H\ybrid
S\ound S\ystem
WINTER WAS HARD TOO…
Tourette TICK5 (2CD)
by Dan Warburton
H\ybrid S\ound S\ystem is a spin-off of Berlin's Zeitkratzer collective
featuring Reinhold Friedl on piano, Ulrich Krieger on saxophones and
Burkhard Schlothauer on violin. All three compose, too, and their
work is featured on the first CD of this set along with Manuel Cecchinato's
"Four Constellations Before A Dawn" and Cage's "Two", for saxophone
and piano. The second CD brings together nine remixes of the material
by Carsten Nicolai, Lee Ranaldo, Rene Liebermann, Boris Hegenbart,
Craig Willingham, Masami Akita (aka Merzbow), Marcus Schmickler and
Dean Roberts, who contributes two pieces. The title, which is also
the name of Friedl's piece, is a reference to the Kronos Quartet's
bestseller "Winter Was Hard", a timely reminder that Zeitkratzer have
followed Kronos' lead in smashing down the fences between contemporary
classical and popular music by commissioning figures from the world
of rock and leftfield electronica to produce or arrange work for them.
While Zeitkratzer's most prominent crossover coup of recent times
was their arrangement of Lou Reed's legendary "Metal Machine Music",
it's worth bearing in mind that their roots also lie in the extremely
quiet, slow moving lowercase style that has been associated with Berlin
now for quite some time (and against which several musicians are now
feeling the need to push). Schlothauer is also active in the Wandelweiser
Group, with Antoine Beuger, Jürg Frey and Radu Malfatti, and his "Something
Lost… Töne" for sax, piano and slowed-down sounds is in keeping with
the radical Wandelweiser aesthetic in which silence plays an important
structural role. Krieger's "Fallen From Grace" starts with a bang
and incorporates some gritty multiphonics, scratchy violin sonorities
and thudding inside piano work, but keeps the slow heartbeat, despite
some spiky rhythmic interjections. Cage's austere "Two" sounds almost
baroque in comparison, after which the extended techniques employed
in Friedl's composition come across as opulent, impressionistic even.
George Crumb comes to mind on several occasions listening to this
and Cecchinato's piece, whose extraordinary sonorities seem due in
no small part to studio treatment, reverb and spatialisation (though
the booklet lists no electronics as such).
And so to the remixes. Though the musicians are undoubtedly sincere
in their wish to break down barriers and open the world of modern
composition up to a generation of punters reared on techno and rock,
it's probably fair to say that more copies of this album will be sold
to rabid Akita and Sonic Youth completists than in the discerning
niche market of contemporary classical music. Thankfully though, there's
not the slightest whiff of sell-out - though quite what John Duncan's
recollections of Tokyo porn actress Toki Ruriko have to do with the
project is frankly beyond me - all the contributions are clearly sourced
in the compositional material and respect its leisurely pace and serious
character. Nicolai's "Alva Noto.z1" imposes a somewhat ominous three-note
bass line and a haze of bleeps and clicks onto isolated piano chords
to create a rather forlorn landscape. Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo's
mix starts off using the same loop, but abandons Nicolai's regular
pulse in favour of a cloud of violin tremolos and thuds from inside
Friedl's piano. The stock-in-trade touches of ProTools are in evidence,
but used discreetly and sensitively, the piece ending in a spine-tingling
upper register crescendo. Liebermann's "..\." is busier, superimposing
dozens of tiny clicking loops over a background of rumbling piano
resonance to create a veritable rainforest of activity, while scrupulously
respecting the character of the original pieces. Hegenbart's "re:remerge"
is similarly austere, recalling his fine collaboration a while back
with Werner Dafeldecker on Grob. Dafeldecker (shame he wasn't invited
to take part in this project) also turned out a magnificently morose
album with Dean Roberts ("Aluminium" on Erstwhile) in 2000, and Roberts
contributes two fine pieces to this collection that move further away
from the instrumental source sounds to create a web of tingling pulses
and sustained bell-like tones. Sandwiched in between them is I-Sound
(aka Craig Willingham)'s ".{.." (dontcha just love these titles? I
haven't had as much fun with my computer keyboard since fällt's invalidObject
series a couple of years ago), which cooks up a gurgling broth of
rasps and buzzes into which handfuls of Cage chords are tossed like
spices. Similarly, Masami Akita goes straight for the gut by sampling
and looping one of Krieger's dirtiest multiphonics. As Merzbow pieces
go, this must be one of the prettiest he's done in recent times, but
it can't resist an odd blast of viciousness about halfway through.
Unlike all the other remixes, it strays just a bit too far from the
feel of the original source material for my liking, though as Akita's
presence will probably guarantee a good few hundred sales off the
bat, one imagines that the project instigators didn't mind too much.
Fortunately, the album goes out on a high note with Marcus Schmickler's
"friedl.krieger.extension", further dazzling proof that Schmickler
is one of the brightest laptoppers out there with a pair of ears to
match his software. A satisfying way to round off an intelligent,
well realised and highly recommended piece of work.
Hafler
Trio / Jason Lescalleet
The Hafler Trio
THE MOMENT WHEN WE BLOW THE FLOUR FROM OUR TONGUES
Crouton Music Crou16 10"EP
Jason Lescalleet
DUE PROCESS COMBINES XIX XX
We Break More Records 003 LP
by Dan Warburton
The explosion of activity in electronic music in recent years has,
as we all know, led to the arrival of a string of new labels on the
scene - Mego, Raster Noton, Mille Plateaux, Touch, 12k, Intransitive,
Edition, Ground Fault, Bremsstrahlung, Tigerbeat6, the list goes on..-
all of whom are producing serious work of the highest quality: almost
exclusively on CD. Somehow, the mythology of the digital world of
laptops, MiniDiscs, glitches, fizzes and pops is supposed to "suit"
CD format better, though exactly why is somewhat unclear. It's especially
gratifying then to come across two superb releases of new and challenging
electronic music released on vinyl only.
For several years now, Milwaukee's Jon Mueller has been curating his
Crouton Music label with painstaking attention to detail and originality
when it comes to packaging. Discs have appeared in wooden boxes, cardboard
sleeves and in various odd sizes, accompanied by exquisite photographs
and texts (many by Mueller himself). The Hafler Trio's "The Moment
When We Blow The Flour From Our Tongues" comes as a 10" EP on transparent
vinyl, with track titles printed forwards and backwards, and an accompanying
booklet featuring elegant photography and elusively poetic textual
fragments that may or may not have something to do with the music.
The Hafler Trio has always been an intriguing proposition - for a
start, it's not a trio (these days it's Andrew McKenzie alone, working
out of Reykjavik) - despite several notable releases on hip imprints,
h3o have remained relatively hidden in the undergrowth of the underground,
McKenzie crafting his extraordinary and inscrutable soundscapes with
apparent disregard for the Wire-driven vagaries of the alt.electronica
marketplace. The two pieces here are no exception: discreet and beautifully
crafted soundscapes of glacial beauty, they weave their way into your
consciousness as gently and insistently as a small child pulling at
your sleeve. Interested readers might also wish to read a fine interview
with McKenzie at www.croutonmusic.com.
Jason Lescalleet, who recently moved away up the coast from the hotbed
of activity in Boston to the seclusion of Maine, continues to prove
that he's one of the most original practitioners of electronic music
with two extended pieces, "Combine XIX" and "XX" on the fabulously
named We Break More imprint. The last Due Process offering that came
my way ("Fin De La Voix", on Ron Lessard's RRRecords a couple of years
back) went as far as "Combine XXIV", and it seems that Lescalleet
(alone, presumably, since Lessard isn't credited as participating
on this release, though DP has until now been more or less his baby)
is continuing the work. Lescalleet's working methods are various and
not always easy to figure out - not that it's important to know how
his extraordinary sounds are arrived at - using a combination of tapeloops
and trashed hi-fi as well as digital post-production, he arrives at
a musical result which renders the analog vs. digital debate pretty
meaningless. Both pieces are somewhat grittier than the music on Lescalleet's
recent "Mattresslessness" release on Cut (see last month), but nonetheless
require active and attentive listening to reveal their many wonders.
Fragments of thrashing rock, biblical readings (in French) and field
recordings are woven together with the artistry and attention to detail
of Belgian lacework, and the end product is just as durable.
Guus
Janssen
Sound-Lee! (Guus Janssen, Jorrit Dijkstra, Raoul van der Weide,
Wim Janssen)
PLAYS THE MUSIC OF LEE KONITZ
Geestgronden GG 021
www.geestgronden.com
by Nate Dorward
Dutch pianist Guus Janssen, who has an affectionate but subversive
approach to the jazz piano canon (Wilson, Tatum, Tristano and Monk
are obvious reference-points), hasn't recorded all that frequently
in recent years as an improvising pianist - he's also active as a
"straight" composer - so it's a pleasure to receive this latest bulletin
from him in his improviser's guise. "Plays the Music of Lee Konitz"
is a live recording from Amsterdam's BIMhuis in 2001 in which Janssen's
quartet mulls over half a dozen 1950s Konitz tunes, plus alto saxophonist
Jorrit Dijkstra's "Near-Lee" (based on "One-Note Samba"); some of
the readings stretch to as much as twelve or thirteen minutes. Lennie
Tristano's aesthetic is given an intriguingly skewed revisiting: whereas
his single-note lines took a winding, snake-charmer's course across
the keyboard and his block chords fell across the keyboard like landslides,
Janssen's approach recalls Monk and Mengelberg in its obstinate refusal
to let go of a clutch of notes until he's dealt with it to his own
satisfaction. There's little trace of up-and-down runs in Janssen's
playing, which favours instead stride-piano styles that set the two
hands talking back at each other; as a result there's a playful, bouncing-ball
quality to his work. These mannerisms are sometimes pushed to the
point of self-indulgence, and in a few spots Janssen's two-handed
toying with rhythmic displacements risks losing the thread entirely
(notably a confused passage on the saxophonist's re-entry in the middle
of "Ablution" that might well have been edited out) - but I'd rather
hear music whose risks don't always pay off than music that doesn't
take any in the first place. Dijkstra's nonchalant phrasing and tone
recalls Michael Moore as much as Konitz himself, but it's Eric Dolphy
who most often comes to mind here - especially his fondness for placing
an absurdly sour note at the terminal point of a phrase. Indeed, one
might argue that this disc inherits the legacy of Dolphy's "Last Date"
(on which, lest we forget, Dolphy was partnered by Dutchmen) as much
as it does the Cool School. Questions of musicial genealogy aside,
it's a welcome addition to the catalogues of Janssen and Dijkstra,
who demonstrate with flair that Konitz's work as a composer is in
need of reassessment and exploration.
Donna
Summer
THIS NEEDS TO BE YOUR STYLE
Irritant 30
by Dan Warburton
Many years ago, when the real Donna Summer made some dumb remark
about AIDS being the wrath of God, large bins were placed outside
record shops in San Francisco's Castro district for local patrons
to throw their DS albums into in disgust. Whether Mr Jason Forrest
is now trying to woo the gay community back by adopting the disco
diva moniker is open to question, but the sweaty partygoers who adorn
the cover of "This Needs To Be Your Style" were probably all in short
pants when it happened many moons ago. Even so, the omnipresent snarl
of radio, TV and muzak ensures that, whatever these fading 70s and
80s pop icons might be doing now, their old shit is being eternally
recycled and ingested by a generation of kids who, although they might
sincerely love it, have no qualms about subjecting it to whatever
butchery today's music software can perform. Supertramp, Hall & Oates,
The Go-Gos, The Cure and Earth Wind and Fire are thrown into Forrest's
food processor, chopped up into bite-size pieces, sucked up and spat
out across the dance floor. He happily acknowledges a debt to plunderphonics
founding father John Oswald, but stops short of giving the finger
outright to corporate Amerika (and Empress Donna's armada of lawyers
who are, one imagines, sailing forth as I write to take on the plucky
young Nelson on the high seas of the law courts): "All of a sudden
I'm getting paranoid that more than 1000 people might buy the record,"
he confided recently to The Wire's Philip Sherburne. Well, sorry,
Jason, but my recommendation to readers is go out and buy this as
soon as you can. At a time when many practitioners of post-techno
electronica seem to be disappearing into their own software with a
belch of half-digested Deleuze and a gleam of high-pitch glitch that's
about as sexy as a box of fridge magnets, this much-needed blast of
attitude is more than welcome. Damn right this needs to be your style.
Roscoe
Mitchell
Roscoe Mitchell and the Sound Ensemble
SNURDY MCGURDY AND HER DANCIN' SHOES
Nessa NCD-20
by Nate Dorward
This 1980 date marked the debut of Roscoe Mitchell's Sound Ensemble
(one of his two regular non-AEOC groups of the time, the other being
the Space Ensemble), which found him with a quartet of younger players:
trumpeter Hugh Ragin, guitarist A. Spencer Barefield, bassist Jaribu
Shahid and drummer Tani Tabbal. Mitchell continued to reconvene the
group throughout the 1980s, recording a number of discs for Black
Saint, but this vibrant debut recording for Nessa has long had a favoured
status among Mitchell enthusiasts. The disc opens memorably with "Sing/Song":
the rainfall delicacy of its beginning yields to clubbing frenzy and
then - at (literally) the last minute - to a peal of song almost shocking
in its freshness and joy. The piece is somehow at once both a fun
ride and a cleansing experience. "CYG" and "Round" are characteristic
but very different pointillist studies, existing in a state of calm
suspension, the musical fabric stitched together with reprises of
material which reveal themselves only very gradually: the most obvious
instance on "CYG" is the soft but disquietingly prolonged held note
at the beginning, midpoint and end of the piece, while "Round" explores
its material through a series of unhurried displacements and mirrorings,
closing at last with a musical round which fades away like a retreating
Oriental procession. "Stomp and the Far East Blues" is an enigmatic
dovetailing of sardonic funk and serene exoticism (Barefield's guitar
splits the difference between sitar and oud) and the title track is
a snappy, off-balance dance that closes the album on a high. Even
better, though, is the reading of Braxton's march "Composition 40Q,"
announced by a cheerfully vulgar football whistle. From this point
the listener is relentlessly frog-marched into stranger and stranger
surroundings, an experience both disorienting and intensely pleasurable.
David
First
DAVE'S WAVES
Ants ant09cdr
by Dan Warburton
Let me start by dedicating this review to the spineless individual
who wrote in to the site to complain about my use of culinary metaphors
and provided a false email address so I couldn't even send him a recipe
in return. As my wife is fond of reminding me, the only things that
matter in life seem to be music and food (plus a few other things
we won't go into), and I'd like to think David First would agree:
"Dave's Waves", subtitled "A Sonic Restaurant", was originally an
installation of the same name in Lier in Belgium, another country
where food matters, where listeners (diners?) could seat themselves
at a table, don a set of headphones, peruse the menu and select the
track of their choice from a CD player in front of them. This takeaway
version consists of four "entrées", "Cross-eyed Luck", "Closet Earth",
"Queen Siesta" and "Harebrainer", each lasting 19'33", and for those
unfamiliar with First's cuisine, it's all about drones.
Drones have been around for quite some time in occidental art music
(and for thousands of years in other cultures), more precisely since
post-War contemporary composition drove headlong into a perceptual
cul de sac by coming up with theory-heavy compositional systems
that seemed to have little to do with their sounding result. Those
connoisseurs who treasure their battered copies of La Monte Young's
"Drift Study" and go to extraordinary lengths to acquire the music
that grew out of Young's early 60s Dream Syndicate group (with John
Cale, Angus Maclise and the somewhat over hyped Tony Conrad) are strongly
encourage to book a table at Dave's Waves right away, since First,
whose career has involved collaborations with musicians as diverse
as Cecil Taylor and Richard Lloyd, is quite simply a master chef when
it comes to cooking up harmonics. "Cross-eyed Luck" is a set of frequencies
that glissando gently through the brain's alpha wave range and out
into the listening space. On headphones it's deeply relaxing, but
blasted out into your apartment it's a thriller. "Closet Earth", it
says here, fixes its harmonics at the fundamental resonant frequency
of the Earth's electromagnetic field, the so-called Schumann Resonance,
but the music is far from static - a gently manipulated sawtooth wave
sweeps in and out of view. First's menu is keen to stress the music's
therapeutic qualities: writing of "Queen Siesta", whose frequencies
move through the delta wave range, he reminds us that this latter
is "the brain wave signal of the subconscious, the seat from which
intuition arises," adding: "this one is for the connoisseur - those
who make it all the way through will be amply rewarded." That might
sound like your mum telling you to eat up your greens, but it's nowhere
near as traumatic an experience as it sounds. The closing "Harebrainer"
though is a real rollercoaster ride, with First including phase shifted
filtered white noise to set up nothing less than a monstrous groove.
Guaranteed to get your head spinning, indeed. Bon appetit!
Mark
Whitecage
Mark Whitecage / Dominic Duval / Jay Rosen
THE PAPER TRAIL
Acoustics Ele 413
Mark Whitecage / Dominic Duval / Jay Rosen
NO RESPECT
Acoustics Ele 414
Mark Whitecage & his Virtual Combo
DUCKS ON ACID
Acoustics Ele 415
by Dan Warburton
Why Mark Whitecage isn't filling thousand seater auditoriums throughout
Europe is a total mystery to me; the man is an absolute master of
the alto saxophone and clarinet (not to mention a dab hand at electronics),
and of the finest and most original jazz composers in the world, and
has been for years. While festival promoters pull their socks up and
start giving him the exposure he so richly deserves, the rest of us
can gobble up all the available copies of these three fine limited
edition releases on the Acoustics label.
"The Paper Trail", recorded in New York way back in 1995 in a somewhat
dry acoustic, finds Whitecage at the peak of his form, spinning out
threads of melody as delicate as flowers but as strong as sinew. Tracks
like "Cheese" swing deliciously, proof, if any were needed, that free
jazz can be light and elegant as well as forceful and tempestuous.
Duval is on fine form, and Rosen's drumming is assured and sensitive
throughout, but has yet to attain the maturity evident on more recent
outings such as "No Respect", recorded live in Graz, Austria, in 2001
(the applause is rather brutally cut at the end of the tracks). "Bushwhacked"
lopes along as slinkily as a panther, Whitecage dangling lazily off
the beat like a liana. On "Just Us" he channels his sound through
a delay unit, his clarinet emerging from an impressionistic haze.
(The technique wears less well on "No Respect", but Whitecage has
the sense to switch the machine off after three minutes.) Duval's
bass sound is outstanding on "Court Street", where he punches out
funky bass riffs like Eddie Gomez while Rosen shuffles along elegantly
in the background. The trio's reading of "Round 'Midnight" closes
the set, and joins the pantheon of great cover versions of the song.
"Ducks on Acid", recorded last year in New Jersey, features Whitecage's
"gizmos" (pitch processors, loop stations and delay units), which
he uses to layer his horns into a one-man orchestra. "You can imagine
things can get pretty complicated in a hurry," he writes, in a style
as forthright and accessible as his playing, and they do. It's odd
but arresting stuff; "Pong" sounds like a Pauline Oliveros outtake
circa 1965, while I'd be curious to learn what Mr Rollins would make
of the two readings of "Oleo". The additional treatments work best
when Whitecage uses them horizontally, i.e. to create contrapuntal
interplay ("See No Evil" and "Let's Make Believe" are especially impressive),
rather than vertically - the harmoniser-thickened texture on "Synare
Samba" and Whitecage's weird vocals on the aptly titled "DD's Acid
Trip" become somewhat claustrophobic after a while, maybe deliberately
so. If pushed to recommend just one of these three releases, I'd opt
for "No Respect", but if you're genuinely interested in getting familiar
with Whitecage's phenomenal talent, you should get them all.
www.ejn.it/mus/whitecage.htm Contact rozmark@bellatlantic.net
John
Luther Adams
IN THE WHITE SILENCE
New World 80600-2
by Dan Warburton
First things first: the "Luther" is there to make sure you don't
get this Adams confused with the other one - remember "Nixon in China"?
- though you could be forgiven for doing so, since both men write
post-minimalist tonal (or rather diatonic) music. John Luther Adams
has lived in Alaska for the past quarter of a century, and is at pains
to let you know it: "I've come to measure everything I do [..] against
the overwhelming presence of this place.. [which] has profoundly influenced
the atmosphere and the scale of my work." As such, the seventy-five
minutes of "In The White Silence" are more representative of his aesthetic
than other shorter pieces that have appeared elsewhere, notably on
the Cold Blue label last year. Like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, Adams
has a knack for creating soundscapes whose unashamedly beautiful surface
cunningly disguises the rigorous contrapuntal devices that lie beneath;
the fact that the entire composition remains in the same basic white
note mode tends to mask the subtle polyrhythmic relationships between
its various strata, and the uniformly slow tempo serves to obscure
(though in a work as self-consciously "white" as this, obscure is
certainly not the right word) the larger form, cogently analysed by
Sabine Feisst in her accompanying liner notes. "Silence is not the
absence of sound. It is the presence of stillness," writes Adams,
but despite the fact that there is plenty of stasis - especially harmonic
- in the piece, there is in point of fact no silence at all. In the
sense that Adams openly aspires "to music that is both rigorous in
thought and sensuous in sound," the piece, sensitively performed by
Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble and beautifully recorded, is a
success, though to a certain extent I feel uncomfortable listening
to it in the middle of a bustling city; Steve Reich's "Desert Music"
only made sense when I listened to it while crossing Nevada, and Adams'
music seems to be as site-specific as James Turrell's light works
and Richard Long's land art. Listened to in the right frame of mind,
it works its charms, but if you approach it with the slightest hint
of an ironic smile, you'll probably end up being disappointed, if
not lulled to sleep. And that's perhaps what differentiates John Luther
Adams' music the most from that of his namesake down the coast - its
total absence of irony.
Moor
Lehn Butcher
THERMAL
Unsounds 04
by Dan Warburton
Saxophonist John Butcher is often frustratingly associated with
the so-called micro-improv end of the spectrum, but there's nothing
he likes nor does better than getting caught up in a bout of hard
blowing; he's just as adept at screeching upper registers as he is
at squeezing out delicate multiphonics, and this outing on guitarist
Andy Moor's label Unsounds gives him plenty of opportunity to do both.
Moor, who started out in Dog Faced Hermans before joining Dutch punk
group The Ex nine years ago and relocating to Amsterdam, reveals himself
as an improv guitarist to watch; his background in rock means he has
no qualms about laying down the odd motoric riff ("Once Gravity Strikes
For Real"), coming at the instrument from a different angle from the
"usual" post-jazz techniques of Messrs Bailey, Russell et al. Thomas
Lehn is in his element, conjuring forth a veritable electrical storm
of blurts, zaps and fizzes from his analogue synthesizer, and giving
it a good pounding to boot (dig the spring reverb), but "Thermal"
is no mere brutal slugfest - far from it - behind the grit and the
sweat there's a cunning sense of complicity and cogent sense of structure.
A trio of tiny tracks ("Miss Universal Happiness", "Weak Alarm" and
"Tongue") reveal that the trio is perfectly able to handle small forms
too. Only complaint: the cover photo, which I imagine is supposed
to represent a cloud, or a puff of smoke (but in fact somewhat resembles
a map of France) - surely not the appropriate image for music as strong
and sinewy as this.
Tod
Dockstader / James Reichert
OMNIPHONY 1
ReR TODD1
by Dan Warburton
Created between 1963 and 1967, "Omniphony 1" was a groundbreaking
collaborative work between composers James Reichert and Tod Dockstader.
Dockstader provided Reichert with a set of "cells" (recordings of
natural as well as electronically generated sounds) to be transcribed
and extended in an instrumental composition for 12-piece ensemble,
which was subsequently recorded (in 1966) before being sent back to
Dockstader for further transformation using Moog processing equipment.
The resulting 45 minute five-movement work is accompanied on this
release by Dockstader's earliest work, 1961's "Study No 7" and one
of his most recent, "Past Prelude", from 1990.
Compared to previous milestones in mixed instrumental / electronic
music by Varèse and Stockhausen, Reichert's cellular writing, which
owes more to Bartók, Stravinsky and Hindemith than it does to the
Darmstadt avant-garde, sounds somewhat dated, as do Dockstader's manipulations
(that treacly Moogy sound is now identified clearly with its epoch
as much as the mellotron is with early 70s prog), but the reappearance
of this music is cause for celebration (especially for those of us
who have been trying to find original Dockstader vinyls for some time).
Both Dockstader and Reichert studiously avoided being sucked into
the wearying tenure track of academia (Reichert ended up working for
CBS on TV themes), and their music, despite the rather boxy sound
of the instruments, still retains a directness that faculty snobs
would no doubt dismiss as glib and superficial, but which draws listeners
into the music rather than alienating them. (From a compositional
(i.e. music theory) standpoint, Babbitt's "Philomel" - roughly contemporary
- is probably light years ahead, but "Omniphony" is a darn sight more
fun to listen to.) Just as Dockstader avoided the serialist polemics
of the Europeans, his own take on musique concrète - he's always preferred
the term Organized Sound - is refreshingly free of the somewhat inhibiting
Schaefferian solfège dogma, freely incorporating snippets of military
bands and Third Reich broadcasts, documentary style (Luc Ferrari's
seminal "Music Promenade" also comes to mind). No wonder trendy rockers
like Jackie O Motherfucker's Tom Greenwood like to slap Dockstader
lps on the turntable.
Improvisation
In Brief
David Grubbs / Mats Gustafsson
OFF-ROAD
Blue Chopsticks BC11
by Dan Warburton
The last time Dave Grubbs and Mats Gustafsson got together, on 1999's
"Apertura", the Swedish saxophone virtuoso found himself sitting on
one note throughout (an extraordinary display of circular breathing,
but hardly what Mats fans normally pay money to hear) while Grubbs
droned merrily away on the harmonium. This time round, as if to make
up for it, "Rendezvous Up North" starts off with an extraordinary
display of the kind of yelping and splattering that Gustafsson does
better than anyone else. Grubbs' harmonium is also in evidence, but
his instrumental palette is more varied here, including (of course)
guitar, laptop, and, apparently, a glass-topped table being dragged
back and forth across a concrete floor (whooa, those after-concert
parties in Sweden must be really something). Add to this fragments
of Bach cantatas and what sounds like a cat in heat, and you end up
with one of the oddest (and most enjoyable) outings of the year so
far, refreshingly so, given improvised music's tendency to take itself
far too seriously.
Supersilent
6
Rune Grammofon RCD 2029
by James Baiye
The four members of the Norwegian group Supersilent, the press release
proudly informs us, as if it's something to be proud of, "never rehearse
as a group and don't discuss music with each other." Perhaps if they
did, they'd come up with something more interesting than this. It
seems these days that everything coming out of Norway is ultra-hip
(The Wire magazine being in a large part responsible for the trend),
and referencing "in" bands like Godspeed You Bloody Exclamation Mark
(who will, I'm prepared to risk a bet, have disappeared off the map
in a couple of years.. anyone out there remember Labradford?) will
surely sell them a packet of albums, but these dull semi-tonal improvised
ramblings should have stayed in the hard drive. It's easy to see what
music these chaps enjoy listening to: early 70s Miles and Herbie,
and of course Soft Machine (whose generic numbering - rather than
naming - of albums they've chosen to adopt), but especially the early
ECM outings of fellow countryman Terje Rypdal. Not surprisingly then
do we learn that the Rune Grammofon catalogue is distributed and marketed
by ECM (which used to stand for "European Contemporary Music", though
"Exquisitely Crafted Monotony" might be more appropriate these days).
Raising a glass to Rune Grammofon's healthy balance sheet, I've just
listened again to Rypdal's 1985 ECM outing "Chaser", and it's a lot
more fun than Supersilent, I can tell you.
Keith Rowe / Oren Ambarchi / Sachiko M / Otomo Yoshihide
/ Robbie Avenaim
THUMB
Grob 432
by Dan Warburton
Recorded live at the Instants Chavirés outside Paris in 2001 (in
front of an audience that was either very small or extremely attentive,
probably both), this one's for completists only. Clocking in at 30'07"
(which would have been fine for a full length album about forty years
ago but these days qualifies as an EP), it's a slow-moving affair,
very prettily executed, but hardly a groundbreaking addition to the
already extensive discographies of the musicians involved. Sachiko
M provides her customary sinewave drones, and the gentle whirring
of Rowe's battery-powered fans is easy to make out, but it's hard
to imagine what Avenaim and Otomo are up to. Couldn't they have salvaged
more than a half hour's worth of music from a complete evening?
Chris Cutler
SOLO
ReR CC1
by Dan Warburton
Though Chris Cutler has been experimenting with electronics in his
drum kit since the mid 1970s, we've had to wait until now for the
solo album. And it's been worth the wait. In typically self-deprecating
manner, Cutler plays down his considerable virtuosity ("there are
no samples, pads or triggers, just acoustic drums amplified and modified
with standard electronic processors [..] pedals and guitar effects,"
he notes), but he handles his equipment with consummate skill. It's
not just a question of what you hit, but what you hit it with - as
well as standard sticks and brushes, Cutler uses metal rods, kitchen
utensils, violin bows, cocktail mixers and massagers to great effect
(he's also a dab hand with a pair of rolled up newspapers). As ever
though, strange sounds for their own sake don't amount to much; it's
how they're integrated into larger structures that counts, and these
five extended live recordings ("the places and the people who occupied
them are imprinted in the sound and inseparable from it", Cutler writes)
are glorious proof that Cutler knows exactly what he's doing.
Morgan Guberman / Chuck Ehlis
EXOTIC ZOOLOGY
Frank Mark Arts FMA 0012
www.frank-mark-arts.com
by Dan Warburton
If you're a fan of that whole subgenre known as "dark ambient" (which
is pretty vague as terms go - they all are - but you can guess what
it sounds like), these three spacious tracks from the West Coast featuring
Morgan Guberman's electric bass and voice and Chuck Ehlis' guitars
and loops, will be right up your street. Ehlis, whose life was brutally
cut short in January 2000 when he was hit by a car not far from home,
showed singular sensitivity in his treatments, and there's a sense
of poise to this music that sets it apart from the thousands of other
rather vapid offerings gathering dust in the Ambient bin. Guberman,
who's just as good at handling Scott Rosenberg's thorny Braxton-like
charts in the Skronktet West as he is at manic vocal improvising à
la Phil Minton, is a versatile musician, and one to watch. If this
album had Bill Laswell's name on it, you can bet you'd have heard
of it already. But now you have, anyway.
Natto Quartet
HEADLANDS
482 Music 482-1018
by James Baiye
It's an oft-spouted cliché that Californians have looked westwards
across the Pacific for inspiration more than they have to the eastern
seaboard or Europe beyond, and one that inevitably comes to mind when
confronted with a disc featuring shakuhachi (Philip Gelb) and koto
(Shoko Hikage) and whose album and track titles are various Japanese
culinary specialities. Though natto itself (fermented bean curd) is
something of an acquired taste, the music on the album is eminently
digestible and seasoned to perfection. The Japanese instruments are
complemented by Tim Perkis' discreet and sensitive electronics, some
splendidly florid piano work from Chris Brown (especially on "Sake"),
and there's plenty of space and fresh air throughout this fine example
of West Coast improv.
Copyright 2003 by Paris Transatlantic
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