Somewhere around '94, I subscribed to WIRE and, with it, received a copy of Ascension's "Live/Dead" LP. This was a duo of guitarist Stefan Jaworzyn and drummer Tony Irving. I have to say, it still sounds extreme, ie, extremely loud, noisy and raucous, though you can't miss the bassic rock underpinnings lurking down there. Maybe a tad less harsh than demanded by current No Fun fans, but they still might get into it if it's around anywhere. Me? Eh, much thrashing about to no real cathartic effect. Kids making noise. Better than some I've heard, not so good as others.
Around this time, I was reading about all these musicians in WIRE whose music I had no way of actually hearing. Pisses me off a bit that it would be another couple-three years for many of them. I used to keep a little list in my wallet of things to keep an eye out for--I remember the odd name "Polwechsel" being there for quite a while.
there was an interesting overlap between the Ascension crew and the Simon Fell crew at the time, there's a record under the artist name Descension, with Ascension plus Fell and Charles Wharf. Ascension had two other releases besides the Live/Dean LP, including the short double CD 'Broadcast', which is much better than the others.
ReplyDeletebut the pick from this scene for my money is the Stefan Jaworzyn/Alan Wilkinson Incus duo, 'In A Sentimental Mood', a record that should be much better known than it is.
Many of the Guitar/Winds CDs on Incus were wonderful and often rare documentation of particular duos. Besides "In a Sentimental Mood", I really love the Kaiser/Oswald & the Mats Gustafson/Jim O'Rourke discs. And the Frith/Zorn and Chadbourne/Zorn discs seem to me to be the best CDs of those two longtime collaborations.
ReplyDeleteyeah, agreed, although I've sold most of them in the last few years, a very high-quality series. the George Lewis/Bertram Turetsky one is also very solid.
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