| YULE
2008 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Nate Dorward, Lawrence English, Jason Kahn, Massimo
Ricci, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
The Library of Babel
Norbert Möslang:
Cracked Everyday
In Concert: Psychedel-yah
Festival, CAPC Bordeaux
On Barnyard: Barnyard
Drama, Jean Martin, Colin Fisher, Evan Shaw, Justin Haynes,
Lori Freedman, Scott Thomson / Blah Blah 666 / Anthony Braxton
& Kyle Brenders
In Print: Craig Shepard
On DVD: Joëlle Léandre / Elliott Sharp
JAZZ & IMPROV: Choi,
Hong, Sachiko & Otomo / Charles Gayle / Frode Gjerstad /
Malcolm Goldstein & Matthias Kaul / Mats Gustafsson / Mary
Halvorson / Peggy Lee / Jim McAuley
Regenorchester XII
/ Keith Rowe & Seymour Wright / Shoup, Corsano & Flaherty
/ Chris Speed, Chris Cheek & Stephan Furic Leibovici / Sun
Ra / Steve Swell / Toot / Rafael Toral / Trio Sowari / Ute Völker
& Angelika Sheridan / Jacob Wick & Andrew Greenwald
CONTEMPORARY: Mark
Applebaum / John Hudak / Kernel / Iannis Xenakis / Zeitkratzer
& Carsten Nicolai
ELECTRONICA / NOISE: Alan
Courtis / DJ Olive / Fennesz / Illusion of Safety, Burke &
Dimuzio / Junko, Henritzi, Mattin / Joel Stern
Last month
|
 Nick Cain,
in a typically entertaining if slightly snarky Outer Limits roundup
review in November's Wire, began his review of Lucio Capece
and Sergio Merce's Casa on Kostis Kilymis' Organized Music
From Thessaloniki label with "for the 150 people worldwide who
still care about electroacoustic improvisation (EAI).." Not sure
what irks me most about that: the "150 people worldwide"
(surely there a few more of us than that, Nick included –
let's wait to see how many of the "I'm One Of The 150" T-shirts
Kilymis is printing up are left a year from now) or the "still",
as if hundreds of EAI enthusiasts have now given up on the genre and
drifted off into the dreamy pastures or laptopia or returned to the
hustle and bustle of "old school" improv. As (I hope) this
latest issue of PT will demonstrate, "much remains to be heard"
(to quote Stéphane Rives), not only in EAI, but in the other
"niche markets" this e-zine attempts to cover. Special
thanks this month go out to Tony Herrington at The Wire,
for allowing me to reprint an article originally commissioned for
November's "Unofficial Channels" feature; to Jason Kahn,
for letting me use the original English version of his article on
Norbert Möslang that has just appeared (in French) in Jérôme
Noetinger's Revue & Corrigée; to Maxime Guitton
for inviting me to a windswept and rainlashed Bordeaux at the end
of last month to cover a festival of psychedelic music (no, I don't
know what it is either) he was curating there; and of course to our
regular contributors and our eagle-eyed editor Nate Dorward. Bonne
lecture et bonne année 2009.-DW
 August
1979, Harold Moores Records, Soho, London. Fingers sore and caked
with grime after hours' thumbing through racks of dusty vinyl, I find
my copy of Stockhausen's Telemusik / Mixtur, the climax of
an orgiastic day of record buying. Now, in less time than it takes
to remove that LP from its (truly hideous) cover, a quick Google,
a couple of clicks and the music I spent three years hunting for and
a small fortune acquiring is flying through cyberspace to the hard
drive. Sure, as any vinyl junkie will tell you, a download, however
lame or lossless it might be, is not the same thing – but only
madmen and millionaires collect rare vinyl today. Why spend months
scouring fleamarkets for a mint condition Geechee Recollections
when you can hoover up a dozen Marion Browns in less than half an
hour (I did)? But having done so, do you take the time to convert
the file, burn the disc and stick it into a shiny new jewelbox with
a high-res print of the album cover and a copy of the original booklet?
After all, once they're on your machine, those mp3s have a nasty habit
of disappearing.
 So,
sadly, do record labels. Downloading is having quite an impact on
the record industry, especially small, dedicated imprints which care
enough about OOP avant-garde music to reissue it in properly mastered
limited editions with elegant packaging and well-researched liners.
The doyen of reissue labels, Atavistic's Unheard Music Series, has
been pretty quiet lately, but at least it's still a going concern,
unlike Meidad Zaharia's Mio imprint, which, after several handsome
slabs of vintage French prog weirdery by the likes of Philippe Besombes,
Jean-Jacques Birgé and Jean Cohen-Solal dropped out of sight
just when Zaharia was optioning the rights for the 1976 Berrocal /
Tusques rarity Opération Rhino. Don't fret: you can
get it if you want it, for £99 on eBay, or free as a download
– I found it in fifteen seconds flat. The sound quality's a
bit duff, but I'm £99 in pocket and digging the music.
Similarly, if you're prepared to put up with a bit of snap crackle
and pop, why shell out a three-figure sum for the Mosaic Complete
Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton, when the albums it contains
are already available as free downloads? Skip the question of whether
it's morally right to stick something on a blog when it's technically
back in print. One feels no qualms about downloading things that are
long unavailable and show no sign of reappearing – the Giorno
Poetry Systems LPs over at Ubuweb, the ICP back catalogue, Radu Malfatti's
FMPs with Stephan Wittwer, neither of which Radu is ever likely to
reissue – but how many of us can put hands on hearts and swear
they've never downloaded things for free they could just as easily
have bought with as many clicks over at Amazon? Not I. Nuff said.
Move on.
 The
implications of all this are more far-reaching, and go way beyond
simple P&L. Downloading ultimately calls into question the time-honoured
idea that education is about the transmission of important information
from Those Who Know (to quote Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow)
to Those Who Don't, the idea of knowledge as something painstakingly
acquired through a long process of apprenticeship and research. The
legions of bloggers who spend their free time digitizing and uploading
rare platters for public consumption aren't so much Those Who Know
as Those Who Have. And having isn't the same as knowing. Professors
of Musicology and Wire journalists alike love to chart out
linear paths through history like the opening of Matthew 1
– Brahms begat Schoenberg begat Webern begat Boulez etc. –
but the bright red threads they've left us to find our way out of
the Minotaur's labyrinth are being tangled up in the ones and zeros
of cyberspace. Music history as we once knew it is unravelling. Rhizomes
are in, roots and branches are out, and nobody needs Those Who Know
sitting at the top of the tree anymore.
Jim O'Rourke and David Grubbs, like John Zorn before them, became
poster boys for the avant-garde not only because of the originality
and diversity of their own music but because of their unbridled enthusiasm
for long OOP albums by the likes of Arnold Dreyblatt, Folke Rabe and
Mayo Thompson, which they shepherded back into circulation on their
now defunct Drag City subsidiary Dexter's Cigar, and later individually
on Moikai and Blue Chopsticks. In the past couple of years though
both Grubbs and O'Rourke have moved out of the limelight a little,
and nobody seems to have emerged to take their place and tell us what
to rush out and buy next.
 But
the number of people who rushed out and bought Thomas Lehn and Ray
Russell because Jim raved about them pales into insignificance compared
to the hordes of mad completists who've tried to track down music
by anyone on the infamous list of alt.music oddballs that accompanied
the first Nurse With Wound album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting
Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. The Nurse List immediately
established NWW's Steve Stapleton as one of Those Who Know, and it's
been keeping collectors of weird music busy and broke for over a quarter
of a century. Not anymore though, since much of it is now available
for free download. Now we all know, or think we do. With our little
laptops we can all be composers (being able to read music doesn't
matter anymore), critics (why pay journalists to research and write
reviews when we can stick up our enthusiastic knee-jerk reactions
for free?) and DJs, ripping and posting those oldies, goodies and
weirdies for our personalised mixtapes. In the future, everybody will
be world famous for 15 Megabytes. Or, as Syndrome says to Mr. Incredible,
"everyone can be superheroes. And when everyone's super, no one
will be."
 The
world of downloading is a world of crazed bulimia. A good friend whose
collection already includes several thousand free jazz rareties (including
the complete Brötzmann and the complete Braxton – quite
a feat) still downloads everything in sight, "for the hell of
it." Not that I can talk, with 12 Gigabytes of unheard mp3s languishing
on the hard drive. But I do know the joy of unearthing not one but
fifty buried treasures soon gives way to feelings of inadequacy and
frustration, as you realise you'll never be able to listen to everything
out there. If Pascal were writing today, he wouldn't be terrified
by "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces," but by
the eternal noise. Perhaps my old Cambridge professor Alexander Goehr
was right after all when he groaned about there being "simply
too much music." The French Bibliothèque Nationale that
Alain Resnais affectionately portrayed in his 1956 short film Toute
la mémoire du monde is rapidly becoming Jorge Luis Borges'
Library of Babel.–DW
[This article was originally commissioned for inclusion in The
Wire #297, November 2008, and is reprinted here with permission
- see Editorial above]
Norbert
Möslang: Cracked Everyday
"All
of life consists of vibrations, and all of these relate to particular
resonances. There are light waves, sound waves, microwaves... In this
context you can start to combine things and, for example, use a radio
as resonator for the waves from a remote control. And if it maybe
doesn't work, then you just have to go on changing the frequencies
and looking for connections until you've cracked it."—Norbert
Möslang
Crash
the System
For
over thirty years Norbert Möslang, both alone and in his groundbreaking
work with Andy Guhl in the legendary Voice Crack, has been forging
a path through performance, audio recordings, room installations,
public works, multiples, photography and video. His work revels in
disruption, error and chaotic systems designed to teeter on the edge
of utter destruction and revelation.
 Born
in 1952 in the Swiss city of St. Gallen, Möslang began playing
the recorder at the age of seven in school. After a year, he was asked
to join the accordion orchestra but soon quit when the instructor
forced everyone to march around the classroom while playing. Undeterred,
he went on to play harmonium and take piano lessons. By sixteen he
was sitting in on piano with local pop and swing bands. He bought
his first soprano saxophone at seventeen and taught himself to play,
forming a free improvising duo with a local drummer in 1969.
Möslang first met Andy Guhl in 1972 at a rehearsal with a St.
Gallen rock band. Guhl had dropped by to hear Möslang jam. The
two struck up a friendship and soon thereafter started playing together,
with Guhl on contrabass and Möslang on soprano saxophone. By
1973 they had given their first concert with a trumpeter in St. Gallen.
The two continued working together as a duo and in 1977 found themselves
performing at the prestigious Total Music Meeting in Berlin, the epicenter
at that time of free improvised music in Europe.
Released on the Free Music Production label in 1977, Deep Voices
became Möslang and Guhl's first entry into the annals of music
history. Though sounding very much like an artifact of its time, repeated
listens reveal the two already developing their own particular musical
language, a dialog which in many ways reveals their music in the years
to come, even when they had long since discarded all acoustic instruments.
In addition to the use of "home made instruments", Deep
Voices gives another hint at the duo's future with the presence
on stage of a lone cassette deck—needless to say, this was not
there to record the concert, but to inject a bit of good-natured malfunctioning
into the proceedings with, as Guhl explained in a later interview,
"electro acoustic studies" running parallel to the music.
Even today, Deep Voices still sounds fresh, like free jazz
beamed in from an alternate universe.
Möslang and Guhl stayed in this mode of operation for Brissugo,
the debut cassette release on their Uhlang Produktion imprint in 1980,
and Knack On, a live recording from Innsbruck, Austria, released
on Uhlklang in 1982. Knack On documents the duo's first real
departure from acoustic instruments towards what would later become
"cracked everyday electronics." The sound is raw and brutal,
with shards of radio static, white noise bursts and tearing metal
colliding against absolute screeching saxophone mayhem.
To
Make Movement Audible
 Two
performances held in the context of the burgeoning underground St.
Gallen art scene of the early 1980's corroborated Möslang and
Guhl's intent to move their sound investigations beyond the confines
of the concert environment. In 1983 at the Szene, St. Gallen they
exhibited their first room installation, Lokalstradio, in
which an array of radios placed on turntables distributed around a
transmitter create an oscillating feedback system, phasing in and
out of itself with the spinning turntables. In the same year they
staged Werkstatt Eisen at the Grabenhalle, St. Gallen, taking
a more actionist approach to the idea of a room installation with
a dozen people banging away on scrap metal. A recording of this performance
became the second cassette release on Uhlang Produktion.
Around this time Möslang began performing solo, developing a
feedback system for soprano saxophone, transmitter and radio. By hanging
a radio to the bottom of his saxophone and attaching one pole of the
transmitter's antenna to the body of the sax and one pole to his right
hand, he could manipulate feedback from the radio by the moving saxophone
and using his body to determine the sensitivity of the antenna. This
proved to be a prototype for Möslang's later work, where body
movement modulated magnetic and infrared fields of vibration, setting
in motion audio and visual processes.
Voice
Crack
 1984
saw the release of Voice Crack and the first instance of
"cracked everyday electronics" explicitly stated as the
duo's choice of instrumentation. Starting with a lone static pop sounding
like a pistol going off in some abandoned warehouse, Voice Crack
blurs the lines between room installation and concert. Recorded on
March 23rd, 1984 at the Gallery Corinne Hummel, Basel, this record
documents the duo's first performance with "cracked everyday
electronics" and evokes at times a version of David Tudor's Rainforest
gone terribly awry. Although recorded in a concert setting, the intent
of the performance resembles more the installation Lokalstradio
in that a system of interacting objects and fields of interfering
magnetic and infrared vibrations gets initiated, only to be abandoned
to generate itself in ever-varying patterns. At some point the duo
leave the performance area and let their instruments run themselves.
Voice Crack sounds very much like an old factory slowly taking
itself apart, with components falling away, fuses shorting out, random
sputtering hums and static, the sound of an electro-mechanical entity
slowly fading into rubble and dust. The performance ends when the
duo pull the power.
In many ways the sensibility behind this performance owes much to
Dziga Vertov's film Man with the Movie Camera, to which in
1983 Möslang and Guhl first performed a live soundtrack in the
Kraftwerkzentrale Kubel, an abandoned power station in St. Gallen.
Vertov's credo was to record "life at it is" without theatrical
subterfuge, as life might be without the camera present. Vertov's
aesthetic influenced other artists living in St. Gallen at this time,
including the film maker Peter Liechti, with whom Möslang and
Guhl created a soundtrack to Liechti's 1985 film Senkrecht Waagrecht,
and the visual artist Roman Signer, whose 1985 performance Ereignisse
von und mit in the Grabenhalle, St. Gallen also included the
duo.
To
Crack the Code
 Möslang
and Guhl's work involved not only cracking the code or intended function
of everyday electronic devices. As the Swiss art critic Ralph Hug
observed: "The code of the seemingly autonomous action of a system's
individual elements becomes subsumed by the network, forming together
to create a new aggregate." This applied especially to the duo's
concerts, where the musicians themselves, the individual machines,
circuits and even waves of sound and light, gradually lost their individual
identities to form a new pulsating entity. Another example of this
was the 1985 performance Radio Laboratorium, where the public
was invited to bring their own radios and tune in to transmitters
placed on four tables distributed around the Grabenhalle, St. Gallen.
Dictaphones and other appliances sent inaudible audio signals which
could only be detected by tuning into the frequency from each transmitter.
Tuning into the correct frequencies precipitated screeching feedback
from the radios. The performance was documented on the cassette Radio
Laboratorium, the fourth release on Uhlang Produktion.
During Möslang and Guhl's first tour of the United States in
1986, several concert venues announced them as "Voice Crack"
and the name stuck. The self-released Kick That Habit, recorded
in concert on May 31, 1986 in Birmingham, Alabama, captured the duo
in full swing. Hearing this record it is no wonder that Möslang
had been unceremoniously fired from the King Übü Örchestrü
in 1986, his last gig as a wind player. 1986 also saw him completely
abandoning conventional instruments. He recalled, "I found my
saxophone and bass clarinet playing increasingly less stimulating.
Electronic sounds were more compelling and the idea of working with
movement and visual elements more interesting. Being fired from the
King Übü Örchestrü, where one was meant to play
very little, and that very quietly, also played a role in my move
away from wind instruments and this particular world of improvised
music."
Kick That Habit was anything but quiet or sparse. An epiphany
in noise, the record sounds like a joyous rejection of all the musical
shackles imposed on the duo by an increasingly anachronistic and reactionary
European improvised music scene. The record kicks out the jams in
such an uncompromising and confrontational way that it should come
as no surprise that the duo could barely find places to play back
home. As Jim O'Rourke would later write in the liner notes to a re-release
of Knack On, "Any thought of them playing at Total Music
Meeting was about as rational as a Lynyrd Skynyrd reunion."
Acute
Noises
 1987
began with a performance of Draht, a piece for 20 metres
of amplified steel wire strung across the length of the Grabbenhalle,
St. Gallen. Played by Möslang and Guhl with sticks, violin bows,
metal objects and their bare hands, the piece evoked the spirit of
a raw electronic music, subsuming the performance space with shrieks,
moans and interfering frequencies. Draht dates back to 1980
and was one of the duo's longest running performances, still being
played until 1989. Verlag Vexer, an arts publishing house in St. Gallen,
documented the 1987 performance as a cassette with accompanying booklet.
In light of Draht, it is interesting to note that Möslang
has worked as a violin builder since 1974.
In 1988 Voice Crack embarked on their second tour of the United States,
stopping in New York City to record with free noise pioneers Borbetomagus,
playing at that time in an expanded line-up with bassist Adam Nodelman.
Entitled Fish That Sparkling Bubble, the recording goes beyond
the sonic excesses of Kick That Habit. It is hard to imagine
a recording studio being able to contain the ear-splitting volume
and density of sound. Borbetomagus and Voice Crack first played together
in 1984 at a concert organized by Möslang in St. Gallen. Listening
to Fish That Sparkling Bubble it is clear that, in their
own ways, both groups had followed a similar trajectory. Voice Crack
and Borbetomagus were made for each other and Fish That Sparkling
Bubble documents the two groups celebrating this realization.
The
Red That Screams
 1989
proved to be a watershed year for Möslang and Guhl. The premier
of Peter Liechti's documentary film Kick That Habit, with
Voice Crack as the main instigators, brought the duo much exposure
and critical acclaim. Liechti's achingly beautiful film finds poetry
in the seemingly mundane of everyday life and the bizarre in ordinary
Swiss landscapes. A cameo appearance by Liecthi, hacking a chair to
bits with an ax, is just one of the many scenes in the film which
belie the cliché of an idyllic Heidiland.
Percussionist Knut Remond, a friend of Möslang and Guhl's from
St. Gallen, came into the Voice Crack fold, recording the sessions
for 1990's Ear Flash. This record marks a distinctively more
refined sound for the group. Greater definition and separation of
the individual instruments has replaced the earlier recordings' wall-of-sound
aesthetic. Remond would remain with the group through 1994, recording
on two more Voice Crack- Borbetomagus collaborations: Asbestos
Shake, released in 1991, and Concerto for Cracked Everyday
Electronics and Chamber Orchestra released in 1994 and recorded
at, of all places, the Carnegie Recital Hall, New York City.
The duo also stepped up their art activity, initiating a series of
multiples with Krachbox (1990) for Edition Kunsthalle St.
Gallen, and Radio Korrigiert (1991), Platinen (1992)
and 2 Speakers Drumset Operiert (1992), all for Vexer Verlag,
St. Gallen. They also managed to exhibit two new room installations,
Wellenbad (1989) in the Kunsthalle, St. Gallen and Kiff
That Habit—Crack That Code (1992) in the Kunstraum, Aarau.
Perhaps the most interesting collaboration from this period was A
Hole in the Hat, a 1991 performance with Nam Jun Paik at the
Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. Set against a wall of televisions showing
a Joseph Beuys performance, Paik played piano and conducted Möslang
and Guhl as they modulated a short wave radio with toy car remote
controllers.
Interferences
 By
1996 Möslang and Guhl began to record with European improvisers
again, since then producing a long string of collaborations which
would exceed the scope of this article to discuss. Several factors
contributed to their return to the European stage, the most important
being a renewed interest in electronic music by a younger generation
of listeners and musicians, including one Jim O'Rourke, whom Möslang
first met when he organized a concert in St. Gallen for Illusion of
Safety in 1992. O'Rourke not only performed and recorded with the
duo but vigorously promoted their work, re-releasing Earflash
on his Dexter's Cigar imprint in 1996. The 1996 For 4 Ears CD Table
Chair and Hatstand, with O'Rourke and Günter Müller,
found the duo playing in a quieter, yet not necessarily more restrained
mode. Another recording that same year from one of Butch Morris' conduction
performances, Cond. #70 TIT for TAT provided further proof
that Möslang and Guhl were brilliant improvisers.
Parallel to their packed performance and recording schedules the duo
exhibited in 1995 alone the works Aetherfetzen, Loop
1, Surfing Songbirds, Ballchannel and Loop
2. Incredibly, they also found time to record a new Voice Crack
CD in 1997, Below Beyond Above. With cover artwork from their
long-time friend and collaborator Alex Hanimann, Below Beyond
Above marks the final phase of the duo's musical development.
The studio had become a tool in and of itself, with all instruments
recorded to multi-track and the resulting sound files later edited
and re-assembled to create six tracks built around loops phasing in
and out of sync, random bursts of static, pops and bangs pre-empting
the surfacing structures.
The 1998 MP3 release Taken and Changed on the fals.ch internet
label resulted in two tracks, "Yellow Cube" and "Orange
Ashlar." The trademark Voice Crack "knack" is there
but completely honed down to the essence of the sounds themselves,
almost as if the duo were trying to penetrate to the very heart of
their machines' circuits and diodes.
Wireless
Fantasy
Released
in 1999, the duo's last full-length CD Infrared continues
where Taken and Changed left off, delving yet deeper into
the internal world of interfering wave fields and crackling circuits.
One hears the six tracks from inside the machine, looking out through
a blinking diode. Taken and Changed also sounded harsher,
unlike the follow-up vinyl release shock_late on the Cologne
Entenpfuhl label, which favored more discontinuous loops and an almost
relaxed sense of ebb and flow. As Frank Dommert of Entenpfuhl wrote
in the liner notes, "Embedded in the carefully constructed layers
are the duo's trade mark explosive sound events, which seem to have
been placed with more delicacy than ever... sounding more like the
shadow of some big bang, or like someone shooting into a pillow. Or
as if they had dissected an explosion and used only some selected
splinters."
Voice Crack's swan song, ballchannel, a seven-inch single
released on Meeuw Muzak in 2000, retained only the splinters. Documenting
the 1995 room installation of the same name, ballchannel
takes the duo full circle back to the long player Voice Crack,
the recording of an-installation-as-concert with Möslang and
Guhl sitting on the floor of a gallery in Basel surrounded by their
whirring appliances and blinking lights sixteen years ago.
In 2001 the duo focused their energies on a major new sound installation
commissioned by the 49th Venice Biennial. Using hydrophones to channel
the underwater sound world of the Grande Canale into the church of
San Stae, sound_shifting results in a portrait of hectic
Venice processed by a myriad of underwater acoustics and the church's
voluptuous resonance. An accompanying book with CD of sound_shifting
included a photo essay as visual adjunct to the sound work. Taken
from hours of video footage recorded with an underwater camera placed
near a gondola stop on the Grande Canale, the resulting video stills
lend a hauntingly elegiac aura to the sound installation.
The 2002 exhibition two + one in the Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland
would be Möslang and Guhl's final exhibition together as well
as their first each alone. Foreshadowing the duo's impending split,
two + one featured the new works glass_speaker (Möslang),
readysound (Guhl) and, as if waving goodbye, a collaborative
work from 1997, Speed Up. The duo went on to perform a handful
of concerts after this, but by the end of 2002 Möslang and Guhl
had decided to end their collaboration.
Swings
 2003
would be a busy year for Möslang. The exhibition Electronic
Music Archive at the Neue Kunsthalle, St. Gallen posed the question,
"What does electronic music look like?" Curated by Möslang,
over fifty musicians and visual artists, including Nicolas Collins,
Tina Frank, farmersmanual, Institut für Feinmotorik, Phill Niblock,
Pita, Yasunao Tone and David Watson were invited to show in the form
of objects, room installations, paintings, drawings, videos, photos
and performances their take on electronic music as visual inspiration.
Möslang also showed a new version of his work glass_speaker
at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. Here Möslang transformed the exhibition
space into a huge resonating body by affixing transducers to the gallery
windows and channeling the sound environment from outside. The windows
became powerful loudspeakers, turning the space into an immersive,
vibrating sound environment.
As if this all were not enough, Möslang released his first solo
recording, distilled, as a three inch CD on Aesova. Broken
up into four segments, the twenty-minute composition starts with fields
of radio static panning back and forth like tracer bullets in a night
sky, gradually permeating and morphing into sounds generations away
from their origin. Listed as a "processed live recording"
from 2001, distilled illustrates Möslang's first move
towards a more digital orientation in his work.
How
Does a Bicycle Light Sound?
"But
what is the sound of a blinking LED bicycle light—that is, a
tool the purpose of which could not be further removed from musical
purposes, that instead was designed to increase road traffic safety?"
Published in the 2004 Volume 14 of the Leonardo Music Journal,
this quote taken from Möslang's short essay How Does a Bicycle
Light Sound? concisely states his modus operandi. "For my
purposes, the original—visual—function of the tool is
irrelevant, which does not mean that it is not interesting. The interaction
of light and sound produces countless possible combinations. It is
an electronic playground full of linked acoustic and visual elements
that can be used, manipulated and re-used as one wishes."
 Möslang's
2004 room installation capture, exhibited in Feldkirch, Austria,
investigates this nexus of light-becoming-sound with ten amplified
fluorescent tubes laid in a group on the floor of the gallery space.
Contact microphones attached to the lights amplify their hums, buzzes
and clicks and send these sounds through an equalizer to a computer
board. Working with a programmer, Möslang devised software to
re-work these sounds in a constantly evolving generative system. Two
loudspeakers projected the processed sound of the fluorescent lights
back into the exhibition space. The piece works on both the auditive
and visual levels, with all cables, power cords, open computer board
and the lights themselves lending a strong sculptural element to the
work, looking as if one had stumbled upon some aborted industrial
experiment. Documented on the 2005 Cut CD capture, the audio
component of the work is in and of itself a fascinating stand-alone.
The six tracks of Möslang's second solo recording, lat_nc_,
released as the 2004 For 4 Ears CD, bubble and slide in a cauldron
of dystopic loops and oblique shards of sound. Möslang composed
the tracks (which were initially recorded in 2002) with his long-time
engineer Pierre Bendel at Zack Studio, St. Gallen. Although now working
more in the world of digital processing, Möslang still preferred
the focus of re-working and mixing the final tracks in the studio.
Chaotic
Actions
 Möslang
premiered two new visual works during 2005, meta_pix, at
the Transit Davos Wintersport, and karaoke_landscape at the
Gallery Luciano Fasciati, Chur. As in Möslang's solo recordings,
these two new works pursued random processes through digital processing,
exploiting software error and data flows. In karaoke_landscape
sound input from the gallery modulates the visual processing of a
landscape projected onto a computer screen. Like an erratic etch-a-sketch,
the picture slowly re-constituted itself in a haze of audio impulses.
In "meta_pix" web cams from the Davos department of tourism
transmit a stream of mountain images processed by a data flow of weather
forecasts from the Swiss avalanche watch. The resulting images depict
alpen panoramas distorted by storms of data and transmission errors.
The 2005 composition hashed_hush, a radio production for
West Deutscher Rundfunk, presented Möslang moving completely
away from cracked everyday electronics and working solely with digitally
processed underwater recordings made in the Romanshorner Harbour of
Lake Constance. This spellbinding work conjures up the ghosts of early
tape music through a haze of digital flotsam and jetsam, the final
five minutes surging with clouds of dense full spectrum noise sucking
one down the watery depths.
Magnetic
Fields
 Though
still performing concerts with his table of cracked everyday electronics,
Möslang's compositions and visual art continued to move further
into the realm of the digital. His award winning 2006 room installation
get_pic, shown in Switzerland at the Gallery Luciano Fasciati,
Chur and the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, implements a stream of web cam
shots from different locations in Singapore. Cut and re-sized randomly
by software of Möslang's own design, the ensuing images surface
in unsettling patterns on four computer monitors placed on the floor
of the gallery. As with all of Möslang's work, nothing is hidden:
the cables, exposed computers, and the naked LCD screens create a
kind of high-tech art brut.
As with hashed_hush, Möslang's fourth CD burst_log,
released in 2006 on For 4 Ears, was completely composed from previously
recorded sound files—in this case the first three tracks of
his 2004 CD lat_nc_. As Möslang wrote, "extensively
processed and re-worked," which is putting it mildly. The six
tracks shine brilliantly, perhaps like the robotic space craft Swift,
as it orbits the earth in the sun's glare, collecting data from gamma
ray bursts, for which the CD is named. Rhythm takes a more prominent
role on burst_log than on previous recordings. The second
track "b1_2_ _7:43," with its 160 bpm four on the floor,
glaring bursts of static and a sequencer off on the right channel
chattering wildly, would not be out of place on some futuristic dance
floor.
Möslang pushed on in 2007, releasing his second CD for Cut, header_change,
which used as source material the raw data from Swiss visual artist
Silvie Defraoui's video stills, and premiered lightsound,
a new room installation for light-modulated greeting card sound chips.
Since Voice Crack's demise Möslang has also collaborated either
live or in studio with, among many others, Kevin Drumm, Dälek,
Günter Müller and Ralf Wehowsky, with whom he has just released
Einschlagskrater, a seven-inch single on Meeuw Muzak.
As Möslang once observed, "For the last 20 years, various
small electronic tools have been mass produced and thrown onto the
market . . . just waiting to be cracked! This is the wreckage of Western
civilization, as it were, and the musician is the ethnologist who
collects and cracks this wreckage." We will undoubtedly not have
to wait long to see and hear what he cracks next.–JK
[This article also appears in the December 2008 issue of Revue &
Corrigée, in French translation; thanks to Jérôme
Noetinger for agreeing to its publication here in the original English.
Thanks to Norbert Möslang for photos. Go to: http://moeslang.com/
- DW]
Various
Artists
Psychedel-yah Festival,
CAPC Bordeaux, France, 28th – 30th November 2008
 For
most of us the word "psychedelic" – from the Greek
"soul," (psyche) and "manifest," (delos),
meaning literally "making clear" and "freeing the spirit"
– is associated with something visual: it conjures up images
of the Glenn McKay and Mark Boyle lightshows that accompanied the
early live appearances of Jefferson Airplane and Soft Machine respectively,
Ira Cohen's Mylar chamber, Mati Klarwein's album covers, tie-dye clothing,
etc. The term "psychedelic music", on the other hand, which
first appeared in the mid 60s, notably with the 13th Floor Elevators'
The Psychedelic Sounds of.. (1966), is much harder to define.
"Trying to understand this music," writes curator Maxime
Guitton in the programme accompanying the three-day Psychedel-yah
Festival in Bordeaux's Modern Art Museum, "means re-evaluating
two essentially generational (hence paramusical) characteristics:
a tendency towards syncretism – underestimated – and the
use of drugs – overestimated." Among the examples he cites
are Bernard Parmegiani's fusion of musique concrète
and free jazz in 1966's Jazzex, Brigitte Fontaine sitting
in with the Art Ensemble of Chicago on Comme à la radio,
Daevid Allen's 1967 collaboration with François Bayle in the
studios of ORTF ("no official recording was released, but their
simple existence continues to fire the imagination.."), and the
1969 festival in Amougies, Belgium, a fine example of trans-genre
meltdown which brought together in the same muddy field American expat
young lions of free jazz – Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp, Don Cherry
– and already established European pop acts, some soon to become
big names (Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Gong..), others lost legends
(Ame Son, Frogeaters..).
The IAO exhibition in Bordeaux's CAPC Modern Art Museum, which the
Psychedel-yah Festival of music and film kickstarted, set out to reassess
the impact of psychedelia "as understood from the French context
and its many international ramifications, a three-month trip across
the psychedelia of yesterday and today." Guitton's text concludes
with a brief and "necessarily subjective" discography of
exclusively French albums: seven key LPs from 1971, including Gong's
Camembert Electrique, Barney Wilen's Moshi, and
Bernard Vitet's La Guêpe, plus ten more recorded between
1969 and 1977, from Jean Le Fennec's Phantastic to Ghédalia
Tazartès (photo below)'s Transports, via Ame Son's
Catalyse, and Areski & Brigitte Fontaine's L'Incendie.
(Just as well he inserted that "necessarily subjective"
– this is not the time and place to argue the case for the albums
that didn't make his list.) But what, musically, do these discs have
in common, and how – if at all – can they be brought together
under the banner "psychedelic", a term after all that transcends
music altogether?
 The
best way to "understand psychedelia from a French context",
and to structure such a stylistically diverse collection of material,
is to provide what the French love to call a fil conducteur,
a unifying thread. The choice of Gong is at once logical – they
were, after all, first presented to the world through the good auspices
of a French label (BYG) and subsequently, after the departure of Daevid
Allen in 1974, co-opted into the French prog mainstream by Pierre
Moerlen – but problematic. The mid 70s French incarnation of
Gong might look "psychedelic" – hence the decision
of festival scenographer Lili Reynaud Dewar to construct two huge
three-dimensional replicas of the "rainbow pyramid eye"
album cover of 1974's You (photo above) – but sounds
distinctly "prog". There's a world of difference between
You's polyrhythmic intricacies and the raw jam of, say, Amon Düül
I's Psychedelic Underground – surely an essential album
of reference for European psychedelia. Following the politically charged
free-your-mind-and-your-ass-will-follow logic of BYG/Actuel and Amougies
led not only to cosmic prog / synth rock – Moerlen's Gong and
Tim Blake's Crystal Machine, the delightful excesses of Besombes
and Rizet.. – but also to the dark violence of Mahogany Brain,
the unclassifiable weirdery of Jacques Berrocal's Musiq Musik
and Parallèles and the wild early work of Un Drame
Musical Instantané, Jean-François Pauvros and Gaby Bizien.
Given Maxime Guitton's enthusiasm for and desire to include some of
today's leftfield pioneers, from jam bands like Endless Boogie to
trance noise outfits like The Skaters, it's perhaps a shame he didn't
(couldn't?) get the likes of Mahogany Brain's Michel Bulteau on board
too – I'd have loved to see a live set by the trio with Pauvros
and Ernie Brooks that recorded 1999's Rinçures (Fractal).
As it turned out, barely a third of the groups / artists he invited
to appear at Psychedel-yah were French, and half of those were local
talents from the Bordeaux region, no doubt with the right attitude,
the right records at home and the right effects boxes, but sadly lacking
in personality and stage presence. They shuffled almost apologetically
onstage, almost unnoticed by the diffident beer-swilling public, and
nobody seemed to know – or care – when the soundcheck
ended and the set proper began. The acoustic of the huge vaulted space
of the CAPC, originally a warehouse used to store goods arriving from
the colonies, was flattering for most of the torpid jamming on offer,
but not at all appropriate for anything involving rhythmic detail.
The second of the two stages – not really a stage at all, in
fact, since the musicians played at floor level – was set up
at an angle (the space being divided into various triangular zones
in accordance with the omnipresent You cover idea), which
sent whatever sound was not soaked up by the public hurtling into
a corner to be reflected out into the wider area as muddy sludge.
"Turn
on, tune in, drop out", was Timothy Leary's famous phrase, but
most of the punters on the first night were having difficulty turning
on to start with. Many seemed more concerned with trying to film or
photograph proceedings (why?) with digital cameras and mobile phones
than with actually paying attention to what was unfolding before them.
I suspect the closest these people ever get to throwing open the doors
of perception is receiving a text message. The older members of the
audience, who presumably turned up to admire the collection of vintage
posters and Actuel magazine covers, or to catch a glimpse
of an authentic psychedelic survivor (and Tim Blake and Kevin Ayers
looked as dog-eared as the covers of their LPs on sale in the adjoining
wine bar), gazed wistfully at the slideshow projections of bearded
/ beaded flower children serving beans to bedraggled kids on sunny
campsites way back when.
 After
a refreshing blast of West African psychedelia on the house PA, Brooklyn-based
Endless Boogie (photo, left) eased into their 45-minute one-chord
jam, singer and lead guitarist Paul "Top Dollar" Major alternating
chit chat with the audience – most of it unintelligible thanks
to the delay on the voice – with lick-heavy guitar solos. But
he seemed oddly ill at ease in the huge venue. "Anyone know what
time it is?" he asked at one moment. "We can go on for five
minutes or five hours." Five hours would be fine, but that would
involve drawing the listening public so far into the music that they
forget all notion of clock time and surrender themselves to the psychedelic
eternal now. Hardly likely to happen if you keep wandering offstage
to ask the soundman how much longer you've got left.
"It's easy," Guitton argues, "to reduce psychedelic
music to a set of clichés: pop melodies, distortion, musique
concrète-derived sound effects, seasoned with a pinch
of free jazz inflected improvisation and borrowings from ethnic music,"
but that's precisely what Psychic Ills, also from New York, seemed
to want to do. Bassist Liz Hart jangled a long string of shells around
the stage and vocalist / guitarist Tres Warren waved a cymbal around
his head for no apparent reason before intoning a monotone mantra
with so much echo and delay he sounded like a distressed sheep. When
a crashing double-stick epic backbeat kicked in on the second track,
a lone punter pressed his torso up to the speaker stack to absorb
as much of the "vibe" he could, while everyone else gazed
on apathetically. "All these young hippies taking themselves
so seriously makes me want to become a punk," scoffed a woman
next to me, while she fiddled with her iPhone.
On the other stage Expo 70's Justin Wright provided another forgettable
display of guitar licks over a thudding 7/8 bass note loop, accompanied
by a projection of bleary black and white films overlaid with Rorschach
test blots and smudges drifting in and out of focus. Parallel to the
music, the festival also featured a collection of notable archive
experimental films, but Ron Rice's swan song Chumlum (1964),
with music by Angus MacLise, was screened when hardly anyone was present,
and the public seemed more interested in making ombres chinoises
in front of the exploding groovy pink and purple bubbles of Open Light's
lightshows than in watching rare treasures like Paul Sharits' Razor
Blades (1968), with its disturbing retinal afterburn jumpcuts.
The "highlight" of the first night was the appearance of
Gong vet Tim Blake guesting with Parisian prog four-piece Tulzi. On
the cramped stage cluttered with period analogue artifacts, including
Hohner and Farfisa keyboards, Blake spent most of his time grinning
at the cameras and making sci-fi filter sweeps on an analogue synthesizer
and oh-so-dramatic swoops on a theremin, to the delight of the two
dozen or so punters in the crowd old enough to have forgotten how
tacky this stuff already sounded thirty-odd years ago. Even describing
it as a poor man's Hawkwind would be doing a serious disservice to
Hawkwind.
 The
second day of the festival started well, with The Skaters (photo,
right) , one of only a handful of groups all weekend that managed
to release the music from of a prison of "deep" tribal drumming
and noodling empty rhetoric. Lying low so nobody could see what they
were up to with those cheap Casio keyboards, darbouka, tin whistles
and karaoke delay units, Spencer Clark and James Ferraro succeeded
in creating music sufficiently mysterious and compelling to pull the
audience in. Refreshingly bassless, and freed from the tyranny of
the backbeat, their layers of looped synthesizer arabesques, frantic
outbursts of handheld percussion and occasional throaty blasts of
singing and tin whistle, set against a backdrop of clattering lo-fi
Jajouka-like drumming, were genuinely mesmerising, and needed neither
glitzy lightshows nor gobfuls of pills to work their magic. Ironic,
perhaps, since Clark, when confronted after the show and pressed for
his definition of psychedelia, said: "I don't know man, but I
guess it's something to do with synaesthesia." Before
adding, "I don't really know why we were invited, but it's great
to be here."
While a bloke did an impromptu striptease in front of the Op Art film
projected in the entrance hall of the building – ah, someone's
entering into the spirit of things, I thought, until I saw his wife
filming him on a camcorder – the veteran local double act
of Fox and Coyotte, excellently accompanied on laptop by Joachim Montessuis,
amused the crowd with blasts of euphonium and speeches on how "Barack
Obama might be a nice guy but he's still ignoring the plight of the
American Indians!" before distributing walnuts to everybody and
serving themselves to a large glass of cognac. What a shame Charlemagne
Palestine wasn't invited.
Meanwhile, over on the main stage, Belgian collective Sylvester Anfang
II were setting up. At one point the bassist chipped in Hooky's bass
riff from "New Monday" – perhaps an indication of
what he'd prefer to be playing? – before squatting down with
the rest of the band for what turned out to be yet another depressingly
sludgy E minor jam complete with wanky wah wahs and Tim Blake whooshes.
I wondered whether the squatting was some kind of necessary ritual
to distance themselves from "normal" (non-psychedelic?)
rockers cavorting around the stage à la Jagger, but
as the music rose in intensity – another feature of almost all
the sets at the festival: slink on, fade in, get loud, fade out, slink
off – they managed to struggle to their feet. Thinking once
more of the woman moaning about young hippies and aspiring to be a
punk, I was reminded of Mark Perry's old line: "Here's three
chords, now form a band." Except nowadays you don't need three;
one will do just fine.
Indeed, Christelle Gualdi aka Stellar Om Source was doing quite a
good job building a Terry Riley-esque solo on her Kawai (once more
over a droning low E pedal) until Marc Blanc, another hero of the
"good old days", former Daevid Allen sparring partner and
the man behind Ame Son, joined in on drums. But imposing a solid backbeat
on proceedings sapped the life out of Gualdi's playing, and even some
dramatic pitchshifts couldn't bring it back. Blanc continued alone
on guitar, while a colleague distributed "tracts" (nicely
printed A4 photocopies adorned with revolutionary slogans) among the
audience and tried in vain to get them to sing along.
 Things
were clearly going downhill, as Heatsick's Steven Warwick struggled
to make something interesting from two mics and the de rigueur
effects boxes, to the total indifference of anyone in listening range,
and the latest incarnation of Stephen Lawrie's Telescopes with Vibracathedral
Orchestra vet Bridget Hayden (photo, left), settled down on the floor
for a 45-minute heroic but unsuccessful attempt to scale a wall of
sound of their own creation, bowing and manhandling a pair of guitars
to little avail. But worse was yet to come, with the evening's final
set from Spectrum-Sonic Boom, aka Pete Kember, joined – surprise!
– by none other than the original Soft himself, Kevin Ayers.
"Wow, can you believe it? We're going to hear Kevin
Ayers!" enthused one of the museum curators to me as we observed
proceedings at a safe distance from the upstairs balcony (if I'd had
a pair of opera glasses I'd have turned them the wrong way round like
the messieurs in Pasolini's Salò..). Evidently
thrown in as an afterthought to give the proceedings some kind of
historical street cred, Ayers' appearance consisted of a half-assed
rendition of part of his 1973 chestnut "Decadence", accompanied
by a single chord on his guitar – I can only imagine he was
too stoned or drunk to find another one – and some wimpy synth
triads from Kember. The public, egged on by an Ayers groupie in the
front row who started clapping enthusiastically at the first sign
of any regular strumming from the guitarist (not that there were many),
demanded more, but the second piece, an unstructured jam that went
nowhere at all and soon ran out of steam, was even more embarrassing.
Ayers wandered off to leave Sonic Boom to get back to his turgid sub-Kraftwerk
synth pop. I wandered off too. Fading flowers in his hair / he's
suffering from wear and tear.
The
following afternoon, for what was only their second public appearance,
the Angers-based Ruralfaune Collective performed, appropriately enough,
on a stage dominated by a polystyrene animal standing on its hind
legs and adorned with a white imitation-fur wrap and a gleaming gold-painted
head (an ibis?). Once more none of the musicians was standing, and
three of them were naked from the waist up, droning gently away on
another downtempo trawl through the backwaters of post-rock / New
Weird something-or-other guitarlore, until unforeseen problems with
the guitarist's gear led to some rather nasty growls of low end distortion
which eventually curtailed what had otherwise been a pleasant, if
not exactly stellar, set.
Given the disappointing appearances by vieux routiers Blake
and Ayers on the preceding evenings, the long-awaited reunion of veteran
French psych troubadours Ame Son (Marc Blanc, drums and acoustic guitar,
Bernard Lavialle, electric guitar, François Garrel, flute)
turned out to be a pleasant surprise. They played real songs, and
well-crafted ones too (rhythmically and metrically intricate in places,
but not at all flashy), performed with love and care by three men
who were in there at the start of it all but who'd managed to retain
much of their youthful enthusiasm – Blanc's voice on "I
Just Want To Say" still as fresh and light as it was on the group's
1970 BYG/Actuel outing Catalyse – and clearly delighted
to be making music together again after an absence of some twenty
years. It was a timely reminder that "psychedelic" doesn't
have to mean "heavy", and found a resonance in the set later
that evening from The Family Elan, aka Chris Hladowski and Hanna Tuulikki
(Scatter, Daniel Padden's One Ensemble, Nalle..). With sleigh bells
attached to their shoes, and a tambourine and sruti box underfoot
to provide light rhythm and discreet drone, Hladowski & Tuulikki's
Eastern European folk-inspired material struck a chord with the public,
who actually demanded an encore (just as well, as it revealed what
an extraordinary voice Tuulikki has when she gets up into the upper
register). Of course, there were a few insensitive blasé little
fuckers sitting off to the right who cheered loudly when one of the
amps let out an unintended feedback howl, but I'd like to have seen
them do better.
 Between
these two affectionate homages to a gentler, rural psychedelia, some
of the festival's most challenging offerings came from filmmaker Ben
Russell. Black and White Trypps #3 scrambles Richard Pryor's
head better than the acid he took ever did, and Black and White
Trypps #4 zooms in on punters at a Lightning Bolt gig in Providence
RI, framing the ecstatic expressions of the sweaty youngsters in dimly
lit slowmotion (a reminder perhaps that kids are still turning on,
tuning in and dropping out to music today – just that the music's
moved on a bit). Music to accompany the latter film was by Joe Grimm,
who subsequently took to the stage himself (photo, right), where he
stood twiddling knobs on a strange Medusa's head contraption with
wires twisting upward into the light of Russell's projector. At the
end of each wire was a photoelectric cell which responded to the intensity
of the light beamed on it, allowing Russell, manning the projectors,
to modify the parameters of Grimm's noisy drones by simply blocking
out the light with his hand. A similar device onstage allowed the
music to influence the intensity of the projectors themselves, creating
a wonderfully paranoid you-fuck-with-me-and-I'll-fuck-with-you working
relationship. The performance was tough, uncompromising and not always
pretty, but it made a welcome change to experience sound and image
actually working together for once – ha! how quaint and old
hat, you say, but it worked. One of the festival highlights
for sure, as was the set that followed it.
 Reines
d'Angleterre (photo, left) (for non-French speakers that translates
as "queens of England" – the French word "reine"
not having, as far as I know, any homosexual connotation, not that
it matters) is a trio consisting of El G and Jo Tanz on electronics
(Casio keyboards to lay down the harmonic carpet, mixing boxes and
effects to rip it, and their voices, to shreds) and Ghédalia
Tazartès, one of the authentic originals of French alt.music
since the mid 70s. Tazartès brought with him a length of plastic
tubing, a homemade bell of jangling metal pipes, an accordion and
a fan, but it was his voice that really did the business, an extraordinary
instrument capable of going from sub-bass power throat singing to
wild bel canto mezzo soprano. "We haven't got a clue where we're
going when we begin," admitted Laurent (El G) later – and
that was what made their four ten-minute "songs" so exciting;
the glorious collision between genres – noise and, umm, well
do we call Tazartès' music, free opera? – perfectly
in line with the melting pot aesthetic Guitton so admired in the albums
cited above. But would El G describe their work as psychedelic, I
wondered? "I don't give a fuck about that," he laughed.
"That's nostalgia – and the thing I love about Ghédalia
is he's not the least bit nostalgic."
So
just what is psychedelic music, then? Judging by many of
the acts programmed at this festival, you'd think it was all slowmoving
E minor drone, embellished by guitar / synth noodling and occasionally
driven forward by thudding tribal binary rhythm. But there were too
many exceptions to prove the rule, from the folk-inflected balladry
of Family Elan to the claustrophobic terror of Grimm and Russell,
from the mad operatics of Tazartès to the thrilling scuzz of
The Skaters. Maybe we should remember the "necessarily subjective"
that accompanied Maxime Guitton's selected discography: psychedelic
music is after all what you want it to be. Returning to the word's
etymological origins, and mindful of the link to drug culture, I'm
still inclined to go for something closer to "ecstatic"
– something that takes you out of yourself. To quote that well-known
psychedelic composer Iannis Xenakis: "The soul is a fallen god.
Only ek-stasis (going outside oneself) can reveal its true
nature. It is necessary to escape from the Wheel of Birth (reincarnations)
by means of purifications (katharmoi) and sacraments (orghoi),
the instruments of ekstasis. Katharmoi are performed
by means of music and medicine." (For "medicine" read
"drugs.") The Psychedel-yah fest had its ups and downs –
more of the latter than the former for this tired old hack, admittedly
– but there were real moments of ecstasy to savour, for which
I am, and will remain, very grateful. Thanks to Maxime Guitton, François
Guillemeteaud and the staff of CAPC Bordeaux for inviting me.–DW
[Photos courtesy Cedric Eymenier. An edited version of this review
appeared in The Wire magazine #300 - reproduced by kind permission]
Barnyard
Drama
I'M A NAVVY
Jean
Martin/Colin Fisher
LITTLE MAN ON THE BOAT
Jean
Martin/Evan Shaw
PIANO MUSIC
Jean
Martin/Justin Haynes
FREEDMAN
Lori
Freedman/Scott Thomson
PLUMB
Blah
Blah 666
IT'S ONLY LIFE
Anthony Braxton/Kyle Brenders
TORONTO (DUETS) 2007
 Barnyard
Drama is the Toronto husband-and-wife duo of singer Christine Duncan
and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Jean Martin, though more recently
the group has doubled in size with the addition of guitarists Justin
Haynes and Bernard Falaise (the latter on loan from Montreal's musique
actuelle scene). The churning guitars and dark, hallucinatory
sound of I'm a Navvy set it apart from other offerings on
Barnyard Records, which generally tend towards quiet, everyday surrealism
(as the punning title of one release on the label puts it, "piano
music"). Some of the pieces are too arch, especially the overripe
"The Blues" and Duncan's faux-naive ballad about "that
butt'ry burning feeling", sung in a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth
British schoolgirl accent. But the air of wicked mischief is generally
quite engaging, the musicians conjuring up a black magic rite out
of grungy blues, snarling electronica, and the guitar-driven meltdown
at the end of The Big Gundown. Duncan's voices range from
gorgon to sexpot to blithering idiot to chanteuse, but isn't mere
grotesquerie (which tends to wear thin very quickly, as witness countless
free-improv vocal albums); she takes the trouble to really occupy
these different personae, until the music becomes a dizzying meditation
on female innocence and experience. Great choice of cover tune, too:
the lyrics of Noel Coward's "Little Girl Blue" may express
bemused pity for the girl, but the music's already leaving the human
scale behind, floating off into the zero-gravity dark, the stars twinkling
all around in detached bemusement.
 Martin
seems to like duets, though the examples of the format on the label
are about as different from each other as you could imagine. Little
Man on the Boat, his collaboration with saxophonist/guitarist
Colin Fisher, is a homemade brew of warped pop, rock, free jazz and
ambient textures. The production is elaborate but small-scale, constructing
a serenely artificial world out of layered instruments, loops, overdubs,
and soft chorales of horns and voices; even a rock guitar solo here
is oddly scaled-down, suggesting the comfortably self-enclosed pleasures
of a child's toy. The disc is often best when the materials are reduced
to a bare minimum: the title track, for instance, is a gentle whirl
of acoustic guitar and consoling horns; "A Long Way from Beacon
Hill" blends hushed ambience, weightless keyboards, trumpet,
and a guitar loop that splits apart like light across rippling water.
"Cat Song" is especially barebones: hearttugging guitar
chords issue at the slowest of drips while Martin's brushes skim the
surface of his cymbals; halfway through, a third element intrudes,
hesitant whinnies from what sounds like a sax with a child's kazoo
stuck in its bell. Even the busier tracks avoid clutter: "Koyaya",
for instance, shows Martin's deft producer's touch, as he nibbles
away at Fisher's rubbery jazz-rock guitar solo with typewriter percussion,
chilly organ chords, and pert horn sections that drop in erratically
for just a note or two. As with a lot of Barnyard releases, it takes
a few listens for the disc's surface playfulness to wear off and the
underlying seriousness and musical substance to come through.
 Sax-drums
duets can end up rather desiccated affairs through a lack of colour
and the tendency towards shapeless duels, but Piano Music
(Martin and alto saxophonist Evan Shaw) nicely evades all the cliches
and limitations. Shaw is an interestingly varied player - on "Sweeter
than a plastic bag", for instance, you can hear him go from cool
Osbyish obliquities to bebop in extremis, running through
ideas so profligately it suggests either inspiration or desperation;
Martin presses him forcefully, often matching his phrasing exactly,
and clouds of out-of-tune chords (melodica, perhaps?) add an air of
shadowy enchantment. As the punning title suggests, this is music
that (without being particularly minimalist) finds a lot of shadings
within a minimal palette, and Shaw is especially good at a kind of
abraded purity, in which uncertain whispers or murmurs become a kind
of melody. On "A strong glue is not necessary" his playing
is so pared-down it's like a Konitz ballad with four bars of rest
between phrases--a space occupied by Martin's terrific brushwork and
a growing array of electronic squiggles and overdubs--until in the
final moments Shaw's playing fragments, then trails off into computery
bleeps. A brief spoken-word cut-up listing Chinese delicacies is skippable,
but the rest of the CD is consistently excellent, from the stunning
long-form improv "Rattlebag Jimmy" to the cover of (wait
for it...) the Shaggs' "Philosophy of the World".
 The
Martin-Haynes duet album Freedman is the oddest of the bunch.
Haynes is on ukulele throughout, and Martin's kit is simply a suitcase.
(Do musicians still play on suitcases in hotel-room jam sessions these
days? It's a sound familiar to anyone who's got a copy of the old
Bird on Tenor session....) The setlist consists of seventeen
tunes by Myk Freedman, the lap-steel player who masterminds the St.
Dirt Elementary School (local faves at the Tranzac Club). There are
no feats of Jake Shimabukuro-style uke virtuosity here, just a gentle
ramble through Freedman's ought-to-be-standards: lazybones serenades,
plingy dance music, miniature Chadbournesque string-violence, shuffle-and-thump
grooves, ghostly Oriental ditties and faux-bossa. The players are
recorded in tight close-up, which makes the uke sound splendid and
gives everything an intimacy that's as affecting as bittersweet melodies
like "Love Boat of Love". Haynes plays with a laidback charm
and grace, occasionally letting things drift whimsically off-course,
and (as on all these albums) Martin's ability to get a huge sonic
variety out of next to nothing is uncanny. It's good-humoured music,
but they're not playing it for laughs or kitsch; it might sound like
a gimmicky premise for a CD, but give it a try and it'll pleasantly
surprise you.
 Plumb
is the only "traditional" free improv disc in this batch
of releases, an encounter between clarinetist Lori Freedman (best
known as half of the duo Queen Mab with Marilyn Lerner) and trombonist
Scott Thomson. It's recorded in extreme close-up in a dry acoustic,
which actually suits the music very well: the playing is plenty vivid
on its own, a lot of the action taking place "inside" the
sounds. The CD is, fortunately, not an extended-technique showcase,
though there are plenty of odd, ear-tickling sounds to be found here.
What the duo is up to is subtler than hiss-blap-brrp sonic extremism:
often it's as if they are unpacking the extraordinary sonic oddities
and treasures discoverable even in fairly standard sounds on their
instruments, the rasps and flutters and expressive jolts that lurk
within a note. Thomson keeps to small, tactile gestures but somehow
contrives to give bebop momentum even to moments of drifting near-stasis,
his playing's calm surface ruffled by countless small shivers of delight
and contrariness; while the solo piece "Lead" shows how
much mileage he can get out of quivery pirouettes and split tones
- he even throws in some curt bouncing-ball melodies right out of
J.J. Johnson. Freedman is more inclined to moments of catharsis, exploiting
the bass clarinet's sheer animal warmth or (contrarily) emitting abrupt,
computery bleeps, and letting loose a huge outcry in the middle of
"The Plummet"; but she's also got a knack for using hisses,
sighs and whispers with needle-like precision. (Nice to hear a free
improv disc where the quietest moments are so intense, even passionate,
never threatening to dissolve into vagueness or low-energy drift:
there's a quiet, bubbling episode at the end of "Leak" that
will make your scalp prickle.) This is first-rate music that hardly
deserves the tag "abstract": it contains more melodic invention
than a score of mainstream jazz records.
 It's
Only Life! is by the determinedly offbeat quintet Blah Blah 666.
It's best described as postmodern, DIY vaudeville (banjo, ukulele,
ricky-tick percussion, tootling melodicas, glockenspiels) with south-of-the-(American)-border
touches, including covers of "La Cucaracha" and "Mexican
Hat Dance". They're probably a band to see live, given the bizarre
visual component of the music - Ryan Driver (of the Reveries, another
of Toronto's more self-consciously bizarre ensembles) plays a bass
made out of a broom, and Martin and Nick Fraser play a single drumkit
simultaneously, at least when one of them's not playing "plastic
blow thing" or trumpet - and perhaps it's better to think of
this as a kind of celebration of the collaborative, communal nature
of this city's music scene. The sense of fun comes through even just
on disc, but unlike other offerings on the label, this one relies
too much on charm and stylized tattiness.
 Anthony
Braxton has been up north of the border a fair bit lately: he's been
a guest at both the Victoriaville and Guelph festivals, and has forged
an alliance in this city with the AIMToronto collective. The live
double-CD Toronto (Duets) 2007 contains two 45-minute performances
of his Ghost Trance compositions in the company of saxophonist Kyle
Brenders. "Composition 199" is a jogtrot quarter-note spiel
that's very much in the mode of Braxton's early GTM; indeed, a glance
at Jason Guthartz's discography suggests that, though it seems to
be previously unrecorded, it must date from the mid-1990s. The other
piece ("Composition 356") is an "Accelerator Whip"
GTM piece that already received an airing on the mammoth Iridium set
from Firehouse 12, its constantly shifting proportional rhythms sending
the players on a bumpy rollercoaster ride. Both performances leave
the GTM tramlines fairly quickly, leaping off into a forest of contrasting
episodes; the players are particularly good at playing foreground/background
games, so that you're constantly shifting from hearing their interaction
as mutual dialogue or as solo-with-accompaniment. When he's on soprano,
Brenders sometimes mimics Braxton's skittery loopdeloops but more
often tends towards a melodic forthrightness out of Steve Lacy (in
town, he frequently plays with The Rent, a Lacy covers band); on tenor
he's more of an Evan Parker man, his tone gruff and grainy. A few
of his licks are distractingly derivative (especially his recourse
to Parkerish burblings), but what matters is his great ears and his
wholehearted response to the very plastic character of Braxton's music,
the way it seems to be buffeted by strange gusts of anger and hesitancy
and delight or to suddenly become soft and languid. Given that this
year has been even by Braxton's standards a prolific one for releases
- an amazing nineteen Braxton CDs and one DVD were reviewed in the
Fall 2008 issue of Signal to Noise alone - there's some danger of
this one falling through the cracks, which would be a shame: there
are passages here that are among the most enjoyable I've encountered
in latterday Braxton, like the deluge of slithering arabesques that
occurs near the end of "Composition 199."–ND
Craig
Shepard
ON FOOT
Edition Howeg 105pp ISBN 978-3-85736-256-9
 On
July 17th 2005, composer Craig Shepard set out on a 250-mile walk
through Switzerland, starting in Geneva, heading north into the mountains
of the Jura, descending to Basel and following the Rhine valley and
the southern shore of Lake Constance eastwards until he arrived at
St. Margrethen on August 17th, from where he boarded a train home
to Zürich. In his backpack, along with various items of essential
camping equipment, which he lists in detail (I wonder how often he
used that cellphone.. not much, I hope), was a pocket trumpet. Shepard
set himself the task of writing and performing a piece of music every
day at 6pm sharp – one performance started five minutes late,
but we'll forgive him – in the open air, more often than not
in public spaces, playing sometimes to up to 50 people. On Foot
is a beautifully produced document of the trip, complete with facsimile
reproductions of the 31 handwritten scores. Written in ballpoint pen
on manuscript paper 9 x 13.5cm – so that he could hold the score
in his hand and the trumpet in the other, as shown in the photograph
on page 30 of the book – they're deceptively simple but effective
pieces, and must have sounded beautiful in situ.
 Craig
Shepard is currently the youngest member (he was born in 1975 in Connecticut)
of the Wandelweiser Group, whose ranks he joined after studies with
fellow Wandelweiser Michael Pisaro. In keeping with the Group aesthetic
(more details of which you can find here),
his compositions make frequent use of long sustained tones interspersed
with long stretches of silence, sometimes notated (the lungas and
breves recall sixteenth century mensural notation), sometimes not:
one piece (Ste. Croix, le 24 juillet 2005) calls for the
use of a stopwatch to time the several minutes between each brief
melody. Some pieces come with clear tempo indications, others (Grottes
de l'Orbe, le 22 juillet 2005) notate short and long breaks but
leave the tempo up to the performer, but most are measured according
to "walking pace: the quarter note equals one step."
The 15-page text Shepard provides to accompany the scores is as clear
and straightforward as the composer's music. In addition to providing
details of his daily routine (up at 7am, usually tucked up in his
tent by 9.30pm), accommodation (for the nine nights he didn't camp
out), meals (fruit, wheatgerm, local sausages, once in a while canned
goods bought at supermarkets along the way..) and various aches and
pains, there are some memorable passages. One describes a visit to
the remains of a Carthusian monastery in the Jura mountains: "What
remained was an absence, a silence. Not the silence of contemplation
but the silence of a passing. It was neither gloomy nor morose, it
was not the watchful silence of a graveyard, nor was it the silence
of an empty house, its inhabitants at work or on vacation. I played
some tones into the silence. Though I heard them echoing across the
hills, there was no echo from the ruins, no response. The tones had
not been swallowed up. There was no resistance, no sense that I had
intruded on anything. It was as if my sound could not penetrate that
silence – that, somehow, the tones were irrelevant. Or that
my tones and that silence did not exist in the same space. After spending
some time at the ruins, I continued my walk. Coming out of the woods,
I experienced for a moment this heightened awareness: I became suddenly
alive and fully aware of where I was in that moment. I could smell
the sweet pines of the forest and the hay of the meadow mixed with
a hint of cow-manure. I felt a soft breeze brushing the hairs of my
arms, sun on my cheeks and heat coming off the grass. I heard cicadas
singing softly, crickets chirping, cowbells clanking, cows' tails
swishing, flies buzzing, the wind hushing through the trees, and the
stones of the path crunching underfoot. I was simultaneously aware
of each sensation individually, and of all the details collectively
as an atmosphere, a mood, a haze. There was no time; everything was
now, everything still."
That reminds me of a favourite quotation from an earlier European
mystic, one much admired by Wandelweiser "patron saint"
John Cage too: "There exists only the present instant... a Now
which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday
nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and
as it will be a thousand years hence." (Eckhart von Hochheim,
1260 – 1328)
For a moment I thought about writing something along the lines of
"it'd be nice to have a recording of some of Shepard's pieces
recorded in the locations where he originally performed them.."
but decided against it. For what we have in On Foot is but
a document of a work, not a work itself. It would be perfectly possible
for Shepard, or someone else, to record the music – either in
the place where it was first performed during his walking trip, or
elsewhere (I see in fact that performances of the music have taken
place already, in Brooklyn's Issue Project Room, with Christian Wolff,
Katie Porter and Jeremy Lamb)– but it wouldn't be the same.
"Once you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air.
You can never capture it again." Eric Dolphy, of course, but
he could have been referring to Shepard's compositions too. I see
on the Wandelweiser website that he is (or was) "on his way to
visiting every tram, train, and bus stop" in Zürich. If
you ever come to Paris, Craig, bring your pocket trumpet. I'd love
to hear you play.–DW
Christine
Baudillon
JOËLLE LÉANDRE: BASSE CONTINUE
Hors Oeil Editions
 Coming
in a Spartan-yet-elegant light blue casket adorned with a beautiful
photo of the ever-pensive, ever-curious Jöelle Léandre
surrounded by the branches of a tree – and including a booklet
with drawings by the bassist, with a commentary by Jean-Noël
von der Weid – this is the definitive document of the Aix-en-Provence
free-thinker's approach to music, physical performance and, in short,
being. Director Christine Baudillon is obviously an admirer –
who isn't? – yet this heartfelt homage doesn't get mired in
superficial adulation. Rather, this 140-minute documentary offers
a synthesis of an existence that has been completely devoted to –
and devoured by – the purest kind of vibration.
At the beginning of the DVD, Léandre walks in the country –
a periodic occurrence in the movie – and addresses the difficulties
of the "big box" as an instrument, versus the piano. She
totally identifies with the double bass, emphasizing the injustice
of its restricted role in most orchestral writing, not to mention
the way that it's often physically relegated to the background of
the concert space, where the performer barely has elbow room for arco
playing. From this ideological kernel sprouts her entire personal
philosophy, a stubborn opposition to anything remotely resembling
"classification" or a "rule to be obligatorily respected".
At the same time, she underlines the importance of academic studies,
even if she more or less left them behind to explore new avenues for
freedom of expression and abandonment of routine. Meditating aloud
in the fields, the silence broken only by birdsong, she's visibly
emotional as she attempts a definition of life, which for her is neither
the past nor the future, but right now – instantaneous creativity.
Even so, she fondly reminisces about her work with Cage, Cunningham
and Scelsi, still fundamental influences on her own music. In another
sequence, she tries to make a cab-driver understand that improvisation
is not just wandering around clueless, but needs a precise idea of
the place one wants to arrive at. Léandre's energy, and her
consciousness of the impossibility of putting all of this in mere
words, are fundamentals of Basse Continue. Non-musician reviewers
can only sympathize.
The strictly musical episodes, shot at jazz festivals and radio broadcasts
between 2006 and 2007, are equally engrossing. Léandre is captured
solo, in a series of duets (most impressively with Barre Phillips,
India Cooke and Anthony Braxton) and a quintet. There's also entertaining
footage of her at a music clinic, desperately trying to draw a shy
female pupil out of her shell; the student, overwhelmed by her teacher's
grandiose theatrics, finally works up the courage to ad-lib a vocal
over bass and drums. Baudillon hits the bullseye with some perfect
editing choices, sometimes mixing an outside remark in with the music,
elsewhere abruptly cutting from a rapturous moment – and, believe
me, there are many – to something amusingly prosaic, such as
Léandre doublechecking the credit-card charges after grocery-shopping.
But nothing surpasses the inner response and deep respect that this
writer felt while observing the fire in her eyes, the beauty of her
fingers fluidly moving across the strings, her ability to engage the
spectator via ironic gestures and obsessive soliloquies, like a fervent
conversation between a divine madwoman and her faithful companion
– the big box itself.
In the final sequence Léandre visits Tel Aviv, where she gets
involved in a discussion about the futile aspects of all cults and
religions, before playing a wonderful bicultural duo with Palestinian
oud player Sameer Makhoul. Their poignant chanting underscores the
last image: Léandre with her feet in the sea, looking off into
the horizon. It's a lovely way to conclude one of the most striking
documentaries about a musician I've ever seen, on a par with Humbert
and Penzel's Step Across the Border on Fred Frith (who, incidentally,
is also present here). Anyone with a serious interest in the art of
improvisation should consider this release an absolute must.–MR
Bert
Shapiro
ELLIOTT SHARP: DOING THE DON'T
Pheasants Eye DVD
 Following
2007's The Velocity
of Hue: Live In Cologne by Pavel Borodin, another file on
the artistic career of Elliott Sharp gets unearthed courtesy of director
Bert Shapiro, who has pulled together performance footage, private
conversations, and talking-heads soundbites in an absorbing, if somehow
still not definitive profile of this fundamental figure of contemporary
music. The core program is subdivided into three chapters. "Doing
the Don't" is a boiled-down primer on Sharp's compositional methods
and projects (mostly derived from scientific, mathematic and even
genetic connections) interspersed with snippets from concerts ranging
from 1987 to 2007, home-conducted rehearsals (interesting to observe
the Sirius String Quartet practicing "Light in Fog"), and
opinions from fellow musicians and – nice touch – family
members. Apart from the heartwarming shots of E# playing acoustic
guitar to toddlers Kai Otis and Lila Mary (one of whom tries to steal
and eat the bottleneck!), a particularly revealing moment comes from
Sharp's partner, video artist Janene Higgins, when she discloses that
only after the birth of his children did Sharp actually accept to
be "a part of the human race" – until that moment,
he'd thought of himself as an alien. Sharp's work is too diverse to
cram into a 20-minute chapter, of course: the many performance clips
are extraordinarily exciting, leaving us with watering mouths, and
the documentary never really gets to grips with the critical concepts
behind this man's art. At the end of the day this almost feels like
a voice-over commentary on a slide show of Sharp's gigs, though it's
useful to hear his detailed descriptions of particular concepts.
For the hardcore E# fan, the most enjoyable episode will be "Slabs,
Pantars, Violinoids", in which he recapitulates his influences
and describes the development of his guitar style and his interest
in constructing instruments (as a kid he used to experiment with the
remnants of his father's job as an industrial designer). The full
gallery of his fretless, double-neck and multi-string axes is on display
here, plus the "stringed inventions" named in the chapter's
title. Great stuff. Finally, "Sharp on Sharp" draws on an
interview with Frank J. Oteri, in which E# talks about the music industry,
his nonconformist relation to it, and the complex interrelations between
a composition, its audience and the surrounding physical and socio-cultural
environment. This section is also quite stimulating, particularly
because of Sharp's concisely articulated, ear-pleasing elucidations
– yet it is so pithy that, again, we're left wanting more.
The extras include a video excerpt from "Larynx" recorded
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987, in unfortunately dismal
audio quality (hey, it's a rarity), and 80 minutes' worth of recent,
previously unreleased audio-only tracks, including "The Velocity
of Hue" for electroacoustic guitar and laptop (Padua, Italy,
2006), "Synda-Kit" (Beijing, 2007) and the splendid "Quarks
Swim Free" (Brooklyn, 2006). In essence, this is a collector's
item first and foremost: don't expect an epochal masterpiece. But
for serious aficionados of this self-professed "alien",
it's a required addition to the long chain of necessary items. Above
all – despite a few flaws – Sharp's richly certified rational
brightness, in evidence throughout Doing the Don't, makes
you feel less dispirited about human evolution. That alone makes this
document a breath of pure oxygen.–MR
Choi
Joonyong / Hong Chulki / Sachiko M / Otomo Yoshihide
SWEET CUTS, DISTANT CURVES
Balloon & Needle
 Having
thoroughly enjoyed other Choi Joonyong / Hong Chulki releases that
have recently come my way – the final chapter of the 5 Modules
series on Manual, the Expanded Celluloid, Extended Phonograph
DVD with Lee Hangjun, reviewed here last time round – I have
to admit I'm having problems with Sweet Cuts, Distant Curves
– though not with the album title, which is terrific. There's
something about this particular assemblage of clicks, rips, crackles
and hums (yes, once more I'm afraid we're stuck with this vocabulary,
until anything more musicologically coherent comes along, which I
suspect might be a while) which fails to keep my attention, and I've
tried six times now; and I think it's to do with the pacing of the
material and the event density. The other abovementioned offerings
from the Koreans (Choi on modified CD players, Hong on turntables
and electronics) are busy, even boisterous affairs, while my favourite
discs of recent times with Otomo (turntables, guitar) and Sachiko
(sinewaves) – most notably the majestic Good Morning, Good
Night on Erstwhile with Toshimaru Nakamura – have been
quite the opposite: slowmoving and spare, but the five sweet cuts
here seem to lie somewhere between the two, in a strange midtempo
– if we can speak of tempo – limbo, neither quiet and
intense enough to draw you in, nor rough and feisty enough to thrill
to. I'll keep trying, but I haven't cracked it yet.–DW
Charles
Gayle Trio
FORGIVENESS
Not Two
 For
better or worse, Charles Gayle is likely to be remembered as one of
free jazz's wild blowers, idolised by the likes of Henry Rollins,
with a scorching back catalogue on Silkheart, Black Saint, Knitting
Factory and FMP (1991's Touchin' On Trane remaining his most
highly acclaimed outing to date). But as the years go by those lungs
tire a little – listen to recent Arthur Doyle or the last offerings
of Frank Lowe – and merely blowing your horn inside out won't
cut it anymore. You've got to go back to the notes instead of losing
yourself in the upper harmonics. This 2007 trio date recorded in Lodz's
Jazzga Club in Poland is welcome proof that Gayle has still got a
lot to say and doesn't need to scream to make his voice heard. Joined
by the splendid rhythm team of Hilliard Greene (bass) and Klaus Kugel
(drums), Forgiveness presents, in addition to the traditional
ballad of the same name, five Gayle originals and a cover of Coltrane's
"Giant Steps." But it's Ornette Coleman who springs more
readily to mind – put that down to the use of the alto –
in the upward melodic swoops. Indeed, the Coltrane cover is probably
the album's least convincing track (maybe it was included to please
the Polish punters), simply because nobody except Coltrane himself
has ever been able to negotiate the changes of the tune at high speed
and come up with a coherent solo. Gayle is at his best when he's at
his most Ayleresque, and "Holy Birth" is the album's standout
track for me. To be perfectly frank, I like his piano playing even
more than his sax, but it's probably heresy to say so. But while I
wait for the follow up to Time Zones, Forgiveness
will do just fine.–DW
Frode
Gjerstad / William Parker / Hamid Drake
ON READE STREET
FMR
Frode
Gjerstad Trio
NOTHING IS FOREVER
Circulasione Totale
Circulasione
Totale Orchestra
OPEN PORT
Circulasione Totale
 On
Reade Street is a fine set of up-to-the-minute jazz recorded
at Piano Magic in New York in January 2006, with Gjerstad playing
alto sax and clarinet with the fabled Parker/Drake rhythm section.
Three improvisations are featured: "The Street", "The
Houses" and "The People", all distinguished by sparkling
vigour and creative nosiness. Gjerstad is a choice elicitor of out-of-the-ordinary
elocutions, refusing gadgetry and reed-fuelled bric-a-brac in favour
of a strong sense of asymmetrical melody, trawling the improbable
waters of curvilinear liberty in search of the most disparate notes,
looking for composure while surrounded by havoc. Parker's input is
a combination of equanimity and efficient indeterminacy, the weight
of his instrumental prowess pushing his companions towards the correct
route; his bowed moans are especially powerful. The mixture of harmonic
acuity and bass rumble in "The Houses" and in his frequent
duo spots with Gjerstad are the highlights of a brilliant performance.
Drake's drumming can be elusive, vivacious, hard-swinging, even absent,
but it always maintains the rhythmic cohesion of the group at the
utmost level of technical responsiveness and passionate commitment.
It would be ridiculous, though, to try and apply a scale of values
to a record that's basically a collective, necessary reaffirmation
of the true ethics of jazz. This is one of those rare instances where
a combination of musicians that looks great on paper actually delivers.
In spades.
 Nothing
Is Forever, a studio recording from 2007, constitutes another
chapter in the history of Gjerstad's trio featuring Øyvind
Soresund on acoustic bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums. The three
have been together since 1999, and their previous releases have appeared
on Cadence, Splasch, Falcata Galia and FMR. Gjerstad's playing is
informed by a sense of indestructible anarchy that pushes towards
the extreme registers virtually ad infinitum, in search of taintless
chirps and raucous invectives against an implausible enemy, hand-knitted
fragments of seething pneumatology that never cease to surprise and,
on more attentive analysis, reveal a stunning technical command. Storesund
acknowledges the inspiration of William Parker and, believe it or
not, Jamaaladeen Tacuma (one of the most unjustly neglected virtuosos
in the history of modern jazz, if you ask me), but in this album he's
largely content with fantasticating a stark, nihilist luminosity,
his lines at once concretely dissonant and utterly suspended. Nilssen-Love
is his usual self, effective but unruly, at times almost quarrelsome;
aside from his continuous restructuration of the trio's torrential
diluvia, he gets a couple of solo spots whose insuppressible, rudderless
outflows thrust the whole shebang past the outer limits of rationality.
 In
Italian the acronym CTO stands, funnily enough, for Centro Traumatologico
Ortopedico ("Orthopaedic Trauma Centre"), and indeed parts
of the Circulasione Totale Orchestra's Open Port, recorded
live in Stavanger (Norway) at 2008's MaiJazz festival, unfold with
bone-breaking force. Frode Gjerstad modestly describes the thirteen-man
aggregate as "some of my musical friends over the years",
yet this is much more than a parade of famous improvisers. I'm not
a fan of "sounds-like-X" comparisons, but if it helps, picture
a cross between Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz projects and Chris McGregor's
Brotherhood of Breath (not surprisingly, "Yellow Bass and Silver
Cornet" – the 48-minute suite that comprises the entirety
of this disc – is dedicated to Johnny Dyani and John Stevens).
One distinctive trait of this unit is the extensive use of instrumental
doubling: two drum sets (Louis Moholo-Moholo and Paal Nilssen-Love),
two reed players (Gjerstad and Sabir Mateen), and two acoustic basses
(Nick Stephens, Ingebrigt H. Flaten), the other members being Bobby
Bradford, Morten J. Olsen, Anders Hana, Børre Mølstad,
Kevin Norton, Lasse Marhaug, and John Hegre. After a preliminary collective
flare the piece is set in motion by an expressive solo by Bradford,
whose cornet gives a faint illusion of composure before the blasting
cooperative is set loose to enjoy the pleasures of improvisational
insurrection, with very few moments of relief. The gap between tradition
and modernity is emphasized by the presence of Marhaug's ever-unquiet
electronics, his startling discharges of distorted fury mocking any
attempts at enforced lyricism like a grinning demon pretending to
be your personal friend in a public photo. It remains to be seen which
side of that gap we want to be on but, either way, this is a galvanizing
listen.–MR
Malcolm
Goldstein / Matthias Kaul
THE SMELL OF LIGHT
Nurnichtnur
 The
good people who've sent me recent stuff in to listen to will no doubt
spit in rage when they see a review of a disc that was after all released
in 2004, but I'm making no apologies. Fact is, I only discovered this
when I went to Malcolm's recent Fragments Of The Wall gig
here a couple of months back. And what a discovery! Transformation
is the name of the game in The Smell of Light, both implicit
in the album title – whose synaesthetic / holistic overtones
are in line with the transcendentalist Thoreau-inspired philosophy
underpinning Malcolm Goldstein's work as a composer, improviser and
poet for over half a century – and explicit in the packaging,
a Wolfgang Kuhle artwork made from a 93 sheets of Kinwashi paper cut
into 1100 hand-sewn bags. The album itself, another fine addition
to Goldstein's small but consistently outstanding discography, features
six tracks, five of them compositions – or rather, structured
improvisations, for as always with Goldstein's work the boundary line
between composition and improvisation is effortlessly erased –
on which Goldstein, on violin and voice, is joined by German percussionist
Matthias Kaul. Kaul's background in contemporary classical music is
reflected in the colourful array of instruments he performs on, including
marimba and button gongs, and his fondness for bowed and rubbed sonorities,
in conjunction with the rather-too-wet acoustic of the Frankfurt studio
where the pieces were recorded back in 1999, also serves to blur the
distinction between the seemingly incompatible string and percussion
instruments. On "Good mourning moon" and his own piece "Revolver",
loosely inspired by and quoting the Beatles album of the same name,
Kaul also plays hurdy gurdy, whose fragile, thin tones are often indistinguishable
from Goldstein's. Poetry – in the form of two John Cage mesostics,
one based on a quotation by painter Jasper Johns – is transformed
into music, either as a performing score in its own right ("that
is poetry as") or spoken by Goldstein as part of the piece itself
("it were another"). As always, his virtuosity is no empty
display of technical trickery, but reveals the dangerous essence of
the violin as gut and metal stretched tight over a wooden box. If
light is something we can smell, here is music we can touch.–DW
Mats
Gustafsson
IT IS ALL ABOUT
Tyyfus
 The
six track titles on this limited edition LP recorded at the Potlatch
Festival in Helsinki (nothing to do with the French improv label of
the same name btw) in January 2006 are shots out to Gustafsson's nearest
and dearest, playing partners and inspirations – "...The
Shit, Derek", "...The Fire! Paal", "...The Chance,
Paul", "...The Resistance, Dror", "...The Keys,
Peter", "...The Time, Thomas + Ann" – but anyone
looking for explicit stylistic homage to Messrs. Bailey, Brötzmann,
Lovens et al. won't find much. However, if the paint-stripping, harrowing
blowing of early Arthur Doyle – think "Domiabra" on
Noah Howard's The Black Ark or Babi with Milford
Graves and Hugh Glover – is your idea of a good time, you'd
better put some pocket money aside to invest in a copy. Improv heads
might regret the relative dearth of the clicks and pops that characterised
Mats's earlier outings (the 1996 solo Impropositions remains
a personal favourite), but what the disc might lack in subtlety it
certainly makes up for in raw energy. Better not send a copy to John
Gill, though.–DW
Mats
Gustafsson
THE VILNIUS EXPLOSION
No Business
 The
Lithuanian jazz scene hasn’t seen much significant documentation
to my knowledge, but clearly someone out there is trying to change
that, and smartly so, by bringing to disc hometown performances by
known visiting musicians (Mats Gustafsson, Joe McPhee..) alongside
local players. A companion release, The Vilnius Implosion
is a staggering solo set by Gustafsson, but here the Swedish reedman
is in heavy company for four hard-blowing improvisations with Lithuanians
Liudas Mockunas (reeds), Eugenijus Kanevicius (bass), and drummers
Arkadijus Gotesmanas and Marijus Aleska.
A first time collaboration with no rehearsals, The Vilnius Explosion
finds its footing rapidly, an already established ensemble fleshed
out with slap-tongued defiance. Burbling bass clarinet and sputtering
baritone set a grey-brown tone for the first piece, a thirty-minute
unifying battery of "Gittin’ to Know Y’all"
revelry. Gustafsson’s fierce overblowing and gestural slather
are front and center, but just when it seems like he's stealing the
show, Mockunas stretches out on tenor. Goaded on by low baritone blats
and frantic uptempo rhythm, his fleet sonic blurs retain an audible
link to Warne Marsh, reaching well beyond the Ayleresque peals. In
contrast to the strikingly fluid just-outside-the-pocket tenor playing,
Mockunas’ bass clarinet and soprano saxophone are bent and rough-edged,
a tartness encircling and tugging at Gustafsson’s BBQ-fed musculature.
The hornmen seem to find so much fuel in playing off of and against
each other that it could all easily turn into a post-FMP slugfest,
but fortunately it doesn’t, thanks in part to an extremely sensitive
rhythm section that knows when and how to propel things forward with
both detail and simplicity. Kanevicius's bowed work is spiky but effective,
and the percussionists play as much with silence and shadow as kinetic
shove.–CA
Mary
Halvorson
DRAGON'S HEAD
Firehouse 12
 Guitarist
Mary Halvorson is one of the best things about Anthony Braxton's recent
music - even though she's crammed into a remote corner of the stage
on the Iridium 12(+1)tet gig, it sometimes feels like she's the glue
holding all those pulse-tracks and whatnot together. Her new trio
disc with bassist John Hebert and drummer Ches Smith reveals that
she's also an imaginative composer in her own right, from the clanking
march-meets-waltz of "Old Nine Two Six Four Two Dies" to
the dank groove of "Too Many Ties" (where it sometimes sounds
like her guitar's made out of rubber) to "Totally Opaque",
which is perhaps her response to the Carnatic M-BASE intricacies of
Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa. Indeed, there's nothing especially
Braxtonish about the music, since she's much more of a harmonically
oriented thinker anyway; the flavour is more like Andrew Hill-plus-math-rock,
which is to say it's dark, bracing stuff, the stubbornly contrary
melodies, chords and metres either pulling away from each other like
antimatter or squashed up together, so that the listener makes a little
mental/aural leap or stumble every few bars. (The connection is cemented
by the deep-voiced, downright soulful presence of Hebert, who anchored
Hill's last working group.) Like Joe Morris or Bruce Eisenbeil, she
makes an honest, penny-plain guitar tone sound tougher and wilder
than the results of a rack of effects, simply through scrunchy voicings
and a hard, clear sense of line.–ND
Peggy
Lee
NEW CODE
Drip Audio
 Cellist
Peggy Lee is a crack free improviser from Vancouver (see her work
with Carlos Zingaro and John Butcher, in particular), but the previous
CDs by her band gravitated towards compositions with a twangy/dreamy
neo-Frisellian sound. For this disc the band (formerly a sextet) has
expanded to eight members, and the music has become altogether more
individual, pulling together dark, droning mise-en-abyme
constructions and haunted melodies bathed in reverbed guitar and yearning
horn-charts. (The aching, close-blended dissonances of her writing
often suggest Kenny Wheeler or Booker Little.) U-turn moments and
knockout climaxes are largely absent, but that's not to say the music
doesn't develop a ravishing slow-burn intensity of its own, as the
horns wind like vines around Kurt Weill's "Lost in the Stars"
or step ominously through the smoky, piecemeal groove of "Preparations"
(before it melts away into rippling guitars). New recruit Jon Bentley
adds some useful saxophone muscle to what had previously been just
a front line of trumpeter Brad Turner and trombonist Jeremy Berkman,
and the presence of two guitarists - Ron Samworth and Tony Wilson
- gives the octet a particularly rich texture, as they tug gently
beneath the ferocious "Scribble Town" (sustaining a calm
heartbeat beneath the agitated exterior) or give lucid impetus to
Bob Dylan's "All I Really Want to Do". I hate it when "layered"
arrangements simply lock the instruments in place (which is the problem
with a lot of smart, ambitious, clockwork jazz these days that seems
hung up on odd-metre grooves); Lee's got the right idea instead: she
creates textures you can get lost in, colours and shapes that bleed
into each other, an atmosphere of slow-motion weirdness heavy with
desire and stray thoughts, like those in-between moments where you're
still heavy with dream as you surface into waking life.–ND
Jim
McAuley
THE ULTIMATE FROG
Drip Audio
 Roy
Dickinson's The Ultimate Frog, as PT's own Nate Dorward informs
us in his liners, was "a little parable about art, idealism and
God published in Harpers in 1924. Its hero Old Man Sanders is on a
quest for a choir of four perfectly harmonious croakers; he dies in
the act of capturing the last frog, one which 'hit middle C as true
as a good cellist.' The narrator, picking it up in hopes of completing
the little choir, discovers that in the meantime the three others
have escaped back into the swamp. The story's moral is (inverting
the usual maxim) that 'the good is the enemy of the perfect' –
that the bravest souls won't settle for the good-enough in art or
life." On this magnificent double CD, Jim McAuley – for
more information see Nate's interview with him here
– plays classical, steel-string, 12-string, prepared marquette
parlor guitars, dobro and marxophone (a hammered dulcimer, used by
Ray Manzarek on The Doors' "Alabama Song", if you're interested)
in 23 duets, seven of them recorded back in 2002 with violinist /
violist Leroy Jenkins, six from 2006 with bassist Ken Filiano and
the rest with the ever resourceful and inspiring Cline brothers, Nels
(guitar, on six tracks) and Alex (drums, on four), and one final poignant
solo homage to McAuley's erstwhile sparring partner, the sorely missed
Rod Poole.
The music runs the gamut from rough and ready follow-it-where-it-goes
free improv – the tracks with Jenkins are the most adventurous
– to tight, composed structures (if quintuple time's your thing,
check out "Five'll Get Ya Ten" with Alex Cline on disc two).
What's most refreshing about McAuley's playing is its openness to
and clear affection for guitar music in all its forms, from flamenco
to folk, dirty blues to Derek Bailey. Talking of Bailey, you can forget
all that nonsense about "non-idiomatic improv" too (nobody
was more idiomatic than he was to start with): this is music that
positively relishes its stylistic diversity (to quote McAuley from
his interview: "certain things like the blues literally feel
good – physically – to play"), moving effortlessly
from the kind of rich 12-string playing that wouldn't be out of place
on a Ralph Towner disc to hard angular, Baileyesque fingerpicking,
often within a couple of phrases. And doing it in a totally unaffected
way.
Prior to recording with Filiano the pair rehearsed and sketched out
a rough game plan, resulting in duets which are more structured, both
motivically and harmonically – especially when the marxophone
is used, due to its fixed pitch limitations. They make for a fine
contrast with the cuts with Jenkins (whose beautiful shallow vibrato
is always a pleasure to rediscover), thanks also to McAuley's careful
and intelligent sequencing, which subtly highlights points in common
between sessions recorded years apart. Inserting the Jenkins duo "Improvisation
#6" between the two Filiano tracks "A Ditty for NC"
and "The Zone of Avoidance" is particularly smart, and following
it up with the microtonal bottleneck twanging craziness of "Froggy's
Magic Twanger", a duo with Nels Cline that Harry Partch would
have been proud of, is masterly. Beautiful surprises abound throughout
this excellent set; get yourself a copy before it hops back into the
swamp.–DW
Regenorchester
XII
TOWN DOWN
Red Note
 Way
back in The Wire 154, in his Freefall column, Clive Bell,
puffing happily on a pipe dream of free improv concerts in football
stadiums, came up with the term "StadProv". Alas, Derek
Bailey never made that double album with Prince, and 2006's AMM world
tour never happened, but with Town Down it looks as if Viennese
quartertone trumpeter Franz Hautzinger has come up with the goods.
For the twelfth (hence the XII) incarnation of his Regenorchester,
a collaborative project that first saw the light of day in London
in 1995, he's brought together a veritable improv supergroup featuring
Christian Fennesz on guitar and computer, Otomo Yoshihide on guitar
and turntables, bassist Luc Ex and drummer Tony Buck for six slabs
of colourful and decidedly rock-influenced instant composition.
The band took full advantage of the facilities at SWR's studios in
Baden Baden to superimpose and remix several versions of the pieces
– the title track and the epic "37rd Rainday" end
up with no fewer than six tracks of guitar, four of trumpet and three
each of bass and drums. That might sound like a recipe for disaster,
but the end result is remarkably clear and coherent, with plenty of
space in the mix for the listener to follow the development of individual
elements, from Otomo's crackling turntables to Fennesz's distinctive
laptop shimmers.
With a project so reliant on artful studio trickery, it's hardly surprising
that the liner notes namecheck Miles, but Hautzinger, even when playing
straight and avoiding his trademark breathy blasts and close-miked
bubbles, sounds nothing like him. Regenorchester XII isn't a Davis
tribute band like Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith's Yo Miles! –
instead of being channeled into lean, mean grooving funk, its energy
flies out in all directions, and the musicians, Buck and Otomo in
particular, delight in wallowing in the tacky, treacly excesses of
70s fusion, not so much "Black Satin" as "White Night",
from Narada Michael Walden's Garden Of Love Light. In these
dark days, with electroacoustic improv still apparently immured in
its near-silent cloisters, music as unashamedly self-indulgent as
this comes as a welcome surprise.–DW
Keith
Rowe / Seymour Wright
3D
wmo/r
 "Documents
such as tape recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as
they preserve chiefly the form that something took and give at best
an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot convey any sense of
time and place." Thus spake Cornelius Cardew, in 1971's Towards
an Ethic of Improvisation. "Accepted," replies Seymour
Wright some 37 years later in his notes accompanying this package.
"Yet, by extension: are several documents such as tape or digital
recordings of one improvisation, juxtaposed, equally empty, unable
to convey any sense of time and place? Or, are several documents such
as tape or digital recordings of one improvisation, juxtaposed, exponentially
more empty, serving to convey nothing but deficit time and place?
Or are, in fact, several documents such as tape or digital recordings
of one improvisation, juxtaposed, actually cumulatively less empty
and, thus, able to convey some relative sense of time and place?"
Three questions to ponder there – and three discs to listen
to to help you make up your mind. All document the same concert, an
encounter between saxophonist Wright and guitarist Keith Rowe in Derby's
Dance Centre in November 2002 (one wonders why it's taken so long
to appear). David Reid (centre, edge of stage) recorded (and filmed?)
the event with his video camera, Chris Trent (right, front row) captured
it on a DAT machine with a pair of mics, and three rows behind him
on the far left Jeff Cloke did likewise with a single mic to a minidisc
recorder. If you're interested in which particular mics and machine
were used (I have to say I'm not), the booklet tells you that too.
"Possibilities, for me, rest in the relative time and place relation
created by and between these several juxtaposed documents," Wright
continues. Superimposed would be more effective: the best
way (only way?) to fully appreciate the differences between the three
discs is to load them up into music software which allows you to jump
from one recording to another at will. But apart from a somewhat lower
level on Cloke's recording, and the obvious shifts in stereo placement
due to his and Trent's positions in the room itself, there doesn't
appear to be much to justify the release of all three, let alone the
kind of radical illumination Wright seems to be seeking, as exemplified
by the inclusion of a quotation from Paul Cézanne: "the
same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study
of the most powerful interest and so varied that [...one...] could
occupy [...one...] self for months without changing place, by turning
now more to the right, now more to the left."
A fine quotation, to be sure, but it depends what that subject is,
and whether it warrants "study of the most powerful interest".
After several listenings to the three discs, both individually and
superimposed, I'm not sure we wouldn't have been better off with a
straightforward mix of Trent and Choke's recordings (properly balanced
and synched: one starts seven seconds later than the other). The music
Rowe and Wright made that evening, though not as exciting in my view
as some of their other available work, notably Wright's recent solo
outing Seymour Wright of Derby, is interesting enough in
itself to reward repeated listening, but, paradoxically, the only
way to fully appreciate the nuances of difference between the three
recordings is to listen on headphones. Not exactly a three-dimensional
experience. Even a Surround Sound recording, not that wmo/r could
afford to release one, wouldn't add much. Surely the only way to "preserve,
relatively, multi-dimensionally something of the form which that improvisation
took" and appreciate the "relative, loco-temporal frame
within which listeners position and reposition themselves" is
to go to gigs and avoid listening to recordings altogether. 3D
is a cute concept, and one perfectly in line with label boss Mattin's
flair for savvy marketing, but he could pull off a real coup if he
figured out how to release a recording of improvised music which,
Mission Impossible-style, self-destructs after one listening.
My own answers to the three questions Wright asks above are yes, no
and no.–DW
Wally
Shoup / Chris Corsano / Paul Flaherty
BLANK CHECK
BOUNCED CHECK
Tyyfus
  In
the same spirit of their earlier twin LP releases Steel Sleet
and Last Eyes, the first of which was also on the fine Finnish
Tyyfus imprint, here comes another double whammy of scorching vinyl,
once more printed white on black and black on white respectively,
and once more featuring Paul Flaherty (tenor and alto saxes) and Chris
Corsano (drums), this time joined by another revered fire breather,
Wally Shoup (alto sax). Originally released last year (you'll excuse
my not reviewing them then, but I was on "sabbatical"..
and anyway I didn't get 'em until a couple of months ago), both LPs
feature music recorded live – how could it be any other way?
– in Seattle's Gallery 1412 in October 2005, before Corsano
was called up for duty on the Good Ship Björk. Flaherty completists
will presumably have already worn out their copies, but vinyl enthusiasts
in search of thrills and spills should certainly consider treating
themselves. I wonder though, as Corsano thrashes his snare to oblivion
and Flaherty and Shoup's stratospheric fireballs burn up what little
oxygen remains in this apartment (I daren't open the window, not for
fear the neighbours might lob a splinter bomb through it in retaliation,
but because it's 4° outside and pissing down rain), what else
there is to say. Of course, it's not all blood and bullets –
as usual both saxophonists find room for their own touching takes
on the blues – but those already familiar with the work of these
cats will know what to expect. And, as usual, they don't disappoint.–DW
Chris
Speed / Chris Cheek / Stephane Furic Leibovici
JUGENDSTIL
ESP-Disk'
 Bassist-composer
Stephane Furic Leibovici's Jugendstil is the first recording
in recent memory to have wholly assimilated the early music of Jimmy
Giuffre and found something beyond it. Here he's joined by clarinettist
Chris Speed and saxophonist Chris Cheek on seven original compositions,
beginning with a five-part through-composed suite, the "Carter
Variations" (dedicated to composer Elliott, not clarinettist
John), whose measured shrillness takes up only the first five minutes
of the disc but sets the tone for the remaining forty. The semi-improvised
chamber music of the following six tracks offers a world of narrow
delicacy and tonal isolation, a steely response to the Symposium
on Relaxed Improvisation, with delicate tenor and clarinet wheeling
upwards above the bassist's grey-brown strums.
Speed is one of the finest clarinettists working today (check out
the minimalist prog outfit Claudia Quintet for further evidence),
and his narrow, vibratoless playing enters into an ambiguous triangle
of relationships with Cheek's breathy tenor and soprano and the bassist's
crisp harmonics. The hornmen's harmonies are tart trills, like a condensed
version of the interplay of Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, or like five
bars of the Giuffre-Swallow duets on Free Fall with the air
sucked out of them and stretched to five minutes' length. (Not that
that's necessarily a bad thing...) Furic Leibovici explores extremes
of concentration and sterility, and though the horns make use of piercing
harmonics, their delivery is pure and unwavering. The results are
curiously winsome yet almost mechanical. Restraint is key –
but Furic Leibovici's meaty pulse and Cheek's gruff, shadowy tenor
indicate that the corners could be set aflame at any instant. Perhaps
the isolationist tendencies at play here are anti-Giuffre, but the
concentration on a small range of raw materials makes a powerful musical
statement.–CA
Sun
Ra
SECRETS OF THE SUN
Atavistic-UMS
 Secrets
of the Sun is another welcome notch in the Atavistic Unheard
Music Series' reissue program of Sun Ra titles that Evidence missed
in the first go-round. Dating from 1962, it's also one of the scarcest
Saturn LPs and one of the first in the Arkestra's freewheeling New
York period. Ra is joined by the usual suspects – Allen, Gilmore,
Patrick, Boykins, Stroman, Hunter, Johnson – with a few interesting
additions, including Calvin Newborn on guitar, and Eddie Gale and
Al Evans on trumpets. The original six-track LP is augmented by a
17-minute rendition of "Flight to Mars," slated for inclusion
on a later Saturn LP but unissued until now.
"Friendly Galaxy" starts off the proceedings, with out-of-tune
piano and lilting bass vamp so distant they sound like they're in
another room from Evans' piercing flugelhorn and Newborn's spiky,
skittering lines. The poor recording quality actually enhances the
music's spaciousness, to the point that most of the solos seem practically
unaccompanied. Clunky rhythmic flecks accent Evans's in-the-red postbop,
but it's as if he's hanging out on his own, and the guitarist's glassy
tone stands out from the faraway din of low reeds, bass, and piano
– not to mention that his bluesiness is nothing like the woody
reverberation of bass clarinet and tympani that usually fleshes out
Ra's world.
Art Jenkins is presumably vocalizing into a glass on "Solar Differentials,"
his bubbling glossolalia making a raucous contrast to Ra's blocky
left-hand lurch, occasionally strung together with hissing tape noise
and reverb. "Space Aura" is a rickety bottom-heavy march
on which the soloists blast out of the gates full-throttle; Gilmore
and Patrick's hurtling whorl of energy practically ghostwrites "Sun
Ship", yet the tune itself sounds more like screwed-down Monk.
Here, the tensions in Ra's music (and possibly in the band, too) become
eruptive and nearly uncontrollable, as the ethno-Les Baxter-bebop
tunes of earlier Arkestras give way to solos and interplay more befitting
the free tonalities of an ESP-Disk' session – when Gilmore lets
loose with reed-splitting torrents, Ra seems unsure whether to follow
or rein him in. As always, it's fascinating stuff, and considering
the amount of Saturn releases that haven't yet seen reissue (...Featuring
Pharaoh Sanders and Black Harold , anyone?), Atavistic should
be busy for years to come.–CA
Steve
Swell Rivers of Sound Ensemble
NEWS FROM THE MYSTIC AURICLE
Not Two
 There
aren't many current torchbearers of Free Jazz of the kind that flowered
in the "loft jazz" heyday of the 1970s. The kind of group
music where loose dirge-like heads give way to sprawling and heel-digging
solos in free time only rears its head nowadays with a funky backbeat
or in the service of a greater structural aim. Trombonist Steve Swell
is one of those rare individuals who still play loft-style free jazz
with nuance and flair. On News from the Mystic Auricle, he's
joined by trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr., reedman Sabir Mateen (who fielded
a similar three-horn line on 2006's excellent Prophecies Come
to Pass (577 Records)), bassist Hilliard Greene and drummer Klaus
Kugel. These three lengthy improvisations are, as the ensemble's name
implies, dedicated to Sam Rivers, the octogenarian reedman who has
cut a path from tradition to freedom over a career spanning fifty-plus
years.
Rivers' trio performances from the 1970s were sprawling affairs, a
kaleidoscope of colors and dynamics that encompassed his full range
of instruments and demanded strong, independent-minded support from
his sidemen. Swell's ensemble has a similar collective ethos. A case
in point is the title track, which begins as a flute exploration underpinned
by arco bass and bowed cymbals. Swell's bugle flicks and slippery
guffaws soon enter in metallic singsong with Mateen's birdcalls, their
jovial bravura riding a web of accents. Brass shout and pluck give
way to deft triple-time as Mateen lets loose on tenor with hard, burnished
yelps and scumbled overblowing. Once a young upstart in Horace Tapscott's
band, he still draws on the sound of his forebears: his high-register
tongue-speak has a lineage traceable to blues shouters. Even when
the quintet is at its most intense, with Kugel tumbling his toms and
piling on layers of coppery wash and Campbell's conical-bore projections
front and center, there's an extraordinary degree of openness to the
music. The improvisations are busy but unhurried, like windows thrown
open onto conversations that have always been ongoing.–CA
Toot
TWO
Another Timbre
 As
its title implies, this is the second outing – the first was
on Sofa three years ago – from the triumvirate of Axel Dörner
(trumpet), Thomas Lehn (analogue synth) and Phil Minton (voice). It
also refers to the fact that the disc contains just two tracks, "ling",
recorded in June 2008 in Esslingen and "kla", which dates
from May 2005 in Klagenfurt. Connoisseurs of Dörner, Lehn and
Minton can amuse themselves by trying to work out how the musicians'
individual vocabularies have evolved over those three years, but suffice
it to say they make abundant and gleeful use of their particular "tricks"
(to quote Paul Lovens): there are plenty of pitchless machine gun
puffs and gritty low notes from Dörner, spring reverb shudders
and sci-fi bleeps from Lehn and split-tone wheezes, birdcall twitters
and Leatherface-does-Donald-Duck from Minton. But even though the
individual sounds themselves will no doubt be familiar to you, dear
reader, the way these three master craftsmen choose to deploy them
is source of amusement and delight. To paraphrase Art Lange writing
about Misha Mengelberg, you can hear them listening to each other
– and they take great pleasure in going their own ways when
you least expect it. It'd be also too easy for one of Minton's boozy
spitstorms to provoke an avalanche of stuttering and splattering from
Dörner and Lehn, but more often than not they take the opposite
tack, sitting quietly on a sound until Phil either shuts up or joins
them. Similarly, some of Dörner's busiest playing occurs while
Minton is at his most demure and introspective. It all adds up to
one of the most musically satisfying improv releases of the year,
on what must be (though I hate the inevitable end of year "top
tens" and "best of"s) 2008's label of the year.–DW
Rafael
Toral
SPACE ELEMENTS VOL.1
Staubgold
 This
is the third episode of Rafael Toral's projected epic Space Program,
after 2006's Space (Staubgold) and last year's Space
Solo 1 (Quecksilber), and it's the best yet. Turning his back
on the luxuriant drones that characterised his work from Sound
Mind Sound Body to Violence Of Discovery And Calm Of Acceptance,
Toral has put his guitar back in its case, preferring instead to develop
a whole arsenal of self-designed electronic instruments, including
(featured here) "glove-controlled computer sinewaves", "ribbon-controlled
sinewave bursts", and "modified MT-10 amplifier." In
an interview that formed the basis of an extended feature in The
Wire (#272, October 2006), Toral described Space Elements as
"a projected set of six albums, each focusing on specific sonic
element of the Space Program, and the family of instruments associated
with it." Those familiar with his pre-Space output might
find it strange to see this covered in the Jazz / Improv section,
but Toral's remarks on jazz, and his relationship to it, are worth
quoting: "What I'm doing is probably more of a jazz based approach
to electronic music than the other way round. Performance practice
in jazz often consists of a personal way of structuring musical elements,
a way of accessing a whole range of personal techniques and solutions.
In that sense I might describe myself as a jazz musician. That's what
I call 'vocabulary' – and 'language' is useful as a term to
describe how that vocabulary is put together and used in musical discourse."
Listening to Space Elements Vol.1 you can see (hear, rather)
just what he's getting at: there's not the slightest semblance of
regular "beat", no harmonic "changes" to play,
the music is generally restrained and the texture spare, but it's
certainly closer to jazz in feel than anything he produced prior to
launching himself into Space. There's an economy and clarity of line
to his own playing that connects him to a long line of less-is-more
jazz musicians, from Frankie Trumbauer to Bill Dixon, via Lester Young,
Jimmy Giuffre and Chet Baker. On the subject of Baker, it's worth
recalling that Toral also appeared on trumpeter Sei Miguel's extraordinary
Showtime (1996), which was dedicated "to Chet and Cage"
– Miguel has remained a huge influence, not only on Toral but
on a whole generation of Portuguese improvisers, including cellist
Rute Praça, trombonist Fala Mariam, bassist Margarida Garcia
and percussionist César Burago, all of whom (along indeed with
Sei Miguel himself) contribute to Space Elements Vol.1. Burago
deserves special mention: his use of unconventional instrumental timbres
in conjunction with a terrific sense of timing – i.e. knowing
just when to play and, more importantly, when not to – is a
pure joy. There's also an appearance from David Toop on flute on track
three, whose elegant, understated lines intertwine with Toral's delicate
sonic calligraphy to produce some truly exquisite music. Go get yourself
a copy.–DW
Trio
Sowari
SHORTCUT
Potlatch
 Recorded
at La Muse En Circuit studio just outside Paris at the end of November
2006, Shortcut is a fine follow-up to Trio Sowari's 2005
debut outing Three Dances, also on Potlatch. I suppose you'd
still file it away under "EAI", but it's a good example
of just how difficult that particular term is to define. Long tracks?
Well, not necessarily: the first four are over and done with in under
three minutes. Slowmoving? Not always: anyone who's seen Messrs. Durrant
(Phil, laptop) Beins (Burkhard, percussion) and Denzler (Bertrand,
tenor sax) in action will have been impressed by the often sprightly
nature of their music, and that's very much in evidence here. Quiet?
For the most part yes, but not always: Durrant in particular can get
quite boisterous when he wants to. His violin has been sitting in
its case for a while now, but Shortcut's intricate exchanges
have more in common with his earlier work, notably the great trio
with Johns Butcher and Russell, than you might think. Those who've
taken it upon themselves to seek out precursors of latterday EAI /
lowercase / reductionism have been quick to point to AMM (logically
enough, given Keith Rowe's prominence in the scene), but I have a
sneaking suspicion that John Stevens' work with the various incarnations
of his Spontaneous Music Ensemble might prove to have been just as
influential in the long run. I'd argue that a line could be traced
back from the tight interplay of Shortcut's superb closing
track "Moving Targets" via The Scenic Route to
the SME's A New Distance and Face To Face. That
said, there's nothing remotely retro about this music: the sonic pinpricks
of "Dots #2" are as exquisitely placed and compelling as
anything on Durrant's two seminal lowercase outings with Thomas Lehn
and Radu Malfatti, beinhaltung and dach, and the
rich textures of "Trespassing" should certainly appeal to
EAI purists, all 150 of them. Musicianship and creativity of the highest
order – if it didn't make it to your Christmas stocking this
year, make sure it gets there in 2009.–DW
Ute
Völker / Angelika Sheridan
LEUCHTFISCHE
Valve
 With
an album title meaning luminescent fish (phosichthyidae), and track
titles referring to several species of them (some of which look pretty
fucking scary.. good job I'm not likely to come across many of these
buggers in my local poissonerie), you might think you're
in for a rather chilly deep sea dive with this duo album featuring
accordionist Ute Völker and flautist Angelika Sheridan, but you'd
be wrong. Here are thirteen brief duets – ranging in duration
from 1'21" to 5'54" – that explore the instruments'
possibilities, and there are more of them than you might think, even
if you're already familiar with Fred Van Hove or Pauline Oliveros'
accordion work, or the flute playing of Carlos Bechegas, Sabine Vogel
or Alessandra Rombolá. Sometimes consensual (listen to how
the vaguely oriental arabesques of "Elongata" intertwine),
sometimes conflictual (Sheridan makes no attempt to combat Völker's
boisterous fisticuffs on "Ovatus", hooting on her bass flute
until the anger subsides), it's a grand listen, from the introspective
meandering clusters of "Argenteus" to the lively splutters
of "Taenia" (which also means tapeworm, by the way, if you
feel like losing a bit of weight after the Christmas excesses).–DW
Jacob
Wick / Andrew Greenwald
37:55
Creative Sources
 Here's
another name to add to the already long list of so-called "extended
techniques" trumpeters: Brooklyn-based Jacob Wick, who joins
percussionist Andrew Greenwald for a set of four duets, entitled,
wait for it, "Track 1", "Track 2", "Track
3" and "Track 4", with a total duration of, yes, 37'55".
One supposes that the track and album titles were chosen not out of
lack of imagination but more as a plea for listeners to approach the
pieces as "pure music" (whatever that is), or maybe an act
of homage to the likes of Braxton – I see he's now up to Composition
No 367B – and Cage. Duration as title of work, 4'33"
being the most notorious example. You could say there's a touch of
late Cage Number Piece austerity to Wick and Greenwald's first track,
which, clocking in at over 21 minutes, divides the album in half –
indeed, one wonders whether a vinyl release wouldn't have been more
appropriate, as the three shorter pieces that follow seem to belong
together as a more lively counterbalancing triptych, one that makes
for an interesting comparison with Nate Wooley and Paul Lytton's recent
(untitled) LP outing on Broken Research.
Lowercase / EAI seems to have arrived at a fork where two roads diverge
in a yellow wood, and can't decide whether to go further down Sugimoto
Lane to where it bends in the undergrowth of silence or take the other
path which, having perhaps the better claim, doubles back to more
traditional chatter and clatter. On 37:55 Wick and Greenwald
take a couple of tentative steps in each direction before heading
back to the junction to consider their next move. They still seem
just a little afraid to let themselves go (notably on the third track),
but it's that repressed energy which gives the music its peculiar
urgency.–DW
Mark
Applebaum
SOCK MONKEY
Innova
 In
an amusing and well-written autobiographical note included in the
beautifully produced 20-page booklet accompanying this latest offering
from Mark Applebaum (b. Chicago, 1967), the composer writes: "Some
of his music is composed according to painstaking and thorough, if
dreary, techniques defended by sober, sensible and defensible logic
resulting in characteristics like authenticity, integrity, depth,
merit and seriousness, qualities that tend to make modernists happy,
or at least comfortable. [..] Recent works, however, tend increasingly
toward absurdity. In retrospect (or historical revision), Applebaum's
aesthetic relies on acts of musical collision." Sock Monkey,
the follow up to 2004's Catfish (Tzadik), and the latest
of a whole string of albums on Innova, starts off with a fine example
of Applebaum's exuberant postmodernism, in the form of Magnetic
North (2006), a 14-minute adventure scored for brass quintet
and percussion with occasional interpolated cadenzas from an additional
soloist, in this case Applebaum himself on his self-designed mouseketier
(an electroacoustic sound sculpture incorporating amplified bits of
junk and toys, whose already strange sounds are further transformed
electronically). The score – extracts from which appear in the
booklet – uses various forms of traditional and graphic notation,
and also calls on the performers to engage in various other activities,
including tearing up bits of paper, dropping ping pong balls, and
constructing a "bag mute" made from a ball of tin foil which
is rolled around among the musicians and eventually stuffed into a
paper sack. One amusing instruction calls for a bar to be repeated
x+1 times, where x is the number of times it takes two players to
stop playing on protest (!). John Zorn's game pieces inevitably come
to mind, so it's only natural he gets a mention in Applebaum's liners.
The piece is smart, well-written and superbly performed – but
probably funny enough without the trombone belly laugh before the
end.
Last year's The Composer's Middle Period (I'm a little wary
of such titles, I don't know why) is another hectic 3'25" tour
de force written for the sfSound ensemble, here a sextet consisting
of oboe, bass clarinet, trumpet, trombone, violin and cello, in which
five "materials" – ranging from a graphically notated
ensemble "outburst" to intricately scored canonic writing
– are repeated five times, in various overlapping configurations.
The three pieces entitled Theme in Search of Variations,
scored respectively for percussion trio, five-piece and four-piece
ensemble, are somewhat less frenetic, but still reluctant to sit still.
Once more, virtuosity seems to be the name of the game – this
is music which somehow seems designed to impress: why else would the
composer include a diagram showing the percussionist's setup? Light
relief of sorts (not that anything on this album is exactly "heavy"
enough to warrant any) comes in the form of Variations on Variations
on a Theme by Mozart (2006), in which the composer performs the
Variations on Ah! Vous dirai-je maman (K.265) – on
prepared piano. Not one but eighteen of the beasts, each
prepared differently. It's hilarious stuff, but the liners go rabbiting
on about the piece being a "musical collision through transcription
of the subset collisions through neuromuscular economy," or something.
Tongue in cheek, perhaps, but probably the kind of spiel you'd expect
from someone who studied with Brian Ferneyhough at UC San Diego. Hence
the title of Entre Funérailles I (1999), a hypothetical
interlude to be performed between two versions of his erstwhile teacher's
Funérailles (for string septet and harp), in this
case a tiny (2'21") but intricate miniature for solo trumpet,
expertly handled by Brian McWhorter.
On Martian Anthropology 7 – 9 (2006, again), commissioned
and performed by the Paul Dresher Ensemble Electro-Acoustic Band,
Applebaum goes rummaging in the toybox once more, with crackleboxes,
samplers, and a drumkit featuring pizza boxes, egg cartons and plastic
bags. On the Nature of the Modern Age is a little more sedate
– as it should be, being an affectionate homage to John Silber,
Applebaum's former composition teacher at UCSD – and is scored
for piano duo and live electronics, which are used principally to
loop sounds sourced from inside the instruments. The closing title
track Sock Monkey (2007) is named after a cuddly toy belonging
to the composer's young daughter Charlotte, which might explain the
relatively accessible nature of the writing for the Stanford Symphony
Orchestra. It's clear Applebaum knows his Stravinsky, Bartók
and Ligeti inside out, but I wonder what a card-carrying modernist
like Ferneyhough would make of those Sacre flourishes at
4'21" and the descending octatonic harp tinkles that set in a
minute later. Dogmatic quibbles aside, it's clear Applebaum knows
how to write challenging and entertaining music for the top-notch
performers he has access to at Stanford. As he's a tenured composition
professor there, expect him continue doing so for quite some time
to come.–DW
John
Hudak
ON AND ON
Presto!?
 John
Hudak's past projects have explored the tiny details of environmental
sounds both natural – snow melting (Old Moon, Kissy,
2003), underwater insects (Pond, Meme 1998), grass in a field
(Tall Grasses, Digital Narcis, 2002) – and man-made,
ranging from motorway traffic noise (Highway, Edition, 2000)
and vibrations and static on the Brooklyn Bridge (Brooklyn Bridge,
Shirocoal /Soleilmoon, 1998) to an answering machine message from
his mum (Don't Worry About Anything, I'll Talk To You Tomorrow,
Alluvial, 1999). Some of these have been ravishingly beautiful –
especially the collaborative ventures with Jason Lescalleet (Figure
2, Intransitive, 2000)and Stephan Mathieu (Pieces
Of Winter, Sirr, 2004) – others (Highway,
notably) have tried the patience (though with Hudak's work it's always
worth bearing in mind Cage's "if something is boring after two
minutes.." anecdote). Recently he's taken to using the computer
to translate information into music – on 2006's Sotto
Voce (Conv) recordings of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein
reading were transformed into MIDI-triggered cello pizzicati. He describes
his working method in On And On as follows: "I recorded
myself strumming a guitar for a long time. I converted the strumming
audio to MIDI information (a collection of numbers that hold the basic
pitch information along with duration and volume). The computer had
to simplify the strumming, and in this simplification left me with
a melody... a succession of number information [sic] that
I used to trigger the pitches of an instrument much like a dulcimer."
The end result is rather similar to parts of the Michael Byron disc
reviewed here last time round: always the same – once you've
heard it, you'll recognise it again instantly for the rest of your
days – but never the same. It's not at all unpleasant, but at
normal to loud volume levels the unchanging timbre of the instrument
can become somewhat irritating, and you may find that the only way
you can get through the whole piece (it lasts over an hour and ten
minutes) is by turning the volume down and allowing it to tinkle along
merrily in the background. You'd miss a lot of lovely little details
if you did, though.–DW
Kernel
THE DEEP
Zora
 The
Deep is the latest composition – and we're definitely talking
composition here: you can even check out the score online at the sleazeart
website, and very interesting it is too – by Kasper Toeplitz
for Kernel, his laptop trio with Eryck Abecassis and Wilfried Wendling.
There's plenty of information about the group and their instrumentation
(i.e. software, for the most part) at the sleazeart site, but no amount
of background reading and scrutiny of KT's pdfs (you'll need a smattering
of French) can prepare you for the impressive 59'33" of The
Deep. Since Paul D. Miller and his chums made Xenakis suddenly
hip a few years back, far too many musicians have been quick to claim
some kind of Xenakis street cred, but very few compositions pack the
clout of Bohor or La Légende d'Eer. Happy
to report that The Deep is one of them. Toeplitz has a real
feel not only for the large form – which is not simply a question
of taking a short form and stretching it out: ask Eliane Radigue,
who worked closely with KT on the realisation of her Elemental
II back in 2004 – but for the surface and texture of the
sounds he and his playing partners choose to articulate it. Any self
respecting fan of Xenakis, Radigue or EAI for that matter (putting
any anti-composer prejudice aside) should check this splendid work
out at the earliest opportunity.–DW
Iannis
Xenakis
ELECTRONIC WORKS 2
Mode
 In
her liner notes to this set, along with copious details about Xenakis's
plans for the sound spatialisation of 1970's Hibiki Hana Ma
(written for the Osaka World Fair where he had access to over 800
loudspeakers) and the laser lightshow he devised for 1974's Polytope
de Cluny, Sharon Kanach writes: "you had to be there to
understand." Well, most of us weren't, so it's a question of
"nothing here now but the recordings," to quote William
Burroughs. Xenakis / Mode completists will no doubt not want to be
without this latest addition to the catalogue, but Polytope de
Cluny has in fact already appeared on the label, as part of the
excellent double CD CCMIX
New Electroacoustic Music From Paris (Mode 98/99). Audio
purists will appreciate the new stereo mix, taken from a 96KHz/24-bit
transfer from the original analogue master, but at what my mother
would call "civilised" volume it doesn't sound drastically
different to me (but then again I haven't been playing the disc as
loud as I should for fear of instant eviction). Hibiki Hana Ma
("Reverberation – Flower – Interval") started
out as an orchestral commission, but Xenakis, keen to take advantage
of the Osaka sound system at his disposal, transformed it into an
electroacoustic work, but one that uses source material from his extant
instrumental music, notably Kraanerg. Once more, this isn't
its first appearance on disc – though it's a slightly brighter
mix compared to the version included in the EMF Electronic Music
set released back in 1997 – so Xenakis nuts will probably already
have it. It's good crunchy stuff, though I'm not sure I rate it as
highly as DJ Spooky does, and it suffers a little from the pairing
with Polytope, which is a more colourful (nearly said "lighter",
but that wouldn't be the word) piece.
Xenakis completists will definitely want to get hold of the DVD issue
of this Mode disc, though, which includes an eight-minute film made
in 1960 by Peter Kassovitz entitled Vasarely and documenting
an exhibition of that painter's work at the Denise Renée Gallery.
Xenakis provided music in the form of a piece entitled NEG-ALE
for piccolo, horn, cello and percussion, but later withdrew the work
from his catalogue. Understandably so, as it's pretty slight compared
to the other pieces he produced around that time – Herma,
Atrées, and the ST series. One wonders whether
he'd have been happy to see it released, but I am, despite certain
reservations about the recording quality and the rather uninspiring
cover art of the Mode Xenakis series in general.–DW
Zeitkratzer
/ Carsten Nicolai
ELECTRONICS
Zeitkratzer
 "Repetition
and romanticism: here is where Schubert and his 'magnificent breadth'
can always be felt, his rhythmic, inward looking, almost monotone
music where the minor key is an illumination." So writes Reinhold
Friedl (I'm assuming he's responsible for the accompanying text –
in the booklet the English translator is credited but not the author),
pianist and artistic director of the Berlin-based Zeitkratzer ensemble,
founded in 1999 and best known for their collaborative crossover ventures
with the likes of Lou Reed, Merzbow and John Duncan. Quite apart from
not understanding parts of the above quotation – illumination
of what? – I'd be happy to take issue with the description
of Schubert's music as monotone, and it's certainly not all inward
looking by any means. But maybe getting your work properly financed
by institutions such as the Deutscher Musikrat gemeinnützige
Projektgesellschaft means having to namecheck some major figures of
German cultural history instead of enthusing about leftfield turn
of century techno by the likes of Raster Noton's Carsten Nicolai,
whose three featured compositions on Electronics are pleasant
enough, though not exactly earthshaking. "synchron bitwave"
is a colourfully scored 16-minute exploration of an open position
D minor triad, "5 min" (which actually lasts 8'09")
gradually adds rhythmically regular bleeps and buzzes to a sustained
pale middle C# drone, and the closing "c1" sticks resolutely
to its note – no prizes for guessing which one – once
more making effective use of the orchestral forces, particularly Frank
Gratkowski's bass clarinet and Anton Lukoszevieze's cello, but hardly
breaking new ground. Its 27 minutes are curiously split into two tracks
on the CD, for listening convenience one assumes, though nothing momentous
happens until four minutes into the second track, when some dreamy
piano chords start drifting in. It's well executed, beautifully recorded
and elegantly packaged but I'd trade it all for a bar of late Schubert
any day of the week.–DW
Alan
Courtis
UNSTRINGED GUITAR & CYMBALS
Blossoming Noise
 It's
about time we – myself included – stopped referring to
Buenos Aires-based Alan Courtis (ha! they've spelt his name right
for once!) as "ex-Reynols", as he must have released nearly
as much under his own name (Anla more than Alan, admittedly) than
he did with Roberto Conlazo and Miguel Tomasin. This latest offering
on the ever-wonderful Blossoming Noise imprint (not that I can share
many of the label's treasures with my dear wife as music for a candlelit
dinner) consists of three wonderful slabs of textured sounds named
after herbs – cardamom, coriander and fenugreek – sourced
from, as it says, a stringless guitar and cymbals. Though you may
not believe that last bit if you hear it. I didn't, until I received
this explanatory email from Alan: "The guitar is an Argentinian second-hand
guitar from the 70s (the body is a copy of a Gibson 335 with a Fender
Stratocaster type fingerboard) that I found in a Salvation Army
here in Buenos Aires about ten years ago. It didn't have a bridge
and all the bridges I tried didn't fit, so it was lying in a corner
of my apartment for about eight years. One day I just understood
that it was that way without bridge or strings, and attached
a contact mic to the plug connector and the old wires it had inside,
and it worked perfectly. The sounds are mostly feedback sounds coming
from the guitar itself. Obviously they're heavily processed, so there's
a wide range of frequencies, from the sub-low to very high. The effects
employed were mainly distortion, reverb, EQ and pitch shifting.
And also there are some sounds from the body of the guitar,
rubbed or slightly smashed with objects, which you'll notice especially
in track two." I love that "slightly smashed".. wish
I'd written that myself. Oh yes, "and there are layers of cymbals
throughout the record." Well, that tells you how he did it, but
doesn't go any way in explaining why it sounds so damn good. Put it
down to a great ear and a real feel for structure. One of Courtis's
best releases to date, not that I can say I've heard more than a third
of his prodigious output.–DW
DJ
Olive
TRIAGE
Room40
 The
third in a series of "sleeping pills designed to create deep
warm enveloping environmental textures which become soft company for
those who have trouble sleeping", following on from Buoy
(2004) and Sleep (which dates from 2001 but was only released
in 2006), Triage is the soundtrack from an installation at
the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and, in addition to Olive himself, features
contributions from David Watson (bagpipes), Vija Brazus (percussion,
guitar, vocals), Karl Francke (harmonica, vocals, keyboards) and the
curiously-named DJ Reaganomics (turntables). Postprod and processing
are handled by Christian Fennesz, so you know you're in for a classy
piece of work even if the dreamy stuff isn't your bag. Indeed, the
instruction "play it quiet" (makes a change, that) and the
soporific mission statement could be distinctly offputting to those
who have found some of the releases on Lawrence English's imprint
too soft and cuddly, but there are many exquisite moments here and
you'll be missing out on them if you doze off, or turn the wick down
too low. So crank it up instead – it may still send you off
to the land of nod, but you'll enjoy the journey much more if you
take in something of the view along the way.–DW
Fennesz
BLACK SEA
Touch
 The
success of Endless Summer, both aesthetically and in terms
of its audience reach, has been both a blessing and a curse for Christian
Fennesz. Its release placed him firmly – and more than likely
historically – in the pulsing electronic aorta, and it remains
a reference point for critics and fans alike, but its achievement
has become less and less relevant to his current activities. Case
in point is Black Sea. Here Fennesz sheds the chronic splutter'n'splice
of more obvious DSP, and instead offers his most intricate and far-sighted
work to date. It's a record that finds his compositions at their most
dense, harmonically orchestrated and compelling. Take "Vacuum"
for example: it's a fairly cursory piece at just under four minutes,
but within its gentle melody and playful processing is an affecting
and engaging cinema-like melodic narrative of a type that has become
increasingly important in Fennesz's universe.
Black Sea is a record in which most source elements are filtered
through countless layers of transformation, creating a blurred soundscape
of layered washes of guitar, showering cascades of reverb-loaded static,
and harmony hinted at through clouds of processing. Close inspection
of a piece like "The Colour of Three" – which features
a pottering prepared piano contribution from Australian Antony Pateras
– reveals a web of miniature sounds clambering together, a modulated
series of pulses that could be mistaken for the sound of insects.
Such audio filigree only reveals itself to the listener through careful
attention: on cursory listens Black Sea is more like a mirage,
a giant gauze-like screen of sound that can become curiously atmospheric,
but closer examination reveals a huge amount of tonal colour and sonic
intricacy. It's an elegant, expansive and engulfing creation –
just take in the final passages of "Saffron Revolution"
if you need any proof.–LE
Illusion
of Safety
THE NEED TO NOW
Experimedia
Illusion
of Safety
IN SESSION
Waystyx
Dan
Burke / Thomas Dimuzio
UPCOMING EVENTS
No Fun
 As
the saying goes about London buses, you wait for an hour and then
three arrive at the same time. The 1990s saw the release of somewhere
near a couple of dozen Illusion Of Safety albums (vinyl and CD, not
counting compilations), but since the turn of the century Dan Burke
(photo, right, courtesy Seth Tisue, I think) hasn't exactly flooded
the market with product, as they say. But the arrival of these three
new platters, hard on the heels of the excellent ten-incher Sedation
& Quell (C.I.P.) is proof that he hasn't been twiddling his
thumbs since 2001's In Opposition To Our Acceleration (Die
Stadt), the last IOS album that came my way. It's been well worth
the wait.
These days Illusion Of Safety is a Burke solo project, but until the
end of the 90s it was a group of likeminded adventurers including
Mitch Enderle, Thymme Jones, Chris Block, Mark Klein, Mark Sorensen,
Kurt Greisch and Jim O'Rourke (and others). IOS first took it to the
stage on June 17th, 1983, back when Yuri Andropov was snoozing in
the Kremlin, Fucked Up Ronnie Reagan's Star Wars SDI project was a
three-month-old baby, Margaret Thatcher had just won her second General
Election with a crashing 144 seat majority, and The Police's "Every
Breath You Take" and Irene Cara's "Flashdance" were
topping the charts. My God. Just think: if you were born on that day
you could now be the proud parent of a child old enough to tell you
to turn that weird shit music off. The Irene Cara, I mean.
Enough of that, and enough of reviews that describe Burke as a "veteran"
or a "survivor" – the music on these three fine new
discs is solid proof that he's just as good now as he ever was. One
of the most consistently impressive things about IOS is its refusal
to be pigeonholed. To quote the MySpace page, Burke's music has been
described as "ambient, post-industrial, electro-acoustic, electronica,
noise, sound collage, improvisation, and power electronics. Unable
to categorize their work into one style, each release, live performance,
and sometimes individual piece often shifts abruptly from one atmosphere
to another." Which makes it all the more relevant now that the
worlds of noise and EAI are moving ever closer together, and the pioneers
of 90s glitch / crunch / click / cut laptoppery have grown up and
become established and mature composers.
 The
seven tracks on The Need To Now are fine examples of what
Dan Burke does best: choosing varied and rich sound material, and
crafting it with an impeccable ear for timing and strong sense of
structure into intelligent, satisfying music with little regard for
ephemeral fads and fancies. It's no surprise that Frans de Waard is
a major league IOS fan, because he does that very well too. "Why
isn't Daniel Burke a famous Hollywood soundtrack composer, I wonder?"
muses de Waard in his review of the album over at Vital Weekly.
Yeah, quite. Though maybe he just wouldn't want to be. Tracks like
"Remember" – a seven-and-a-half minute masterpiece
(right up to the final second.. check it out) – are just too
good for Hollywood.
 In
Session, a limited edition release on the Russian Waystyx label
(500 copies, so don't hang about) is another fine example of Burke
prying open the cracks between the various genres of electronic music,
mixing "ambient" (i.e. predominantly wet, reverb-heavy textured
drones) with crunchier more "noisy" material (drier, more
abrasive sonorities, more forward in the mix) to create a listening
experience of considerable complexity, but one that neither overloads
the ear nor sends it off to sleep. Quite the opposite: you'll be surprised
how you get drawn in – special bonus points for anyone who can
identify the David Sanborn track way way back in the mix on "Waiting
Room", haha.
In Session's six tracks were mastered by Thomas Dimuzio,
who teams up as a performer with Burke on Upcoming Events,
whose 15 tracks were all (amazingly, considering their complexity)
recorded live during three concerts in California in November 2004.
It's a splendid follow up to 1999's Hz (Sonoris), also sourced
in live recordings the pair made in 1997. No post-prod jiggery pokery
here either, just careful mixing and sequencing. The riot police on
the album cover, plus the fact that it's on No Fun, might lead you
to expect something nastier – but Upcoming Events packs
a subtler punch than Hz. The opening track, "Deregulation",
sets the tone well, building gradually over ten minutes from distant
snippets of radio to become a sprawling mass of tremolo strings and
wailing sirens. The sounds the pair create are complex to the point
of inscrutability, often so heavily processed that their origins are
impossible to determine, yet disturbingly arresting. I actually dreamt
about the nagging rising semitone on "Closed Circuit" the
other night. When music reaches you even in the deepest recesses of
sleep, you know it's got something. Invest in a copy now and see if
it fucks with your dreams.–DW
Junko
/ Michel Henritzi / Mattin
JE T'AIME!
Absurd
 This
29-minute set was recorded live at the Densités festival in
2007, and there's a minute or so of curiously distant applause at
the end to prove it. Those already familiar with Mattin and Junko's
Pinknoise and Junko's
work with Henritzi's late lamented noise outfit Dust Breeders will
no doubt be drooling at the prospect of a menage à trois,
but it certainly sounds like the punters there enjoyed it more than
I did. After six and half minutes of next to nothing – a few
distant high pitched whines from Mattin and the occasional reverb
shiver from Henritzi – the grande dame of Japanoise
makes her entry, but the lacklustre recording makes her sound more
like a distressed pussycat than the wild beast we're used to. Mattin
brings the thundering noise in only at the 18-minute mark, by which
time the music sounds to be running out of steam. For completists
only.–DW
Joel
Stern
OBJECTS.MASKS.PROPS
Naturestrip
 Australian
author Hugh Wilcken, enthusing about Joy Division in the latest (January
2009) issue of The Wire, writes about how strange it was
for him "listening to Joy Division as a teenager in the sun-drenched,
hedonistic Sydney of 1981." Maybe it's a bit of a cliché,
maybe it's just me, but "sun-drenched" is the kind of adjective
that often springs to mind on listening to what comes my way from
down under – from the gamelan clutter of the Pateras / Baxter
/ Brown trio to Jim Denley's environmental improv (Through
Fire, Crevice + The Hidden Valley), from the rich hues of
Oren Ambarchi to the garden intimacy of Carchesio and Craig's Leaves
(also on Naturestrip). And there's certainly a lot of sunshine and
colour in Joel Stern's latest offering, made with "car radios,
pipes, bulbul tarang, no input mixer, ukelele, pocket trumpet, doors,
electronics, junk, concertina, rainstick, music boxes, accordion,
bell, wires, bees, rusty gate, harmonica, rabid dogs (!), mbira, megaphone
and bits and pieces." But these eight brief pieces, dating from
between 2000 and 2007, weren't all recorded in Australia – among
the many places Stern lists is Ipswich. Hardly my idea of sun-drenched,
but never mind. Stern is clearly having so much fun sticking his mic
into beehives it really doesn't matter. And I guess you could find
a bee or two in Ipswich, if you looked hard enough. My esteemed Editor
Nate Dorward recently moaned about the overuse of "cinematic"
as an adjective to describe much recent sound art, and I'm reminded
of Michel Chion's observations on music as image in his recent interview
here: "People tell me there are images in my music. They hear
a dog barking, and say it's an image. To which I'd say, if a dog barking
is an image, tell me what kind of dog it is. A big dog, or a poodle
or what?" (At least Stern informs us that the canines whose mad
yelps we hear on "Dead Lakes" are "rabid"..) Whether
you like the old Metamkine "cinema for the ear" line or
not, there are enough recognisable natural sounds on offer here to
conjure up some kind of picture in the mind's eye. This may not be
"pure music" (whatever that is – even Chion doesn't
believe in the concept), but it's certainly good music in my book
– beautifully recorded, carefully sequenced and aurally immensely
satisfying. Along with the abovementioned Leaves, it's my
favourite outing on Naturestrip to date.–DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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