Six pieces I did in August. I somewhat humorously find myself in the position of certain musicians who release, almost, their every thought, a stance I really don't have so many problems with on the one hand. On the other, as I start painting (and drawing--those perhaps to come) more often there's necessarily a rise in the number of pieces that fail for one reason or another. If they're bad enough, they go straight to the trash but I keep others around because, to my eye, there are one or two good aspects to them. But for now, especially since I am happy with a small bunch from August, I'll just present those.

The above is a good example of a piece that was seriously drifting toward the trash--I was trying for a very fine, precise rendition and failing utterly, so I just tore into it. And, I think, it worked.

I'd previously done a set of four 4x4 inch paintings of a red t-shirt or details thereof. I always had it in my head to do three sets, red, indigo and gray, four each, all the same size. Here are the indigos:








Cutting square sheets out of a larger block inevitably leaves one with oddly proportioned rectangles of paper and I've been using them as is. When oriented vertically, you're almost automatically drawn to a kind of Japanese compositional area. I did a few, this is the one I thought worked decently:



As always, enormous thanks to Betsy for her help, inspiration and judgment.

Sebastian Lexer - Dazwischen (Matchless)

I'm not as interested in the software integration used by Lexer on this solo recording, more in the music as such, but the electronics are indeed used well enough that it's tough to imagine the music without them and, in any case, the music is quite good indeed. Richard went more into depth than I'm able to here and if I'm not quite as blown away as he was, this is still one excellent disc. As he points out, most of the pieces feel more like compositions, breathing compositions, than improvisations, all the more impressive when manipulating and assessing the live interaction with the programming, but Lexer carves out his own sound as well. Gentler than Tudor, harsher than Feldman (though alluding to both), more liquid in feel than most post-serialists but still retaining no small amount of astringency, even piquancy. Maybe a tinge of Tilbury but not nearly enough to be a distraction. The cuts work well as a suite though if I had to choose a favorite, it would be "defining edges" with its multiple gentle arcs like flowering branches. Wonderful palette in that one and there's not a sub-par track on the disc. I can easily imagine this one revealing more and more on each listen and look forward to doing so. Get this.

Matchless


Tim Olive - The Specialist (Emrecords)

The "area" in which Olive is operating here is, even if I can't quite define it succinctly, one that I'm not so partial to these days: clunky/noisy/scratchy. Not the clunky/noisy/scratchy of, say, Tandem Electrics (who I should thank for a fine set the other evening at Listen Space along with an excellent one on the part of Bonnie Jones and Tim Albro), but something a bit more assertive, more through-plowing, with less concern for space. Given that, I've been trying to listen to this from a different angle, the same way I wouldn't look at the Gilbert and George-ish disc cover and evaluate it like a Twombly. This yields some dividends. The claustrophobic press of the sounds begins to be appreciated on its own merits, the grinding gears, the wacky clangs and whoops, the oily feel, the strangely moist static. Listened this way, there's much to enjoy but I get a little disgruntled by the thirteen rather brief tracks, wanting to here the kernels elaborated upon (like track 12, a rich, Roweian drone). In sum, I'm a bit half and half on "The Specialist"; it's too gesturally active, if you will, for me to totally embrace, but intriguing on its own terms.

You can get it, among other places, from Squidco where there's another review.



Seijiro Murayama - Space and Place (ftarri)

It's funny, there's something here, on the third track, that I'm sure most if not all of us have done, that is, striking a hard surface with a smooth stick and varying the pressure along its length so that the tone changes. I remember first discovering this with paint brushes on a concrete windowsill. So when it emerges here, I have this odd combination of pleasant nostalgia and a little disappointment of the "hey, I've done that" variety. Curious about the quasi-Sun Ra allusions in the titles of the album and last track as well. Overall, it dwells more in the snare and cymbal-induced drone area and I generally enjoyed the pieces though I had a nagging sense of grasping their essence a good length of time before they concluded.

available stateside via erstdist

Without a doubt, my most enjoyable, if belated, "discovery" of this year has been the music of Michael Pisaro. I'd heard snatches off and on for a while, if I'm not mistaken, including while listening to the Wandelweiser radio stream, but hadn't really listened until a few months back when Barry kindly sent me his Confront release of "an unrhymed chord" and soon thereafter I heard Pisaro's "hearing metal (I)" among four recent Wandelweiser discs. Michael saw the write-ups here and was kind enough to send me his entire Wandelweiser output, an additional six sets of material which I've been happily wallowing in for several weeks.

I find a real affinity between the way I approach "things" and how I hear that Pisaro does, which likely goes a long way in explaining why I enjoy the music so greatly. If I'm allowed to generalize, he comes at things with an extremely high level of concentration and seriousness, but that seriousness has something of an innocent, even childlike sense of wonder at the phenomena he's experiencing/creating that I find both appealing and inherently fascinating. That concentratedness necessitates lengthy works, by and large, but not once have I found a piece over-extended, even (especially) the 288 minutes of the combined Transparent City project. That's a remarkable accomplishment right there. Too, he has the wonderful habit of creating "rules" that can be thought of as "simple" in the sense that they're easily described and understood, yet they faithfully produce complex, endlessly rewarding results.

I bet the earliest piece, "mind is moving I" (1995), for acoustic guitar (with whistling), employs some system with regard to chord choice, length, decay, dynamics, etc. though I get the impression that the whistles are more intuitively placed (I could well be wrong!). The guitar sounds are emitted sparsely: isolated, quiet chords with odd harmonics, mostly left to hover on their own, sometimes in a short series, often allowed to evaporate, occasionally cut short, sometimes accompanied by a soft whistle. That's all. Yet for 72 minutes (a popular duration for Pisaro) I was held rapt; it felt more like a half hour had elapsed. Listening at home or, better, up here in Cape Cod, it was a perfect complement for the area birds, squirrels, bees, flies--it integrated with the surroundings beautifully. Not "peaceful" in any sappy, ambient sense but, oddly, in a very active manner despite the surface stasis of the music. Here, as on subsequent releases, I can't help but think that it's Pisaro's poetic sensibility--what to introduce when, with what qualities--that makes this music stand apart from quasi-similar efforts by others. Again, it's not a complicated "score" (maybe it is?) but its particulars, including the care and concentration with which it's performed here, cause it to levitate.

His "here (2)" for accordion (Edwin Alexander Buchholz) and flute (Normisa Pereira da Silva) appears on the excellent 2-disc set of accordion music that includes a wonderful rendition of Cage's "Cheap Imitation" as well as engaging pieces by Frey and Beuger. In a sense, it anticpates later works where a sine tone is buried amidst sounds of similar timbre in that the flute, especially in the piece's first half when the accordion is breathing out thick, dense chords, is virtually hidden from overt perception. As the music trends higher and sparser, attaining a kind of thin air aspect, the twinned tones, long sustained, are clearer, interlacing quite beautifully. At 20 minutes, it's relatively short for Pisaro, but perfectly timed here.

It's difficult to write, qualitively, about the "Transparent City" sequence, comprising two 2-disc sets, 24 pieces of 10 minutes each with two minute pauses between tracks, except to say that I love them, have been listening quite often and don't think I've come close to exhausting the material there. As mentioned above, the basic idea seems rather simple: take a 10-minute swatch of field recording (all samples here recorded in and around Los Angeles, in various types of locale) and threasd it through with sine tones that roughly approximate the general timbre of the recorded sounds. And that's what we hear. Why they work so fantastically (though, interestingly, I'll be damned if I can pick out any "favorites" from the bunch) is tough to say, except for two things. First, the recordings themselves are great, precise, depth-filled, almost as fascinating as sitting in those places with open ears oneself, no mean accomplishment. Second, as in "mind is moving I", the aesthetic judgment evinced by Pisaro in his deployment of the sine tones is unerring. I used the term "thread" above and, in fact, the strongest mental image I have while listening to "Transparent City" is the glimmer of a thin silver filament wending its way through rough, jumbled material, just barely glinting here and there, disappearing into the folds, re-emerging. The sine tones never dominate, never lie atop the recorded material; often they're either absent or unhearable. When relatively prominent, they take on something of a Lynchian aspect, imparting an otherwordly quality to the water, marketplace, roadway, etc. The field recordings were unedited; curious if some judgment was applied choosing which 10-minute segment to utilize. Why 24 pieces, using recordings from a four-year period? Dunno, except to say, miraculously, it doesn't seem like overkill! The pieces are different but of the same cast; there's a strong consistency here. I'd even welcome a third set.

Belying somewhat what I said above, the structure behind Pisaro's "harmony series" (here, #s 11-16 out of 34) is, if not complex, at least a bit arcane. As I (probably faultily) understand it, he begins with a poem and somehow manages to render it graphically ("as if one were making a stencil"). He then reduces the essential meaning of the poem or fragment thereof to a single characteristic which informs the rendition of the piece ("proliferation" is cited as an example, so that piece "might be read as a shift from a barely to a clearly audible, multi-faceted sound".) And I think there's more to it but I'll stop there. The result is nine pieces that are often spellbinding (some of the numbers have variations--the nine are presented almost symmetrically, both by title and approximate length: 16a, 11a, 12a, 13, 14, 15, 12d, 11c, 16b). Far too much to go into here, but highlights include 12a, a duo for oboe/English horn (Kathryn Pisaro) and sine tones (the composer), a 20-minute series of paired tones of long duration (with long silences) that is almost stately, the tones sliding with mild irregularity up to and away from one another, creating slightly irregular "beats". I might call it "meditative" but its mutations require too much attention. Two solo works are gorgeously played by Greg Stuart (percussion--a musician I very much want to hear in other environs), one recalling Jeph Jerman a bit. 14 might be my personal favorite, for violin, harmonium, piano and (I think) bowed guitar, the single piano notes in a slow tempo, like water droplets on a sheer, silk scrim, shifting gently in a breeze. Evoking the spirit of Feldman without ever imitating him. Great piece.

Neatly, this series concludes with the Wandelweiser release (2-disc) of "an unrhymed chord", the same piece through which I was really introduced to Pisaro's work via the fine version by Barry Chabala. Here it's rendered twice, the first a tremendous exploration by Stuart using 70 sounds, all "made by friction--either by bow, stick or hand". As much as I enjoy Barry's, this one is my current standard; maybe there's something about the chosen sounds, that frictive aspect, that really imparts a wonderful grain to the piece here. That plus the choices Stuart makes, of course. Whatever, it succeeds in manifesting as a palpable presence in the room, filling the space, endlessly absorbing. The second version might be the one work out of this entire bunch that didn't work for me on most levels. Aggressive and chancy idea, though: Joseph Kudirka, who realized the work, solicited contributions from several dozen musician acquaintances, asking that the "sounds were to be electronically generated in a non-performative fashion". Kudirka then assembled the sounds in the manner suggested by the score (the louder the sound, the shorter its duration/iteration), their entry more or less determined by the notations of the contributors. There's something of Rowe's "sight" about this but it lacks that work's "found" power and grace. For my ears, perhaps the already semi-randomized nature of the score requires more "touch" on the part of the person doing the realization. Here, everything is listenable enough, not bad by any means, but the specialness that adheres to so much of Pisaro's work isn't there for me.

Hey, pretty decent batting average nonetheless.

Many thanks to Michael for sending these discs my way, it's been a total pleasure coming to (begin to) know the music.

I believe most if not all of these are currentlyh available through erstdist

Curious listeners might also be advised to tune into Wandelweiser Radio which seems to be currently down but which I imagine will be back soon.

Every so often, browsing through my LPs, I come across a sequence that makes me wonder, "Is there any other collection that contains (say) these four LPs?" This is one such string.



David Garland's first album, if I'm not mistaken [I am, maybe, by two--see site below--not sure of the sequence of LP releases], from 1986, with Mark Abbott (who used to have an electronic music show on KCR that I wish I'd paid more attention to in the late 70s), Klucevsek, Marclay, Zorn and others though it's more often than not solo. The opener, "I Am With You" give a clue as to Garland's fine songwriting and singing capabilities, with some goofy electronified vocals that work surprisingly well, still. It's downtown NYC in '86, after all, so one can expect awful synthesized percussion and, yes, it's here; not really as awful as you might expect, actually. Overall, still sounds good in that unique, hyper-awkward way Garland has with a tune. Singing about i-beam girders, clocks, furniture, Planet X, keeping in touch:

I think I'll probably be
here for you when you need me.
Just give me the word. I'll come right away--
unless, I guess, I'm busy or something.

There's something about Garland I find inherently likable, I admit. I can imagine having grown up with him as a good friend, with similar obsessions. Wish he recorded more. Ah, lookee here, he has a site and apparently an upcoming album.

nota bene: when I saw Fredric Rzewski play at the new Carnegie recital hall a couple of years ago, Garland sat in front of me. He's very tall. It was mildly annoying.


I think I have Gaslini on one other record, a duo with Braxton (and a piece for the IIO, I guess), but I otherwise know next to nothing about him. This is a 1976 release on Pausa with no accompanying info; I imagine I picked it up (apparently in a cutoff bin) intrigued by Ponty being on the same disc as Lacy, Oxley, Rutherford etc. I wrote it up for AMG here and can't add much to that. Not really my cuppa, a little too much on the "classical" side of free jazz, maybe, Cecil without the soul.


I suppose it's possible, given this LP's seeming obscurity and its creator's involvement with a certain dinosaurean rock group, that this might well be the most monetarily valuable thing in my collection. Maybe not, just checked e-bay and they're showing two, one for $50, one for $130. Whatever, it's a pretty nice set, not at all what you'd expect from someone associated with the Floyd (he co-composed Atom Heart Mother). Interesting bio at AMG.

Fun music, though, piano miniatures mixing Satie with minimalism, sometimes with a childlike simplicity, other times descending in a chaotic storm (though Geesin's always in control--maybe not such a good thing). He attains something like a hyperactive player piano status--incredibly dense but somehow mechanical even as one is, embarrassingly, experiencing a bit of a thrill. In a funny way, imagine the best possible Keith Emerson solo piano album (I know, this is difficult) and you're most of the way there.



This one has been reissued as "Ghana: Ancient Ceremonies, Songs and Dance Music". My 1979 LP has the dubious generalization, "Africa" followed by "Ancient Ceremonies Dance Music & Songs of Ghana". Whatever, it's a spectacular bunch of disparate tracks, very much in keeping with other great, more widely proclaimed Nonesuch ventures. Instruments like the dzil , a xylophone-like thing with, I imagine, gourd resonators (likely filled with spider webs, imparting that fantastic buzz) are spellbinding to hear. Lot of percussion typical of West Africa, but also treasures like the gonje, which resembles a douss'ngouni but is bowed, here played by Adolphus Micah. Wonderful village choral work as well. The young girl singing "Marilli" is nothing short of incredible. Raw and beautiful.

***********

Too late to listen to the next in the shelves, though Jon Gibson's "Two Solo Pieces" wouldn't likely make those five LPs any more likely to exist in a set elsewhere. Besides, as luck would have it, he immediately precedes my Glass section, a job I have mixed feelings about attempting (listening through, that is).

In any case, we'll be on Cape Cod from tomorrow to the 19th; might post from there, might not. See everyone soon.

I like cold weather.

I've always been partial to it. I mean, give me 50◦ on a clear, crisp day or evening and I'm very happy. But given the choice between 90◦ and muggy or 10◦ and raw, I'll take the latter every time. It's gotten "worse" as I've aged, on both ends. Tolerating high heat and humidity becomes more and more of an ordeal while my apparent immunity to the effects of cold has also increased. My winter coat is a short, light jacket, like a windbreaker with a thin lining. I've never zipped it up. I can imagine doing so in an extreme situation but that hasn't happened yet (strong winds, below zero). I don't own a hat, or gloves (that's what pockets are for!) or earmuffs or a scarf. I don't really think twice about it, just go about my business wearing, or not wearing, however much clothing I feel comfortable with.

So, last evening, we're eating at a local bar/restaurant, one that has outdoor seating so that we can bring the puppy along. At the next table, there's a family of three, father, mother, daughter. I recognize the guy from the neighborhood, though I'd never met or spoken to him. As they're leaving he comes over and says, "Excuse me, but I gotta say hello. I was telling my wife that this is the guy who goes around walking his dog in freezing weather in a t-shirt or with his jacket wide open like it's spring." Nice guy, we exchange mildly humorous remarks about imperviousness to cold.

I tell him that, when taking Nanook out for her nighttime pee, which generally involved walking no more than 100 feet up the street, I'd routinely go out with my feet clad as they are around the house, that is, barefoot. I'd only put on footwear if there was snow on the ground. Very bracing when it's around 20◦! Sometimes, though, it will have begun to snow without me realizing it. I'll get to the front door with the dog and think, "Hell with it", and go out sans shoes anyway.

Yes, it's cold, but it's entirely worth it imagining what goes through the mind of the next person to walk down my street, encountering barefoot footprints in the new snow.

Been thinking about this movie for several days, Ayneh (The Mirror), directed by Jafar Panahi (1999). [Spoilers to follow, be forewarned]

It has an interesting structure, something about which caused me to relate it to ares of music I generally concern myself with here.

The movie begins with a simple enough premise: a seven-year old girl, one arm in a cast, leaves her school in Tehran one afternoon and her mother doesn't come by to pick her up. All her friends have gone home and the remaining school personnel are somewhat indifferent to her plight, eventually foisting her on a man with a scooter, who also seems relatively unconcerned with the young girl's actual safety. One of the clear subtexts in the film is the miserable way women are treated in Iran, their issues often dismissed out of hand if not derided. The girl wanders through the streets of Tehran, trying to get strangers to bring her home, a location of which she has only a vague idea. One of the fascinating aspects of the movie thus far is that it was shot on the streets of Tehran as is, cinema verité style so the viewer gets an excellent idea of the everyday activity taking place there, the massive amount of traffic through which she and others dangerously thread their way included.

Fine, all well and good. One is rather touched at her ordeal and the film is well-shot enough to maintain interest.

About 40 minutes in, the girl has secured a ride on a bus she has been told will head in the direction of her home. She's lodged herself near the driver but the front of the bus is reserved for men--women must huddle in the rear. There's something of an argument going on between the driver and the person who put her there when, all of a sudden, the young actress, Mina Mohammed Khani, breaks character and has something of a tantrum, declaring, "I don't want to act anymore!", removes her hijab and the fake cast on her arm and angrily leaves the bus, seating herself on the steps of a nearby store. A camera pans toward the back of the bus where we see the film crew in a dither, the director ordering a female adviser to talk with Mina, to try to convince her to continue. Several people try to no avail, mina continuing to change into her own clothes, in a total snit.

Panicked discussion ensues among the crew. One of them realizes, however, that Mina hasn't removed her mic an that they're still able to pick up transmission. Realizing she's in the middle of Tehran, far from her home, in essentially the exact same situation as her character (hence, "The Mirror"), they make the rather amazing (casual? callous? negligent?) decision to continue to film her from the bus. So they do, following her going from person to person, place to place, trying to get home.

It's a pretty amazing shift as the viewer goes from more or less caring about her character to seriously caring about the welfare of this little girl, wandering through traffic, engaging not always kind strangers, getting into cars, etc. (though she does so with determination and pluck).

But it was the act of being willing to change gears mid-film that made me think of some (possibly weak) connection to certain areas of music. Going from a scripted form, though loosely so and incorporating much improvisation, to an entirely freely improvised one where the structure is outside the control of the director and forms on its own. I guess more than anything, it was that willingness, even if it was more or less forced by circumstance, to go with something outside oneself, to surrender to happenstance with the knowledge that, maybe it'll lead to something even better than you'd planned (which it certainly does, in this case). Something akin, say, to Rowe's use of radio in AMM, to be willing to "disrupt" a perfectly fine performance with an intrusion of the unknown that may or may not be appropriate, that may cause the concert to crash and burn or not.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it but, whatever, it was a unique kind of viewing experience for me. (I'm almost counting on being told the dozens of times this trope has been used before....) Perhaps it has to do more with decisions made in real-time, a rare enough occurrence in a film that (unlike, say, Godard) didn't begin the day with that in mind as a possibility.

Worth seeing for any number of reasons, anyway.

First heard Garbarek on the late George Russell's "Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature", on which I believe he contributed some of the thematic material. Just prior to that, I guess, ECM had begun to release his work, that fine string of records culminating in "Witchi-Tai-To" (maybe "Dansere"? We'll see when we get there). But the earliest recording is from 1969, I think (released in 1971 by Flying Dutchman), the self-titled debut of his band, Esoteric Circle, with Terje Rypdal, Arild Andersen and Jon Christensen. Annoying, I can't locate a cover image of the LP which feature the sculptures of Gustav Vigeland (here are photos of same):




Great record, one of the best proto-fusion albums I know, holding its own with Tony Williams Lifetime or the early McLaughlin's. Rypdal is pretty incendiary, Garbarek is in Ayler/Coltrane mode, on tenor throughout, composing wonderful melodies, moving here, fierce there. It might be argued though, that it's Andersen who really holds things together--what a great tone he had (might still have?), really one of the most under-rated bassists from the time period.

I know there was a recent upsurge of interest few years back when ECM finally released the early Garbareks. Listeners who enjoyed those should certainly get their paws around this one.


Definitely a seminal record for me. Happy I could find a shot of the original vinyl, much pinker than the disc release, I think, and a great example of an archetypal early ECM cover (recorded in 1970). Wonderful record, strong combination of gorgeous, northern-tinged melodies with tough, imaginative free soloing, each member of the quartet on pretty equal footing. Beautiful miniatures by Andersen especially; what a fantastic bassist he was. Christensen, when all's said and done might be a trifle light for my taste, kind of a Scandinavian Barry Altschul, but he fits in well enough here. Garbarek could write killer riffs too, as in the wildly propulsive "Beast of Kommodo" [sic] which still rocks mightily and the surging title piece (which was used for many years as the opening theme for WKCR's evening jazz program). Then of course, there's "Blupp". Fine recording, well worth hearing if you haven't.


I think there was a period when many of the ECM covers were all text, right? Nice design, anyway. "Sart" is kind of Garbarek's reaction to electric Miles, bringing in Bobo Stenson on piano and e-piano. The title cut especially, with its viscous semi-funky bass and spacey soloing. It's interesting how different his first five ECM albums are from one another, each taking a fairly divergent path from its predecessors. Of this bunch, it might be my least favorite but has its virtues nonetheless. When the piece "Sart" wells up, like a big bubble bursting from the depths of a thick stew, it's powerful enough. The first part of "Fountain of Tears" (titles like that portending ill to come) does point a bit toward Tryptikon and Andersen's (again, brief) "Close Enough for Jazz" is moodily lovely. But there's an air of diffusion that subtracts from the overall effect of the record, imho.


Another fine cover. I go back and forth between this one and the following as my favorite. Pared down to a trio with Edward Vesala and excellent substitution for Christensen (especially in this sort of music), Garbarek pulls a Norwegian Ayler, investigating Scandinavian folk forms from a free jazz angle, and as raw as he ever got. The structures are "loose" again here in terms of a lack of defined heads, but there's a great tautness in general feel, everything seem stretched to the verge of snapping. It's not that it's loud and strident all them time (though there's a good deal of that), just that it all feels tense. In a very good way. Even the closing folk song, "Bruremarsj", which sounds essentially like a drinking song, carries a dark edge. Very fine record.


Pound for pound, I might have to consider this the strongest Garbarek release. He had the inspired idea to do covers drawn from the JCOA catalog, Carla Bley's great tune, "A.I.R." from Escalator and Don Cherry's equally beautiful "Desireless" from Relativity Suite, adding in Carlos Puebla's "Hasta Siempre" which Charlie Haden had used in his Liberation Music Orchestra and Jim Pepper's "Witchi-Tai-To". "A.I.R." is given an incredible run-through here, Garbarek on soprano, new bassist Palle Daniellson really driving the quartet (no more Rypdal, this is all acoustic), Stenson in fine Tyner mode. The sole original, Danielsson's "Kukka" is pleasant enough, though unexceptional, but serves as a nice lead-in to "Hasta Siempre" where Garbarek unleashes his inner Gato. The title track begins with the piano trio, working its way to a furious improv on the theme and final statement of same; still gives me a bit of chills, I must admit. "Desireless", on the JCOA recording, was always a real tease, a super-gorgeous melody that only lasts a little over a minute, iirc. Well, here it's stretched out a full 20+, sating this listener quite well. Fine, fine performance. With Holland's "Conference of the Birds", probably my favorite ECM jazz album.

nota bene: this is the first in this particular series that came out on Polydor, thus no longer imbued with that intoxicating German-pressing smell of the earlier ECMs. *sigh*



"Dansere", with the same quartet, recorded about two years later, is a nice enough record, but much of the fire is gone, replaced by the (if I may stereotype) Nordic iciness that, as far as I can tell, permeated his work from here on in. This is a big step toward "the ECM sound" (the slight preciousness of the album title and cover photo inch that way as well); the burr has been sanded off some, the melodies are folksier (as opposed to folk-song based) and there's a certain self-conscious ponderousness to much of it. Not nearly as weak as much of what the label would issue in coming years, but it's a sidestep in that direction. Stenson is more Jarrett, less Tyner. Listening now...it's perfectly passable but somehow depressing, like these guys have in the interim become "professional jazz musicians" rather than just musicians. There's more than a whiff of Eberhard Weber over much of it...the pastels are coming...

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

I'm sure I liked "Dansere" pretty well at the time (1976) but this was the last Garbarek release I bought. Some of that doubtless had to do with my lack of a stereo for a couple of years ('77-'79--stolen from my apartment, couldn't afford a new one) but I'd already given up by and large on the label.

Too bad about Jan. Coulda been a contender.

Jeph Jerman round-up. Releases listed in reverse packaging size order. Cover images when available.

Jeph Jerman/Doug Theriault - all be right with you (tandjrec)

A 3" disc. As it lists recording dates from 1996 to 2009 and three locations, one can safely assume these 20 minutes have been assembled from various situations; once in a while it even sounds that way. Actually, the occasional shift in spatial resonance is one of the more attractive features here, close mic'ed to booming. Sounds like Theriault pretty much on guitar (probably processing?), Jerman on percussion. Very energetic throughout, inching more toward free improv than eai, the air aflutter with squeaks, clicks, taps, twangs 'n' bangs. Well constructed, not essential.

There's a site, tandjrec but it doesn't seem to be functioning at the moment.


Jeph Jerman - Vinyl (easy discs)

Described on the insert as simply, "collaged recordings of old vinyl records being played with cactus needles and dried agave leaves". It sounds like it and sounds fantastic. "Sere" was the term that first came to mind. The dryness, not as in sterility but as in lack of moisture and enhanced clarity, is all over this music. There's a true tactile aspect as the needles and leaves race across the tracks. You even seem to pick up faint ghosts of recorded music; I'm not sure if this is even possible or if I'm suffering audio hallucinations. Actually, the third of four tracks manages to evoke a more aqueous feeling, the sounds more rounded and reverberant. Beautiful recording, highly recommended.

Jeph Jerman/Tim Barnes/David Daniell/Sean Meehan - Live 07/22/04 (CDR)

The two tracks contain the names of the performers in differing sequences and combinations: "jeph/david/sean & tim" and "tim/sean/jeph & david". This is in the small sound end of the spectrum and far be it from me to have any interest in parsing out who's doing what. More than most, it's the kind of live recording that begs to have been heard in situ, all the location acoustics in play. Upping the volume on disc would seem to miss the point. It's lovely, though, in its quietude and care. Especially fine ending to the second of the two tracks, a gentle, rocking back and forth sequence. Wish I'd been there.


Jeph Jerman/Tom Cox - If/When (CDR)

Four tracks of relatively active, highly concentrated shuffling around of stuff. Small stuff mostly, I think, on surfaces with some amount of resonance. You get a sense of stirring often, as though Jerman and Cox have placed objects with varying degrees of solidity, including things that might melt during the process and items with slight bell-like properties, and have taken to mixing them with utensils of differing materials, sizes, densities. Very enjoyable; oddly, very relaxing.


Jeph Jerman - @stuk (CDR)

[Cover from Patrick Farmer's review at Bags. Mine is different, as I imagine all are]

Three cuts, the first dealing with Jeph's radiator, its own and all the surrounding sounds, the second with his electric meter. They're quite wonderful, forming very large, densely detailed spaces in which to wallow. Not sure what else there is to say, just that they're fine ear openers. At the beginning of the live piece, it's difficult to say what, if anything, Jeph is doing (aside from counseling about cellphones) and what noise the audience is making, but soon he sets to sliding metal objects across one another, dropping them atop each other and generally creating controlled metallic havoc, later on switching to stones or marbles, rolling them in hand (maybe in his mouth?), letting them drop.

One pauses at this point to wonder about qualitatively differentiating Jerman offerings. They all tend to strike these ears as pretty "good", sometimes more than that but they're so clearly an expression of Jeph's gestalt that, in a way, they're of equivalent "value". Anyway...


Jeph Jerman - Prayer.Tactus (semperflorens)
Then again, something like this does stand out a bit. "Prayer" has Jerman on a Tinguely machine (not sure which one as there are a few. Here's an example), Tibetan prayer wheels, burden busket ([sic] I assume, "burden basket"?) and drum. It's fantastic. You're plunged into an entirely other world: mechanical, rumbling, moaning, percolating, electronic, stone-age. "Tactus" (for stones, volcanoes, shortwave, wire and vlf [Very Low Frequency?])--did someone say "rumbling"? This is one huge set of low-level, speaker-threatening growls, as though Jerman had lowered a mic a mile or two into the maw of Mount St. Helens. Very impressive, also in a way very approachable. Eventually, it splays out into a combination of shortwave bleeps and gamelan-like sounds. Of the Jerman I've heard, this might be the one I'd offer to someone looking for a taste. Marvelous release.

Jeph Jerman/Daniel Mithas/Nick Phillips - Ones/Hands (Palsy)

As reconstructed with the help of Nick Phillips, this LP consists of recordings Jeph sent the pair, Ones (Mitha & Phillips), in 2004 which may or may not include some of their work with him in the 90s. They then added in bits of their own, mixed things together. This was issued by White Tapes in 2005 on disc but the LP version was remastered by Scott Colburn. Got it? Who cares, it's an amazing recording, just gorgeous all the way through, the Ones duos presumably responsible for the bulk of the non-Jerman sounding (that is, more tonal) portions, though I wouldn't bet much on it. Very nice mesh, the displaced guitar sounds alongside the rustling noise, lovely episodic, cinematic feel to each side. When the acoustic guitar emerges full-on, almost Robbie Basho style, toward the end of one piece, it's pretty magical. The other swells into an enormous drone of cymbals and ringing bowed metal. Both are pretty great. Have turntable, get this vinyl.

To the best of my knowledge, all of these are available from erstdist

(Various) The Black Box (Flingco)

Just in time for your Halloween gift grab bag. A tombstone-shaped device with speaker, volume control and track selector, The Black Box corrals nine brief tracks from Annie Feldmeier Adams, Haptic, Cristal and Wrnlrd for your edification and/or dread. Did I say brief? Well, it depends. Each piece is a mere snippet, lasting several seconds, but placed on a loop so that you may play it for as long as you like or can tolerate. The two by Adams are spoken lines: the cheery, "Today I will not kill myself" and the positively exuberant, "I don't feel anything". The three by Haptic are enticing enough smears, the two each from Cristal and Wrnlrd (the latter apparently an obscure black metal outfit) are flashes of attractive noise. The tinny speaker imparts a rather nice extreme lo-fi aspect to the project and, I have to say, leaving the final cut, Haptic's "3", on for an extended period sounds pretty cool. A novelty item? Yep, but kinda fun....actually, what's really fun is leaving it on that track (batteries not included, btw), putting it back in its smartly designed box, muffling the sound somewhat, and leaving said box on the shelf of some unsuspecting person, like a spouse.

flingco sound


On (Sylvain Chauveau/Steven Hess) - Your Naked Ghost Comes Back at Night (Type)

I'm clearly not the best person to assess this as my knowledge of or interest in current "dark ambient" is minimal; not sure if the so-called "Isolationism" of the mid 90s applies, though that's my chief referent. Here, Chauveau (guitars) and Hess (drums, percussion, piano) created several hours of music which was shipped to Helge Sten for processing. Sten, I take it, is also known as Deathprod, a figure of some standing in the dark ambient world [also, as I was reminded by Steven, a member of Supersilent]. The result is seven bubbling, turgid, molten tracks that, yes, remind me of things I'd heard some 15 years back, though there's a depth of detail and range of sounds that was generally lacking then (in my experience). Pulses rather than beats and dollops of tonality render the music much less oppressive and blank than it might have otherwise been. Not exactly my cuppa by any means, but the last three tracks, where things are reduced to a nice, bleak simmer, work pretty well, sound good and hollow.

type


Fredy Studer - Voices (Unit Records)

Recorded between 2000 and 2005, released in 2008, "Voices" documents percussionist Studer's interactions with three vocalists, Lauren Newton, Saadet Türköz and Ami Yoshida. I don't think I'd heard much of Newton since her Vienna Art Orchestra days. Türköz is entirely new to me, of Chinese ancestry via Istanbul, her voice carrying a fine coarseness and drawing on Khazakh traditions. Yoshida, of course, is a known quantity. Newton in avant scat mode, as she is here on "Axis", sounds rather trite, like second hand Jeanne Lee, and tread perilously close to Galas on "Madcap" but when she sits back and relaxes, as on "Die Dinge", she's fine if not inspiring. Türköz is more rewarding, though I'd be interested in hearing her in more traditional settings; her voice seems so redolent of Central Asia and that can be a bit oil and water with Western art tropes. I sometimes found Studer's percussion, while always capable, somewhat rote in an efi sense, but with Türköz, on cuts like "Can", he fits well. Yoshida, on her own, is as striking as ever (her tracks were recorded in 2004) but Studer doesn't follow her lead, playing a kind of gross Prevost cymbol-bowing session on "Nakae". Overall, too grab bag and unfocused to recommend.

unit records

Four new recordings from Wandelweiser.


Tom Johnson - Counting Keys (Edition Wandelweiser)

My reaction to Tom Johnson's music in the past has visited the extremes of hot and cold. I love "An Hour for Piano", really like most of "Rational Melodies" and am unreasonably fond of "Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for String Bass". On the other hand, on my short list of suggestions for interrogation soundtracks to reduce the most hardened mass murderer to a pile of mush, I'd place "The Chord Catalog". Perhaps this is impressive in and of itself. John McAlpine performs four works here that skirt the boundaries between math experiment and oddly lovely music. "Counting Keys" (1982), in five segments, utilizes fairly clear additive and modulative rules, iterating one kind of approach per segment, watching as the results expand, contract, cascade. The rote aspect never quite transcends its directives, though, and the end product, while attractive, remains somewhat dry. Desirous of writing a piece "consisting more of silence than sound", Johnson created "Organ and Silence for Piano" (2002), which does just that, though some of the sounded parts in the first couple of sections are a bit...pompous, as though defensive of their turf. It quiets down some and the methodology for generating note sequences is less overt throughout, though one still senses it's buried down there somewhere. But the ambiguity imparts a more poetic feel and, indeed, the silences are well used and come to have a real solidity.

As its title suggests, "Tilework for Piano" (2003) makes use of tiling properties, as imagined for musical notation. Now, admittedly, I'm a big fan of tiling and if I would have preferred something with a more Penrose feel, I do think that in this piece, Johnson does manage to transcend the topography of his construction, which involves laying triplets "alongside" each other, five of them in various groupings, repeated as many times as there are combinations. There's a playfulness, almost of a animal nature, to be heard, the notes skipping and prancing in clearly defined groups whose relationship to each other is constantly in flux. Sort of like Penrose tiles...."Block Design for Piano" (2005), my favorite on this recording, has an exceedingly complicated plan involving 330 6-note arpeggios but as McAlpine points out in his liner notes, these blueprints are all but inaudible, the listener instead somewhat enraptured by the haze of those rising figures, the harmonies quite gorgeous for all their rigorous base, a fine blossoming sense reached by irregularly (?) varying the lengths of the arpeggios from four to five to six notes. Quite beautiful.


Michael Pisaro - Hearing Metal 1 (Edition Wandelweiser)

The first Stockhausen I ever heard, back in college, was Microphonie and I've always remained partial to the general family of sounds elicited therein. So it's not surprising, all else aside, that I'm drawn to the music here, derived from the excitation, via bows and strokes of a 60" tam-tam much like that used by Stockhausen, sensitively played by Greg Stuart. The added flavor, as is Pisaro's wont, is the integration of sine tones pitched very close to the range of the tam-tam itself, becoming almost indistinguishable from it insofar as the sine throbs might well be mimicked by bowing action on the metal. One soon ceases to care as the music, infinitely complex when played at volume, envelops the listener. Pisaro describes "Sleeping Muse" as "something like a four-part chorale of bowed sounds" and merely reading about the approach might summon up drone-y, rather flaccid work but this is nothing of the kind. As rich, (relatively) tonal and flowing as the music is, the range of detail, the the endless swirls are entirely absorbing; one guesses that the sine tones are the spinal fluid here, imparting a kind of meaning to the arcing tones.

"The Endless Column" (the three pieces, by the way, are all titled after Brancusi sculptures) slows things done lusciously, a series of strokes (recorded individually, ordered randomly, one after another) swaddling a slowly rising sine tone which, again, is more felt than heard. The deliberateness of this piece is wonderful; one gets something of a prayer bell feeling but with the peals entirely dissembled. The final work, "Sculpture for the Blind", superimposes eight layers of bowing, again interwoven with sine tones, the durations of the bowing increasing over the ten minutes of the piece. The structure thus falls midway between the preceding two, combining the drone of "Sleeping Muse" with the slow pulse of "The Endless Column" as well as containing a fine, subtle grainy character that gives it a different coloration. Again, the focus one hears, on the part of both the composer and performer, keeps the music from drifting into gauze, not even close.

Wonderful recording, one of the best I've heard in recent months.


Antoine Beuger - two.too (for erwin-josef speckmann) (Edition Wandelweiser)

Two discs, the first an almost hour-long duet, "two", with Irene Kurka (soprano) and Jürg Frey (clarinet). The voice and clarinet alternate long, pure tones, Kurka very gradually singing the text: "as the full moon rises/the swan sings/in sleep/on the lake of the mind" (Kenneth Rexroth). The pair kind of seesaw back and forth, very calm and deliberate, reciting the words one at a time but repeating each many, many times, changing pitch with each advance in the poem. Beuger's concern for space is evident; it spools out slowly, like a thread in water. I find myself first rather entranced, then gradually bored, then fascinated again, going back and forth on an even slower pendulum than the performers. Ultimately, I found my attention wandering around the 40 minute mark.

But then there's "too". I had first listened to it without having read Richard's analysis of the piece (with the help of info from the composer). I would have realized after another listen or two, I think, that the underlying body of "too" was precisely the same recording just heard, but I never guessed that the "accompanying" duo of Rhodri Davies (Irish harp) and Ko Ishikawa (sho) had been lifted from a Hibari recording done in 2006 (one I don't own) and transplanted, the 20 minute track laid three times in succession over "two", just overlapping it on each end, tucking it in. Perhaps a closer examination of the recording dates may have hinted as much, but the two performances are so well integrated that the notion may never have crossed my mind. Technical details aside, the addition of Davies and Ishikawa absolutely open up the work. What was once intriguing if a bit arid now just blossoms. The Hibari recording also contained large amounts of space so there's never the slightest sense of overcrowding (indeed there remain, still, many moments when none of the four are creating sound). It may be due in substantial part to the affinity between the four voices, the harp providing a soft percussiveness that lovingly accents the smoother tones from voice, clarinet and mouth organ. There are times when the voice and sho are in almost perfect unison, others when the harp seems to be supplying just the right counterpoint. It's an inspired, not to say unusual choice, and Beuger aced it, an impressive decision. "too" becomes a rapturous experience, well more than the sum of its parts.


Stefan Thut/Manfred Werder - Im Sefinental (Editions Wandelweiser)

What to say about this release? How to possibly offer a qualitative opinion? To all aural appearances, we have two field recordings done in a glacial area of Germany, near rushing water, on the same day, each a bit over a half-hour long. You can hear some small sounds apart from the water: a plane far overhead, birds, perhaps wind rustling long grass, but the water is the backbone. Variations between the two works are minor (the second, by Werder, contains some very high-pitched squeaks that might be avian--there are crow caws at one point--and, I think, more buffeting of the mic by wind); maybe they were recorded at the same time from different vantages, opposite sides of the stream. Have they been enhanced or otherwise worked on? Hard to say; nothing that strikes me as obvious. So, one simply sits back and listens.

What sets them apart from any number of "mood enhancing" environmental recordings done since the 60s? There is a difference, I daresay, perhaps having to do with focus, depth of audio field, sustained concentration. That last probably makes the greatest impression, the willingness not to seek overt change. They each end with alarming abruptness. I enjoyed them. Hard to say exactly why except that, if nothing else, they strike me as honest.

Strong set of releases.

wandelweiser

Available stateside from erstdist

Andrea Neumann/Ivan Palacký - Pappeltalks (Uceroz)

A fine, strong set of duos from 2006-07 with Neumann at the inside piano and Palacký on his amplified knitting machine, I take it a Dopleta 160 model. I've been curious about this the handful of times I'd previously come across his work--I guess this is it:


It does generate a wonderful range of sounds, buzzing to clattering and much between. Of course, that's of less import than the coordination between the two musicians and these talks are marvelously cohesive, sounding as one. You can, on occasion, pick out the resonance of the strummed piano wire but it weaves perfectly amongst the aural skeins of the Dopleta. Calm in pace but aboil with activity, these talks reveal new thematic connections on each listen. Both players give the sense of being very intent, very concentrated, paying great attention to where the music wants to go--harsh when it needs to be, sedate as well--maintaining a spacious but firm kind of control. The disc is also arranged quite well, the final Pappeltalk a kind of summation, a very rich 15 minutes worth of delicious granules, deep thrums and delicate plucked tones; very Roweian. Excellent work, get it.

Oh and I won't mention anything about the cover on the small chance that someone will be as surprised as I was.

palacky


Michiel de Haan/Marc Spruit - Schoonhoven, Hollands Licht (CDR)

Two new releases from the duo who brought us "Radical Improvisations" a couple years back. Schoonhoven, so named in honor of ZERO-movement artist Jan Schoonhoven (see below) comprises six tracks (seven listed on the sleeve, six showing in my player) from 2007-08. Not solely due to the guitar/turntable instrumentation, but the first things that leaps to mind are the Otomo/Tetreault duos from years past, for both the ferocity and the in-your-faceness of the music. It's very "hands-on", more toward the gestural noise end of things than "eai" as such. In many ways, it's a kind of music I've found myself veering away from, but this pair, here, really digs in with all four hands (possibly a couple of feet as well) and the resultant swarm of crashes, blips, whooshes, snatches of LPs, bangs 'n' beeps serves to create a convincingly plastic wall of bric-a-brac. Nicely done and, at about 1/2 hour, perfect length for work of this density.



Its companion release, Hollands Licht, as one might gather, attempts to make sonic reference to the uniquely limpid light of that area that has infused canvasses from Vermeer to Mondrian. A tall order, to be sure, and if there's any way to tell whether or not they succeeded, I'm unaware of it. The music, in many ways, is even harsher than on "Schoonhoven", the cuts more abrupt, the variations in microsecond attacks more severe. To the extent I hear it as pricklier, I'm not as fond of it as the prior disc, but those sharp, painful points, taken on their own, work just fine, though there are loopy moments as well and its 28 tracks in about 40 minutes pushes things a tad inasmuch as one tries to get a handle on the elaborate display. Still ok, though, noiseheads should get quite the kick playing this at volume.

Ordering info at their myspace page



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

Addendum: Miraculous apparition of rainbow image on the wall behind my computer, source unknown.

A few minutes ago, Richard mentions in an fb status update that he's whistling, "I Saw Her Again Last Night". Immediately, I'm transported back to my childhood bedroom, listening to WABC on the radio and reading Marvel comics. This has happened countless times.

I'm sure it's been researched (though a quick google on "music induced visual flashbacks" yielded nothing), but it's always striking to me how consistently this occurs, that linkage between a song and, in my case, reading comic books. Just let me hear, or even hear a reference to, a pop song from, say 1966 to '71 ("the Letter", "Hello, Goodbye", "Groovin'"), and what transpires in my head, in addition to a scarily note for note, word for word reproduction of said song, is an image from Hulk, Nick Fury or Doctor Strange. Not necessarily an actual image, but a range of inks, certain colors, even the smell of the comic. (I know olfactory sensations often carry the most powerful nostalgic associations). But the merest suggestion of one of these songs and there I am, lying on my bed, devouring the latest batch of Marvels, hastened back from Sandy's Breyer Patch where me and another fanatic would bedevil him into prematurely opening the stack of new arrivals, beseeching him to let us use his wirecutters to unveil that month's cache.

Guessing, I imagine it has to do with going through puberty, discovering things in the wider world, beginning to differentiate between "stuff" and "art", how important that would have been for someone that age. Jeez, you'd think a pop song might mentally connect me with some girlfriend, but nope, just comics. Geek in training.

Lately, it's been the colors as such, the inks. That period, in Marvel, was one of experimentation in many aspects but one that doesn't get mentioned often (not like I follow discussion on this, but I bet) is the coloring, the ink techniques. I didn't realize at the time that the artists, the Sterankos, Buscemas, Adams, etc. pretty much just did pencil drawings, leaving the inking and coloring to someone else. Little by little, I realized that I enjoyed those comics inked by Joe Sinnott more than others; his thick, sensuous line held far more appeal than the relative scratchiness of his cohorts. But the coloring began to get interesting too. The introduction of black matrices for shading was way cool; I remember it in some Adams-drawn things and the inker/colorist's name I recall is Tom Palmer--not sure if that's right. [Just checked--yep, that was he. Has a whole book on the subject: Tom Palmer: The Art of Inking Neal Adams] In addition to the black or gray-scale shading, there was an increased use of super-saturated colors, rich purples and dark greens that threatened to stain one's fingers. Those were what have been leaping to mind lately when "Hurdy-Gurdy Man", "Love Is Blue" or "Last Train to Clarksville" flits across my consciousness.

Curious how common this is. Gotta be.

'nuff said.

[Heh, just realized I posted on more or less this same subject in August of last year. Just shows to go. Obviously found no further corroboration of this connection in the interim!]

A quintet from entr'acte, the first three on vinyl, the latter two on disc.


Jacques Beloeil - Bidules 1-9 (entr'acte)

Nine pieces for cheap Casio SK1 (LP). Almost despite myself, I found the first half of this album wackily enjoyable. It's like some modern-day, nerdy Keith Emerson trapped in his basement, obsessing over what can be wrung out of this tawdry keyboard, over the top baroque but fun. That's on the side labeled "Agreement". The other side, "Reaction", is a different bowl of tapioca, overtly Glassian in approach, albeit the relatively palatable Glass of "Einstein" and the Dances. With a rhythm track. And really overt. Elsewhere, it resembles early 80s Frith, Skeleton Crew, etc.; indeed, the sounds are almost identical on occasion (I know Frith used a Casio then, perhaps the same model). It's actually put together pretty well and, on one level, pleasurable enough. Necessary though? Hard to give it that.


Ian Middleton - Time Building (entr'acte)

(Not precisely sure that's the cover; think so)

In some ways, not in so different a territory than the Beloeil, though here the device of choice is a Korg analog synth. Also, to its disadvantage, there's not the slightest tinge of humor. Drone-y tracks, almost sitar-like in tone, quavering rapidly, with agitated burblings alongside. Way too woozy for my taste and there's not so much difference between the six tracks, all oozing along perilously close to astral realms. Think Daniel Lentz without the rigor.


Nokalypse - Repeated in an Indefinitely Alternating Series of Thoughts (entr'acte/Absurd)

Themistoklis Pantelopoulos adopting a somewhat annoying nom. Hopefully its not only his Hellenic derivation, but the comparison in a surface sense to Xenakis is hard to pass up. The Xenakis of Kraanerg and Persepolis, at least as evidenced here. The piece is a huge mass of swirling sounds, kind of organ-like in essential nature but I get the feeling they're often synthesized mutations from a large variety of sources, some of which might be natural. They're layered one atop the other, several dozen ply thick it seems, into a huge, messy lasagna of sound. It's not bad at all, actually, if (not surprisingly) lacking Xenakis' structural rigor and having, somewhere beneath it all, a rockish tinge (no rhythms, just a kind of guitar-chordy sound). Not bad, easily the best of the three LP releases here.


Marc Behrens - A Narrow Angle (entr'acte)

(a note: reviewers copies from this label arrive in generic sleeves; I'm never quite sure what, if anything, the actual sleeve design on the commercial release is. Only comes up as an issue here, where I like to have such an image. The one above accompanied an announcement of this disc at blog.cronica; no idea if it has anything to do with the Behrens disc, but I liked it)

Three pieces sourced from three different places: a games parlor, a Tokyo Metro station and a Taoist temple, the sounds altered radically and infused into quite solid constructions. The first is marvelously violent and careening--pachinko-like!--and, when played at volume, feels like being smacked around the room. In a good way. The Metro piece begins with a huge whoosh but soon settles in to an eerie reflection on the two standard tones emitted by the turnstiles, one granting access and a harsher one denying it. These are delicately played with, adapted, layered into a shimmering matrix that's both icy and enchanting. The temple track I found the most compelling, tending toward the quiet, with low booms and high whistles, but erupting once in a while, an unexpected bell peal in the relative silence. Really impressive and a fine release overall.


Simon Whetham - Fractures (entr'acte)

Based on field recordings made in Iceland, this has a very cinematic feel, though Whetham gives equal time to (what sound like) natural phenomena, often having a roaring aspect, and human activity, including snatches of conversation, footfalls and various engines. Much of it is quiet, barely there rustling and, as such, is very pleasant to listen to. However, it makes one appreciate the best work of people like Tsunoda who, somehow, manage to invest more into their mappings of the everyday. Still, 'Fractures' works very nicely and is well worth hearing by fans of the territory.

entr'acte

So, I went over to Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center last evening. A free, outdoor show scheduled to begin at 7PM, the main draw (for me) being a performance of Rhys Chatham's "A Crimson Grail" for 200 electric guitars, 16 basses and sock cymbal. I wasn't expecting anything fantastic; as much as I loved the Guitar Trio box last year--still do--my general take is that when guys like Chatham or Branca expand their palette to a gargantuan degree, muddiness sets in, in concept as much as sound.

The organizers of the event were clueless in several regards. I arrived quite early, around 5PM, armed with a book (Junot Diaz, Oscar Wao, which I had been resisting for a while but succumbed), food and water, scheduled to meet Carol around 6:30 at a designated spot (me, cell-less, having to revert to prehistoric methods of encounter). Of course, they weren't allowing people into the seats, which would have been simple and non-disruptive, so a couple hundred of us clustered around the entrance. At about 6, we were told, "Oh, the line is going to be around the other side of the park." Like they'd never done one of these events before. Not that it ended up mattering, but it's a little annoying being ushered from right at the entrance to about 600th on line. Still, fine, it was amusing though to listen to the bitching and moaning around me, much of it from a prominent local film critic who shall remain nameless....

But we got in and actually secured a couple of seats pretty much in the center of the audience area. The guitar seating was on three sides of the venue, ground level, front, left and right. There were four canopied podia, from which the conductors (David Daniell, Ned Sublette--fun to see him--, Jon King and one other I forget)would control their sections, they themselves taking cues from Chatham who, with the sock cymbal player (essentially a metronome) was on stage.

First up, though, was the Asphalt Orchestra. I was wondering what the deal was as no mics were on-stage, but the 15 or so piece band marched in along one of the side aisles, playing a rousing little number a la Dirty Dozen Brass Band and formed a line in the front. Ground level, with no mics, in front of 1000+ people. So maybe the first two rows could hear them clearly. Again, great planning. They did two pieces, departed and I bet half they crowd barely knew they were there.

OK, the Chatham. As a composition, it was severely clunky, lurching from one section to the next with little sense of any organic whole. It began very nicely with a controlled hum that expanded into a rich drone, the sounds gently flowing back and forth over the space, lovely effect. The next section also began intriguingly, a 16-note pattern that was also meted out to the four sections, I think four notes each but slightly irregularly, so the sequence softly ricocheted from one quarter to another, the initial bare bones "melody" being added to little by little with flourishes and fanfares. That was fine, but it went on way too long, the sock cymbal's relentless beat becoming very wearying and the essential elements of the section not all that fascinating to hold up for that long (20 minutes?)

The cymbal and the parts for the basses were two of the aspects that tended to drag down much of the music that night, lending a concrete-bound quality to music that should have soared. I understand there's a practical reason to have a timekeeping function for an ensemble that large but I don't think that was the answer (maybe, reduce the ensemble? Obviously....but no, can't do that...)

It was in two parts (Chatham said three but I couldn't distinguish the latter) and each ended with a kind of rave-up, the volume and pace increasing. They were the highlights of the set, but: 1) It wasn't anywhere near as loud as it needed to be. I don't know if they were under neighborhood restrictions (though I was told that only amps below a certain power level could be used--the guitarists brought their own) but these portions just begged for increased volume. and 2) This was odd--the first such section bore a striking resemblance to parts of the title track from Branca's "The Ascension". I mean, if I walked in at that point, otherwise unaware, that's what I would've thought was being played. And the finale, otherwise the work's highpoint, sounded as though explicitly derived from the same album's, "The Spectacular Commodity". How strange to have such overt (if subconscious?) references to music done in more or less the same vein almost 30 years ago. I gave Chatham perverse credit, though, for writing a central "melody" that was simply a C-Major scale. [edit: Maybe he's been listening to Taku :-)]

So, all in all, it was an underwhelming experience. As with Branca, in my experience Chatham's music works better the more pared down it is (including his two gong piece). Given overly abundant resources, things tend to billow out into conceptual murkiness and flaccitude (!).

Great conversation and Haitian food with Carol and Rick afterward, though! Made the evening more than worthwhile.