Just outside

2012-01-29T10:13:00.003-05:00

Eva-Maria Houben - druids and questions (Edition Wandelweiser)

I've been listening to this recording quite often over the past few weeks, including a couple of days (like today) when it's the only thing I'm playing. I absolutely love it though explaining why--why this particular recording works for me so well--is, as usual, a little tough.

One work, an hour long, consisting of "electro-acoustic music with organ sounds". Had only the latter been indicated, I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow as almost all of what one hears sounds as though it could have been generated by adapted organ pipes. The passages, full but soft, embedded in a quieter hiss, are airy and breathy with a tracery of organ-tone within, the kind of sound I imagine could be conjured up by allowing more air to escape a pipe than normal. What other sounds are incorporated i couldn't say though I get a hint of traffic now and then; but that traffic, if it is such, sounds like it could have been organ generated as well.

No matter. The wavelets of sound appear in succession, held for a bit, differently lengthed, interposed with periods of near silence, a form one might more or less expect from Houben, fitting in quite well with the Wandelweiser aesthetic. And yet it stands apart, very beautifully and strongly.

On the left inside of the packet is written, "Listening to Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question", on the right, "Yet a Druidic Difference/Enhances Nature now" - Emily Dickinson. The Ives is a high favorite of mine and, once posited, making a connection between the gently keening tones created by Houben and the searching trumpet in the older piece isn't difficult. Perhaps it's, in part, that quality that's so moving, that blending of calm and subsurface agitation limned in the Houben, the breathing sequence, not regular but also not panicky, and the unease beneath. I can't say I know from druids more than the man on the street and have no notion how they mingle here.

The music has a huge tinge factor, coloring one's room, seemingly fading away but always maintaining a crucial presence that one registers from time to time as things around you suddenly leap into a different focus than before.

Wonderful work, endlessly listenable, affording new discoveries every time.

Wandelweiser
available from ErstDist

2012-01-16T19:30:00.008-05:00

Richard Chartier - Transparency (Performance) (LINE)

There's this amazing-seeming thing called the Grand Tonometer pictured here, built by the physicist Rudolf Koenig in the 1870s, consisting of 692 tuning forks, designed to elucidate the range of frequencies over some four octaves.

Chartier has taken recordings of the device to construct this lovely work. As one might expect, the general sound-world is one of shimmers, layered tones usually without the initial strike, though that bit of percussiveness surfaces now and then, a very beautiful effect. There are other subsidiary rumbles and noises, the whole embodying a complexity not immediately apparent. There's something almost stately about the way it proceeds; one picks up something of the ceremonial, as though witnessing a rite of some kind. I'd love to have witnessed this live but am happy enough to have this document, a unique and beautiful recording.

Seth Cluett - Objects of Memory (LINE)

Five pieces with widely varying instrumentation but fitting into a common aesthetic, quiet, pensive, with, at their best, a nice subtle tension. "objects in stillness", for bassoon, viola, guitar, percussion and four sine tones, exemplifies this approach well, a sandy, drone-like piece that never rests easy, but diffuses slightly along its path. It also illustrates what I find lacking about some of the pieces, a kind of papery thinness that I might normally enjoy but here, often, find a tad insubstantial. The second work, for amplified paper, bowed vibraphone, bass drum and compressed air gets past this and works very well; the occasional grounding by the soft, thick sound of the drum no doubt helps but the textures as well integrate in a manner I hear as more delicious and sexy, if you will, than on the prior piece. The next work, for three guitars, electric bass and four sine tines, drifts back toward the territory marked out but the first, though smoother given the sources. Again, while pleasant, I felt the need for more grain, more toughness, however disguised.

Gears shift a bit for "doleros", a documentation of an installation at the Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn, delicate (and lovely) clinks playing off against a flux of gentle drones, the latter varying in texture, quietly surging forth and ebbing. Ambient voices and harsher clangs make a welcome appearance just as the near-twenty minute piece concludes; might have preferred such action earlier but the work hangs together well enough as is. The final and longest track, at 26 minutes, is a live performance involving cassettes and sine tones. It's the most purely drone-based work here, the pulsing (and attractive enough) sines offset just a bit by some rumbling beneath. It's a work one would much rather experience live where personal movement would effect the sounds perceived. On disc, there's once again a lack of depth, some gap I need filled.

There's much good music here but I can't shake the feeling that everything could be tightened, dirtied up a bit or otherwise somehow enhanced. I'd be curious to hear more from Cluett down the line.

Seth Horvitz - Eight Studies for Automatic Piano (LINE)

Impossible not to think of Nancarrow while listening to Horvitz' collection though in terms of the actual music heard, there seems to be a sliding toward Reich (with, as noted in the text one can read here Tenney serving as intermediary). Not sure if I'm imposing foreknowledge, but the use of a Disklavier imparts a subtle amount of cleanliness, if not slickness, to the proceedings that's mildly offputting; my analog soul prefers some irregularities and roughness that a paper roll and metal and wood piano can supply. Given that, though, the intricacies of the compositions are impressive and sonically overwhelming in the sense of the impossibility of a human to manage these scores with such precision. An yet, one wishes for more of a purely musical nature to balance the precision. Sometimes I had the impression of a mechanical Andriessen or Adams--much form, less of musical or, really, sonic interest. The barely-tamed wildness of Nancarrow is absent, subjugated to technical mastery. The final cut, "Strumming Machine", clearly nods toward Charlemagne Palestine but refuses to acknowledge his excesses which, after all, are a large part of his most successful music. More grit, please.

Steve Roden - Proximities (LINE)

Nice idea. Roden, using a text by Donald Judd, selected a sequence therein of the letters A through G, recorded them on an old Paia Oz, played back the result,at dawn, in a gallery of some 50 of Judd's sculptures in Marfa, recording it all on a digital recorder, an iPhone and a micro-cassette recorder. One has the sense of other exterior sounds bleeding through though perhaps they're artifacts of the devices themselves. In any case they're a welcome tonic to the thick, syrupy (in a good sense) mini-organ tones, scraping and scouring them. It's 42 minutes is sometimes in danger of palling, but those background sounds buttress the Paia Oz, supplying the necessary tension, even dominating the affair on occasion. Toward the end, one hears a cascade of marvelous, hollow pings, which Roden identifies as the Judd sculptures themselves, expanding in the growing warmth of the room as the sun rose and beamed through the glass-sided enclosure. A lovely way to end.

Asmus Tietchens - Soirée (LINE)

Wherein Tietchens takes pieces he's done in the past and "recycles" them, subjecting them to some kinds of iterative processes and presenting the 10th iteration of eight works on this recording. He asks, "Confronted with the variety of the results I ask myself: Is it really necessary to create further new electronic music if only one piece as a nucleus is sufficient to derive hundreds and hundreds of different distinct individual variants?" Well, I've no idea about the general question and don't know Tietchen's prior work nearly well enough to discern whether the results here are as rich as the originals or offer glimpses that they didn't, so I can only take these at face value. The music ranges from pieces with echoes of 60s tape collage to sparer, spacier works like "p1" that contain (refreshingly) too many gasps to ooze into anything too Eno-esque. Elsewhere, one almost has a sense of reworked field recordings, which may well be the case. The music is slippery in an odd way, giving hints of form and structure but quickly evaporating. It doesn't leave a strong image in my memory, but a pleasant enough tinge, like a blurred photo.

LINE

2012-01-15T09:03:00.005-05:00

Lee Noyes/Radio Cegeste - to orient themselves with coastlines (idealstate)

Radio Cegeste is a project created by Sally Ann McIntyre which involves site-specific recordings of a "micro radio station", in this case operating on a hilltop near Dunedin, New Zealand. It seems to comprise the bedrock of this fascinating disc; what else is mixed in, by Noyes and perhaps McIntyre, is hard to distinguish, though I take it a broken accordion is one such (and a lovely element, at that). Whatever the case, the results are quite fine, varied within these radiophonic parameters and flow beautifully. Had this emerged from N[Q], I wouldn't have been surprised. There's a similar level of restraint, of allowing the phenomena to stand on their own for extended periods, a minimum of overt manipulation or gestural activity. Snatches of voices, a violin melody (I recognize it, but can't place it), swarms of other generally low-key detritus come and go, very much giving the sense of drifting by, being momentarily captured, then going on their way.

A very fine recording, recommended.

and/also - like also and any (idealstate)

and/also being Noyes on percussion and Stuart Porter on alto sax. More of a post-free jazz session with Porter, especially, sticking in more (relatively) traditional frameworks, recalling Braxton among others, with something of the plaintive quality of Marion Brown (and McPhee, too). Noyes moves things in a Prevostian direction and, once in a while, Porter follows suit but mostly stays in a fairly non-extended area, creating something of an oil and water effect, which actually does work on occasion but more often sits uncomfortably for this listener. He seems like a perfectly sound player but, given my predilections, it's hard for me to get too excited about this kind of venture. Well played on its own terms though.

Lee Noyes - Xiàzhì (idealstate)

Solo Noyes, one live track and two studio, from 2011. Extremely quiet for the most part, all electronic as near as I can tell. The lengthy live track is especially impressive, a long trek from the kind of sparse playing I relate sometimes to Rowe (as in his recording with Sachiko) that lays a fine groundwork for some explosions later on, said eruptions not at all sounding forced or requisite, more natural bubblings up from the pre-sewn seeds. The subsidence, with its heavy thrum, is an unexpected joy as well. Good, thoughtful work, deserving of more commentary than I can come up with today. Check it out.

idealstate

2012-01-07T13:53:00.007-05:00

Haunted House - Blue Ghost Blues (Northern Spy)

I don't know Connors' work, in or out of Haunted House, nearly as well as I should, having seen him but two or three times and only heard the early Erstwhile release by the group and a handful of solo projects of his. This recording should go a long way to changing that (and should have been somewhere on my year-end favorites listing; apologies for the omission). The opening track, "Millie's Not Afraid", is one of the more exciting pieces I've heard in recent months, a churning, surging stew of guitars, throbbing percussion and voice. The remaining tracks might not quite approach this height, but they're damn fine. Langille's voice works perfectly hear, the drumming of Murgali (on naf and kanjira) never fails to incite bodily movement and the twinned guitars of Conners and Burnes compliment and mesh in a thick, ropey, chiming mass that should be the envy of many a rock band. Fine stuff, do check it out.

Northernb Spy

also available from Erst Dist

Lasse-Marc Riek - Saison Concrete (Semperflorens)

As the title suggests, an evocation of the seasons via musique concrete means, though not overtly so. It begins slowly and not so distinguished from much other work in this field but gradually coalesces into something thickly mysterious, cavernous and immersive. That depth doesn't last too long though and the rest of the trip, while pleasant enough as it passes, doesn't really hit me so hard, It ends rather too cutely with a snatch of barrel organ (thought the ghost of Breuker appeared for a moment!). Not bad, not essential

semperflorens

Merzouga - Mekong Morning Glory (Gruenrekorder)

Merzouga is Eva Pöpplein and Janko Hanushevsky who together recorded sounds along the Mekong River through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, assembling them into the work at hand. There's a good bit of recognizable music from the beginning, presumably instruments encountered along the way (strings, by and large) reconfigured int he studio, melded with similarly deconstructed bird, engine, water, vocal, bell, urban and other sounds. There is indeed a strong sense of structure--the pieces don't just meander about but have discernible dynamic variance and blocks of morphing densities. It stands very much in a middle ground between field recordings and composition--a recurring single bass note offset by skittering strings around the 15-minute mark could easily be a near contemporary cello/bass exploration (Johnny Dyani/Abdul Wadud?) with a tweak or two. An interesting approach and it makes for an engaging listen. My main quibble is a general soft focus and lack of rawness, as though events had been "filmed" through a very thin gauze; I wanted a bit more bite.

Gruenrekorder

2012-01-04T18:01:00.006-05:00

Keith Rowe/John Tilbury - E.E.Tension and Circumstance (Potlatch)

I'm not sure if all readers are aware of the circumstances surrounding the pair's first recording, "Duos for Doris" (Erstwhile, 2003). The session, set up by Jon Abbey to occur in Nancy and involving no small amount of logistical and personal difficulty was suddenly in danger of not happening at all due to the serious illness of Tilbury's mother. An uncertain day was spent at Rowe's home in Vallet, after which Tilbury called from England to relate that his mother had indeed passed away but that he'd still meet up in Paris and travel to Nancy, a day later than scheduled. The result was a recording that remains right at the very pinnacle of music for this listener.

Not long after came the dissolution of AMM, a bitter affair. It seemed utterly unlikely that Rowe would ever again play with either of his former companions. In 2008, Rowe's own mother, Eileen Elizabeth Charters-Rowe, died. Tilbury, upon learning of the event, re-established contact and eventually suggested that, just as their first duo ended up centering around the passing of his mother, so they perhaps could get together in honor of Rowe's. Happily, that event took place in December, 2010 at Instants Chavirés in Paris.

When I first heard recordings of the concert, I thought of the almost hour-long set as one of searching and finding, the latter taking up most of the second half. I don't think this is really the case though and, on reflection, it's perhaps silly to think that a mere 6-7 year absence would in any way negate the empathy and sensitivity that had been established since the mid-60s and, especially since 1980. I now here it more as a gradual coalescing of elements, something like a pond in which randomly floating elements, via surface tension and other affinities, slowly accrete, soon forming a wonderfully complex and beautiful entity which lingers for a while, before gently dissipating.

The sheer sounds and, especially, their congruence, are amazing. There are several occasions throughout where the mix is simply unique, like nothing you hear anywhere else; such ears these fellows have. Since 2003, Rowe has gone through a couple of fairly substantial changes in his overall approach, from the maximalism one heard in, say, his 2004 dates with Fennesz to the Twombly-esque scratchy sparseness of his recording with Sachiko M to the hyper-dense obscurantism of some sole projects like The Room. In a sense, he seems to jettison much of that, though by no means all, for a more purely organic interaction, not fundamentally different from what was heard on the Doris sessions. I hear this set as very much an extension of that one, almost as though it could have been recorded the next day, like a conversation picked up after an unfortunately long interlude, returning to the thread but with implicit knowledge of what's intervened. Tilbury is as solid and extraordinary as ever--arguably more so later in the set; he play figures both recognizable and knew and I admit to no small amount of joy when hearing some of the more familiar emanations, like that four-note climbing arpeggio that appears at about the half-hour mark, like an old friend rounding the corner.

We're very fortunate to have this music.

Potlatch

available in the US from Erstdist

2012-01-02T09:37:00.004-05:00

Wade Matthews/Afredo Costa Monteiro - Winter (Copy for Your Records)

A strong recording from Matthews (digital synthesis, manipulated field recordings) and Costa Monteiro (amplified springs, electric motors, radio). I'm increasingly at a loss how to describe work like this insofar as differentiating it from that of others. This isn't a criticism--far from it, the music here is excellent--just to say that it inhabits a zone--grainy, amorphous but with organic shape, rich in depth--that's not so uncommon. Again, that's fine by me. I've enjoyed Costa Monteiro's work for quite some time and find he rarely disappoints. I'm far less familiar with Matthews, having heard perhaps four or five examples, liking some, not caring for others. But this is a really nice pairing, consistently (at least) interesting, sometimes elevating matters further. They handle density and sparseness equally well and their palette, which I hear in tones of rough gray and brown, is prickly and engaging. Love to hear them in concert...In the meantime, check this one out.

Miguel A. Garcia/Richard Kamerman - Homophest (Copy for Your Records)

A half-hour live set from late September of last year, possibly a bit less aggressive and itchy than you might guess, building its own kind of flow, with tinkling and scratches and hums, cresting a couple of times, resettling. A satisfying set, one that would have been enjoyable to witness, not too far in character from some of the shows Kamerman and cohorts put on during the. AMPLIFY:stones earlier that month.

KEROAÄN - Daunting In Its Variousness: First In A Suite Of An Indeterminate Number Of Pieces (Copy for Your Records)

Software designed by Ian M, Fraser and Reed Evan Rosenberg. Funny, before I visited Ian's page, I remarked to myself on the Xenakis-ness of the title...otherwise, difficult to know what to say and, in fact, probably unfair given that it's the audio for a video installation where the light effects influence the audio (I think). One can get an idea from this vid:

KEROAÄN - LIVE DIFFUSION from spacecoffin on Vimeo.

Clearly, something you'd really have to experience in situ. As is, the audio dis feels a bit insubstantial though I think, as the structure is stochastic based, it may also simply be tough to grasp (at least for me) all at once. I have similar problems with some of Xenakis' music at the beginning, though over time things settle in. In any case, would love to see/hear the work sometime as I find something pretty exciting about it.

Copy for Your Records

2012-01-01T09:00:00.007-05:00

(photo: Yuko Zama)

OK, though I think this gets sillier and sillier over time, here's a listing of the recordings that I've enjoyed most over the past year. I'm fudging more than usual this year in that there are six, count 'em, six releases among which choosing a favorite seems especially ridiculous; any one could occupy the top spot on a given day. I will say that, in terms of momentousness, Φ, by virtue of its bringing together, with such delicious tension, the two main "schools" of interest to me in contemporary music, might have the conceptual edge. In any case, alpha:

1. Jurg Frey - metal, stone, skin, foliage, air (Nick Hennies) (l'Innomable)
1. Radu Malfatti/Keith Rowe - Φ (Erstwhile)
1. Michael Pisaro - asleep, street, pipes tones (Gravity Wave)
1. Michael Pisaro - fields have ears (Another Timbre)
1. Michael Pisaro - close constellations and drum on the ground (Gravity Wave)
1. Keith Rowe/John Tilbury - E.E. Tension and Circumstance (Potlatch)

Five more to make a Top 11:

7. Keith Rowe - Concentration of the Stare (bottrop boy)
8. Lucio Capece/Radu Malfatti - Explorational (b-boim)
9. Cornelius Cardew - Works 1960 - 1970 (+3db)
10. Toshimaru Nakamura - Maruto (Erstwhile)
11. Michael Pisaro - Hearing Metal 2 (Gravity Wave)

(photo: fabonthemoon)

Ten more superb albums that should be on everyone's list:

Antoine Beuger- un lieu pour etre deux (Copy for Your Records)
John Cage - Four4 (Another Timbre)
Luc Ferrari/Rinus van Alebeek - Cycles des Souvenirs (Mathka)
Hong Chulki/Jin Sangtae/Kevin Parks - 音影 (Celadon)
MIMEO - Wigry (Bolt/Monotone)
Joe Panzner - Clearing, Polluted (Copy for Your Records)
Robert Schumann - Dichteliebe (Bolt)
Mites - something but it's not tomorrow (CDR)
Seijiro Murayama/Stephane Rives - Axiom for the Duration (Potlatch)
Haptic - Scilens (Entr'acte)

(pausing to mention four historical items that are incredible:)

Eliane Radigue - Transamorem-Transmortem (Important)
Various - I listen to the Wind that Obliterates My Traces (Dust to Digital)
Derek Bailey - Concert in Milwaukee (Incus)
John Cage _ Ryoanji (hat ART)

So much good music, I feel compelled to also list these other releases, all excellent, all more than worthy of your time:

Greg Kelley/Olivia Block - Resolution (Erstwhile)
Craig Shepard - On Foot (Wandelweiser)
Taku Unami/Takahiro Kawaguchi - Teatro Assente (Erstwhile)
Dominic Lash/Patrick Farmer/Sarah Hughes - Droplets (Another Timbre)
Richard Garet/Asher Thal-Nir - Melting Ground (contour editions)
Anne Guthrie/Barry Chabala - Preston Hollow (Roeba)
Hankil Ryu /Hong Chulki/Choi Joonyong - Inferior Music (Balloon & Needle)
Giuseppe Ielasi(Bellows) - Handcut (Senufo)
Graham Lambkin - Amateur Doubles (Kye)
Michael Pisaro - Hearing Metal 3 (Gravity Wave)
Nikos Veliotis/Klaus Filip -Slugabed (Hibari)
John Wall/Alex Rodgers, Alex - Work 2006-2011 (entr'acte)
John Cage - The Works for Percussion (Mode)
Richard Kamerman - changes.txt (Engraved Glass)
Patrick Farmer - Like falling out of trees… (Consumer Waste)
Anne Guthrie - Perhaps a favorable organic moment (Copy for Your Records)
Ben Owen - 05012009FP (winds measure)
John Cage/Morton Feldman - In a Silent Way (Stradivarius)
Manfred Werder - 2009 (5) (Cathnor)
Mites - something to ponder upon (Mystery Sea)
Graham Stephenson - Defiantly Not (Pilgrim Talk)
Jeph Jerman - Arrantre (CD) (no label)
Eric Cordier/Seijiro Murayama - Nuit (Herbal International)
Jason Kahn - Dotolim (Balloon & Needle)
Ben Owen -Birds and Water, 1 (Notice Recordings)
Gill Arno - Lacunae (winds measure)
Jamie Drouin/Lance Olsen - Absence + Forgiveness (Infrequency)
Christian Wolff - Kompositionen 1950-1972 (Edition RZ)
Boris Hauf/Stephen Hess/Keefe Jackson/Juun - Prismatics (Creative Sources)

As always, much thanks to those of you who send these beautiful things my way.

2011-12-29T17:23:00.009-05:00

Antoine Beuger - un lieu pour être deux (Copy for Your Records)

As performed by Barry Chabala (guitar) and Ben Owen (synthesized tones, field recordings)...and gorgeously so. I haven't seen the score and I must say, a part of me would rather not, preferring to wallow in it and contemplate why on earth this gossamer construction seems to hold together so well, what the structure could possibly be that makes it seem as solid as any more densely populated piece of (fine) music. The field recordings are a constant, though at a fairly low volume level--urban, with car sounds and kids playing, but often at a distance as though heard from a high story of a building (other times voices in a large enclosed space). Chabala's guitar and, I suppose, Owen's tones appear at intervals, relatively strong, sometimes surprisingly so, though never (of course!) strident and varying in their attack. Here, it seems to strive to blend into the city sounds, there it stands apart. A place to be two. I read it as a weaving in and out, the street sounds always there, if only hovering faintly, the guitar passing now and then. Yet there's a tensile feel to it as though there's a grid underpinning everything, but difficult to perceive.

Wonderful, in any case, easily listenable again and again, totally natural, highly recommended.

Copy for Your Records

Lucio Capece/Radu Malfatti - Explorational (b-boim)

I think my natural tendency, perhaps not uncommon, when approaching a new release involving Malfatti, is to think compositionally, in Wandelweiser terms. Obviously a wrong tack in an improv session like this one. But listening to it as such is tough in one sense, though immensely rewarding--it does indeed challenge one's notions of free improvisation. There have been many comments, of course, about it's severely quiet nature and yes, it's a recording that begs to be heard in a pristine environment. The heating unit for our apartment is outside my room and, it being winter, when it activates, there's no way I hear the music. My window fronts on the street which, though reasonably quiet, is populated by vehicles whose engine hum is uncannily close to the pitch of the bass clarinet and trombone being ever so subtly wielded here. So one does the best one can and...it's enough.

It's an extraordinary performance in ways I imagine I'll still be delving into years from now, two sets of faint, hazy (though precisely limned) lines in space that occasionally intersect, balanced beautifully. More than most, one would wish to have been there and, happily, there's a video available of the first 23 (out of 40) minutes of the set:

Going on about the control, sound placement, quietude, etc. seems silly. It's an improv, that's what I love about it. I love that Radu waits about 6 1/2 minutes before making his first sound. I love the sound of the paired horns when they coincide but also love that this happens only rarely.

Wonderful, wonderful music and ideas.

b-boim

both available from erstdist

2011-12-27T18:07:00.006-05:00

mpld - one more episode in between recollection and amnesia (unframed)

Six pieces from 2006 re-released (as also the one below) from an original edition of 10 via mpld (Gill Arno), most involving prepared slide projectors. After a brief, evocative inside-piano track, the projectors take over, casting an eerie kind of spell, somehow allowing for sound types that, in this world where you think you've heard everything, strike me as unusual. There's a range, to be sure, sometimes enhanced electronically (though perhaps always), tending toward a kind of rubbed hard rubber area amidst the metallic taps, maybe rubber-coated metal, the shell providing resonance, being ground against one another with serious pressure. Sometimes the projector as such exposes itself in fluttery, humming fashion--quite lovely and forceful. The 20 minute "four flashbacks" is especially evocative, helicoptering through the mist and smoke and dust. Very nice. A closing field recording merges seamlessly with the piece, drifting off. Beautiful cover image as well, culled from his live projector set-up.

Gill Arno - Nervatura (unframed)

For "Nervatura", Arno, on a visit to Chicago, drew on a map, following railway lines and traveled that route, recording along the way as well as picking up scraps of metal which he later heated and then placed on thermal-sensitive paper, one of the lovely results becoming the fold-out sleeve for this disc. Three pieces, each designated by map coordinates, which gain in strength over the course of the recording. Om the first, railway sounds predominate with trans on track and station bells, children's chatter mixed in. The second dwells in crowd noise, nicely immersive. It's the in the third that things really gel, become rather epic. Hollow sounds, water again, engines...a boat engine, I think. But then a hum enters the picture and just transforms things, elevates them. Not sure of the source, though they're reminiscent of ringing metal wires but whatever their origin, they perfectly glue together the engine thrums and distant metallic clanks. And at 19 minutes, it lasts precisely the right length.

Fine effort.

unframed

2011-12-26T09:40:00.009-05:00

Michel Doneda/Jonas Kocher/Tao G. Urhovec Sambolec/Tomaž Grom/Giuseppe Ielasi - Udarnik (l'Innomable)

Four pieces by the first four names above and a fifth constructed from that material by Ielasi. An oddly structured recording, at least to my ears. The live quartet dates (soprano, accordion, computer, contrabass) are ok but rather routine, the kind of breathy/scratchy/rubbing improv that one expects from Doneda and with which his companions seem comfortable. For myself, there was nothing particularly special about it. But Ielasi's recombination of the material (not certain if he confined himself to the substance of these tracks or had other options) is superb, a fantastic dense, rolling nine-minute piece that has all the vigor and robustness lacking in the originals. As I said, an odd choice to stand this work on its own when it clearly outshadows its forebears. Worth it for the Ielasi alone.

Ferran Fages - Llavi vell (l'innomable)

You're never sure quite what to expect with Fages though most recently (of what I've heard), he's gone bk and forth between noisy improv and calmer, lovely acoustic work. This one's different. Essentially a long, continuous,fairly complex drone derived, one suspects, from a contact-mic'd guitar, possibly augmented by simultaneous transmission via speakers into the room. The overall effect is one of a ringing, dulcimer-like quality. It's attractive enough but, somehow, I didn't find over the course of its 44 minutes enough to sustain my interest. I suspect this is partly due to the simple fact of its being a recording, that were I to experience it as a sound installation, to be immersed in it, things might be different. As is, it's not unpleasing but ultimately unsatisfying.

Leo Alves Vieira & Pangea - Post-Sleep Paths (Marmorno)

Vierea on Bb Clarinet, flute, acoustic guitar and electro-acoustics, Pangea (Juan Antonio Nieto) on sound treatments, with additional string work. The five pieces take existing sound, often music (is that Don Cherry on track 3?) or spoken word, and alter them in a manner reminiscent of concrete and tape assemblage work from the 60s, albeit with a greater amount of ancillary sound and a subtler approach. There is indeed a sense of dream-logic in play, a misty surreality about the music. This is most finely wrought on the aforementioned third track where that sped-up trumpet flits in and out of guitar chords, masses of static and dynamic displacement; a dizzying and very enjoyable journey. I found the dis as a whole a bit inconsistent but when it gels, things are quite fascinating. Worth checking out.

Marmorno

Luscinia

2011-12-25T15:01:00.004-05:00

Graham Lambkin - Amateur Doubles (Kye)

I first encountered Lambkin's work, as did many, I imagine, with the brilliant "Salmon Run" several years back, never having experienced his tenure with Shadow Ring. Subsequent efforts with Jason Lescalleet, on his own and in the three or four times I've had the pleasure of experiencing his live performance, he's pretty well cemented, in my head, himself as one of the more unique musicians around. And, of course, the term "musician" is highly suspect as Lambkin certainly pushes the boundaries of what one considers musicianship. Live, it's sometimes difficult to discern exactly what it is he's contributing while on record, his use of previously existing music, often to brilliant effect, raises questions of authorship that can be prickly. I suppose that's never been more so the case than with "Amateur Doubles". Which I love.

One opens the gatefold LP sleeve to a photo of the Lambkin family seen through the window of their car, apparently a Honda Civic. Graham is fiddling with something beneath he dashboard, his wife Adris Hoyos behind the wheel, a son in the back seat. This was the recording studio. Atop the dashboard are the two CDs that make up much of the sound source for the disc: "Pôle" by Philippe Besombes and Jean-Louis Rizet and "300 Miles Away" by Philippe Grancher, both Tangerine Dream-y, fusion-y 70s discs with mucho synth/electric piano action. What seems to have occurred is that Lambkin extracted some quite evocative and lovely nuggets from what I'm given to understand are otherwise unexceptional recordings and constructed a melange of sorts (on tape? you hear what sounds like cassette insertion at several points)) which he proceeded to play and record inside the car.

It sounds almost hilarious in one sense but, dammit, it works beautifully. The recordings dominate the soundscape (bracketed by a few moments of something else, including some flute practice at the beginning of Side One--though maybe that's also part of the source recording?) though they're clearly embedded within this somewhat claustrophobic environment, this small "room". Apart from the general ambiance of the space, you hear other elements including the chatter of children, presumably Graham's and Adris', some amount of exterior sound (though I daresay the windows were closed during this operation), various clicks and tappings and what sounds to me like Lambkin's low, muttering voice.

And it somehow all works, works pretty wonderfully. As with field recordings, I have to think it all revolves around choices made and how those choices synch up to the listener's taste, sense of structure, etc. Lambkin manages to rescue these pieces, on their own perhaps a bit sappy, by fixing them in this very real setting, by imbuing them with enough grain and grit so as to make them palatable, no mean feat. I can put this on and listen all day, dwelling on the multiple possible meaning of the term, "amateur doubles".

Incidentally, I'm not sure if this isn't a feature common to all clear vinyl, but there's a very cool optical occurrence one encounters when looking down at the spinning disc, the grooves appearing to go both "forwards" and "backwards" on the turntable. Trippy!

Highly recommended...

Available via erstdist

2011-12-22T19:23:00.006-05:00

Patrick Farmer - Like falling out of trees into collectors' albums (Consumer Waste)

The title poses a kind of question, or observation, that I imagine often crosses the mind of those who deal in field recordings: to what extent they're "merely" the recipients of sounds that happen to fall their way. How much of themselves ends up in the recording? Does it matter? Farmer perhaps touches on this in a short essay included here when he writes "that there is everything and nothing to record, to notice, to document".

As ever, with releases as (apparently) "pure" in their substance as this one, that is, bearing little seeming enhancement on the part of, in this case, Farmer, qualitative judgment is something of a fool's errand except insofar as to simply state whether or not the sounds moved me, placed me in a different psychological space, or not. Well, these do. Three recordings: a pond's slowly melting surface--soft water sounds augmented by the occasional airplane; aower lines recorded via mic placement on a wire fence--a beautiful, oddly hollow but complex sound in which you can imagine infinite levels of detail just outside the range of your hearing; a wasp paring away layer of a bamboo cane, the subtlest of the trio and, on disc, almost as fascinating as it might have been to be inside that tube, which is to say, very.

An excellent recording, highly recommended for those with any interest at all in this area.

Jack Harris/Samuel Rodgers - What's that for, mate? (Consumer Waste)

Fine laptop/electronics session, two longish works, each traversing substantial territory in a calm and inquisitive manner. Generally quiet but with a few laser blasts and, better, some unexpected encounters in the form of voices and brief rhythmic patterns. There's an impressive intensity to the calmness, a highly tuned consideration of sounds and sequencing, and a good balance of the gentle and the severe. This grew on me each successive time I listened, a very enjoyable amble indeed.

Ben Gwilliam/Hainer Woermann - cardtape drafts (Consumer Waste)

I believe (I'll doubtless be proved wrong) that this is my first exposure to Gwilliam (tape, magnetics, amplified processes) and Woermann (amplified cardboard, preparations), hopefully not the last.

Yes, amplified cardboard. Excellent.

Four tracks, unhurried but not unbusy, carrying a strong sense of the space in which they were constructed, scurryings, tappings and rubbings buffeting against one another, almost as though blown into contact by a strong breeze. Great balance between liquid sounds and dry ones, the latter most often brought to us via the cardboard, if I'm not mistaken. Not that I expect to see such in everyone's arsenal soon, but Woermann wields it quite ably here. Dynamics are worked wonderfully, elements expand out of the room, into the open, still abristle, ebb to a rumble, wax again toward the end, everything buzzing.

Strong recording; need to hear more from them...

consumer waste

2011-12-17T07:56:00.006-05:00

Hong Chulki/Jin Sangtae/Kevin Parks - 音影 (Celadon)

Perhaps the translation as "chiaroscuro" is the most fitting; one of the immediately apparent aspects of this very fine recording, for those who have experienced the music of the Seoul-based musicians only on disc, is the transitioning between the harsh, more abrupt sound-word they've tended to inhabit and a smoother one, one in which long, semi-pure tones are not uncommon. It's a fantastic mix. I'm guessing the latter is largely the result of Parks' presence here; not that his own out put has been so streamlined, but that the longer tones seem more often than not to be introduced and elaborated on by the guitar, picked up by others in the ensuing minutes.

That's the impression which permeates the disc: a delicate, lovely balance between the rough and tumble of Hong Chulki's turntables (which, surprisingly in this day and age, are occasionally the brief source of some identifiable music) and Jin Sangtae's hard drives and Parks' guitar and electronics, the former seeming to adapt themselves a tad or two to the relatively clearer tones and hums of the latter. It's bby no means a complete accession and that's much of the beauty, that tension and elasticity that forms in between. As implied above, it's entirely possible that this particular area is more routinely heard at performances in Seoul than have been documented on disc (at least within my hearing), but to this listener, the music comes as a refreshing variation to what's appeared before on Manual, Balloon and Needle, etc. Parks' oyster shells to Hong's and Jin's cigarette butts? The fifth of five tracks achieves a special kind of synthesis, really beautiful.

It's quite active overall but feels entirely unforced, a very natural flow in effect, the bleats and screeches blending wonderfully with the more mellifluous tones. I don't want to suggest it's all that smooth, btw, just a more finely grained sandpaper than one might expect. Not sure what else to say except that if you enjoyed the Parks/Foster "Acts Have Consequences" release (and, really, who didn't), you love this one. Highly recommended.

Celadon

Hong Chulki/Ryu Hankil/Choi Joonyong - Inferior Sounds (Balloon and Needle)

Album title of the year? Though closer in character to previous work out of Seoul, this too strikes me as having moved toward a fuller, somehow more accommodating sound. There's a kind of surge in effect throughout much of the disc's two almost half-hour tracks; one pictures a large mass of all these thorny, harsh elements "balled up" into a larger form that steadily oozes along. As in the Celadon release, the aural landscape is active, silences rare to non-existent. It's more than harsh enough for your average passer-by but less so than I might have expected, given past music.

So in many ways, including the coincidence of their fairly close release dates, I think of these as a kind of diptych. And it's just as hard to parse on some ways. Knowing the instruments involved are typewriters, turntables, CD-players and a snare drum gives one an idea and if you know earlier work from these musicians, you'll have an inkling, but there's less overt aggression than encountered in the past. I'm of course reluctant to conclude anything of a general nature from only two examples but I'm naturally curious to find out if this represents anything of a recent tendency there. Whatever the case, this adjustment, if it is such, suits really well with me, nudging the music just a hair toward a more user-friendly sound. It will still easily drive any adjacent acquaintance from the room, don't misunderstand, but the music feels more solid and focused than ever. Excellent work. (and a wonderful packaging idea)

Balloon & Needle

Both available stateside via Erstdist

2011-12-11T08:27:00.002-05:00

Ben Owen - Birds and Water, 1 (Notice Recordings)

I wish I could figure out exactly what it is that I routinely enjoy about Ben Owen's work that differentiates it from others plowing roughly the same territory. As before, the best I can do is posit that it revolves around choices made and that those choices, in one sense or another, coincide with my taste, with what I would do or, more likely, what I wouldn't do but would look back and think I should have done. This cassette release (which I heard on disc) contains two substantial sides, over 47 minutes each, both realized at the Experimental Television Center in Owega, NY in 2010, using A system developed by David Jones (presumably not our David Jones) in 1974 that includes sequencers, oscillators and image processors. Side A shifts from area to area, some intense and full, some all but silent, the latter often redolent, on closer examination, with hums and wooly static, here smooth, there very, very rough. What to say except that both the selection of sounds as well as their duration/sequencing sit perfectly, keeping one rapt and delighted.

Side B is a bit of a tougher go only because it's essentially a single drone, kind of a thicker variant of a Sachiko M piece. There are striations, though, and they're apparent on reasonably close listen even before the ocarina-like, wavering tones appear. The long hum. I haven't had the opportunity to really lay this out loud, though I imagine it would sound great. I enjoy it as is even if I somehow find it missing that extraordinary level of attention that Sachiko manifest. Still and all, very fine.

A strong, absorbing recording, well worth seeking out.

notice recordings

2011-12-03T07:37:00.019-05:00

Steve Beresford/Stephen Flinn/Dave Tucker - Ink Room (Creative Sources)

Nice title. Electronics/percussion/guitar. I haven't kept track of Beresford at all over the years, though I recall enjoying his more straightforward efforts (Signals for Tea, the film disc on Tzadik) more than his free work and this, more or less and example of the latter, confirms my prejudices. It's less Beresford that's the problem than Tucker, whose rock-referential, harsher-than Frisell (which is to say, not very), gentler than Bailey approach wears thin quickly. Combined, the trio churns out something resembling a random, less than inspired set of music that wouldn't have been out of place in downtown NYC circa 1990. Retro-efi? Not for me.

Heddy Boubaker/Ernesto Rodrigues/Abdul Moimeme - Le Beau Deviant (Creative Sources)

Now this is more like it. Six pretty incisive, thoughtfully considered improvs from Boubaker (alto and bass saxes), Rodrigues (viola) and Moimeme (prepared electric guitar). Not earthsaking but solid. Most things I've heard involving Boubaker over the past several years have shown well-learned lessons from AMM without descending into slavish imitation and this is another. The pieces are quiet and spacious, relaxed but concise. Boubaker manages to avoid both saxophonics and post-Butcher tropes, really just disappearing into the mix, no mean feat. All contribute at moments and with sounds that tend to feel exactly right at that time. Just a good, strong session, very enjoyable.

Erik Carlsson - The Bird and the Giant (Creative Sources)

Solo percussion and not bad at all. He sticks mostly to metals and bells, sometimes sounding a bit like certain prepared piano set-ups, keeps things calm but percolating, well-paced and, by virtue of the elements employed, very soothing on the ear. As with the trio release above, I can't say there's anything startling or "new", but no matter. It's an exceedingly pleasant recording, absolutely fine for creating a bubbly, meditational atmosphere. Also appreciate the more sandpapery final two tracks, nicely offsetting the prior sounds. Good work.

Marjolane Charbin/Frans van Isacker - Kryscraft (Creative Sources)

Piano and alto saxophone; don't believe I've heard either musician before. This is one of those recordings where I can't say there's anything particularly wrong but it doesn't quite grab me. Fairly quiet (aide from an annoying sax explosion toward the end), making use of plenty of extended technique, inside-piano, etc. Perfectly competent and sometimes charming, though more so the "straighter" it gets (an all-too common phenomenon in my experience; I can't begin to count the number of musicians I think would be better served to be less "avant"). Were I attending a live event and this was presented, I'd be satisfied but I'm afraid I'd forget it within hours. It's fine, just more or less indistinguishable from many.

Boris Hauf/Steven Hess/Keefe Jackson/Juun - Proxemics (Creative Sources)

The pick of this particular litter, to these ears. I hadn't heard Hauf in quite some time, though I have fond memories of the discs he used to send out, willy-nilly, about ten years ago. He's added sines and harmonium to his tenor and soprano, teaming hear with Hess (drums, electronics), Jackson (contrabass clarinet, tenor) and Juun (piano) for three lush, deep probes. Interesting how well the two reeds work in this context. While they make free use of what has come to be heard as "traditional" breath tones, they freely drift into standard sounds and even, as heard some 15 minutes into the opening track, a kind of mournful melodic line that wouldn't have been so out of place in the Garbarek of "Afric Pepperbird" (1970). And it works. The shortish second cut is even, to my ears, more directly referential to that once-fine Norwegian, sounding like it could have been an outtake from "Tryptikon"--very tasty, too, I have to say. Surprising they could still manage to make something viable from this material, at this date, though it's Juun's prepared piano, an element not heard in those early ECM days, that proves to be the winning ingredient. The harmonium appears on the final piece, a soft, semi-droning work that shifts every few minutes, from low throbs to hollow winds back to harmonium drones with semi-rhythmic, light percussion. The horns return, undisguised and again, manage not only not to irritate but to gibe before the wheezy drone returns to take things out. Excellent recording.

David Chiesa/Jean Sebastien Mariage - Oort (Creative Sources)

Double bass and electric guitar, doing a reasonable rendition of the cloud of debris between Mars and Jupiter. Spacious, and scrape-filled (much arco bass and, I suspect, bowed guitar)--I would have thought I'd like it more than I do. Something is lacking for this listener, however and I'm guessing that, however extenuated the sounds, they seem to relate back to the kind of post-serial gesturalism that often makes me itch. Less a concern with pure sound than with flourishes of extended technique, that is. Not bad but not enough air for me.

Abdul Moimeme/Ricardo Guerreiro - Knettanu (Creative Sources)

For two simultaneously played, prepared electric guitars and "interactive computing platform". Not sure what the latter does, though I assume it's something along the lines of regurgitating Moimeme's guitar as the music carries that tonality pretty much throughout. It's echoey, spacey; reminds me somewhat of Laswell's 90s explorations which....isn't a great thing to remind me of. Much resonant scraping, ringing tones, darkness. Better than that, with some welcome harshness tossed in here and there but overall, far too meandering and, well, spacey, for my taste.

[Writer's note: Last week my pc was the recipient of some malware, so I'd been working on Linda's laptop, where I did the above. When my pc was apparently fixed, I used it to write the remaining four reviews of the Creative Sources discs. Unfortunately, fixed it wasn't and none of them were saved. I just don't have the heart or time to rewrite them and, since I didn't happen to find those four discs very much to my liking, I'll let them drop. Apologies, Ernesto. The four were:

Matthias Muche/Philip Zoubek/Achim Tang - excerpts from anything
Alon Nechushtan - Dark Forces
Olaf Rapp/Joe Williamson/Tony Buck - Weird Weapons
Joe Williamson - Hoard ]

Creative Sources

2011-12-02T08:18:00.003-05:00

Haptic - Scilens (Entr'acte/Flingco)

The band that refuses to disappoint.

As ever, tough to encapsulate short of mere descriptives. They're careful and quiet, yes, with something of a dronish character lurking about, though not so insistent as to make it a very conscious apprehension. It more involves the materials they choose to use in constructing these hums, rubbings, vibrations and how (for example, in the luscious opening track) they deposit small helpings of beautiful, clear piano, augmented by rougher, less clear string abrasion. On first blush, you (I) don't realize how much variation there is--a sign of great work: apparent simplicity made up of enormous complexity.

The fifth track gets rudely percussive for a bit, surging then receding then coming back again, before settling down. But it's a fine jostle amidst the general, wonderful haze. A "hidden" sixth cut zones out spectacularly, just a languorous throb amidst crickets and ice crystals.

Hear this.

Pali Meursault - Without the wolves (Entr'acte)

A really fascinating recording with an interesting arc. At the beginning of the first track, we hear a soft but quite detailed range of dripping sounds, reasonably dense but clear, augmented by similarly pitched glitches and cracks, with the odd metallic bang. It's very much of a piece and, in its fashion, rather steady state. I liked it very much and admired Mearsault's sticking to it for quite some time, allowing variations to creep in that didn't disturb the flow but rather focused the listener's attention here and there within the stream. Some 15 minutes in, however, it began to pall a bit. Something, something hard to pinpoint, was no longer clicking. A certain range of drops vanished, perhaps that was it, and I found it disquieting.

But this shift, relatively abrupt though it was, began to open up adjacent areas that, while quite different and becoming more so as the piece wore on, seemed somehow appropriate when the opening was reconsidered in hindsight. Bits of radio, whirring buzzes and all manner of detritus appear, eventually evanescing into the dark. Nice.

Second and third tracks have more of a field recording feel, from breathing and talking around a fire (?) with what sounds like a good bit of trudging around, to wind-whipped howls and dog yips, all, eventually fanning out into an ethereal ringing, quite beautiful.

I got pretty lost in this and enjoyed it a bunch.

Nick Storring - Rife (Entr'acte)

Storring is a Toronto-based cellist and electronicist and I think this is my first encounter with his music. It's a reasonably juicy one. The music also diverges from what might expect after the first few moments, when I was guessing at a post-modern cello set augmented by electronics, but occupying a fairly abstract area. Not so. Quite quickly, the kitchen sink is duly thrown in and the subsequent music incorporates eastern tropes, zither, lush electronica, beats and much else. If I had to make a single comparison, it would be to Fennesz, whose influence looms large, especially insofar as general tone, but Storring, in these ten tracks (which I read as a suite) is even less constrained, seemingly willing to drift wherever the "moment" takes him. This has its pluses and minuses. I find myself enjoying it in large part even as I question how much depth is there. It's sonic candy to an extent, tasty and easily digested if, perhaps, lacking in required vitamin department.

Still, well worth a listen and one of those discs that could provide a gentle avenue into deeper realms for innocent ears.

Entr'acte

Flingco

2011-11-30T12:51:00.002-05:00

Just a note on this marvelous release, otherwise unrelated to the usual stuff here.

Steve Roden, who, I guess, is actually a bit related to the aforementioned usual stuff, apparently spends a good deal of his spare time trawling thrift shops in search of, among other things, ancient, obscure vinyl and old photographs. He's collected two CDs worth of the former and a bookload of the latter, all consisting of music-related subject matter, in this fantastic volume.

The music dates from the '20s to '40s, the photos from the mid 1800's through maybe the 30s (? not sure, don't have it at hand). There are blues, hymns, folk songs, pop tunes, most of them by people you've never heard of, many of them just gorgeous. Highlights include Nick Lucas (a central inspiration for Tiny Tim! and who appeared on the Tonight Show wedding of same) crooning, "If you Hadn't Gone Away", Eva Parker's stirring rendition of "I Seen My Pretty Papa Standing on a Hill" ("He looked just like a ten-thousand dollar bill") and an awesome jew's harp performance of "The Old Grey Horse" by Obed Pickard.

I've posted a couple of selections on facebook to deafening silence from the eai community (:-)) but what the hell...it's great music.

Oh, and their Fahey set contains its share of gems as well.

Dust to Digital

2011-11-26T10:42:00.008-05:00

Greg Kelley/Olivia Block - Resolution (Erstwhile)

Jérôme Noetinger/Will Guthrie - Face Off (Erstwhile)

The two new Erstwhile releases stand in something of a contrast to recent albums on the label, being (to my ears), less strictly idea-oriented and more concerned with pure sonic attributes. In some ways, I here them as similar to recordings like "eh" and "Lidingo", which is all well and good.

Olivia Block makes her label debut, paired with Greg Kelley in his first appearance on Erstwhile since "Forlorn Green", although the overall cast of the session seems more firmly located in her neck of the woods, which is to say very thick and richly layered, possessing a massiveness and spatial volume. She plays a bit of piano here and there (once unfurling a couple of strikingly Tilbury-esque arpeggios, elsewhere within the piano's string-bed) but it's her electronics that predominate, finely integrated with Kelley's trumpet, enough so that it's often difficult to pick out the horn from the diverse soundscape.

Though the five pieces have enormous dynamic range, there's never a sense of sparseness; even at its quietest, you get the impression that even the gossamer strands that are barely discernible are tightly connected and possess great tensile strength. And when things get churning--or tumbling--look out. The sheer sound is marvelous through most of the set, especially those moments, beloved of Block, wherein one experiences loud but slightly dulled bangs, like crates being jostled in the hold of a cavernous ship, similar to the ambiance of her "Heave To" but here augmented by Kelley's ferocious rushes of wind power and tin plate-induced buzz. The fourth cut, "some old slapstick routine" is almost bravura in its deployment of crashes, wheezes, bangs and piano, a marvelous explosion of densities, colors and plasticity.

It's interesting re: the title, "Resolution" that had we read this in 1970, wed likely think of "moral determination" whereas today, I daresay, we think in terms of sensual acuity. In any case, I hear this as quite a sensual release, and a very good one.

There's a somewhat similar feel, at least to these ears, with the Noetinger/Guthrie recording, not in actual sound but in the sense of being immersed in a purely sensual world, here defined by electronics and percussion. It's a more prickly clime, more spittle and nails, but contains the same kind of richness and viscosity.

Twelve cuts that, though often differentiated by a brief gap, read decently enough as a continuous suite. There are different tensions in play here: a bit of a musique concrète resonance via Noetinger and the slightest of free jazz allusions on the part of Guthrie, who's been investigating that territory in recent years.

Difficult to know what to say apart from simple descriptives; for all its grit, there's a certain airiness at hand, the whirs of the tape decks seeming at some physical distance from Guthrie's clatter. Perhaps that's one aspect, that there's a strong feeling of twoness here whereas "Resolution" has a kind of unity that, had I not known otherwise, might have made it difficult to ascertain the number of people involved. "Face Off" (and perhaps this is apropos given the filmic reference of the title) strikes me as more of a dialogue, even (heaven forfend!) a conversation. Whatever, it maintains interest absolutely throughout. Listeners aware of the prior work of both will have a reasonable idea of what to expect, though it's less monolithic that some of Guthrie's electronic work from recent years.

One tends to consider new Erstwhiles in the context of its impressive catalog. While these may not have the conceptual depth of Rowe/Malfatti (not that much does, imho) or the sheer, aggressive innovation of a Taku Unami project, they're each entirely winning baths of sound from two pairs of fine and fascinating musicians. Recommended.

Erstwhile

2011-11-20T09:05:00.008-05:00

Two LPs by Mattin that were apparently released in early 2010 but showed up on my doorstep only recently. The first deals, more or less traditionally, with music, the second not so much. Mattin will be appearing (what that entails, who knows? or even if he'll appear) along with Jarred Fowler and Rind on Tuesday, 11/22 at 208 Bowery, 2nd Floor at 8PM.

Loy Fankbonner/Margarida Garcia/Kevin Failure/Mattin - Exquisite Corpse (w.m.o/r - Azul Discografica - Ozono Kids)

The idea is simple enough: four parts of each of ten songs recorded independently, with only the lyrics serving as "graphic score" of a kind, limiting the length to standard pop's three minutes, layering the results without discrimination. MIMEO's "Sight" was a far deeper exploration along tangential lines, including as it did the advice to think in terms of the communality of the ensemble despite being geographically isolated. Perhaps the same idea was at play here or the members thought of it themselves. I also found myself recalling Gavin Bryars' wonderful "1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4" on that mid-70s Obscure disc, wherein the group member recorded simultaneously but outside the range of hearing each other, beginning a written piece together (in this case a loungy jazz number) but gradually, inevitably, drifting apart.

In any event, we *are* presented with a commodity here, another in a long string of seemingly contradictory product emanating from Mattin who might just as likely sit and stare at his performing partner for the duration of the set, recording what transpires, playing it back immediately, or not show up, or interrogate the audience. Not sure if this is the "last" item which presents a fairly traditional musical approach (in ultimate outcome, if not in means of production). If I attempt to describe what it sounds like...oh, a bit of Boredoms, maybe some DNA, any number of groups straddling the noise/rock divide. At times, rather amusingly, it brings back memories of Last Exit or Arcana. It's perfectly listenable, very loose, Failure's guitar chiming, Fankbonner's drums supple and varied and, probably (not surprisingly) Garcia's bass, rough-hewn and uncompromising, supplying the most material of lasting interest. Mattin's vocals are suitably disjointed and glossolaliac.

Listen here (w.m.o/r)

Mattin - Object of Thought (Presto!?)

When I opened the package in which these LPs arrived, the knife I used left an incision directly across the black circle that occupies most of the back cover of this release. Seemed appropriate, somehow.

I find this one a good bit more interesting, ultimately, than the Exquisite Corpse album, largely due to its fine juxtaposition of the abstract and concrete, the latter consisting of the spoken words of Mattin, recording his thoughts on (I take it) a range of subjects, which he then distorts, cuts and otherwise manhandles, removing any real vestige of meaning with the exception, possibly, of tone of voice. In this sense, one recalls Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room", though the end result falls in territory adjacent to Ashley's "Automatic Writing". Not to make a qualitative comparison, just an elemental one.

Side A is quiet, Side B, less so. Sometimes the words are intelligible, more often not, slowed to an indistinct mumble. Electronics interfere like a mal-tuned analog radio. Sonically, it works quite well, balanced, slithery, interruptive. That's part of the irony, I suppose, that one is unable *not* to listen (at least, that's the case with me) without making assessments that are more aesthetic than political. One can expand upon the attempted portrayal (and understanding) of ideas made impossible by the corporate chaos around us, though that's not a particularly deep thought, both obvious and subvertable. So one listens to it as sound, contravening what I imagine Mattin's preference would be. And it works quite well, though my favorite aspect might still be the knife cut I made in the sleeve.

presto!?

2011-11-15T15:46:00.012-05:00

Sean Baxter - Solo Drumkit Improvisations (Bocian)

Bocian had preciously released a couple of Baxter solos on 45rpm vinyl; sometimes I thought it worked well in that format at that length, other times I wanted to hear the music more expanded. Well, got my wish on the latter here, with a 35-minute LP, eight tracks of varied percussion. It's all quite full and active on Side One, but at the same time, there's not much of a sense of fussiness or bravura playing. Things grow quiet on the flip side, much crinkling of material at first, then a flurry of toms and light metallic clatter. Echoes of Le Quan Ninh perhaps, maybe a hint of Beins as well.

Good recording, worth checking out.

James Rushford/Joe Talia - Paper Fault Line (Bocian)

New names to me (though Anthony Pateras also appears), Rushford on viola, piano, synth, organ and many percussive objects, Talia wielding mostly percussion (also an LP).

How to describe? Side One is a fine welter of noise, with tones of percussion that tends towards the mid-range and higher pitched end of things, with electronics weaving in and out, the whole thing surging and ebbing. Like the Baxter above, very busy but without a feeling of fussiness, advancing with fervor, then retreating to bubble about and reconsider. The organ is surprising when it enters at the side's conclusion, tonal and church-like (or, at least, funereal).

The obverse side has more of a concrète feel at the beginning, but once again the organ appears, this time more deeply ethereal, with a faint choral aspect. The music continues in a slightly spooky vein, with glass-like tinkling and high keening provided by bowed material. There's an abrupt stoppage (no cuts are listed, so I'm reading this as a continuous work), followed by isolated electro-percussive tones, reminds me of something...Jarrett/DeJohnette from Ruta & Daitya? not sure. In any case, quite enjoyable and I'm interested in hearing more from this pair.

Bocian

"Blue" Gene Tyranny - Detours (Unseen Worlds)

Tyranny has always been something of a puzzle for me. First hearing him as part of Robert Ashley's ensemble, I took his keyboard work to be rather tongue-in-cheek, the flashiness and obvious technical prowess a kind of commentary on same, similar to the horror/enticement of the cocktail lounge-ish music, expertly done but quease-inducing. But on his solo piece on the brilliant "New Music from Antarctica" compilation, the modestly titled, "The World's Greatest Piano Player", he really seemed to revel in the raucous honky-tonkin' and I thought, hmmm, maybe this is really where his head is at. Subsequent music has more or less steered me in that direction, though I always retain an itch that has me wondering if I shouldn't be taking the music at face value, if, somewhere down there, Tyranny is chuckling...

In any case, I'm choosing to take this recording as it comes. Four works, delicate and tonal, sometimes possessing a Satie tinge, more often carrying more than a whiff of Jarrett at his soloing best (without the pomp or angst). There's a gentle country aura in "13 Detours"; one can picture a house pianist in a rural bar, by himself around 3AM, ambling about the keyboard, trying out arcane variations on what he'd played earlier. "George Fox Searches" is both the most overtly Jarrettian (though much better) as well as the most effective piece, though Tyranny cites a Quaker hymn as a source. It's a quite beautiful, sprawling 19 minutes, always interesting, often achingly lovely.

The other two compositions use electronics and tape. "She Wore Red Shoes" has a touch of the Ashley-era throb with a clipped rhythm embellished by florid pianistics, pleasant enough. "Intuition" is dreamy, with held notes and taped sounds of fireworks and maybe a calliope?

Nice work. Does a part of me desire more meat? Yes, but it's a reasonable enough dish as is, occasionally wuite piquant! :-)

unseen worlds

Yannick Franck - Memorabilia (Silken Tofu)

Six tracks of heavy, dark, slowly pulsing dronage. I'm afraid there's not too much else. Well-constructed and rich enough, but the kind of amorphous, throbbing mass that just can't hold my interest. Some annoying, if softly spoken vocal on the fifth track don't help. Nothing wrong with this, and of interest to those who really get into this area, but too indistinguishable from similar work by others and not nearly enough grit for yours truly.

Silken Tofu

2011-11-15T13:27:00.000-05:00

Christian Wolff - Kompositionen 1950-1972 (Edition RZ)

Wolff occupies a rather unique position in my evaluative process, always has. There's something about his music, generally, that I deeply love and admire but I'll be damned if I can routinely pick out what that something is and, in the meantime, I find his work very, very difficult. This is made all the more problematic by its seeming (on the surface) simplicity and often relative tonality. There's a slipperiness to it, a conflict between the "should be graspable" and "leaking through my fingers" that persistently baffles me. Which all goes to its beauty, I imagine.

Coincidentally, shortly after writing the above, I saw an exchange with Michael Pisaro and Jon Abbey on facebook in which the former complained about the blandness in most of the performances on Disc One here. Now, I take for granted that Michael knows vastly more about Wolff and has far more experience with his music than I do, so I place substantial trust in his opinions. That's part of the reason that makes me reluctant to critically comment on certain areas of music, and Wolff is often one. Because I simply don't have the breadth of listening experience to differentiate at that level. I listen to the first piece here, "Duo for Violinist and Pianist, 1961", performed by Cardew and János Négyesy, and it sounds fine to me, difficult to grasp in the manner I mentioned above, but very enjoyable. I'm sure I'm missing something, perhaps as simple as having four or five other renditions at my disposal and the time to compare.

In any case, this 2-disc set presents performances of a range of early Wolff pieces realized from 1956 to 2011. Several stellar performers including Cardew, Tudor, Nelly Boyd, Rzewski and Rowe. I imagine there are differing opinions as to Rzewski's pianistic gifts, some finding him too steely, but I've always loved his attack and he does wonderfully here on four pieces, three recorded in 1963 (I think the earliest I've heard Rzewski), one in 1971, spare and delicate. There are two versions of "Edges", the first by Gentle Fire (Richard Bernas, Hugh Davies, Graham Hearn, Stuart Jones and Michael Robinson) from 1974, which elicited especial condemnation on that interchange cited above. I can see the point a bit; there's a kind of narrative aspect that seems out of place. It's certainly rough and, to my ears, doesn't hold a candle to the Rowe, but I can't quite hear it as utterly offensive, the overall sound closer to what you might have heard from Davies' Music Improvisation Company from around the same time. But Rowe's version is stunning. Hyper-quiet, with a restraint that's almost painful, small shimmers, clicks, flutters, radio...truly, the "edges" of sound. Worth the price for this alone.

Other pieces I especially enjoyed included the strong, droney "Duo for Violins" played by Daniella Strasvogel and Biliana Voutchkova; "Stones" is almost always delightful and is so here; the four pieces played by Tudor ("For Pianist 1959", "For 1, 2 or 3 People, 1964", For Piano I, 1952" and "Suite (I)"), each managing to be incredibly incisive in such a free-flowing world; and the lovely "Drinks", for glasses and liquids.

There may be justified carps for more experienced Wolffians than I, but I found this a very fine exposition of a segment of his work and highly recommend it.

Volker Heyn - Sirènes (Edition RZ)

Heyn is new to me. My first impression, on the opening track, "K'TEN" (2005), was something out of the Louis Andriessen mold; specifically it sounded very similar to the early work of Andriessen disciple Michael Gordon (not the highest praise in my book). The second piece, "Sirènes", is an intense string quartet that reminded me of Lachenmann, though again, my knowledge of the latter is pretty minimal. After the third cut, "Prelude zu Ferro Canto #1", for tape and orchestra, I gave up having any stylistic expectations, especially seeing that the next work was titled, "Blues in B-flat" for solo cello (and a very excellent one, at that).

The overall tenor of Heyn's work, if this can be considered a representative sampling, is rather harsh and aggressive, with slashing strings, jangling, grinding percussion and a lot of fff-ery. That fullness--one is tempted to say overstuffedness--can be bracing at times but over the long haul, is a bit exhausting in the sense of having received the ideas only to have them driven home once again. This is fine, I suppose, and Heyn is adept at it. It's a case where one's love of the music may come down to one's appreciation of the kind of character the music evokes. Personally, I opt for the more reticent (as in Wolff, above) but others may well be swept away by the vehemence and violence evinced herein.

Edition RZ

available stateside from erst dist

2011-11-12T07:54:00.000-05:00

Echtzeitmusik Berlin - Self-Defining a Scene

Burkhard Beins, Christian Kesten, Gisela Nauck, Andrea Neumann - Editors

(Wolke)

If one was going to choose a city for which to extensively document the recent history of what's come to be known in these parts as electro-acoustic improvisation, my first pick might be Tokyo, but Berlin would certainly be up there. This handsome book goes a long way toward providing a history (not the history, as the editors are the first to say) of the Echtzeitmusik ("real-time music") scene from the early 90s through 2010.

The first section of the book deals with memories of the specific locations wherein echtzeitmusik flowered. It's likely the least interesting portion, being more a rundown of venues, how they became such, how long they lasted etc., combined with certain memories of same. One does have the impression that it was much more of a squatter situation in many case than it is/was in, say, New York. I sort of picture a number of ABC No Rio-like rooms...The exception to this run of relative dryness, oddly enough, is non-Berliner Rhodri Davies' warm and beautiful recollection of his years in the city, from 1997 to 1999.

The remaining portions are devoted to discussions of ideas, ranging from the specifically musical to the social and elsewhere. [I beg for forgiveness on the perfunctory nature of the capsulization that follows, but I just don't have the time to go into each area in detail] Much of it will be generally familiar to those readers who have spent a good deal of time in conversation with musicians in this neck of the woods (and/or who are musicians themselves); most of the issues are those that routinely surface. This isn't to say the discourses are of no value--they often are and, at the end of the day, it's good to have them assembled in printed form in at least one place--just that expectations for discovering new, crucial insights should be kept at a minimum. Diego Chamy's piece, "The Interaktion Festival: A Critical Defense" stood out, to me, for its fine questioning of premises, something that's always of great value. As is often the case, he'll aggravate many, but I imagine he'd consider it a failure if he didn't.

If I have a complaint, it's that some of the pieces, not unexpectedly given the number of contributors, are a little humdrum while others, in the context of purportedly discussing the scene and interesting aspects thereof, end up being little more than a rundown of what that individual has been doing recently.

But overall, Echtzeitmusik is a solid enough job and certainly a valuable attempt at, at the least, beginning to describe and document this area of the music. Well worth reading for almost anyone involved.

Wolke Verlag

2011-11-05T11:19:00.015-04:00

Tomek Chołoniewski - Un (Mathka)

Percussionist Chołoniewski presents five solo pieces. My first exposure to his work, I believe, and the initial piece raised my hopes, a soft, thoughtful exposition on muted bells. From the second track on, though, we're very much in Andrew Cyrille/Milford Graves territory, almost as though their "Dialogue of the Drums" had been seared into his memory. Not a bad source, of course, not at all, and Chołoniewski delivers a soulful, rich and energetic set. He tones things down for a couple of cuts, some bowing involved, before closing with a more forceful variation on the struck metal theme, evoking a mixture of gamelan and free jazz (heavy on the floor toms) that's very appealing. Good record, one of the better solo percussion things I've heard lately and, at a mere 18 1/2 minutes, a nice length as well.

mathka

The Limbo Ensemble - Plebiscitu (Audio Tong)

The brainchild of Portuguese reed player/electronicist Paulo Chagas, who solicited contributions from nine musicians scattered around the globe (including our own Massimo Magee as well as cellist Travis Johnson and bassist/percussionist Bruno Duplant), parsed through them choosing two to four selections per tracks, then added in himself. That last causes some problems though, to these ears, the whole notion doesn't quite gel here. The "solos" themselves are hit and miss though it's pointless to really criticize or praise them as all that matters is how they're used by Chagas and, generally, I find that effort to be uninspiring. THere are numerous times when I'd rather Chagas sat himself out as, for example in the third track (with Magee, Johnson and guitarist Thomas Olsson), things seem to be preceding along just fine without him. That "vanity project" aspect intrudes fairly often. Things coalesce a bit more on the final two tracks but, all in all, not very memorable.

Niski Szum - Songs from the Woods (Audio Tong)

Not often one hears Robert Frost lines around here...Niski Szum (gotta love that nom) is Marcin Dymiter (vocals, guitar) and on two of the four tracks here, he breaks out that old warhorse, "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening". The opener, "Blues from the Green Hills", has something of a Frithian air to it, an attractive, propelled piece of overlaid guitars, loping along pleasantly enough. "The Woods, Part 1" brings in the Frost. There's kind of a moody, folk aspect, Dymiter's Polish-accented English charming, softly sung over a shimmering backdrop. "The River" is the longest track, something of a drone with maybe a bit much fuzz; there's a smoothness overall to Dymiter's work here that strains my interest, needs a bit more bite. The final track is a recapitulation of the second with a bit more instrumental time. As said, pleasant enough but in the end, one-dimensional.

Zero Centigrade - Unknown Distances (Audio Tong)

Tonino Taiuti (acoustic guitar) & Vincenzo De Luca (trumpet)

The first, warped guitar notes instantly recall Partch's stringed instruments, a reference that will always warm this heart. It's a nice contrast, the resonant guitar with occasional, very deep strums offset by the squeezed, breathy trumpet. Guitar/trumpet isn't the most easily integrated combo one can imagine but Taiuti (who, btw, is credited with "composition" here; it seems pretty loose, generally, though some pieces have a clear dramatic structure) and De Luca do a good job, the former tending toward the clear, rich and ringing, the latter more strangulated and extreme. Perhaps a bit of sameness settles in over the course of the disc, but the pair is consistently imaginative enough to make it a worthwhile journey.

DMP Trio - Insular Dwarfism (Audio Tong)

Pawel Dziadur (electronics),Slawomir Maler (alto and tenor saxophone), Philip Palmer (alto saxophone, objects)

Kinda gabby and noisy--think Brotzmann and Zorn with Thomas Lehn at his most active. The sax playing, for all it's "freedom", is bland, sounding like any random efi session from 1985 or so, the improvisations are formless as well, containing no surprise, intriguing textures, etc., and the electronics are pretty basic. Nothing special here, keep moving.

audio tong

2011-10-31T19:32:00.007-04:00

mites - something to ponder upon for a restless soul like you (Mystery Sea)

mites - it's something but it's not tomorrow (CDR)

Trying to quantify what it is about the music of Grisha Shakhnes (mites) that's so fundamentally appealing, I hit upon a number of things, to be sure, but foremost is usually the sense of commitment I get, of having a strong basic idea and seeing it through, for exactly the length of time it requires. Shakhnes uses field recordings pretty much but with such a deft hand and ear. As is often the case, print descriptions are pretty valueless; suffice it to say that he tends toward the grainy and sooty but with great depth and a wonderful knack for opposing and mixing textures. Every track in each disc is strong, all of them capable of being listened to and examined numerous times with new detail and structural relationships emerging on each occasion. Ont he Mystery Sea disc, they linger at mid-volume level save for the "climax", as it were, in the penultimate cut when the dynamics surge; it's a drama that feels well earned.

The CDr, which incidentally arrives in a magnetized rubber case, suitable for sticking up on your refrigerator, the shifts in loudness are more abrupt and differing sound sources appear, including bell-like tones. But even in the relatively plentiful variation, there's a unity about the pieces, a sense of purpose. There's also, as late int he second piece here, a wonderful naturalness in the sound, particularly, for me, the irregular rhythm heard when (it seems) something--a cord, perhaps?--is being wind-buffeted against a metal surface. Such a fine quasi-rhythm! The last, very quiet track is especially impressive, a fantastic series of low rumbles and tones of other sounds, pitched low, leading after 20 or so minutes to an Arabic voice (intoning a prayer) and a muffled female voice (not sure of the language) and a Western orchestra bled in alongside. It works beautifully.

Don't let these slip through--really excellent work.

Mystery Sea

Cdr available from Erst Dist

Scott Smallwood/Sawako/Seth Cluett/Ben Owen/Civylu Kkliu - Phonography Meeting 070823 (Winds Measure)

Five recordings as presented live at Issue Project Room in 2007, all based around field recordings, bleeding from one to the other. The creators provide "notes" for each, ranging from proper note to six photos (Owen) to a set of three and four letter words (Kkliu).

Smallwood's piece mixes more or less "traditional" sounds--wind, water, chimes, birds--but it has an appealing thickness to it, a density often missed in such works. It's in episodes, like a series of snapshots, drifting into a fine deep drone that ushers in a welter of urban sounds, a large, populated interior space. Actually, I'm never quite sure when one person's music ends and another begins. I'm thinking that the children partying are within Sawako's contribution, but who knows? Doesn't matter too much...It progresses through wooly buffeting with crunchy...footsteps? (perhaps Cluett's portion)...abstract crackles, indecipherable sounds (Owen?), very intense, like hyper-magnified quiet noises...a buzzing hum, very long held, a household device, perhaps, listened to from a fly's closeness. FIne journey, wish I'd been there.

Winds Measure also sent along two cassettes which, as I've mentioned, I'm only able to listen to in the car, not the ideal place for anything possessing a smidgen of delicacy which both of these recordings do. They each sounded interesting: Taku Unami/Stefan Thut on one and Unami with Angharad Davies on the other, but more than that I'd be reluctant to say. OK, there's clapping. But, hell, take a chance!

winds measure

2011-10-30T13:40:00.011-04:00

Robert Schumann - Dichterliebe (Bôłt)

I should say up front that, although I've heard Dichterliebe on any number of occasions in the past on radio, I'm not very conversant with it nor do I know it intimately. When I've heard it, I'm sure most of the time it was the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/Vladimir Horowitz rendition. So if I may assume that's the benchmark for this piece, it's clear that Bernhard Schütz (voice) and Reinhold Friedl (piano) have chosen to interpret the (exceedingly beautiful) songs in a manner much more reminiscent of Brecht/Weill and, to these ears, it's a perfect choice. If you know any of the songs at all, it's likely the first one, "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai", with its heartrendingly gorgeous melody and wrenching sense of a missing line. Well, it's the showstopper here too, with Schütz (who is known as an actor in Germany, though I've no idea if he's previously lent his talents to a musical venture) delivering the words in a breathy, burred voice that only just makes it to the end of the line, a stirring effect as the final syllables are gasped. Friedl also elasticizes the music, injecting some Satie and even Feldman into the rolling phrases, allowing them to linger for split seconds before continuing the cascade. Absolutely beautiful. If that's the high point, there are several other fantastic performances among the sixteen lieder, some quite raucous (shouted vocals here and there), others intensely brooding.

Can't recommend this one highly enough.

Mauricio Kagel - Ludwig van (Bôłt)

Ashamedly, I'm not so familiar with Kagel's "Ludwig van" either though, again, I've heard it now and again over the years. But I'm much less able to evaluate the performance by Frédéric Blondy (piano) and DJ Lenar (turntables) in relation to its original status. Actually, the piece was initially a filmwork, done for the bicentennial of Beethoven's birth (1978) in which the interior of his studio was
covered with pages of scores from his work. A piano would play the music as it entered the view of the camera plus there were TV and radio programs on the composer jostling for aural space. You get something of that here as recognizable scraps of Beethoveniana surface and subside amidst other noise and spun and scratched recordings.

As a piece of music, the collage technique feels a bit dated, perhaps inevitably though, given that, the recording more than sustains interest. Blondy's playing (I'm assuming the piano is predominantly Blondy throughout, not pre-existing recordings) is both sensitive and strong. When actually spinning the vinyl, the effect by DJ Lenar is, I guess, appropriately nostalgic. What holds the work together, not surprisingly, is the actual substance of Beethoven's music, containing enough power and beauty to transcend the perturbations and attempts at warpage.

Good recording, need to check out the original....

Rinus van Alebeek plays Luc Ferrari - Cycle des Souvenirs (Bôłt)
Rinus van Alebeek - Luc Ferrari (Mathka)

OK, this is a little confusing.

The Mathka release, per it's liners, was recorded October 28, 2010, the Bôłt the next day, both in Montreuil, France. The first was explicitly at the home of Ferrari, in the presence of his wife, Brunhild. The second doesn't say anything about the location to that degree of specificity; I've no *real* idea if it was recorded in the same situation though it would seem to be odd to do it elsewhere on the next day if you're in the same town.

At first, despite the apparent date difference, I wasn't sure if I didn't have two copies of the same recording, but the Bôłt clocks in at 72:30, the Mathka at 66:41 so, assuming no editing, I take it they're different. It's tough to tell without playing them side by side (which I've not done...perhaps I will; or someone can set me straight) since the original Ferrari piece, "Cycle des Souvenirs", is played throughout on both. That's the conceit here, incidentally: van Alebeek "simply" inserts a disc of the Ferrari into a system, at his home (possibly elsewhere), and walks about the environment, mic in hand, recording the ambiance with the original piece suffusing the space. It's a wonderful idea, in my opinion, and works brilliantly.

Why this works so well is tough to say except for the underlying premise that the nature of Ferrari's music clearly lends itself to thoughtful and sensitive integration with existing environments. All credit to van Alebeek for judicious mixing and editing, in both releases, for creating a flow that seems entirely rich and natural. The piece, voices, the sounds of the room, Mme. Ferrari, in at least one of the versions, reading quietly; it all blends with the "Cycle" as though it had always been there. If I have to choose, there's something a bit clearer and shimmering in the Mathka recording, but both are very much worth hearing.

Excellent work.

Bôłt

mathka

2011-10-24T21:00:00.008-04:00

MIMEO - Wigry (Bôłt/Monotype)

I love LPs, Still. Admittedly, however, I'd have preferred this to have been issued on CD, or two CDs. The massiveness, the organic quality of the music contained herein benefits from as few interruptions as possible. An amazing set.

Performed in the cathedral at Wigry, Poland in November of 2009, in the freezing cold. Looking at a map, I see the structure is positioned on a promontory that extends into a large lake and, from the dark cover photo, looks to be quite beautiful.

It's a powerful performance but one, largely due to its amorphous character and sheer density is really tough to describe. MIMEO had been in existence a dozen or so years at the time of the recording and had, one hopes, long since reined in the natural danger of overdoing re: the immense firepower at its disposal. It doesn't seem that, as is often the case in a MIMEO event (how many shows have there been in total? A dozen?) that there was any guiding plan put forward by one member, as was the case with The Hands of Caravaggio (Rowe) or the concert at the Serpentine (Matthews). Instead we hear, apparently, a pure improvisation. One can say that, loosely speaking, it progresses from quieter, (relatively) calmer areas near the beginning, surges forward to a mini-climax or two and, for much or Side D, just tears the roof off, causing the marbleized saints to grimace in fear, the stained glass to melt.

There's something marvelous in that barely contained power, the more so because it's been delayed, subdued, for an hour or so. Very tempting to describe the affair in sexual terms, though not solo, instead with ten participants managing to reach orgasmic synchrony as a single vibrating, shimmering organism.

:-) Too much? Too Keenan? Dunno, it reaches places like that, really an astonishing album. I kind of wish I didn't have to flip over the vinyl an extra couple of times, and sure, there's some meandering moments but if you have a turntable, this one is about as mandatory as it gets.

Bôłt

monotype

Available in the US from erst dist

Rick Reed - The Way Things Go (elevator bath)

Hey, whaddya know? Another double LP! Also electronic in nature, though solo and, I daresay Reed wouldn't be out of place as a member of MIMEO. His music is resolutely smooth (in a good way) and spreads itself out like a syrup.

I find it oddly hard to offer much in the way of descriptors. The six pieces are fairly steady state, drone-y, if you like, though exceedingly rich and varying substantially within the initial parameters. There's a fundamental tonality to them, yet they bristle. I think it's fair to detect Rowe's influence (Reed, of course, plays with Rowe and Michael Haleta in the Voltage Spooks trio) and at times I think of the music here as akin to what you might get if you took some of the similarly (relatively) unabrasive passages of Rowe's work, especially that from around 2004, and stretched it out, by doing so making more apparent the detail nestled within.

At its best--for me, "in a hazy field of gray and green" and "the way things go (for c.h.) here--Reed attains a kind of granular ethereality that I find singularly captivating. He doesn't get nearly as much notice as he deserves. Check it out.

elevator bath

2011-10-22T10:43:00.011-04:00

Tetuzi Akiyama/Takuji Kawai - Transition (ftarri)

What a nice surprise this is! While Akiyama is a known, if widely ranging in style and quality, item, Kawai is new to me and a wonderful find. Perhaps surprising to myself in that his style laps quite a good bit in a jazz direction, albeit a specific one. To these ears, he comes very much out of Paul Bley, a musician of whom I'm quite fond. The pieces, which I assume are improvisations, are ruminative, quiet and inward-bending. I suppose one of the surprising things is that, at heart, the music is very responsive, much more so than standard post-AMM improv and yet there's not a whiff of staleness about it. To the contrary, there's something quite fresh and alive going on. Akiyama is in a slightly more mainstream mode than his "Relator" persona and is extraordinarily sensitive here. Kawai prods and pokes, like a better version of Misha Mengelberg, but also offers a kind of elegiac tolling, allowing the notes to just suspend, that's absolutely entrancing. The entire disc is solidly excellent though if I had to pick a track as a favorite, it would be "Realization", single guitar notes hung in the cool air over low, rubbed strings and isolated, deep piano tones. Gorgeous. Don't let this one slip through.

available from erstdist

Mural - Live at the Rothko Chapel (Rothko Chapel Publications)

Jim Denley (wind instruments), Kim Myhr (guitars, zithers, percussion), Ingar Zach (gran cassa, percussion). Inevitably, what first strikes one is the image of the space in which this trio is performing, visual and aural. The sound itself is noticeably clear and vivid and one imagines it playing off the dark, gorgeous paintings. It also a spacious yet solid performance, with more than a tinge of AMM in the general character, mostly quiet and not very harsh. Myhr has some lovely moments on guitar and zither, somewhere out in classic Sugimoto and melodic Fages territory (sort of taking the Tilbury role), Denley reins in the potentially troublesome flute and sax both by nixing any jazz content and, like Myhr, often venturing down lyrically abstract pathways. Zach might be the real glue here, though, managing to contribute massive amounts of varying coloration without even coming close to being obtrusive. Good job, check it out.

Kim Myhr's page
Rothko Chapel Publications

Richard Garet - Decentering (Sourdine)

Another helping of complex, steady-state music from Garet, who does this quite well. Presumably sourced from field recordings among other things but processed, reprocessed and more into something very much other. As with most of the music in this area that I find enjoyable, you have to deal with both the surface uniformity and the underlying complexity simultaneously. So, at the beginning, for instance, you register the high, slightly rough pitch and then pick up the faint low tone as well as begin to hear what's making the high tone rough, all these small irregularities. Other layers are introduced or subtracted, generally adjacent in volume but varying in timbre, twining together, forming a variegated strand, though always a strand. The predominant feel is of wind, cold wind, blowing through interstices, picking up stray elements, including traces of voices, carrying them along for a bit, discarding them. Toward the end, the wind aspect recedes and a more claustrophobic sound emerges, or the wind is being funneled through a tighter set of tubes...Good work, worth hearing.

sourdine

Edén Carrasco/Leonel Kaplan/Christof Kurzmann - Una Casa/Observatorio (Three Chairs Recordings)

Carrasco (alto sax), Kaplan (trumpet), Kurzmann (lloopp). How to describe when, to your ears, something just doesn't work from the get-go? When almost every decision made by the musicians involved makes you wince? Part of it may have to do with the way the music uses the lexicon of eai but inserts it into the structure of efi, an uneasy fit. Perhaps this was the intent (I often wonder about the frustrations musicians must feel in attempting to break out of whatever the current stylistic environment is dictating, especially when that environment is, really, pretty rich and interesting!). But here, all the whistled sax, breath-a-fied trumpet and, perhaps most egregiously, the software-generated loopiness (or llooppiness) simply fails to cohere for me. Everything seems pro forma. The second of the two pieces here ratchets things up a bit and its to the music's benefit; the more activity, the thicker the mix, I suppose, providing a certain amount of body missing otherwise and the periodic pulsing rhythms help as well.

jardinist

available from erstdist

2011-10-20T20:26:00.004-04:00

Loren Connors - Red Mars (Family Vineyard)

Five tracks, recorded at home and live in NYC in 2010, accompanied by Margarida Garcia on electric double bass on one cut.

What can one say about Connors at this point? His music is instantly recognizable and has been as long as I've been aware of his work, perhaps darkening even more (having begun at a pretty inky point) as time goes on, as he deals with his illness. Even the softer parts herein are less light-providing than questioning, wondering if this is all there is. The desolate blues framework of music like "On Our Way", which opens this disc is my favorite Connors territory--aching, dour yet so graceful, so appreciative of the beauty he manages to locate. Garcia is wonderful alongside, blending in perfectly, providing a deep sepia to the blackness. Spacier, bleaker works like "Red Mars II" are also effective, if not as wrenching, arcing out into "An Index of Metals" realms. On "Showers of Meteors" he combines these two approaches, very effectively, swaying from keening pangs to shards of noise, billowing outwards, swathing the room. The closing piece, "Little Earth", is appropriately contemplative; it wafts away, but the clouds it's resting on are carrying much rain.

A lovely recording, a must for Connors aficionados.

Akira Sakata & Jim O'Rourke with Chikamorachi - and that's the story of jazz... (Family Vineyard)

I first heard Sakata on the late 80s release, "Mooko", with Bill Laswell and Ronald Shannon Jackson and, at the time, like it a good deal, finding it to be a kind of pared down variation on Last Exit. The promotional prose for this 2-CD release also brings up Last Exit and, to an extent, that's appropriate though the raw power, not to mention the zeitgeist-fulfillment, is entirely different. Sakata, on alto here, lacks the elemental quality of primo Brotz, the rare saxophonist who could indeed shoulder a free metal ensemble. He's a decent player, but all too quickly, in a free context, lapses into standard playing, sounding like any dozen alto players from the past three or four decades. O'Rourke is heard largely on guitar here and, often enough, wanders all too obviously into Sharrock territory, inadvertently emphasizing the paleness of the comparison despite surface fireworks. I should say that listeners unaware of prior work may well find this exciting and riveting--it's loud and aggressive enough, to be sure--but those blocks of energy are pasted into a much more lackadaisical context than, at its best, Last Exit ever tolerated.

When the quartet seriously takes things down several notches, as toward the latter stages of "Hanamaki" and parts of "Nagoya 1" (my favorite moments on the set), and O'Rourke fall into the kind of pastoral playing he does very well; it's more convincing and Sakata (who sounds like he's on clarinet on the former, though it's not listed) excels, summoning up a wee bit of John Carter. I've enjoyed Darin Gray's bass playing in the past and, indeed, find it to be consistently the most enjoyable element here--solid, deep and considered. Chris Corsano's drumming (he and Gray seem to comprise "Chikamorachi") doesn't wow me as much as it does many; Jackson's funk undercurrent was key to much of Last Exit, sublimated though it may have been, and I don't hear a similar thing here. Not that it's by any means required.

A Last Exit cover band? It's difficult to avoid thinking in those terms for much of the 100 or so minutes here. Personally, I find the idea rather bizarre and certainly not my cuppa. Others, of course, may have been awaiting this since Sharrock's unfortunate early death. For those listeners, this could be just the thing; for me, not so much.

Family Vineyard

2011-10-17T18:16:00.007-04:00

Moniek Darge - Sounds of Sacred Places (kye)

Five pieces recorded at various public sites between 1984 and 1987. My favorite is the opening track, "Turkish Square", actually recorded in Ghent at a site of the same name, incorporating, among other things, an "n-dimensional" oscillating system built by Darge's partner, Godfried-Willem Raes. This system generates rich, thick tones that sound as though they might vibrate any metal in the vicinity (reminds me a bit of those produced by Max Neuhaus' Times Square installation) which are enjoyable enough, but are only enhanced by the sounds of kids cavorting, whistles, voices call for "Yusef", a woman speaking rapidly, quietly, over a threatening rumble. A fine piece. The remaining four tracks are all enjoyable if, to these ears, a bit less so. In "Abbey-Sounds", several people, in several languages, narrate their thoughts about the space over recordings of doves that occupy the roof and other quasi-avian sounds. "Rain" is just that, accompanied by the strangled utterances (or Darge, I take it), recorded via a mic right alongside her larynx. It's disturbing and uncomfortable, bother me a bit, not necessarily in a good way. David Moss is one of the voices on the preceding track and the voice here annoyingly reminds me a bit of his. The last two pieces utilize a bell, apparently this one, the first in a muffled and fairly steady series of strikes in which the initial attack has been processed out (fascinating sound!) the last in a slow set of strikes where overtones overlap, a little woozy, perhaps, but easily capable of being luxuriated in.

available from erstdist

Graham Stephenson - Defiantly Not (Pilgrim Talk)

As with Unami, but for different reasons, I'm kinda glad I heard Stephenson in several contexts at AMPLIFY:stones before I heard his solo disc (trumpet, microphone and, um, audacity). I generally found him the most rewarding member of the ensembles in which he appeared, largely for the concentrated quality he brought and the remarkable amount of variation within an (only) apparently narrow range.

So when the first track begins with eight or so minutes of seriously painful, shenai-like shrieking, a strangulated trumpet if ever there was one, in the back of my mind there's the assurance that this will somehow fit into a context. And it sort of does, if only as one color (if you will) among several, no greater weight attached to the stridency than to the quiet later on. Relative quiet, that is, as the aforementioned microphone seems to come into play, sliding about brassy surfaces. Or the trumpet sliding around the mic whilst emitting gases. Odd digital beeps, too. You begin to get a real sense of the visceral in this first piece; it's exhausting and invigorating. A lot of ground is covered but with not the slightest sense of meandering.

The second track pits a fairly pure, though reedy sounding, high tone against background scrabbling, all embraced by an audible room hum and the occasional voice. Very casual, in a way, but subtly moving, the central tone difficult to not hear as a keen of some kind, abraded by harsher, scouring wind sounds. Good stuff. The final cut begins softly enough, all breath and muted rumblings but midway through, while the ind still howls (Stephenson-generated?) and car horns honk outside, it sounds like the trumpet hasn't forgotten its earlier abuse at the, erm, hands of the microphone and engages it in battle. Not sure who won, but burbling quasi-serenity returns, several minutes of percussive sounds, a quick onrush of traffic, then silence.

Fine job, excellent recording.

pilgrim talk

also from erstdist

Billy Gomberg - Quiet Barrier (Rest + Noise)

Among NYC denizens that deal with this end of the music spectrum, Gomberg's solo work stands rather apart. It's resolutely gentle and more or less tonal, harkening to Fennesz as much as anyone else (although sonorities of Terry Riley creep in as well), most rougher elements swaddled in ringing synth tones and billowing organ-y swells. I like it pretty well both for the sheer aural delight, which is considerable, but more for the subtle twists and turns it tends to take--nothing dramatic, it simply often ends up a few steps removed from where you thought it was going. Rough, burred edges often intrude on the lushness, faint rhythmic elements appear--wooden knocks here, slow, slow throbs there. There's often enough a tinge of sourness as well, most clearly in the final piece, that tempers what might be an overly cloying smoothness.

It's not overwhelming by any means but doesn't make any pretense of being so. It's quite ingratiating and a certain pleasure to simply languish in, which I enjoy doing very much. This back to back with the Stephenson above is quite a nice yin/yang.

rest + noise

2011-10-16T09:06:00.006-04:00

Taku Unami/Takahiro Kawaguchi - Teatro Assente (Erstwhile)

I'm not sure if it was beneficial or detrimental, in terms of assessing this recording, to have, between initial hearing and the present day, seen both Unami and Kawaguchi perform at AMPLIFY:stones. Unami performed six times, I believe and Kawaguchi several times during the final two days at Issue Project Room. Of course, it was clear from the get go that, with "Teatro Assente", you were witness to an extra-musical performance of some kind, whether assembled at a later date or presented almost as an aural byproduct of what transpired at the theater in question (said establishment formerly showcasing soft-core or "pink films" as they were known in Japan). One certainly had to engage in some level of visual imagination just as, at September's festival, one had to watch the proceedings; indeed, there was often more to watch than to listen to.

So what to make of it? Let me say first that, overall, I found it a very rewarding experience, though the hows and whys of that remain elusive. I had a similar reaction to most of Unami's events during AMPLIFY, more so, admittedly when the semi-narrative structure of the boxes and the tension they generated between co-performer and audience was in effect. You're able to draw immediate parallels between elements of those sets and what appears here on disc, notably the frequent footfalls and, of course, the tumbling of raw materials, cardboard, metal or otherwise.

Those footsteps, and the mental image you tend to retain of a darkened theater, impart a slightly noirish aspect to the set; the activities have a threatening aspect to them again, reflected in part in live experience by the uncertain stability of the box structures. There's also the omnipresent sense of a large, enclosed space--the theatre--which, perhaps influenced by the photos from the case's interior, I do think of as dark, hence hear much of the activity, quiet as it is (and there's a lot of quiet), as occurring in the wings, outside the limits of my sight and eerier for that. It's oddly episodic as well, with new elements being introduced fairly late in the day like the bird sounds and, most infamously, the hardcore guitar work in track 7 which leaps in out of nowhere, grandstands, then disappears, resurfaces more than ten minutes later. Why? I've no clue.

So even with the assistance of having seen the pair in action, "Teatro Assente" is one tough nut. I enjoy it very much, more than their duo performance at issue Project, in fact, which struck me as somewhat forced at times. I'm guessing the lack of direct visual referents is a plus here, allowing me to construct mental imagery more in keeping with my own perceptions. It's easily enough appreciated purely on sonic grounds, I guess, but that strikes me as too purposefully ignoring the real goings on. I haven't come up with a scenario that's utterly wowed me, but give me time.

I'm happy "Teatro Assente" exists though, as I was happy to have experienced Unami's (and Kawaguchi's) performances last month, whether or not I thought a given one "worked". It's very healthy to have art like this out there.

Erstwhile

2011-10-15T12:52:00.004-04:00

Toshimaru Nakamura - Maruto (Erstwhile)

In many ways, Nakamura's music has shifted rather decidedly over the past few years, say since his last recorded collaboration with Keith Rowe, "between". It became a bit less radical to these ears, more comfortable. Sometimes this worked well, other times it seemed a bit *too* cushy. Here, however, he's not only different but has finally (at least, from what I've heard) discovered a tough, deep, difficult-to-entirely-grasp new area, a very welcome development, more so in that solo outings haven't previously been his best friend.

The beginning of "Maruto" sets the stage. He leaps right in, no slow leaking of sounds, but the choice is odd, almost awkward yet moving. A series of staggering, mid-range buzzes that have a hollow feel, intermixed with softer scrubbings and high sine pitches. It's odd in that these 5 1/2 minutes are very different from anything that follows during the next 41 but instead of sounding out of place, they do seem to function as a somehow appropriate preamble. There's an echo of that strong tone in the next section, but it's more one layer out of several, only lasts a little while and then the piece reduces to the territory it will occupy for the remainder, an unsettling mix of hums, static, thin sines and super-low bass. It's almost queasiness-inducing and I say this without, I'm sure, getting the full effect of the bass tones, which I gather from various sources are both visceral and difficult to fully appreciate without benefit of an absurdly good sound system.

There's something morass-like about the music, much less airy and electric sounding than previous work. It's almost sluggish, though I mean that in a good way! Like water in a slowly moving swamp. It's extremely self-contained, diffident maybe. Nakamura reduces things down to a low, low simmer (again, allowing for subsonics beyond the reach of my speakers) and allows it to just pool there, eddying slowly. Something very exciting about that, very organic. The closing third or so of the disc is tough to describe--it's quite soft but with a good bit of activity, most sounds possessing a kind of burr, rotating about each other, knocking into one another, disappearing. Again, a pond surface with gentle, underlying currents, but with a film of algae, water striders, leaves, etc. is the image that lingers. The final minute or two is just a deep, low, low tone, still soft. That initial section, in retrospect, seems like a tumbling of liquid into this now quiescent pond.

A wonderful recording, one I found challenging in unusual ways, sliding in and out of my mental grasp, offering a lot to contemplate for a long while to come, I suspect.

Erstwhile

2011-10-09T08:16:00.003-04:00

Chris Cochrane/Dennis Cooper/Ishmael Houston-Jones - Them (Tzadik)

"Them" was initially conceived in 1985 by choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, write Dennis Cooper and guitarist Chris Cochrane as a work revolving around gay men and their lives, subsequently developed into a longer work the following year, becoming more overtly concerned with AIDS, dealing with the matter in a very direct, sometimes brutally harsh way. PS 122 produced a revival of the piece in 2010, which I had the good fortune to attend. It was a very moving experience, Houston-Jones' controlled but ferocious choreography, Cooper's intimate, unsparing, often achingly romantic spoken texts and Cochrane's guitar and tape contributions, ranging from noise to gorgeous songs all melded finely, framing the vignettes drawn from everyday life in the (ongoing) era of AIDS. A sequence toward the end where the young male dancers, one by one, went through the quiet motions of palpating jaws and armpits in front of an unseen mirror, searching for enlarged lymph nodes, was one of the saddest, most wrenching things I've seen.

Happily, Tzadik has released a disc which, though you have to imagine the dance, does a pretty good job of filling in the rest though, if the production continues to be staged (and I believe there were plans to do so), I'd urge people to go and experience the totality. Here, the music is provided by Cochrane (guitars, percussion, bass, accordion, keyboards, tapes) accompanied by Kato Hideki (bass, percussion, keyboards, mandolin), wrapping itself around several spoken texts by Cooper (with one by Jeremy Pheiffer). In my previous exposure to Cochrane's work, I've been most attracted by his song forms which are solid and almost traditionally beautiful but with enough warpage and weft to transfix and that's often the case here, as on the utterly lovely "Ish solo". But he also proves adept at more ambient noise pieces ("Pre-Show") and ones that seem to draw inspiration from electric Miles. Still, as enjoyable as the music is, you have to listen to it, I think, as a kind of obbligato to the texts, delivered in a calm but intensely nostalgic voice by Cooper. They largely involve memories--first loves, old boyfriends, traumatic events, the peaks and valleys of growing up gay in the 60s and 70s, the drugs and sex, the suicides. All coming to the fore now that, in 1986, so many were dying.

The booklet includes several photographs from the production, giving the listener at least a small idea of the physicality of Houston-Jones' contributions--robust, male, youthful vitality and explosiveness is pervasive in the piece, making the node-searching episode all the more heartrending.

In all, a fine disc and, short of a well-filmed DVD, as close as you'll get to "Them" without seeing it. But if it shows up in your neck of the woods, do yourselves a favor and go.

Available from Squidco

2011-10-07T19:56:00.004-04:00

Lee Noyes/Phil Brownlee/Jerome Poirier - White & Red/Lux (Ideal State)

Two works, the first, "White & Red" with Noyes on sampler and electronics, Brownlee on violin. The violin is spare and scratchy, Noyes' contributions fairly minimal. It's the kind of music that can easy succumb to aridity combined with a sense of meandering and that's almost the case here for the first several minutes. But gradually, a sort of tentative fluidity asserts itself, the col legno's take on a settled aspect and the electronics finds an interesting steady tone, an odd, rounded sound that somehow works quite well with the still dry strings. Things grow suitably chaotic toward the end, making the trip fairly satisfying overall. "Lux" is a substantially different creature with Noyes deploying a "laptop-processed 19tet inside piano" and Poirier on electric cello. While the sounds themselves are rather smoother than the preceding piece, the structure is fragmented into blocks, the arco cello, generally rich in tone, offset against a variety of electronic attacks that, true to their source (or one of their sources, at least) tend to have something of a piano resonance to them. There's a very odd and intriguing section with the inside piano generating a periodic, harsh alarm-bell sound while the cello is searching the nether regions beneath; very unsettling. It eventually slows down drastically, evolving into a series of blurts, burps and scrapes, yet retaining, somehow, a forward flow. Fascinating piece, I enjoyed it very much.

Michael Johnsen

Two self-produced 3" discs from Johnsen, one from 2007 (pictured above) and one from 2009.

The earlier disc is a 21-minute excerpt from a longer performance involving two AM radios with loopstick antennae in close proximity, their resultant sounds processed by Johnsen. My prior experience of Johnsen's music, borne out here, is of a harsh, scratchy, squeaky and hyperactive realm. In this instance, the radios squelch 'n' belch, not too dissimilar form what Ricardo Arias might conjure up given a wide enough array of balloonage. It migrates it bird chirp territory and, as it does, much needed air enters the room. What had previously been a bit claustrophobic and, for my taste, overly populated, now attains a welcome balance of acute, piercing slivers of sound as well as the space through which they're hurtling. From there, the music veers back into the gurgling with choral radio samples bleeding through, the activity once again becoming more crowded, less incisive to these ears.

The 2009 recording is a complete 22-minute set from Issue Project Room, no details on the means of sound generation provided. The sounds are lighter, more transparent, though still far busier than otherwise. There's a skittering quality throughout which goes some way to ameliorating a major sense of gabbiness. One almost imagines a noise version of Carl Stalling...Some 12 minutes in, it turns toward softer, seemingly padded elements; one imagines the cartoon characters brought to mind by the thought of Stalling creeping through some dark, crowded attic or alleyway. It diffuses nicely as it reaches its conclusion, the sounds dissipating, leaking around the corners. Good job, sorry I wasn't there to see it.

Interested listeners can contact Johnsen at: johnsenmm@yahoo.com

2011-10-04T17:58:00.004-04:00

Michel Doneda/Jonas Kocher - Action Mécanique (Flexion Records)

Gotta love a sandpaper outer sleeve...

Doneda on soprano and sopranino, Kocher on his accordion and objects. Doneda's someone whose work I greatly enjoyed 10-12 years back but have found less and less compelling over the years, doubtless my taste shift more than anything, but I've enjoyed Kocher's recent work well enough, so I came into this with high hopes. Fans of the saxophonist will no doubt revel in this but, overall, I found it hit and miss, focusing more on sonic extremes of one kind or another (pinched high tones, guttural low ones, much in between) than any real solidity of form or concise exploration of sound.But maybe that's part of it, that the techniques, in fact, aren't so extreme anymore, that the sounds are more commonplace these days and, more, the interplay has about it something of the routine aspect of efi. At heart, it seems to be operating from a stance that doesn't hold as much interest for this listener anymore, though I admit I'd be hard pressed to quantify it further. "Too gabby" in Radu's words? Well, yes, that's part of it. More, nothing said I haven't heard before, I'm afraid. Your mileage may vary.

flexion records

Francisco Meirino/Jason Kahn - Music for an Empty Cinema (authorized version)

A fairly steady state work, mid-range in volume, fuzzy and complex in nature, made up of multiple elements, enough that it's difficult to take them all in at once. Some like the bristling central line tend to be heard in the foreground while others, like the low, distant thrum, can be perceived when concentrated upon but are more often "felt". Not everything is droned; manual manipulations and additions appear now and then, a kind of prodding of the field, bending the signal somewhat. It blisters a bit, disembodied, difficult to discern voices seem to be in there somewhere, possibly from a radio, eventually dissipates, as it must. The music is engaging enough though at some point, I felt it losing steam. I'd rather have heard two or three different tacks, but not bad.

authorized version

2011-10-03T19:43:00.004-04:00

Joe Panzner - Clearing, Polluted (Copy for Your Records)

Ah, so satisfying. I remember stumbling across an unusually well-written review of "The Hands of Caravaggio" back when, by a young 'un somewhere out in Ohio, impressive enough that I wrote him and complimented his work. Well, he's done a good bit since then, both written and aural but "Clearing, Polluted" is a real high water mark.

Descriptives here are going to be a bit of a problem as I think it'll be tough to do justice to how this actually sounds. Jesse did a fine job; consult him as well. All electronics, yes, and one gets the impression that the devices are fairly lo-fi in nature.It begins quite harshly with blistered sounds; in truth, I was anticipating something along these lines. But Panzner very quickly moves into subtler areas--not routine quiet patches but mysterious stretches with soft but disturbing stria wafting over the surface, interrupted here and there by what seem to be brushes on drums. That gaseous sound becomes more and more embodied, revealing a startling richness and, eventually, an organ-like beauty. This tumbles into the second track which again, begins in scattered, abrupt fashion, a burble of bumps, hisses, gurgles and crackles. It then explodes into a fine cacophony, the most raucous portion of the disc, but music that somehow seems expertly reined, bucking but not swirling off into a muddy morass, hypersensitive to detail and sonic weight. This too coalesces into a surprising form some seven minutes in, a kind of grinding, chiming mass that contains the feel of something rockish--like the best moments of Branca, only much better. Seriously strong stuff.

But the last track, the excellently titled, "Less Than a Feeling", is perhaps the most fully realized, solid piece. Again the detail combined with the billowy structure utterly wins me over. It's as though you're hearing sounds from inside the mantle of the Earth, miles below the surface, deep and resonant like you'd expect but with needle-thin, unexpected sparks flying. Soon, other sounds make themselves felt, many, each inserted with fine grace and timing before ending, perfectly, with a grating plug pull that brings us, nearly full circle, back to the beginning.

Great recording, do check it out.

copy for your records

also available from erst dist

2011-10-02T09:32:00.007-04:00

Anne Guthrie/Barry Chabala - Preston Hollow (Roeba Records)

As Richard mentioned a couple of weeks back, this is a collaboration at a distance, Guthrie having recorded her fine, often plaintive French horn in an apparent avian paradise named Preston Hollow with Chabala adding his thoughts, on e-bow guitar, at a later date. Both elements work extremely well, Guthrie's ruminations unforced and open to the environment--one imagines she may have entirely forgotten that she was recording the vent--Chabala's commentary considered and complimentary. It proceeds from a relatively fractured onset, Guthrie playing clearly but not throughout (the birds take that roll), the guitar entering now and then. But about midway through, Chabala sets a lovely, multi-tiered drone in motion, something that risks being overbearing but, to my ears, enhances the existing music in a lovely manner that moves the entirety of the work into an adjacent, perhaps surprising space, unifying all three elements. Toward the end, Guthrie adds a series of marvelously "human" notes, wistful, self-questioning, even vaguely imitative of the flies we've heard buzzing about, maybe trying to sublimate into the environment. Very beautiful, whatever the rationale (if any) and a really fine achievement for both musicians (and the birds).

Gosia Winter/Barry Chabala - Ananke (Roeba Records)

A slightly longer range collaboration, spanning Australia and New Jersey. Seven brief songs (about 25 minutes) and they *are* pretty much songs. Winter has a pleasantly raspy voice and (happily) eschews extreme techniques, instead drawing from folk forms and blues in a generally heartfelt and honest fashion. In the first song, her accompaniment is struck matches and a faucet, lending a fine atmosphere to the elegiac tones. If anything, I feel some affinity for the Canterbury scene, though drastically pared down. Chabala's guitar (not e-bowed) is clear and bell-like, reminding me a bit of, say, Brian Godding (!) while Winter, especially in pieces like "I Shadowed Share You" evokes Julie Tippetts not a little bit. I was a bit skeptical on first hearing, but repeated listens largely won me over (ok, I still have problems with "Nmbrs"...). Interesting alleyway for Chabala, curious to hear if he pursues it, and nice to hear Winter for the first time. (Is "And Frightened Not" a standard from somewhere--sounds like it should be...)

Roeba/Chabala

also available from Erst Dist

Barry Chabala/Jez riley French - Trammels (engraved glass)

And, to complete the set, yet another album with an ocean between the participants. Three photographic scores among the four works, two of which provided on an accompanying postcard and, perhaps, the cover is the third? "bruxelles score #3" is a serene affair, placing soft city recordings athwart gentle, chiming guitar tones; not earthshaking but nice, like a warm bath. The score for "for ivan and anna" is very attractive, a blurred, horizontal photo of greenery atop four differently widthed slivers of similar subject, ranging from red/yellow to green/lilac. The music is eerie, soft, e-bowed (?) howls among ultra-low rumbles (wind?), interspersed with hisses and other ephemera. Strong, moody piece.

"(....) a coda" is quiet, really quiet. Four or so minutes in, I pick up some faint sounds, then a soft but clearly audible e-bow swelling. Subsides back into the barely heard. Nice idea, well realized. Again, nothing particularly groundbreaking but accomplished with grace; that's good enough. The title track is probably the most active, Chabala playing sparely but freely, using what sounds like a Roweian handheld fan at one point, French creating echo-y, indistinct sounds beneath. Again, a fine bed of sound, a low level murmur of goings on that are both varied and vaguely forward-thrusting.

engraved glass

2011-10-01T17:00:00.005-04:00

Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga - Stroke by Stroke (Organized Music from Thessaloniki)

21 shortish tracks(12 seconds to six minutes) of solo (for the most part) zither with objects, recorded in the artist's home in Athens. As there are no gaps between the cuts, one listens to the disc as a kind of suite. An interesting, and commendable, fact is that despite there being a quite wide variety in attack and resultant sounds, this isn't difficult to do. The shifts are abrupt but somehow not disjunctive. The zither is percussed or bowed, generally speaking; one hazards a guess that the strings were occasionally vibrated via the abuttal of some electronic object. But whatever the case, the sounds are almost always fascinating in and of themselves and, if anything one would like to hear them investigated at greater length. Lazaridou-Chatzigoga verges on song a couple of times ("clinkers" and "woody woodpecker", both delightful) but for the most part, matters are resolutely abstract, the extended range of the excited zither allowed to shine. Good recording.

Sister Overdrive - Honey (Organized Music from Thessaloniki)

A cassette releases (heard by yours truly on disc) from Giannis Kotsonis, who goes by Sister Overdrive. "Honey" seems to be a piece constructed from multiple sources including processed field recordings, electronics and excited objects--many layers of such--and molded almost clay-like into a surging, organic-sounding form. Hard to describe without limning each phase in turn but suffice it to say that it has a quasi cinematic feel that's more Bourne Identity than Bela Tarr, freely and smoothly flowing. Clangs here, rumbles there, steam vents over yonder. I never found myself bored and thought Kotsonis made reasonable choices throughout but I can't say I was riveted either. Like other things in the general area I've heard recently, it begins quite compressed and robust only to splay out and almost evanesce in its latter half before recongealing and going out with more or less of a bang. It's a nice path, even if I begin to wonder about its ease of access. Kotsonis throws in a twist--just when you think it's over, a new, different sounding piece, drone-filled with birdlike twitters, appends itself. Enjoyable, though, well worth a listen.

organized music from Thessaloniki

2011-10-01T10:49:00.004-04:00

Jean-Luc Guionnet/Seijiro Murayama - Window Dressing (Potlatch)

Seijiro Murayama/Stephane Rives - Axiom for the Duration (Potlatch)

Two duo recordings from Potlatch, each featuring Murayama with a saxophonist, Guionnet on one, Rives the other, both thorny and intriguing affairs.

Guionnet has made something of a habit of skirting categorical boundaries, as likely to engage in pipe organ drones as free jazz extravaganzas as eai as Chamy-ized performance. Here, he and Murayama seek to wring more out of what I hear as the nether reaches of efi, kind of the area you may have expected Butcher and Prevost to explore a decade or so ago, This isn't to cast it as a recherche event; I get the feeling Guionnet is very conscious of this "re-mining" of certain approaches and I choose to listen to it that way, allowing more latitude than I otherwise might, always acknowledging that there may still be lodes hitherto unexposed. Not that I'm often sold on the venture. When Guionnet erupts in plosives, guttural, Mitchell-esque drones or a flurry of squeaks, it's next to impossible not to hear their lineage. On the other hand, the placement of these sounds within the generally gentle framework provided by Murayama (often using brushes or the like) can be quite attractive and thoughtful, setting up a certain tension in this listener's head that alternates between aggravating (in the sense of wondering why they bother) and itchily delicious when, on their own terms, they succeed. Is it too easy to say, "Ah, here's the Evan Parker section."? I don't know, I'm sure Guionnet has other thing son his mind but there no way anyone doesn't register Parker from time to time (or Butcher elsewhere). Murayama as well, though perhaps less overtly, operates out of a similar context; I find his contributions less problematic but maybe I'm over-reaching when I think I pick up references to Butoh at the conclusion of the first 30 minute plus track, isolated strikes sounds that are very moving.

The second track concentrates on rushing air sounds from Guionnet, brushed ones from Murayama, a bit more into early century eai (! :-) ) but with a undertone, to these ears, of free jazz; it's not too hard to imagine Roscoe Mitchell getting to this point. Again, not a deep criticism, just curious about the whys involved. More, harsher airborne rasps in the third then back to a more "traditional" interplay for the final cut, Murayama again peppering the affair with lovely, heavy blows mixed with whooshing scrapes. As before, I hem and haw; it's very well played, well imagined. Had it been on a Butcher solo outing from 2002, I would have been wowed. Should I still be so? Not sure...in any case, listeners without my qualms should find much to enjoy.

The recording with Rives is a rather different animal. Rives, on soprano, uses what I presume to be a circular breathing technique but manages to do so with nary a trace of the inhale/exhale one normally hears, producing, in that sense, a very pure drone, although internally braided in a complex manner. Murayama bows low-pitched metal in a sawing fashion, supplying that missing pulse. It's piercing, not a little grating and extremely focused, not dissimilar from prior Rives work as far as that goes. The tones set one's inner ear abuzz, drive the dog nuts and generally upset the neighbors. It's wonderful. The second section, some 20 minutes in, tones things down a hair, Rives' sounds threading through the continued (though softer) bowing of Murayama, creating a music that hints at raga, particularly the alap portions. Interestingly, though perhaps only because I've recently played it myself, I was also reminded of the quavering strings heard in Ornette's "Silence" from the 1962 Town Hall recording. Rives soon migrates to purer tones as well, even as the metal becomes more diffuse, a lovely effect. This, in turn, transforms into ultra-high ringing--I'm not sure if Rives is in there or not, actually, but I'm guessing he is--splattered with the odd crash of metal. The final track (it's one piece, just subdivided into cuts) subtly combines these approaches, retaining the soprano drone but splintering it a bit, still keeping the disc's overall consistency, something I appreciate hugely. It densifies, entwines, shudders, grows steadily more complex, meatier. Ends.

A fantastic recording; listen.

Potlatch

2011-09-25T16:58:00.008-04:00

Ernst Karel - Swiss Mountain Transport System (Gruenrekorder)

As far as untreated field recordings go--now yer talkin'. It obviously helps if your ear is attuned to especially wonderful groups of sounds as Karel's was during some hiking expeditions in Switzerland that involved the usage of various modes of transportation--gondolas, funiculars, etc.--that have as one of their salient qualities the generation of rich and spectacular sonics. He recorded them extensively and extracted the nine pieces presented here without any manipulation. What can one say? I've thought about qualitative issues in this regard for quite a while now and the best I can come up with, short of technical excellence in the recording, is that saying "yea" or "nay" on a given example involves more a general overlapping of taste between the documentor and the listener than anything else. Person X will find one group of sounds inherently fascinating while I, even trying my best to get into non-discriminatory, post-Cagean mode, may not. Karel found these sets of sounds delicious and I heartily agree with him. Were I on one of these gondolas, I'd likely be paying as much attention to the aural atmosphere as the visual one and I'm very glad Karel got them down. Your mileage may vary but I found these clunks, whirs, bells, chatter, wheezes and rumbles a great joy of which to partake. Check it out.

gruenrekorder

Simon Whetham - Mall Muzak (Unfathomless)

I guess the Mall in Broadmead, Bristol is somewhat less exotic and spectacular than alpine funiculars, but Whetham squeezes what he can out of the locale. I take it that there are treatments applied and, at any rate, there seems to be a good deal of layering. The result is a soundscape that doesn't sound particularly mall-ish, perhaps a good thing, but also becomes somewhat amorphous over its 50 minutes. The ambiances and resonances of the large spaces seem to predominate, creating a rich blur that, as attractive as it is in some ways, to these ears, could use a bit of roughness, some nodes strewn in, some more etched quality. As I mentioned above, this is an entirely personal reaction (what isn't?) but the sounds as displayed on "Mall Muzak" don't rivet me the way those gondolas did (to use only the recent example). It's fine, not an unpleasant listen, but somehow less fascinating.

unfathomless

Craig Shepard - On Foot (Wandelweiser)

Hmmm....I'm wonder if we can sneak this one into a field recording slot as well...field composing, at the very least. Shepard, in 2005, set himself the task of hiking 250 miles across Switzerland, composing a new piece each day (performing it as well, in some public setting). Six of these works are collected here, performed by various Wandelweiser-involved folk.

The music has an aura of folk song to it, however attenuated, heard clearly in Christian Wolff's melodica rendition of "Crêt de la Neuve, le 20 juillet 2005" with it's gentle ups and downs, similarly the second brief track with Katie Porter on clarinet. Each sounds as though it could be an extract from a larger piece...or someone simply tootling abstractly, but beautifully, in the countryside. With the third piece, "Vallore, le 23 juillet 2005", performed by a quartet of Antoine Beuger (flute), Jürg Frey (clarinet), Marcus Kaiser (cello) and Tobias Liebezeit (percussion), the music spreads out, long thin tones piercing an imagined mountain air. A gorgeous piece that, oddly, reminds me of some of the finer, quieter Braxton music from the late 60s.

The foursome splits for the final three tracks, Frey solo on a lovely, quite melodic song, tinged with sadness. next, in extraordinary piece played by Beuger, the limpid, life-ful, soft tones hanging in the room; all the pieces were recorded in work spaces of the musicians and one can hear the life beyond the walls, very beautiful. Finally, a lengthy (27 minute) composition performed by Kaiser and Liebezeit, one that has the clearest Wandelweiser ring to it. Resonant metal is struck every so often, with ample silence between. At the same moment, the cello is bowed at a pitch as equal as possibly to that of the metal, so much so that it's often difficult to discern, more of a grainy presence beneath the dull peal; again one hears exterior sounds as well. The fact of the struck metal lends the piece something of a ritual character but not woozy in the least, entirely focused.

A seriously wonderful recording; can't wait to hear more from Mr. Shepard.

Wandelweiser

2011-09-24T17:16:00.008-04:00

Kim Cascone - the knotted constellation (Monotype)

A cascade of Cascone (c'mon, you know that's hard to resist). Field recordings and contributory gauze from other individuals forming a kind of sound that's at a remove from that heard in areas I more typically traverse. I hear more of an association with the classic tape manipulators like Raaijmakers, for example, than Tsunoda. The sounds--and there are zillions of them--sound chiseled, often crystalline, each buzz, rattle 'n' hum distinct. For the listener, this sets up a certain kind of distinction, something like Rothko vs. Hoffmann, an aspect that strikes me as somehow fundamental (it may not matter so much to others). The sounds carry greater independent weight, are less easy to integrate into the whole so that when one hears, for instance, what sounds like the croaking of a decent sized monkey some ten minutes in (I could be entirely wrong on this classification!), one hears it as more apart from its sound bed than one is used to, This isn't a bad thing, of course, and is in my opinion to Cascone's credit that it feels challenging, as though asaying, "OK, deal with this." You can't relax in your comfort zone as easily as you can elsewhere. It's not all harshness by any means; bells and water abound, each again having that etched, photo-realist quality. It's only 33 or so minutes, but it's as chock-full o' nutty sounds as anything you're likely to hear this year.

Scanner/David Rothenberg - You Can't Get There from Here (Monotype)

Jolting flashback to the mid 90s when Scanner was one of the cooler things around, the notion of intercepting live phone transmissions and integrating them into improvised electronica seeming pretty damned awesome. Well, that didn't last (for this listener) but here's Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) again with David Rothenberg (bass clarinet, clarinet, laptop). no eavesdropping in sight. My immediate referent on the first track, a laid back, coolly funky one, was the fine mid 80s collaboration between Hector Zazou and Bony Bikaye. It's pleasant but lacks that same fire. Unfortunately, that's about as good as it gets, the remainder toned down to a druggy flux, replete with whispered (presumably sampled) vocals, a woozy, gurgling bed of electronics and meandering clarinets. Suave but not my cuppa.

Eugene T. Robinson/Philippe Petit - The Crying of Lot 69 (Monotype)

Heh...excellent cover. And I liked the disc as well, an extended text with accompaniment created by Eugene S. Robinson, a writer with whom I was unfamiliar who seems to specialize in 21st century noir (Bouncer Lit?) though here there's an at least superficially obvious connection to Pynchon, and Philippe Petit, who wields electronics, recordings, guitar, etc. Rhys Chatham makes a notable, Cherry-like appearance on trumpet on the first track, btw. Robinson's voice travels from the coolly disinterested to the verge of hysterical breakdown, narrating an ambiguous series of hazy vignettes involving...well, it's never quite clear but there are antagonisms, questionings, rough stuff. Petit's setting, which might loosely be described as "dark ambient" appropriately allows the voice to remain front and center, accenting the dialog instead of demanding attention, leaving an effective and disturbing "story", Lynchian in its dystopic, oneiric aspect. Very good of its kind.

Trophies - Become Objects of Daily Use (Monotype)

Trophies is Alessandro Bosetti (voice, electronics), Kenta Nagai (guitar) and Tony Buck (drums) but fall easily in line with recent work of Bosetti's. Veteran readers know I've had my share of problems with his work and, sad to say, they continue here. As in prior releases he reads text in repeated fragments over a loosely rockish backdrop that, again, uncomfortably recalls Scott Johnson's late-80s work in the "John Somebody" mode. The iterated vocals, often tracked sound for sound by electronics (which I find seriously tiresome) wear thin quite quickly and the accompaniment, while handsome enough, also reminds me of the busy work that, for example, the Cline brothers produced in that ill-fated Hemphill band from around the same period as the Johnson. The same approach is followed on all eight tracks (expanding a bit into a quasi-Carnatic area on the final one, but too late).

Monotype

2011-09-24T14:48:00.002-04:00

Patrick Farmer/Kostis Kilymis/Sarah Hughes/Stephen Cornford - No Islands (Another Timbre)

Maybe it's because I'm writing this at the tail end of two weeks + of constant concert going and my music-listening brain is a bit frazzled, but it's difficult for me to figure out what to write about this release, other than to say I like it a lot. The quartet (electronics, turntables, chorded zither and amplified piano) occupy the kind of quiet-yet-scurrying territory that's not so uncommon but do so exceptionally well, breathing air and vitality into an area that often gets overcrowded. They perform two improvisations and then Cage's "four6", the latter in a bird-heavy environment and beautifully paced. The entire recording bristles with intelligence and care--I'll leave it at that. An excellent job--listen.

Dominic Lash/Patrick Farmer/Sarah Hughes - Droplets (Another Timbre)

"Droplets" is even better, containing an improvisation, two versions of a piece by Taylan Susamm ("For Maaike Schoorel") and Eva-Maria Houben's "Nachtstuck". The first realization of the Susam work involves soft, rushing sounds that seem wind-driven though I take it that's not the case. They kind of zip by, almost like sped up versions of car sounds (though maintaining a deep pitch), interspersed with silences. The second take features each musician's instrument as a recognizable element filling more or less the same "portions" of the score with sound. In both instances, a lovely, somber mood is generated. This is, I believe, my first exposure to Susam's music; would like to hear more.

The improvisation, titled "Elusion", is just wonderful. From the initial airplane hum to the steely rustles like metal shavings being disturbed, through delicious low tones and on. Really every moment seems vital here. I saw Dom a few times in the last couple of weeks performing Pisaro's music and was, as always, very impressed; perhaps I focus on him unfairly here, but his playing sounds great, really gluing things together. I guess you could say there's a "wandelweiser" feel in play--it's quiet, spacious and rather linear--but there's also something very flexible here, a certain give and pull that's very enticing. Hard to describe! But great.

Houben's 33+ minute piece (an extract) is performed outdoors, through the rain, by Lash. The downpour is there from the get go, the deep arco drones welling up from the wet in almost stately fashion, like a slow, slow marche funebre, before transforming into sets of scale-like patterns interspersed among others. I'm not sure how I would have felt about the piece sans precipitation; perhaps other plein air sounds would have sufficed. But the rain really does sound fantastic and swathes the bass wonderfully. Whatever, it's lovely to listen to, as is the entire disc. Highly recommended.

James Saunders - Divisions that could be autonomous but that comprise the whole (Another Timbre)

Six pieces that, in a way, occupy a similar space; again there's more than a whiff o' Wandelweiser in terms of quiet, singularity of purpose (within each work) and space. So we have a piece for 10 players sliding coffee cups on different surfaces (a very nice, engrossing work) and one at the end with cup on brick. Radios, bowed wood and metal, etc., thread among traditional instruments but the mood is soft sandpaper and dry rustling. Even the piano tolling in "Part of it may also be something else" sounds unanchored, as do the harmonica and melodica...beautifully so. I went back and forth as to whether I thought matters, overall were too gossamer or just right, coming down on the latter more often than not. In fact, something about the music reminded me, in effect anyway, of how I find Christian Wolff's music so eely and difficult to grasp. I'm fairly certain there's far more to the music than I'm able to get at this moment and I'm doing it a disservice; I hope to get back to it in the future. In the meantime, people should hear this.

Tierce - Caisson (Another Timbre)

Jez riley French (field recordings, zither, etc.), Ivan Palacky (knitting machine) and Daniel Jones (turntable, electronics). One piece, about 58 minutes long and an enjoyable if not always riveting one. That's perhaps unfair as "riveting" is unlikely to be what this trio was aiming for; one has more a sense of deriving enjoyment from an unforced kind of meandering (meant in a good, ambling way), the elements introduced leisurely, with ample space. You don't get the sense an arc of any kind was intended, more of a "walk". It densifies about 15 minutes in, storms for a bit before splaying out for most of the remainder. Not sure what it is that I find a wee bit lacking--perhaps wanting more grit. But it's fine, a nice web of titters and tones, hums and speckles. A perfectly good stroll.

Anett Németh - A Pauper's Guide to John Cage (Another Timbre)

This recording grew on me quite a bit over repeated listens, possibly having to do simply with state of mind. What I initially found a bit arid "filled in" very much over time. Two pieces, the title track for piano, clarinet, objects, field recordings and electronic was composed along Cagean lines, using chance procedures to determine elemental aspects, all items save piano treated electronically to some extent. But that piano, sporadic though its contributions are, serves as a supple spine and gives the music--soft but essentially mellifluous--a very attractive, sinuous character, like a small pool of water expanding on irregular ground. The second track is smoother, enjoyable in a post-"Obscure Music" kind of way (it's for "manipulated recordings" and electronics), moving along slowly, the hollow tones oozing amongst the field recordings. Pretty nice though, again, some added grit mat have been welcome. Good job, though, and add Ms. Németh to the list of people whose work I'll be curious about in the future.

All in all, a really fine new batch from Another Timbre. Congrats, Simon.

another timbre

2011-09-18T10:18:00.003-04:00

As a kind of addendum to AMPLIFY:stones, we had two evenings of three sets apiece at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, featuring various combinations of Taku Unami, Taku Sugimoto, Moe Kamura, Takahiro Kawaguchi, Radu Malfatti and Annette Krebs.

Friday's first set was another festival highlight for me: Malfatti/Sugimoto. Not that anything was particularly unexpected--Radu kept to his exquisite low, soft tones augmented by the occasional finger tap on his bell or mute, etc. while Sugimoto held an e-bow almost motionless above his strings, generating a hum that had to have been inaudible beyond ten feet or so. But it was just perfect, a fine example of commitment tied to execution. Indeed, the Malfatti experience: hearing him in a number of situations and talking a good deal with him, was an enormous and special pleasure. Kawaguchi was up next, solo, standing behind a table strewn with small objects, some of a mechanical nature. He constructed a mini-environment, first grappling with a small motor from which a metal rod protruded, that rod becoming a magnet (two magnets?) with a polarity that served to repel a magnetized disc while keeping it floating alongside the rod, rotating against it and generating a drone. If that makes sense. In any case, fun to watch. He had a bag of what seemed to be the innards of egg timers, which he wound and set on the table, perhaps 30 of them, plunked a wine bottle amongst them, arranged small flashlights and occupied himself with similar activities, many of which I'm doubtless forgetting. It paled after a bit, for this viewer/listener. He ended by simply leaning back against a wall and waiting, hands folded across chest, for about ten minutes, listening to a buzz. Lastly, Krebs/Unami in which, true to the form he'd established over the previous two weeks, Taku constructed a set, this time a mock music performance with mic stands (rolled paper serving as mics), amps (cardboard boxes), etc. He brought out a long broom, "wired" it to a speaker and conscripted David Kirby to wield it, which Mr. Kirby, lavishly attired in a dark magenta three-piece suit, did admirably. A box served as a drum set for Cat Lamb and bass (push broom) duties fell to Kjell Bjorgeengen, each similarly plucked out of their chairs. Unami joined the audience to witness their performance. Krebs, all the while, was generating fairly minimal noises, including samples of a slightly drunken friend (in German) as well as winding cellophane tape around herself and the set. It was....funny, more or less enjoyable, uncomfortable, unusual.

The final evening began with the duo Saritote (Moe Kamura and Taku Sugimoto) who played what were easily the most tuneful, "straightest" music of the festival, very lovely miniatures, often only a few seconds long. The melodies were spare and clear as was Kamura's pitch-perfect voice, very fragile and quite beautiful. At one point they played Satie's "Vexations", Sugimoto playing the melody at first single-note, then chorded, after which Kamura would sing her own obbligato to the line; lovely, a very crystalline, fine set. Unami and Kawaguchi were up next (splash zone in effect) and, well, constructed another fairly elaborate scene involving a tall ladder, chairs, the inevitable cardboard boxes, chairs, twine, garbage bags, candles, flashlights, fans, etc. all arrayed over about 40 feet of space from stage-center to a far wall. Taku cowled himself as he'd don at Stone, moaned a bit, answered a cell call. When they were well-satisfied, Unami switched on a sound-generating device for some loud thrumming and they left the room briefly, Kawaguchi returning a few minuted later to shut matters down. It's the type of thing that could be really awful but they pretty much manage, somehow, to pull it off. Not my favorite sort of thing, but....Finally, 35 or so sets after it had begun, Krebs/Sugimoto closed the curtain on this edition of AMPLIFY, playing a fine set in which Krebs' sampled voice (a male reading a poetic text) played against Taku speaking, in Japanese, describing his initial meeting with Annette some 13-14 years ago, each also contributing small sounds from their instruments. It worked gorgeously for a good 15-20 minutes, meandered a bit, came back together and, appropriately ended with the pair sitting in silence for a good while.

***********

The festival, day in, day out, was one of the stronger ones I've ever attended, almost every event offering at least something of value, many sets turning out to be spectacular. Its arc, from the opening hints of Wandeweiser, through the Rowe and Unami phases, the Malfatti waves, back to Pisaro, ultimately the Japanese crew, provided a layered continuity that was invaluable. Hats off to Jon (and David Kirby for the amazing sound system) for another job exceedingly well done.

2011-09-16T14:28:00.004-04:00

Been busy between returning to work and spending all evenings at AMPLIFY, but I guess I should post a few words about the three evenings of (mostly) Michael Pisaro's work. Going from memory here, not notes.

On Tuesday, we had the pleasure of hearing Michael in duo with Radu Malfatti, performing the latter's "Claude Lorrain 2" and his own "Ascending Series 6". I was admittedly disappointed to learn that Radu's title referred not to the painter but rather to the street containing the site in which the piece was first performed (Claude Lorrain Strasse in Vienna) and the "2" to how many musicians were performing the present version. Nonetheless, I attempted to picture some of Lorrain's landscapes (one illustrated above) during the pppp set, none too successfully. I was mighty tired (worse the next day) and details drift together, but both compositions were quiet, spacious and lovely. As evidenced elsewhere in the fest, Malfatti's control was breathtaking, his soft, low tones as pure as water and his extracurricular activities (tapping, scraping and otherwise accosting his instrument or mute) were precise.

The next day's activities began with "A cloud drifting over the plain", a quartet + tape set with Pisaro (piano), Barry Chabala (guitar), Greg Stuart (percussion) and Dominic Lash (bass). [I pause to mention that it's now Sunday morning as I'm typing this and, as no notes were taken, I'm relying on an increasingly hazy memory of events, so I won't go into much detail from hereon in unless I'm relatively sure the described events actually occurred!]. They played over a tape--was this the one with Nick Hennies playing a piece of Radu's for four bass drums? In any case, the activity was somewhat denser than I expected, Pisaro apparently providing the lead in that sense, the others picking up on that. As was the case throughout the evening, I found myself drawn to Lash's extraordinarily sensitive work. Every pluck or bowing seemed to embody grace and purpose. This was even more the case on the subsequent piece, a melding of two "mind is moving" compositions, IV and IX, with Pisaro on guitar and Lash. As is often the case with his work, the spacing and placement were beautifully considered. That's just the half of it, though, with the performer bearing a huge weight in terms of execution and Lash came through in stunning fashion. Hard to describe otherwise; those who know Michael's work will have a fair idea of how it played out, the gentle notes, the silences. Experiencing it live is a different beast. Finally, "fields have ears (6)" was rendered by Barry, playing to tape (maybe this was the Radu piece?) and was notable for several segments of surprising, vaguely rockish modalities. Very vaguely but offering a whiff! It too was lovely and had an intriguing plan beneath, having to do with overlaid (imaginary) garden plots determining the distribution of sounds, but more than that I can't say.

The following evening was composed of two rather amazing pieces. First up was "A transparent gate with ten panels", with a structure modeled on Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise" in Florence. The work is in ten 10-minute sections, for solo percussionist (Greg Stuart) with tape and, I have to say, 100 minutes have never passed so quickly. The live performer plays a different instrument (sometimes two) in each section, said instrument being small percussion (brass bells, hollow wooden blocks, a triangle, etc.) that are struck or bowed, sparingly and softly for the most part. Seven small iPod speakers were arrayed against the wall on either side of Stuart. From these issued accompaniment by the same items but arranged so as to overlap the live segments in brick-laying fashion. So the piece began with Stuart tapping on the triangle. Five minutes in, triangle sounds began appearing from the speakers, spatially distinct. Somewhat before he moved to the next portion, sounds from the instrument he was about to play would appear on the tape. These would fade in and out as the piece continued, offering a reference back to the prior sound and a preview of the upcoming one. As in much of Pisaro's music, not an excessively cluttered concept, but a clear and lovely one that engenders more complication than you expect. As said, time seemed to pass quite quickly, a subjective "fact" confirmed in conversation with several other listeners. The last segment used grains of rice falling to the floor, landing on sheet of tin foil, an incredibly sensuous and gorgeous sound. A great piece, superbly realized by Stuart.

The evening, and AMPLIFY:stones proper (the Stone portion) concluded with one of my favorite Pisaro works, "asleep, street, pipes, tones", performed by the composer and Katie Porter (bass clarinet). I've written elsewhere about it so won't go on at length; suffice it to say that it retains, to these ears, its mesmerizing quality, its almost heart-wrenching, brief allusions to "traditional" melody (some of those two or three not bass clarinet figures just kill me) and its constant sense of surprise, new elements being introduced quite late during its 64 minutes. A great work.

ok, will attempt to write up the last couple of nights at Issue project later on today....

2011-09-13T13:15:00.004-04:00

Michael Pisaro/Greg Stuart - Hearing Metal 2

Giving a blow by blow account of Pisaro's music is becoming increasingly absurd. The pieces really demand to be considered as a totality (even as some more recent works are more segmented than in years past) and their vastness, both in simple length and, more, in their enormous depth, make normal descriptors seem hopelessly futile.

Nonetheless.

"Hearing Metal 2" is gorgeous. Its first section wavers in episodes that feel like shutters opening and closing over a camera's lens, a camera mounted in a moving vehicle sometimes, the scene flitting by, blurred. But then it also opens, on occasion, into an area with an organ being played, one with a very "churchy" tonality. There are some oddly loopy moog-like swirls, water, other things. It's disorienting and, first time through, a bit baffling. The combinations of sounds (sine waves threading through the weave) are wonderful, no question; the structure is more difficult to perceive short of the simple fact of the episodes (I haven't seen the score and, I've little doubt, much would be revealed therein).

At around 17 minutes, birds and wind appear. This serves as a brief interlude to the second section, quite a different creature than the first. (It's also where Stuart's contribution is foregrounded--I'm not sure at all what, if any, he playing he did in part 1. btw, both he and Pisaro are credited on the front of the disc so I'm doing the same here; to my ears, the equivalency seems entirely justified.) After a silent start, the sound wells up and is immediately ultra-complex. The first time I listened, my immediate point of reference was Xenakis' great "Bohor", which turns out to be a favorite piece of Pisaro's as well. A similar kind of massive, dense, infinitely detailed throb, a deep churning that possesses an almost geologic character. The sandworms of Dune might make such a noise during their burrowing.

It's an extraordinary block; in fact, I find myself visualizing the piece as a variation on Newman's inverted obelisk: several layers of fractured shards on top, irregular on the whole but well-formed individually, drifting onto this immense, dense slab which, in turn, balances on a tiny point, whose tip bears the entire weight of the piece--the brief return of birdsong at the conclusion.

If I have a qualm it's that I find the structure a bit unsettling, don't quite grasp it save for the image described above which I think is more in my head than anywhere else. But that central section is so rich--I take for granted that Stuart bears much of the responsibility for this--that it obviates any carping. A wonderful disc.

Michael Pisaro/Greg Stuart - Hearing Metal 3 (Gravity Wave)

In some ways, I find this a more difficult go--not on the surface but trying to parse out the structure beyond the rather monolithic block that's readily perceived. Part of me hears the work as an extended version of, say, an old Art Ensemble piece (I know Michael grew up listening to the AACM!) wherein there's a long quiet percussive build via malleted cymbals and other drony devices (see the beginning of "Ohnedaruth" on Phase One) that eventually explode into the theme or collective improv, etc. Here, the first 23 minutes have something of that aspect, a dense matrix of ringing tones generated, I take it, by bowed and struck metals. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, knowing his earlier work, and even so, it's quite enticing and endlessly listenable. At the 23-minute mark, however, Stuart breaks into what I think can be fairly heard as a trap set mini-explosion, as though Don Moye had just entered the building. Somewhat prior, Pisaro had begun generating very organ-y sounding sine tones and these persist in this section, continuing and complexifying (?) as Stuart switches to cymbals, again sounding very much in a kind of avant-jazz tradition. It then kind of "fans out", sublimating between brushed drums, softer cymbals, half-buried sines and I imagine much more. One gets the sense of spray, of vapor.

It quiets down to a gentle patter, skittering for the last several minutes; very lovely.

"Hearing Metal 3" feels very much of that arc--quiet/loud/quiet--but there are many strands threading their way through it and, five or six listens in, I think I'm still only getting glimmers of what's actually there.

Needless to say, both releases are automatic gets for anyone at all interested in Pisaro's music. Me, I'm getting ready to go out this evening and see him in duo with Radu Malfatti. Should be smokin'. :-)

Gravity Wave

Distributed by erstdist

2011-09-12T07:39:00.002-04:00

Not to leave out mention of other shows, including a superb duo improv from Keith and Radu, but last evening's solo Rowe performance is, at the moment, blotting out all else.

You knew it had the potential to be exceptional, occurring on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 (and the 38th of 9/11/73 as well) in NYC. One of his prime topics of musical conversation over the previous week had been Dvorak's "Piano Quintet" (a recording with Clifford Curzon at the piano) and he had dropped a hint or two that it might figure in his set. As it happened, that was the "theme", threading its way through the performance, its romantic, evocative melodies beset by all manner of reality-reminders, Rowe-generated and otherwise.

He later explained that the Dvorak, for him, was about memories, specifically cherished memories from long ago, how wonderful things were then. Not hard to make a connection with US self-image vs. the past ten years. The set was as harsh, overall, as anything I've heard from him, in a similar emotional range as the duo with Burkhard Beins (ErstLive 001). He made frequent use of the scrubbing coils on guitar strings as well as his trusty nail file, allowing the Dvorak to filter up (and linger for a good while) before burying it in carnage, back and forth. The other principal element was radio and he managed, in typical fashion, a couple of extraordinarily serendipitous captures, including EMF's "Unbelievable" (the chorus, "You're unbelievable" was almost too apropos!) and a talk radio program during a 9/11 conspiratorial discussion.

Better still...The Stone, as many know, is on the ground floor on the corner of Avenue C and 2nd St and the sounds of the outside world stream into the space with little loss of volume. Not too much of a bother during a standard free jazz squall perhaps but something quieter practitioners need take not of, if only to ignore and subsume into their work. About midway through Keith's set, a voice was heard (female, I'd guess middle-aged, possibly latina, quite likely inebriated) saying, "No! No! No! NO! NO! NO!! NO!" etc. Excellent enough in context, but when Don, who was manning the door, went out to ask her to please be quiet, that there was a performance going on, she exploded, "Fuck you! Fuck your performance! Fuck you!" and continued in that vein for a minute or two. The analogy between this and US attitude toward the world, especially in the last decade, was all too delicious.

The Dvorak continued to do battle with the drones, the violence, the rudeness, the narcissism, the absurd sense of self-worth and obliviousness, eventually fading away.

Just a powerful, deep, harrowing presentation. I trust it will appear on ErstLive one day soon.

2011-09-10T13:08:00.003-04:00

Been a bit recalcitrant but also very busy, so a few more brief notes.

Two night back Keith and Toshi played what was, at the time, my favorite set of the festival. They hadn't played together in a few years and Keith's style had diverged significantly in that time from what I think of as his "Rothko" approach to his "Twombly" one which might be less conducive to Toshi's way which has been fairly consistent. Nonetheless, at the start it was as though they picked up right where they'd left off, creating rich drones, not lacking an edge. I figured that, sooner or later, Keith would disrupt things and he did, about 15 minuted in, interjecting some harsh squalls, and, for the midsection of the set, roiling the waters quite a bit, beautifully offset by Toshi's response, which deepened the tones a bit while maintaining the flow. All of this led up to a pristine last ten or so minutes, utterly gorgeous, where the strains thinned out into a steady, icy calm. Very, very satisfying.

Last night was the first set of Keith with Radu Malfatti, performing Radu's "Nariyamu" and Cardew's "Solo with Accompaniment". It was amusing, earlier on, watching the pair rehearse "Nariyamu", rehearsal, for Keith, being an activity rarely indulged. There's some looseness in the composition but Malfatti does require a certain pitch at points throughout, something that Rowe's set-up acts actively against. But the performance was magnificent. The gossamer strands--sets of three or four tones, sparsely arrayed, interspersed with small sets of clicks--managed to evoke a kind of enormity, of vastness. Malfatti's control verges on the supernatural, just amazing to hear. My individual highlight of the festival so far. The Cardew was also very fine, Rowe at more liberty to make noise and Malfatti also (relatively) expanding a bit.

all for now...apologies for the brevity. Rowe/Malfatti improv tonight & Toshi solo.

2011-09-08T10:34:00.003-04:00

Briefly, wanted to comment on last evening's Rowe/Unami set.

Keith, during his stay here, had been referencing Philip Ball's "The Music Instinct" (a book coming at the love and desire for music from an evolutionary and neurobiological standpoint) quite a bit, particularly a passage where Ball posits that music is not acoustic, that it's constructed in the listener's mind. It wasn't entirely surprising, therefore, especially considering Unami's performance the previous night, that Rowe utilized the speech function of his Kindle and sent the introductory portion of the book through the house PA at Stone, the computerized voice adding an extra later of oddness by its frequent mispronunciations and routine mis-inflections of the text. He accompanied this by sparse scrabblings at his guitar neck and "writing" on a stone, as well as the odd, short radio capture.

In the meantime, Unami once again began constructing box towers this time a bit more stable by virtue of tucking in the ends and taping them. He did this in the same intent manner as he had before, eventually building an edifice that took up most of the left of the stage area and appeared vaguely threatening toward Rowe. With the text continuing, talking about aspects of music and pattern recognition, inevitably one began applying the words to Unami's activity, forming connections that seemed as apropos as they were clearly accidental. Quite marvelous.

After 40 or so minutes, Unami threaded some twine behind and betwixt his boxes, carrying the ends himself this time toward the entrance to The Stone at the rear of the audience space, exiting the room. From somewhere out on the street he slowly pulled the string, causing the towers to slowly topple. Again, there was something wonderful about seeing these structures shudder and move "by themselves", the cardboard squeaking against each other. They fell, one after another, the last narrowly missing Rowe's table, resulting in a delightfully bulky, awkward pile which, via continued tugs, continued to throb a bit, as though in death throes. Unami opened and closed the door several times, accentuating the scene, a dark tolling, perhaps, as Rowe slowly faded out the voice at a point the electronic reader was describing how the mind sorts and melds two melodic lines, such as violin and piano, into a structure that can be heard individually or dually.

It was a wonderful experience, very invigorating, one that will linger in this mind for quite some time.

Again, my camera was useless but Yuko posted some fine pics here, including some from the previous set of English (Joe Foster and Bonnie Jones) with Toshi Nakamura, which was fine (and utiltized David Kirby's sound system to great advantage, especially the sub-woofer) but not nearly as memorable.

2011-09-07T07:55:00.003-04:00

Last evening's first set was the "trio" of Richard Kamerman, David Barnes and Graham Stephenson, arrayed in three successive duos (DB/GS, RK/DB, RK/GS). The music was fairly cohesive throughout the personnel shifts and, like a fair amount of what has transpired so far in the AMPLIFY:stones festival, had its strong and beautiful points even if they were dispersed among shakier passages. It tended toward the quiet, though Barnes made louder, ruder sounds on occasion. Stephenson played trumpet throughout, positioning the bell right atop the mic but almost always playing very, very softly with fine control, sometimes evoking bird chirps. Kamerman used his motorized devices arrayed on a snare drum (I should say, I was blocked from much of the visual activity, so I may misrepresent something), allowing them to putter about, sometimes falling over. Barnes was perhaps more subdued than expected, using a small mixer (?), percolating alongside. Each of the three improvs had its moments, the first ending with noticeable calm and beauty, kind of tumbling to a conclusion, the last effectively humorously with a dropped item from Kamerman and synchronous stoppage from Stephenson. Very engaging, overall; hoping they manage to get together more often.

In the course of a festival of this length, naturally enough much of the music will fit into a fairly "standard" (if still excellent) area of improv and, naturally, other sets, if they choose to stray, will stand out. Taku Unami has, I think it's fair to say, ventured the furthest from the pack thus far.

Before entering the performance area, one saw no particular equipment, just a table with a couple of small cloth sacks. Unami came in and began setting up, an action which, one quickly realized, would be the essence of the piece. He calmly but with concentration began constructing an assemblage, pulling out (eventually) ten or twelve cardboard boxes which had been lying flt against a wall, opening them to form rectangular tubes (the end flaps left untucked). He stacked these two or three high on a few tables, looping lengths of twine around them, introducing a standing floor fan (turned off and on periodically) amidst these columns, as well as, ultimately, several tape measures, a black garbage bag or two and adhesive tape.

At two points, inevitably, the structure toppled. Unami was unfazed and continued his construction. Having spent the previous few days in Rowe's company, I automatically thought of the venture as a rumination on failure, building up only to have things fall apart. After 40 or so minutes, he seemed to have things in place, at least as much as possible, having added a couple of small flexi-lamps to the assemblage. He wound the twine behind and among the three cardboard towers (9/11 allusions were, I guess, obvious, though I admit it never occurred to me during the set) and gave the ends to two first row audience members. He walked to the rear of the Stone (I should mention that, soundwise, the main elements had been his footfalls, the whir and click of the fan, pulled tape and the falling of boxes) and asked that the light be turned off. This made for a fairly dramatic scene, very attractive. Keith and I had the same thought at that moment: it would be wonderful if Unami simply walked out of the venue, leaving the room dark, the ends of the twine in the hands of the audience members. Unfortunately (in the sense that this denouement was pretty much inevitable), this didn't happen. Instead after looking at the tableau for several minutes, he asked that, when he gave the countdown, the twine-holders pull sharply on their cords. He counted off, "3-2-1-0" and the boxes, fan, tapes, twine, garbage bags all came a-tumbling down. Unami, oddly, tapped out a kind of bossa nova rhythm on what sounded like a wood block he may have been holding, repeating it three times, then walked up to the scene of destruction, put on his shirt and the event was over.

There was, as Keith pointed out, something very George Brecht/Fluxus about the performance and certainly it wasn't without precedent by any means. Still and all, it was fascinating for me to watch Unami go about his business, very intent, with no sense of art-school cuteness, very absorbed in what he was doing at the same time as every so often chatting with audience members, not taking himself overly seriously. As I said, parsing it, I may have preferred some other choices on his part but it remained an invigorating, rich work. Tonight he plays in duo with Rowe. Who knows?

(my photo uploader isn't cooperating today, not that I took anything particularly worthwhile. But Yuko Zama did and you can see her excellent photos here

2011-09-05T16:41:00.003-04:00

Jason Lescalleet led off playing solo last night, speaking to the audience beforehand very movingly, describing how this weekend encompassed both the anniversary of his father's death (if you haven't heard Jason's "The Pilgrim", please do so) and the occasion of his son's moving out of the house. He began the set with a low buzz that sounded like a miniature mic had been inserted in the abdomen of a bumblebee; it slowly increased in both volume and complexity before beautifully shattering into complex shards well up there in decibel level. For the remainder, he veered back and forth from quieter passages, with low rumblings from his loosely strung tapes, to piercingly loud ones, at the edge of aural pain (likely past it for some), extremely sharp-edged. It was unsettling, sometimes disjointed, but largely effective. Towards the end, he built up a very dense drone within which I could swear I was hearing some deeply buried gospel-y piano. Sure enough, several minutes later, the dronage began to evaporate and the song loop--I've no idea what; my first impression was something along the lines of Leon Russell, but that's apparently not the case--came to the for, resolutely, iterating until it faded out minutes later. A lovely and moving summing up.

The highly anticipated duo of Christian Wolff and Keith Rowe was next, only the second time they'd played in that formation, though they've often worked with the Merce Cunningham troupe as part of a trio with Takehisa Kosugi. Wolff had an electric guitar lying flat on the table with sundry small instruments and made use of the piano as well. They began, at leas on Rowe's part, by playing Wolff's "Stones", with Wolff apparently playing bits and pieces of other compositions of his throughout. To the listener, however, it felt like an improvisation and, to these ears, some of Wolff's contributions seemed perfunctory or routine although, listened to from a different angle, there was an appealing awkwardness that one doesn't encounter often in this area (I easily defer to Wolff, assuming there were ore ideas percolating there than I'm aware of). Hard to say, except that it was discomforting. Given that Rowe had been talking much of the last few days (and had mentioned in an article written this week by Kurt Gottschalk in New York City Jazz Record) about failure and how he hoped his audience understood how much more valuable a failed performance is than a "wow" one, well, they might have succeeded by thereby failing...in any case, however unfortunately, they succeeded brilliantly in the last ten or so minutes, Rowe maintaining the varying hum he'd been using almost throughout (in addition to some gorgeously modulated radio) and Wolff ceasing the wandering from item to item, resting his left arm on his guitar and being content with whatever hum that generated. Crystalline and beautiful. Very happy to have witnessed this meeting.

2011-09-04T12:04:00.002-04:00

A few very quick thoughts about the first three nights of AMPLIFY:stones. I had to miss the opening set, Antoine Beuger's "approcher s'éloigner s'absenter", though I heard glowing reports about it. The first Pisaro piece (can't recall the title, but it was from 2005), played by Barry Chabala, Dominic Lash and Ben Owen, was calm and spare in the manner we'd come to expect, beautifully executed. The very recent "hinwandeln, augen zu" (hope I'm attributing the title correctly) was gorgeous, with the much fuller sound that's been evident in recent recordings on Gravity Wave. Owen contributed some wonderful textures midway between a watery gurgling and a more abrasive tack, soft but rich. There was even a kind of allusion to a descending rockish cadence for the guitar at one point. The sound was consistent, flowing form one member to the other, very peaceful but with roiling beneath. I trust it will see release sometime--I'm quite sure there's more to discover within than one listen yields.

Two more "traditional" improv sets on Friday, Bonnie Jones and Maria Chavez opening. I thought the performance was a bit inconsistent, achieving some strong surges, then dissipating and meandering a bit, utilizing a not unfamiliar array of harsh electronics and vinyl turntablism. To the extent I could discern the contributions, which wasn't that hard, I found Jones' work more incisive and to the point. Again, though, this is a new pairing and I'm curious to hear more. David Kirby, using mostly cassettes (six or eight sources, I think), augmented by a software IPad app he wrote to simulate certain Moog sounds, provided a rough, rollicking set of full-on burbling noise. Again, there were very strong initial statements that I think could have been elaborated on to better effect and occasionally the thread would get lost, but there were enough "saves" to make it worthwhile. Kirby too, is relatively new at this game and it was exciting to glimpse the potential.

Saturday's opening set by Vanessa Rossetto (viola, electronics) and Graham Lambkin (electronics, objects in cardboard box), was wonderful and strange. That box, clearly a nod toward "With Hidden Noise" was a fine...what's the word I want? not "symbol" but perhaps evocation or embodiment of the magic aspect of this music, Lambkin manipulating various things (stones were involved) obscured from one's view. Rossetto provided the glue via viola dronage as well as contributing her own roughage. There was a real sense of surprise and lack of knowing where things would go but their steps were largely unfailing. A possible ending was reached when Lambkin tore apart the box, but things lingered and a luscious kind of exhalation sound amidst drones was achieved, the music slowly, very slowly, fading and ending perfectly.

Olivia Block performed entirely on piano, all acoustic, the first time I've heard her doing such and apparently a new direction for her. She structures things somewhat beforehand (not entirely improvised, in other words) and devoted almost all her time here to inside the piano, beginning by thrashing about at the strings forcefully, then investigating dynamic peaks and valleys. Overall, I found the quieter areas far more successful as she showed her fine, fine touch when eliciting the most delicate sounds from the gentle stroking of the strings and, even better, a grainier attack where the roughness was fascinatingly offset by the quietude. The few occasions where she introduced single keyboard notes were gorgeous, offering a brief tonic to the otherwise more percussive music, with very much of a Tilbury feel. Again, despite a few meanderings (including staying with the louder beating of the strings with mallets for longer than necessary), the set ended beautifully, in a soft lushness, perfectly timed.

So, a lot of exciting, intriguing, not always successful but often enough music!

Tonight, Lescalleet and Rowe/Wolff--could be amazing.

2011-08-23T18:00:00.007-04:00

Giuseppe Ielasi - 15 Tapes (Senufo Editions)

As indicated, 15 brief, often blistering pieces derived from taped sources. It's almost always been the case, for me with Ielasi's music, that I hear a strong underlying musicality, even a melodicism, in his work no matter how superficially abstract it gets. Still the same. Exceptional structure and depth throughout, each mini-track capturing something arresting, each a very different selection of noise, some ambient, some pristine, this one forlorn, that one brutal. All in less than 20 minutes.

Hard to say much more except that it's really good.

Bellows - Handcut (Senufo Editions)

Bellows is Ielasi and Nicola Ratti, wielding contact mics on vinyl, a Revox a77, memory man and sine waves. As enjoyable as "15 Tapes" is, this one is even better, one of my favorites of the year so far. Again, descriptors are hard to come by--there's greater cohesion in the sense of thoroughgoing throbs often being in play, though they're refreshingly irregular and shifting, even as they provide a gelatinous kind of substrate for the shattered, more etched tones and shards. Think of Gum filtered through early (and primo) Carl Stone, circa "Mom's". Maybe a touch of Fennesz and even (don't shudder) Fenn O'Berg, but rougher and with air surrounding the brittler edges. There's iteration, but always eroding, disintegrating.

The first eight tracks, recorded in 2009, were originally released on planam, the latter five, from 2010, new here. I can see some listeners finding the music perhaps a bit too digestible, palatable. But it suits me just fine---excellent recording.

Kessel Jaeger - algae (Senufo Editions)

From sources as varied as "positive organ". marxophone, tremoloa, turkish crescent, nfir and synth, Jaeger fashions a skittering, moody, dystopic soundscape that may indeed be algae-encrusted. I think I've heard two other discs by Jaeger (if thsa tbe a real name; I guess there's some doubt), one I liked very much on Mystery Sea and another I wasn't so keen on from unfathomless. This one lies somewhere in between. Drone-y, with some attractively buzzing metals drizzled over deep, lush organ-ics (presumably positive ones), it's reasonably immersive if not as gripping as I might like. The third track uses a type of sound I like a lot--I link it to thwacking the rods of a toy piano from the open end. I take it this isn't from such an instrument, unless that's what a marxophone is, but it's luscious to hear. (ooh--might be! looking it up, I see it's a fretless zither...). This last piece has the most depth; some eerie whines help out. Not bad, fine for the drone crowd.

Jennifer Veillerobe - Zweifarbige Gesten (Senufo Editions)

Hard to know what to make of this one. Electronics, I presumes synths of one sort or another, though there's other stuff afoot I take it, producing rougher statics and such. Very simply arrayed in the sense of pretty much one thin layer at a time, spaced apart somewhat but with no apparent structural form. On the one hand, it sounds like someone farting about with electronics, just eliciting whatever happens to come out when this knob is twiddled, that connection made. On the other, over its course, the music's spatial nature, especially when it eases into some Sachiko-esque scratching which it then offsets with deep, fluttery waves, is quite winning. Eventually, it sounds like a faint tea kettle, before ending with paired electronic tom-tom beats. Search me. I kinda liked it, not sure why.

senufo editions

2011-08-22T20:05:00.005-04:00

Robin Hayward/Kristoffer Lo/Martin Taxt - Microtub (Sofa Music)

[my pc is temporarily--I hope--out of commission so I can't scan and I also can't find an image of this disc on-line, sorry]

Back in the mid 70s, Howard Johnson organized an all tuba band, six or seven of them, I think, called Gravity; maybe it's still extant, I don't know. I remember Braxton running into Johnson at Environ, enthusiastic about writing for the ensemble; also don't know if that ever happened. I guess there have been all tuba projects in the interim but I doubt they've been as focused and fascinating as this trio.

Two C-tubas and an F-tuba, the latter microtonal, though all three in tandem certainly depart from pitch standards. One track, some 32 minutes long, one linear idea. Linear, that is, stepping back a few paces, the way a dense rope might look linear. Within the strands, however, is an amazing depth of twining tones, long-held, resonating, forming fluctuating pulses that buffet the eardrums in delicious fashion. For the first half, well, there's more variation than in a set of Sachiko sines but it's arguably in the same ballpark, one long stretch of tubaic taffy. They then descend, spelunk into the depths of the horn, the dark booms augmented by soft breath sprays like decompressing oxygen tanks. There's water down there, cold. They emerge slightly, blink at the light and continue on, down an adjacent path, before encountering an obstacle, hesitating, sending out gentle feelers, stopping.

A fine recording, give a listen.

[Martin graciously provided me an image of the cover:]

Silencers - Balance des Blancs (Sofa Music)

I admit, glancing at the instrumental line-up, I was a bit fearful of a kind of free-jazz/eai balancing act, the sort of thing that leaves some amount of frustration one way or the other. Well, it is, kind of, but achieves, at least on occasion, a rather amazing amount of success. The quartet (Benoit Delbecq, prepared piano; Kim Myhr, guitar, resonant objects; Nils Ostendorf, trumpet; Toma Gouband, percussion) manage, at their best, to create a music that strikes me as similar to what Don Cherry's Eternal Rhythm band might have done if somehow transported intact to 2010. They manage to mix abstraction with implied melodic and rhythmic content in a way that's not disingenuous or cutesy, the prepared piano referencing, inevitably, gamelan but also mbira. If this occurred consistently, we'd have a truly stellar album, but the four also fall into some meandering ("En Turbulence"), not terribly but routine in aspect though that too picks up a head of steam midway through. I would have liked more focus but the group gels pretty well and creates an individual sound that's enticing. Curious to hear where they go from here.

Sofa Music

2011-08-17T07:36:00.001-04:00

Apologies for the lack of posting...doing other things while on vacation and faced with a pile of stuff upon return, half of which I've yet to be able to give a first listen to....will be back sorta shortly...

2011-07-30T08:14:00.007-04:00

Keith Rowe - Concentration of the Stare (bottrop-boy)

Spend any amount of time in the company of Keith Rowe and the names of certain painters will arise in conversation with some frequency. Caravaggio, Twombly and, among others, most definitely, Mark Rothko. Just as, long ago, he'd imagined what the guitars in Braque's cubist painting might actually sound like, so, I think, he did with Rothko, often referring to the way the "tinged" the space in which they were hung. For some time, in the early oughts, Rowe tried to place his music in a similar area, where it more tinged the aural scape rather than imposed itself on it ("Duos for Doris", with John Tilbury, might be one of the finer examples of this approach).

Needless to say, when he at last had the opportunity to actually perform in Rothko Chapel in Houston Texas in 2007, it was a weighty event for him. And, when in fact confronted with the fourteen extraordinary panels there, one gets the impression he felt the need to perhaps "balance" his sound with the artworks to a more forceful degree than he may have done in their absence. The 40 minute set, generally speaking, refers back two or three years to the rich, steady-state solo work from the first few years of the decade. More so than most recordings, a great deal is necessarily lost here--the pure physicality of Rowe in the midst of the Rothkos, communing with them, the immediate resonance an observer would doubtless register between sound and canvas; one simply must imagine the totality of the event. (I have to say that such imaginings aren't helped by the cover of this release, a flat, boring purple that has nothing to do with the rich violet-blacks of the paintings in the room.)

As is, it's a fine addition, the sound stream made of of rough, thorny elements spun together into strands that lessen the harshness--think burlap. As is always the case, it seems that there are four or five levels operating at any given moment and one's concentration easily hops from one to the other, never losing track of the whole. It builds to a mini-crescendo about 25 minutes in, then to a still more intense level five minutes later before subsiding back into the room. Those familiar with Rowe's work over the last 12 + years will recognize the territory covered, an expanse far more immediately accessible than, say, "The Room". Again, what's obviously missing is the presence of this room but it's not all that difficult to transport oneself there, making one's own connections between the clouds of electronics, filled with endless details and the infinitely deep spaces within the Rothkos.

Be a nice idea if the Chapel would install this as an occasional element perhaps....

A beautiful set and, of course, an obligatory get.

bottrop-boy

available from erstdist

***************

I'll be heading off the Block Island for two weeks tomorrow so, unless I decide to post something from there, see you in mid-August.

2011-07-27T19:59:00.005-04:00

Ferran Fages - Pèl Nord (Bocian)

Robin Fox - More Impossible Futures (Bocian)

And still another pair of 7" vinyl releases from Bocian...

Fages eschews the uniquely gorgeous guitar sounds heard in recent albums and launches full bore into a piercing, whining squall conjured from "manipulated AM radios". "Pel" needles its way into ones ears before splaying out into subtly layered (but no less abrasive for that) slab of splintering harshness. It's monolithic in one sense but prismatic enough to invite, if one's ears can withstand it, deep consideration. "Nord" is rounder, more hollow but cuts a not dissimilar path, just a slightly more negotiable one. Unlike some qualms I've had with previous Bocian 7 inchers, the length (about 3-4 minutes each) works quite well here, cramming more than enough information into the short span, providing a large amount to chew on and tasty too. A fine addition to Fages' already impressive catalog.

Robin Fox spins his wax via synthesizers. On the title cut, he sets three or four differently lengthed and timbred patterns atop each other, each seesawing in varying tempi, each mutating as it goes, forming a quasi-regular iteration that leaves just enough space for an organic feel to manifest. "Drift Compression" ventures too far into loopy synth territory for my taste but it's all quite handsomely done. I'd have liked to hear the first piece evolve a bit more, curious to see where it would have gone.

Bocian

2011-07-17T08:25:00.008-04:00

John Wall/Alex Rodgers - Work 2006-2011 (Entr'acte)

A fascinating release. A bit has been written on what a departure this is for Wall, but I'm not sure. I may have missed something along the way (I have five releases of his on Utterpsalm) but aside from the obvious prominence of Rodgers' voice, I hear it as a not too wayward extension of the previous works. Yes, it was constructed, laboriously one imagines though not so much as had been the case on earlier releases; built from improvisations but so had much of his music been before. It's pared down in terms of elements--just Wall and Rodgers--but much of his music had been as well, even if there were half a dozen contributors at a given moment; it tended to sound sparse and astringent.

Rodgers' texts are not at all improvised, though Wall seems to have taken liberties rearranging and editing them. From what I understand, the slight warping and other electronic effects imparted to his voice are of his own devising as well as having recorded into a cheap dictaphone, hence perhaps the up-closeness of his sound. Wall balances his own contributions equitably, Rodgers phasing in and out of a mix that's not all too unlike Wall's past work despite (one assumes) not be derived from the instrumental work of others and, as stated, having been improvised. It retains the silvery thinness heard before, a unique and beautiful sound-world; I've little doubt I would have recognized the music as Wall's in a blindfold test. I often visualize a think plate of copper or zinc, with various bumps, scratches and other "imperfections" arrayed across its softly gleaming surface. Rodgers, his words slurred, bitter and Beckettian adds just the right amount of soot...or suet. It really meshes perfectly, not foregrounded so much, more embedded.

While certainly episodic in construction (as can be seen here, the piece cleaves together seamlessly as a whole, a bleak cascade of shards and syllables, like little else you'll hear. An excellent recording.

Entr'acte

(Erstdist should be getting them in shortly)

ErikM/Norbert Moslang - Stodgy (Mikroton)

I like the title. :-) And the music, if not stodgy, does carry a whiff of nostalgia, evoking those halcyon days of the early oughts when the rambunctious noise of cracked electronics with at least an implied rhythmic base could be exciting. In fact, these pieces stem from 2002-05 and do reasonably capture the spirit of Voice Crack, ErikM, Jerome Noetinger, etc. from around that time, the hurly-burly of a certain kind of sound that was at once rough but kind of...globular, the really harsh edges having been eroded away somewhat, perhaps midway between the truly severe and the area that would soon be explored by Gunter Muller and often released by For 4 Ears. It's aggressive, full, more or less non-stop, one of the motives being to establish a thick wall of sonics, a dripping mass of electronica propelled along by, as stated above, some sort of throb or pulse. I recall thinking that, at its best, this branch of music was a kind of guilty pleasure, a big gob of taffy to ameliorate the leaner (in a purely volumetric sense) offerings available elsewhere. I can still reach that frame of mind, though I grant that it's tougher these days; I think I've been largely sated by these particular flavors. Still and all, a representative and good sample of ErikM's and Moslang's work, doubtless to be highly enjoyed by their fans.

WPB3 - A Floating World (Mikroton)

I rather enjoyed the previous disc from WPB3 I'd heard, on Herbal International. It struck me that, at times, they approached an AMM-like sound world and accomplished this better than most. This effort, recorded in November 2008, doesn't quite get there for me. Nusch Werchowska (piano, objects), Mathias Pontevia (horizontal drums--I still don't know what differentiates them--, percussion) and Heddy Boubaker (alto and bass saxophones) seem to clearly intend to exist in that world--though perhaps they're sick of hearing it--but it's a tough row(e) to hoe. The use of space or, too often, the occupation of space, feels uneasy to me, as does the teetering into (forgive the overuse of the term) efi-y way of playing, the jazzy references (for example, the Cecil-ish piano at the beginning of the second cut. Indeed, this may be one of those bands where I'd rather the wholeheartedly went the avant-jazz route. Boubaker has a good tone, especially on bass sax, Pontevia seems to be a fine drummer out of the Lovens tradition--when they go all out in that direction, as they do later on in that same track, they're fine. It's that middle ground that's uncomfortable and hesitant. Perhaps I'm being too picky. Listened to in a more relaxed frame of mind, "A Floating World" is fine, cohesive and varied. It's just those damned glimmers of something more that gnaw at me....

Mikroton

2011-07-12T19:40:00.010-04:00

Patrick Farmer - Green rings around the eyes, this grass in vibrant motion. (nadukeenumono)

It's long been my belief that there are musicians who simply possess a high degree of musicality. Silly enough statement, I know. And even within that, of course, it's a musicality that happens to resonate with my ears, not necessarily yours, who bring to their work, however seemingly abstract, a logic or a poetic sense that matches, to some great extent, those found in my own synapses. I've always enjoyed Farmer's work, always found something of value, however obscure or slight were the elements that comprised it. I'd gotten used, in my limited exposure, to a reticent approach so this recording, a half-hour plus of rather violent pops and sputters interspersed with silences that seem to contain their own aggressiveness, while a significant departure from what I'd heard before, nonetheless has the same musicality (if you will) the same sense of rightness about it. Quantifying it is next to impossible and if I stand it, just for the sake of comparison, alongside of Rowe/Sachiko's 'contact', it's not to say it's at the same level--I don't think it is--but that it evinces a similar concern with the nexus of harsh sound and space, with not shying away from some tough problems of apparent discontinuity vs. the actual fluidity of the situation. To this listener, it works and works quite well; everything fits and, somehow, makes sense. A fine effort.

nadukeenumono

available from erstdist

Nicholas Szczepanik - Please Stop Loving Me (Streamline)

Coming from an utterly different direction but achieving a result that's just as excellent, is Szczepanik's intriguingly titled release. I've no idea as to the actual source(s) of the sounds, but the general result is a rich cream with an organ-y flavor, though one suspects there might be orchestral and choral elements, all combined and threshed via electronics. No matter, really. It's unavoidable to mention the Eno of "On Land" here (and even a taste of Brancan sonorities); there's a feel of some of the passages form that seminal work but much deeper and, if you will, more romantic. I use the term not only in deference to the disc's title but also in that I was reminded throughout of the work of Bernard Herrmann. While at one glance, it's drone-oriented and steady state, there's always numerous plies writhing beneath the surface and when they venture toward full audibility, they have something of that wrenching, almost melodramatic quality heard in Herrmann. This occurs most noticeably around 24 minutes (and it's stunningly gorgeous) in and you think, perhaps, the first portion was only a prelude, that there would be a shift, but not really. It just settles into an adjacent seethe. Unlike Farmer's, it's "easy" on the ears but there's just as much to explore, just as many surprises; you simply have to tilt your head differently. The lengthy diminuendo also has more going on "inside" it than might be apparent at first blush, more unsettling than you think. Very, very enjoyable.

I don't see it listed yet on the Streamline/Drag City page, but here's one place where you can learn more.

Adrian Dziewanski - Orbital Decay (Scrapyard Forest)

Not entirely dissimilar to Szczepanik's music, as it happens, Dziewanksi's work also resides in drone territory and one of its major strands is an organ-like hum, but there are both significant low pulses and, more prominently, a sparkling set of buzzes and trills atop, all forming a slow ebb and flow. It's fundamentally much more in the steady-state realm, though, essentially unchanging over its duration--the relationships between the sounds are altered, to be sure, but the basic character of the piece remains very much the same throughout, at least as far as I can hear. All well and good and it's a pleasant confluence of sounds but I wanted more--either a variation in structure that had more resonance or the integration of sonic elements with a somehow rougher character. OK, but needs more street.

scrapyard forest

2011-07-07T19:53:00.006-04:00

Anne Guthrie - Perhaps a Favorable Organic Moment (Copy for Your Records)

Quite a wonderful very different kind of recording. Guthrie's taken a field recording concept and extended it into unexpected and moving areas. Several people have written on this release already, and written well, often noting how the album is quasi-symmetrically structured which, indeed, is interesting. The first two pieces are variations on Bach's "Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude" which Guthrie performs on her standard instrument of choice, the French horn. As Richard noted, it sounds as though she's playing for her own enjoyment in her studio, the window open allowing the sounds of the street to be clearly heard. The performance itself is rough, as though she's only begun to negotiate the undoubtedly difficult transferal from cello to horn. But one gets the sense that her ears were perhaps as much attuned to those exterior sounds as her horn and that the idea for the subsequent piece percolated at that time. In any case, that's the narrative I get as listener as in track two, the environmental sounds become wooly and richly blurred (offset with some metallic clinking), the horn compressed and kneaded into a sound reminiscent of a Terry Riley electronically enhanced soprano (though better). It's a wonderful piece, made even more so by the connection to its forebear.

The middle cut, "Times Center, NYC 2010" for quite a good portion of it's 9 minutes plus seems to be just that, the harshly limned sounds of people in a large interior space (one can almost see the fluorescent lighting). But there's a soft ringing thrum that subtly emerges every so often, casting a warm glow on matters. That glow morphs into a more insistent, higher pitched thrum, begins to establish a more equal footing with the screeching children and that odd, indecipherable vocal din you hear in such spaces; ultimately it's all you hear. In some ways, the piece is a variation on ideas found in Pisaro's "Transparent City" compositions, and a very lovely one.

The last two reverse, in a way, the approach of the initial pair, the first being a diffusion of the second. We hear what sounds like a treated recording of traffic whizzing by, possibly overhead (I was very much reminded of a favorite concert, Sean Meehan, Greg Kelley and Zach Wallace, playing very quietly beneath the FDR Drive overpass at 38th St. as cars roared above). It's a ghostly enough sound and when Guthrie enters, softly keening the Scottish ballad, "Annie Laurie", that spectral feeling is redoubled, like a spirit on the wind. As the piece enters its final minutes, the automotive volume is pushed, the machines achieving a sound like enormous hornets, the plaintive voice still peeking through--wonderful work. Guthrie then closes with a simple, but utterly beautiful, rendition of the song, sounding as though singing inside a park tunnel, the sounds of the city in the near distance.

An exceptional recording, one of my favorites of this year.

Richard Kamerman - I stayed in the apartment for thirty-two days without leaving (Copy for Your Records)

Kamerman's release, on the same label, is slightly different. 20 minutes of severe noise in two discreet streams, one a general rough burbling, like an extremely active lava cauldron, the other a series of kind of accelerative sounds, with a revving quality, short bursts that appear like accents in the boiling flow; at the conclusion these seem more like chainsaws than anything else. It's pretty incessant, save for brief gaps of digital silence scattered throughout. There's a sense of amorphousness about it, ameliorated somewhat by those revs and silences, but overall possessing a massive, slab-like aspect that, I think, would lend itself more to a live experience, at substantial volume, wherein the listener could bathe (or burn). On disc, at necessarily limited volume, it's fine but I have the feeling I'm missing something, probably including the vibrations that would potentially disrupt my bodily functions were I in the same room.

Copy for Your Records (from which I filched the skewed images above)

also available from erstdist

2011-07-03T08:04:00.014-04:00

Pascal Battus - Simbol/l'Unique Trait d'Pinceau (Herbal International)

Pity the poor, abused cymbal! The immense range of sounds capable of being elicited from this amazing piece of metal via stroking, tapping and otherwise attacking it clearly continue to absorb the attention of many musicians. Sometimes this can result in deep, fascinating plies of noise, though often at the expense of other structural elements need to hold a give work together as a unit. It's a delicate balance.

Battus here offers two cds worth of cymbalic material, one suite of three parts ("Simbol") and one of five ("l'Unique Trait d'Pinceau"). The sounds on the former seem to be largely derived from the instrument being stroked in one manner or another but the salient point to these ears is the separation into striae of relatively pure pitches, very high to very low, the middle ground often occupied by coarser sounds. When everything gels, the results are rapturous as on the third section of "Simbol", titled, "Soil". I think having a strong low pitch is the key, anchoring the work deep in the ground, so to speak, enabling the higher, rougher pitches to be read as chaotic escaping gases (!), organic excreta unfurling out into the air. Really a wonderful track, one that manages to entirely avoid the sameness that many adventures in cymbaling encounter.

"l'Unique Trait d'Pinceau" dispenses with any vestige of drones, hurtling into a series of attacks wherein the overt nature of the cymbal is camouflaged within a mass of hisses, screeches, groans and flutters. [I'm informed by my esteemed colleague Dan Warburton that this second disc is likely not sourced from cymbal-sounds at all, a mistaken inference I drew from the liner notes, so disregard any cymbalic references herein] It's still a cymbal, of course, and one can, if so inclined, trace hesitant pathways back to that folded and flattened piece of metal but similar to how how might approach a post-Tetreault/Yoshihide recordless turntablist, better to just sit back and immerse oneself to the extent possible. Battus doesn't make this an easy venture either, the music both assaultive and irregular, an incessant stream of "difficult" noise, perhaps a bit non-reflective for me (he mentions in the notes that this section is more improvisational than the former, "often made at home in the heat of discovery") but generally holding interest. On the final cut, "Bouteille magnetique" (magnetic bottle), he produces a sound that seems for all the world to derive from guitar strings; how a bottle, magnetic or otherwise, in interaction with a cymbal created such tones is beyond me but the result is transfixing enough. Here's a kind of post-Bailey music that really works, perhaps in part due to its non-guitar nature? Lovely track, in any case and an album well worth your time.

herbal international

Sean Baxter - Metal/Flesh (Bocian)

Another solo percussion effort, out of Australia, here on Bocian's somewhat odd format of 7" vinyl, meaning we have about eight minutes of music. Sometimes this approach works, as with the recent Krakowiak release, sometimes it strikes me as excessively restrictive, which is the case here. Not that I'm sure I would have been entirely enamored of 20+ minutes of Baxter's drumming, but I do think it would have provided a fairer indication of his music. "Metal" has low-pitched drums probably covered with metallic objects, beaten irregularly but consistently, creating a fine melange of sound but feeling much like an excerpt, as though it should have been embedded in some larger conception. For fun, I also played it at 33rpm; the resultant pitch change was enticing. Wish I had a 16rpm option..."Flesh" is drums and cymbolics; again, it's perfectly fine if perhaps retro in a way, sounding like a portion of a good Andrew Cyrille solo. Can't complain about that as such, of course, but again would have liked to have heard this in a wider context. In sum, an enjoyable if frustrating release.

Bocian

Craig Hilton/Tomas Phillips - le goût de néant (Absinth)

In which Hilton creates an improvisation on guzheng and, with Phillips, subjects it to manipulation via laptops. Beginning with the guzheng allows for a lush richness, a very attractive bed in which to mess around and, indeed, the pair don't stray very far from its essential tonality even as the nature of the sonics varies quite a bit. Sometimes other sounds seem to intrude--the beginning of track three seems to includes pachinko parlors and piano samples, but who knows? It teeters on the edge of excessive spaciness to these ears but pretty much manages to fall on the right side of things. The final track of four, for instance, has an airy, cavernous quality that could veer more toward the Eno-esque, but it retains a certain bitterness, later infused with taps and scrapes, that keeps it in a grainier, more complex area. That said, I wouldn't have minded things being pushed much further in that direction but, as is, the disc is solid enough and could be an enticing listen for a relative newcomer to this end of the spectrum.

absinth (though I don't see this release listed there yet)

2011-06-30T19:57:00.007-04:00

Mike Bullock - Mild Disappearances (Songs from Under the Floorboards)

As fine a bassist as he is, the few times I've heard Bullock dealing with electronics, I've also been very impressed. To some extent, he combines the two here though it's the electronics that are to the fore, though precisely what he's using is not listed and I'd be reluctant to even guess about it. Quasi-basslike sounds filter through the mix seeming to be possibly sourced from some unexpected meeting of bow and resonant wood but, again, who knows? Field recordings are present as well, birds and water sounds well represented. But the unexpected spine of the first track is a ping and descending glissando (again, the later possibly bass-derived?) that form a kind of melodic reference point around which the remainder of the sounds cluster and from which they disperse. It's a nice gambit and if it hangs around a minute or two longer than I might like, it's still refreshing enough to make the piece stand out and infuse it with an unusual richness. Though not nearly so overt, a subtle sense of tonality continues throughout the disc, even when it's fragmented into scattered clawings at the bass or fractured sine tones. Bullock keeps the mix deliciously viscous, balancing the shrill with the rumbling, evoking landscape while remaining abstract (I thought of Kiefer more than once). The last cut brings the bass more into play and is substantially sparser but still manages to retain the earlier depth, just pushing it into a different area, and a really interesting one, dark sounds existing in a large, even darker space. A fine recording--don't miss it.

Kiyoharu Kuwayama/Masayoshi Urabe - Heteroptics (Songs from Under the Floorboards)

A 2002 date with Kuwayama (cello, viola, percussiona) and Urabe (alto, percussion). For me, it lies on an uncomfortable divide wherein musicians are aware of and attempting to enter into the (then) newish territory of post-AMM improvisation but still retain a good bit of the emotional trappings of post-Ayler jazz. Urabe's playing, indeed, reminds me most of Joe McPhee with a similar balance of abstraction and a deep, almost spiritual color. Somehow, with McPhee I find that a more natural quality; with others, as well as it may be handled, there always seems to be something of a remove. Which isn't to say that the music here doesn't succeed on its own; it's pretty effective, the ghostly alto lamenting over parched string scrapings or the ghostly rattle of metal. There are moments of near-silence but, interestingly, even then, the sounds that appear carry some sentimental weight--curious how that happens. It's soon enough back to the haunted wailing though. There's a moment, some 38 minutes in, when one of the pair appears to toss a large metal pipe or two onto the hard floor with refreshingly raucous results--would that this abandon was followed throughout. As is, while not entirely up this listener's alley, I can easily see this being highly appreciated by, say, fans of Kaoru Abe.

Intransitive

2011-06-25T08:56:00.008-04:00

Ben Owen - 05012009FP (cdr)

I love hearing field-recording based work that still manages to confound my expectations of the are. It's still fascinating to me why some work and others don't; wish I could pinpoint the whys and wherefores, but maybe not. Ben Owen's collection of four pieces begins with a set of sounds more complex than initially sensed: water, yes, some owl-like hoots (not sure of the source--perhaps the "two pipes" of the title), a pervasive, grainy hum, large but more distant thrums (boat engines?), the sound of heavy wooden furniture being pushed across a resistant floor--it's rich, mysterious and evocative and immediately plunges one into this presumably fictional construct. A very strong sense of place, even if it's difficult to discern the boundaries or to entirely plant one's feet on the ground. With the odd, somewhat violent interruption, the first piece establishes itself and then just sits there, breathing. Very lovely. The brief "walk wind rain", despite its title, is more truculent, the elements buffeting the mic. Again, it's quite rich, thick juicy sounds zooming through the frame, evaporating, replaced by rainwater gurgling through a gutter. Those burbles segue right into "ceiling mid level", where the dynamic level is reduced to a bit more than a simmer but, again, with periodic eruptions. That tension between agitated calm and outright violence explodes again on the final track, "in hull", the soft water drips dispersed by the odd, shuddering moan, as though the hull in question has run up against some unforgiving wood pilings. It's disquieting, uncomfortable.

A very fine recording, issued in an edition of only 50 so, hop to it.

ben owen

mpld - lacunae (winds measure)

"lacunae" is a DVD release by Gill Arno, operating under the nom, mpld, two tracks, a brief one under 5 minutes and one of 33 minutes duration. The opener establishes the mood and frame: black and white flicker images, initially much more dark than light, allowing the viewer only glimpses of what eventually coheres into a landscape, low-horizoned, with the square silhouette of a building on the left. The sounds are percolations, clicks and a thin whistling whine. As track two commences (seamlessly as far as the sound goes), the image shifts to a brighter, but still flickering one, again a landscape, sea in the foreground, the scene bisected vertically, on a slant, by an artifact of the camera, I think, a thick black wedge, sharp on the left side, blurred on the right. The flicker-image necessarily brought to mind the fine Richard Garet/Asher collaboration, "Melting Ground", though the visuals here are darker, "older" looking. As well, they're still images, though the flicker imparts an odd sense of motion and it takes some amount of discernment to realize that nothing is, in fact, moving. The motor of the boat from which this has been shot (? I presume) gains prominence as does the intensity of the flicker as more light enters the frame. The water journey continues, the scenes slowly changing, the gurgling of the propeller in water surging and subsiding, shifting pitch an timbre. Some 23 minutes in, the dark outline of a man is seen in a still shot, against a craggy shoreline; views of other passengers ensue. At about 28 minutes, there's a startling close-up of a washed-out facial image, mannequin-like, blank. During the waning moments, the soundtrack reduces to a soft burble while the visuals become gently abstract, fold into negatives.

"lacunae" is a haunting, lovely piece, adrift in memories and their sensual associations. Excellent work.

Andrew Hayleck - weekend (winds measure)

I was also sent this cassette by Andrew Hayleck but, as my only cassette deck sits in my car, I was forced to listen to it whilst traversing the wilds of New Jersey, not the ideal situation (auditorily or olfactorily). I can only say that it sounded pretty good, full of sounds that ranged from the urban street to insectile (it's compiled largely, if not entirely, from field recordings) and that both pieces, lasting about 13 and 11 minutes, flowed along very well, seemingly infested with detail, as near as I could determine amid the sounds of speeding vehicles.

winds measure

2011-06-20T19:36:00.007-04:00

Christian Munthe/Lee Noyes - Onliners (*for*sake)

When last I wrote about Munthe's music, in May of 2010, I remarked how difficult this "area" of improvisation is for me to evaluate, nestling as it does (to my ears) in what I think of as the post-Bailey tradition, an approach that still strikes me as a particularly forbidding tract to cultivate. As I wrote then, Bailey's shadow is so long that it's impossible not to hear him lurking around.

Munthe, now as then, negotiates the territory ably enough and, in fairness, seems to consciously leave the Bailey-esque boundaries as often as possible, but it's still a hard music for me to settle into comfortably.

That caveat aside, the duo with percussionist Lee Noyes is nicely spiky, Munthe seemingly scraping at his strings as much as plucking them, Noyes responding in kind (dare I say "post-Lovens?"). There is that efi conversational aspect which, again, isn't quite my cup of tea but I can easily imagine this appealing to differently attuned listeners. Unsurprisingly, I most enjoy the tracks, like the second one here, where the duo migrates the furthest away from the field.

Christian Munthe/Christian Jormin - Sedimentology (*for*sake)

From the same year (2009), another duo with a percussionist. It begins promisingly (again, from my point of view), sounding far more like an extension of Partch than Bailey, with ringing, bent guitar notes and spare percussion. But they quickly fall back into a not dissimilar territory than was the case with the Noyes recording--agitated, occasionally frantic, percussive playing with little space. The remainder skirts the borders between the verbose and the slightly more considered, always sounding better the nearer it is to the latter. Munthe does have a good sense of space and elastic pacing when he allows himself to recede a bit. As I said the last time around, I'd like to hear more of this facet of his work.

Anders Lindsjo/Christian Munthe - The Ping of the Pong (*for*sake)

Here, Munthe teams with another guitarist, Anders Lindsjo but, aside from the exchange of sound sources, the overall feel of the session is akin to the earlier duos (this one is from 2010). Scrabbling, slithery, scratchy, sibilant, sliding, scurrying....sustained, maybe even incessant. I take it for granted, I suppose, that the constant activity is something valued by the musicians, a burbling stew that hopes to yield a frothy richness, but I can't help but want to hear more consideration, more attentiveness to the room they're in, not so much to each other. Again, that's my mishigas, not necessarily that of those directly involved and, as with the other discs, they perform what they choose to perform pretty well.

Christian Munthe/Christine Sehnaoui - Yardangs (Mandorla)

My limited knowledge of Sehnaoui's work had also led me to place her, more or less, in the Bailey/Parker lineage and "Yardangs" (a tip of the hat to whoever chose the title for alerting me to such a wonderful word) does little to dispel that notion. She's very good, quite adept in covering a huge range of sounds though almost all are clearly within the saxophonic tradition, even when dealing in breath tones and spittle. The same might be said of John Butcher but he, often enough, has a conception that removes his instrument from being squarely in that tradition whereas Sehnaoui extends the existing one. Again, to this listener, things work better the sparer it gets, less well when things become agitated.

Again, I don't mean at all to disparage Munthe's work, it simply exists in a space that I don't find so conducive, that's aurally aggressive in a manner that I find too much "in your face", leaving the audience fewer listening options than I like having. Fans of the efi/Emanem persuasion will doubtless find the goings-on here very much to their taste and, to the extent I can honestly hear the music as such, it does a fine job at elaborating on that tradition.

*for*sake

Mandorla

2011-06-07T21:00:00.014-04:00

A few words on George Lewis.

Like many outside of Chicago, I first heard Lewis in the context of Anthony Braxton's "Creative Orchestra Music, 1976", particularly his solo feature on the infamous march piece. In the summer of '77, as I've written many a time, I first saw him live at the Tin Palace with an incredible Braxton quartet that otherwise included Muhal, Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall. Lewis, I guess 23 at the time, brought the house down on several occasions that day, once causing Brax to step to the side and deliver an exaggerated bow in his young trombonist's direction.

I don't have a distinct recollection of catching him around otherwise in those days though doubtless I'm forgetting some events (maybe with Anthony Davis?). I *do* remember him up at Environ, not a little pissed off at an interview with Albert Mangelsdorff that had been run somewhere, wherein the German had maintained that he was the only trombonist able to play overtones, Lewis wanting desperately to walk up to him, 'bone in hand, and proffer a rich, multi-layered blaat.

His first recording, from November 1976, is already remarkably self-assured and experimental, mightily impressive for a 23 year-old. The sidelong piece for three trombones is a fine mix of approaches, pointillistic alongside trad-referring chorales, bluesy wails amongst strangled squawks, etc., all cohering amazingly well, not sounding like a mere grab bag of effects, but as a considered walk through a catalog of available sounds and structures. Side two has three pieces more "in the tradition" and beautifully played, especially the closing "Lush Life", as pretty and imaginative a version as you're ever likely to hear.

I'm not precisely certain of the chronology of these four albums as the remaining three don't include recording dates, but they're all from 1977-79.

Lewis began using electronics (at least on record) around '77, a fairly unusual move (in the way he was using them) among AACM-affiliated musicians, presumably deriving from his knowledge of and working with people like Ashley and Behrman in conjunction with his increased activity at and eventual directing of The Kitchen. Ewart always struck me as an interesting player--often fantastic as part of an ensemble, a bit tending toward new-agey things on his own. Here, he's fine on flute, alto and bass clarinet, as well as percussion. There's a typically rambunctious first piece, well played but fairly standard for the time followed by a more fascinating piece, the pair dealing more in pure, extended tones, rubbing them up against each other. Lewis also contact mics his instrument. Lewis' "The Imaginary Suite", which takes up side two, is marvelous and a clear antecedent (if, in fact, it preceded!) the following recording; indeed, part two of this piece is virtually the same. Using low horns, percussion and a bed of electronics, Lewis fashions a music that was leagues away from what any of his AACM cohorts (with, perhaps, the partial exception of Anthony Davis) were doing while at the same time injecting enough grit and blues to easily distinguish it from the white, post-minimalist music of the period.

In years past, this was always on my Desert Island Discs list. Not certain if it would be today, but it's still damn great. Lewis, Davis, Ewart and Teitelbaum. Two sidelong tracks, the first, "Blues" a bit more raucous for a while before mellowing, the title track all rich, deep smoothness. For sheer sonic gorgeousity, this is tough to beat. But more, as said above, this simply not only stood out, but stood very much apart from the work of any jazz-based musician from the period that I can think of. The title track, following a wonderful, billowy beginning, settles into such a beautiful electronic bed, something that might be akin to the Eno of the period, but far deeper, from which Ewart's alto emerges like some wondrous fern, unfurling leisurely but inevitably, splintering, coalescing. And Lewis--well, there's no more beautiful trombone solo in jazz--if this is jazz--to my ears. Everything is in there. And, the piece just ceases with the trombone dangling out there. Soooo good. Hmmm, maybe still Desert Island....

It might just be that Lewis didn't release much more through the 80s, but this is the last recording of his I have on vinyl. On Lovely, no doubt having to do with his tenure as Director of the Kitchen. A quartet, as above with J.D. Parran replacing Davis. Very different from the Charles Parker disc, beginning with a swarm of percussion and double reeds (Ewart on musette, Parran on nagaswaram), an intriguing variation on minimalism. Low horns and electronics don't appear until about halfway through the first side, foghorn-like, buoys in the clatter. There's actually a brief snatch of what sounds like some very Rowe-ian guitar in there, presumably Teitelbaum-generated. It's a fascinating step, on the whole and, if I don't love it as much as the Parker homage, it indicated some intriguing branching out.

But...I'm not sure what happened. I think the next thing I have under his own name is the "Voyager" disc on Avant ("Changing with the Times", which I liked even less, was approximately co-synchronous--I see "Berlin Tango" listed at AMG, but I'm unfamiliar with that). Somewhere in those 10-15 years, his use of electronics had become, to my ears, overly academic and bland. Subsequent releases ("Shadowgraph" and others) didn't rectify the situation to these ears. I saw a performance of a work of his in Nancy in 2002, a quartet wielding light sabers that triggered sounds--not very good. (Although I relish the memory of hanging out in the wee hours at a table including George and Teitelbaum, the former proving to be a voluble storyteller and exceedingly friendly person). However, I did have the good fortune to witness a duo with the late Bill Dixon at Vision Fest in 2006 that was extraordinarily beautiful, thoughtful and sensitive. I've no doubt that I've missed things along the way from Lewis that I should have heard--I don't think I've encountered anything emerging from his professorship at Columbia, for instance. I was hoping for more from his book on the AACM as well.

Still, one of my favorite musicians, all things told, from this period and I'm extremely grateful for any number of musical memories, live and on record.

2011-06-03T18:22:00.010-04:00

I've sort of gotten in the habit of posting any semi-decent watercolors or drawings on facebook and letting them just slide down the page, something I find rather attractive, truth to tell. But since I have a rare grace period here (no discs to write up!) and I don't feel like talking overmuch about the three Kronos vinyls I've played recently, I thought I'd post a couple of groups of paintings, and a drawing, that seemed to work out well enough.

Last year, I did a set of a dozen t-shirt paintings, four each in red, indigo and light grey, which I enjoyed a bunch and which yielded maybe six decent pieces. So I decided to do a few of black cloth and found the batting average to remain the same: two I like very much, two with some redeeming qualities but some awkwardnesses as well. It also allowed me to deal with the problem of Payne's Gray, a color that absolutely beguiles one while wet but tends to dry in a cakey fashion, much to the painter's chagrin. The first three dealt with that by layering on indigo (mixed here and there with other blues and red) in a kind of oil-painting manner, as glazes. On the last, by working wet into semi-wet, I somehow managed to avoid the harsh dryness--one shot, no return--very happy with that one, the fourth as well as the second.

In any case, in order:

Last month, our dear friend Carol gave us an old scoop of some kind--perhaps a flour scoop?--she'd found in a shop in France. It's a lovely object, old white enamel with wonderful rust stains, and I quickly set about getting it down on paper. First a fairly simply drawing:

Then a fairly simple, if ill-drawn watercolor:

For some reason, I had an urge to work at it in, more or less, a monotone of some kind, and to concentrate on just parts of it. I kind of like the way these turned out:

All for now, thanks for looking.

2011-05-29T19:35:00.012-04:00

Paul Vogel - Godwit Songs (Munitions Family)

A cassette release (though I heard it on disc) of highly abstract electronics that bear, at best, only a passing resemblance to the song of the godwit--at least that's the assumption I'm making, though perhaps it's a singularly eai-oriented bird...In any case, it's very good: two tracks, the first being more aggressive and "noisy", beginning with some gentle, metallic pops before they're overwhelmed by harsh, contact-mic-ish scratches, severe whines and more. It never gets too dense--much more reminiscent of Sachiko M than most toiling in this area. Very solid, although things get more godwit-like on the second track, which I find all the more successful. It's really just as active but much quieter, yet within the compressed dynamic range, there's an enormous amount of space and differentiation; an entirely convincing sound-world is created, one that might well refer to the avian, amphibian and insectile life one observes with one's ear to the ground. Lovely.

Munitions Family

Michael Johnsen/Pascal Battus - Bitche Session (Organized Music from Thessaloniki)

Not bitching as such but, rather, recorded at a place called Bitch in Nantes, this is a cassette recording of pretty uncompromisingly harsh electronics (Johnsen-electronics, saw, Battus-magnetic pick-ups). Also a cassette release, also heard by yours truly on disc, also very noisy but there the comparison with the Vogel ends. It's very active, more percussive than you might guess given the instrumentation, full of squawks and screeches and, ultimately, unsatisfying to me. That blurry, subjective line between interesting and uninteresting noise gets crossed here, for me; I don't pick up as much consideration as I like--perhaps the pair is unconcerned with that or is choosing to operated in a more Mattin-oriented manner. Don't know, but as uncompromising as the music undoubtedly is, it also failed to grip me. Curious to figure out why the difference in personal appeal between this and Godwit Songs. Your mileage may vary.

Organized Music from Thessaloniki

Jonas Kocher - Solo (Insubordinations)

Solo accordion, that is, a form I'm admittedly partial to and Kocher, who I don't think I've previously heard (someone will prove me wrong, no doubt) [and, indeed, Richard, did--sorry about that] delivers admirably. What comes through more than anything else is a deep love of the instrument and the huge variety of sounds of which it's capable. A live set, Kocher is very patient, using a great deal of space, his choice of sounds running much of the gamut from virtually inaudible to full-throated squeeze-boxiana. The set sounds only loosely organized, as though Kocher is taking some delight in discovering the sounds as he happens on them, worrying less about the overall structure which nonetheless coalesces very nicely and naturally. There's an especially beautiful high drone portion about 20 minutes in that I could have happily listened to for a long time. Difficult to describe otherwise; not as extreme as Costa Monteiro on the same instrument but well to the left of Klucevsek et. al. A fine recording--don't let it slip under your radar.

Insubordinations

Kevin Drumm/Jérôme Noetinger/Robert Piotrowicz - Wrestling (Bocian)

One of two handsomely produced 45s issued by the Polish label Bocian, this one features two excerpts from a 2005 live show by what I guess one could call a power trio. Now, I'm not as big a fan of Drumm as many though I've no doubt this assemblage is quite capable of producing a healthy blast of noise, but they seem not so well served by these brief snippets. Artur Nowak, who recorded the event, mentioned how great the entire show was and it well may have been. Here, we get two parcels of ear-rending sound, mere peepholes into the concert. One can imagine its entirety, I suppose, and the samples are tasty morsels of the kind, but...I guess I have to question the strategy in such a release. It may have been a matter of this or nothing, though, and fans of the three musicians will doubtless consider it worth the expense. It does have its (short) moments.

Tomasz Krakowiak - AP (Bocian)

Krakowiak's 45 works far better with regard to this medium and, to these ears, is a stronger set of music. Two pieces lasting 4'59" with Krakowiak on cymbals and microphone. By description, it sounds like nothing unusual: one with stroking of the surface (with the mics? not sure), generating keening overtones and unaccompanied by low-end rumbling from some other source, the other a more delicate version of same, the deeper tones taking on a very poignant quality as though commenting on their higher-pitched neighbors. But the particulars of the pieces are somehow unique and very, very rich. I imagine there are countless rubbed or bowed metal recordings about--this is one of the better ones I've heard. Ok, I admit, I would have liked to have heard this music at greater length, but still.....

Bocian Records

2011-05-28T13:22:00.007-04:00

Jürg Frey - "Metal, Stone, Skin, Foliage, Air" (l'Innomable)

It's been a good year, thus far, for great recordings. Rowe/Malfatti, two amazing Pisaros and now this one.

Frey's piece, superbly performed by Nick Hennies, dates from 1996-2001. I think this may generally be the case, although I don't know Frey's oeuvre intimately enough, but his work tends to be more overtly active than many other Wandelweiserians. "Metal, Stone, Skin, Foliage, Air" is set forth in clear, readily delineated sequences yet manages to breath in a very natural manner, not to come off as didactic in any way. As with other work I've heard from him, there's an undercurrent of narrative that's as beautiful as it is extremely subtle. As with much wonderful contemporary composed music (especially that emerging from the Wandelweiser group), while experiencing it, any lines between the written structure and the acoustic, physiological effects produced by the instrumentalist(s) performing it are blurred; it's very difficult (for me, anyway) to parse out both while listening, something I can only do in retrospect.

Depending how one wishes to break it down, MSSFA is in 9-11 sections. I take it they're precisely time, though the breaks seem to fall on 10-second marks rather than whole minutes. Given general Wandelweiser aesthetics, it's a bit of a shock when the piece begins in full force with a light, steady, medium tempo rhythm is heard on what sounds like a glockenspiel or celesta, though the wavering pitch has me wondering whether it might be a home-constructed metallophone of some kind. Immediately, one hears the dual nature of the music: the structure (here, at first, simply the rhythm) and the larger effects of the sound, in this case a wealth of gorgeous overtones. I'm not sure if there was overdubbing employed of if it's possible that overtones from a single source can result in the kind of scalar sequences one perceives here; whatever, the case, it quickly draws you into the world. At 7:20, we shift to a different set of metal, though still in the same family, with differing overtones. The rhythm remains the same, constant. This portion also lasts for 7:20, giving one the initial view that we'd encounter a series of these equally timed portions. Wrong.

At 14:40, a haze of cymbalry occurs, though again there are high, ringing overtones that sound as though they could be from other sources. In any case, the explicit rhythm has ceased but the continuation of a metal sound acts as a bridge. Mirroring the first two sections, though not strictly duplicating them, at 19:30 the palette shifts, remaining in the brushed metal area (tam-tam?) but lowering the overall pitch, shifting the overtones. So, we've had four sections and, again, have a limited view of the overall structure, a view that once more is subverted when, at 24:20, the stones are introduced, maintaining the non-explicit rhythm (though there's something of a pattern in the sense of iterated circular movement as they're rubbed on what seems to be a metallic surface, perhaps a bowl. I should say, I think these are stones. So, in this transition, Frey has kept the general attack, changed the source.

At 29:10, there's the clearest break in the composition, what turns out to be the conclusion of the first half of the work. A light, tapping rhythm, more rapid than at the piece's beginning, is heard on a snare drum and it's metal side (again, guessing). It alternates in steady beats of 20/16 for a while, before morphing into 8s and 12s. Sonically simpler than the previously heard sounds, it's something of a palate cleanser, refocusing us on rhythm (in a fascinating way) while still holding on to vestiges of overtones in the delightful apposition and eventual mix of these two "dry" sounds. This is followed, at 34:10, by what I hear as a kind of fulcrum upon which the piece swivels, again branching out into unexpected (but right-feeling) directions, a rich, wonderful bass drum section, very low and resonant, the initial touch all but unheard, the rhythm found in the throbs.

The second half of MSSFA is even richer, phenomenologically more awe-inspiring than the first. Not to belabor the reader more than I've already done with all this descriptiveness, but for the final four sections, Frey introduces air (recordings of wind sounds? again, it's mysterious) and foliage and also, I think, combines them with previous sources, resulting in some terrifically complex sets of sounds; that is, complex when concentrated on but fairly simple in outline. Again, that dichotomy is utterly delicious as one mentally flits back and forth between appreciating the overall structure, the various substructures, the pure beauty of the sounds, their poetic distribution, the varied durations and rhythms--all of these elements combined in an unfussy manner so that one may either appreciate the whole or the parts, ideally not bothering to distinguish between them, just experiencing the work. I'll just add that the concluding section possesses an otherworldly beauty that's exceedingly rare.

A great, great recording. Thanks to Frey and Hennies.

Listen.

l'Innomable

available from erstdist

2011-05-28T11:18:00.005-04:00

Writer/musician/DJ/other-stuffer Kurt Gottschalk recently published a collection of short stories, "Little Apples", an often subtly interlocking set of brief, NYC-based pieces. They're quite good. He asked seventeen artists for images of apples, one of which precedes each story. One of those is by yours truly.

The stories are funny, quirky, sad, resonant. Read it.

Here's the book's facebook page

You can order/download it at lulu

2011-05-17T18:04:00.012-04:00

Five releases that feature Ernesto Rodrigues, recorded between 1999 and 2010 in various settings. Rodrigues has been heard on many, many discs, enough that I wouldn't presume to use these examples of anything definitive regarding a partial career arc, but in very general terms, they might be seen as limning some parts of a pathway. He's always, from what I've heard anyway, trod a line between (for lack of better shorthand) efi and eai, gradually casting aside some of the busier aspects of the former, but never entirely jettisoning that particular approach to group interplay.

His duo from 1999 with Jorge Valente (synthesizer and computer) finds the pair (Rodrigues on violin, prepared violin, signal processor) in very scratchy, skittery mode on one piece, loopy and bloopy on another, spacy here, harsh there, less, as I hear it, expansive in exploration of areas than unfocussed. Within this, there's still a good measure of call and response, in solid efi fashion, less of a concern with the space. Now, to my ears, this makes things not so interesting, but especially at the time of its release, I could imagine it being door-opening to someone coming out of the (say) Wachsmann/Turner environment.

Skipping ahead a few years to 2005, tp the extent this could be considered representative (a dubious assertion, perhaps), one hears large strides having been made. No doubt some of this is due to his compadres here: aside from son Guilherme (cello), there are Angharad Davies (viola), Alessandro Bossetti (soprano saxophone and Masafumi Ezaki (trumpet), forming an attractive strings/winds quintet. It has its scratchy and overcrowded moments, to be sure, but there's a far greater sense of space, of sounds unfurling. They get into a very nice, sandpapery drone area about midway through, the pops of the strings contributing an especially fine layer. At about 33 minutes, it also lasts for just the right duration--a good recording all around.

Another brief set (less than 27 minutes), from 2006, finds Rodrigues in the company of Gust Burns (piano), Vic Rawlings (Cello, electronics, loudspeakers) and David Hirvonen (electric guitar, electronics). Through most of the performnce, we're in scratchy drone territory, pretty restrained though somehow I feel it's less focused than I'd like to hear. Several minutes from the end, the music takes an abrupt turn into a harsher area, a nice tonic for what transpired earlier. In this instance, I may have liked to have heard more, further development, although that "coda" can also be understood as a tantalizing path, trod on for a little bit, opening to some glimpsed landscape but closed for now.

"Erosions" is a 2010 date with Rodrigues' viola accompanied by Wade Matthews' electronics and field recordings and Neil Davidson's rumbling acoustic guitar. Interestingly, I have the sense that, although the sounds here are quite full and active, the music is informed by quieter, more contemplative approaches heard or taken in the interim which have imparted a rich, breathing quality to the work, a sense of pacing and breathing that wasn't as prominent earlier (again, going from a meager number of samples but also of what I know of Rodrigues' prior catalog). I wasn't crazy about a previous Davidson solo effort but he fits in just fine here. In fact, the trio gels really nicely, creating a churning sound-world, with hints of drone, that results in one of the better recordings I've encountered from Rodrigues, well worth hearing.

Finally, from a bit later in the same year, we have "Suspensão",an double disc octet date with Rodrigues (viola,harp, metronomes, objects), Guilherme Rodrigues (cello), Gil Gonçalves (tuba), Nuno Torres (alto sax), Abdul Moimeme (prepared electric guitars, objects), Armando Pereira (toy piano, accordion), Carlos Santos (electronics, piezo elements) and José Oliveira (percussion). In some ways, it recapitulates the journey of the previous decade, a bit over-busy here but well integrated and spaced there (no mean feat with eight players). The second and fourth of the four lengthy pieces here work excellently, really establishing a true-sounding space (the accordion helping out greatly). The other two, perhaps intentionally, harken back to the busier, scratchier approaches of prior years.

Since first encountering the music of the Iberian improvisers, I guess more than ten years ago now, I've been impressed by the territory they (speaking generally) carved out for themselves, distinct in a number of ways from the improv being practiced elsewhere. As they, inevitably, began to mingle more and more with other European, Asian and American musicians, the music widened in many respects, perhaps lost some idiosyncrasy in others. But here, as elsewhere, it's heartening not to hear complacency, to continue to hear the searching, often along that difficult, slippery and occasionally very rewarding path between efi and eai.

Creative Sources

2011-05-10T15:53:00.011-04:00

Roberto Mallo/Miguel Prado/Ryu Hankil - Sannakji (Manual/Taumaturgia)

Mallo (alto sax, amplifier), Prado (plastic tapes, bags excited with motors) and Hankil (speakers with Piezo vibrations) craft a really nice, quiet, intense session here. The first of the two long tracks especially is abuzz with insectile sounds, sputters, faint whines, kind of like a small pool of water alive with bugs, gases, currents--low key but always very active. Space eases in as the piece progresses, the gases dissipating a bit, the crawlies burrowing under. It's a very fine subset of sounds, rather unique in some ways and quite bewitching, well arrayed.

The second track begins similarly, a delightful spread of ticking sounds especially, but expands out a good bit into a wider palette, particularly the amplified sax of Mallo, a high, dry tone, and some fairly loud electronic interruptions. It's somewhat more disjunctive that the earlier piece but that's likely a good thing--it may not feel quite as whole or "successful" but it shows the trio not resting once they've accomplished something, instead fanning out for other game. A fine job, an excellent listen and nice to see the Galician/Korean connection.

taumaturgia
manual
available from erstdist

No Hermanos Carrasco - Mímesis Intemperie (l'Innomable)

In which the brothers Carrasco (Edén, saxophone, hoses, bell, idea, production) and Nicolás (violin, objects, production mix) place themselves in two different environments, outdoors, and play discreetly. The first seems to be in or near an amusement park (aside from the cover image, there's nothing quite like the screams of children on roller coasters), the second (following a couple minutes of silence on disc) at some remove from concentrated activity, the sounds of birds, ducks and wind dominating those of motors and sirens. In each, rap and rock bass lines percolate through the mix on occasion, blurred, from a distance. Also in each, the Carrascos play fairly unobtrusively, sometimes making recognizable sounds on saxophone and violin, other times leaving it to the listener to guess if it's them or the environs.

Overall, I wasn't so struck by the outcome (Richard enjoyed it much more than I did, however). I found the instrumental playing, actually, a bit more self-conscious than I wanted to hear--the violin work on the second track, for instance), where it sounds overly imitative of birdsong. Not always--sometimes things blend finely, but often enough that it bothered me. I did find the pieces more successful when I stopped really listening for detail and just allowed all sounds to, as best I could, achieve equilibrium, more easily done in the amusement park track than the following one.

Nice idea and, possibly, one that could be more easily sunken into were one present at the time, ideally a distance away from the brothers, so as to let their sounds come and go more smoothly amongst the others.

l'Innomable

Available from erstdist

Jamie Drouin/Lance Austin Olsen - Absence & Forgiveness (Infrequency)

One of those all too rare experiences when an entirely lovely recording drops in from out of the blue, or Canada in this case. Though not much info is provided, both appear to be utilizing electronics of some sort and the three pieces are live improvisations. They share an extreme delicacy and quiet, combining faint sine-like tones with various other small sounds, buzzes, clicks, etc., all spread out, gently pricking the space, weaving this way and that. By description, it doesn't sound all that different from any number of efforts in recent years, but something about this one stands apart--the sensibilities involved are unique and, I get the feeling, simply more intelligent than many, making subtle choices that you don't come across often. You think you have things pegged then, on the second track, they don't so much as veer off as take an adjacent path that was there all along but untrod, introducing brief, low flutters and tiny snatches of spoken word, coloring the field in an unexpected but, retrospectively, absolutely appropriate manner.

The final track seems to bring in all these elements, but again, very low key, very subtly. Something about it just gels even more than the first two, feels even more a natural extension of one's room space. Really good, better than I'm able to delineate here.

It'd be a shame if this one gets overlooked. Do yourselves a favor and check it out.

infrequency

2011-05-05T10:20:00.011-04:00

Zeitkratzer - Zeitkratzer Plays PRES (Bôłt)

In which our indefatigable avant cover band takes on electro-acoustic works from the 60s and 70s by Polish composers, and wonderfully so. I should say, at the outset, that I'm entirely unfamiliar with the five composers represented here (Eugeniusz Rudnik, Elzbieta Sikora, Krzysztof Knittel, Denis Eberhard and Boihdan Mazurek)--my loss--so I've no idea how close or distant these realizations are frm the originals, but I'm guessing it doesn't matter too much.

It's a live recording and seems to have been done in one shot as there are a few seconds of ambient sound between tracks. Indeed, in his excellent liner notes, Michael Libera mentions this importance of Zeitkratzer member Ralf Meinz (credited with "sound") who apparently greatly augmented the product of this chamber ensemble on the fly, resulting in a true electro-acoustic work, once removed. Group leader Reinhold Friedl was given some thirty hours of music to study and from which to extract pieces to render. Those chosen, assuming the recreations are fairly accurate, tend more toward the minimalist/drone-y than one might expect from music of this area, though he points out that Polish electro-acoustic music had a very different character from German or French of the period.

In any case, the results are delightful, whispery, brushy swathes of sound, flurries of pizzicato on Sikora's "View from the Window" (an amazing sound), the deep, impressive thrums of Knittel's "Low Music" (a highlight here), the super-complex tingly drone of Eberhard's "Icon (for tape)", my other highlight and something I'd very much like to hear in its original form.

A fine recording, my favorite work yet from Zeitkratzer.

(Various) PRES Revisited (Józef Patkowski in Memoriam) (Bôłt)

An interesting notion: Disc 1 contains seven works by four Polish composers, more or less in the electro-acoustic area while Disc 2 consists of live interpretations of each piece (plus a group improvisation) performed at Cafe Oto in London by (in part or whole) Phil Durrant (violin), Mikołaj Pałosz (cello), Eddie Prevost (percussion), Maciej Sledziecki (electric guitar) and John Tilbury (piano). The set is dedicated to Józef Patkowski (1929-2005), who founded the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in 1957, remaining in charge there until 1985.

Again, the composers chosen, aside from Penderecki, are new to me and I've no idea how representative these works are, if they are at all. Bogusław Schaeffer's "Antiphonia" reminds me of quasi-similar vocal work by Penderecki (though who influenced who, I don't know), with clouds of voices intoning in harsh harmonies, ably (and, to my ears, more interestingly) reinterpreted by Phil Durrant on solo violin. [I noticed in the course of writing this, that Schaeffer's music was used by David Lynch in the soundtrack for "Inland Empire".] His "Assemblage" is an itchy piece constructed largely from pizzicato violin fragments (an 8-string device he designed himself) and prepared piano. As interpreted by Sledziecki, it's a little "No Birds"-Frithian, but not bad. "Collage", by Rudnik, fits more cleanly into other tape collage work of the era, an excellent, bumpy piece incorporating tape scraps rescued from the trash bin and some wonderfully fluttering, deep electronics. It's rendering by Pałosz and Sledziecki is ok, if a bit over-dependent on fuzzy guitar. I'd never heard Penderecki's "Psalmus" (1961) before, for electronics (possibly with vocal material as a source?) but it's of a piece with parts of his "St. Luke's Passion", eerie and haunting. Tilbuty's solo version on prepared piano is as gorgeous as one would expect but also sends him into an area subtly but distinctively different from his more frequent Cage/Feldman sensitivity--for Tilbury nuts, like yours truly, reason enough to get this set.

Mazurek's moody "Episodes", featuring flutes and (strings, is an extremely lovely, dark piece and is given a rich reading by Durrant, Prevost and Pałosz while his "Esperienza" is a powerful engine of explosives and drones; the quintet performance is lively and rich, featuring a wonderfully spiky Tilbury "solo". Rudnik's "Dixi" closes out Disc 1, all thin slivers of electronics, like dozens of aeolian pipes, coalescing and dispersing. Appropriately, it's interpretation is given over to Pałosz who produces an extraordinarily dense, harrowing and intricate reading, in many respects outdoing the original, no mean feat.

Disc 2 closes with an extended "Homage to Boguslav Schaeffer's Symphony". Not knowing the original, I can only listen as though to an improv (which this essentially seems to be) and say that it's an enjoyable enough one, if nothing to much out of the ordinary (though, again, lovely Tilbury)

The set includes an extremely informative booklet, with much info on the composers and their work. Again, an excellent job.

Bohdan Mazurek - Sentinel Hypothesis (Bôłt)

Well, now I know at least a little about Mazurek via this double disc set documenting work from 1967-1989. I'm loathe to write very much about it as I feel especially ill-equipped to comment on this area of music, one which I'm reasonably ignorant of, especially in bulk form like this. Individual pieces from different composers, as above, seem more graspable and, if you will, compartmentalizable. Much of Mazurek's work, as presented here, falls into what I hear as a genre of electronic music that I have difficulty differentiating among--taped electronic sounds arranged in collage fashion, a tendency toward the usage of histrionic voices, things that often hit me as dated and effects-driven. I'm sure I'm missing a good deal, not hearing these works in all their fullness.

Here, a good bit of Mazurek's music feels similarly. There are exceptions--"Canti", is quietly subtle and quite beautiful, made up of "low, vibrating string of [a] harp, noisy crowd in a room, woman's voice, processed whisper...". "Sinfonia Rustica" is odd in another way, an enjoyable bed of natural sounds with a strangely jazzy oboe occasionally keening atop. Others are half and half, like "Daisy Story" (1977-79), which meanders around for much of its 19+ minutes, then launches into a kind of minimalist explosion, though one that's more purely mechanical than rhythmic in a human sense a la Reich.

So while much of Mazurek's music doesn't particularly excite me, I can easily imagine listeners more devoted to this area finding a huge amount to enjoy here. As with the other Bôłt releases, the packaging is excellent and the liner notes very comprehensive. I'm quite happy to have received at least a little bit of exposure to the world of PRES and the Polish experimental scene in general.

Bôłt

2011-05-04T07:40:00.004-04:00

Cornelius Cardew - The Great Learning (Bôłt)

So we have, at last, a full recording of the Cardew piece, something that had previously only been available in fragments going back to an early issuance on Deutsche Grammophone. This one was performed during July 2010 by about 60 people, musicians and non-musicians alike (in adherence to the composer's instructions), most of them Polish and, fwiw, no names that I recognized.

A question immediately surfaces, however: Aside from documentation, of what value is a recording of a work like "The Great Learning" which, as near as I can determine, is a resolutely participatory piece? Even in live situations (and I know a performance organized by Nick Hennies is upcoming in Austin), I would think that the obvious thing to do would be to allow for extra seats, instruments and scores, encouraging audience members not to merely sit and listen but to actively engage with the work. Being at such an occasion and simply listening would strike me as missing the point. [Nick, in a facebook back and forth on Cliff Allen's page, gave reasons why inviting anyone who attends to sit in might not be such a good idea; the score is more complicated than I realized] Yet here are these four discs, some 270 minutes of sound, sitting in my room--what else to do with them?

So, with some reluctance, I sit here and try both to imagine myself amongst the crowd and at the same time, evaluate the music. Now, I fully admit, that I'd be uncomfortable participating in a performance of "The Great Learning", particularly the intoned, vocal sections. Chairman Mao, who was directly responsible for the deaths (largely by starvation but directly as well) for untold millions of people (between 40 and 70 million by most estimates) isn't someone I hold in very high esteem, whatever other worthwhile qualities he may have had. [As Nick points out below, I was greatly mistaken about this--for some reason, I always associated this text with Mao, not Confucius---my mistake] This may well color my appreciation of the sounds heard here as, almost inevitably, I vastly prefer the instrumental passages to the vocal ones. Not that these are "great" or terribly fascinating to listen to, but at their best (ok, yes, the percussion sections) one picks up on the communal excitement and sense of interpersonal unity that one assumes was one of Cardew's goals. Sometimes, as in Paragraph 2, with the drums and long-held voices, both combine quite effectively and one gets the sense of the kind of potential that's here. The more drawn out and indecipherable the words the better, as far as I'm concerned, so Paragraph 3 (which reminds me very much of parts of Centipede's "Septober Energy"; curious if Tippett drew inspiration from this work), all putty-like and elastic, functions well. All sections have their merits; I found Paragraphs 1 & 7 the most rewarding musically, 4, the least, fwiw.

Personally, I'm glad to have this document and I imagine anyone with a serious interest in Cardew will feel the same. But it's best considered as a part of his oeuvre, perhaps not so much as a recoding one intends to listen to as often, say, as the piano pieces or the better readings of "Treatise".

Bôłt

2011-05-01T09:28:00.009-04:00

Mark Wastell/Lasse Marhaug - Kiss of Acid (Monotype)

There's something about scraped or otherwise abused resonant metal that generates a sound of extreme complexity, the surface irregularities serving to carom the sounds within the basic structural regularity of the material, setting up a delicious, fractal yin/yang. By the same token, I imagine it's irresistible for those with a liking for electronic sound modification to use such metallic source material as a basis for further exploration and that's what Marhaug has done with Wastell's strokes here, the latter recorded in 2004, the augmentation done over the following year.

At first, Marhaug respects the quiet, shimmering tones of the tam-tam, layering the gentle billows atop one another, very much retaining the character of the source before hinting at mischief to come with an abrupt shard of noise. The second, longer section begins conservatively enough but gradually veers away from obvious sourcing, Marhaug adapting the sounds to his own ends, retaining all of the richness and complexity but extending the palette into other realms before retreating back into metallic clouds. It's simple on the one hand, but especially when played at volume reveals an enveloping mass of detail that's very entrancing. Good job.

As further inducement (or deterrent), the handsomely produced package includes wry liners from our own Alastair Wilson....

Lionel Marchetti - une saison (Monotype)

A two-disc set containing four previously released tracks, dating from 1993-2000. I was familiar with only one, "Portrait d'un glacier (Alpes 2173m) which appeared on Ground Fault about a decade ago and which I enjoyed very much then and still do today. It's the one work here that eschews vocalizations and, imho, is all the more powerful because of it.

Marchetti's pieces are always very complex, intricately constructed from widely disparate sources, weaving a dense dreamworld that, to my ears, is sometimes very convincing, but sometimes carries an artificial feeling that gnaws at me. The three works aside from the glaciated one all include the vocals of Hélène Bettencourt, operating in a moaning kind of manner all too reminiscent of the Shelley Hirsch's of the world, something it takes me some amount of concentration to get past. Still, Marchetti does manage to transcend this at times, notably in "L'oeil retourné" which builds wonderfully to an icy, clean plain. It's rocky, tough sledding for much of the music though ultimately worthwhile; one can sit back and marvel and the sheer ingenuity of the construction even if one isn't always moved by the outcome.

The release includes a booklet containing a fine essay by Michael Chion which also concentrates on the glacier piece which, imho, is the true gem here.

Alessandro Bosetti - Royals (Monotyoe)

I admit that, after very much enjoying his work with Phosphor and several earlier recordings, much of Bosetti's recent work, a good deal of which has involved vocals, has left me cold. This one, unfortunately, continues that lineage.

It's very odd, sounding like an updating (with more advanced technology) of the work Nicolas Collins or maybe Scott Johnson was doing in the late 80s. There's a text, more or less self-referential, spoken on the first piece by Fernanda Farah, whose voice is (I take it via computer) echoed on a piano in strict unison; most of the vocals are treated this way, I think--electronically iterated in real-time by various instruments. There's something almost archaic about this; I guess it was mildly interesting the first time one encountered it (Richard Teitelbaum?), but it seems somewhat pointless now. The music and rhythms also have that kind of 80s post-minimalist feel, a bit sterile, almost drum-machine-esque. When the explicitness of the vocals and rhythms dissolves, as it does later in that first track, the results are much more enveloping and inviting, while still possessing somewhat the quality, inherently and in fact sonically, of ice cubes swirling in a crystal glass. When he brings out his soprano, the piece begins to sound a bit Braxton-y, in a good way, maybe a sidewise elaboration of the Ghost Trance work, the undercurrent of voices used effectively. But then it returns to the structure used at the beginning and pales...

"Life Expectations" continues the use of vocals triggering music, apparently rearranged found conversation in this case a la Scott Johnson. When the leaden rhythm appears, again one can't help thinking 80s post-fusion; very hard to get past. "Dead Man" uses text by W.G. Sebald, in French, alternating with a kind of mocking razz from what sound like kazoos mixed with other instruments. Again, a piano precisely echoes the words, an effect that has grown tiresome.

So, I don't get it overall but it's well-crafted and I imagine has its audience.

Intriguing cover art by Kati Heck...

monotype

2011-04-29T17:21:00.006-04:00

Alessandra Rombolá/Michel Doneda - Overdeveloped Pigeons (con-v)

With Album Title of the Year neatly sewn up, we proceed to the music provided us by Rombolá (flutes, tiles, ceramic objects) and Doneda (soprano and sopranino saxophones, radio, objects), recorded in 2008. I've been familiar with Doneda's work for well over a decade but have only encountered Rombolá on a handful of occasions. Still, what expectations I had of the music turned out to fit pretty well, with some exceptions.

The pair concentrate on breath tones at the harsher end of that spectrum, whooshing through the space, augmented by valve pops, leavened by hummed multiphonics, all in a loose framework that maintains mood throughout each of the five pieces. Well handled, though the general approach isn't going to sound appreciably different than much of what we've heard from, at least, Doneda, for some time. Except for the non-woodwind parts, that is. By including Rombolá's ceramic work and whatever objects that Doneda is manhandling, especially on the first and last cuts, the pair manages to elevate the music into a new and exciting territory. There's something wonderfully chaotic about that clangor mixing with the long, reed-generated tones. Those tracks make the disc worth hearing and, I hope, bode well for future investigation.

Oh, and lovely cover art by Alejandra Calabrese!

con-v

Juan José Calarco - aguatierra (unfathomless)

A melding of field recordings near canals around Xochimilco (an area of Mexico City) and improvisational recordings with electronicist Pablo Reche. As has happened dozens of times in the past few years, I'm presented with a item that's tough to evaluate in any sensible way except to remark on how generally enjoyable and/or immersive (or not) I find the recording and whether or not there's something "extra", some emergent quality in the music that strikes a special sweet spot. Well, it does provide auditory goodness, Calarco's choice of sounds tending toward a mixture of wet wooliness, layers of hums, sloshes and warm, wooden knocks, basically straddling the areas implied by the disc's title. It's not overly dramatic, often subsiding into a quiet mix of delicate, everyday sounds, which is welcome. Is it more than that? Not that I can hear. This isn't necessarily a criticism as, in essence, it's perfectly enjoyable to hear, but once heard, it doesn't leave me with questions, hasn't incited any new avenues of thought.

unfathomless

2011-04-28T18:05:00.006-04:00

Esther Venrooy - Vessel (entr'acte)

Recordings of installations can, of course, be problematic, some more than others. On this and the next one, we find one that manages to work superbly on it's own digitized feet and one that seems more incomplete.

Venrooy's "Vessels", which was installed in the Diapason Gallery, Brooklyn, in 2008, is sourced from the varied and often behemoth sounds of cargo ships on the river Waal in the Netherlands, enhanced here and there and overlaid in elastic, viscous patterns. If anything, it might recall some of Olivia Block's work with similar sounds ("Heave To") but Venrooy's sensibility is very much her own. The ultra-deep mix of hums, whirs and echoing bangs that begins the piece evolves into sloshing water and the low thrum of submerged engines. That thrum takes over, a wonderfully complex and rich sound, enveloping the space (I can imagine how this would have worked in situ!), eventually subsiding back into a set of ringing tones and distant aqueous clangs.

The recording runs only a half-hour, but it's time well spent and an impressive addition to Venrooy's already outstanding ouevre.

entr'acte

Eric la Casa/Jean-Luc Guionnet - Reflected Waves (Ondes réfléchies) (Passage d'Encres)

Another discafication of an installation, this one staged in Melbourne in 2005. To these ears, though not without its attractions, it suffers more than the Venrooy by being heard apart from its intended environment; one track here is apparently an unedited room sample, the other was perhaps constructed from various extracts. One gets a strong impression that the spatial character is a defining element, that having the organ chords stemming from one location or several, the voices from others, the bangs and clangs from still others would have a vastly different effect than hearing them issue from a pair of speakers. Putting oneself in the frame of mind to listen as though one was sharing the space helps and it's entirely possible to imagine walking through a gallery filled with these reflected waves. Given that, I don't find the installation quite as compelling as Venrooy's. The organ, presumably Guionnet, is quite nice, oozing through the space, enveloping disembodied voices and all else in its path. Those voices, especially when presented as cold excerpts enunciating single, apparently unrelated words, grow tiresome. Other found vocal tapes, such as a Chinese woman urging a sale of some two dollar item, a couple of pop song shards and a horde of demonstrating union workers chanting slogans, seem haphazard and non-illuminating. But saying all this, it seems, in this case, especially futile knowing how much I'm necessarily missing.

The disc lists a DVD mpeg some 9 1/2 minutes long, but I couldn't get it to play on any system--Region 2? The release also includes a very handsome, full-size booklet documenting (in French) the installation.

Passage d'Encres (though I don't see mention of this release there, as of 4/28)

2011-04-24T12:40:00.005-04:00

(photo: Yuko Zama)

Radu Malfatti/Keith Rowe - Φ (Erstwhile)

In some ways, the cover image sums things up very well. A piece of fibrous paper that's been subjected to a world of wear and tear, resulting in extreme unevenness, holes, tatters. Yet Rowe has drawn on this erose surface as straight a line as he can, as purely as possible, an impossible task given the terrain. The ratio of top to bottom sections isn't quite that golden (1.618 to 1) but perhaps that's also something felt to be ideal but, in reality, unachievable, like an unbleeding, uninterrupted line.

Rowe is a man of very strong opinions as is, I suspect, Malfatti. While open to all manner of challenges, there are certain premises to which he holds fast and the Wandelweiser group, generally speaking, doesn't accept them. Given the popularity of these composers in recent years among many of the same listeners who hold Rowe's work in high esteem, he's spoken about his misgivings a bit, acknowledging certain positive aspects of the music while feeling it's overly restricted in others, as though (my interpretation of his thoughts, possibly not his own) their music is but one subset of possibilities and unnecessarily limiting in and of itself. So an encounter with Malfatti, a leading exponent of the Wandelweiser aesthetic, was bound, at least on Rowe's part, to engender an amount of tension. And they run headlong into it on the very first piece.

The three-disc set, an extraordinary document, is beautifully structured: two pieces by composers each musician admires on the first disc, one composition by each musician on the second and an improvisation on the third. Malfatti chose to bring along Jürg Frey's "Exact Dimension Without Insistence". I've no idea whether or not he gave any consideration as to how anathema a piece like this would be for Rowe to perform. After all, the guitar part calls for eleven repetitions of a specific pitch, at preordained times over the course of 20 minutes. While he had often performed graphic scores over the years, I'm not sure there had been an instance of Rowe playing precisely notated music since...Amalgam, in 1978? The notion runs counter to several of his deepest precepts, including the freedom to inject whatever sound one chooses (or not) at moments one deems appropriate in the context of the room (and more). Much less having to tune his guitar! Or at least one string. The piece ended up taking the better part of the day to record, such was his difficulty in "just" playing these eleven notes and in the end was compiled by Christoph Amann from fragments derived from several stabs. To my ears, however, the result was worth it. As with much of Frey's music I've heard, there's an underlying sensuousness, even a plaintive quality that comes through the severity of the score in a way I think of as Beckettian. I can't help hearing Malfatti's three notes (I might add that though the score calls for three evenly spaced quarter notes, Malfatti, more often than not, allows a slight bit of extra time between the second and third, indicating he's perhaps not so subservient to the score either) as a kind of call: "Where are you?", with Rowe's single response, "Here." Frey's sequencing, sometimes alternating, sometimes not, is wonderfully poetic and touching; one almost expects an answer from the guitar after the trombone call; when it doesn't occur, you're worried. Similarly when the lone guitar note is sounded three times with no reply. So much drama wrung from so little material.

Rowe brought along Cardew's "Solo with Accompaniment", a piece he knew deeply and containing a "solo" part that would seem to suit Malfatti well, which is to say, one consisting of single, lengthy lines. I'm not at all sure how one is to interpret the score, with its tic-tac-toe-like grids, except to assume that the accompanist, here Rowe, has a great degree of freedom as to how to render the markings therein. Rowe is marvelous here, using some manner of electronics (I've no idea what, exactly) to generate piercing, short wave radio-ish slivers, rich, deep lows and crunchy tinkles that may be scouring pad sourced. The two often sound in quasi-unison, Malfatti's sonorous, pure horn the perfect foil for Rowe's scattered abrasions, yin/yang, Malfatti steadfastly tracing that line across the ravaged, bedraggled soundscape.

The score for Malfatti's "Nariyamu", as reproduced in the tray behind disc #2, appears to be fairly simple (only one page is shown--I'm not sure if that's it in its entirety or not) but its realization is very complex and subtly beautiful. The essential element is unison or near unison held notes by trombone and electronics, Rowe generating a multi-layered buzz, crescendo and decrescendo, more or less matching Malfatti, with a substantial rest between sequences. But right from the beginning, there are tiny activities occurring alongside: what initially seems like Malfatti gently tapping his fingernails against his horn as well as drip-like sounds. A kind of regularity nonetheless accretes via the main sequence, but several minutes in, this falls apart, orients itself, re-coalesces, continues on. As in much of Wandelweiser-area music, the real beauty lies in the poetics of the choices made--where to alter the schema, where to allow extra silence, what groupings to choose, how to subtly inflect the sounds generated. "Nariyamu" does this brilliantly, becoming a living, breathing creature and, going out on a limb, I can hear in Rowe, given somewhat more freedom of exposition, a growing appreciation of this aspect of Malfatti's, and by extension, Wandelweiser's work.

Rowe brought along his "Pollock '82", a new set of pages created for this session. Unlike the Malfatti or Frey scores, his is pure graphism, consisting of actual details from Pollock paintings, reproduced in ink by Rowe and laid out, intuitively spaced, on staves. Though the score, as seen beneath the tray for Disc 3 here, includes several sections of dense blottage, the rendition as heard continues along the sparse, quiet path previously followed, albeit with an absence of clear pattern. Malfatti, who had introduced percussive elements in the prior piece, here presents breath tones and windy growls for the first time; he still pretty much maintains that respiratory rhythm, exhaling to produce sounds, inhaling in silence, a slow, subtle pulse. Rowe keeps his palette light, using high, scattered tones, the odd plucked note, scraps of static and tracings of contact mic, as though these particular spatterings of paint are microscopic portions of the whole. It's a very strong, very complex performance, the intricacies of which I think I'm only just penetrating.

The improvisation making up Disc 3 is easily the most difficult to write about or, for me, to grasp. I do have the impression that it's Rowe at the helm to some degree. He's operating in what I think of as "Twombly mode". As opposed to the Rothko-inspired "tingeing of the space" approach of several years ago, I get the sense of him encountering a very large, white canvas upon which he make art marks, leaving much of the surface untouched. Dots, squiggles, smears, a dab of REO Speedwagon. Not that Malfatti is merely tagging along, hardly so. He supplies much of the color, the stains of hue that give depth to Rowe's marks and often links to surprising emotional power as when he inflects, up or down, his low trombone tones so as to recall whale song. The space is so vast, so little to hold onto. I'm not sure there's another improviser willing to cede so much space as Rowe though, at least in this respect, he fits right in with the Wandelweiser aesthetic, an arrival at a similar point via differing paths. There's a quiet monumentality achieved here, an appreciation of the sheer largeness of space, with a tacit acknowledgment of how little, how subtly, we affect it. Again, this piece will doubtless reveal more and more for years to come.

A great, great recording.

Erstwhile