The irrepressible, not to say irresponsible, Mattin sent over three discs the other day, one of them his new duo with trumpeter Axel Dorner (or Doerner if you're umlaut-challenged), "Berlin". The words "extreme" and "Mattin" often go hand-in-hand and this disc's no exception although, as it progresses, you realize the extremities have more to do with structure than in harsh noise. There's plenty of the former, especially toward the beginning, but more jolting are the abrupt and unexpected stops and starts along the way. They're pretty brutal. Dorner (who, as near as I can tell, doesn't use laptop on this date) sticks largely to his patented "trumpet as tubes of metal" approach, generating metallic breath tones throughout that mesh cleanly enough with Mattin's electronics to often be indistinguishable. But somehow, a real sense of give and take and collaboration oozes through. What begins as sonic aggravation has you upset that it's ending an hour later. Good record.

Gave up on the last Roth; better than its predecessors but not good enough to finish. Half-skimming the Rush as well, which is disappointing. The sexual interplay, here between a husband and wife, just doesn't hold interest or, for that matter, come across as very believable. There's a glimmer of a plotline surfacing here and there, hopefully it'll be enough to warrant plowing through 700+ pages; I've got about 400 to go.

Attempting to slake my neverending thirst for Japanese novels, I picked up:

Shusako Endo - The Samurai
Yasunari Kawabata - The Old Capital
Kenzaburo Oe - Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

Also ordered the new Cardew Reader, despite having previously shelled out substantial dollars on Treatise Handbook and the Scratch book, both of which are included in this one. Also despite the unaccountable and unacceptable omission of Rowe from the invited commentators. Presumably a leftover from the scrap with Prevost, but there was no one, as near as I can discern, who was closer to Cardew than Keith and, arguably, there's no musician around who understands his work as thoroughly and deeply. But, so it goes....