Editorial:
Free beermats from Columbia!
Dr. Eugene Chadbourne admits quite openly that one of the reasons
why he became a journalist back in the 70s was to get hold of the
albums he wanted and couldn't possibly afford to buy. To be sure,
it's always a pleasure to open the mailbox and find new CDs, even
if the logistics of finding the time to listen to them are becoming
ever more nightmarish. So far, I can still put hand on heart and say
that I have listened to everything I've received (though it takes
time), but compared to other case-hardened journalists I don't receive
that many. Here in France there's a weekly magazine called Télérama,
basically a TV guide fleshed out with various essays on art, culture
and what have you, a mag that has had phenomenal success over recent
years because it knows just how to grab that ever-growing market of
young(ish) upwardly-mobile professionals who "don't have enough time"
to read, listen or go to exhibitions - and feel mighty guilty about
it. The record review section in Télérama judges albums with a star
system, or rather an fff system (that's not an expletive, by
the way): if you're lucky enough to have your album accorded the mythic
triple f sticker, expect to sell upwards of 3000 copies within a week,
because Télérama readers flock in droves to the nearest emporium and
buy whatever the man tells them to. You can imagine how many CDs people
who write for such mags receive for review, can't you? And do you
think they keep them all (let alone listen to more than a handful)?
Get real; they're off down the road every week with a sports bag that
would do Michael Jordan proud, stuffed to the brim with unwrapped
CDs to sell off to various local record shops. At about $5 a disc,
you can see it's quite a bit of extra pocket money. And lest I be
accused of holier-than-thouness, I freely admit I sometimes do it
myself when I end up with duplicate copies or things that obviously
don't correspond to what we're looking for.
To combat such blatant abuses of the promo copy system, poor, cash-starved
little cottage industry labels like Columbia have recently taken to
sending out CDRs as promos instead of the real article. I've just
received a promo copy of James Carter's Gardenias For Lady Day,
with no information whatsoever on the disc or the plain black sleeve
about who's playing, when / where it was recorded, and apparently
I can't even play it on my computer, as it's copy protected, whatever
that means. Talk about paranoid.. If you'll pardon my French, I'll
be fucked if I'm going spend any time surfing on the Columbia website
for information about this disc, and if they seriously expect me to
spend any time reviewing it, they can kiss my hard drive. Am I really
supposed to believe that Columbia can't afford a few bob to send out
a few real copies (so what if a bunch of hardboiled scribblers trade
a few in for cash? I doubt neither James Carter's sales nor his press
coverage would suffer as a result..)? Do they really understand what
makes people want to own records? Packaging is an integral part of
the work - I'm talking liner notes and personnel lists as much as
cover art and design - stop for one moment, close your eyes and think
of your ten all time fave rock / pop / jazz albums: I'll bet you can
picture the covers of them all, from Pink Floyd to Miles to Nurse
With Wound to Black Flag to Nirvana..
Now when a small indie label like Grob starts doing the same thing,
i.e. sending out discs (real ones) without the digipak (expensive)
to save a few quid, I can understand. Felix Klopotek's imprint runs
on a tight budget, producing high quality uncompromising improvised
music in limited editions which probably just about break even, if
they do at all. But even so, I want to know what the cover looks like,
who's on it, what the track titles are, where and when it was recorded
and who mixed it. I recently suggested to Nicolas Malevitsis, who
runs the excellent CDR label Absurd in Greece (see below), that the
least he could do when sending out promo CDRs would be to send a .pdf
file showing what the cover art looks like. So, for anyone out there
who's thinking of sending material in to Paris Transatlantic for review,
think on: unmarked promo CDs make terrific beermats. For the record,
the James Carter album is rather nice - but you won't find a review
of it here, so don't bother looking. Instead, many thanks to Frank
Sani for submitting this month's lead feature, an interview with harpist
Rhodri Davies (and thanks
to Rhodri for corrections and proofing). Bonne lecture. —DW
New
on Absurd
Sindre Bjerga / Anders Gjerde
STAVANGER
Absurd 27
Accompanying the first issue of a new fanzine called
Playground (it's worth bearing in mind that Absurd's Nicolas Malevitsis
considers his imprint more as a 'zine than as a label), Norwegian
sound artists Sindre Bjerga and Anders Gjerde's Stavanger is
sourced in MD recordings made in their Norwegian coastal hometown.
The issue of Playground folds out like a pocket tourist guide, and
contains what seems to be an extended interview with the artists (though
as the man said, it's Greek to me) and a street map of the city. Quite
where the recordings were made, or how they were subsequently sculpted
into such intriguing work, or whether or not there was some kind of
underlying system (maybe a prescribed route through the city?) is
not clear, but the recognisable elements such as honking geese (and
honking shoppers) are integrated into more abstract soundscapes with
great coherence and sensitivity.
AKIYAMA / FRANCIS / KNEALE / NEVILLE / WATKINS
Absurd 28
Good news: guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama's trip to New Zealand last year
didn't only spawn the excellent Corpus Hermeticum release International
Domestic, but also a fine fifty-minute sprawl of texturally rich
and rewarding improvisation with local talents Campbell Kneale (Birchville
Cat Motel), Stefan Neville (Stabbies and the Rocket), Richard Francis
(Eso Steel) and Clinton Watkins (Mr Doe). Despite the rather austere
artwork (an orange footprint), this limited edition CDR (197 copies
this time) is full of intriguing surprises. Small scale surprises,
maybe - Akiyama's onkyo background and the predominantly ambient
/ drone tendencies of Kneale and Francis' work guarantee that the
heartbeat is generally slow and that nobody pushes anyone else around
- but very beautiful ones. Tetuzi has been on a veritable roll now
for well over a year, and all his recent releases without exception
are most worthy of your undivided attention.
Adam Sonderberg / Sam Dellaria
FOLD YOUR ARMS AND THE WORLD WILL STOP
Absurd 29
Chicago-based Adam Sonderberg and Sam Dellaria have released a number
of collaborative electronic works in recent years on Sonderberg's
CDR imprint Longbox (Signal Hill, 64 Squares..), but
Fold Your Arms And The World Will Stop is their richest and
most satisfying offering yet. As usual, Sonderberg is giving little
away about how he and Dellaria came up with their sounds (I'm still
trying to figure out exactly what they did in another recent piece
Nil, in which they remixed an album of mine), but there's apparently
some organ and clarinet in there, though they're often comfortably
buried in a warm sine drone lightly peppered with stuttering static.
As is often the case with Sonderberg's work, events move at a sedate
pace. A glowing, breathy organ rumble appears at 10'21", followed
five minutes later by what might be the clarinet, the texture gradually
thickening until a volley of refracted high register tones appears.
Simply describing what goes on is no substitute for the listening
experience though; if you've missed out on these guys' work until
now, this (and the recent all-star outing by (the)
Dropp Ensemble reviewed in last month's issue) is definitely one
to look out for.
The Sonic Catering Band
LIVE FROM THE CANTEENS OF ATLANTIS
Absurd 30 (2CD)
Part performance art, part live music installation, The Sonic Catering
Band was, as its name suggests, just that: Colin Fletcher, Tim Kirby
and Peter Strickland donned the traditional chef's toques and
cooked, literally, using contact mics, samplers and live mixing to
record the event and transform it into live music. Nice concept (and
their recipes aren't bad, either: check out www.soniccatering.com
- who said the English can't cook? Answer: the French), but mere listening
can hardly convey the visual - and olfactory! - elements of an SCB
performance. The problem with cooking sounds is that they're predominantly
percussive, and once they've been looped into grinding part-technoid,
part Industrial clanking mixes, that's just about it. The first of
these two discs presents a kind of Greatest Bits selection culled
from various shows between 1998 and 2001, while the second documents
the group's final appearance at the Forde Gallery in Geneva in November
of that year ("the only performance of ours cohesive enough to warrant
appearing in its entirety", as the notes rather wistfully admit).
Still, it's fun stuff, and for those of us who missed out on the group's
early singles (tastefully presented in a pizza box!), it's a fair
and honest representation of the SCB's work. Bon appétit.—DW
Mal
Waldron & Judi Silvano
RIDING A ZEPHYR
Soul Note 121348-2
These duets were recorded in 2000 in Waldron's adopted hometown
of Brussels, and released just before the pianist's death late last
year. In a career distinguished among other things by his work as
an accompanist to singers from Billie Holiday to Jeanne Lee, this
is apparently his final such gig on record. Unexpectedly free of standards,
the set list is drawn by Silvano from the tunes Waldron wrote during
his late-1950s stint at Prestige as house pianist, composer and arranger.
Some have words by Waldron, while Silvano has written fresh lyrics
for others and also contributed two (wordless) originals of her own.
The respectful gesture towards a little-explored body of compositions
is welcome, but it's hampered by the uneven quality of both Waldron's
and Silvano's lyrics, which tend to lurch from trope to trope, from
rhyme to rhyme, without hewing to a consistent situation or rhetorical
stance. When the first track, "You", opens "If I could be a part of
you / I'd choose to be the heart of you", it's a bad sign, not just
because of the absurdity of the image but because it's immediately
abandoned: the only way to make such lines work is to follow out their
logic (cf. "All of Me", or, for that matter, Donne's Songs and
Sonnets), but from this point the lyrics dissolve into vagueness.
"Soul Eyes" requires Silvano to mourn the impossibility of truly knowing
the feelings of another person in this world, to celebrate the mutual
love between her and the addressee (someone who will "always be true"),
and to advise that other person how to find someone else who'll
"be true". Hard to see how all three sentiments can comfortably reside
in the same song. Silvano turns in the album's best lyrics on "Finding
My Love/Empty Street", a pop song-blues in the vein of "Willow Weep
for Me" or "Stormy Weather". But she and husband Joe Lovano also work
"Flickers" up into an artlessly clunky tribute to Waldron himself.
Lyrics that hymn the greatness of dead jazz artists - of the "Prez,
he was the greatest cat" variety - are unimaginative, and risk pushing
jazz's consciousness of its rich tradition into canonical navel-gazing
(as if jazz were only about jazz), but to pay fulsome tribute when
the guy's alive and kicking and in the same studio is merely flattery.
Well, so what: countless albums have survived crummy lyrics on the
strength of sterling musical performances. With Riding a Zephyr
this is a trickier matter. Silvano's not an obvious match for Waldron
- neither earthy nor ethereal, her vocals have a basic plainspoken
quality, which is pleasant in itself though subject to rather foursquare
technical decoration. Her most effective performance is the title
track, a barebones improvisation of the kind Waldron thrives on, as
he creeps assiduously up and down the piano over a pedal point. Here
her vocals are unusually simple and unaffected, while elsewhere she
fares less well, from the overdubbed Manhattan Transfer-style chorusing
on "Cattin'" to the squeak'n'chitter improv on part 2 of "Dust". The
good news is that Waldron himself is in excellent form throughout.
He can make the slowest of tempos roll rather than trudge, and the
music is suffused with tremendous warmth and tenderness, despite its
doomy minor-key sensibility. Not a classic album by any means - among
his final recordings, One More Time is the one to plump for
- but if you're a Waldron fan there's enough of the great man's wizardry
here to make up for the disc's infelicities. —ND
Music
from the ONCE Festival, 1961-1966
Various Artists
MUSIC FROM THE ONCE FESTIVAL 1961-1966
New World 80567-2 5xCD
The ONCE Festivals that took place in Ann Arbor, Michigan (and elsewhere)
during the 1960s have, in retrospect, come to be regarded as events
of monumental cultural importance, both as models for successful ventures
in terms of programming, financing and logistics, and as opportunities
to discover not only new and important work coming from Europe but
also a generation of composers, several of whom - Robert Ashley, Gordon
Mumma, Roger Reynolds to name but three - would go on to become major
figures in the history of post-War American contemporary music. Fortunately
for posterity, the university radio station WUOM had the foresight
to record the entire proceedings, which makes New World's five CD
box Music from the ONCE Festival arguably one of the most important
releases of the past decade, following as it does hard on the heels
of James Tenney's Selected Works 1961 - 69, not to mention
long-overdue reissues of work by Ashley (on Alga Marghen), Mumma (on
Tzadik), Reynolds and Oliveros (on Pogus).
Ashley and Mumma's later activities with the Sonic Arts Union and
beyond are reasonably well-documented, but the music of their ONCE
contemporaries George Cacioppo (1926 - 84) and Donald Scavarda (born
1928) has been unfairly neglected. The box's inclusion of no fewer
than eleven of their works goes some way to righting the balance,
and will hopefully encourage performers and labels today to rediscover,
perform and record their music. Cacioppo's 1960 "String Trio" reveals
deep roots in the expressive serialism of the Second Viennese School,
but within a couple of years he was experimenting with conceptually
elegant graphic notation, and by the time he wrote the intriguingly-titled
"Advance of the Fungi" in 1964 (scored for an ensemble featuring male
chorus employing numerous extended vocal techniques, percussion, three
clarinets, three horns and three trombones) he'd arrived at a mature
and original style embracing the flexibility of American experimentalism
while preserving predominantly serial pitch procedures. The 1962 "Pianopieces"
demonstrate the coherence of Cacioppo's musical evolution - while
"Pianopiece I" is conventionally notated, the score of "Cassiopeia"
is a stunningly beautiful graphic score, a star map charting various
routes through the material - but both are clearly the work of the
same composer, as Donald Bohlen's superb performance makes clear.
The influence of post-War Europe is evident in much of this music
(after all, the first ever ONCE concert featured Luciano Berio and
Cathy Berberian performing music by, amongst others, Stockhausen,
Haubenstock-Ramati, Bussotti and Berio himself), but the ONCE composers
were just as drawn to Cageian experimentalism, in matters of notation
and especially visual presentation. Ashley initially had some reservations
about releasing recordings of works whose theatrical and spatial considerations
were almost as important as their purely musical content, and though
we can but dream of what it might have been like to experience Mumma's
"Dresden Interleaf" live (complete with its squadron of alcohol-burning
model aeroplanes), the appearance of forgotten masterpieces of the
first order such as Scavarda's "Groups for Piano" is cause for celebration.
"How short can a piece be and still be perceived as complete and coherent?"
was the question Scavarda set out to answer. His five groups last
respectively 7, 8, 10, 8 and 7 seconds and are ferociously complex
(this in 1959, a whole decade before Ferneyhough) - Robert Ashley's
performance of this 1959 piano piece is simply stunning. Ashley was
no slouch as a performer, and his readings of his own "Sonata" and
Reynolds' "Epigram and Evolution" are both superb. Indeed, the quality
of the playing throughout is exemplary: Mumma notes that no subsequent
performance of his "Sinfonia for 12 Instruments and Magnetic Tape"
ever "matched the careful preparation and enthusiastic energy of the
ONCE premiere."
"I am surprised that the music sounds so familiar," writes Roger Reynolds
of "Epigram and Evolution". "Not in the sense that I know its specifics
well, but rather that I recognize my sensibility. One imagines that
one is continuously evolving, but it turns out that the signature
features are already there at the outset." Reynolds' remarks could
apply equally well to the works included by Ashley and Mumma. Ashley's
"The Fourth of July" clearly marks a departure from the idea of electronic
music that sought to use the new technology to realise (predominantly
serial) works whose complexities far surpassed the capabilities of
human performers. Ashley's piece might have started out as an ambitious
project to layer tape loops of sinewaves according to a complex hierarchy
of tempi and durations, but some chance experiments with a parabolic
microphone in his backyard led to the incorporation of recordings
of his neighbors' Fourth of July party. The result is simultaneously
rigorous and quirky, deadly serious and amusing, quintessentially
Ashley. Similarly, Mumma's "Sinfonia" starts out conventionally enough,
but when the raucous tape element comes crashing in it's clear Ann
Arbor is a long way from the studios of WDR Cologne. 1961's "Meanwhile,
A Twopiece" manages to be simultaneously uncompromising in its modernity
and wryly humorous in its theatricality - the audience is in hysterics
- proving that challenging new music need neither be po-faced and
pretentious nor shoot for cheap laughs to work.
Discovering the sheer variety of notational and permutational strategies
adopted by the ONCE group is as entertaining as it is exciting; Mumma's
series of "Mographs" were derived from seismological data recording
subterranean earthquake (and nuclear testing) activity, and his "Gestures
II" includes one section that coordinates activities in hundreds of
possible permutations (the composer later performed it with David
Tudor but got lost several minutes into the game and gave up). Another
section, appropriately entitled "Onslaught", finds the pianists performing
inside the body of the instrument to the accompaniment of a suitably
aggressive tape montage of piano and percussion sounds. When asked
to write for bass virtuoso Bertram Turetzky and his Hartt Chamber
Players, Mumma rose to the occasion with a truly challenging score
originally intended as one of four movements, hence the title "A Quarter
of Fourpiece" (he unfortunately never got round to finishing the other
three).
Robert Ashley's "Quartet" was originally commissioned by Selmer as
a piece for beginners - an example of its elegant and accomplished
graphic notation is included in the booklet - but the composer also
makes provision in the score for performers to murmur extracts from
unspecified texts, and accepts the presence onstage of actors and
dancers "seated among the players, as though asleep". His "in memoriam…Crazy
Horse (symphony)" (1963) remains a model of how experimental notation
can be used to coordinate a large ensemble with utter coherence. "I
have never written, 'Do what you want,'" the composer explains. "I
give the performer a lot of latitude, but he or she has enormous responsibility
to the score. I'm a control freak." "Fives" originated in a "huge
compilation of number tables of every combination and order of the
proportions of the numbers one through five that I could imagine."
Realising that these would be inappropriate for the musicians to perform
from ("I wouldn't touch the tables myself today"), he prepared a more
conventional score, albeit "impossible to play". Unplayable or not,
the work sounds magnificent, and is executed with bravura by New York's
Camerata Quartet and other ONCE regulars including Ashley and Bob
James on piano. James is well-known as an accomplished jazz pianist
- yes, that Bob James - but was (maybe still is, somewhere) a superbly
precise interpreter of difficult contemporary scores - his performance
of Reynolds' "Mosaic", with Karen Hill on flute and piccolo is a veritable
tour de force.
Reynolds, of all the composers featured here, remains closest to the
Europeans in aesthetic. "A Portrait of Vanzetti" was written during
a Fulbright grant-supported stay to study with G.M. Koenig in Cologne
(Reynolds returned to the USA only several years later), and sets
texts extracted from the letters of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an Italian
anarchist falsely accused of and subsequently executed for murder
in Massachusetts in 1927. It's a supremely confident and accomplished
work for a 29 year old, and one that deserves to be heard more often.
The same can be said for Scavarda's magnificent "Sounds for Eleven",
which eminent musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock rightly described at
the time as "a study in discrete sonorities of the most remarkable
variety of instrumentation."
While the selection for the box unsurprisingly concentrates on the
ONCE group's principal protagonists - a most welcome strategy with
respect to Scavarda and Cacioppo, whose work deserves a thorough reappraisal
- it's perhaps a shame that nothing from La Monte Young and Terry
Jennings' "thoroughly degenerate evening" that opened the 1962 festival
made it to the disc (one assumes that it too was recorded), especially
one of Young's pieces that consisted of him banging a frying pan 923
times (fortunately, Jennings returned to Ann Arbor in 1964, and appears
on George Crevoshay's "7PTPC"). Presumably a tape must also exist
somewhere of the 1964 concert which featured Eric Dolphy playing with
the Bob James Trio and the ONCE chamber ensemble, and hopefully this
too might someday see the light of day.
Though each work included in the box is worthy of attention as a representative
example of the extraordinary creativity that characterised the ONCE
Festivals, not all are masterpieces. In his "Music for Clocks" Philip
Krumm set about superimposing rhythmic layers in a noble but not altogether
convincing attempt at a technique György Ligeti would later refine
in his instrumental works of the 1970s and 1980s. Robert Sheff, who
later reincarnated himself as pianist "Blue" Gene Tyranny (and continues
to collaborate with Ashley on the latter's operatic projects), contributes
two works to the set: "Diotima", a lugubrious work for tape and flutes
- somewhat marred in places by the bronchial splutterings of the audience
- that ends rather incongruously with 63 repetitions of a two-second
fragment of music, and "Ballad", a gentler affair for flute, violin
and piano. Disc five of the set also features "Track" by David Behrman,
with whom Ashley, Mumma and Alvin Lucier went on to form the Sonic
Arts Union, a riotous ten-minute exploration of unconventional instrumental
techniques accompanied by a hilarious tape collage featuring excerpts
from film, radio and television, and Pauline Oliveros' "Applebox Double",
which finds the composer and David Tudor scraping, rubbing, bowing
and scratching the surface of prepared wooden boxes in a completely
improvised performance that sounds intriguingly more like the work
of today's lowercase improvisers from Berlin and Japan than Oliveros'
rich accordion work on her recent Deep Listening outings.
The 140 page accompanying booklet features comprehensive documentation
and dates of all ONCE concerts, numerous extracts from the scores
of the works and an impressive collection of archive photographs,
many by Makepeace Tsao and Mary Ashley, including her legendary scandalous
poster for the 1964 festival (in which Mumma, Scavarda, Cacioppo and
Ashley posed as gangsters behind a naked woman sprawled across the
counter of a local eatery). As well as providing cogent and informative
information on each of the thirty-five works, Leta Miller's outstanding
essay recounts in detail the inception, organisation and funding of
the festival, acknowledging the key influence of catalysts such as
Ross Lee Finney, Roberto Gerhard, Wilfred Kaplan and Milton Cohen.
As if this were not enough, Ashley, Mumma, Reynolds and Scavarda each
provide their own illuminating background material. One imagines that
the vaults of French and German state radio must also contain hours
of archive recordings of the new music dating from the late 1950s
and early 1960s; perhaps the appearance of the ONCE box might spur
other labels on to investigating the possibility of releasing them
to the public at large one day. In the meantime, rejoice. —DW
On
Thirsty Ear
Spring Heel Jack
LIVE
Thirsty Ear THI 57130.2
Tim Berne
THE SUBLIME AND: SCIENCE FRICTION LIVE
Thirsty Ear 57139.2
DJ Wally
NOTHING STAYS THE SAME
Thirsty Ear THI 57140.2
The Spring Heel Jack story is an interesting one; how and why John
Coxon and Ashley Wales made the transition from the stomping drum'n'bass
of "Lee Perry Part One" on their 1995 debut These Are Strings
to the abstract and eclectic mixture of improv, free jazz and electronics
that has characterised their three outings for Thirsty Ear would certainly
make for an interesting read. Certainly, it seems clear that they
got lost somewhere along the way after Versions, especially
on the disappointing albums that followed it up, rising phoenix-like
with 2001's Masses and its sequel from the following year Amassed.
Riding a wave of rave reviews - how could the alt.music press not
fall for an album that features Han Bennink, Evan and William
Parker, Paul Rutherford, Kenny Wheeler, Matthew Shipp and Jason Pierce?
- a proposal for a SHJ tour was accepted, hardly unsurprisingly, by
the British Contemporary Music Network, and the abovementioned titans
(minus Rutherford and Wheeler) set off with Coxon and Wales to deliver
the goods in concert around England in January this year. This (inevitable)
live album features two extended spans of music, 35 and 39 minutes
long respectively, recorded three days apart at Brighton's Corn Exchange
and Bath's Michael Tippett Centre.
While Coxon and Wales were most definitely hands-on performers and
producers on their earlier drum'n'bass outings, they seem to have
taken a more curatorial behind-the-scenes role in the Thirsty Ear
incarnation of SHJ. In concert Coxon plays electric guitar and piano,
while Wales is credited on instruments (?!) and electronics, but they
apparently feel no need to compete with the team of heavyweights they've
recruited. As a result, there's plenty of room for Bennink, Shipp
and the Parkers to stretch out - and much for their respective fans
to admire - but nobody seems to want to assume overall control of
the steering wheel. Both tracks drift rather wonderfully but somewhat
aimlessly from punchy early 70s groovefests (Shipp's Rhodes is tasty)
to atmospheric doodles (sorry, but I'm still not convinced by William
Parker's bamboo flute and shenai noodlings) and rather half-hearted
reprises of material from Amassed. Presumably the only instruction
the musicians were provided with prior to taking the stage was "go
out there and enjoy yourself"; it all has the feel of a jam session,
albeit a rather good one. Compared to the awesome punch of its two
predecessors, however, it's a pretty lightweight affair. For my own
part, as an old drum'n'bass nostalgic, I still prefer 1996's 68
Million Shades. —DW
The Sublime And?? I'm still trying to decide whether that's
the dumbest or the hippest record title I've heard this year. This
double-CD was recorded earlier this year at a concert in Switzerland,
by Berne's current working band, Science Friction, which in addition
to the leader features Craig Taborn on keyboards, Marc Ducret on guitar
and Tim Rainey on drums. Berne himself is blowing alto sax (no baritone,
which seems to have receded in his instrumental arsenal lately), on
which he's characteristically wrenching and direct. He can sound very
like his contemporary John Zorn - they were virtually impossible to
tell apart on Spy Vs Spy - though he lacks Zorn's cartoon violence:
it's no accident that the album's title slices away the implied "ridiculous"
from the "sublime". Berne's always loved a large canvas, and the six
tracks here average at about twenty minutes, with one broaching half
an hour. Each piece inevitably gravitates towards Berne's inimitable
barbed-wire riffs, while also uncovering a surprising amount of open
space; he's not a fan of banal jump-cut aesthetics but instead prefers
long transitional passages of dreamy suspension. Featured solos by
band members are excellent, if sometimes a tad overextended, but what
sticks most in the ear is the swarming weirdness of the full quartet:
the keen edge of the leader's alto, Taborn's sly, bubbling Fender
Rhodes and insinuating organ, Ducret's virtuosic, grinding attack
on the guitar, Rainey's gutpunching drums. The performances' sprawling
length may bother some listeners, but it is justified by how it permits
the basic material to develop into drawn-out dream-like swirls, when
it might have been too bristling and impacted if kept on a short leash.
That said, the very long tracks on disc 1 overstay their welcome somewhat,
but disc 2 is thoroughly achieved, from Taborn's shivery organ piece
"Small Fry" to the slow-gathering radiance of "Stuck on U (For Sarah)"'s
conclusion. —ND
Perhaps the most surprising thing about DJ Wally's album is its title,
since, as far as the Thirsty Ear Blue Series is concerned (with the
possible exception of Berne and Spring Heel Jack), everything stays
the same. The fare the label has been dishing up for some time now
is as successful, seductive and appetising as a hamburger, capturing
that elusive crossover audience (the dynamic end of the market consisting
of kids who've grown up with hiphop but who, for whatever reason,
want to "graduate" to something more closely resembling jazz) by teaming
up NY's finest (wheel in the usual suspects: Carter, Jamal, Parker,
Shipp, Brown and Ware, plus the flutes of TE head honcho Peter Gordon)
with the hippest hiphop producers and DJs. The resulting music is
as elegantly packaged as a Big Mac, and just about as filling - without
being particularly nourishing. The signifiers of a bygone age of jazz
- that out-of-tune piano that used to dog those old recordings live
at the Five Spot, Roland Kirkish fluty splutterings, even smatterings
of (real?) applause - are lovingly dusted off and slipped into the
mix along with tasty samples and soundbites that stick to the surface
of the music like balls of fluff. It may be thicker, but it's not
deeper. Slamming hiphop beats - and these are particularly good ones
- are just as effective as foursquare techno kickdrums at levelling
everything in their path to create a uniformly smooth surface. Along
the way, all the peaks and troughs - the internal rise and fall of
well-structured solos and imaginative, responsive accompaniment, in
short, the very bread and butter of jazz - are mercilessly flattened.
Solos are no longer central to the musical argument (if indeed there
is one anymore), but are relegated to the status of mere embellishment,
and even a one-minute temperamental outburst of free piano from Shipp
halfway through fails to convince you otherwise. Jazz has become merely
jazzy; goodbye jazz, hello McJazz. —DW
Milton
Babbitt
OCCASIONAL VARIATIONS
Tzadik TZ 7088
[ This review was originally commissioned by Kurt Gottschalk
for his excellent webzine The
Squid's Ear. Go visit! —DW]
The Grand Old Man of American contemporary music Elliott Carter recently
described minimalism as "death", but the old rivalry that used to
exist between Uptown and Downtown (i.e. academia / serialism / old
school vs. trendy / minimal / crossover) is practically non-existent
these days. Proof, if any were needed, comes with the release of this
album featuring the über-Uptown music of Princeton's eminent
professor Milton Babbitt (at 87 also a Grand Old Man) on John Zorn's
Tzadik imprint. Reissue, to be more precise, as the Composers Quartet
classic reading of Babbitt's 1952 "String Quartet No.2" was originally
released in 1973 on Nonesuch, and both the "Composition for Guitar"
(1984) and the title track, which Babbitt realised on his trusty RCA
Mark II Synthesizer between 1968 and 1971, were issued by the Composers
Guild of New Jersey in 1990 (even if you own the original releases,
though, the Tzadik disc is worth the price of admission for Scott
Hull's outstanding mastering alone). New stuff comes in the form of
Babbitt's "String Quartet No.6", dating from 1993, in a spirited reading
by the Sherry Quartet.
"If these are variations for an occasion, they are also only occasionally
variations of the same degree of variational explictness, induced
by the same modes of musical mutation, although the procession from
the local detail to the total composition eventually clearly discloses
a distinct articulation of the one-movement work into three manifestly
and mutual 'parallel' sections (each itself variationally bifurcated):
'parallel' presentations of the same complete succession of twelve-tone
aggregates, identical to within the traditional means of transpositional,
registral, contour, timbral, and temporal variation in their non-traditional,
uniquely electronic extensions." So writes the composer of "Occasional
Variations" - and listening to Babbitt's music requires the same effort
as reading his prose. It's not that he spouts incomprehensible pretentious
jargon - far from it - but what he has to say needs careful and concentrated
attention to yield up its secrets.
For over half a century Milton Babbitt has dedicated his life as a
composer to the exploration and elaboration of the principles of serial
composition, working patiently and painstakingly on the extensions
of serial technique in the domains of timbre and rhythm (his time-point
system, originally formalised in the 1962 article "Twelve-Tone Rhythmic
Structure and the Electronic Medium", remains the most theoretically
coherent adaptation of serial pitch procedures to the parameter of
duration). As the above-quoted sentence makes abundantly clear, Babbitt
is hardly given to soundbites, but two of his more memorable utterances
are worth mentioning in this context. "Nothing grows old faster than
a new sound," he once stated, a maxim that goes some way to explaining
his uncompromising commitment to serialism and the theoretical system
that grew from it in post-War America, set theory (if you think that
explanatory sentence on "Occasional Variations" is heavy going, try
"Past and Present Concepts of the Nature and Limits of Music"). Drop
the needle - well, it's a CD so you can't, but you see what I mean
- anywhere in either the Second or the Sixth quartet and you'd be
hard pressed to say which is which; Babbitt has consistently avoided
the fads and fancies of so-called extended techniques when it comes
to writing for standard instruments, and the timbres he opted for
in his seminal works using the RCA synthesizer were selected primarily
with a view to elucidating the serial structure of the musical argument,
not as weird and wonderful sounds for their own sake. So it was that
Morton Subotnick became hip and Babbitt never did.
Which brings us to the second oft-quoted remark: when asked once who
he might like to be - as a musician - if he weren't Milton Babbitt,
he answered: "Stephen Sondheim." (This might explain the inclusion
by the good folks at Tzadik of a cute photo of ten-year old Milton
brandishing a saxophone.) One imagines that Babbitt might concur in
part with Anton Webern's celebrated statement of faith that one day
the milkman would be able to whistle his music, but as both composer
and theorist he's nothing if not pragmatic - make no mistake, this
is difficult music. Its density is mesmerizing: the title track lasts
just under ten minutes, but feels like twenty. In terms of sheer volume
of concentrated information, Cecil Taylor often comes to mind. Difficult,
but not unprepossessing: William Anderson's spirited reading of the
"Composition for Guitar" almost swings, and anyone familiar with Derek
Bailey's work - who isn't, these days? - should have no difficulty
latching on to some of Babbitt's pitch procedures. The two string
quartets are tougher nuts to crack, but compared to Carter and Ferneyhough's
works for the medium, far from forbidding. The Sixth is decidedly
lyrical (for Babbitt), and contains numerous melodic and harmonic
events that enable the attentive listener to penetrate deeper into
the work's complex structure.
The one regret one might have is that, as mentioned above, three of
these four works have been released before, and while their reappearance
is cause for celebration, one wonders why other unreleased compositions
could not have been issued instead. Babbitt might not be as unstoppably
prolific as Carter, but he has produced a significant body of work,
much of which hasn't been heard outside of the intellectual hotbeds
of American academia. That the music should appear on Tzadik, however,
is most definitely good news: Zorn's championship of American pioneers
such as Ives, Partch and Wuorinen is not only consistent with his
own recent concentration on "composing with a capital C", but with
his desire to share the music he loves with the widest possible audience.
There's still a long way to go, though: perhaps when places like Tonic
start programming evenings of Babbitt chamber music, things will start
to change. In the meantime, buy your milkman a copy of Occasional
Variations. —DW
Vijay
Iyer
BLOOD SUTRA
Artists House AH 09
Like John Butcher, self-taught jazz pianist Vijay Iyer originally
embarked on a career in physics, until Steve Coleman encouraged him
to take the plunge into music. His breakthrough disc was his third,
Panoptic Modes (Red Giant, 2001), a powerful, almost suffocatingly
intense quartet outing featuring altoist Rudresh Mahanthappa. Commissions,
grants and enthusiastic reviews followed thick and fast, and his discography
began to pick up speed: Panoptic Modes was followed in quick
succession by Black Water, a duo with Mahanthappa, and Your
Life Flashes with the band Fieldwork. This October saw a double
release: a song cycle with Mike Ladd from Pi Records, and Blood Sutra,
the follow-up quartet disc, on John Snyder's admirable and innovative
non-profit label Artists House. Mahanthappa and bassist Stephan Crump
are still on board, and Tyshawn Sorey takes over from Derrek Phillips
at the drums.
While the dancing Indian rhythms that Panoptic Modes drew upon
aren't left behind on the new disc, the intensity of its newfound
engagement with the rhythmic energy of pop (from rock to hip-hop)
is immediately noticeable, and the results strikingly original. Iyer
has long since stopped sounding like anyone in particular, though
passages can suggest everything from Andrew Hill to The Inner Mounting
Flame. The plethora of jazz artists who seem to think time signatures
like 5/4 and 7/8 are still "daring" should be strapped down and forced
to listen to what he's doing - it's so complex in places that it's
hard to figure out what the basic count is, yet it actually comes
off with the kind of deep-set, compulsive groove that Greg Osby would
kill for. Sorey is a key addition: with Crump and/or Iyer's left hand
keeping hold of the pulse, he ranges further afield than Phillips.
Like other state-of-the-art drummers (Nasheet Waits comes to mind),
he seems to be on perpetual fast forward or rewind, the drums tumbling,
stuttering and miraculously righting themselves.
This is often severe music, but its intensities and hard-won ecstasies
are of the kind that invite rather than repel. The pianist's short
note in the booklet reveals that the pieces are drawn from a much
longer suite, concerning interrelated themes that cluster around "blood"
as substance and symbol: "health, kinship, identity, race, violence,
liquidity, desire." The linkage is felt at an emotional level rather
than musically explicit - each piece is self-contained, and only the
decision to omit breaks between several tracks hints that they are
parts of a whole. But just as Iyer has learned how to pace a performance
- for a good example, listen to "Imagined Nations", a bristling dance
floor stomp that achieves some superb moments of frenzy without hectoring
the listener - Blood Sutra as a whole is carefully structured.
Iyer doesn't reveal his hand too early on, so that it only becomes
clear over the album's duration how its energies come to converge
on the epic "Because of Guns (Hey Joe Redux)", one of the most compelling
jazz glosses on Hendrix I've heard, in which Iyer's new line all but
pulls the tune apart. Inevitably but nonetheless satisfyingly, the
closing "Desiring" is a peaceful coda to the foregoing tumult. Panoptic
Modes was good, but with Blood Sutra Iyer's stars are finally
in alignment: this is essential listening for followers of contemporary
jazz. —ND
On
TwoThousandAnd
 Ross
Lambert / Seymour Wright
lucky rabbit
TwoThousandAnd 2++6
Mattin
GORA
TwoThousandAnd 2++7
If lowercase improv seemed to be digging itself into a bit of a
hole about a year ago (Taku Sugimoto's "hum" being, perhaps, the final
logical move before lapsing into total silence - I await his forthcoming
double album with Radu Malfatti with great interest), it seems to
have found a way out by veering to the opposite extreme: noise. In
a recent Wire piece Mego's Peter Rehberg said something to the effect
that aficionados of the ultra-minimal should also try listening to
Merzbow. It seems that a younger generation of (predominantly electronic)
improvisers are doing just that. The first of these two new releases
from Michael Rodgers and Anthony Guerra's beautifully packaged label
(jet black CDs! makes a change from those silvery, shiny things) features
the work of guitarist Ross Lambert and altoist Seymour Wright, aka
lucky rabbit, an animal that divides its time between London
and Tokyo, where it enjoys hanging out, or whatever rabbits do, with
Utah Kawasaki, Tetsuro Yasunaga and Ami Yoshida, all of whom pop up
on three of the seven tracks. Despite that To(n)kyo connection, this
must be one of the noisiest rabbits that's ever walked the surface
of the Earth. Wright and Lambert have no qualms when it comes to manic
spluttering and churning lo-fi drones, even though the overall pace
of their music is leisurely - not surprisingly do we learn they've
both performed with AMM luminaries Keith Rowe and Eddie Prevost. Not
an easy listen by any means, and a little tiring at 73 minutes, but
certainly an intriguing one.
 Gora
brings together four live recordings of Bilbao's Mattin recorded respectively
in Nijmegen, Hamburg, Berlin and London (this latter also features
Rosy Parlane and Julien Ottavi). "Computer feedback" is Mattin's speciality,
and he seems to delight in putting himself (and his equipment) in
situations of extreme danger, listing influences as wildly diverse
as Whitehouse and Malfatti (!). Hard to believe that common ground
might exist between those two, but Mattin finds it. In "Ni" he teases
delicate sonorities out of the computer until it spits out a thunderous
drone, seemingly in self-defence; by the four minute mark the poor
suffering machine explodes altogether into a barrage of noise worthy
of the Japanese grandmasters. Similarly, "Zu" goes hell for leather
until it stops short in its tracks at 5'20". Not for long. "Eta" (not
sure if this has anything to do with the artist's Basque origins,
so I probably shouldn't read too much into that title) plays with
the same extremes of contrast, but is faster moving. To what extent
Mattin is in total control of proceedings isn't clear - that's the
beauty of feedback, folks - but the results are not only exciting
but starkly beautiful. Even the nasty bits. —DW
Jazz
& Improv Roundup
Larry Stabbins
MONADIC
Emanem 4093
Tony Wren / Larry Stabbins / Howard Riley / Mark
Sanders
FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON
Emanem 4067
Solo sax recordings are a daunting undertaking, placing
heavy demands on both performer and listener. David Murray's late
70's flood-the-market releases notwithstanding, they are usually performed
by well-established artists who can expect a certain level of curiosity
on the part of a well-targeted audience. Larry Stabbins is a veteran
of the UK scene, probably best known as a member of the pop band Working
Week. His discography is small, at least as a free improviser (disappearing
altogether for a while in the 90's didn't help matters), which makes
this well-conceived and executed new solo disc all the more welcome
as an effective showcase of his talents.
The titles of these thirteen improvised pieces are drawn from active
verbs, ranging from "Breathing" to "Playing"; many are straightforwardly
descriptive, and accurately so ("Buzzing" and "Shaking"), but Stabbins'
music is no mere dry run-through of a technical exercise. He strikes
an intelligent balance between melody and extended technique, employing
motifs he is obviously comfortable with and using dynamics effectively
to attain an emotional content often lacking in solo efforts. He alternates
between the soprano and tenor, effectively tailoring his approach
to take advantage of the tonal characteristics of each horn. The first
12 pieces were recorded in the studio, but the final "Playing" was
captured live - responding to that audience, Stabbins really digs
in and plays with special verve. "Playing" contains one of the catchiest
melodies you're likely to hear in a solo sax disc, one that stays
in your head long after the disc has stopped spinning - how many other
solo saxophone discs can make that claim? Highly recommended.
Four in the Afternoon (which came out last year but for some
reason slipped through the net at Paris Transatlantic until now) features
Stabbins in a quartet nominally organized by bassist Tony Wren - who's
been making a welcome return to the improv scene after a period of
absence - along with Howard Riley on piano and Mark Sanders on drums.
Each of the album's seven pieces is remarkably cohesive and quite
distinctive in its execution and realization. The opening "A Soft
Day" begins with long tones on tenor from Stabbins, an unusual move
that serves to focus the listener's attention on the intricate interplay
between the other musicians: Sanders develops cymbal patterns and
intermittent scraped accents, while Riley throws in jumbling motifs
and Wren rumbles happily along underneath, moving things forward compellingly
before fading to a conclusion. "Game of Two Halves" starts with an
upbeat Stabbins leading the way on tenor again as his bandmates skitter
along behind him, with Riley eventually taking over the melodic responsibility.
Wren and Sanders quietly bring the first "half" to conclusion with
Sanders bowing a pattern that Stabbins picks up on and transforms
into a motif that on Monadic would have been called "Pulsing".
Once the tenor pattern is set, Wren and Sanders jump in vigorously
to move the piece rapidly forward, and by the time Riley enters the
piece is off to the races in an invigorating display of spontaneous
propulsion. Eventually everyone drops out but the pianist, but with
no loss of momentum. On the final magnificent "Transcension", Wren
and Sanders start off developing a rhythmic base which Riley complements
with rumbling chords before Stabbins' tenor adds a complementary pattern
of overtones that successfully adds to the inexorable momentum before
the piece eventually fades to silence. Every cut has something by
which to distinguish it from the others - this is one to play to any
acquaintance who grouses that improvised music "all sounds the same"
- the listening and reacting abilities of the participants, who had
only played together three times prior to the recording, are uncanny.
As with Monadic, this is highly recommended and accomplished
music that no adventurous listener should be without.—SG
Scott Rosenberg's Skronktet West
EL
Spool Arc 01 SPA401
Arc is Spool's new post-rock series, it says here, but with the
best will in the world the music of Scott Rosenberg and his Skronktet
West - as opposed to an earlier Skronktet he ran in Chicago some years
back - is hardly rock, let alone post-rock (whatever that is: Spool's
'Field' series, by the way - see below -is devoted to "sound art",
though what that means is anybody's guess too). What we have instead
is a collection of seven pieces, all Rosenberg compositions except
for one, that push the envelope of jazz composition in surprising
and challenging ways. Reedman Rosenberg studied with, amongst others,
Anthony Braxton, and it shows; aside from Braxton, there are few improvising
instrumentalists out there these days who are seriously addressing
the question of notated composition. (Notated as in writing real notes,
rather than sets of verbal instructions or woolly graphic scores:
there are plenty of cats doing that.) Rosenberg's compositions
are as thorny and challenging as their titles ("Shrrr", "Sdppd", "Sttm"..)
- his scores leave much room for improvisation, but also present fiendish
problems of ensemble coordination, which are brilliantly handled by
the Skronktet West. It's nothing less than a supergroup of sorts -
in addition to Rosenberg's saxophones and contrabass clarinet, the
quintet includes clarinet virtuoso Matt Ingalls, guitarist John Shiurba,
bassist Morgan Guberman, and, driving the machine along with consummate
finesse, Gino Robair on percussion. If you leave your brain outside
and expect yet another helping of run of the mill improv fizzes and
wheezes, you're not going to get much out of this album; if, however,
you care to listen - with the emphasis on care - you'll find
it one of the richest and most satisfying releases of the year. —DW
Thierry Madiot
MASSAGES SONORES #1
Pink P04
http://www.pink-rec.fr.st/
French trombonist Thierry Madiot has, for some time now, been perfecting
his technique not only on the venerable instrument but also on the
various lengths of tubing he likes to attach to it. In concert, he's
almost distracting to watch as, barefoot, he hooks the end of the
slide between his toes, keeping an arm free to insert assorted bric-a-brac.
Now that solo extended techniques albums are definitely in (trumpets
leading the way), it's surprising Madiot hasn't released a solo trombone
album before now. And Massages Sonores isn't one either. Almost
all of the eleven tracks feature other "materials" (named and numbered
as such), and the CD comes attached to a wooden box containing various
tiny objects and a set of instructions so that listeners can perform
their own intimate sound massages (for a description of the concept,
refer back to our review of Pascal Battus'
companion album in the August 2003 issue). These include (in my case)
two polystyrene worms (as used in packing cases), eight small clay
balls (the kind found in large plant pots), a small concertina-like
length of rubber, a crumpled up ball of crepe paper, two empty tinfoil
and plastic pill containers, a tiny bundle of grass and a flimsy piece
of plastic shaped to resemble a miniature vinyl flexidisc. Taking
any of the above and placing in proximity to the earhole (or even
inside it: small children should probably abstain) will produce sounds
quite similar to those on the album. You might also, I suppose, load
up the eight "matičres" tracks into your hard drive and do your own
remix massage. The most impressive pieces are the longer ones, especially
"massage ŕ 4 mains", in which Madiot enlists the help of Franck Collot;
here at least is a chance to hear how the objects can be used to articulate
a more extended span of music. It's attractive stuff, but one detects,
despite the plethora of materials, a certain lack of substance. Perhaps,
though, the desired effect is simply well-being (as in a real massage),
in which case the album is an unqualified success. —DW
Jazz
& Improv Roundup (continued)
John Butcher/Mike Hansen/Tomasz Krakowiak
EQUATION
Spool Field 3
Recorded live at Toronto's St George the Martyr Church, Equation
documents a meeting of British sax master John Butcher with locals
Mike Hansen on record players and Tomasz Krakowiak on percussion.
The two 25-minute pieces on offer, "Noise Temperature Suite" and "Standing
Wave Suite" are divided into five and four parts respectively, but
run continuously (index markings not corresponding to perceptible
stylistic shifts or fresh motifs). Butcher's ever-developing mastery
of his craft is audible throughout: circular breathing and multiphonics
are flawlessly brought into play, ideas often shadowed by underlying
ghostly tones fading in and out. Hansen's turntables provide a staticky
backdrop, and Krakowiak rubs or bows percussion placed on top of an
upturned bass drum (ŕ la Lę Quan Ninh), but it's often very hard to
hear what he's doing. What rhythmic elements there are are instead
provided by Hansen and Butcher, slap-tonguing staccato metallic dots
of sound. His playing throughout is exquisite, but Krakowiak's inaudibility
is frustrating and the group is never more than the sum of its parts,
the improvisations failing to gel over their duration. I'm told that
later concerts by the group have been more compelling; perhaps Equation,
which was I believe these players' first encounter, was just made
before its time. —SG
Tobias Delius / Wilbert De Joode / Dylan van der
Schyff
THE FLYING DEER
Spool Line 19
Tobias Delius / Hilary Jeffery / Wilbert de Joode
/ Serigne C.M. Gueye
APA INI
Datarecords DATA033
Mention Delius to most music lovers and they'll conjure
up images of the old dandy Frederick, penning his wistful orchestral
elegies in the sun-dappled garden of his French country house, gloriously
oblivious of the artistic turmoil of the early twentieth century unfolding
around him. Lovely stuff, but you ought to know there's another Delius
out there (no relation) who's equally well worth checking out. Anyone
who's ever seen Toby Delius in action - or read Kevin Whitehead's
informative profile of him in his excellent survey of the Dutch scene
New Dutch Swing - will have noticed not only his prodigious
technique on tenor saxophone and clarinet but also his near-encyclopaedic
knowledge of jazz history and its various stylistic manifestations.
If you haven't checked out Mr Delius' work, these two albums are a
good enough place to start. Both are excellent live recordings of
concerts in Amsterdam, The Flying Deer recorded in September
2001, Apa Ini fourteen months later. Delius is partnered on
both by bassist Wilbert de Joode, but the appearance of two markedly
different percussionists - Dylan van der Schyff on the former, Serigne
CM Gueye on the latter - provides numerous illuminating points of
contrast. Gueye, who hails from Senegal, is a hands-on percussionist
(literally: he plays bugarabu (congas), calabas, djembé and sawrouba)
who can groove like crazy ("Zwerfvuil") and swing like mad ("Bugar"),
an open invitation to Delius to root around in that encyclopaedia
and pull out a string of cunning references to everyone from Paul
Gonsalves to David Murray via Archie Shepp. The extra pair of lungs
on the date, trombonist Hilary Jeffery, is equally inventive, and
well versed in trombone history. Delius' own compositions are delicious,
especially the township shuffle of "Fusspot", but lest that give the
impression that the saxophonist is a mere recycler (albeit a damned
impressive one), it's worth recalling that telling old quote from
Sam Rivers: "I listened to everyone I could to make sure I didn't
sound like any of them." Delius is one of the most original players
of his generation.
With van der Schyff behind the kit, and without Jeffery, The Flying
Deer steers closer to improv (if a flying deer can be said to
steer anywhere at all, and, more importantly if any meaningful distinction
can be made in Delius' music between improv and jazz, which I rather
doubt). Van der Schyff, though not at all averse to swinging his ass
off, is a more timbre-oriented percussionist, and his bowed cymbals
and Lovensesque splatters (though perhaps one should namecheck Michael
Vatcher, whose kit van der Schyff was borrowing on this occasion)
spur Delius on to explore another aspect of his armoury, a vast repertoire
of clicks and breathy flutters more associated with European free
music. The same phenomenal energy is there throughout, though, and
de Joode gives his bass as much muscle with the bow as without it.
Both this and Apa Ini are thrilling sets, well worth the asking
price. Just make sure you go to the right Delius bin in your local
record store. —DW
psi
THE ___ WHO HAD BEGUN HIS CAREER AS A USEFUL ___ OF THE ___ COURT
LATER BECAME THE ___ OF ___ AND THE ___ OF ___.
Evolving Ear EE06 / Aqui AQUI02 / humansacrifice HS005
psi (not to be confused with Evan Parker's label of the same name)
is a trio comprising guitarist Chris Forsyth, percussionist Fritz
Welch and Jamie Fennelly on electronics. Fennelly, who went off last
year to the celebrated madhouse of Dutch electronica, STEIM, throws
some nasty spanners into the works, but Forsyth, who's been racking
up an impressive list of fine collaborative ventures with musicians
as diverse as Alessandro Bosetti and Assif Tsahar, is quick to pull
them out and hurl them at percussionist Welch, whose kit includes
all manner of junk. The eight tracks on offer here are splendid examples
of rugged, no prisoners electroacoustic improv, a strong and well-produced
collection of gritty and imaginative work, and well worth seeking
out. —DW
Annette Krebs / Alessandro Bosetti
Grob 450
This set of six duets featuring saxophonist Bosetti and guitarist
Krebs was recorded in 2001 and originally slated for release in the
middle of last year, but has only just appeared (not that there have
been any radical changes in the Berlin lowercase improv aesthetic
in the meantime). As readers of this magazine well know, there's a
lot of this kind of stuff about these days - in what seems to be a
conscious reaction against improvised music's origins in the excesses
of free jazz, a whole generation of younger players is now actively
exploring the outer reaches of instrumental technique and the use
of silence as a structural element in a highly disciplined way. Bosetti
and Krebs' album deserves to be considered as one of the landmarks
of the genre (if genre it can be said to be), and a timely reminder
to those who think any old semi-random assemblage of scratches and
whooshes will pass as good music that there's no substitute for a
strong sense of structure and serious listening. Intriguing sonorities
notwithstanding - you'd be hard pressed to identity Krebs' instrument
as a guitar at all if nobody told you - the architectural coherence
of this music is extraordinary. Numerous fine releases have appeared
from the members of Berlin-based collective Phosphor, including their
eponymous debut octet on Potlatch last year (whose heavy-handed mixing
makes it perhaps one of the least representative examples of their
work, in retrospect), but this one is really something special. Choose
your listening environment with care, as each tiny sound is exquisite
and exquisitely placed. Can't tell you what the tracks are called
or what the cover looks like, though, as this was one of those promo
jobs that arrived just with a press release (see above).—DW
Electronica
Roundup
bernhard günter
UN PEU DE NEIGE SALIE
trente oiseaux TOCSE1
Bernhard Günter's 1993 debut album has long been something of a
cause célčbre in the annals of new electronic music, principally
because such extended ultra-minimal ultra-quiet electroacoustic soundscapes
had never been heard before (though goodness knows they've spawned
literally hundreds of poor imitations since) - indeed, the folks who
mastered the original album for Selektion were convinced that there
was nothing on Günter's tape at all! Once the Selektion edition had
sold out, Table Of The Elements reissued the album in 1997 and Günter
took advantage of the occasion to improve the sound quality by remastering
the five pieces using high quality parametric equalizers. In September
1998 The Wire magazine included it in its "100 Records That Set The
World On Fire" feature, which seemingly assured its mythic status.
Now that the TOTE issue too is out of print, Günter has reissued the
album on his own trente oiseaux label as an enhanced CD complete with
liner notes and photography. Once more, his patient application of
state-of-the-art digital technology has resulted in clearly improved
spatialisation and definition - this is one of those albums where
you'd be a damn fool to pay big bucks for an original copy whose sound
quality is so evidently inferior. That said, the previously available
"untitled II/92" and "untitled III/92" have disappeared, being replaced
by the more recent "Whiteout", which combines the two aforementioned
pieces along with excerpts from "Differential", and was originally
composed for a (so far unrealised) video project by Tanaka Takahiro.
Günter obviously remains deeply attached to his bit of dirty snow
- the album title is a quotation from Claude Simon - and frequently
plays it in his concerts (at quite considerable volume too, I might
add, which I suppose makes it OK if you feel like turning up the wick
when you play this at home). Ten years down the line it still sounds
quite extraordinary: make no mistake, Günter is a composer,
not some idle laptop twiddler - these four pieces of music are carefully
structured and painstakingly sculpted works - his ear for sonority
is matched by his attention to formal detail on both micro and macro
level. Be warned though: trente oiseaux also releases albums in limited
editions (this one's a run of 500, with the first 200 numbered and
signed by bg himself), so be careful the patch of snow doesn't melt
away before you get to it: you might have to wait until the next reissue,
and it's hard to imagine it could possibly sound better than this.
Classic stuff. Go to: trenteoiseaux.com —DW
Satoru Wono
SONATA FOR SINE WAVE AND WHITE NOISE
Sonore SON20
Another cracking release from the Sonore label, following on from
earlier splendid offerings this year from Yuko Nexus6 and Carl Stone.
Satoru Wono is a Tokyo-based composer - composer being the keyword:
unlike his peers in the Max/MSP fraternity, Wono has recently consciously
set about situating his work in reference to the (so-called) classical
repertoire (his last album was a string quartet, and was entitled
as such - one imagines a symphony is in the works). Though "sonata"
literally means "sounding together", which I suppose would make just
about everything a sonata of sorts, the standard definition of a classical
or Romantic sonata is a work whose four movements generally follow
the quick - slow - quick - quick pattern (the third often being a
Minuet and Trio or, later, a Scherzo). Wono flips this on its head,
his movements being entitled respectively "Sonata" (recalling the
pre-classical tradition of sonata as a one movement work, as in the
works of Scarlatti), "Scherzo", "Adagio" and "Divertimento" (itself
normally a collection of reasonably diverse pieces of a predominantly
light nature). For his basic musical material he uses, as the title
makes clear, nothing but the simplest musical material - a sine wave
- and the most complex - white noise, constructing his work with an
economy of means that Beethoven would have been proud of. That said,
if you're expecting a flaccid neo-classical romp or a pretentious
PoMo hotchpotch, you're in for a nice surprise: Wono's work is as
cool and precise as Pan Sonic, as brittle and funky as early Aphex
Twin, and grooves like mad. The "Sonata" itself is preceded by an
"Overture" (well, of course), a "Canon" and followed by a 17 minute
"Variation in A", which as its title implies gives the venerable note
one hell of a workout in all its octave positions. All in all, it's
a glorious piece of work, a shrewdly planned and thoroughly accomplished
project, both in conception and realisation. —DW
Aki Onda
ANCIENT & MODERN
Phonomena PAAM 020CD
A few years ago, Aki Onda bought a portable cassette recorder at
a street market in Brixton, and started - innocently enough at first,
obsessively after a while - recording the sounds around him that caught
his attention, until the day came when he noticed his collection of
cassettes was beginning to take up too much shelf space (I know the
feeling). "I then took these tapes and randomly began layering new
sounds onto them," the composer writes in his liners, eventually ending
up with "incredible sonic collages that just invented themselves."
Citing - astutely - Jonas Mekas, Peter Beard, Robert Frank, Phill
Niblock and Luc Ferrari as influences ("people who have obsessed over
the mechanism of the human capacity for memory"), Onda crafted the
six tracks on Ancient & Modern between 2000 and 2001, during
which time he also began using the trusty cassette recorder more often
in live performance (there's an awesome example of him in action on
the second volume of Meeting at Off
Site, on the Improvised Music in Japan imprint). Though the
genesis of the music may lie in chance, there's a strong sense of
structure to each of these pieces, from the churning polyrhythms of
"One Day" via the delicate chiaroscuro of "Flickering Lights" to the
obsessive and peculiar loop of "Voice". Like the miscellaneous bric-a-brac
collected by the enigmatic (and probably half mad) Stillman in Auster's
City of Glass, the sonic fragments Onda has amassed are indeed
curious: music boxes, snatches of street markets and smoky night club
crooning, tiny fragments of percussion, organ and vibraphone looped
into drones, but, imbued with that particular warmth and hiss that
connoisseurs of the cassette medium recall with affectionate nostalgia,
when mixed together they create their own haunting poetic logic. Any
idiot with a mixing desk can stick any old tape on top of any other,
but it takes considerable knowledge and a healthy dose of musicianship
to come up with something as impressive as this. On the evidence of
Ancient & Modern, Aki Onda has both to spare.—DW
Copyright 2003 by Paris Transatlantic
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