Paul Abbott/Daichi Yoshikawa - Broken Tree

When does a harsh, disruptive, oddly-angled and altogether difficult set of music not work for me? And why? Damned if I know but this one fails to do the trick. I was thinking, while listening, of sets I've heard fairly recently by, for example, Richard Kamerman and Reed Evan Rosenberg (Tandem Electrics) that might, broadly speaking, fall into a similar area but which I greatly enjoyed. Something to do with the perceived flow, maybe, the internal logic that somewhere well below the surface, makes sense to me. Here, I could never really pick up any proper thread, which could well be my failing. Or perhaps Abbott and Yoshikawa intended no thread to be available. Maybe it's that too large a percentage of the sounds for my taste, evoked a kind of saxophonic emotionalism, the wailing feedback-y moans. Too wiggly here, too meandering there. Happily, you can listen for yourself and determine I know not whereof I speak (or hear):

authorized version


(Various) physical, absent, tangible (Contour Editions)

Good news: Richard Garet has started his own label, Contour Editions, and the first release is a compilation of five artists, once again--as has beenthe case quite often recently--all new to me.

OK, anyone who knows me knows how short my patience is for noms and can imagine what it took for me to get past a piece from someone going by the moniker, i8u (count to ten, Brian) but damn if this isn't a wonderful work. She (France Jobin) has been around for a while, actually, I've simply never encountered her that I can recall. "Rarefaction" is a drone piece but one containing exceptional warmth and wit. After several minutes, she introduces this luscious seesaw between a soft high hum and a super-low loud one, the relationship between the pitches sounding oddly familiar as though extracted and mutated from some pop standard. Very nice. Christopher Delaurent's two works are darker, airy rumbles spiced with poppage, that convey a fine, slate-like texture. Not bad, though maybe a bit similar to much other music in this area.

Gil Sansón presents a suite of eight shortish pieces that mix field recordings with electronics, some of which are very lovely on their own while others drift a bit aimlessly. Their relatedness, as well (perhaps intentionally) seems tenuous, though they're the kind of work that I feel I'd enjoy far, far more in situ, in a sizable room, rather than over speakers. The final track, by Brian Mackern and Gabriel Galli closes the disc out in excellent fashion. 14 minutes of Morse Code-infused, gritty hum, whine, whistle and assorted noise that is absolutely convincing and corporeal. Even the warped music box-y cum Jarrett-on-Fender-Rhodes-with-Miles sound emerges some ten minutes in manages to work. Good stuff, want to hear more from this pair.

contour editions

Jim Haynes - Kamchatka (Contour Editions) Admittedly, I can't heard the word, "Kamchatka", without thinking of the phrase, "Kamchatka to Irkutsk"...and, humorously enough, I just now read Haynes' liners and he refers to the same board game. :-) He does actually intend the two works here as a kind of imaginary portrait of the area, found on the northeast rim of the Asian continent, opposite Alaska and Western Canada, a relatively barren mass with some volcanic activity. The first piece, "lilith", seems to have been constructed from odd sounds foraged from short wave radios, noise from between bandwidths, unusual emanations, etc. I sense some acoustic contributions as well, along the lines of rubbed and scratched objects, but I could be mistaken. The atmosphere is bleak and obscure; Richard Garet, in his notes on the Contour Editions website references Tarkovsky's "Stalker" and if the aesthetic weight doesn't come quite so close to that masterwork, the tone is not dissimilar. On the one hand, it has a rough-hewn, steady state feel but never settles into any kind of easy haze. On the other, though, it doesn't quite sustain the level of tension to carry its full 25 or so minutes, leaving this listener intrigued but unsated.

"rocks, hills, plains" doesn't stray too far from the first piece except that it's lined with layers of soft, moody drones, though they're "behind" a series of blunted crackles, and barely-there whines. I end up feeling about the same--moderately interesting and stimulating, but lack the edge and tautness its elements seem to imply. Perhaps the film performance of which it was originally part would have supplied the missing piece. Contour Editions

Michal Rataj- Spectral Shapes (audiotong) I gather there's a whole passel of composers working in what is often called "acousmatics" (a term I first heard in relation to the music of Gottfried Michael Koenig, if I recall correctly) which technically refers to music emitted via loudspeakers but, for me, has come to indicate work that can trace a direct lineage to people like Koenig and Dik Raaijmakers. My problem, such as it is, arises when the kind of power and imagination present in the work of those two (for example) fails to appear in a contemporary variant, the fall-off tends to be rather steep.

Michal Rataj, who I've not heard before, engages very much in that vernacular, which pull this listener straight back to the mid 60s and early 70s--the ringing, brassy whooshes, the backward gasps, the held, chiming interior piano chords funneled through one filter or another; it's a language that feels insular, regardless of how smoothly enunciated. A work for flute and electronics sounds very much like something one may have heard in 1978 from, say, Anthony Davis and James Newton, with far fancier technology. And the exposition here is very good, there's really no finding fault with it; it's something that would doubtless delight the academic musical world for which this is the lingua franca. I don't mean to sound harsh. Doubtless this will engage many a listener but it leaves me cold, a technical tour de force in which I rarely discern a reason for being that moves me. When Raaijmakers was working, there was, at the very least, a palpable sense of excitement at new discoveries, a feeling of danger. In the decade when these pieces were composed, it was more a matter of opening a "drawer", dusting off an approach and applying it. However artfully managed (and, again, I should stress that Rataj appears to be extremely competent in this area), that frisson of adrenaline is tough to recapture. audiotong

Richard Garet/Asher Thal-Nir - Melting Ground (contour editions)

I saw this video back in August of 2008 and wrote about it then--it's very welcome to have it back now and to be able to view it multiple times at leisure. To recap, Garet shot flickering b&w footage from a helicopter of the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska. It's an uninterrupted shot, some 40 minutes long. The camera's gaze replicates that of a calm but extremely interested observer, not blankly staring but occasionally panning to areas of extra interest, slowly, generally keeping the horizon line near the top of the frame, often outside it completely. One easily slips into the mindset of this observer, ceding control. The flicker is most pronounced in the lighter regions and, as there's enhanced contrast in place much of the time, that flicker becomes a major element (though it's not something I recall dwelling on when I first saw it, oddly). Asher's music is piano-sourced, the mics placed inside the body of the instrument, resulting in a resonant, richly-muffled sound, the music itself dreamy in a way that recalls Eno's "On Land" (a comparison I'm sure I've made before--but I think Asher's has, at the same time, a different character, one I like at least as much). There's a wonderful contrast between the music and the grainy rawness of the imagery. Those images themselves flit back and forth between the harsh, cold reality of rock, ice and snow and entirely abstract, pulsating patterns.

A very beautiful collaborative work, highly recommended.

Now, if they'd only release that Asher video shown that same evening 2 1/2 years ago...


Alfredo Costa Monteiro/Ben Owen - frêle à vide (contour editions)

A strong, tough recording from Costa Monteiro (walkman feedbacks, shortwave radio) and Owen (microphone, mixer, op amp, tone arm, sw/mw radio). Four tracks, sustained noise (though I don't read them as drones)--more or less from static or humming regions with an isolated feel. I'm not sure whether this was a long-range interaction or not (I suspect so) but the music carries a kind of detached sense which I think works very well. I've been reading a lot on Robert Ryman lately and found myself relating this music to his paintings insofar as allowing the material to simply speak on its own, with no interpretive intermediary. Similarly, the blankness and thereness of these sounds causes one to shift away from Costa Monteiro and Owen as such and to just experience the sounds instead of talking about them, contextualizing them, etc. Which I'd invite folks to do as it's very rewarding.

Good, raw work.

contour editions

Ralf Wehowsky/Anla Courtis - Aseleuch Tendrradero (Noise & Hate/Ultra-Mail Prod.)

I never really got around to listening to Reynols, just a snatch here and there, so Courtis is pretty much an unknown to me. And my knowledge of Wehowsky is limited to "Tulpas" (which I like a lot) and the odd collaboration (Drumm, Korber, etc). Perhaps bear that in mind when I extol this release--to me, it's extremely fresh and exciting, though I've no idea where it sits in their mutual canons. Using guitars, electronics, tapes, etc., they construct collages of a sort, often with abrupt and unexpected breaks, using a language derived from classic tape manipulation but with a significantly different palette, though I'd be hard-presed to describe just what that palette is. The tracks are largely between three and seven minutes long (in addition to two around 30 seconds), allowing for each to exist as a self-contained composition. I'm almost tempted to say "song", though there's nothing melodic or beat-drive here. Still, I can imagine a voice over much of this material; through the backwards tape, the modulations of (I think) wind howls and such, you can just about reconstruct vestiges of a buried and decaying song.

There's an enormous apparent depth to the layers and the elements within are widely varied in composition, color, dynamics and velocity, making for an entirely absorbing listening and repeat-listening experience. There's also no sense of posturing of showing off--everything seems purposive, several ideas per track, rich but not cloying. They avoid that difficult-to-describe tipping point between excessive activity and...intensive activity, the kind one would find in a handful of soil. Wonderful usage of silent gaps in a piece like "Bal Lileste Ajtdorbeg" where the last half doesn't so much as ebb away as fracture into sparse shards. (btw, I think the titles are in a made-up, almost Borgesian language, though sometimes they seem related to Spanish).

I'm not doing a great descriptive job here, I realize. All I can say is, if you loved "Tulpas", you'll likely love this, though I have little idea what fans of Reynols will think--though I'm guessing most of them will as well. It stands apart, at least a bit, from the general trend and it does so in a very exciting way.

Neither Love & Hate nor Ultra Mail Prod. seem to have a working website, but your can use this one to order:

Discogs

You can also treat yourself to a taste here

Richard Garet - Blank Tape Positive (Contour Editions)

Garet's latest involves the manipulation of modified magnetic tape playback machines, digging into its internal mechanisms, causing the machines to operate irregularly and beyond their original capacities. The results, in two tracks of about 30 and 27 minutes, is somewhat reminiscent of Lescalleet's now classic tape recorder set-ups in that there are various pulses coursing through the pieces because of iterative properties of the device but these are buried and often masked by the noise elements atop which range from juicy thrums to raspy pops and much in between. That sense of propulsion provides cohesion but can also become a bit insistent over these longish pieces. There's substantial change in the colors involved, though the forward drive rarely wavers. Even when things grow a bit spacey, as in the ending minutes of the first track, there's still something of a push in force until it finally collapses, a lonely hum/hiss all that remains. Track 2 begins in a more diffuse, abstract manner, but settles into a chittering semi-repetition, a but more intense and harsh than the first, with some fine, obtrusive clacking elements and some excellent, wild intrusions latte in the track, high-pitched tape gone nuts. It's one of those dicey propositions that depends on how much fascination the listener finds in the kind of sounds employed, in that there's a similar sheen overall. I go back and forth, sometimes immersing myself pleasurably, sometimes wishing I was hearing this in situ, where I'd truly be surrounded by the activity. Garet's music has often accompanied video by himself or others and I could see 'Blank Tape Positive' serving that role very well.

Contour Editions

Rodolphe Loubatière/Pierce Warnecke - Non-Lieu (Gaffer)

Snare and electronics ruckus, most of the time very active and in skittering mode, Loubatière whipping around the snare (presumably with various implements and attacking from different angles) while Warnecke has an unusually light touch on electronics, more or less approximating the snare's pitch and sound range. Moments of quietude, when they occur, are welcome and very well handled. But overall it's spiky, squeaky, non-stop improv. At it's best, as in much of "Espace Occulte" (my favorite track by far), they achieve a kind of combustible quality that's crunchy and fine. As with many a release, however, I found myself searching for moments of respite and consideration, pieces that might enhance their best, more energetic playing.

Gaffer

Loubatière

(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.

A quartet of releases from Mikroton and one from an affiliated label, Laminal.

NG4 Quartet - A Quartet for Guitars (Mikroton)

There are times when one has too much information and at least part of me would have liked to have had less with regard to this release, even if that would have led, in all likelihood, to some embarrassing evaluations. But as it happens, Rowe had talked about this quartet (himself, Anthony Taillard, Emmanuel Leduc and Julien Ottavi, all on guitars and electronics) for much of the last year and a half. At first, he only let on that it was a guitar quartet and that the musicians were meeting, when possible, once a week to rehearse it and that by "rehearse" he meant not only playing but talking quite a bit and examining preconceptions. He stressed how difficult but rewarding the process had been. Then, in June, he discussed the premises behind the work (which you can read about on the Mikroton site, linked to below) quite openly, a nurturing of, among other things, his long held notion of the value of failure but also, I think, of the lack of rigor to which current improvisatory/experimental music is held, by musicians and critics alike (something I'm surely guilty of myself). He wanted the work to be something that was impossible to describe with adjectives like "gorgeous", "strong", etc., anything positive, really, as paradoxical as that aim might be in the sense of the impossibility of jettisoning prior knowledge, of trying to play badly. I kept thinking of an able, adult visual artist attempting to draw like an eight-year old; can't be done, imho. This information doubtless saved me from coming at this project from an entirely erroneous direction but, I have to say, I would have liked to have been able to do so, whatever the subsequent chagrin.

The piece is loosely based, as you can read, on the third movement of Haydn's String Quartet Op. 20, No. 1, at least so far as the five track lengths which follow the one-minute, silent "Affectuoso e sostenuto" (tender and sustained, here referring to the expression on the face of the first violinist of the Lyndsey Quartet, Peter Cropper, as he performed the work), all of them about nine minutes long. They bear the titles, "Ineptitude", "Awkward", "Gaucheness", "Underwhelm" and "Failing". These pejorative qualities don't have anything to do, as near as I can determine, with either amateurishness or the overly slick aspect of some musicians; it's not like they engage in Al DiMeola impressions here. More, I think it has to do with what Rowe perceives as failures on the part of improvising musicians to do so with, for lack of a better word, aptness. This, depending on the situation, can range from graceful delicacy to brutal heedlessness, though I imagine Rowe would have that range of qualities inherent somewhere in the created sounds. This is a very personal distinction on his part, one encountered by anyone who has spent some time with him and listened to his criticism of a given performance; sometimes I can understand what he hears, often the degree of discernment is lost on me. Here, he uses a simple time cell structure based on nine one minute segments for each track, the number of events for each player occurring within a given minute ranging from zero to nine, progressively, the specific events and, I think, the minute sequences, shuffled randomly (perhaps a gentle nudge at the Cage and post-Cage Wandelweiser habit of using similar structures). The sounds are roughly the sort one encounters routinely in free improv contexts (there's a bit of rockish fuzz thrown in now and then as well) but more heard by me as a catalog rather than any purposeful or probative series; I would think of that as one of the work's "failures", not sure if it was on Rowe's mind. The final result is, indeed, underwhelming if one looks at it that way, less so, naturally, if standing back and considering Rowe's premise. It's hard to fail that badly when you know so much. Unless, by blatantly failing, you've managed to lurch into new, potentially fertile territory. Maybe so.

Keith Rowe/Alfredo Costa Monteiro/Ilia Belarukov/Kurt Liedwart - Contour (Mikroton)

No need for much procedural analysis of this one, just an hour's worth of your plain, old-fashioned improv gathering with Rowe (guitar, electronics), Costa Monteiro (accordeon, objects), Belarukov (alto saxophone, objects, ipod, mini-subwoofer, mini-speaker) and Liedwart (objects, electronics). IT's all very subdued and all quite good really, Belarukov once again impressive in his reticence while still often using pure tones, no mean feat. Though I may be mixing him up here with Costa Monteiro if the latter is occasionally summoning similarly pure tones from his squeezebox. No matter, ore to the point that each of the two tracks breathes freely, stretches out quite ably. One notices, after dealing with the guitar quartet release that that one dealt pretty much in short phrases while this is about long-held sounds, much to its benefit. One wonders about similarly "awkward" playing using this formation, if it's more difficult to "underwhelm" in a more stasis-prone environment. Whatever, it's an excellent set, focussed and considered, working up to a subtly exciting rumble towards its conclusion. Well worth hearing.

Kazuhisa Uchihashi/Noid/Tamara Wilhelm - I Hope It Doesn't Work (Mikroton)

A set of live recordings from 2013 by the trio of Uchihashi (guitar, daxophone), Noid (cello) and Wilhelm (DIY electronics).

Mostly at a medium-low dynamic level with medium a medium amount of activity, Noid's cello providing some grain, and longish lines, Wilhelm's electronics flitting back and forth between cracked electronics sounds (nothing too harsh, though) and smoother glides and blips, Uchihashi contributing unobtrusively to the flow, adding color and accents. All pretty enjoyable if not so distinguishable from other ventures in a similar field. Nothing particularly to latch onto; the music slides into the foreground, occupies the territory with some grace and invention, glides away. That could be a good thing, but it sounds like the type of event, were I in attendance, where I might have situated at some remove, allowing the music to blend in with other surrounding sounds. And there's value in that. Otherwise, hard for me to say much about it. Andrew Choate, in his review of one of the live sets (which you can see on the Mikroton site), writes, "...it was clear that this band had no identity, and was therefore actively constructing it in front of us." That might be it.

Angélica Castelló/Billy Roisz/Burkhard Stangl/Dieb 13 - Scuba (Mikroton)

A work written by Dieb 13 and performed by Castelló (amplified subcontrabass paetzold recorder, electronics), Roisz (electronics), Stangl (electric guitar) and the composer (turntables, klopfer--unless that's a German soft drink, I'm confused; but image google paetzold recorders for some cool pictures).

I haven't been a huge fan of much of what I've heard from Dieb 13 in recent years, so I approached this release with some degree of caution, but I'm happy to report that it won me over completely. A piece composed along a timeline which also gives the players room for improvisation, the overall sound does indeed evoke the underwater world, particularly via the enormous recorder wielded by Castelló, Stangl's lovely if limited guitar chimes acting as glints seen up on the surface. The whole piece is very understated, various elements, including voices (some reciting numbers as in old East German coded radio transmissions) floating slowly through, glimpsed and then reabsorbed by the sea. There's even a fairly visceral depiction of air intake through a breathing tube, augmented by a hiss (other apparatus) and the odd ping (passing fauna). It's all quite coherent and deftly executed; whatever the parameters were, excellent choices seem to have been made by composer and performers alike, always leaving a thread, never overburdening it. It possesses that wonderful quality of staying in one place yet being endlessly, subtly different. A happy surprise for me, thoroughly absorbing, and one I highly recommend checking out.

Triac - In a Room (Laminal)

Triac being Augusto Tatone (electric bass), Marco Seracini (piano, synth) and Rossano Polidoro (laptop). Soft soundscapes, inescapably Enoesque, but bearing enough grain to maintain interest. The four tracks drift by pleasantly, no complaints really just impossible to single out particulars from the clouds and hard to think of much here that wasn't accomplished on "On Land", for example.

Mikroton

Laminal

Josef Anton Riedl - Klangregionen 1951-2007 (Edition RZ)

First, an admission: I've always had a certain amount of trouble with, generally speaking, electro-acoustic composers who came of age in the 50s and 60s and operated out of a certain kind of European classical sensibility. Not all and not always (for example, Xenakis escapes this purgatory entirely) and not even consistently among a given individual. Something about the typical magnetic tape sound maybe, its steeliness or just its recognizability would gnaw at me. Much of it, despite the obvious breadth of sounds, timbres etc. sounded to much "of a piece" to me, the gestural aspect carrying too much of the lab, not enough of the street. I had a nagging sense of a string of effects; if the structural aspect of it did in fact involve toroidal planes and solenoidal vector analysis, it failed to capture my interest. This is quite likely my shortcoming.

Much of Riedl's work, as presented in this lavish 2-disc set, fall into that category for me. Seeming outlying works like the delightful opener, "Paper Music", aside, we're in the land of those hollow, metallic tones, blippy electronics, harsh interjections of percussive sounds--nothing at all objectionable in and of itself and by no means unlistenable, but somehow remote enough from the world to leave me a bit cold. Some of it may just be a casualty of time, sounds that have acquired a science-fiction-y sheen in the intervening decades where once they were striking. btw, I've no idea how available this was in the 60s but I'll be damned if Zappa didn't steal liberally from Riedl; parts of this appear virtually intact in works like "200 Motels". But when he pulls back a bit, as in "Studie 62 II", which closes out the first disc, the results can be subtle and rather beautiful, not so distant from good, contemporary eai.

Most of the pieces here are fairly short, though the second disc is dominated by the 51-minute "Ideir notna fesoj", unique aside from its length. It's largely made up of voice tapes, sometimes processed in a way that often causes them to sound backward even when they're not (they often are, in fact), often over a ground of what sounds like ambient sound. The voices soon settle into "normal" speech, discussing avant-garde music it seems (Riedl talking?), interspersed with taped and natural sounds--maybe a recurrence of the paper music from the beginning of the disc--and some lovely percussion toward the end. It's an oddly moving, sprawling work that I found myself quite enjoying.

So, a mixed bag for me overall. Much of it carries the patina that irks me, but several of the pieces work, for me, despite that. I'd hazard a guess that for listeners who are more into this area of music than I, it's a treasure trove.


Patrick Kosk - Mondweiβ (Edition RZ)

Kosk occupies somewhat the same territory (though I'm sure aficionados of the genre will complain that they're nowhere near each other) but I find his work, as represented here, more approachable. I can't say "more concerned with sound" since Riedl clearly is too, but more concerned with the kind of sound, or sound relationships, that I find interesting. There's more patience, for one thing, a greater willingness to linger in one area and investigate it, less of an intent to dazzle. The pieces unfurl naturally and expansively, filling the space like water or gas, often evoking a sense of mystery. The choice of sounds as well feels far less strident than in many of the Riedl constructions. Each piece here limns out a unique area and fills it gracefully with a wide range of tonalities and textures, electronic in source but sounding at least half "natural". Hard to describe in better detail; I enjoyed it a bunch.


(Various) - Tesla (Edition RZ)

This is a DVD containing some three+ hours of material, four audio performances and three video extracts from same. The first is a set called "talking machine" by Steve Roden and Martin Riches, largely a series of soft percussive sequences with the occasional harsh, semi-regimented buzzing. Interesting but a bit scattered and unfocused over 37 minutes. Next, Nik Hummer and Gammon provide a woozier, more ambient piece, sometimes reminiscent of Daniel Lentz' electric keyboard-propelled work of the late 80s. Frank Bretschneider's "subharchord-kippschingung" is a more restrained electronic work, fluttering, soft tones entwined with hard, glitch-y clicks, though eventually it settles into a repetitive pattern that can't maintain interest for it's 41-minute duration. Finally, we have "Benzo vx Subharchord" (info on said machinehere), Benzo being apparently the alter-ego of Richardas Norvila. He mixes varying electronic attacks--drones, roughage, icy splinters, much more--with (German) speech, a long (68-minute) tract of moderate interest (me not knowing German perhaps makes a difference). Any of these may well have been enhanced by one's presence at the event though the three video excerpts don't show all that much occurring visually. In sum, not a must-hear or see.

Edition RZ


Jürg Frey/Antoine Beuger - duos (Edition Wandelweiser)

Two sets of pieces written for the duo Contour (Stephen Altoff-trumpet, Lee Forrest Ferguson-percussion), a potentially unwieldy combination. Frey's "22 sächelchen" (small things) is rather just that, 22 miniatures lasting 32 1/2 minutes that vary from quiet reductionism to outright fanfares. I guess some of the latter sort are a bit...shocking, at least in a Wandelweiser context. But there are also oblique references to jazz (the mute in #11), processional music (the tympani in #13) and much else. For me, however, that resulted in something of a grab bag effect, a series of disconnected bagatelles, some attractive (#17, a lovely quasi-scale, and the closing section), some bland (all finely played, I should say), some annoyingly blaring, that added up to a cabinet drawer of odds and ends.

Beuger takes his time and the results bear him out. Five sections in his "dedicated duos" (the dedicatee being the mathematician Julius Dedekind, an associate of Cantor), and they don't stray all that far from one another--quiet, considered, the instruments often creating parallel lines of sound, not so different from what label-mate Michael Pisaro does with sine tone and acoustic instruments. Indeed, I was often reminded of some of the quieter moments from Greg Kelley over the past years. Very pure, very calm, each tone or duo of tones shimmering in its own space, receding, allowing the next to surface. Lovely work, worth it on its own.

wandelweiser

Both Edition RZ and Wandelweiser releases available stateside from erstdist

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btw, I still have about 15 discs sitting here awaiting proper evaluation so no 10 favorites or anything likely to appear for a week or two....control your grief.

John Lely - The Harmonics of Real Strings (Another Timbre)

This is a tough one for me. In his interview with Lely, label owner Simon Reynall comments that his "music often has the sense of being 'experimental' in a literal, almost scientific sense." I was unfamiliar with Lely's work prior to this release but from the evidence here, as well as from that of several live performances of other pieces I've since watched/listened to online, that seems to be a fair assessment. As I've written before, this approach, to my ears, can reap great benefits but always carries the "risk" of not transcending the "science experiment" envelope. A risk, to be sure, only if you're for some reason hoping for or expecting that transcendence, another matter entirely. I often think of Alvin Lucier and Tom Johnson in this regard, composers (or, using Johnson's preferred term for himself, "list maker") who often use systems of one sort or another, sit back, so to speak, and observe the results. Sometimes the outcome is extraordinary ("I Am Sitting in a Room" being the obvious example), sometimes rather dull. Frustratingly often, the listener is left somewhere in the middle, hearing glimpses of extra-physical beauty or depth only to be drawn back to the mundane, if you will, nature of the process. That's doubtless the point on occasion and maybe it's just that stubborn, clinging old-fashionedness that insists on something more, I don't know.

Listening to six members of the Dedalus Ensemble play Lely's "Symphony No. 3", I get something of the same feeling: unison, microtonal chords in a (almost always) regular procession, related to the Parsons Code for Melodic Contour which consists simply of three symbols--u-up, d-down, r-repeat). There may be more structure embedded there than I can discern, perhaps even some play with phrase construction, but it's a difficult work for me in which to really immerse myself. On the other hand, his "Arrangement", for two pianists, is rather lovely, partially because its very simple melodic line (again regular, with single notes all played on white keys) doesn't technically require four hands at all. But the interplay and dance of the hands as they slowly weave between each other, is somehow extremely moving to watch (certainly a work that gains enormously from experiencing live). And "Distance Learning" is just exhilarating fun. Check out the videos for yourself.

But back to the release at hand. Lely, in the above-cited interview says, "Essentially it’s a very slow glissando along the full length of one bowed string. The player uses light finger pressure on the string – what is traditionally referred to as ‘harmonic’ pressure." He goes on to relate it to experiences he underwent while having difficulty sleeping, scanning the short wave radio spectrum as slowly as possible. Hearing this, I'm immediately intrigued about the transference of that experience to cello (performed here by the always excellent Anton Lukoszevieze). Four tracks, titled IV through I, decreasing in duration, 16:42, 15:57, 12:08, 11:08; I list the times only to see whether or not there might be a hidden pattern--I can't detect one. There tend to be two areas of sound: one, the specific note being glissandoed (!) and two, a background rustle, the latter more discernible the higher up the string Lukoszevieze has progressed (each iteration goes from lower to higher). There are often overtones or secondary notes, leading me to wonder if in fact it's only one string at a time being bowed; I don't know cello mechanics nearly well enough to say. These details aside, I'm left with my overall impression and somehow, I find it not as fascinating or absorptive as I expect. There's a thinness where I want to hear richness; perhaps that's intentional, perhaps an artifact of the recording process, I don't know. I can't help but recall sitting several feet in front of Charles Curtis last year, becoming utterly and ecstatically lost in the depths of his "simple" bowing on Eliane Radigue's "Naldjorlak", wanting that to occur here. Or maybe I need more time with it--I've listened seven or eight times so far, upping the volume a good bit the last couple of occasions, trying to relate the music to the fine cover image by Lely, and the piece is beginning to eat at my reservations. I'm not sure I'll ever arrive at a full appreciation, but I imagine I'll continue to make the attempt over time.

Another Timbre