarinet and Angeli does a one-man-band routine that ends in
a feedback hailstorm. This isn't improvised "dialogue"
– it's far more visceral stuff that gets at the whole of your
body: like any good comedy, it's got room for everything from absurdist
wit to funny walks and abject pratfalls. Whoever braved the inclement
weather witnessed some damn fine music, and the result is one of
the best (and most unexpected) items in the Psi catalogue to date.–ND
Ab
Baars Trio & Ken Vandermark
GOOFY JUNE BUG
Wig
 Ab
Baars' trio with Wilbert De Joode and drummer Martin van Duynhoven
teamed up a few years back with trombonist Joost Buis for the stellar
Kinda Dukish; on Goofy June Bug the guest this time
is the indefatigable Ken Vandermark, and the music is correspondingly
more in the vein of Vandermark's rather parched clockwork reconstructions
of free-jazz tradition. The two reedsman are quite closely matched
in terms of sound – especially their comparably frowsy, greyish
tone on the tenor sax – and Buis's trombone is rather missed
as a result: at times the music falls victim to the drabness that
dragged down Baars' last disc, Stof, though the diverse set
of compositions by both hands considerably helps matters. There are
a couple of longish, understated tone-poems which have just enough
going on to keep from sagging (the rhythm section really do great
work keeping "Memory Moves Forward", er, moving forward
beneath Baars's wispy threads of shakuhachi), some two-tenor blowouts
and loose-limbed swingers, and a few unclassifiable items like "Prince
of Venosa" (constructed around a short fragment from Gesualdo[!]).
Baars' title-track is the most memorable and most joyous piece here,
an oddball groove pulled between the curiously hushed, secretive melody
that circles around among the horns and bass and the faster currents
of van Duynhoven's drums, and Vandermark's trademark squared-off riffing
gives it an extra rhythmic layer. Still, it's hard to feel the disc
plays consistently to either hornman's strengths: De Joode is wonderful
as always (getting the most vocalized sound out of a wooden instrument
this side of a daxophone), and Duynhoven also discreetly lifts some
of the tracks, but Vandermark sounds better with the outlandish excess
that's the speciality of his Scandinavian buddies like Paal Nilsson-Love,
and Baars needs to brighten up a little.–ND
Bik
Bent Braam
EXTREMEN
BBB
 Pianist
Michiel Braam runs a big band with an unmistakable Dutch accent, as
its mock-phonetic bandname suggests. The music's a galloping mix of
swing and Monk and neoclassicism and complete insanity, liberally
seasoned with a spry sense of humour, yet somehow it sounds completely
unlike the venerable (and similarly-inclined) ICP and Breuker ensembles.
Like Misha Mengelberg, Braam is constitutionally averse to "leading"
the band in any usual sense of the word, but he's too sunny a character
to go in for Misha's stubborn perversity. Instead, he's developed
a genial musical philosophy – "system", if you like,
though that sounds starchy – which he calls "bonsai".
Tunes are assigned to each member of the 13-piece band (to call whenever
they like – even in the middle of another piece!) and there's
also a large menu of miscellaneous cues to pick from. In this way,
everyone gets to be a conductor and instant composer/arranger. There
are parallels to Braxton's collages and Zorn's game pieces, but BBB
doesn't sound like them either: best to think of bonsai as the logical
conclusion of Shelly Manne's dictum that a jazz musician is someone
who "never plays the same thing once".
Extremen catches the bik bent in typically rumbustious and
unpredictable form, in a concert at Amsterdam's Bimhuis. Pieces like
"Michaelx" and "Erix" make conventional swing
sound like you've never heard it before, reinventing it from chorus
to chorus, and Braam's compositional ingenuity is evident in pieces
like "Frankx", in which, as he remarks in the liners, "something
like 10 different metres are played simultaneously." The players
seem to take the CD's title to heart with some genuinely ferocious
playing: saxophonist-clarinettist Frank Gratkowski is in particularly
fiery form – listen to him tear dementedly through the south-of-the-border
fantasia "Franxs" in the company of trumpeter Angelo Verploegen
– and Wilbert De Joode is as always a dab hand at drawing forth
elegent grotesques from his bass, taking a completely off-the-wall
solo on "Wilx" that sets it alternately squealing and feebly
muttering. My favourite moment, though, is saxophonist Bart van der
Putten's feature,"Puttex": on the surface, the piece is
a conventionally lush, emotive ballad, but the band turns it inside
out, until the atmosphere becomes oppressively thick and dangerous.
And though Braam might be diffident about the limelight ("apart
from the fact that I make the announcements you can hardly tell I
am the band leader at all"), his stamp is all over the music,
not least his ability to suggest the champagne sparkle of 1930s pianists
like Teddy Wilson even when he's on a rampage at the keyboard. It's
a pity that Braam has never done an Anthony Braxton and put out a
box set of Bik Bent Braam's performances: it'd be fascinating to hear
how this most mercurial of bands refashions the material over a series
of concerts.–ND
Jeb
Bishop / Harris Eisenstadt / Jason Roebke
TIEBREAKER
Not Two
 Live
from the Re Club in Krakow comes this fine, carefree set of music
by a trio of American musician-globetrotters; drummer Harris Eisenstadt
in particular has a taste for popping up in good but unexpected company
in all parts of the world, from his earlier studies in West Africa
to his more recent perpetually zigzagging itinerary through Canada,
the States and Europe. Trombonist Jeb Bishop's playing is wonderfully
various throughout this freeboppish set of originals (four by him,
two by Eisenstadt, one by bassist Jason Roebke): his steep doubletime
lines, precisely interlocking chains of ideas and snappy articulation
on the opening "Round Two" would do a bebopper proud, while
on the soft rubato ballad "How Are You Dear" he draws on
an expressionist language of growls and mutterings. Whatever the exact
idiom of the moment, there's always a strong sense of balance to what
he's doing; his playing is never overtidy or stiff, but it has an
air of alert, slightly muted self-dialogue that's at some remove from
the loop-de-loop swagger of a Ray Anderson or Roswell Rudd. Roebke
and Eisenstadt similarly combine intensity and clarity of purpose,
and they make these grooves really zip and pop, from the bad-news
blues of "Double Dog" to a jovial Ornettified revisiting
of that old bebop chestnut "I Got Rhythm" on the closer,
"Piggly Wiggly."–ND
Lucio
Capece / Sergio Merce
CASA
Organized Music from Thessaloniki
 Recorded
in Sergio Merce's casa in Merlo, Argentina, in February this
year, this latest offering from Kostis Kilymis 's OMT imprint consists
of two tracks: "Vivar, vivar", on which Merce plays a four-track
portastudio without tape and Lucio Capece a Sruti box (handheld miniature
harmonium) and filter, and "Vieja Casa Nueva", which features
Capece on bass clarinet and Merce on tenor sax. "Vivar, vivar"
is a curiously enthralling 29 minute piece, with Capece's dry drones
deliberately forward in the mix as if to place Merce's squeaks, squelches,
gurgles and flutters tantalisingly out of reach, like a shortwave
station you never quite manage to tune in. The ear is drawn into the
acoustic background, but in trying to concentrate on what Merce is
up to it also discovers a wealth of detail in Capece's seemingly static
dyads and trichords: phantom melodies, rich overtones and complex
interlocking pulses. The all too brief "Vieja Casa Nueva"
intersperses long pianissimo tones with silence; there's no flashy
circular breathing on display here – each tone lasts the length
of a breath – but both musicians reveal some impressive multiphonic
technique, often giving the illusion there are at least two other
reed players hiding out in Merce's house. It's a shame they couldn't
have kept it up longer than seven and a half minutes; four times as
long and it would have made a splendid counterbalance for the first
track. As it is, it comes across as something of an afterthought,
albeit a very pleasant one.–DW
Rhodri
Davies / David Lacey / Dennis McNulty
POOR TRADE
Cathnor
 "In
September 2006 a Welshman, Rhodri Davies, travelled to Ireland to
play harp with two Irishmen, David Lacey and Dennis McNulty,"
writes Richard Pinnell on his Cathnor label website, "as children
played in the school playground next door and roadworkers went about
their business along the road." Makes it sound very homely, doesn't
it, like, OK lads we'll just run through "The Bells of Aberdovey"
and "Where The River Shannon Flows" and nip off for a pint
of Guinness next door, but there's nothing specifically Gaelic about
these three extended tracks of topnotch EAI, splendidly recorded by
David Reid (yes, you can hear the kids outside if you listen carefully!),
and beautifully packaged in Cathnor's typically elegant oversize digipak.
Dublin-based David Lacey (percussion and electronics), has, in collaboration
with his frequent playing partner Paul Vogel, been at the forefront
of the burgeoning Irish free improv scene for a while now –
PT readers will no doubt recall Richard Pinnell's review of the i
and e festival last year – and has signed a number of fine
releases with Vogel in the company of visiting notables including
Annette Krebs, Martin Küchen, Keith Rowe and Mark Wastell. In
the company of laptopper Dennis McNulty and harpist Davies he's signed
probably his strongest release to date (though last year's Chip
Shop Music was pretty solid too). As genres go, EAI isn't known
for being overly dramatic – internal conflict and stress is
crystallised and sublimated long before it gets a chance to bubble
up to the surface – but there's considerable tension and power
here, a wealth of detailed interplay between the three musicians,
and a real feel for structure at both micro and macro level. Dark,
rich, mature and satisfying – the music, that is, not the Guinness,
though I do hope they treated themselves to a few well-deserved pints
of the black stuff after recording this little gem.–DW
Arek
Gulbenkoglu / Adam Süssmann
UNTITLED
The Rhizome Label
 I've
just thought of a great marketing idea to rid the world of those damned
mobile phones: the Arek Gulbenkoglu Ringtone! I can't resist quoting
Brian Olewnick's Just Outside blog on this one (and neither
can Rhizome main man Jon Dale): "76 minutes of next to nothing,
very beautiful. I get the feeling they found Taku’s Live
in Australia too in your face, took the idea and toned it down
a few notches." I'm listening to it through headphones at ferociously
high volume, hoping and praying that neither musician actually
plays anything louder than a pianissimo because it'd blow
my bloody eardrums out. A plane passes by... someone slams a door...
there's a curious rustling (er, no, sorry that's the sound of my cigarette
burning in the ashtray)... all very pretty but I've got quite a few
albums of distant traffic noise already thanks, and my favourite remains
Sugimoto / Totsuka / Mattin's Training Thoughts, which compared
to this sounds like Gare Saint Lazare on Saturday afternoon. That
said, there are plenty of wonderful sounds to listen to here, and
you don't need any musicians getting in their way by playing very
much. And, so as not to disappoint you, they don't. "Whoo, yeah!"
someone cries shortly after the 21-minute mark (that's probably Jon
a mile and a half away digging his Scorces album), and three minutes
later there's the clink of what could be empty glasses being cleared
away. Time, gentlemen, please.–DW
Greg
Kelley
RELIGIOUS ELECTRONICS
No Fun
SELF-HATE INDEX
Semata
THIS
IS NOT A JAZZ RECORD, proclaim the good people at No Fun. Not that
I think many Louis Armstrong fans wandered into Carlos Giffoni's Knitting
Factory moshpit last May by mistake.. Nor, I imagine, do many people
consider Greg Kelley a jazz trumpeter, even though he has displayed
some impressive chops in earlier outings with Paul Flaherty (is he
a jazz saxophonist? discuss). But as Self-Hate Index is sourced
in Kelley's trumpet playing, Religious Electronics has ended
up in PT's Jazz / Improv section too as part of a double header. Well,
what the hell, Hair Police made it to Post-Rock, go figure. I prefer
to leave it others to worry about what to file it under; I'm more
interested in listening to the music. And mighty fine it is too.
 Kelley
describes his equipment on Religious Electronics as "just
a 'pedal chain' or 'feedback loop' or 'no input mixing board' system
with a ring modulator, distortion pedal, delay and four channel mixer.
As all of those terms have some bad associations, I think I'd choose
'feedback system', which is also kind of pretentious." The music
isn't, though – it's characteristically uncompromising stuff,
another thrilling assault on that flimsy wall separating EAI and Noise
(ach, I've started pigeonholing again, forgive me). The A-side, "Despair
is Sin" – title courtesy Kierkegaard – was previously
available as a limited edition ("20 or 30 of them") CDR
given away at No Fun in 2005. At Giffoni's request, Kelley cooked
up a longer B-side to join it, "O Lord the Star Torments Me",
whose title is a quotation from a Thomas Bernhard poem "written
in the heights of tormented agnosticism." Tormented it certainly
is – Kelley gives his "feedback system" one hell of
a workout here – but, unlike a few noise albums I could mention,
there's a rock-solid structure under the ferocious surface, and it
makes all the difference.
 Self-Hate
Index on a cursory listen might not sound all that dissimilar
if you're a jazz fan, but scrape off the grimy layers of distortion
and you'll find a trumpet in there. It spends quite a lot of time
hiding in caverns of gritty reverb, but from time to time a note of
pristine beauty emerges from the gloom. What's refreshing about this
is its raw energy and sense of drama, present as much in the quieter
tracks as in the more abrasive ones – far too many solo trumpet
outings of recent years have remained within a world of tiny pops,
puffs and gurgles, and haven't aged that well (Kelley's own Trumpet
being a notable exception, as I realise now eight years down the road).
The upper register explorations in "Accumulating Errors (What
Is Peripheral?)" will have you sweating as much as Kelley was
when he recorded it – that's the rumble of an air conditioner
you can hear in the background. The album title, he informs us "refers
to psychological evaluations of potential suicides" – but
don't let that put you off. True, "Anxious Drift" might
not be the most appropriate muzak to play in your analyst's waiting
room, but from where I'm sitting it sounds fuckin' wonderful.–DW
Byard
Lancaster
PERSONAL TESTIMONY (THEN AND NOW)
Porter
 Multi-instrumentalist
Byard Lancaster is a good fit for the recently arrived Porter Records.
Among others, the label has reissued rare sides by trumpeter Ted Daniel,
Finnish pianist-composer Heikki Sarmanto, and Boston blues-rock outfit
Natural Food, as well as releasing new material by Philly hip-hop
group Misled Children and Andrew McGraw's South Asian collages. Lancaster
(whose Live at Macalester College was also reissued by Porter)
has long held to his motto "from a Love Supreme to the Sex Machine,"
integrating funk, free improvisation, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and
gospel into his musical approach. Personal Testimony is a
solo record, featuring Lancaster on flutes, bass clarinet, saxophones,
piano, percussion and voice, often overdubbed. It was issued originally
on his own Concert Artists label in 1979; like many Porter reissues,
this CD contains a postscript of material recorded in 2007.
As its title promises, the journey here is often very personal and
autobiographical. The album opens with the piano-and-voice improvisation
"Miss Nikki", which sets Lancaster's his keening rasp over
a garden of arpeggios (check "Global Key" for the update),
while the low, woody bass clarinets on "Brotherman" build
upon the work laid down thirteen years earlier with Marzette Watts
on the latter's ESP session. The opener's preaching is recalled on
"What a Friend We Have in Jesus," a brief alto solo that
might have been saccharine if it weren't for its utter simplicity
and workmanlike air, not to mention Lancaster's commanding projection.
It segues into "Marianne and Alicia," which seems to be
the same alto improvisation with overdubbed soprano and reverb. It's
startling and odd, something like a soul-inflected Lol Coxhill experiment.
The characteristic banshee wail is coupled with Konitz-like runs on
"Brian," but in "Mind Exercise" Lancaster lets
the squalling multiphonics splay out completely, in the pure sound
approach that he assimilated from working with Sunny Murray and Bill
Dixon.
As for Now, Lancaster's raspy vocal bleeds into split tones on the
West African-tinged "Prayer Cry"; on the second half, a
field of Lancaster voices (or is it field recordings?) are added alongside
flute and congas. The contrast between sessions is often striking,
as for instance the very different uses of overdubbed flutes on "Dogtown"
(Then) and "Afro-Ville" (Now); certainly the multi-instrumental
orchestration of "Tribalize Lancaster" - purring flute,
shakers, slide whistle, djembe and vocals - is far from the bedroom
studio of yore. The original LP's lo-fi, documentary charm made it
a remarkable oddity in the pantheon, and perhaps the sessions could
have simply been released on different discs; still, it's a pleasure
to have this range of material available.–CA
Thomas
Lehn / Marcus Schmickler
NAVIGATION IM HYPERTEXT
A-Musik
KÖLNER KRANZ
A-Musik
 Bart,
Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler’s debut duo disc on Erstwhile
from 2000, always felt like one of the last words in dueling electronics/synth/cracked-circuit
improvisations. Like other greats in the field (Voice_Crack, Furt,
Shaking Ray Levis), their music is a disorienting experience –
down for them is up, high and low frequencies bisect in maddening
ways, improvisations crackle and fizz with hyperactivity. The chaos
is faux, though, as the more you disappear into Lehn and Schmickler’s
madness the more you concede to their peculiar logic. Navigation
Im Hypertext, Frankensteined from live performances, fits this
logic insofar as it’s exactly not what you’d expect –
looking for Looney Tunes electroacoustics, instead you’re handed
instead exotic, paced micro-incidents. It’s very considered,
as though Lehn and Schmickler want you to focus on each noise’s
constituent parts, and its episodic structure, whereby short snippets
represent consecutive ideas at their most refined, lends the album
the feel of an index or notebook. Even longer pieces, like the thirteen-minute
fifteenth track, are quite cautious – here, glorious peals of
sizzling tones lock together and sit in the air like a spun toffee
halo, while bass lollops around in a daze, trying to find its way
out from under the blanket. Navigation Im Hypertext is process
oriented, and perhaps that’s why it’s so appealing: it
invites a slightly different approach to listening than other synth-
or electronics/improv sets.
 Kölner
Kranz is the flipside to Navigation’s precision.
Featuring two side-long, maximal performances, it plays out as though
Lehn and Schmickler are trying to corkscrew every move possible on
their combined digital and analogue kits into one uncontrollable fantasia
for noise detritus. There are times where the magnesium flammability
of it all overwhelms, and your only response is supine submission.
Much like Bart, though, its chaos is sculpted (if not scripted):
this isn’t a "blowout." Lehn and Schmickler are attentive
to detail, something that’s reflected in their responsiveness
when improvising – lightning fast, they’re still masters
of the appropriate. An excellent double set, actually – well
worth it to be able to hear two contrasting approaches to more-or-less
the same thing.–JD
MORE
JAZZ & IMPROV
Denman
Maroney / Reuben Radding / Ned Rothenberg / Michael Sarin
GAGA
Nuscope
 It's
great when musicians are choosy about what they release –
god knows there are far too many folks happy to give their every
passing whim permanent digital form – but, face it, it's not
a good strategy for conquering the jazz world, if that's what you're
looking to do. Gaga features a quartet of musicians who've
all in their way emphasized getting things just right rather than
getting ahead, assembling meaningful canons rather than just "documentation."
More power to them! Leader Denman Maroney is a fine pianist with
an undeservedly low profile, up to now most frequently encountered
in the company of bassist Mark Dresser. He calls his approach "hyperpiano,"
which usually refers to his particular brand of inside-piano playing,
but here involves a carefully conceptualized take on a "straight"
jazz idiom in which rhythms are stacked up at exactly calibrated
ratios. Don't sweat the details – basically, think of it as
a (relaxed) version of a Conlon Nancarrow canon, or as an extension
of Monk at his most perversely logical. The opening "Fowler's
Blues" sounds like "Misterioso" heading off in four
different directions at once, while "Detach & Retain"
is a nod toward the genre Monk more or less invented, harmonically
wandering midtempo tunes in no particular key. Indeed, the overt
Monkishness of several pieces is a bit distracting to this ear,
but fortunately the melody of "Detach & Retain" owes
more to Andrew Hill in the way its theme that seems to treat metrical
changes as cadential formulas. The musicians joining Maroney are
all less-is-more players, content to let the music's complexities
grow clearly and organically; Ned Rothenberg's work on saxes and
clarinets is tart and pared down, and bassist Reuben Radding and
drummer Michael Sarin deal beautifully with the pianist's multilayered
structures, taking advantage of the staggered rhythms to create
lots of push-pull harmonic interest, occasionally turning the tracks
into explorations of a bumpy kind of bitonality. The 20-minute title
track's my favourite, a piece that gets further away from conventional
jazz territory, turning a slinky quasi-tango into a hypnotic, abstracted
weave of stop-start cross-rhythms.–ND
Chris
McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath
ECLIPSE AT DAWN
Cuneiform
 At
the start of this live recording made in Berlin in 1971, emcee Ronnie
Scott introduces the band with his usual deadpan wit: "Most
of the guys in the band come from England; and the rest of them
come from South Africa, which is a wonderful place... to come from."
Pianist Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath transmuted that experience
of cultural exile into a wild and woolly mix of bighearted Africanized
Ellingtonia and rowdy collectivist free jazz that teeters between
joyousness, anger and sorrow. This latest archival discovery was
recorded between the group's first and second studio albums for
RCA – now available in handsome CD reissues on Fledg'ling
Records – though the music is considerably more unhinged than
either of them. It's roughedged, excitable stuff, with several wilfully
chaotic moments when the sectionwork comes unglued. There's bristlingly
hot playing by saxophonists Alan Skidmore, Mike Osborne, Dudu Pukwana
and Gary Windo (a Warne Marsh protégé, though you'd
never guess it from his playing here), and bassist Harry Miller
and drummer Louis Moholo whip things along with amazing recklessness:
Miller slashes viciously through the ensembles, while Moholo's drumming
constantly trends towards thrashing, unpredictably pulsed doubletime.
Trumpeter Mongezi Feza is AWOL, unfortunately, though the admirable
Harry Beckett and Marc Charig bring an immaculate touch and slippery
gift for melodic invention to a brass section also featuring trombonists
Malcolm Griffiths and Nick Evans. McGregor himself has a duff piano
to work with, which probably explains why halfway through the concert
he migrates towards an organ, though not before he's graced the
rattling "Take the 'A' Train"-goes-to-space piece "Restless"
with a volatile, note-scattering solo.
Most of the charts are built around terse, shouting riffs –
dance rhythms delivered with such monolithic force they become hymns
– which collapse into truly epic freeform blowing. Familiar
pieces from the band's book make an appearance, from "Nick
Tete" to the closing "Funky Boots March", but the
title track is a rarity: an arrangement of a piece by fellow South
African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim/Dollar Brand. It's like a scorched-earth
version of an Ellington ballad, graced by swelling horn charts and
Evans' aching trombone. There's none of Duke's Olympian majesty
and grace on Eclipse at Dawn, though, not even any catharsis –
the passages of frenzy and violence rarely suggest at their end
that their energies and emotional contradictions have been resolved
in any way – but the Brotherhood's music nonetheless achieves
its own harrowing kind of beauty.–ND
Michael
Moore
FRAGILE
Ramboy
HOLOCENE
Ramboy
 American
ex-pat Michael Moore always seemed the subtlest ironist in the much-missed
Clusone 3, but good luck detecting anything but the sincerest intentions
in Fragile, a modern-mainstream quartet outing on his Ramboy
imprint. Pianist Harmen Fraanje and bassist Clemens van der Veen are
a little smooth'n'silky for these tastes, but Moore's emotional honesty
and tendency towards understatement means that the pretty stuff never
cloys. Drummer Michael Vatcher keeps to a discreet volume level but
works his usual mischief, introducing little hitches and sidesteps
into the music's otherwise even flow, and Ab Baars drops by for two
haiku-like miniatures. Moore is at his most Konitzian on "The
Troubadors" (a slowed-down "Giant Steps" variant) and
the rubato ballads are alert enough to keep away from ECM-style drift;
the shadows fall at the album's end with a pair of impressionist mood-pieces,
"The Smell of Novato" and "Upside-Down Man".
That darker mood carries over to Holocene, a trio date with
Moore (mostly on clarinet), accordionist Guy Klucevsek and cellist
Erik Friedlander. This kind of folksy minimalist chamber-jazz was
a breath of fresh air in the 1990s in the hands of players like Marty
Ehrlich and Dave Douglas, getting away from the cliches of conventional
jazz instrumentation and showing what you could do at a lower volume
level. Moore's version is thinner, more downbeat in texture, its pallid
beauty free of peppy tango or klezmer inflections; Klucevsek's accordion
is often used for soft, abstract church-organ chords. What's missing,
unfortunately, is the kind of passion and smouldering drama that would
make these small pieces seem larger. –ND
Evan
Parker
CONIC SECTIONS
Psi
 Psi's
series of reissues of Evan Parker's solo soprano sax albums is now
virtually complete with the release of Conic Sections, originally
released on Ah Um in 1993 (but recorded in 1989). Parker's liner notes
credit the lively acoustic environment of Oxford's Holywell Music
Room, England's first concert hall, constructed in 1742, for the way
he plays on this date: frequently it's as if he's playing the room
itself, testing out the way it responds to different tonal colorations
and positionings, and he's occasionally tempted into some unusual
moments of luxurious near-stasis. The disc continues the trend of
1986's The Snake Decides away from the terrifying bleakness
of his earliest solo LPs, towards an incredibly ornate drone music
in which volleying counterrhythms are constructed out of a fixed set
of notes. The eardrum-ravaging skirls of Monoceros (1978)
often threatened the listener with sonic white-out; here, they're
just one element in the larger texture, swooping like seagulls over
the onslaught of coruscating trills and slower, step-by-step diatonic
sequences. For better or worse this album marks the logical endpoint
to Parker's solo music--he didn't record another until Lines Burnt
in Light (2001), which just sounds like a footnote to this one
– but it's still one of his most perfectly realized creations.
The long "Conic Section 3" in particular has some wonderful
episodes, including some slippery chromatic runs near the start, a
flowing midsection so emphatically tonal it verges on Philip Glass
territory, and a slightly ludicrous sequence where the music constantly
gets sucked back into inane burbling.–ND
Schlippenbach
Trio
GOLD IS WHERE YOU FIND IT
Intakt
 Let's
just get this out of the way: the Schlippenbach Trio is one of the
longest-active groups in improvised music, formed in 1970 and working
and recording fairly regularly over the last thirty-eight years. Recordings
like Pakistani Pomade (FMP, 1972) were full of a combination
of fierce acrobatics and serious brawn that was a far cry from the
contemporary Brötzmann/Van Hove/Bennink trio, much less anything
else on that side of the pond. But in the years since "With Forks
and Hope," certainly things have changed in the trio's approach.
On Gold Is Where You Find It, the trio's newest disc and
its first for the Intakt label, saxophonist Evan Parker sticks to
tenor, and his gruff sound gives the set a solid, foot-down consistency,
even as it's carried along by drummer Paul Lovens' pulsing detail.
The opening improvisation, "Z.D.W.A." begins with slap tongue
and damped percussive rattle; Schlippenbach's chords are gauzy, light
and almost hesitant, extrapolating a singsong progression, piano-roll
fragments and Monkishness erupting as Parker and Lovens apply daubs
around him. Unaccompanied low rumbles build into Jelly Roll Morton
four minutes in, then kaleidoscope into Indent-era Cecil Taylorisms
as Lovens enters with coppery thrash. It's a delicate elision of stylistic
approaches that's natural and almost seamless. Sure, the pounding
rhythm-field is still there, but Schlippenbach's integration of instrumental
history into a free, collective context is more audible than ever.
There's long been a push-pull between longer pieces and bagatelles
in the group's repertoire; indeed, pieces like "Range" (recorded
at the 1974 Moers Festival, partially issued on Three Nails Left,
FMP) were far too long to fit on an LP side. Yet the abovementioned
Pakistani Pomade included very short pieces, ditto the "Fuels"
series on Complete Combustion (FMP, 1998). This latest set
includes six pieces around the five-minute mark or under, valuable
encapsulations of the detail – there's that word again –
in their music that range from the playful tone rows of "Slightly
Flapping" and the clicks and pops of "K.SP" to the
title track's miniature concerto. Some of these short pieces sound
almost like they're extracted from a larger whole: it's a demonstration
of their ability to instantly locate moments of complete empathy,
within the briefest span. A rare thing, indeed.–CA
SLW
SLW
Formed
 Googling
around for the group name I came across Silver Wheaton Corporation,
Sisters of the Living World, Stefano Lubiana Wines, Securities Litigation
Watch (rather appropriate perhaps for these troubled times), Shift
Left Word, Second Language Writing, and even, according to urbandictionary.com,
"slw: some1 ppl f*ck randomly on the street", but in fact
the name is short for Sound Like Water. This refers to a
concert originally scheduled to take place in a disaffected swimming
pool at the end of a brief residence in Brussels in late 2006, which
included several studio sessions and a live performance in which the
audience was surrounded by – immersed in might be more appropriate
– the music of Burkhard Beins (percussion, objects), Lucio Capece
(soprano sax, bass clarinet and preparations), Rhodri Davies (harp,
electroacoustic devices), and Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing
board). This uninterrupted 56-minute span of music should be played
loud, but even at high volume it takes a while to get into; one senses
the musicians too are sounding each other out for most of the first
quarter of an hour. Things really get cooking about halfway through,
with some ominous low end rumbles and thuds (Davies? Nakamura?) that
send Beins into pulse mode, scraping stones and polystyrene around
his drumheads, and tease out some gritty multiphonics from Capece's
bass clarinet, building to a genuine climax (yes! complete with cymbal
crashes!) five or so minutes later. Eventually the music retreats
into more typically inscrutable EAI territory – pale eBowed
sine tones lightly dusted with static drizzle, huffs, puffs, ticks
and clicks – but it remains somehow scarred by the memory of
the earlier explosion, like a conversation between four friends all
studiously avoiding the elephant in the room. Eventually it picks
up again five minutes or so before the end, coalescing around an obstinate
mid-register drone (I think Davies is responsible for this one, but
Nakamura's work in recent times has been so wide-ranging and unpredictable,
I wouldn't be surprised if it was him), but fades out before it gets
into any more trouble.
Though each of the four musicians has been loosely associated with
so-called reductionism – though Capece freely admits he doesn't
know "what reductionism is or means" – what's particularly
exciting about this release is how full and rich the music is. "We
didn't want the music to be identified with silence or quietness,"
he writes, "but with the organization of the material. The volume
was quite high, though I wouldn't say it was extremely high or that
the music could be identified with 'noise' as a genre or attitude."
The activity level is high too, and it's fascinating to follow individual
trains of thought as they veer into sidings or disappear into tunnels
along the way. Capece describes the group's approach as one of "relating
sounds in a simultaneous and immediately successive way without developing
ideas. Ending and re-developing. The idea was to use different material
but as one idea, keeping the tension." As descriptions go, that
strikes me as being pretty close to the "in the moment"
aesthetic associated with an earlier generation of improvisers. Indeed,
those who prefer their improv more "old school" might be
pleasantly surprised by SLW. It's convincing proof that EAI has matured
enough to acknowledge the value of the music it originally sought
to distance itself from. What the world needs now, I'm told, is more
liquidity – Sound Like Water is my idea of a liquid asset.–DW
Fred
Van Hove
JOURNEY
Psi
 I'm
often leery of published statements about a musician's "influences",
but I'll make an exception in this case: it's genuinely illuminating
to read in the liner notes to Journey that one of Fred
Van Hove's earliest musical inspirations was the bells from the carillon
of the Antwerp cathedral. Like many of his solo recordings, this is
a sustained, nearly hour-long improvisation, the pianist developing
particular zones of activity with great patience, spending minutes
at a time homing in on a narrow band of the keyboard or working variations
on a single technique. Van Hove has developed something like a pianistic
version of change ringing, as he piles up crisscrossing waves of sound
that keep revealing new resonances and internal patternings. There's
a sense of both musician and listener being entirely "inside"
the music – which is to say the experience is less like listening
to piano than to a church organ (one of the few musical experiences
where you are, in a sense, actually inside the instrument).
Psi has usefully inserted an index marker halfway through the piece,
reflecting the sharp stylistic turn that occurs halfway through. The
opening 30 minutes develop out of a series of gracefully broken glisses
and giddy smears, which slowly coalesce into a hammered-out chordal
rainstorm that teeters on the verge of full-blown Romantic agony.
Part 2 begins with some inside-the-piano string-bending before plunging
into a churning, pedal-down exploration of the instrument's lower
registers; contrasting flickers of activity run like seams through this dark,
trembling backdrop. This half is perhaps less exhilarating than the
tipsy arabesques of part 1, but it's still a fine example of
the kind of resonant quasi-architectural space that Van Hove can construct. Journey
is a reminder of how sheerly beautiful dissonance can be, the nimbus
of clashing notes and harmonics virtually floating free from
the turbulent activity beneath; the results are strikingly different
from the general run of free-ish solo piano discs, occupying a halfway
point between Liszt and Muhal Richard Abrams's Vision Towards
Essence.–ND
Carlos
Zíngaro / Wilbert De Joode / Dominique Regef
SPECTRUM
Clean Feed
 Spectrum
is the work of a pan-European string trio that brings together Portuguese
violinist Carlos Zíngaro, Dutch bassist Wilbert De Joode and
French hurdy-gurdy player Dominique Regef. They take a different approach
from similarly constituted groups like the String Trio of New York
or the Kent Carter String Trio: no composed pieces or programmatic
music, no bagatelles or dance pieces here – this is unruly,
rough-and-tumble free music. Another thing that sets the group apart
is the use of the hurdy-gurdy, a Renaissance wheel violin which allows
the player to accompany his melodies with a constant drone, much like
a bagpipe. Early-music instruments rarely make their way into contemporary
music, much less free improvisation, so Spectrum's unique
palette is something of a treat for weird bowed-instrument loyalists.
The set begins with Zíngaro and de Joode's broad arco sashays,
bolstered underneath by Regef's slight scrabble. These movements soon
become tighter, detailed, less tonal, and the space occupied ever
narrower through ponticello, massive bass clusters, and peals
of metallic hurdy-gurdy scrape. Then, quickly and almost imperceptibly,
the trio recedes into darting, hushed sounds and terse plucks in an
array of sparse gestures and solid blocks. The final third of "Spectra
01" offers one of those "how did they get here" moments,
Regef finding a nasty little low phrase to repeat and anchor a swarming
line, subsuming de Joode's throaty pizzicato and teasing scuttled
mimicry from Zíngaro's extended ballets before a unison hum
closes it out. The second improvisation begins with Regef snipping
away at the East European-flavoured violin-bass interplay, before
a more resolute drone emerges to act as a launching pad for Zíngaro's
stark song. Nearly a half-hour in length, "Spectra 02" offers
a peek at the cranked facility of Regef's handiwork on an instrument
that may seem almost primitive; his contributions flit within a narrow
range, and are fleshed out by subtle sonic heaves. Spectrum
is nasty, vicious and rhapsodic music, altogether an extraordinary
addition to the improvised string-music pantheon.–CA
Bernard
Bonnier
CASSE-TÊTE
Oral
 Recorded
back in 1979, originally released in 1984 on the composer's own Amaryllis
label and long OOP (though of course you can find it available for
free download within seconds if you try), Casse-Tête
is, to the best of my knowledge, the only album Montréal-born
musique concrète composer Bernard Bonnier released in an all-too-short
life – he died in 1994 aged 41. Surfing around a bit, I read
that the empreintes DIGITALes label was supposed to release an audio
DVD of Bonnier's complete work a couple of years ago, but the project
seems to have been shelved. Maybe this long overdue reissue will kickstart
it back into life. It ought to, as Casse-Tête is a
blast. Bernard Bonnier (is that him on the album cover? he looks rather
like Gyro Captain in Mad Max 2) worked as assistant to Pierre
Henry between 1970 and 1975 – Soldier Boy (of which
more later) was realised in Henry's Apsome studios – and was
no doubt familiar with le maître's famous 1967 genre-bending
collaboration with Michel Colombier, Messe Pour Le Temps Présent.
But whereas that sounds dated and stilted 41 years on, the seven tracks
on Casse-Tête remain extraordinarily fresh, and seem
to anticipate later developments in both musique concrète (Ned
Bouhalassa's Aérosol is a not-so-distant cousin) and
leftfield techno (Vero-la-Toto sounds like Aphex Twin in
the schoolyard). Not so much mass for the present as mess for the
future. Concrète purists might frown at Bonnier's over-reliance
on irregularly overlapping loops, and technoheads might sniff at his
rather rudimentary backbeats and primitive synth patches (not that
that ever mattered to Richard D. James), but who cares when they're
combined to thrilling effect in tracks like "Blue Marine"?
Soldier Boy takes a snatch of Elvis Presley's song of the
same name and mangles it just as well as Jim Tenney did "Blue
Suede Shoes" in his celebrated Collage #1 (1961). You
can just tell Bonnier was having a ball with Henry's gear, looping
The King to death and then digging him up and slicing up the royal
cadaver some more. Sure, he gets a bit carried away, and the piece
ends up collapsing under its own weight, but it takes risks and is
fun to listen to. Nice to see this out and about again.–DW
Michael
Byron
DREAMERS OF PEARL
New World
 Dreamers
of Pearl is a 53-minute work for solo piano in three movements,
individually entitled "Enchanting the Stars", "A Bird
Revealing the Unknown to the Sky" and "It is the Night and
Dawn of Constellations Irradiated". If those titles tempt you
to load up the convertible with plastic pyramids and gaudy crystals
and drive out to Pahrump Nevada to await the arrival of the Martians
(don't take any doves along), think again. Michael Byron might be
associated with the second wave of California minimalism – moving
away from strict process-based music towards what I once described
elsewhere as "solid
state" – and much of his earlier work was luminously tonal,
but Dreamers of Pearl is about as close to New Age ear candy
as those "funny looking little critters" in Mars Attacks
were to being ambassadors of interplanetary peace and love. The work's
roots in minimalism are evident enough though, especially in the second
movement, which moves through its clearly defined harmonic fields
as patiently as Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, but the actual
surface of the music is constantly changing, rhythmically irregular,
and often tough and angular. Byron's music is fully notated, and the
handsome 20-page booklet contains numerous extracts from the score
which reveal its considerable metrical and harmonic intricacies (particularly
in the first movement, in which the pianist has to negotiate a different
key signature for each hand!), but sounds fresh enough to have been
created in real time – one wonders at times whether he's hit
upon a way of getting his music software to transcribe and print out
a recording of an improvisation, so naturally do the notes lie under
the fingers. As such, Scelsi's solo piano music comes to mind, as
does La Monte Young's Well Tuned Piano, a transcribed score
of which wouldn't look all that different from Dreamers of Pearl
in places. One wonders also whether Joseph Kubera, whose performance
of the work is absolutely stunning, has learnt the piece by heart
– which would be quite a feat – as it seems well nigh
impossible to commit any of its myriad local details to long-term
memory. But you could probably say that of the Ligeti Etudes
too, come to think of it – and Byron's music, like Ligeti's,
is instantly recognisable, perceptually challenging, beautifully proportioned
and deeply satisfying. Check it out.–DW
Luc
Ferrari
TUCHAN CHANTAL
Room40
 "It's
all in French, naturellement, my fluency in which is so poor that
they could be talking about Sunday bus timetables in lower south east
Perpignan and I'd be none the wiser," writes Nick Cain in his
write-up of this in the November Wire. (Good job I was with
him recently to act as live interpreter for his interview with Ghedalia
Tazartès!) Quite frankly, he should have left it well alone,
and so should you if your French listening comprehension isn't up
to it. Tuchan Chantal, or Tuchan, Portrait of a villager
as it's described on Ferrari's Wikipedia page, is an exercise in what
the French would call racler les fonds du tiroir, or scraping
the bottom of the barrel. It's a mini-hörspiel recorded in the
village of Tuchan in the Corbières region in 1977, consisting
basically of interviews Ferrari and his wife Brunhild conducted with
a local 22-year-old woman, Chantal. As an example of homespun wisdom
(she discusses everything from extra-marital sex to politics to Picasso)
it's moderately interesting – I like her line "la propriété
pourrit les gens".. "owning [your own house] makes people
rotten" – but as a piece of music it's negligible. The
interviews are interspersed with fragments of guitar music (sounds
at times like a kind of octatonic Flamenco version of Monk's "Misterioso")
and a little – not enough – of the rural soundscape (crickets,
church bells, the usual stuff). Ferrari completists will no doubt
lap it up, but unless they're fluent in French they're wasting their
money.–DW
Gordon
Mumma
MUSIC FOR SOLO PIANO 1960 – 2001
New World
 Those
of you who know Gordon Mumma only for his pioneering 1960s work with
electronics – from the earwax-melting Dresden Interleaf
13 February 1945 and Megaton For Wm. Burroughs to the
raw cybersonics of Hornpipe – ought to know that, prior
to his groundbreaking work with the Sonic Arts Union he did in fact
study "traditional" composition and performance in the 1950s
with Ross Lee Finney in Ann Arbor and George Exon at Interlochen.
A talented pianist, he's well versed not only in the contemporary
repertoire – performing much of it in a duo with Robert Ashley
back in the 60s – but also in Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Schoenberg,
Webern and Bartók. This fine twofer from New World, beautifully
produced and complete as ever with informative liner notes, may be
entitled Music For Solo Piano 1960 – 2001, but only
two of the works it contains date from the early 60s – the Suite
for Piano (1960) and Large Size Mograph (1962) –
even if seeds of the later piano music, notably 1997's Jardin,
were planted back in the composer's formative years. The music is
intimate, introspective and condensed – which could, once more,
come as something as a surprise to those who only know of Mumma's
work from the period of the ONCE Festival and the Sonic Arts Union
– and reveals a remarkable ear for pitch and fondness for time-honoured
contrapuntal techniques. But this is no exercise in neoclassical nostalgia:
Mumma's take on serialism is as fresh in the Eleven Note Pieces
& Decimal Passacaglia (1978) as it is in the thorny Suite,
and when he chooses an extant work as a model – the Minuet from
Haydn's Symphony No. 47 in the second piece of 1996's Threesome
– there's not an inkling of postmodern irony. There's enough
set theory in the Sushihorizontals (1986 – 96) to keep
a graduate class busy for several months, and, best of all, you can
really hear how it works. Dean Vandewalle's performances are terrific,
at one and the same time meticulous in their exploration of dynamics
and timbre and touchingly lyrical. Now there are two words
I bet you never thought of using to describe the music of Gordon Mumma..
get yourself a copy of this posthaste and think again.–DW
Eliane
Radigue
NALDJORLAK
Shiiin
 A
piece by Eliane Radigue for cello? Can't be done. So I thought when
I was first told of this project while preparing an article on Radigue
for The Wire three years ago. How could the composer of the
some of the most exquisite subtly evolving electronic music ever created
forsake her trusty ARP synthesizer and write a piece for a solo stringed
instrument? Then she told me it was for Charles Curtis, and I understood.
With several splendid readings of Feldman (Patterns In A Chromatic
Field (Tzadik), with pianist Alec Karis) and Lucier (if your
collection doesn't include the double CD set with clarinettist Anthony
Burr on Antiopic, do something about it) under his belt, and having
worked extensively with La Monte Young (we're still waiting for his
reading of Young's Trio for Strings – any news on that?),
Curtis was evidently the man for the job. I can do no better than
quote his excellent and informative liners: "Naldjorlak
is structured around a tuning of the cello which seeks to consolidate,
as nearly as possible, all of the resonating parts of the instrument.
The reference for the tuning is found in the instrument itself: the
so-called wolf tone. This refers to a particular note which stands
out from all others as a jagged or excessively-resonant frequency;
most string instruments have one such note. It results from a piling-up
of wood and string frequencies relative to tautness, and is generally
considered a blemish on an instrument's sound. For Naldjorlak
I proposed focusing on the wolf tone because of its instability and
extraordinary spectral complexity. When tuning the entire cello to
the wolf tone, the wolf frequency moves. One can never tune exactly
to it, and the result is a tuning that spans a narrow range of frequencies,
something like a small semitone. This small semitone became the foreground
pitch material of the Naldjorlak, and can be followed through
every section of the piece. Three of the four strings are tuned as
closely as possible to the wolf tone, and a fourth string is tuned
to a string tension which will cause the tailpiece to also resonate
at the pitch of the wolf tone. The endpin is likewise tuned to the
same pitch, by the length to which it is drawn out. Every adjustment
of a single element causes changes in the other elements, but over
time it is possible to reach a consensus tuning, which could be expressed
as unison-plus-small-semitone."
Tuning the strings down to the wolf tone means they're slacker than
they normally are when tuned to their traditional pitches of C, G,
D and A, and anyone who's ever tried to play on slacker strings will
be acutely aware of their sensitivity: the slightest increase in bow
pressure results in a raising of pitch, which in turn creates numerous
rich disturbances in the upper partials. Curtis's performance is truly
stunning – not only in his ability to change bows almost imperceptibly
(a real bugger for anyone playing sustained tones on a string instrument)
but also, in the transitional sections, to move from one string to
another, via a doublestop. The harmonic richness of the piece is simply
staggering – it's easily as subtle and multilayered as in any
of Radigue's tape works – and, far from being static ("an
hour-long cello piece using one note? gimme a break") the music
is constantly on the move, the tiniest change in finger and bow pressure
opening up new avenues of complexity, not only in the domain of timbre,
but also, curiously enough, rhythm, as the acoustic beats beloved
of Lucier appear and disappear as Curtis zooms in on the wolf frequency
with awesome precision. The later sections of the piece, when Curtis
bows the tailpiece and even the endpin of the instrument, beggar belief.
It all goes to make Naldjorlak one of the most exciting releases
of recent times. And the good news is it's not alone: Radigue has
already finished Naldjorlak II for Carole Robinson and Bruno
Martinez, and Naldjorlak III, a trio for Robinson, Martinez
and Curtis, is in the works. Naldjorlak II is scored for
two basset horns, by the way. A piece by Eliane Radigue for two basset
horns? Can't be done. Yes, it can.–DW
Cristal
RE-UPS
Flingco Sound System
 It's
nice to see an ex-member of Labradford stepping into the relatively
harsh glare of limited-to-500 culture. As part of Cristal, Bobby Donne,
alongside Richmond, VA's Jimmy Anthony and Greg Darden, potters around
in the not terribly under-populated area of computers/electronics
and in predictable fashion, though it's no less pleasurable for being
so. Like a lot of recumbent laptop composition, Re-Ups makes
virtues of minimalism and temporal dissolution; the opening "Rimescolisi"
slowly bubbles and wanes, like candles about out to snuff, and the
following "Stars, Hide Your Fires" sets a hollowed-out drone,
pegged at both ends of the audio spectrum (low rumble and high-pitch
whine), rolling against flickering incidentals. Most of the album
sits nicely within these parameters, though the hefty, asphalt blocks
of noise the trio gruffly manhandle on "Left Of Swept" flag
a significant, though under-explored shift in attention: indeed, more
of this abrasion would have been welcome, to level out the more predictable
dark ambient tendencies of some of the other tracks.
Re-Ups often recalls something Touch might have released
about fifteen years ago (the decisively edited, appealing blankness
of Indicate's Whelm comes to mind), recalibrated for the
modern laptop context. If you were a fan of the isolationist movement
from way back when, this makes a lot of sense: it's all about subliminal
movement, implied tension, and encroaching (rather than supplicating)
ambience. If pushed, I'd ask for more risk taking, a little less featureless
horizontal sprawl, and for Cristal to work towards standing out both
from the current pack of faceless digitisers and from history's cold
clutches. But I like Re-Ups fine and for a second album it's
a strong intervention. Next time, though, more blood.–JD
John
Levack Drever
CATTLE GRIDS OF DARTMOOR
Pataphonic
 John
Levack Drever, acoustic ecologist and co-founder of UK Soundscape,
hails from Edinburgh, but completed his doctoral studies at Dartington,
down in deepest Devon, hence the Dartmoor connection. In any case,
there certainly aren't many cattle grids to be found near Goldsmiths
College in London, where he currently lectures in composition. That
said, it's hard to discern what's actually composed here, though there's
probably some Ferrari-esque Presque Rien sleight-of-hand
I'm not aware of: to all intents and purposes what we have is a 71-minute
field recording of cars (and the occasional horse) crossing, umm,
the cattle grids of Dartmoor. Since Drever, as the name of his label
implies, is a enthusiastic student of the science of imaginary solutions,
'pataphysics (his work previously came to my attention on the Sonic
Arts Network 'Pataphysics
compilation) I'd like imagine there's some deep structure to it
all, some hidden level of meaning involved, but I sure as hell can't
work out what it is. Maybe he loaded his mixfiles into ProTools and
juggled them around so that each passage over the cattle grid occurs
at a time precisely determined by some obscure numerological system
derived from the cattle grids' precise map reference; maybe his Audio
Technica AT815ST stereo shotgun microphone (gee, thanks for telling
us, that makes all the difference) was specially positioned in a gesture
of prayer to face the cemetery in Bagneux where Alfred Jarry was buried
on November 2nd 1907. Who knows? But I probably shouldn't take the
piss – it's clear people down in Devon take their cattle grids
seriously. Have a read at this: http://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/chagford_grids.htm
–DW
Peter
Rehberg
WORK FOR GV 2004-2008
Editions Mego
 Many
praise him as one of the most eloquent computer musicians of our time,
but Peter Rehberg’s ascent to Laptop Mountain’s pinnacle
still smacks a little of intelligent positioning. While his mutability
is admirable, he’s been quick to throw his lot in with the metal-not-metal
hordes, and while I don’t doubt it’s down to genuine interest,
there’s something overly cosy about this meeting of extremities.
And while as a navigator of the nether regions of electronics, Rehberg’s
cachet is undeniable, sometimes his work is underwhelming –
if some of the tracks on Work For GV 2004-2008 slipped out
into the world under a different name, they’d be marked as tedious
dark ambient.
For what it’s worth, those tracks are still tedious dark ambient,
though I’ll admit the production is of a higher cut than that
of a bedroom gothic. There’s a very fine line between truly
oppressive sound design and mildly diverting mood piece, and too much
of Work For GV 2004-2008 fits the latter description, though
this is possibly due to their functional design – they were
created for puppeteer and choreographer Gisèle Vienne. Some
of them feature author Dennis Cooper reading his work, which will
please fans of his texts of transgression. Cooper’s appearances
are successful because the difference between the texts (psychosexual,
obsessive portraits) and the delivery (lugubrious, detached) enacts
a very real tension that’s hard to map: it’s probably
the most provocative thing about Work For GV 2004-2008. Cooper’s
writings have always been admirable for their starkness and economy,
their refusal to explain. When Rehberg’s productions move into
similar areas, they’re more successful. “Slow Investigation”’s
stalking, bruised melody winds from the speakers like a possessed,
drugged serpent. It navigates unbearable melancholy and emotional
distance in an inexplicable manner – particularly as these things
aren’t readily reconcilable. If anything, “Slow Investigation”
recalls the monolithic slabs of synth that haunt Prurient’s
Pleasure Ground, which makes some critics’ dismissal
of Prurient and veneration of Rehberg amusing – if anything,
Prurient’s the more affecting and inventive of the two. “Boxes
& Angels” is the other gem on here, an eleven-minute exploration
of a gorgeous, shuddering loop. Much like Rehberg’s artistic
pinnacle, the third track from Get Out, its strength lies
in both its accumulative and its affective properties. When it disappears
briefly at seven minutes to make way for glass-bell drones, the latter
are somehow rendered more gorgeous through this juxtaposition. Rehberg
excels at these moments of uncomfortable beauty, and more of them
would be very welcome.–JD
Zilverhill
EOTVOS
Adeptsound
 Though
this fine slab of dark ambient inaugurates a new label based in "the
world's most isolated city", Perth in Western Australia, the
roots of the project, like the roots of just about anything dark in
Australia's brief history, can be traced back across the water in
England. Zilverhill is a collaborative venture between Tim Bayes,
aka Schuster, a veteran of 80s Industrial cassette culture (go a-googling
and explore the murky connections between Schuster and Nottingham-based
Dieter Müh and, surprise, you'll eventually unearth a Nurse With
Wound connection via Colin Potter) and pRESENT dAY bUNA, about whom
I've been able to find precious little except that his name is Paul
and he's currently located in Sheffield. But whoever and wherever
they are, they've signed a terrific release here, 70 minutes of beautifully
structured electronica based on transformed loops of everything from
disembodied answerphone messages and radio broadcasts to oppressive
synthesizers and crunching machinery. There appears to be a clue as
to what some of these field recordings might be over at Cyclic Defrost
( "the sound of a gas rig thudding and grinding underwater off
the far north coast..") but most of them remain fascinatingly
inscrutable. Unlike many similar albums that find their way here,
this one had me listening all the way through, three times in a row;
it's rare to come across a disc that sustains interest without flagging
for an hour and ten minutes, but this one does it just fine. Whether
the album title has anything to do with Hungarian-born composer and
conductor Péter Eötvös I couldn't say. Add that to
the list of unanswered questions raised by this splendid debut outing.–DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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