| SEPTEMBER
News 2004 |
Reviews
by Nate Dorward, Stephen Griffith, Richard Hutchinson, Jamie Stephenson,
Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial:
From Down Under
In concert: JAZZ EM AGOSTO
In print: Ben Watson
on Derek Bailey
On Leo: Anthony Braxton
Label Profile: Fencing
Flatworm
On Naturestrip: Tarab
/ Toshiya Tsunoda / Joel Stern / Lawrence English
On Rossbin: Blue Collar / Fages, Barberan, Costa
Monteiro
JAZZ: Cecil Taylor
& Mat Maneri / Sunny Murray, John Edwards & Tony Bevan
/ Orchestrova / Ted Sirota / Atomic, School Days, Vandermark
5
IMPROV: Doneda, Wright,
Nakatani / Pateras, Baxter, Brown / Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic
Ensemble / Ben Fleury-Steiner / Noid / Rowe, Ambarchi, Avenaim
CONTEMPORARY: Jason
Eckardt / Petri Kuljuntausta / Michael Rüsenberg / Ramon
Sender / Gal / Tristan Murail / M.A.Doherty
ELECTRONICA: si-cut.db
/ Ian Andrews / Tu m' / Oreledigneur / 3/4HadBeenEliminated
/ Thembi Soddell
Last month
|
There's
a distinctly antipodean slant to this issue of PT, which not only
profiles Melbourne's new sound art label Naturestrip but also reviews
the work of Anthony Pateras, Sean Baxter, David Brown, Oren Ambarchi,
Robbie Avenaim and Thembi Soddell. Appropriately enough, a copy of
Marisa Giorgi and Michael Spann's excellent magazine xochi23 arrived
in time to join the summer reading list, along with Ben Watson's controversial
biography of Derek Bailey (see below)
and Alain Bancquart's Musique: habiter le temps (of which more
later). Xochi23 compiles short fiction by Nabaloum Dramane, Hamri,
Jürgen Ploog and Brion Gysin - his "Mountains of London" is not credited
as having been published before, which is one good reason for searching
it out. Others include a reprint of a hilarious 1971 interview with
Charles Bukowski, a more extended chat with the late, great Steve
Lacy dating from 1984, and a lengthy discussion with Daevid Allen
from 2003. It's amusing to compare Lacy and Allen's very different
impressions of Jean Georgakarakos and Jean Luc Young, the eminence
grises behind the BYG Actuel label - which helped establish both
musicians at the end of the 1960s - Lacy dismisses them as "gangsters"
while for Allen they're counter-cultural revolutionaries. It's all
very entertaining stuff and recommended reading, but it's only available
from xochipub@hotmail.com and the edition is limited to just 100 copies
- so MOVE. Bancquart's book is a tougher nut to crack, like his music.
Containing lengthy discussion of, as one might expect, his music and
the poetry of his wife Marie-Claire, whose work he has set throughout
his career, but also Beethoven, Schubert and Nono, and the microtonal
theories of Ivan Wyschnegradsky, it makes useful background reading
to accompany his epic Livre du Labyrinthe (released on Mode
last year). Expect a bit of mathematics and a dose of music theory.
Oh, and it's in French too, of course.
Thanks also go out this issue to Rui Neves and the team at Jazz em
Agosto in Lisbon for their kind invitation to attend the festival,
and to those who wrote in to the Letters
Page, particularly Christian Dergarabedian, who tells us the story
of the early years of Reynols - and one I'll bet you haven't heard
before, even in our interview with Argentinean crusaders last year.
Talking of which, Absurd records has finally released I
Am Not Sitting In A Room With Reynols, which features the
recording of the PT interview, though you're highly unlikely to be
able to understand a word. That's postmodernism for you. Bonne
lecture.—DW
JAZZ
EM AGOSTO 2004
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon
August 3rd - 8th
Since he took over the Artistic Direction of Portugal's "Jazz in August"
festival a few years ago, Rui Neves has earned well-deserved praise
for his daring programming. He could easily fill the thousand-seater
auditoriums and amphitheatres of Lisbon's prestigious Gulbenkian Foundation
six nights running by giving gigs to the Brads, Norahs and Wyntons
of this world - that he manages to have queues stretching halfway
down the street for the likes of George Lewis, Otomo Yoshihide and
Franz Hautzinger is as commendable as it is surprising. Merely stringing
together reviews of the eleven concerts I attended out of twelve (my
apologies to Paul Plimley and Lisle Ellis for missing their set on
the final afternoon: it was a toss up between them and Nuno Ferreira
/ Jesus Santandreu - I made the wrong choice) isn't good enough; Neves'
choice of artists and his proud and unequivocal billing of their diverse
offerings as JAZZ need almost as much discussion. Any visiting African-American
would have been bemused (amused, or annoyed) to find only one black
man - Lewis - in a line-up of 49 featured musicians; though nobody
would dispute the authenticity of jazz's origins as a Black American
art form, it was as if Neves' roster of artists had been drawn up
with the express intention of showing how far and in how many different
directions jazz has moved since the unfortunate term was coined.
 This
year's edition of Jazz em Agosto had a distinctly Canadian bias, with
no fewer than five of the twelve concerts featuring all Canadian line-ups
(not to mention turntablist Martin Tétreault's appearance with Otomo
Yoshihide). These included the festival's opening and closing acts,
the NOW Orchestra and the Paul Cram Orchestra, the former conducted
by George Lewis and their resident artistic director Coat Cooke. As
luck (i.e. weather) would have it, both of these large ensemble shows
had to be moved indoors from the open-air amphitheatre they were originally
scheduled in, and somewhere along the way the big band clout got lost
in the Gulbenkian Foundation's luxuriant gardens. Percussionist Dylan
van der Schyff sounded particularly far away in the NOW orchestra's
set, which consisted of five "very long" (you can count on Lewis to
give it to you straight) pieces and ran continuously for nearly two
hours, requiring quite an effort of concentration on the part of the
listener. There was ample room for extended solo spots by each of
the orchestra's 16 members (including Lewis) - high spots were Bruce
Freedman's incendiary alto saxophone and Brad Muirhead's bass trombone,
which even gave Lewis a run for his money - but the length of the
performance, complexity of the compositions and density of arrangements
led me to wonder whether two 40-minute sets separated by an interval
wouldn't have been more impressive. And Lewis himself, despite an
extraordinary ability to galvanise the band into action, tended to
distract attention from the proceedings by wandering off into the
wings when not actually conducting. Paul Cram solved the problem of
the eternally visible conductor by dividing timekeeping duties between
his band members, and the fact that they occasionally had to beat
time didn't stop saxophonist Don Palmer and trombonist Tom Walsh (to
name but two) turning in solos of terrific power and coherence.
 Both
big band shows raised the same problematic question - how far can
intricate large ensemble arrangements be stretched to accommodate
free playing? The question of where to draw the line between (arranged
/ composed) jazz and (free) improv was also naggingly present in the
sets by the Peggy Lee Band and François Houle's Electro Acoustic Quartet,
both of which also featured percussionist van der Schyff and guitarist
Ron Samworth. Lee alternated material from a forthcoming album with
several "instant compositions" (nice to see her adopting Misha Mengelberg's
term), improvised duets, the most satisfying of which featured Samworth
and Brad Turner, whose sense of space and gift for limpid melancholy
recalled another great Canadian trumpeter, Kenny Wheeler. Elsewhere,
it was as if Lee couldn't decide if she wanted to be on ECM or Emanem;
putting aside her cello in favour of a twangy (12 string?) guitar,
she led the sextet into the kind of territory Metheny and Frisell
used to explore a couple of decades ago, while the fidgety, in-the-moment
improv of her duo with van der Schyff was just crying out for some
spiky multiphonics from John Butcher (with whom both musicians have
recorded). Samworth's apparent openness to any and all styles of guitar
playing, from 70s prog noodling to gritty improv crunch, was less
convincing in Houle's set, which was slowed down and muddied by over-dependence
on electronic gadgetry. Houle is one of the most outstanding clarinettists
on the planet, which made his all-too-frequent twiddling on an adjacent
Apple even more frustrating. At one point, the wretched Mac took over
altogether, churning out an annoying montage of speech and field recordings
and relegating the live musicians' input to strangely inconsequential
background noise. The name Houle has chosen for his band inevitably
recalls Evan Parker's outfit (replace "quartet" with "ensemble" and
add a hyphen), but he's got some way to climb before he reaches the
high plateau dominated by Lawrence Casserley and Walter Prati.
 If
the Canadians chose to avoid standard repertoire, some of the other
groups opted for a full frontal assault. The Thing, a testosterone-oozing
Norwegian / Swedish power trio featuring Mats Gustafsson on baritone
and tenor saxes, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass and Paal Nilssen-Love
on drums, took material by musicians as diverse as PJ Harvey ("To
Bring You My Love"), White Stripes, Donald Ayler and Norman Howard
as well as numerous Scandinavian folk songs and subjected it all to
a grilling worthy of Ruby's BBQ, Austin TX (the terrible trio played
in matching Ruby's T-shirts). Gustafsson isn't exactly subtle, with
clucks, splatters and occasional elephantine trumpetings gritty enough
to sand a picnic table, but after the rather precious doodlings of
Lee's band he came as a welcome surprise, as did his participation
in Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Quintet next day. Their splendid set
was the high point of the festival for this listener (hardly surprising,
as it included personal favourites such as "Hat and Beard", "Lonely
Woman" and "Orange Was The Colour Of Her Dress"), particularly Kenta
Tsugami's slow-building solo on the Dolphy composition. Driven on
by the decidedly oddball but totally convincing rhythm section of
bassist Hiroaki Mizutani and drummer Yasuhiro Yoshigaki (about time
we saw more drummers drumming standing up and playing a trumpet
at the same time), and riding a wave of wails from Otomo's guitar,
Tsugami took the alto sax on a journey from Paul Desmond to Paul Flaherty
that had everyone, Mats included, shaking their heads in wonder.  And
Otomo's solo reading of Ornette's "Lonely Woman" was proof, were any
needed, that he's the greatest master of guitar feedback since Hendrix
- the segue into the delicate nuances of Mingus' "Orange" was breathtaking.
The large crowd certainly appreciated it.
It's hard to say if Otomo's quintet set drew the biggest gate of the
festival or whether that honour fell to the headlining band the following
night, Franz Hautzinger's Regenorchester XI, but it seems clear that
the locals weren't queueing round the block to see the Viennese trumpeter
- though in a perfect world elevators and hotel lobbies would be playing
Dachte Musik and Brospa - instead they wanted to see
the poster boy of the laptop generation himself, Christian Fennesz.
As it turned out, Fennesz's swathes of colour were often buried beneath
the muscular rhythmics of Alex Deutsch (drums) and Luc Ex (bass),
and the man himself was often hidden from view by guitarist Karl Ritter
pacing up and down like Rilke's panther. Ritter's incessant toing
and froing were visually intensely distracting, but his playing was
tight and inventive.
Hautzinger, in case you haven't heard his work with Orchester 33 1/3
or his loopy soloing on Fritz Ostermayer's Kitsch Concrete,
can play the hell out of the trumpet, but is best known for the subaquatic
bloops and plops of his extended techniques work. Rather schizophrenically,
he alternated between two mics, one for the straight and one for the
weird stuff, and not surprisingly his gurgles and icy breathy blasts
often lost out. Imagine Bill Dixon on Dark Magus instead of
Miles, electric Miles clearly being the point of departure for Hautzinger's
band. One imagines an album won't be long in coming, and let's hope
Fennesz will be interested enough in the project to take part, because
he must have been bored as hell to light up a cigarette onstage (definitely
the uncoolest image of the festival).
Hautzinger's
set came at the end of a thoroughly electronic day that started with
a solo spot by Supersilent's Arve Henriksen on trumpet and electronics.
Removing the mouthpiece and singing into the horn, he sounded like
a cross between Jon Hassell and a shakuhachi, looping tiny modal melodies
and his own wavering falsetto vocals into the kind of featureless
New Age mush Arvo Pärt might write one day if he sells out and goes
POP. The trumpeter called for audience participation (clap yo hands,
stomp yo feet and hum along with Henriksen), which he got - first
time round at least. When he tried again half an hour later, there
was no response. The audience had thinned out, and I suspect those
that were left in the womblike glow of the Sala Polivalente had nodded
off. There was, however, no chance of a quick snooze in the next set,
a turntable battle featuring Otomo Yoshihide and Martin Tétreault
that was about as far from jazz as Henriksen's noodling was - in the
opposite direction. With steadfastness of purpose (happily not without
humour though) and objects as diverse as crocodile clips, strips of
tinfoil, pan scourers and metal plates they transformed their long-suffering
turntables into noisy feedback laboratories in five pieces ranging
in duration from five to 20 minutes. Hardcore eai it might have been,
but it captivated the audience, proving that in the right hands electronic
equipment is a viable and creative resource in its own right and not
simply a means to tart up existing acoustic instruments. In short,
live electronics have moved on a hell of a way from harmonizers and
foot pedals. Unfortunately, Portuguese guitarist Nuno Ferreira and
Spanish tenor saxophonist Jesus Santandreu haven't understood this
yet, and used their equipment the following day either to pad out
their rather lifeless compositions or to avoid paying a live rhythm
section by creating bass and drum loops of crashing monotony (though,
credit to them, they did come up with a rather attractive take on
the fiendish changes of "Giant Steps", which most musicians avoid
like the plague).
 There
were numerous moments of light heartedness during the festival, but
few of the artists actively sought to engage with another important
aspect of jazz history - the music's sense of humour and entertainment.
Many years ago jazz musicians decided they'd had enough of fooling
about like clowns and demanded - with justification - to be considered
as creative artists, treated correctly and paid accordingly. But jazz
and improvised music never lost their fondness for showmanship and
spectacle, from Rahsaan Roland Kirk circular breathing an entire concert
to the serious fun of Lester Bowie's cover of "Papa's Got A Brand
New Bag", from Eugene Chadbourne demolishing Johnny Paycheck to Han
Bennink demolishing anything he can get hands on. Bennink's antics
came to mind during the solo set by East German percussionist Günter
"Baby" Sommer, who drove all the way to Portugal with his home-made
drum kit (including an ancient kettledrum, tubular bells, rattles,
gongs and some awesomely vulgar car horn trumpets) to entertain the
crowd in the small auditorium with his half-composed, half-improvised
pieces. Case-hardened jazz journalists (there were several in attendance)
groaned, but Sommer achieved something that only a handful of artists
at this year's Jazz em Agosto managed to do - break down the barrier
between performer and public by revealing an inexhaustible passion
for and love of sound and its ability to communicate ideas and emotions
both simple and complex, light and deep. It's a shame Sommer couldn't
have performed in the Anfiteatro, as the open-air concerts were often
interrupted by enthusiastic quacks from the ducks on the pond behind
the stage. I'm sure he'd have loved to play along with them. I know
I would have.—DW [thanks to Joaquim Mendes for photographs]
Ben
Watson on Derek Bailey
Ben
Watson
DEREK BAILEY AND THE STORY OF FREE IMPROVISATION
Verso, 443pp $30/£20/$45CAN
Any
book purporting to tell the story of free improvisation whose index
has almost as many entries for Theodor Adorno and Frank Zappa combined
(42) as it does for Evan Parker (47) is already off to a bad start.
But this particular 443-page tome is coming at you direct from planet
Ben Watson, a Marxist manga world where the forces of Good and Evil
grapple heroically like black and white on a Franz Kline canvas, and
Heroes and Villains - you're either one or the other - gird their
loins for the final battle between Modernism and its deadly enemy
Postmodernism. "Let it be stated upfront that [this book] is DESIGNED
to be contradictory, argumentative and unfinished - in short, improvised
and dialectical," writes Watson in his Introduction. "Author and subject
haven't reached agreement about anything, especially Free Improvisation."
Presumably, however, they did manage to agree on one thing: the near-total
exclusion of Bailey's long time playing and business partner Evan
Parker. If, as Watson crows, "in opposition to the cosy collusion
of the conventional biography, this glowering gap between author and
subject is here proposed as a field of play for the imaginative and
thoughtful reader," one wonders why he couldn't have seen fit to provide
the imaginative and thoughtful reader with some real hard information
about the serious differences of opinion that prompted Bailey and
Parker to part company acrimoniously several years ago. In choosing
to sideline Parker (one can only imagine in deference to Bailey's
wishes - surely no writer claiming to be as in love with improvised
music as Watson does would just let the matter drop), Watson also
misses out on a golden opportunity to provide a serious and well-researched
history of Incus, whose mail order manifesto included with the first
Incus LP The Topography of the Lungs was a truly revolutionary
blueprint for DIY distribution. There's clearly no love lost between
the two men even today (when I recently asked him when Topography
would be reissued - it's long overdue - Parker replied bluntly:
"When Derek Bailey's dead"), but Parker remains a major figure in
the history of free improvisation and, arguably, in Derek Bailey's
life. The lack of mention of Evan Parker is even more keenly felt
when Watson devotes two later sections of the book to Steve Lacy and
Anthony Braxton, both important but not exactly frequent Bailey playing
partners (reissues excluded, Lacy appears on eight albums with Bailey,
and Braxton seven, compared to over thirty featuring Parker). Compare
the thorough discussion of First Duo Concert with the one cursory
sentence on The Topography of the Lungs (despite the presence
on that album of Han Bennink, one of Ben's All Time Heroes) and Company
1. Parker's is not the only absence, though it is the most notable.
There is likewise no mention of AMM, and very little of John Stevens
apart from an anecdote - in all probability made up - culled from
an obscure fanzine called Radical Poetics.
Excluding Watson's introductory and concluding sections, and the three
appendices - a Bailey discography, an Incus discography and the complete
unedited transcript of Watson's Invisible Jukebox with Bailey for
The Wire magazine - the book consists of six sections: Child
and Teenager 1930 - 1951 (pp.13 - 32), Working Guitarist 1950 - 1963
(pp.33 - 51), Joseph Holbrooke Trio 1963 - 1966 (pp.52 - 111), Soloism
and Freedom 1966 - 1977 (pp.112 - 204), Company Weeks 1977 - 1994
(pp.205 - 310) and Improv International (pp.311 - 373). Of these,
only the first two actually tell (something of) the story of Derek
Bailey's life, in an informative series of vignettes taken from interviews
with the author that took place from 1997 onwards. Luckily for Watson,
Bailey is an authentic working class hero from the world of flat caps,
fish and chips, outside toilets and adultery, and his memories of
sleeping in pubs, threatening his divinity teacher and breaking into
houses are as well-narrated and entertaining as an Alan Sillitoe novel.
The third part of the book tells the story of Joseph Holbrooke, Bailey's
trio with Gavin Bryars on bass and Tony Oxley on drums. The reputation
of this outfit, based on the evidence of their only released recording,
a ten and a half minute rehearsal tape of "Miles' Mode", seems to
have been exaggerated out of all proportion, and Watson quite happily
spins out more hype. (A properly researched book about the history
of free improvisation in Britain should mention not only Joseph Holbrooke,
but other notable early experiments in free playing by Terry Day,
John Stevens, Joe Harriott and AMM, to name but a few. This is not
the story of free improvisation, but a story, one of
many.) Tony Oxley, of course, is another of Ben's All Time Heroes,
but if you weren't familiar with the fact and only had this book to
go on you could be excused for thinking he's the single most important
drummer since Warren Baby Dodds, and that the work of every other
free improvising percussionist from John Stevens to Paul Lytton pales
into insignificance. Not content with placing the Hero on the pedestal,
Watson has to dig a hole to push the Villain into. So you may be surprised
to learn that Paul Lytton's work "sounds more like conventional drum
soloing, lacking Oxley's serialist / surrealist ability to open up
jagged abysses of resonant silence", and, while you're trying to work
out what that last sentence actually means, it's time for Star Trek:
"Oxley had found a way of subdividing time so that he could deal with
almost any kind of randomness a band member might throw at him [..]
whereas [John] Stevens was more interested in warping time itself."
Watson manages to all but ignore Stevens' pioneering work, so the
uncomfortable question of free improvisation's relations with jazz
can be comfortably sidestepped, along with Oxley's allegiance to jazz
at the time as house drummer at Ronnie Scott's.
That bit about subdividing time refers to the eighteen-quavers-in-a-bar
"horizontal concept" Oxley devised to escape from the tyranny of the
beat. "That meant some of the things you could do without losing the
pulse would neither be on the beat or off the beat, because you've
got 18 over 4." Confused? So's Ben, and yet Oxley explains it perfectly
clearly: divide the two half bars into crotchet (quarter-note) triplets
(6 against 4) and further subdivide each of those triplets into triplets.
For some reason Watson latches on to this idea like a limpet and starts
hearing subdivided beats where there aren't any beats at all, for
example in Iskra 1903's "Improvisation 11", which "starts as a tight
trombone / guitar duet, the two musicians using the super-divided
beat pioneered by Oxley to twirl the music about each other's statements."
Irony of ironies, the album that best reveals Oxley's subdivided beat
concept is one that, for ideological reasons of his own invention,
Watson feels compelled to shoot down - John McLaughlin's Extrapolation.
Why Watson feels the need to sell Bailey by dissing McLaughlin is
a mystery: it's like extolling the virtues of fresh fish by comparing
it to drinking chocolate: "What is the real difference between the
'florid, fast and brilliant' guitar playing of Music Improvisation
Company and The Inner Mounting Flame?" (Pause for dramatic
paragraph break.) "The basic difference is harmonic. John McLaughlin's
music is pressed into dramatic modal arpeggios designed to represent
the spirit rising towards transcendence." Ah, the dreaded "T" word.
Anathema to a Marxist of course, and to be regarded with suspicion,
hence snidy asides like the following: "Anything tainted by will to
power is evil, so we should all lie on the floor and 'deep listen'
while Pauline Oliveros squeezes her postmodern accordion."
"It is possible to cite a battalion of theorists of radical modernism
- Theodor Adorno, Clement Greenberg, Asger Jorn - to argue why this
shows Bailey is free and valuable in a way McLaughlin is not," continues
Watson, and one wishes he would. At least (most of) what they wrote
made sense. When it comes to the politics, you can take or leave Watson's
thesis, but the total lack of any serious discussion of music as music
is frankly inexcusable. "To get a grip on Free Improvisation, music
criticism needs a science of the sign, a revolutionary theory. Anything
tainted by existentialism, structuralism or post-structuralism will
not suffice," he intones gravely on p.9. "All that Parisian nonsense
was a product of the failure of 1968: neo-Kantian despair, pseudo-radical
Nietzschean sentimentality. We need the theory that emerged in Russia
in the 1920s." Well, instead of the gritty chunk of Valentin Voloshinov's
"Marxism and the Philosophy of Language", how about Associated Board
Music Theory Grade III instead? I'm not asking for Milton Babbitt,
Allen Forte and David Lewin, but a brief, cogent explanation of Schoenberg's
dodecaphony would not have gone amiss. Watson happily recalls how
important Webern's music was to Bailey in the mid 1960s, but instead
of confronting the question of serialism head on in a discussion of
the Pieces for Guitar, whose importance to Bailey's output
is crucial and completely overlooked, all we get is some sleazy anecdote
about him playing Webern at full volume in a bedsit in Fulham.
At least the interview with Joseph Holbrooke's third member, bassist
Gavin Bryars makes for interesting reading, especially when Watson
pushes him to name the bassist - Johnny Dyani - whose playing he had
criticised in a memorable passage in Bailey's book Improvisation:
Its Nature and Practice in Music, and one begins to regret that
more recordings of Joseph Holbrooke haven't emerged (particularly
a tape of the trio playing with Lee Konitz that was recorded in Manchester
on 19th March 1966). The anecdotes of Mr Andrew Shone, who used to
take the door money for Joseph Holbrooke upstairs at The Grapes, are
revealing but could hardly be described as top-notch musicology (Q:
"Why is Free Improvisation so despised?" A: "Maybe because it's very
hard." Well, blimey..). Watson would have done better asking other
improvising guitarists to comment on Bailey's technical prowess, but
as John Russell (who actually studied with Bailey) is only mentioned
later in passing, and Roger Smith amazingly not mentioned at all throughout
the entire book, we'll just have to make do with the few - too few
- choice quotes from Bailey that explain matters with admirable concision.
On p.213: "Tonality is like an argument, and the answers to the questions
are always the same. Play Gmin7, C13, and the next chord has to be
one of three or four things. If you're looking to get away from that
kind of thing you have to use a different language." Would that the
book included more such straightforward explanation. Where Watson
waffles about "Webern's timbral serialism" (in point of fact Webern
never applied serial procedures to either timbre or dynamics, as was
mistakenly assumed by some overenthusiastic members of the Darmstadt
avant-garde), Bailey's description of his playing technique is crystal
clear: "You can play virtually any note, allowing for octave transpositions,
in three basic ways, as a harmonic, open string or stopped note. You
can play the same notes and do a completely different set of fingerings."
By the time we reach part four, any notion that it is still a biography
has gone out of the window, and the book becomes a kind of soapbox
for Watson to stand on and shoot wildly into the crowd. Among the
targets is Miles Davis (why? for employing John McLaughlin?), whose
post-Silent Way work is described as a "crass celebration of
electric modernity versus acoustic antiquity". (Watson backs up his
attack with an extract from an interview with Eugene Chadbourne: EC:
"One of my friends got a copy of Pangaea and said, it just
sounds like a Deep Purple album." BW: "But not as good…" EC: "We were
critical of the guitar players and we thought it was nothing compared
to Derek Bailey or Hendrix even. We just thought it was cheesy." Curious,
this, coming from a guitarist who in an interview with me quoted Bitches
Brew as one of his all time Top Ten albums, though Eugene is
using the past tense here..) Also caught in the crossfire is Manfred
Eicher and ECM records ("smug, bourgeois, all-labour-screened-off
languor [..] which one wag dubbed the sound of the middle classes
falling asleep"), except presumably those on which Tony Oxley plays,
Keiji Haino ("an all-thumbs corny thespian who only impresses style
victims who think wearing shades, carrying a staff and dressing in
black is some kind of existential statement"), Merzbow ("it seems
extraordinary that anyone so distant from Kurt Schwitters's homely
humour should name himself after his Merzbau [..] Masami should have
called himself 'Artaud-in-the-Hole'"), and, surprisingly, myself,
in the context of a discussion of Bailey's Limescale on p.372:
"[T]he intransigence [..] will doubtless annoy those postmodern critics
(like Signal To Noise's Dan Warburton) who deem the jagged, crunchy,
unmusical sound of Free Improvisation a 'dead dog'." Not having written
anything on Limescale (I don't even own a copy of the album,
you may be horrified to learn), I don't know where the quote comes
from, but never mind. At least when Ben's running the politburo I
won't be the only one to be shipped off to break rocks in Siberia,
and look forward to a jolly time in the gulag with many other fine
musicians of my acquaintance including David Toop, Keith Rowe and
Steve Beresford.
Avid watchers of the London scene know there's a long-running spat
between Watson and Beresford, who memorably compared Ben to Julie
Burchill in a letter published a while back in The Wire. However,
since Watson can't deny the importance of Beresford's work as an improviser
and because Eugene Chadbourne and Mark "Sniffin' Glue" Perry (both
Ben Heroes) express admiration for him, he chooses instead to take
him to task as a political philosopher, of all things. Similarly,
it's clear Watson's dying to have a go at John Zorn (I don't know
what Watson means by "postmodern" but it's certainly an epithet I'd
use to describe Zorn's work), but daren't say too much, firstly because
Zorn plays his ass off with Bailey and secondly because it's largely
thanks to several high profile releases on Zorn labels that Bailey's
career has really taken off in the past decade. Similarly, Watson
is forced to show respect for Bryars' work in Joseph Holbrooke though
you know he's just aching to put the boot in. On p.169 he criticises
Bryars' oft-quoted reservations about improvising, as published in
Bailey's book (p.135 of the Moorland edition): "It is characteristic
that Bryars should appeal to painting, the art form most in hock to
bourgeois property relations." This doesn't stop Watson himself invoking
the work of the French Impressionists in his later discussion of Company
Week, but never mind, back to Bryars: "His argument runs counter to
a whole vein of Black Studies that makes a virtue of the griot: the
jazzman as the in-person embodiment of tradition ('in jazz, the musician
is the treasure', as Archie Shepp puts it)." Suddenly, after going
to pains in the book to separate the two, comparing free improvisation
and jazz is kosher then? "Although to mention the word 'jazz' to Bailey
is to step into a minefield, he actually adheres to principles established
by jazz," Watson writes on p.225. Once more, Bailey's comments on
the subject are refreshingly clear: "For me the real connection between
this kind of playing and jazz is umbilical: the real possibilities
start once you cut the cord. John [Stevens]'s view was diametrically
opposed to that. He believed some connection was essential, however
tenuous. He would speak of it as being organic. I loved it when John
started using words like 'organic'. It meant we were in for a long
night."
Thank goodness for the eminently readable and bluntly honest transcript
of the Wire Jukebox. Bailey's language positively sparkles,
but when Watson tries to add some fizz to his own earnest polemic
with some "memorable" imagery, it falls curiously flat: "[T]he duo
evoke mice on speed stashing individually wrapped gorgonzola titbits
between the wires of a stainless steel egg slicer." (Evoke? Why "individually
wrapped"?) Compare Watson's put-down of Parker's trademark soprano
circular breathing ("the totalitarian afflatus of his technique steamrollers
specific ambience, turning his music into the kind of dependable commodity
required by promoters and applauded by the general public") with Bailey's
matter of factness: "There's always been this tendency, for the last
thirty-five years, to franchise a bit of this music, chop bits off
and turn it into a music."
On and on it goes, with Ben sniping at La Monte Young, Keith Rowe
and Eddie Prévost ("his use of the jargon of 'community' [..] is sentimental,
projecting a rural innocence on musicians who are actually operating
in a highly competitive and mediated firstworld metropolis" - hmm,
he has a point there), bemoaning the fact that his beloved Hession
/ Wilkinson / Fell trio never got the international tours and kudos
that Naked City did (surely as daft a comparison as Bailey / McLaughlin),
and padding the final section out with a tedious compendium of his
own reviews culled from the pages of Hi-Fi News. It's certainly amusing
that the majority of the reviews penned by Watson, a committed Marxist
notoriously vociferous in his criticism of "commodity fetishism",
should have appeared in that most commodity-obsessed publication,
and it's an irony he's acutely aware of and tries to squirm away from:
"After all the claims about Free Improvisation as an anti-commodity
operation, this slavering response to Bailey's albums may seem like
treachery. However, that depends on whether one's criticism of commodified
music is aesthetic or moral. The problem is not that commodities are
immoral - in capitalism, our very life essence is reduced to a commodity
(labour) - but that commodification has a tendency to weaken and homogenise
the music we hear."
One hopes that Derek Bailey is pleased to learn that he too is an
Adornoite: "'Works of art then are deficient, regardless of whether
they are immediate entities or mediated totalities' (Adorno). This
deficiency is what makes art a process rather than a product (Bailey's
concept of Free Improvisation is Adornoite without knowing it), and
only critical philosophy which relates art to the totality can understand
it." For you to swot up on your critical philosophy, Watson has thoughtfully
included a list of further reading material, but by the time you've
made it to the end of the book you feel like rushing out and buying
a copy of anything by Theodor Adorno you can lay your hands on just
for the pleasure of burning it. "Derek Bailey. What a card." Watson
concludes. Card he might be, but Bailey is also one of the most important
musicians to have emerged in the world in the last fifty years, and
he deserves something better than this.—DW
Anthony
Braxton
23 STANDARDS (Quartet) 2003
Leo CD LR 402-405 4CD
 Even
those with just a passing acquaintance with Anthony Braxton's voluminous
discography can't have failed to notice his recurring need to square
up to The Tradition by covering - probably not a word he would approve
of - material from the whole accelerated history of jazz from Fats
Waller to Dave Brubeck, Antonio Carlos Jobim to Sam Rivers. This quartet
alone, which features Braxton on (alto, soprano and sopranino?) saxophones
with guitarist Kevin O'Neil, bassist Andy Eulau, and Kevin Norton
on drums, has already recorded three albums of "standards": Ten
Compositions (Quartet) 2000, Nine Compositions (Hill) 2000
(both for CIMP and largely devoted to the music of Andrew Hill)
and the more wide-ranging 8 Standards (Wesleyan) 2001 on Barking
Hoop. 23 Standards (Quartet) 2003 features material recorded
on tour in Europe that year, from concerts in Antwerp on February
19th, Brussels (three days later), Amsterdam's BIMhuis (November 15th),
Verona (November 17th), Rome (18th), Lisbon (19th) and Guimaraes (in
Northern Portugal, 20th). Quite a punishing touring schedule by anyone's
standards - that the music recorded should be, for the most part,
of such high quality is quite an achievement. The 23 standards include,
in addition to much loved chestnuts as "After You've Gone", "Crazy
Rhythm" and "I Can't Get Started", three Coltrane compositions ("26-1",
"Countdown" and "Giant Steps", two Monks ("Off Minor" and what is
billed rather sloppily as "Round Midnite"), two Dave Brubecks ('It's
A Raggy Waltz" and "Three To Get Ready"), a handful of 1960s Blue
Note classics (Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance", Sam Rivers' "Beatrice",
Wayne Shorter's "Ju-Ju" and Joe Henderson's "Recorda Me", and continuing
the bossa nova theme, Jobim's "Desafinado" and Luiz (misspelled here)
Bonfa's "Manha de Carnival" (here billed as "Black Orpheus").
In his extensive and well-researched liner notes, Stuart Broomer writes:
"The difference between a Braxton performance of a canonical work
and the performance by any of the current neo-traditionalists is that
the work (its meaning, its messages) is again indeterminate, again
liable to new mutations. It is in the imagination of this larger collectivity
that the tradition comes alive, and with it the possibilities of risk
and meaning." Hmm.. while this undoubtedly applies to the more off-the-wall
Braxton covers outings such as the Charlie Parker Project (1993,
hatART, featuring the benign anarchy of Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink),
or the Knitting Factory (Piano / Quartet) 1994 discs on Leo,
it's hard to see what Broomer is referring to here, other than Braxton's
own soloing, since Eulau, Norton and O'Neil certainly play things
straight throughout - one could easily imagine grafting a straight
hard-bop solo by Benny Golson or Warne Marsh over their three-man
rhythm section and it would sound just fine (not only are the musicians'
contributions respectfully traditional, but the tracks follow the
time-honoured head - solos - head structure, and several even trade
fours with the drummer from time to time - hardly iconoclastic stuff..).
Broomer's not wide of the mark though when he describes O'Neil as
"the most remarkable musician to emerge on guitar (that most marketable
of instruments) in a decade, and (at 35) as gifted as any musician
of his generation," but after over four and a half hours of his playing,
even O'Neil's moves, impressive though they are, do become a little
predictable. Bassist Eulau sticks resolutely to the changes throughout
- no flights of fancy à la Dave Holland, Joe Fonda or Matt
Sperry here - and Norton gives no indication whatsoever of the wildly
inventive free playing that characterises his other outings with or
without Braxton. The furthest "out" he gets is a bit of tinkling on
an adjacent glockenspiel.
Braxton's soloing itself is certainly unpredictable, and at times
inspired - as you might expect, there are numerous highlights, but
his readings of Coltrane are particularly impressive - but I'm not
sure it lives up to Broomer's hype. The nagging question that remains
after listening to all this is why the saxophonist insisted on releasing
a 4CD box. OK, so it's a limited edition of 1000, and there are surely
at least that many hardcore Braxton fans out there to shift Leo Feigin's
units (at least I fervently hope so: this is after all the 23rd Braxton
release on Leo, including eleven double albums), but someone along
the line should have raised some serious questions about actual musical
quality. Brubeck's "It's A Raggy Waltz" should have been binned outright:
quite apart from Braxton's squeaky sopranino having difficulty getting
round the theme itself, O'Neil gets lost in the middle eight and Norton's
heavy-handed hemiolas sound positively amateurish - in all honesty,
if you were majoring in jazz and turned this in, you wouldn't graduate.
I imagine the only reason the track wasn't rejected was that it contains
O'Neil's wildest and most Sharrock-like guitar playing. Another question
mark hangs over the brutal fade that ends "26-1" (come to think of
it, shouldn't that be "26-2"?) on Disc One, right
in the middle (it seems) of Norton's drum solo. Who pulled down the
faders, and why? And why keep the rest of the track then, since there
are plenty of equally impressive Braxton and O'Neil solos elsewhere
in the set? It might seem mean-spirited to draw attention to such
odd glitches and bloopers, especially when there are so many extraordinary
moments on offer (my own favourite tracks are the readings of "I Can't
Get Started" and Sam Rivers' exquisite "Beatrice"), but I can't help
thinking that in choosing to release 23 tracks instead of settling
for half as many, Anthony Braxton has missed out on the chance of
releasing one of this year's most spectacular double CDs.—DW
Fencing
Flatworm Recordings
If
boredom is the mother of invention then she spawned a monster in January
2000, the month that saw the inception of Fencing Flatworm Recordings
(FFR), on Rob Hayler's 28th birthday to be exact. He'd taken the afternoon
off work to celebrate the fact, but none of his friends could join
him. "A few months previously," explains Rob, "I'd bought a computer
with a CDR writer in it so, to kill the afternoon, I started a record
company." As one does.. A number of "fantastic creative people" were
key to the genesis of FFR, Rob admits, the most important being Sean
Keeble, "comrade and tireless friend, introducing himself and asking
if he could help." Next they needed a title. "I wanted a name that
sounded twee and indie," states Rob, "but when you looked a little
closer was alien and screwed-up." Flatworms are beautiful, purple
and white creatures that live in warm waters - the fencing part of
the equation comes from their peculiar mating practices: usually androgynous,
as Hayler puts it, "during the season they all grow cocks which they
use to fight each other with. The loser gets impregnated by the winner
and becomes female." Nice!
Originally from Truro, Rob Hayler spent his youth in Brighton before
moving to Leeds in 1991 to study philosophy. Finding himself "surrounded
by fantastic creative people", he soon plugged into the city's thriving
underground scene, becoming a Termite Club committee member in late
1999 and organizing and promoting performances of challenging, forward
thinking music. The label is intrinsically linked with his "Yorkshire
nothing music" recording persona of Midwich. "They began together,"
he explains, "I'd had the equipment for a while beforehand but the
idea really came to fruition the day FFR started. The first FFR release
is the first Midwich release, Every Day Is The Same."
The first non-Midwich release was by Neil Campbell of the self-proclaimed
"cheap local support band" Vibracathedral Orchestra. Released in April
2000, Excerpt From The Never-Ending Bowed Metal Song was originally
recorded as a wedding present for a friend, but Campbell liked it
so much he wanted to release it. "I met Rob through Mike (Dando) at
the Termite Club and he gave me the first 2 FFR releases. I thought
Rob had a nice aesthetic going on, so I gave him the dub I had and
asked him to convert it to mono, cut it in half and split-stereo it
to make a 37 minute piece." In 2003 Campbell and Hayler collaborated
on the 21st FFR release In Luck. "I gave Rob some loop-style recordings
and he added his sounds - that's the first three tracks. The remainder
is me maximising some minimal Rob pulses and twinkles".
The stark black and white imagery of animal life that adorns the early
FFR catalogue certainly made their releases stand out from the pack.
Hayler admits the initial artwork was inspired by the ambient/electronica
label em:t. Sean Keeble adds: "[Rob] was nicking the images from a
dirty great reference book, and I think his conscience got the better
of him. I suppose my pestering to do the covers helped too." Keeble's
pestering came to fruition on the cover of Hayler/Neil's In Luck
CD, although In Brine, an mp3-encrypted CD that featured all
19 previous FFR releases plus artwork as well as the odd rarity and
exclusive, released to celebrate the label's third anniversary, was
the first to feature FFR's all-new full colour extravaganza of everyday
images abstracted into abstruse beauty. Keeble wants his images to
have "the same impact as Mark Rothko's paintings or Cy Twombly's work.
They're very much about details. I like to think they are in a fine
art tradition." But quick to eradicate any hint of pretension, he
quickly adds, "Once I've got the image all I do is stick a bit of
text over the top. Everything is digital, either scans from photographs
or pictures taken with a digital camera, but I don't mess about with
them too much." As well as creating the beautiful artwork that has
become synonymous with the label, Keeble also designs and maintains
the label's website.
There are a number of expressions in the Fencing Flatworm lexicon
that may need some explanation. The collective term for the variety
of styles released by the label is what Hayler calls "neo-radiophonics".
He explains: "I admire the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for the sound
they created - atmospheric, experimental, electronic - but also for
the work ethic they had: getting the best out of limited resources
with inventiveness. I like to think FFR is working with that thought
in mind." Neo-Radiophonics was also the name given to the sixth FFR
release, a limited edition (15) box set containing the first five
releases plus a bonus Midwich CD entitled No Up. Another term
is the "no audience" music scene, which includes like-minded micro-labels
such as Sunny Days Out, Nid Nod, Evelyn and France's Burning Emptiness
(to which FFR is twinned). "The no-audience underground seemed to
be an amusing way of summing up the only thing all these disparate
labels and performers had in common," explains Hayler. "Not many people
are interested!"
A recurring figure in the FFR world is Michael Clough. Originally
from Bradford, Clough records/performs under his own name and as Urlich
Urlich, and is also bassist in the Post-Rancid Poultry (PRP) group.
His first foray into the world of FFR was as part of Klunk, an improvising
electronics collective whose core unit also featured locals Ed 1 (of
V3ctor DJs and Hannas Barber) and Joe Gilmore (of Plank, Vend and
Sumeru). Gilmore explains the idea behind their 2000 FFR CD Infrathin:
"I was interested in making something that was completely alien, music-wise,
something which was obtuse, random, mutant." Clough describes his
part in the process: "I played pre-prepared mini-disc recordings of
synth, field recordings, stuff manipulated on my sampler and stuff
from Joe's audio-software (mainly Max) on his laptop. The way we worked
was to improvise with each other, then re-record bits, run them through
software or sampler and re-improv with those bits." Clough's Thrum
(one of my personal favourites in the FFR catalogue along with She
Looks Like Lisa From Hate by Newcastle-based Posset) came about
by accident. "I'd been playing about with sequencing acoustic guitar
samples I'd done, and later rediscovered the 13-and-a-half minute
long recording of one of those loops. I couldn't decide if it was
beautifully minimalist, or simply boring. I gave it to Rob as he knows
the difference."
Parallel to Fencing Flatworm is its sister cassette label Ordnance,
Tape Only (OTO). The idea for FFR's cassette counterpart had been
brewing for a while but wasn't realized until after FFR started. Hayler
recalls "Julian Bradley of Vibracathedral pushed me into making it
a reality because he wanted to do the first tape!" OTO provided an
outlet for the "incredibly diverse no-audience underground" - i.e.
material a little more esoteric than that associated with Fencing
Flatworm and from further afield - by the likes of Culver, Ceramic
Hobs, manherringbone, BackDrumMower, The Prestidigitators, bin.audio[box]
and Dapper (featuring Thurston Moore). The catalogue runs to 50 cassettes
limited to 50 copies each and is almost hermetically sealed: the final
cassette, by Midwich, is designed to fade into the first cassette
in the series thereby completing the cycle. Each one-sided cassette
features only the title of the artist and a catalogue number and comes
wrapped in a section of map "to dodge the diverting but meaningless
packaging and theory that props up many boring releases" Hayler explains.
Fencing Flatworm's fifth release was New Global Vulgar, the
debut by Matt Robson under the guise of Random Number. Robson's background
had been as a drummer with Leeds bands Coping Saw and Hood throughout
the 1990s, after which he decided to change direction and begin crafting
techno tracks on his G3 Powerbook, giving the results to Fencing Flatworm.
"I just sent some stuff to Rob, because I thought a CDR/7" label would
be a good place to make a debut." Since those "first faltering steps
into the world of electronic music" Robson has gone from strength
to strength with subsequent Random Number output released on Irritant,
Mogwai's Rock Action imprint and Cat Mobile of Leeds.
The Leeds-centric nature of the label's first releases was not some
hidden agenda, insists Hayler: "The first seven releases all featured
people on the Leeds-Huddersfield line because these were the people
who knew about it and who I wanted to get involved. As word got around
we garnered the vast international roster we enjoy today," he smiles.
This "vast international roster" includes New Zealand's internationally
renowned avant-drone gang Birchville Cat Motel, and Hayler and Keeble's
biggest coup was securing the last ever studio recording (FF028 Cursing
Without Killing) by pioneering Netherlands noise outfit Kapotte
Muziek.
Apart from the occasional 7" release, FFR's output is CDR based, a
medium that has its fair share of detractors, but one that is perfect
for the way FFR works. FFR are always interested in hearing material
by new talent, and the label has even spawned its own offspring in
the form of London-based label sijis. "Our policy now is very much
to do with releases on demand," explains Keeble. "We don't have to
wait for a release to sell out before we can produce the next. I'm
always looking forward to the next one. I'm a fan and if I wasn't
helping run the label I'd be buying everything we released." Go to:
www.fencingflatworm.cjb.net
Contact: robert.hayler@ukgateway.net—JS
Tarab
SURFACEDRIFT
Naturestrip NS 3001
Toshiya
Tsunoda / Joel Stern / Tarab / Lawrence English
OVERLAND
Naturestrip NS 3002
Toshiya
Tsunoda
SCENERY OF DECALCOMANIA
Naturestrip NS 3003
 The
magnificently-named Naturestrip label (nature strip - a strip / slice
/ cross-section of nature - or nature's trip? both will do just fine)
is based in Melbourne, Australia and concentrates on the work of "artists
whose aesthetics range from raw documentation to concrete music to
instrumental composition in which field recordings form a core element."
Sort of like Ground Fault with more ground than fault, as it were.
Local sound artist Eamon Sprod, aka Tarab, kicks off the label with
Surfacedrift - not sure all these names shouldn't be lowercase..
forgive me if so - which the accompanying press release describes
as "traces of sonic texture created by microphones dragged through
leaves and gravel / rain pounding against buildings / waves crashing
inside of an abandoned factory / surfaces against surfaces, scraping
against one another. Marks are left." Reminds me of that Luc Ferrari
autobiography: "It took a long time to realise that scraping (frotter)
is what interests me most".. Unlike Toshiya Tsunoda, of whom more
below, Sprod doesn't provide a blow-by-blow account of the recording
process, preferring to let the music speak for itself. The above listed
sounds are all more or less recognisable, along with others - the
roar and crackle of an open fire, birdsong near and far - but Sprod
uses them not as mere local colour, as Ferrari might, but as raw material
to build larger, more abstract structures with. The most satisfying
piece in terms of form is the opening "surface" (track titles like
"iron" and "leaf" hardly communicate the meteorological turmoil that
underpins these pieces), but the most exciting sounds are to be found
on "bottle". You might have dreamt about finding a message in a bottle,
but I'll bet you never wanted to be one yourself - I wonder if this
is what it sounds like in there out on the open sea.
 Overland
is a kind of Naturestrip sampler, featuring more work by Tarab, along
with one track each by Toshiya Tsunoda, Joel Stern, who's recently
returned to his native Australia after an eventful time in London,
and Brisbane-based Lawrence English. Tsunoda's "Reclaimed Land" is
a (seemingly) unadorned field recording of an August evening in Heisei
Cho, Yokosuka City. The title is significant, perhaps, in that it
also refers to the listening experience, which reclaims sounds that
almost everyone on the planet can recognise - the roar of distant
passing traffic, the fizz of nocturnal insect life - and allows us
to appreciate them as musical events in their own right. In stark
contrast, Stern's "Saltwort" uses soda water, assorted bottles and
electronic feedback systems to create a vivid, glistening world (welcome
back inside the bottle). Things very nearly go down the plughole at
5'22" but Stern manages to restart the magical machine. Tarab's "Of
hollow traces" is another slow burner, taking its time to move from
draughty upper registers to a low rumbling underground stream. It's
a good résumé of Sprod's modus operandi, and perhaps worth getting
hold of before you take the plunge and invest in Surfacedrift.
English's "A Summer Crush" was sourced in recordings made in Tokyo
and New York, and cunningly juxtaposes "raw" field recordings with
material that sounds like it's been squeezed through some pretty sophisticated
software. Tweets and caws of garden birdsong coexist with clattering
subway trains; interior and exterior, oriental and occidental, old
and new, private and public, "real" and "recorded" (i.e. sourced from
TV or radio) sounds are skilfully mixed together into a veritable
piece of cinema for the ear, to coin a phrase.
 The
third album on Naturestrip is Scenery of Decalcomania, the
most successful Toshiya Tsunoda outing I've come across since Pieces
Of Air on Lucky Kitchen. As ever with Tsunoda's work you can choose
to ignore the accompanying explanatory paragraphs and try to work
out what's going on yourself, or read his rather sniffy pedagogical
notes before or during the listening experience. Both approaches seem
to work quite well. This particular outing is a little less arid than
his recent Sirr release O respirar da paisagem, but still has
its peaks and troughs. The recordings made on a footbridge in Kisarazu
Bay, with passing hooting ferries and whistling wind are spectacular,
and there's a certain sparking white laboratory beauty to the opening
"Unstable Contact", whose use of bottles and sine waves recalls Alvin
Lucier's work with mics in enclosed spaces, but the final "Cut Diagonally",
a kind of quasi-Xenakis gated remix of Tsunoda's own "bottle at mountain
road" (from extract field recording archive #2 on Häpna) overstays
its welcome somewhat. Still, these are minor quibbles - each of these
elegantly packaged and beautifully produced discs merits your time
and attention. Go to: www.naturestrip.com.—DW
Blue
Collar
_____ IS AN APPARITION
Rossbin RS 016
Ferran
Fages / Ruth Barberán / Alfredo Costa Monteiro
ATOLÓN
Rossbin RS017
 What's
with these ants, then? Seems like ants swarming all over your album
cover is the way to go (cf. Matt Davis and Joel Stern's recent Small
Industry on L'innomable). A reference perhaps to the fabled "insect
music" of the mid 1970s? A metaphor for recent improvised music's
tendency to concentrate on the microscopic? (Have you noticed how
saxophone innovators are getting progressively quieter, from Butcher
to Gustafsson to Rainey to Bosetti? An exaggeration, I know, but forgive
me..) Who knows? Who knows what the title of this album means? Blue
Collar is a trio consisting of Nate Wooley (trumpet, flugelhorn and
voice), Steve Swell (trombone) and Tatsuya Nakatani (percussion) and
these eight tracks come at contemporary improv from another direction.
Extended brass techniques abound - for every "normal" note there are
dozens, maybe hundreds, of squeezes, squeaks, raspberries, gurgles,
pops, clicks, whooshes and spits - and Nakatani's percussion work
is similarly adventurous, but for all its timbral innovation the album
manages to, well, swing. Swell's trombone swoops and dives like George
Lewis, and Wooley's throaty growls and grunts are dirty and sweaty
- think Lester Bowie and early Leo Smith rather than the clinical
plumbing systems of Axel Dörner and Greg Kelley. One gets the impression
that if they'd been teamed up with a Jackson Krall or a Jay Rosen
they'd start bopping about all over the place, but with Nakatani's
ritualistic clanging temple bowls and bowed metals take the music
somewhere else altogether. Sometimes decidedly strange (on track 4
Swell sounds as if he's rinsing out a pair of socks in a bathtub while
listening to Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I), sometimes aggressively
extrovert (no way you could call track 7 lowercase), this is another
one of those records that defies categorization.
 The
same could be said for Atolón, whose four tracks are further
proof that the barriers that once existed between free improvisation
and noise are coming down fast. And in the sunshine of Barcelona at
that. Alfredo Costa Monteiro and Ferran Fages have released several
albums as Cremaster (though not using the same instrumentation), and
trumpeter Ruth Barberán previously teamed up with Costa Monteiro and
Matt Davis in I Treni Inerti (now sadly disbanded, but not before
leaving us the splendid Ura album on Creative Sources). Goodness
knows what Fages' "acoustic turntable" is or does (answers will be
provided to this question in forthcoming issues, fear not), but it
makes a hell of a racket. Indeed, one of the distinctive things about
this album is its avoidance of silence: from nails-on-blackboard squeaks
to hot water spat into your ear to what sounds like seagulls in a
paper bag being slowly crushed to death, this is definitely the one
you ought to play to your Love Supreme-loving uncle when he
comes at you with that dumbfuck "oh yeah well after all free improvisation
basically comes from free jazz, dunnit?" line. If he's still alive
half way through track three he'll probably kill you. Awesome stuff.—DW
Cecil
Taylor/Mat Maneri
ALGONQUIN
Bridge Records 9146
A
few years ago Cecil Taylor fans were virtually tearing their hair
out: where were the new Taylor discs? There was a particularly nail-biting
stretch between the 1993 FMP disc Always a Pleasure and the
1998 two-CD set on Cadence, and it's only recently that FMP cleared
the logjam by issuing a bunch more 1990s dates. Add to those the big
Codanza box of the 1990 trio, that weird trio date on Verve/Gitanes
with Dewey Redman and Elvin Jones, and now Algonquin (recorded
in 1999), and the picture of Taylor in the 1990s work is falling into
place at last - though in the meantime there's the dearth of post-millennium
releases for fans to worry about afresh.
The circumstances of this recording are fascinating. Algonquin
was commissioned by the McKim Fund at the Library of Congress, which
underwrites the composition and recording of works for violin and
piano. It's released on Bridge, a label generally known for classical
music releases, as part of their ongoing series of releases of material
from the Library of Congress. As far as I know Algonquin is
the first instance of the McKim commission going to a jazz musician
(though perhaps it started a trend - a couple years later Don Byron
got the nod). For Taylor, written scores are tools or stimuli rather
than narrowly determining structures - according to Bill Shoemaker's
liner notes, the basis for this hour-long concert was a few sheets
of paper offering "vertical stacks of notes with [a] few symbols and
scribbles to suggest attacks, transitions, et al." - and the real
groundwork is instead laid down by Taylor's (famously gruelling) pre-concert
rehearsals. It's a delight to think that Taylor's score now sits in
the archives next to past McKim commissions by the likes of Elliott
Carter and Ned Rorem, and he's obviously alive to the ironies of the
situation: he ends "Part Two", a gorgeous, lost-in-meditation piano
solo, with a loud shake of manuscript paper.
Despite the presence of violinist Mat Maneri, the texture and pace
of this disc is closer to Taylor's solo recordings than to his ensemble
discs. It's very shapely music. The half-hour "Part One" feels like
a journey between sharply demarcated plateaus, transitions between
them coming as abruptly and yet logically as a key change. Taylor's
circular repetitions come in a myriad shapes - rotating pinwheels,
looped birdsong, ratcheted gears turning, elastic bands stretched
and snapped back repeatedly - and give a curious sense of suspension
to the music even as the surface is constantly in flux. Though the
basic call-and-response idiom is familiar enough to Taylor devotees,
the performance is still packed with surprises, like the marvellous
passage of 19th-century-salon piano morphing into Debussyesque whole
tones at 8'20", or the bright, unexpected scatterings of notes like
birds laughing from trees at 21'38". (One of the great pleasures of
the disc is how clearly you can hear Taylor's sense of humour, often
obscured on his stormier recordings.)
Maneri's habit of assembling solos from soft-edged, droopy bits and
pieces sits a little oddly with Taylor, and on "Part One" the violinist
is audibly unsure of his ground at several points. But he contributes
an excellent solo feature, "Part Three," moving naturally from languor
to dive-bombing virtuosity to an absurd, shoulder-shrug anticlimax;
and the 13-minute duet at the album's close finds him closely attuned
to his partner: he's now mercurial and soaring, where previously he
often seemed to be lagging behind or fluttering about trying to find
a way in. But despite reservations about Maneri’s contribution and
the less-than-ideal recording quality – a couple of pieces are briefly
marred by feedback – I’d wholeheartedly recommend Algonquin,
which is as richly textured as anything Taylor’s done but also has
an ease and occasional flashing wit which give it a flavour all its
own.—ND
Sunny
Murray / John Edwards / Tony Bevan
HOME COOKING IN THE UK
Foghorn FOGCD004
Home
Cooking pulls together three tracks from an April 2003 tour in
the UK. "Split Lip" opens with a four-minute drum solo from Murray
before tenor and bass enter, bouncing notes around like a rubber ball.
Bevan's jittery, running-in-place riffing breaks into Aylerian serenade
eight minutes in, and then there's a quick wrap-up and we're done.
"Home Cooking" is the main track, a 28-minute improv with Bevan switching
to bass sax. After a marvellous sax/bass introduction Murray comes
in on brushes, at which point Bevan starts punching out little riffs
and things almost get swinging. Murray's drum solo is comparatively
uneventful - except for the intrusion of a police siren - but the
trio surges back: there's a passage that sounds like Bevan's throttling
his horn, and he and Edwards get in a nice feedback loop, throwing
increasingly agitated phrases at each other. Things nearly reach a
halt at 23'30" but at the last minute the musicians decide to tack
on a coda, with Bevan spinning out melismas over droning bass. Bevan
returns to tenor for "Split Decision" (with an r'n'b tinge this time
- shades of David Murray as well as Ayler) and Murray is back on sticks,
bashing away righteously in 6/8 before the guys all pile on for a
nice, thudding climax. If the centre of the album is a tad less inspired
than the bookend tracks, that's my only quibble. Check it out.—ND
Rova
/ Orkestrova
AN ALLIGATOR IN YOUR WALLET
EWE EWCD0069
Rova
fans are still waiting for recordings from the band's 25th anniversary
bash to surface - rumour has it that they're hot stuff indeed - but
in the meantime there's this formidable studio date, which expands
the core quartet into a 12-piece "Orkestrova". Rova has always placed
much emphasis on collaborations with likeminded musician-composers,
and on this occasion they've invited pianist Satoko Fujii on board,
as pianist and as composer. She contributes three pieces. "A Lion
In your Bag" is a dialogue between big band and smaller subsets of
the ensemble that crossfades between musical styles: the big band
moves from yammering freakout to swinging jazz, while the small group
bits head in the reverse direction, going from slinky swing to an
incendiary Larry Ochs tenor solo. "A Zebra on Your Roof" has a queasy,
butterflies-in-stomach opening, but turns out to be a feature for
altoist Steve Adams; he moves through a variety of small-group settings
before the full band returns for a grandly melancholy close. "An Alligator
in Your Wallet" has a twitchy 13/8 groove, and features good-humoured
quarrels between the trombones and trumpets and an extended joust
between the band's jabbing, smeary riffs and Bruce Ackley's Lacyish
soprano.
The last two pieces on the album are by Adams, and feature Fujii more
strongly than her own pieces do (on which she was presumably preoccupied
with conducting duties). "Survival" is altogether more spacious than
the rest of the disc, a series of linked improvisations set off by
cues: the most striking soloist is the Tin Hat Trio's violinist Carla
Kihlstedt (look out Mark Feldman!). "Chuck" is an exploded view of
a single phrase from Mingus's "E's Flat Ah's Flat Too", a burly, saxophone-heavy,
inside-out almost-blues that also has intriguing echoes of George
Russell's hyper-blues essays for Riverside like "Honesty" and "Stratusphunk".
Rova's twin virtues as a quartet - the precision and fierce eloquence
of their improvising, and the almost fearsome intelligence of their
compositions - are just as audible in this larger project. It's great
stuff, and all the more welcome given that Rova's expanded-ensemble
efforts have rarely made it to disc.—ND
Ted
Sirota's Rebel Souls
BREEDING RESISTANCE
Delmark Records 551
Breeding
Resistance is a rhythm-driven slice of r&b and jazz, with brief
Coltrane moments the only hints of the avant-garde. Chicago drummer
Ted Sirota formed the band in 1995, and this is his third recording,
with a shifting line-up, this time Jeb Bishop on trombone, Geof Bradfield
on tenor sax, and Jeff Parker on guitar. Sirota is responsible for
five compositions and Bradfield three, while Bishop, Parker and bassist
Clark Sommers each contribute one. From the music alone, it wouldn't
be obvious that Sirota is committed to radical social change, so it's
conveyed through the titles and liner notes - and through the emphatic
words of Fred Hampton on the cut "Chairman Fred (I Wish Fred Hampton
Was Here)." Hampton, the young leader of the Black Panthers in Chicago,
was extremely charismatic, which led to his assassination in his bed
as part of COINTELPRO, the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program. Sirota
builds a piece around clips of Hampton leading a crowd saying "I am
a revolutionary!" and "you can kill a revolutionary, but you can't
kill the revolution" and other such militant phrases. If this sounds
incongruous or alarming, you can relax as the rest of politics is
much less in-your-face. The disk opens with an afrobeat number, "Saro-Wiwa,"
dedicated to an activist killed by the Nigerian regime. "This Is a
Takeover" is reggae/dub. "D.C." stands for Don Cherry, though Bradfield's
composition is not as adventurous as that of the classic Coleman quartet.
"For Martyrs" and "Elegy" are ballads, while the title cut is an uptempo
workout, which ends with Sirota bellowing "YEAH!" There are some good
solos here and there, especially from Bradfield and Bishop, but this
is mainly a rhythm section album. The key influence on the eclectic
Rebel Souls sound is revealed first in Bishop's "Knife," probably
the best composition on the album, and more strongly in the last two
cuts, "Axe" by Bradfield and "Pablo" by Sommers - the Crusaders. It
suggests that Sirota would do well to move in an even more populist
direction - forget about avant cred, head straight for the pocket,
and try to sound more like "Put It Where You Want It" next time around.
—RH
Atomic
/ School Days
NUCLEAR ASSEMBLY HALL
Okkadisk OD12049
The
Vandermark Five
ELEMENTS OF STYLE…EXERCISES IN SURPRISE
Atavistic ALP150CD
It
gets increasingly difficult to keep up with all the permutations of
Ken Vandermark's musical world. The band on Nuclear Assembly Hall
is a merger of one of his regular groups, School Days, and Atomic,
comprising musicians with whom he has engaged in other projects. School
Days initially formed as a tribute to the 1975 Emanem release of the
same name (later reissued on Hatology) by Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd,
Henry Grimes and Denis Charles in which they played intriguing Monk
covers. On their debut release, Crossing Division, Vandermark's
band, including trombonist Jeb Bishop, bassist Ingebrigt Håker-Flaten
and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love played no Monk compositions but did
include two by Rudd along with songs by Bishop and Vandermark. The
follow-up disc, In Our Times, (adding vibist Kjell Nordeson)
contained no Rudd, Monk or Lacy material but did continue in the adventurous
spirit of the source group. In addition to KV, Atomic features Håker-Flaten
and Nilssen-Love with trumpeter Magnus Broo, Fredrik Ljungkvist on
tenor sax and clarinet, and pianist Håvard Wiik. This group was formed
as an antidote to the ECM stereotype Scandinavian jazz sound (an unfair
stereotype for a number of reasons), taking as progenitors free music
hell-raisers in the United States (Shepp, Coltrane and Coleman - their
first release was titled Feet Music after a Coleman song) and
Europe (Brötzmann).
Combining existing groups provides an expanded tonal palette, and
good use is made of it. Everyone gets a composition credit, resulting
in consistently catchy melodies over driving rhythms that veer off
into differing directions until flying back home, with very few dead
spots en route. Bishop is a somewhat underused asset - it isn't until
midway through the last song on disc 1, Ljungkvist's "Kerosene", that
a swaggering trombone solo grabs our attention - but his "Conjugations"
makes effective use of a twining clarinet duet featuring Vandermark
and Ljungkvist. All of the songs make use of pared-down groupings
(combining Nordeson's vibes with Wiik's piano gives these smaller
amalgamations a Bobby Hutcherson Blue Note feel) and Vandermark's
baritone sax, which he's been featuring more of late, provides additional
weight to the charts.
Since
1997 a release by the Vandermark 5 (founder members Vandermark, Bishop
and bassist Kent Kessler joined by saxophonist Dave Rempis and drummer
Tim Daisy) has become an annual event, usually supplemented by a tour.
The group brings a blue collar ethic to improvised music that may
not be everybody's cup of tea, but if you don't like what you hear
it's not because of lack of effort: this is a working band in every
sense of the word and what appears on studio releases is the end result
of songs that have been extensively developed in concert. Elements
of Style…Exercises in Surprise contains few surprises for those
familiar with past releases. What you get are propulsive riff-driven
songs that are interestingly crafted with thematic twists and turns,
with Rempis on alto and tenor providing a timbral and stylistic contrast
to the Vandermark, whose more prominent baritone changes the nature
of the songs somewhat (at the expense of his bass clarinet features).
Daisy's contribution sounds understated compared to his live work,
where he pounds and clatters away with exuberant abandon, but the
undersung Kessler never fails to provide a solid rhythmic underpinning.
The performances here mark an improvement over the last strangely
lackluster V5 release, Airports for Light, and make for a recommended
addition to the group's body of work.
Included with this release, if you order it directly from Atavistic
or purchase it at a concert, is Free Jazz Classics Volume 4, Free
Kings: The Music of Roland Kirk, recorded live in concert earlier
this year. These "bonus" discs have been available in the last four
V5 releases (the first two, made up of live performances of songs
by Archie Shepp, Frank Wright, Carla Bley and others, were subsequently
released separately as a twofer by Atavistic): Volume 3's selection
of Sonny Rollins songs improved the Airports release no end.
This set of Kirk tunes isn't as successful as prior "classics", but
the energy level is sufficiently high to keep V5 fans satisfied.—SG..
Michel Doneda / Jack Wright
/ Tatsuya Nakatani
from between
SOS Editions 801
Might as well nail my colours to the mast
here and state from the outset that I think this is one of the best
albums of improvised music to come my way this year. Saxophonists
Doneda and Wright have been more than busy on their respective sides
of the Atlantic over the past twenty years, and each has contributed
landmark documents to the solo improvised saxophone repertoire - Doneda's
Anatomie des Clefs on Potlatch and Sopranino / Radio on
Fringes, Wright's epochal Places To Go on Spring Garden Music
- and their eventual collaboration a couple of years ago when Doneda
toured the USA turned out to be even better than expected. Both musicians
are sufficiently inquisitive and strong (stubborn, rather) not to
rest on their laurels and spit out the same old licks with the same
old playing partners to the same old audience. Wright, in particular,
positively relishes seeking out new playing partners, and is prepared
to travel great distances to do so. Doneda is more fussy about who
he plays with, but has recently hooked up with Giuseppe Ielasi and
percussionist Ingar Zach, with interesting results. On from between
it's not Zach behind the kit, but the excellent Tatsuya Nakatani,
who studiously avoids the standard Paul'n'Paul'n'Roger rattle-and-clatter
of improv percussion in favour of more isolated and sustained sonorities,
imbuing the spacious opening track with the feel of Imperial Japanese
court music. It's surely no coincidence that Doneda's muted sustained
tones, in combination with Nakatani's bowed metal bowls, sound remarkably
like the sho, or Japanese mouth organ.
Many practitioners of so-called lowercase improvised music these days
just sound like they're going through the motions; saxophonists and
trumpeters spit, dribble, gargle and drool, guitarists and percussionists
alike scratch their prostrate instruments as if they were pimples,
and laptoppers sit statue-like behind their luminescent Apples fizzing
like soluble aspirins. They could do well to spend time listening
to albums such as this - I could also recommend Signs Of Life
(on Spring Garden, with Wright with Tom Djll, Matt Ingalls and Bhob
Rainey and Placés dans l'air (on Potlatch, with Doneda with
Rainey and Alessandro Bosetti) - to realise that lowercase music is
most definitely not lacking in intensity and commitment. In all honesty,
if this album doesn't have you on the edge of your seat throughout,
I'd say there's no hope for you.
There's an aura of mystery to it all, which the scarcely legible black
-on-black (and white-on-white) embossed track listing helps reinforce.
For those who have trouble making out what's written, the track titles
are "hands behind hands", "of pipes and roots" and "…open this surface
to clouds"; the first two pieces were recorded at H&H Studios (Bronx)
in May 2003, while track three comes from a set recorded live at Brooklyn's
BPM Gallery nine months earlier. Accompanying the music is a poem
by Jerome Rothenberg, "The Orators" (from which the title of the closing
track is extracted), which is as deceptively simple, direct and moving
as the music. All in all, it's a superb debut outing from the rather
wonderful SoSEDITIONS label, and perfectly in keeping with their mission
statement as printed on the accompanying press release: substance
over surface - inscribed by visionaries without dimensional boundaries.
Check it out.—DW
Pateras / Baxter / Brown
ATAXIA
Synaesthesia SYN009
After last year's Synaesthesia release Coagulate
with Robin Fox and several tracks on his Tzadik debut Mutant Theatre,
Anthony Pateras (see Wire 240) reveals further evidence of
his improvising skills on Ataxia, more dazzling proof that
the new music scene in Australia - especially in Melbourne - is going
from strength to strength. He's joined by percussionist Sean Baxter
(Bucketrider, Lazy, Western Grey), one of a growing band of hands-on
junk percussionists worth keeping an eye on, and guitarist David Brown,
aka Candlesnuffer, who has collaborated with the likes of Phill Niblock
and KK Null, in six riotously colourful tracks ranging from delicate
sonic haiku ("Maladroit") to all out stochastic freakout - Xenakis
would have loved the end of "St/chi". While improvising pianists since
Burton Greene have been delving inside the instrument in search of
new sonorities, very few have explored the prepared piano with much
rigour - John Tilbury being one - but Pateras' piano, as the album
photography makes abundantly clear, is stuffed to the limit with rubber,
cardboard, screws, coins and crocodile clips and sounds like a veritable
one-man gamelan. It's a truism to say that Bali and Java are as accessible
to Aussies today as Blackpool was to Manchester cotton workers a hundred
years ago; should globalization one day go beyond exporting Big Macs
and Big Brother and the indigenous populations of those islands ever
move into free improv, it just might sound something like this. The
spicy stir fry of New Complexity and exotic percussion clatter bears
more relation to Richard Barrett's "Negatives" - recorded, as it happens
in Melbourne ten years ago - than it does to any other recent trend
in improv; coming at this music from directions as diverse as extreme
noise meltdown and post-Darmstadt composition, Brown, Pateras and
Baxter have served up one of the year's crunchiest and tastiest dishes
so far.—DW
Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic
Ensemble
MEMORY/VISION
ECM 1852
The most obvious differences between Memory/Vision
and the ensemble's previous recordings are that 1) it's live, a continuous
70 minute recording from the Ultima Festival in Oslo in October 2002,
and 2) it adds piano. Memory/Vision is looser and more sprawling,
and is performed by a bigger group than either Toward the Margins
(1996) or Drawn Inward (1998). The original concept was to
take the Evan Parker/Barry Guy/Paul Lytton trio, and link each acoustic
player to a real-time electronic processing player. On Toward the
Margins these were Philipp Wachsmann (paired with Guy), Walter
Prati (with Parker) and Marco Vecchi (with Lytton). Drawn Inward
added to both the acoustic and electronic sides, with Wachsmann
becoming an equal player alongside the P/G/L trio and Lawrence Casserley,
processing the sounds generated by all the other players. Memory/Vision
adds yet another electronic player, Joel Ryan on computer, as well
as pianist Agusti Fernandez, so the original ensemble of six has expanded
to nine.
The first two EPEAE albums were "fast and dense" as Bruce Sterling
once described cyberpunk writing. Each relatively short piece (twelve
on the first disc, eleven on the second) was distinctive and compact.
With 70 minutes of continuous improvisation it is perhaps inevitable
that there are some dead spots, but in any event Memory/Vision
is neither as dense nor as powerful as its predecessors. With six
players on electronics, including Lytton, the music could become incredibly
crowded, and the participants if anything seem too aware of this.
There is clearly a planned sequence of interactions, though there's
no obvious architecture to the overall composition. Wachsmann plays
a very prominent role, and with his lyrical violin passages and Fernandez's
piano, there's more of a classical timbre than previously, with Parker's
role reduced accordingly. Unfortunately, however, there are no passages
featuring the entire acoustic quintet, though there are passages of
electronics with no apparent acoustic playing (hard to be sure with
real-time processing). The "electro-acoustic" hybrid is not always
as well integrated as it could be; it's perhaps a shame that the EAE
is unlikely to get the chance to play together enough to develop the
high level of interaction characteristic of the Parker/Guy/Lytton
trio, and break through to a higher level of synthesis - one feels
the electro-acoustic concept is far from being fully explored.—RH
Ben Fleury-Steiner
BACK ALLEYS, OPEN VISTAS & OTHER DISINTEGRATIONS
Dissonance Dis 07
www.dissonancerecords.net
Ben Fleury-Steiner uses various guitars and
effects / processing (he's a lister, one of those guys who likes to
provide a complete inventory of equipment used, even going as far
as informing you that his 6-string guitar is missing a string, not
that you'd be likely to notice) to create these five spacious tracks.
Maybe it's the black and white (grey, in fact) photography - a highway
vanishing into the distance, but printed upside down: anyone out there
remember Stockhausen's Sirius? - maybe the lazy, hazy diatonic and
rather lugubrious nature of the music, but Loren Connors often comes
to mind. So does Makoto Kawabata (on downers). Fleury-Steiner comes
up with some interesting sounds, but one senses he likes to get carried
away by the FX boxes - it would be good to hear him interacting with
another live musician instead - but, maybe that's the idea. The last
track is, after all, called "Once You Disintegrate, Then You Will
Truly Understand".—DW
Noid
MONODIGMEN
Artonal
www.artonal.at
Monodigmen is the work of Austrian
cellist Arnold Haberl, aka Noid, and continues a line of research
into extreme minimalism already explored in that country by the likes
of Werner Dafeldecker and Radu Malfatti. In essence, each of the 13
tracks on Haberl's CD consists of just one sound - these include bowing
on the wood of the instrument, alternating repeated dyads an octave
apart, threading a piece of wood between the strings and twanging
it Keith Rowe style, exploring the beat phenomenon of near unison
- which is sometimes heard alone (tracks 5 and 9 consist of isolated
single thunks) but usually repeated, either continuously to form a
kind of loop, or interspersed with silence. As anyone who's ever tried
to perform La Monte Young's legendary "X for Henry Flynt" can testify,
it's impossible - without cheating and using electronics - to repeat
exactly the same sound. Excessive determinacy leads, paradoxically,
to indeterminacy; the longer one goes on and the harder one tries
to play each sound exactly like its predecessor, the more one becomes
aware of the difference between successive sounds. Tiny nuances become
critically important, and the work's structure depends as much on
the listener's memory as it does the performer's ability to execute
the physical gesture. Which means as a listener you get as much out
of this album as you're prepared to put in: as musique d'ameublement
this will drive you crazy, but concentrate intently and it will fascinate
and reward.—DW
Keith Rowe / Oren Ambarchi
/ Robbie Avenaim
HONEY PIE
Grob 648
The second instalment in a trilogy of live
recordings starting with the disappointingly slight Thumb,
this 39 minute span of music was recorded at the Musique Action festival
in Vandoeuvre les Nancy on May 26th 2001 (it always pays to check
actual recording dates, as some of this stuff takes years to come
out). Forgive the awful pun, but there's more to get your teeth into
on Honey Pie than on Thumb; in many respects it's a
straightforward "classical" improv set - start out quiet, build to
climax, fade out again, build to bigger climax, fade out altogether
(one imagines even Eddie Prévost could enjoy this one) - with Avenaim's
percussion work more to the fore, happily. On Thumb, which
started quiet, stayed quiet and went nowhere in particular, his contributions
were discreet to the point of near inaudibility, but here he helps
things get almost funky at the thirteen minute mark. It's a satisfying
set, and must have been fun to catch live, but it's not exactly an
essential milestone in the Rowe discography. If you want to hear the
guitarist in more rambunctious mood, hunt out a copy of his duo with
Burkhard Beins from 2001, Grain on Zarek.—DW
Jason
Eckardt
OUT OF CHAOS
Mode 137
"The hiker and the listener have much in common," writes Marilyn Nonken
in her liner notes. "Eckardt's music offers the listener many pathways,
each leading to a different listening experience." It's not exactly
a profound remark, nor a particularly original one (and could apply
to hundreds of composers and a multitude of different styles of music),
but is quite helpful. For over a generation now listeners have been
far too intimidated by contemporary music, particularly of the New
Complexity persuasion, seeing it as intellectually impenetrable and
as "unlistenable" as it is "unplayable". Fortunately, we're approaching
the end of that particular tunnel, and, after Elliott Carter, composers
as "difficult" as Brian Ferneyhough and Milton Babbitt are beginning
to get some long overdue acclaim. Jason Eckardt was born in the city
where Milton Babbitt taught for most of his working life, Princeton
NJ, and duly passed through Babbitt's hands, as well as those of Ferneyhough,
James Dillon, Karlheinz Stockhausen and, principally, Mario Davidovsky,
with whom he studied at Columbia. Not before majoring in guitar at
Berklee, though - Eckardt is the first to acknowledge the importance
of Metal and free jazz in his background. Nonken claims he turned
to composition after discovering Webern, but if one composer comes
to mind on listening to the opening ensemble work "After Serra", it's
Varèse. (Maybe filtered through Birtwistle.) Strong gestures, recognisable
contours and vivid contrasts define the music at every level. "Tangled
Loops", performed by Nonken and soprano saxophonist Taimur Sullivan,
namechecks Parker (Charlie, not Evan this time), Coltrane and Dolphy,
and is perhaps closest to the latter, in its dramatic and dogged pursuit
of the interval. It's a killer piece, and must be a bitch to play
- hats off for Sullivan. Pianist Nonken is no slouch either as performers
go, as PT readers may well remember, and "A Glimpse Retraced" is a
chamber concerto for her and flute / piccolo, clarinet, violin and
cello. Proof that there's plenty of life left yet in the old Pierrot
line-up, it's also the most accessible piece on the disc, alternating
tough angular lyricism - Birtwistle once more comes to mind - with
an exploration of extreme register as chunky and funky as mid 70s
Ligeti. The playing throughout by the members of Ensemble 21 is superb
(bravo to clarinettist Jean Kopperud for making New Complexity Clarinet
on "Polarities" as sensual and thrilling as klezmer) and the album
is as strong and solid as Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc",
a photograph of which adorns the cover.—DW
Petri
Kuljuntausta
MOMENTUM
Aureobel 3AB-0103
petriear@nic.fi
No
wonder Petri Kuljuntausta was the one who wrote in last month with
that helpful background information on Terry Riley's activities in
Finland in the early 1960s, as his own music is as unashamedly minimalist
as the works Riley performed and recorded there all those years ago.
Working with tiny samples of instrumental sound (the composer freely
admits that "these performances are impossible for musicians to realise
in live performance"), Kuljuntausta builds structures of deceptive
simplicity, either harmonically rich ("Canvas", "Momentum") or more
straightforwardly tonal ("Four Notes", "Freedom"). Sorry to be a predictably
boring old fart, but the music of Sibelius does come to mind, as does
that of Bryars, Pärt and Tavener, and calling your piece "When I Am
Laid In Earth" and featuring a harpsichord certainly leads one to
believe there might be a Purcell connection in there too, but this
is no homage to Michael Nyman's Greenaway soundtracks. Kuljuntausta's
looping and phasing has more in common with what Reich and Riley were
doing back when young Nyman was finishing up high school. As is often
the case with minimal music, you get as much out of it as you're prepared
to put in - let it all flow over you and it's pleasant enough, but
try to get into how Kuljuntausta has combined his samples and built
up the pieces, and it becomes quite fascinating - especially the closing
"In The Beginning", where Kuljuntausta adds more colours to his palette
in the form of field recordings. Not so sure how you're supposed to
get hold of a copy, so you'd better email Kuljuntausta at the address
above - as he was most forthcoming with Riley information, I'm sure
he'll reply.—DW
Michael
Rüsenberg
LA
DEFENSE STAGE URBAIN
Real Ambient Vol 04
La
Défense is to Paris what Canary Wharf is to London, a sprawl of predominantly
corporate skyscrapers spanning the nearby towns of Puteaux and Courbevoie
across the Seine three miles to the west of the Arc de Triomphe. In
May 2001 sound artist Michael Rüsenberg took his microphones there
on a warm spring evening to record everything from the local kids
hanging out rapping on the steps of the new Grande Arche to the desolate
whirr of escalators and ventilators in the huge railway station under
La Défense's central esplanade. His "La Défense - stage urbain" is
a 39-minute work in seven continuously running movements, whose titles
sometimes - but not always - provide useful clues to the source sounds.
"La Défense arrival" captures the enormity of the central access to
the station, from the myriad footsteps of massed commuters and the
beeps of the new electronic Navigo Métro tickets to the squeaks and
whines of dozens of escalators. Elsewhere, Rüsenberg's approach to
his source material is more abstract, but in no way averse to explicit
pulse. Even before the beatboxing of the closing "Rap d'Arche" and
Rüsenberg's descent onto the deserted platforms of the Métro to take
him back to Paris, several infectious grooves lurk beneath the surface,
notably on "First Flute". Not surprisingly perhaps, the other musicians
he chooses to remix his material (though strictly speaking their contributions
are not remixes at all, since Steve Argüelles, Eric La Casa, Ned Bouhalassa
and Benoît Delbecq each received 76 sound files of both raw and manipulated
recordings, and not Rüsenberg's finished work) pick up on the beat,
with varying degrees of success. Ned Bouhalassa, born in Le Mans but
now resident in Canada, is as happy to be compared to Aphex Twin as
he is to his musique concrète mentor Francis Dhomont, and his "Le
chœur de la Défense" gleefully jumps on Rüsenberg's implied backbeats
to cook up seven minutes of skilfully mixed drum'n'bass. In contrast,
Argüelles' "Metro Mix (in the plush seat)" is little more than a flaccid
midtempo groove, and Delbecq seems compelled to add some of his own
piano playing in a curious and rather inconclusive coda to the album.
Only Eric La Casa's "Une rugosité, à la périphérie du gris" resists
the beat, preferring to concentrate on La Défense's resonant spaces.—DW
Ramon
Sender
WORLDFOOD
Locust 55
Three
cheers once more for Dawson Prater's Locust imprint for unearthing
these two splendid extended electronic works from the heyday of San
Francisco's mythic (mythic because it was so damn primitive, one suspects)
Tape Music Center. In his entertaining liner notes, which spend more
time talking about pieces that aren't included on the album, but nobody's
complaining, Ramon Sender relates how a Mr Eldon Corl of the Ampex
Corporation provided the fledgling studio on Divisadero Street with
equipment. Much of this would seem pretty primitive compared to the
wonders available at the wiggle of a finger on a standard laptop,
but, like many composers belonging to the first (and for my money
still the most creative, because it had to be) generation of
electronic music - Stockhausen, Xenakis, Maxfield, Oliveros, plus
numerous concrètes - Sender knew just how to push his resources
to its limits and come up with something quite.. otherworldly (one
wonders if he started dropping acid before he did these pieces or
whether hundreds of hours spent transposing warbling square waves
nudged him over the edge). Whatever, "Worldfood XII" is, at 43'15",
a real trip. Behind the strange twittering and gurgling lies a relatively
simple additive / subtractive musical process, but unlike another
milestone in early minimalist electronic music, Steve Reich's "It's
Gonna Rain" - also composed in San Francisco - this is deliciously
camouflaged by Sender's bizarre swoops and cheeps. The source sounds
on "Worldfood VII (To See Him With My Eyes)" are more recognisable:
Sender looped fragments of "a ragged student performance of a chamber
Easter cantata I had written in my early year at the conservatory"
- the piece's subtitle is plainly audible at times - and wove them
together into a thirty-minute luminous tapestry of sound. It's glorious
stuff, and you don't need a glass of Ken's Kool-Aid to get off on
it, either - though any PT readers who do choose to research this
under the influence are most welcome to write in with their findings.—DW
Gal
HINAUS:: IN DEN, WALD.
Klanggalerie GG52
Originally
an installation project conceived for a museum in Essl, Austria -
hence the recommendation to play on headphones in a darkened room
- Hinaus:: in den, Wald. takes as its starting point some of
the thousands of pages of texts penned by Adolf Wölfli (1864 - 1930)
during the 35 years (until his death) he was incarcerated in a psychiatric
clinic outside Bern for attempted sexual abuse of three young girls.
The 45 volumes and 25,000 pages of his "St Adolf - Giant - Creation"
represent a fascinating outpouring of pure schizophrenic genius (go
to: www.adolfwoelfli.ch), but whether Bernhard Gal's rather primary
setting of the texts for speaking voice (his own and that of Stella
Kao, a Taiwanese girl "who didn't understand German at all") and recordings
of someone out of breath tramping out in the woods (to translate the
title) do full justice to the richness and density of Wölfli's work
is a question best answered by those more familiar with it. Whatever,
it's not something you probably want to slip into the Walkman if you're
lost in a forest late one night.—DW
Tristan
Murail
GONDWANA / DESINTEGRATIONS / TIME & AGAIN
Montaigne MO 782175
Tristan
Murail studied with Olivier Messiaen and, with Gérard Grisey, was
a co-founder of the so-called "spectral school" in the 1970s. Murail
taught composition at IRCAM in Paris from 1991 to 1997 and is currently
on the faculty of the Computer Music Center at Columbia University
in NYC, though you wouldn't know that from the long out-of-date liner
notes of this Montaigne reissue. In the three compositions on this
disc, Murail explores various possibilities for integrating electronics
or techniques derived from electronics with acoustic orchestral music.
The harmonic procedures of the orchestral composition Gondwana
(1980) are based on frequency modulations of digital synthesizers,
an idea developed further in Time and Again (1986) by including
a synthesizer in the orchestra. Désintégrations (1982-3), for
17 instruments and computer-generated tape, uses electronics to produce
timbres based on orchestral instruments. The disc progresses most
impressively from the acoustic waves of Gondwana (16'36") via
the prominent electronics of Désintégrations (22'30") to the
agitation and distortion of Time and Again (16'47"). These
three beautiful, compelling works are strongly recommended to those
already familiar with Ligeti and Xenakis, both of whom Murail mentions
favorably in a recent interview with Anton Rovner. The common ground
with Ligeti is microtonality, characteristic of Ligeti's "middle period"
of the 1960s and 70s, and the incorporation of electronics bears comparison
with Xenakis - and Boulez. Désintégrations was commissioned
by IRCAM, but has little in common with Répons, the first pinnacle
of Boulez's IRCAM output. Boulez's electronics are ghostly and subtle
real-time processing of the six soloists, while Murail's work is rougher
and bolder, and has more in common with Xenakis' 1969 masterpiece
Kraanerg. Like Kraanerg (and unlike Répons) Désintégrations
uses pre-recorded tape along with acoustic instruments, and Murail
also makes use of algorithms to generate sound spectra, rejecting
serialism in favour of spectral techniques, which "form an attempt
to rebuild a coherent sound world, which was destroyed due to many
destructive experiences, such as generalized serialism on one hand
and the aleatory experiments of John Cage on the other hand." (see
www.musica-ukrainica.odessa.ua/i-rovner-murail.htm) Many thanks to
Montaigne for rescuing these recordings and bringing attention once
more to an easily overlooked major figure in creative, cutting edge
modern music.—RH
Michael
Andrew Doherty
ARCHITECTURE
www.michaeladoherty.com
That
middle name is presumably so we won't confuse Mr Doherty (born Burlington
NC in 1973) with Michael Daugherty - of slick, PoMo Jackie O Argo
fame - not that there's any chance of doing so once you hear the music.
Architecture's subtle exploration of microphone feedback recalls the
work of Alvin Lucier, and it's a satisfying and well-structured piece.
The only problem is that it lasts but 7 minutes and 50 seconds - a
bit short even for a single these days - but we can live in hope that
in the months to come Doherty might consider reissuing it along with
the Noise Pieces, which present a richer sound palette. Working with
recordings of organ (sampled from a vinyl, from the sound of it),
paper, a suspended ceramic tile and various other tile fragments,
Doherty erased parts of the mix in accordance with a graphic score
(included with the disc). The fact that each piece lasts 4'33" is
presumably no accident. Hopefully in the months to come Doherty will
extend and develop some of the ideas presented here, which often sound
more like preliminary sketches for a work than works themselves. In
the meantime, his music is worth checking out and will probably do
you more good than the glib trash penned by his near namesake.—DW
si-cut.db
OFFICES AT NIGHT [VOLUME 1 - ORIGINALS]
Fällt F.0038.0001
Ian
Andrews
CEREMONIAL
Fällt F.0034.0001
Tu
m'
POP INVOLVED [VERSION 3.0]
Fällt F.0034.0002
Offices
at Night is the first full-length release by Douglas Benford (nice
to see he's dropped those strange curly brackets in the si-cut.db
name), a project that will eventually consist of three volumes, of
which this audio CD is the first. As usual with Fällt, there's a whole
accompanying network of designer packaging and exclusive online distribution
involved - Vol. II will consist of mp3 versions of the tracks by other
Fällt artists, and Vol. III versions by Benford himself - but behind
the elaborate concept and the elegant black and white cover photography
by Kent Knudson, the post-Pole glitch dub is unfortunately a little
unadventurous and too easily forgettable. Half of the album's ten
cuts could have been shortened without jeopardising their structural
integrity, and a couple could have been dispensed with altogether.
More
satisfying is Ceremonial, by Sydney-based Ian Andrews' - apparently
the first CD under Andrews' own name, though he has been active in
electronic music since the early 1980s - which inaugurates another
new Fällt venture, a series of burn-to-order CDs (see www.fallt.com/ferric).
Here the metrics are more complicated ("Gynoecium" and "Working the
hole" rock along in a fast quintuple time, the former shot through
with unpredictable cross accents) and the palette more varied ("Libidinal
Decay" sounds like late 60s Glass rescored for gamelan and remixed
by Autechre), but, like the Benford release, it's as if Andrews is
so in love with his sounds that he daren't let them evolve. If "Working
the hole" holds the attention by incorporating some decidedly odd
field recordings, "Da" and "Andevoranto", despite more complex harmonic
and rhythmic material, soon get stuck in a rut. Andrews saves the
best until last with the evocative "Jaffa".
Those
who already own Tu m's Pop Involved, which Fällt released back
in 2002, might be tempted to pass over Pop Involved [Version 3.0],
thinking it's "just another remix album" (the fact that the new version
has the same index number doesn't help matters), but if you do you're
making a mistake. Only a few of the tracks are common to both discs,
and even pieces that appear to be the same (i.e. have the same title),
aren't. Comparing the two versions is a fascinating exercise, and
reveals how far Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli's elegant
glitch laptoppery has evolved over the intervening two years. The
juxtaposition of treated and untreated instrumental source sounds
- frequently bright acoustic guitars, bathing the album in a Mediterranean
sunlight -throws up some ravishing sonorities and fascinating perspectives.
It's also less overtly "poppy" than its predecessor: in fact, things
can and do get deliciously weird, notably on "Humans' Voices", "Nilo"
and "The Mouse House", which sounds like a Fennesz remix of Sun Ra.—DW
Giuseppe
Ielasi / Renato Rinaldi
ORELEDIGNEUR
Bowindo 05
3/4HadBeenEliminated
3/4HADBEENELIMINATED
Bowindo 06
The
first wave of Bowindos to roll my way was a welcome surprise, a genuinely
challenging set of recordings ranging from the extreme frequencies
of Elio Martusciello to the mildly disturbing interior monologues
of Valerio Tricoli (see earlier review). Compared to their predecessors
these two new outings on the Italian label are beautifully recorded
and look great, but are relatively easy listening - which as David
Toop will tell you is by no means a put down.
Oreledigneur, which is apparently Frioul dialect for "hare's ears"
(now you know) is a duo featuring Giuseppe Ielasi and Renato Rinaldi
"playing big and small objects and instruments", though for their
now out-of-print first release on Ielasi's Fringes label a while back
they were joined by Alessandro Bosetti (samples of another Oreledigneur
recording made in a kitchen popped up on Bosetti's own Bowindo release
Charlemagne, la vue attachée sur son lac de Constance, amoureux
de l'abîme cachée). Like Ielasi's solo release Plans on
Sedimental, the five (continuously running) tracks on Oreledigneur
intentionally seek to blur the distinction between inside and outside,
studio and field recording, improvisation and composition. So much
so, and so successfully, that I'm at a loss whether to file the CD
under "improvisation", "electronica" or "contemporary music" in my
own ever more chaotic archiving system. Incidentally, if some of this
sounds familiar, it's because some of Plans was based on Oreledigneur
samples. Ielasi's guitar work sounds like a cross between Loren Connors
and Keith Rowe, unashamedly diatonic but contentedly static, and drifts
in and out of focus among looped clicks and clunks, fragments of conversation,
what sounds like industrial ventilators, and, in the final section
"recorded live in a garden", insects, passing aeroplanes, distant
church bells and Stefano Pilia on double bass (hard to spot). Quite
what the connection is between the music and the accompanying images
of two men fencing on a deserted runway next to a space shuttle (is
it?) taken from a book by Vincenzo Cabiati and Armin Linke called
"Baikonur Cosmodrome" and presumably having something to do with the
Soyuz space programme's old launch facilities at Tyuratam junction
on the right bank of the Syr Darya River in Kazakhstan (honest injun
- go Google), I don't know. It's one of the many mysteries of a haunting
and evocative disc.
Working with guitars, harmonium, bass, percussion, glass harmonica,
resonant pipes, turntables, synthesizer and other diverse electronic
objects and treatments, the trio of Stefano Pilia, Claudio Rocchetti
and Valerio Tricoli, under the curious appellation 3/4HadBeenEliminated
(three quarters of what?) are, to quote their press release, better
at "asking useless questions rather than giving useless answers".
Tricoli's elusive montage of field recordings (cf. last year's Did
I? Did They?) combines with Pilia's fondness for extended guitar
drones (Healing Memories In Present Tension on Last Visible
Dog) and Rochetti's "Wagnerian turntablism" (here I'm quoting from
the PR as I haven't heard his work before) to produce a very listenable
and predominantly tonal album but one that, once more, won't be pigeonholed
(hooray). Instead of worrying about which shelf to put it on, enjoy
the album's many irresistibly beautiful moments, from the gentle triple
time guitar chipped away by field recordings on "The soul of the suits"
- maybe that's the 3/4 that has been eliminated - via the distant
children's voices and drones of "Memory Man" to the disarmingly simple
acoustic balladry that closes "My smallest ego." For some reason,
Gastr del Sol comes to mind. Don't be fooled though into thinking
it's a turn-on-tune-in-switch-off thing: there are plenty of odd twists
and turns - the disconcerting thuds and rips in "Bench / Frozen" are
superb - the most surprising perhaps being the appearance of a real
twanging binary groove in "Bedrock". But of course it doesn't end
up going where you'd expect it to - the final minutes of the album
sound like someone smashing up an abandoned warehouse. Fascinating,
inscrutable and highly recommended.—DW
Thembi
Soddell
INTIMACY
Cajid CD 001
Based
in Melbourne and working predominantly with transformed field recordings
as she is, I confidently expect to see a Thembi Soddell album out
someday on Naturestrip (see above) - in the meantime here is Intimacy,
a suite of sorts of six continuously running movements entitled "Violation",
"Withdrawal", "Mistrust", "Discomfort", "Repulsion" and "Expectation".
Sounds scary enough to be a kind of imaginary rape scenario you might
think (originally the work was designed for an installation performance
in a "dark and claustrophobic space lined with red drapes"), but the
sound doesn't automatically follow correspond to what the titles might
lead you to expect: "Violation" and "Withdrawal" both crescendo menacingly
but only (perceptibly) towards the end, "Mistrust" is a 37 second
white noise apocalypse (you may curse me for having told you this,
but the instruction on the disc "before listening it is recommended
the volume be set with track three at maximum loudness" should have
tipped you off.. the instruction is a bit theatrical and frankly unnecessary,
as the track is, in context, going to bring you up with a severe shock
anyway, whatever the volume setting of your system). "Discomfort"
also rises in intensity until it peaks in "Repulsion", after which
the closing "Expectation" leaves you guessing, which I suppose is
what expectation is all about. At just under 26 minutes it's about
the length of what these days gets sold as a maxi single; shame it
couldn't have been paired with another more contrasting work. I'm
inclined to think that Soddell has a good ear and sound sense of timing
and structure, but I'd like to hear more of her work to make sure
first.—DW..
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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