| JANUARY
News 2005 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Nate Dorward, Jean Michel Van Schouwburg, Wayne
Spencer, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial:
Happy New Ear
In Print: Robin Holloway: On Music
On Clean Feed: Lisbon
Improvisation Players /
Ivo Perelman / Ze Eduardo Unit
In search of lowercase: Sealed
Knot / Mattin & Taku Unami / Friedl, Günter & Vorfeld
/ Dörner & Hayward
On Sirr: ..to Maurice
Blanchot / John Hudak & Stephan Mathieu
In Print: Audio Culture
On Emanem: Milo Fine / Masashi Harada / Fred Lonberg-Holm
JAZZ: John Abercrombie
/ SURD / Per Henrik Wallin /
Faruq Z. Bey / Marco Eneidi / Cecil Taylor / Joost Buis / Rudresh
Mahanthappa
IMPROV: Stackenäs,
Sandell, Parker, Guy, Lytton / Schlippenbach Trio / Kainkwatett
/ Olive, Nikisawa / Baghdassarians,
Baltschun, Bosetti, Doneda / Stéphane Rives
CONTEMPORARY: Alvin
Curran / Lukas Ligeti / Joël-François Durand
ELECTRONICA: United
States of Belt / Goh Lee Kwang / Pita / Julien Ottavi / Absolut
Null Punkt / Max Eastley & David Toop
Last
month
|
Quite
against my more sensible instincts this issue of Paris Transatlantic
has again mushroomed into something enormous, with reviews of two
major books on new music and no fewer than 37 discs. There's a Portuguese
flavour to the issue once more, with features on Clean Feed and Sirr
– along with Creative Sources and Cronica proof that it's really
happening down there – and, you'll be relieved to see (or maybe
you're not, but I am) NO silly Best Ofs lists. As if a whole
year's music could be reduced to a top ten.. I know I know, I'm not
immune to bestofitisis myself, having produced the self-indulgent
Top 40 a while back, but as I mention in the review below of Alvin
Curran's magnificent Maritime Rites, sometimes the best discs
of the year appear in November and December – too late for the
publication deadlines of mags like The Wire, for example.
Anyway, thanks to the many who joined the team of PT writers during
2004 – Clifford Allen, Stephen Griffith, Richard Hutchinson,
TJ Norris, Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg, Wayne Spencer and Kris Westin
– and here's to a happy, healthy and music-filled 2005 for all.
Bonne année, bonne lecture.—DW
Robin
Holloway
ON MUSIC: ESSAYS AND DIVERSIONS
Claridge Press 438pp £30 / $US45
 "The
composer '..while he was completing his thesis on Debussy and Wagner
(to be published by Eulenberg next year), and latterly on a special
fellowship to enable him to compose. From October he will be lecturing
on music history. After student years at King's, he spent a period
at Oxford, and, since leaving King's College School, Wimbledon, he
has had only one year outside academic institutions: a miserable period
writing correspondence college courses in London…' From a newspaper
article, 1974."
Does that ring a bell? Try Derek Bailey's Improvisation: its nature
and practice in music, page 76. (If you have the first edition.)
The composer in question, not named in Bailey's book, is Robin Holloway,
Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and Professor in the Music Faculty
of Cambridge University, and, thirty years on from the newspaper article
cited above, he's still there. This collection of Holloway's writings
on music was published last year to coincide with his 60th birthday,
but has only just made its way across the Channel to me here in Paris,
the reason being that Holloway is, shall we say, not quite up to speed
when it comes to email, preferring instead to pen long and exquisitely
written letters on the backs of discarded A3 photocopies of his own
scores. Derek Bailey, one imagines, chose Holloway as a representative
example of a world he must have considered light years away from his
own; it's hard to imagine anything more different from the fish'n'chips,
flat caps, pubs and clubs of working class Sheffield than the cloistered
world of a Cambridge don (Nicholas Williams once memorably but rather
unflatteringly described Holloway as a "hothouse plant"..).
And yet I like to think that Bailey would find much to agree with
in this collection of articles spanning the years 1963 – 2003.
Not only that, but Holloway, who for my money has two of the most
acute ears on the planet, would find much to marvel at in Bailey's
guitar playing, which I'm sure he hardly knows.
Of the 71 essays collected in the book, 36 originally appeared in
The Spectator, 13 in Tempo magazine, 6 in the Times
Literary Supplement, and the rest in occasional publications,
including "Beware The Pitfalls Of Sincerity" (bang on target
for its time: it was published by The Independent on October
14th 1989) and the seminal "Towards a critique – the music
of Alexander Goehr" in the collection of essays on Goehr edited
by Bayan Northcott in 1980 (of which more later). Their appearance
in print is long overdue, for Holloway's writing on music is perceptive
and sharp, and as well crafted and accessible as his own music. The
following description of the slow movement of Haydn's String Quartet
Op.77 No.2 is quintessential Holloway: "The melody (essentially
'three blind mice' with twiddles) is a sort of faux-naïf
Lego, whose every link can be used to make a different thing."
Quite apart from being probably the only English sentence ever written
to contain the words "twiddles", "faux-naïf"
and "Lego", it instantly and effortlessly describes the
music in a manner that anyone – including somebody who has never
heard the work in question – can understand, without talking
down to the reader. Holloway's prose style has always been a source
of joy to me, and I readily acknowledge its influence. Who else could
describe Hindemith as "athletic All Bran", Brahms' "Four
Serious Songs" as "oleaginous yet beery" (spot on!),
Stockhausen's "Inori" as "a kind of Heath Robinson
flying bungalow, bristling with quaint quasi-scientific appendages,
celestial tea-strainers and home-made aerials to pick up signals from
Astral Beings" and encapsulate the essence of Aaron Copland in
a single sentence: "Within the hard flat brightness unmistakable
for any other music – brazen, clangourous, metallic, glassy,
strident, gaunt – lies the equally unmistakable Copland tenderness,
oddly wistful (a favourite word), shy, stammering, vulnerable."
Adjectives come thick and fast, but Holloway's writing is no showcase
of verbal dexterity for its own sake. His solid grounding in Scrutiny
and the distant yet discernible presence of Leavis and Tovey ensures
there's plenty of meat underneath the rich, creamy sauce. "Music
is about notes, whether the upshot is Tristan's delirium, Tchaikovsky's
floods of passion, cardiac convulsions in Mahler and Berg, or any
sonata, trio, quartet, symphony by Haydn [..] If 'words, not ideas,
make a poem' how much more true for the relatively unconnotational
art of music. Not passions, neuroses, concepts, pictures or any other
extraneous intentions make a piece of music, but pitches, rhythms,
durations, timbres, in all their infinite potential for organised
combination." Those with more than a smattering of basic musical
training will find much to marvel at in the two extended pieces on
Wagner, "Motif, memory and meaning in Twilight of the Gods"
and "Experiencing music and imagery in Parsifal",
the impressive analysis of Mahler 10 and the tour de force that
is "The orchestration of Elektra: a critical interpretation"
(worth buying a full score for). Incidentally, the Debussy / Wagner
thesis mentioned in the Bailey quote was indeed published by Eulenberg
and still makes for an impressive read.
 Central
to Holloway's thought is the importance of simply being able to hear
what's going on in a piece of music, an idea that applies just as
well to improvised and electronic musics as it does to classics of
occidental art music: "The passage 'speaks' because the ear is
excited or pleased. The combination might have been brought about
by a note-row, a magic square, a throw of the dice, or the cat running
up the keyboard. But its cause is not its reason; the intelligibility
lies in the sound itself, and choices which might have been (metaphorically)
linguistic for their creator do not have any direct bearing except
in as much as the sureness of his choice compels the ear's recognition
that they are right." This extract comes from the above-mentioned
Goehr critique, perhaps the closest Holloway has ever come to a mission
statement, a uniquely personal appraisal of the music of his former
teacher and subsequent boss in the Cambridge Music Faculty. "Goehr's
predilection is for the method that begins in the assumption of an
alleged deep structure in a work, truer than its obviously apprehensible
stylistic surface and its immediate deployment of its affects. Therefore
for him preoccupation with style, as with emotional content, trivialises:
style is merely decorative, affective content is belles-lettres.
But suppose that such obvious surface features were what the composer
had intended the listener to take in? In that sense they would be
the truest content, to grasp which would make analysis superfluous;
mere curiosity to see how the wheels go round. Analysis is how we
hear anyway; the composer has taken pains to make things clear for
us. There are no deep secrets, for everything significant tells sooner
or later."
Among other memorable quotations from the article, we find the following:
"Music written to demonstrate 'that certain notes follow and
that others don't' has in theory got sound and sense out of alignment."
And "most post-serial composition is arbitrary and egoistic;
its base is intellectual caprice frozen into dogma." In the old
Adorno debate, Stravinsky or Schoenberg, choose your side, Holloway's
predilection for Stravinsky is clear (it's a shame the book doesn't
include an analytical discussion of a Stravinsky work along the lines
of the Strauss piece mentioned above), and he saves some of his harshest
judgements for the older composer. In a 1989 Spectator piece, provocatively
entitled "The Great Mutilator" (which "elicited more
vociferous reaction than anything in the fifteen years subsequent"),
he goes for the throat: "Schoenberg's twelve-note music is still
composed upon tonal premises, but the notes no longer make sense except
in mere rationality of construction, and their actual sound is excruciating,
with constant overloading and tension without resolution, and a new
coarseness in the instrumentation that had once been so rich and delicate.
[..] Schoenberg's 'reluctant revolution' gets this the wrong way round:
grammar before speech, a body with skeleton and organs on the outside."
And, in a final coup-de-poing: "Schoenberg invoked the
great tradition of German composers from Bach to Brahms in an unsuccessful
attempt to mend what he had blown up. But in the explosion he had
unfortunately lost his ears. And the result was the mutilation of
a whole epoch of music."
Vociferous reaction it might have provoked, but history will prove
– maybe already has proved – Holloway right. In an earlier
(1977) review of Malcolm MacDonald's book on Schoenberg, he confronts
the problem with his customary common sense: "Schoenberg apologists
can persuade themselves of anything. 'For my part, I shall continue
to whistle Schoenberg's tunes whenever they come into my head.' Brave
words; but listen to people as they whistle! All the time their whistling
is supported by an innate understanding, usually quite unconscious,
of the harmony that gives the tune its meaning, whether be a snatch
of Beethoven, Jerusalem, or something off the hit-parade.
Why don't the committed 'plain-man' Schoenbergians start from the
truth that his harmony is no longer in gear with the melody it underlies,
that the melody is therefore out of focus, that something absolutely
simple and absolutely fundamental has gone wrong, and that from this
central fault every aspect of his later music is riven with chaos
and distress?"
Analysis is how we hear; how simple yet how true. Holloway
has little time for earnest Schenkerians sweating over Bruckner. This
on Ed Laufer's "Aspects of Prolongation in the Ninth Symphony":
"Its putative usefulness – to underline the supreme competence
and inspiration with which in this work Bruckner composes –
would be pre-empted anyway by listening with absorption to an adequate
performance." And if the criticism of Schoenberg above might
lead readers to think Holloway is resolutely anti-serial, they would
be wrong. Indeed, he's one of the few composers and writers who has
recognised the importance of serialism and discussed its application
to the music of composers few people would associate with it. Take
this telling passage from an appreciation written to commemorate the
centenary of Aaron Copland: "The Piano Variations (1930)
crucially discover that the constructivistic rigours eventually christened
and codified as 'serialism' needn't be a slave to strict ordering
of the notes. Rather, the notes make a pool of pitch-resources, a
highly characterised clench of harmony fused into itself or separated
out into intervals forming a repertory of shapes, a sonorous image-cluster
with the material and its total potential locked into a nugget of
heavy-density plutonium. Which above all needn't or even shouldn't
consist of all twelve notes. The obsession with the twelve shows a
misplaced exhaustiveness hanging-over from the nice artificial compromise
of equal temperament, its authoritative canonisation by Bach, and
the gigantic consequences for Western music ever since."
Though the division of this book into three sections – "The
Austro-German Mainstream", "The Others" and (the all
too brief) "Think Pieces" – might suggest the frequently
invoked idea of the continuity of tradition (Haydn begat Mozart begat
Beethoven begat Brahms begat Schoenberg etc.), it does reveal Holloway's
special fondness for composers who slipped off the radar, those who
refused to "make it new", or who simply weren't interested
in pursuing the modernist agenda. Hence the book provides clear and
overdue appraisals of Humperdinck, Rott, Diepenbrock, Schoeck and
Schmidt, as well as better-known names such as Elgar, Fauré
and Poulenc. Take this extract from his piece on Franz Schmidt, "Unobtrusive
Conservative": "Revolutionary achievement, if good, speaks
for itself (though not always at once). It is much harder to estimate
music of calibre that alters nothing. The rhetoric of our times, still
hung up on romantic uniqueness and gearing to 'making it new', tends
to favour only the sharply distinct artistic profile [..] Boulez,
the voice of the undying avant-garde, proclaims in a recent interview
that history will forget those composers who do not follow its dictates.
But who wants to be remembered by history!"
In his 1989 Spectator piece "Beware The Pitfalls Of
Sincerity", Holloway nails the current fad for the likes of Pärt,
Tavener and Gorecki: "How to ensure a sympathetic reaction for
a new piece of music? Ideally the subject should combine Ecology (with
special reference to tropical rain-forests) with Protest (preferably
shrill and futile). It should climax with an ecumenical prayer (in
every known language simultaneously) for intergalactic peace. The
musical material should include at least three of the following: Jewish
cantillation, Catholic plainsong, Tibetan chanting, Aboriginal drumming,
whalesong. The idiom should be middle-of-the-road, artfully disguised
with mod cons (clusters, glissandos, electronics); there should be
a strong pop-music element, plenty of repetition à la Philip
Glass. When inspiration fails, fill the gaps with ritual gong strokes,
prolonged and amplified to the threshold of pain. But such cynicism
will not do; this is a serious matter. [..] The wide current appeal
of such music seems to touch a nerve of communal masochism. Audiences
yearn to groan under the yoke of suffering they may never have experienced."
And later: "I believe that music-lovers are deluded when they
claim to find artistic pleasure in any but a fraction of this music
[..] The content they locate is a projection of what they know of
its circumstances – by which only a heart of stone would not
be moved. Take away this knowledge and the appeal would vanish, for
the music is rarely able to stand on its own merits."
Elsewhere, Shostakovich comes in for some rough treatment: "Neutral
or indeed repellent: battleship-grey in melody and harmony, factory-functional
in structure; in content all rhetoric and coercion, exercises or instructions
in communal lament and celebration, rendered by portentous slow music
and mirthless fast music, nearly identical from work to work, coarsely
if effectively scored, executed with horrifying fluency and competence."
And, on the string quartets: "Astonishing that this cycle is
now as a matter of routine compared with Beethoven's; like comparing
a housing estate to the Acropolis." But others fare much worse,
notably Schnittke ("resource becomes recourse, returns sharply
diminish; techniques that even at best and most necessary were never
innately musical lose their surprise and turn routine; disgust supervenes,
then boredom, finally indifference") and Henze ("the same
old welter of indiscriminate notes in an orgy of clapped-out expressionist
gesturing").
Holloway acknowledges the importance of formative influences –
Goehr, Britten, Hans Keller – while successfully distancing
himself from them. One of the most affectionate portraits is of the
musicologist Donald Francis Tovey: "What would this sane, forthright,
grammar-wielding yet poetic mind make of Britten, Messiaen, Nancarrow,
Ligeti? He'd surely be able to sort out the tangle of ideology, biography,
fire slag and ash in Shostakovich? Tovey on Adams, Stockhausen, Birtwistle?
We need it." In similar vein, one might rue the absence
in Holloway's book of anything substantial on Sibelius, Delius, Carter,
Feldman, Ligeti, Boulez, Reich, Adams and Torke. Why six essays on
Britten (including the well-written but snooty and pompous piece penned
when Holloway was 20) and nothing on Bartók, whose Fourth Quartet
Holloway once memorably described in a lecture as "mindless hideousness".
That particular remark, made back in 1982, actually prompted this
writer and a couple of his aggressively avant-garde pals to stage
a Fred Kite-style "mass" walkout of Holloway's lecture.
When I later got to know Robin Holloway better – as a Caius
student myself, he was my BA thesis adviser – I lent him my
copies of Mingus Presents Mingus and Ascension –
"they kept me awake all night!" he beamed.
 For Holloway
was, and always has been, curious to hear other music, while being
the first to admit he would never be able to welcome it unreservedly
into his life. (Another fond memory is of the time I stopped off at
his London home with a copy of The Kings Of Pressure's Give Me
The Mike, which I'd been looking for ever since I heard it and
its Joe Quarterman sample on a John Peel show. Despite my assurances
that he wouldn't like it, Holloway insisted on blasting the Cezanne
still life of his kitchen with Old School Rap, sitting with head in
hands, muttering "B-b-but what are they saying?")
Spending all of one's adult life within the confines of a Cambridge
college, even if you can dine regularly with the likes of Stephen
Hawking and Jeremy Prynne (both Fellows at Caius), isn't my idea of
living – nor, I would imagine, is it Derek Bailey's –
but I am slightly envious of the hothouse environment that has provided
Holloway with time to listen and fully comprehend the scope and sweep
of Western music, from the complete Bach cantatas to all 37 CDs of
Schubert songs, from Chabrier to Shapey, Purcell to Pärt. What
would this sane, forthright, grammar-wielding yet poetic mind make
of Derek Bailey's Aida, Bernhard Günter's un peu
de neige salie, Stephan Mathieu's Heroin? Robin Holloway
on Merzbow, Sugimoto, Keith Rowe? We need it.—DW
Lisbon
Improvisation Players
MOTION
Clean Feed 025
Ivo
Perelman
BLACK ON WHITE
Clean Feed 024
Ze
Eduardo Unit
A JAZZAR NO ZECA
Clean Feed 028
Launched
in 2001 by brothers Pedro and Carlos Costa in Lisbon, Portugal, the
Clean Feed label has quickly become one of the most important and
thriving labels in modern jazz. With approximately 40 releases in
just under four years, it's also a truly international imprint, with
a roster including artists from the US (Ken Vandermark, Steve Swell..)
and England (Paul Dunmall) as well as the home country (Lisbon Improvisation
Players, Carlos Zingaro, Mario Delgado..). It would be easy to release
only better-known musicians, but Clean Feed has always seen fit to
team up noted international improvisers with the gifted local players,
right from its very first release, The Implicate Order, on
which Steve Swell, Ken Filiano and Lou Grassi were joined by Rodrigo
Amado and Paolo Curado of the Lisbon Improvisation Players. LIP's
strong second date is among this latest slew of releases along with
bassist Zé Eduardo’s tenor-driven power trio and another
installment in the lengthy discography of Brazilian expatriate saxophonist
Ivo Perelman.
 Of several
notable Portuguese ensembles specializing in open-form improvisation,
the Lisbon Improvisation Players, founded and directed by saxophonist
Rodrigo Amado, are probably the most visible. Whereas their first
album was the work of a sextet of Portuguese musicians, this quartet
incarnation of LIP features two Americans, sopranino/tenor saxophonist
Steve Adams and bassist Ken Filiano. (Filiano, a classically trained
bassist often associated with the West Coast circle around reedman
Vinny Golia, has appeared on several Clean Feeds, notably the remarkable
The Space Between with violinist Carlos Zingaro.) LIP do
not particularly conform to any mode of free improvisation; one can
hear traces of the AACM, post-Coltrane energy music, and the various
European strains of non-idiomatic improvisation, but as sinewy baritone
and sopranino lines blend together in a cascade of sound, abruptly
falling away to solo statements by drummer Acácio Salero and
bassist Filiano, such references are of little importance. Improvisations
are frequently built on contrasts, most notably those between Amado’s
husky baritone and Adams’s lithe, poised sopranino; staccato
bursts from reeds and percussion have a strange way of slowly blurring
into a constant hum of activity, anchored by Filiano’s impenetrable
sense of drive. In tandem with the somewhat fractured approach taken
by Salero, rhythm becomes a tenuous thing, hinging on the creation
and subversion of a feeling of movement, with Filiano’s sonorous
arco lines blending with reeds to create a sense of sonic flow that
does not presage rhythm or movement, but rather activity. Motion.
 Similarly
open in concept, but of a decidedly different ilk, is Black on
White, the new offering from Brazil-born tenor player Ivo Perelman,
a firebrand who has made his home in Brooklyn since the early 90s.
Unlike LIP's unique, process-oriented work, Perelman’s music
is firmly rooted in multiphonics-drenched late 60s tenor playing,
equal parts Coltrane, Ayler, Sanders and Barbieri. He's a powerful
and creative player within that sphere of influence, but a consummate
improviser he is not – one gets the feeling from listening to
his solos that his study has been limited to ESP and Impulse avant-garde
sessions (on “Naked Seeds,” he inserts a quote from one
of Barbieri’s “Togetherness” solos, but rather than
leaving it as a sly reference, he milks it dry). Get beyond the unoriginality
of Perelman’s playing though and the pieces can be a gas –
“Cores” is particularly storming, with Perelman's blinding
Ayleresque squeaks and blasts at full tempo as bassist Dominic Duval
and drummer Jackson Krall create a dense kinetic push underneath.
 In stark
contrast to Perelman's fiery salvos, bassist Zé Eduardo’s
trio, featuring tenorman Jesús Santandreu and drummer Bruno
Pedroso (somewhat ubiquitous on the Lisbon scene), takes as its jumping-off
point the words of Portuguese poet and composer José Alonso.
The Eduardo Unit creates a rhythmically supple, intuitive and harmonically
liberated music derived cadentially from Alonso’s lyrics, approaching
folk music while simultaneously being complex and dissonant enough
to subvert such comparison. The trio balances precariously between
guttural skronk and free rhythm, and the loosely swinging, off-kilter
melodies of the parent tunes – check out “Grândola
Vila Morena”. “Canto Moço” is an oddly funky
march, its melody built on an incantatory phrase wrung out completely
with oddly bent, almost wah-wah like saxophone smears. Santandreu
is without doubt a consummate player on his instrument; tackling free
passages with a command of the instrument’s registers and finding
the "wrong" sounds with facility. While he can give the
post-Ayler set a run for their money, he is, on “O Que Faz Falta,”
just as able to channel a “Strode Rode” Sonny Rollins,
crafting one of the most engaging bop tenor solos I’ve heard
in a long time. Many musicians often get the rhythmically off-kilter,
pastiche-like nature of Rollins’ music, but few get the wry
humor too – and Santandreu does in spades.
The spontaneous, open creations of the Lisbon Improvisation Players,
Eduardo's bringing together of Portuguese protest songs and poems
with free bop and the fire music tradition as represented by Perelman,
all feed into today's improvised music. Cloying though it may sound,
what is on offer on these three discs is nothing less than an affirmation
of the universality of improvisation as an art form.—CA
The
Sealed Knot
UNWANTED OBJECT
Confront Collectors Series CCS 1
Mattin / Taku Unami
SHIRYO NO COMPUTER
h.m.o/r01
Friedl / Günter / Vorfeld
MESSAGE URGENT
trente oiseaux TOC 042
Axel Dörner / Robin Hayward
AXEL DÖRNER / ROBIN HAYWARD
absinthRecords 005
 "Lowercase",
"reductionist", "onkyo", "micro-improv",
"minimal improv".. by the time we manage to reach a consensus
on what to call the recent trend in improvised music towards a greater
use of silence, generally lower dynamics and avoidance (deliberate
or otherwise) of "traditional" / "conversational"
models, it'll probably be too late. Indeed, London-based cellist /
bassist / electronician / percussionist Mark Wastell (who by the way
has always preferred the term "reductionist" to "lowercase",
which would seem to have set him on a collision course with Bhob Rainey
who expressed serious reservations about the R word in Signal To Noise
magazine a while back) argues nowadays that the genre / movement,
call it what you will, is over and done with. As adjectives go, though,
"reductionist" is certainly effective to describe the four
tracks that make up Unwanted Object, Wastell's third outing
on disc with the Sealed Knot trio with harpist Rhodri Davies and percussionist
Burkhard Beins. It's as if each musician has decided in advance to
concentrate on a small predetermined number of sonorities: Wastell,
on double bass (his latest instrumental discovery, already featured
on the solo "For John
Entwistle" on Absinth), prefers simple low register pizzicati
and detached staccato bowed work – no danger then of him ending
up sounding like Werner Dafeldecker, as sustained bowed tones appear
relatively briefly later in the album; Beins restricts himself to
bowed and scraped drum heads and cymbals, with a special fondness
for crotales (but as Wastell is well known for using Nepalese bowls
I sometimes wonder if it's not him, even though he's credited as playing
only the bass), and Davies favours bell-like multiphonics from his
prepared harp. The press release sums it up quite nicely when it jokingly
describes the music as "Feldman encounters a gamelan ensemble
at a house party hosted by The Necks", though that makes things
sound more lightweight than they actually are. Feldman's influence
seems undeniable – the use of regular and not so regular repeating
cells of material marks a distinct departure from earlier "oops
you missed it" lowercase practice – and Wastell and Davies'
apparent fondness for duple and quadruple rhythmic structures is just
as surprising. There's no danger of Beins ever letting the music swing,
but at times the pulse element is sufficiently upfront to have you
tap your foot along, albeit briefly. This in conjunction with the
fact that any low bass notes repeated often enough are inevitably
perceived by the ear as the root of a chord makes the music sound
remarkably normal (you could even argue that whole stretches of the
final track could be heard as a kind of D eleventh chord with added
high G# on the crotales). The album title refers to the fact that
the recording was originally intended for release as part of the American
label Locust Music's Object series, but was turned down by the label
for unspecified reasons. I'd be curious to find out what those were,
since the Sealed Knot work is musically as distinctive if not more
so than several of the outings released in the Object series so far.
Perhaps they thought it didn't push the envelope far enough (but offhand
I can think of two other Objects of which the same could be said).
However, despite the fact that its vocabulary is reasonably user-friendly,
the overall impression Unwanted Object gives is one of funereal
dirge. "Requiem for Reductionism", perhaps.
 One of
the consequences of listening to lowercase's use of silence is that
the ear tunes in to what is normally filtered out as "background";
after a quarter of a century of so-called ambient music, it's now
time for ambient noise. Examples include the hum, murmur
and rustle of the audience attending Radu Malfatti and Taku Sugimoto's
concert at Vienna Rhiz (on the IMJ Futatsu
double album), the gallery chitchat from which Mike Bullock's bass
emerges on Initial (Chlöe) and the distant train sounds
that drift dreamlike through Training
Thoughts, released on Mattin's w.m.o/r label last year and
featuring him and Yasuo Totsuka on laptops and Sugimoto once more
on guitar. That concert was recorded by another local lowercase laptopper,
Taku Unami, who also collaborates with Mattin on Shiryo No Computer,
jointly released on w.m.o/r and Unami's Hibari imprint. There's enough
room in their music for passing traffic and local wildlife (canine),
but in keeping with Mattin's oft-quoted enthusiasm for Whitehouse
as well as Malfatti, there are a few nasty surprises too. Unlike much
of the inputless mixing board feedback of Toshi Nakamura, which consists
of gradual permutation of looped material (the conceptual parentage
of Steve Reich is clearly audible), the charm of Mattin's computer
feedback is its sheer unpredictability, its tendency to explode into
noise without warning. This makes listening to his music – as
opposed to Unami's, which is almost without exception extremely quiet
and sparse – quite a tense experience. Sure, listening to Radu
and Taku is tense too, but the concentration is geared towards the
how and when as opposed to the what: one knows chances of Sugimoto
playing more than one or two notes are pretty slim, and the probability
of Malfatti producing an old school FMP-style splatter is, well, ZERO.
The tension is a "traditionally musical" one of how musical
ideas – often little more than mere isolated pitches –
are extended by memory and articulated by silence over a long span
of time. The contrast between Futatsu and Whitenoise,
Malfatti's album with Mattin, could not be greater. Compared to that
album, Shiryo No Computer is something of a disappointment,
because it manages to lose both kinds of tension: Unami isn't interested
in pitch as a parameter to explore, so the Sugimoto / Malfatti line
of enquiry (which ultimately leads back to Cage and Feldman) takes
us nowhere. Nor is he given to the bursts of extremism that characterise
Mattin's work and link it to sonic extremists such as Junko (check
out Pinknoise). Unami's fondness for upturning small loudspeakers
and putting small objects in to vibrate – a pocket version of
Xavier Charles' surfaces vibrantes – is enthralling when it
gets going, but one wishes Tetuzi Akiyama could have sat in and thickened
the plot with a little pitch interest. As it is, Shiryo No Computer
overstays its welcome by about 20 minutes.
It's worth remembering that one of the musicians whose use of silence
and extremely low dynamics proved enormously influential in the formation
of a lowercase aesthetic about six or seven years ago was the German
composer bernhard günter (lowercase letters his idea, not mine).
Günter's debut album un peu de neige salie caused quite
a stir – albeit a very quiet one – when it was first released
on Selektion, though nowadays, after more than a hundred broadly similar
outings by the likes of Francisco López, Marc Behrens and Steve
Roden (many of them on günter's trente oiseaux label) it sounds
almost classical. Intervening years have also revealed the composer's
fondness for Morton Feldman, and an acute ear for pitch, and recently
he's returned to improvisation – he started out as a percussionist
and later studied jazz guitar – both in the +minus trio with
Mark Wastell and Graham Halliwell and with this Berlin-based line-up
featuring pianist Reinhold Friedl and percussionist Michael Vorfeld.
Vorfeld is also credited as playing "stringed instruments",
as is günter, in the form of his self-designed cellotar, which,
logically enough, is a cross between a cello and a guitar. Message
Urgent was recorded at Berlin's PODEWIL in November 2003 (just
a couple of months after günter's exclusive interview with this
magazine) and for those familiar with günter's work both as a
composer and improviser, it's likely to come as something of a shock.
The pregnant silences are gone, replaced instead by long strands of
groaning stringy drone, bowed cymbals and Friedl's inside piano, which
sounds more like one of Horatiu Radulescu's "sound icons"
(vertically mounted bowed grand pianos). Indeed, if Friedl spent more
time playing "traditional" prepared piano, you could be
excused for thinking you were listening to AMM. Not only is the music
not at all concerned with silence, it's also pretty damn intense,
in terms of texture and dynamic. As we've seen above, there are several
examples of music that are both lowercase and intense, but Message
Urgent's occasional surges in volume, sinister seething drones
and at times agitated inside piano scrabblings seem to have nothing
at all to do with the genre as previously described. If this stuff
is lowercase, so are Rowe, Radulescu, Niblock and Conrad. Mark Wastell
is probably right: the term seems to have little meaning anymore.
Never mind though what the album isn't: try listening to
what it is – a gripping and beautifully paced study
in tension and timbre.
 It's always
a good idea to check out precisely when the music on a disc was recorded,
as opposed to released; recordings can sometimes languish in hard
drives and in-trays for several years, long enough for the musical
landscape in which they originally appeared to change considerably.
The duo performances by Axel Dörner and Robin Hayward just released
on Marcus Liebig's Absinth label, once more in an elegant hand-stitched
oversize sleeve, were recorded back in 2001, when lowercase was at
its zenith (how about that for a dumb mixed metaphor). Trumpeter Dörner
and tuba player Hayward are both members of the Berlin-based Phosphor
collective (along with Burkhard Beins, Alessandro Bosetti, Annette
Krebs, Andrea Neumann, Michael Renkel and Ignaz Schick) which released
its debut album on Potlatch that year – in fact it was recorded
just a week before the two untitled improvisations on this new album
– and also played in a trio called rar (again, lowercase letters
their idea, not mine) with Radu Malfatti. Though no recordings of
that trio have ever emerged (nor did rar ever perform publicly), one
imagines the music would have sounded not unlike what's on offer here:
understated but far from undramatic, taking advantage of the performers'
mastery of extended techniques and making significant use of silence
as a structural device to articulate form. And – an important
point – blurring the distinction between composition and improvisation.
To quote Malfatti: "I'm not too happy with the distinction between
improvised and composed music. It's all the same to me: what interests
me much more is what can be done in the one or the other. Not why,
but how." Interspersed here with the improvisations
are two compositions, "Skylines" by Hayward, a brief exploration
of rhythmic unison, and "Werchlich" by Dörner, a spare
Webernian study in extreme registers and dynamics. Both improvisations
and compositions research the same areas of structure and material,
creating impressive austere music, albeit not exactly accessible and
requiring considerable effort and concentration on the part of the
listener. Maybe that always was the hallmark of lowercase / reductionism.
I use the past tense deliberately, as the briefest of surveys into
what these musicians – be they in Berlin, Tokyo or London –
have been up to in the past twelve months reveals that they've moved
back from the cliff top to browse in more opulent pastures. Forget
the labels, and just listen to the music.—DW
On
Sirr
Various Artists
NOLI ME LEGERE… TO MAURICE BLANCHOT
Sirr 0018
John Hudak / Stephan Mathieu
PIECES OF WINTER
Sirr 0019
 After
a compilation album Sul a while back dedicated to reclusive
filmmaker Chris Marker, Sirr's Paulo Raposo – a zillion apologies
for misspelling his name Paolo on numerous occasions – has chosen
another enigmatic and mysterious Frenchman as a point of reference
for a collaborative project. Maurice Blanchot (1907 – 2003)
was, along with his close friends Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille,
René Char and Robert Antelme, one of the most enigmatic and
influential figures in modern French writing. His output includes
both fiction, notably L'arrêt de mort [Death Sentence]
(1948), Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas [The One Who
Was Standing Apart From Me] (1953) and Le dernier homme
[The Last Man] (1957) and criticism: Lautréaumont
et Sade (1949), and L'espace littéraire [The
Space of Literature] (1955) Le pas au-delà [The
Step Not Beyond] (1973) and L'Ecriture du désastre
[The Writing of Disaster] (1980). “I refuse all the
past and accept nothing of the present” he wrote in 1958 on
the occasion of the creation of the anti-Gaullist publication Le
14 juillet. He also probably penned the "Déclaration
sur le droit à l'insoumission dans la guerre d'Algérie",
a public statement of support for those fighting French colonial power
in Algeria. Though he surfaced briefly to support the 'Comité
d'action étudiants-écrivains' during the événements
of 1968, Blanchot remained famous for his reclusiveness. A well-known
photograph of him standing next to a car outside a supermarket is
cause of widespread interest and rumour. "Tall, thin and cadaverous
in appearance," he was often plagued by ill health, though he
died at the ripe old age of 96.
Whether the disembodied words spoken by Brandon Labelle and Maria
Nilsson come from Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas or not
isn't stated, though the title of their piece "the one who is
standing close to me" is a clear reference to the Blanchot work.
Unlike much of Labelle's music, in which the concept is often more
exciting than its purely audio realisation, this is an instantly attractive
piece whose introvert close-miked texts recall the intimacy of Robert
Ashley. There's presumably some perfectly rational explanation for
the cheeping birdsong too, but by the time you've figured out what
Labelle and Nilsson are saying, the disc has moved on. Quebec's Christof
Migone's "I" originates in an idea so simple you've probably
never considered it: if we can look at an ear, why can't we hear
an eye? Migone's piece is "composed entirely of sounds
produced by the eyes of Alex Thibodeau as manipulated by himself.
Eyelids were stretched, eyeballs jostled and squished, tear ducts
made to whistle." Sounds like it must have pretty goddamn painful
for Monsieur Thibodeau if you ask me, but fortunately the piece sounds
just fine, though knowing in advance where its sound material came
from does provoke the Matmos Effect (cf. their overhyped sampling
of surgical operations): yeurkk. If Raposo's own "the
one who is standing apart from me" (reference clear this time)
is a chilly, clanging soundscape that consciously blurs the distinction
between inside and outside, Stephen Vitiello's "essential perversions"
is resolutely the latter, and seems to have been sourced in recordings
of French street protests – perhaps a homage to Blanchot's participation
– complete with car horns, whistles and chants, drenched in
reverb. The austere drone of Julien Ottavi's "rassarcissment"
is followed by Steve Roden's "thomas sat down and looked at the
sea", another one of the California-based sound artist's extraordinarily
introspective offerings – you almost feel listening is a kind
of intrusion – featuring treatments of his voice and guitar,
and the album closes with Toshiya Tsunoda's "cicada chorus resonating
a bottle inside of a bottle", most definitely not a quotation
from Blanchot. One wonders what possible connection there might be
between Tsunoda's extremely noisy crickets and the painfully shy writer,
but like the other six pieces on the album, it'll have you coming
back for more.
 Once
you've heard the sound of squished eyeballs, you might be curious
to know what snow sounds like, or at least what happens when you bury
a contact mic in a snowdrift and record it freezing slowly. This is
what John Hudak did for his "Winter Garden" (see our review
of his collaboration with Jason Kahn in last month's PT), which is
joined on Pieces of Winter by Stephan Mathieu's "Nuit
Blanche", an exquisite warm drone sourced in recordings of pump
organ and ocarina. Hudak isn't the first sound artist to turn his
attention to snow – Jason Lescalleet, Francisco López,
Alan Courtis and Lasse Marhaug have all tried their hand at recording
the elusive substance – but his results, or at least the treatments
he and Mathieu have devised for them are as simply beautiful as Mathieu's
cover photograph of garden furniture gently buried under several inches
of the stuff. In what's fast becoming standard practice nowadays in
this brave new world of broadband Internet, the two artists exchanged
soundfiles and worked on each other's music, producing a collection
of pieces as ravishingly beautiful and deceptively simple as their
authorship is vague. Proofreading this article for mistakes, be they
mere oversights (typos) or genuine conneries, I'm struck
by the disproportionately long review of Noli Me Legere,
in comparison with Pieces of Winter, especially since I've
played the latter album at least as twice as many times as the former.
Maybe after all there's little to say – Pieces of Winter
speaks, simply, unpretentiously, clearly, beautifully – and
in these times of information overload and market saturation, that's
a rare and wonderful thing.—DW
Christoph
Cox and Daniel Warner (ed)
AUDIO CULTURE
READINGS IN MODERN MUSIC
Continuum 454pp
 This
ambitious and thought-provoking collection of 57 essays on "the
new audio culture", edited by Daniel Warner and Christoph Cox,
both based at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, also includes a
discography and bibliography, both of which are sufficiently wide-ranging
and well-researched to ensure that anyone in possession of the all
the recordings, books and articles featured would have a pretty good
grasp of the past fifty years of music history. Whether the same can
be said of the book itself is more debatable; it could be argued that
one of the prerequisites for such a publication is to compile a body
of writing that would give a researcher 50 or 100 years from now a
clear picture of what music / sound art was between the end of World
War II and the dawn of the third millennium. This is certainly the
case for many of the featured articles – the book does include
established classics (Luigi Russolo's 1913 seminal manifesto "The
Art of Noises", Henry Cowell's 1929 "The Joys of Noise",
John Cage's 1937 "The Future of Music: Credo", Michael Nyman's
"Towards (a Definition of) Experimental Music"..) and several
texts that might well acquire "classic" status with time
(Simon Reynolds'ss "Noise", from his Blissed Out: The
Raptures of Rock, Francisco López's "Profound Listening
and Environmental Sound Matter"..), but there's also a good deal
of trendy fluff that would probably strike a reader in the year 2054
as parochial and not a little pretentious.
The book falls into two halves, "Theories" and "Practices",
the former subdivided into three sections: "Music and Its Others:
Noise, Sound, Silence", "Modes of Listening" and "Music
in the Age of Electronic (Re)production", the latter into six:
"The Open Work", "Experimental Musics", "Improvised
Musics", "Minimalisms", "DJ Culture" and
"Electronic Music and Electronica." The first section of
"Theories" kicks off with a blast of Jacques Attali's 1985
Noise: The Political Economy of Music, which manages to cross-reference
Rousseau, Leibniz and even hint at Rabelais, while studiously avoiding
any reference to music or musicians (unless you count Muzak as such).
This certainly sets the stage for the sporadic Deleuze / Lyotard /
Baudrillard namedropping to come, though I wonder if Cox and Warner
wouldn't have been better off starting with the Russolo that follows.
"The Art of Noises" is indeed a text whose importance cannot
be overstated – just count the number of times it's mentioned
in this book alone – and it successfully dwarfs the two brief
texts that follow it, Morton Feldman's "Sound, Noise, Varèse,
Boulez" and Edgard Varèse's "The Liberation of Sound".
Of these, the Feldman is certainly dispensable (surely, given the
volume of Feldman writing in print, a more representative and entertaining
extract could have been found?) and the Varèse a hotchpotch
of quotations spanning a quarter of a century compiled by his student
Chou Wen-Chung. Such editing is typical of the book as a whole; in
their (understandable) desire to get as much in as possible, Cox and
Warner have taken the scissors to a number of texts that perhaps ought
to have been presented intact, especially those whose impact depends
on their typographical appearance on the page (Cage, of whom more
later). Henry Cowell's text is a joy, though. "Since the 'disease'
of noise permeates all music, the only hopeful cure is to consider
that the noise-germ, like the bacteria of cheese, is a good microbe,
which may provide previously hidden delights to the listener, instead
of producing musical oblivion," he wrote prophetically back in
1929. (So next time you feel like describing Merzbow as "cheesy",
go ahead..) Cage's "The Future of Music: Credo" is just
as visionary – having included it, one wonders why Cox and Warner
felt the need to add the far less interesting "Introduction to
Themes & Variations" later in the book – as
is "The Music of the Environment", R. Murray Schafer's landmark
sonic ecology manifesto from 1973. Less well-known but genuinely moving
is "Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life" by Mark
Slouka, whose elegant and touching writing makes the following "Rough
Music, Futurism, and Postpunk Industrial Noise Bands" by Mary
Russo and Daniel Warner himself seem even more inconclusive and patchy
than it probably is. Going from 1770 dictionary definitions to Einsturzende
Neubaten via Russolo and Cardew in six pages is as problematic as
it sounds. Thank goodness for the common sense wisdom of Simon Reynolds:
"[T]o speak of noise, to give it attributes, to claim things
for it, is immediately to shackle it with meaning again, to make it
part of culture. If noise is where language ceases, then to describe
it is to imprison it with adjectives." One wishes Cox and Warner
had left it at that for section one, instead of including a brief
and not particularly informative interview with Masami "Merzbow"
Akita (indeed, one questions whether interviews should have been included
at all), especially since such information is widely and freely available
on the Internet.
"Modes of Listening" starts off in fine style with the splendidly
readable and ever thought-provoking Marshall McLuhan ("Visual
and Acoustic Space", from The Global Village), but the
following "The Politics of Hearing" by Adorno and Eisler
comes across as slight and inconsequential (if Adorno has to be included
– which is itself debatable – surely an extract from his
more polemical work would have been more appropriate). It's easy to
see why Pierre Schaeffer's definition of "Acousmatics",
extracted from his Treatise on Musical Objects, has inspired
subsequent generations of sound artists, but even Daniel W. Smith's
specially commissioned translation doesn't manage to make it especially
readable or enjoyable. In contrast, Francisco López is clear
and cogent in "Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter"
and Ola Stockfelt precise if a little pedantic in "Adequate Modes
of Listening" ("analysis of a musical genre, or of a work
in a musical genre, must contain and be based on analysis of the listening
adequate to that genre.."). Brian Eno's "Ambient Music",
like his "The Studio as Compositional Tool" later, is direct
to the point of bluntness, after which the Virilio / Heidegger / Deleuze
inspired Walkman waffle of Iain Chambers's "The Aural Walk"
is, like the work of the rest of the so-called "Birmingham School",
just talkin' loud and sayin' nothing. Pauline Oliveros' "Some
Sound Observations" is more entertaining, but with Cage on board
one wonders why the editors needed more anecdotes, good though they
are. Even more baffling is the inclusion of J.K. Randall's utterly
potty "Compose Yourself", especially given the volume of
fine work he produced as editor of Perspectives of New Music.
"Music in the Age of Electronic (Re)production" begins with
Glenn Gould's superbly written and edifying "The Prospects of
Recording". Just as entertaining as Gould's creative splicing
of a Bach fugue is Eno's deliciously down-to-earth "The Studio
as Compositional Tool" ("I can neither read nor write music,
and I can't play any instruments really well either. You can't imagine
a situation prior to this where anyone like me could have been a composer").
Things go from good to better with John Oswald's "Bettered by
the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical Debt" and Chris Cutler's
"Plunderphonia" – wonderful to see this sharp and
thoughtful article back in print – but Cox and Warner ought
to have quit while they were ahead instead of giving the last word
to Kodwo Eshun. Compared to Cutler's precise and lucid prose, the
AfroDiasporic futurist rhizomorphic fractal discontinuum of "Operating
System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality" is best described by
the title one of the books Eshun lists in his footnotes: mumbo jumbo.
The
second part of the book, "Practices", begins with a selection
of essays under the heading "The Open Work". First up is
Umberto Eco's 1959 "The Poetics of the Open Work". One wonders
whether Pierre Boulez's "Aléa" might not have been
more appropriate – indeed, one wonders why Boulez is featured
nowhere in the book at all: modernistic avant-garde snob par excellence
he might be, but he has authored several key texts on the subject.
Compared to Eco's fluid prose, John Cage's "Composition as Process:
Indeterminacy" is also rather heavy going and probably could
have been dispensed with, and Christoph Cox's own "Visual Sounds:
On Graphic Scores" comes off as rather slight, sandwiched as
it is between the more substantial offerings by Cage and Earle Brown
(though even his "Transformations and Developments of a Radical
Aesthetic" seems to have suffered somewhat from cut'n'splice
editing). It's a shame David Behrman's superb "What Indeterminate
Notation Determines" couldn't have been squeezed in, though the
reasons for its exclusion would seem to be clear enough: Cox and Warner
don't want to encumber the book with actual musical examples. Which
is a shame, since one presumes many of the people who are sufficiently
interested in the subject to want to buy and read this book will have
more than a passing knowledge of music and a basic grasp of musical
notation. Excluding examples of notation for fear they might alienate
readers while at the same time throwing in dozens of references to
decidedly opaque post-structuralist philosophy seems frankly perverse.
Anyway, who cares? Christoph Cox has, after all, pulled off something
of a coup by getting John Zorn to grant him an interview as part of
the essay "The Game Pieces". And illuminating it is, at
least more so than Anthony Braxton's "Introduction to Catalog
of Works", of interest no doubt to Braxton buffs but, divorced
from the music itself, of limited relevance.
The "Experimental Musics" section presents a strong and
representative selection of writings on the subject: Michael Nyman's
"Towards (a Definition of) Experimental Music" from his
1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, John Cage's
"Introduction to Themes & Variations" (probably unnecessary
but fun nonetheless), Brian Eno's "Generating and Organizing
Variety in the Arts", Cornelius Cardew's "A Scratch Orchestra:
Draft Constitution" (wouldn't something from the Treatise handbook
have been more appropriate? maybe not – that would belong in
the "Open Work" section..) and a 2001 David Toop Wire
article "The Generation Game: Experimental Music and Digital
Culture". In comparison, the section devoted to "Improvised
Musics" is rather weak, probably because very little of substance
has ever been written on the subject apart from Derek Bailey's book,
excerpts from which of course feature here. The liner notes of Ornette
Coleman's "Change of the Century" constitute little more
than mission statement, and certainly don't qualify as musicology.
Frederic Rzewski's "Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation"
is entertaining enough (especially when it provides background to
the celebrated Steve Lacy quote on the difference between composition
and improvisation: "[I]n composition you have all the time in
the world to think about what to say in fifteen seconds, while in
improvisation you have fifteen seconds"), but George Lewis's
"Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives"
seems more interested in discussing genre names and technical terms
than actual music (and was bebop really that radically different from
the jazz that preceded it? The Charlie Parker / Cage comparison doesn't
stretch as far as Lewis would like, methinks). The complex relation
between free jazz and free improv, or what Lewis calls Afrological
and Eurological, remains to be explored, and the contributions of
artists such as Brötzmann, Evan Parker, Zorn and indeed Lewis
himself needs to be correctly reassessed.
The section entitled "Minimalisms" – curious: is there
more than one, then? I guess so – kicks off with "Rap,
Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture"
by Susan McClary, described by Cox and Warner as "one of the
founders of the 'New Musicology'. Namedropping P.J. Harvey and Tupac
Shakur (2Pac minimalist? Yo..) might be new, but rehashing
glib clichés about Debussy's discovery of Javanese gamelan
in 1889 (David Toop did it better in Exotica) and Stravinsky's
Sacre ("in place of allegories of exquisitely wrought Selfhood,
he offered collective, ritualized violence") isn't. Kyle Gann's
"Thankless Attempts at a Definition of Minimalism" is precisely
that: shouldn't complain, though, as my own article on the subject
is listed in the bibliography. No surprises to see Steve Reich's seminal
1969 manifesto "Music as a Gradual Process" included, but
I wonder if a La Monte Young article might not have been more informative
than Wim Mertens's "Basic Concepts of Minimal Music", a
text I've taken issue with on a number of occasions and a subject
I won't bore you with again here. Instead of Young, we get Tony Conrad's
side of the story in "LYssophobia: On Four Violins", swiped
from the liners of the Early Minimalism box. Finally, Philip
Sherburne's "Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno"
explores some tentative links between early minimalism and techno,
in a well-written (and nowhere near long enough!) essay specially
commissioned for this volume.
From this point onwards, things begin to unravel. The "DJ Culture"
section is notable for László Moholy-Nagy's prophetic
"Production-Reproduction: Potentialities of the Phonograph"
(an article spliced together from two separate tracts dating from
1922 and 1923 – extraordinary) and Simon Reynolds's "Post-Rock"
(at last a decent and convincing definition of the term!). Those familiar
with David Toop's Ocean of Sound will recognise "Replicant:
On Dub", and William Burroughs aficionados will have no problem
spotting the epilogue of The Ticket That Exploded (wouldn't
something from Electronic Revolution have been more apposite?).
But the chatty dialogue between Christian Marclay and the seriously
overrated Yasunao Tone is nothing more than hearty backslapping, and
should have been left on the hard drive with the Merzbow interview
mentioned earlier. Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky turns in another of his
epic performances (some people still call them songs), showing once
more that he's just as good at aimless noodling with a pen as with
a cross fader. All the tosh about past, present and future backed
up with panfuls of quotes from McLuhan, Gertrude Stein, Francis Bacon
(not the painter, the other one), Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Plato,
Lautréamont, the de rigueur Deleuze & Guattari,
Brian Masumi and Miller himself – nothing like putting yourself
in good company, eh? – can be boiled down to a couple of lines
at the top of page 350: "[T]he DJ acts as the cybernetic inheritor
of the improvisational tradition of jazz, where various motifs would
be used and recycled by the various musicians of the genre. In this
case, however, the records become the notes." Hardly a revelation.
Getting through the book's final section "Electronic Music and
Electronica" (and I'm still waiting for a convincing definition
of "electronica" – can someone contact Simon Reynolds?)
is a real struggle. Jacques Barzun's "Introductory Remarks to
a Program of Works Produced at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music
Center" is a wonderful plea for open-mindedness and tolerance
but could apply just as well to any genre of "difficult new music",
not specifically electronic. Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Electronic
and Instrumental Music" is fine, but his "discussion"
with Aphex Twin, Scanner and Daniel Pemberton (Richie Hawtin very
wisely refused to participate) culled from an old Wire magazine
is just a waste of space, albeit an amusing one. Perhaps Cox and Warner's
goal was to show how irreconcilable the differences seem to be between
generations and genres, but Stockhausen's pompous hectoring is as
tedious as Richard James' laddishness. And who today, let alone in
50 years time, will remember Daniel Pemberton? Ben Neill's "Breakthrough
Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of Contemporary Electronic Music"
is equally parochial, though talks more sense. Thankfully, the concluding
"The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary
Computer Music" by Kim Cascone is more readable and sensible
than its title would imply.
Despite the reservations listed above – and I am aware there
are quite a few, so I suppose I might as well brace myself for yet
more irate correspondence – Cox and Warner's book is warmly
recommended. It's highly unlikely that readers will have original
copies of all the books and articles featured therein, so the simple
fact that the editors have gone to the trouble of bringing them together
in one volume is to be praised to the skies. But what conclusions
would our hypothetical reader in 2054 A.D. come to? Hard to say, as
we're still a long way away (pessimists might even wonder if we'll
get there at all), but Audio Culture is well worth the price
of admission for the writings of Russolo, Cowell, Cage, Schafer, McLuhan,
Reynolds, Eno and Cutler, to name but a few. As for Lewis, Braxton,
Mertens, Conrad and Paul Miller, skip the words and head straight
for their music instead.—DW
Milo
Fine
IKEBANA (LONDON ENCOUNTERS 2003)
Emanem 4213 2CD
Masashi
Harada
ENTERPRISING MASS OF CILIA
Emanem 4108
Fred Lonberg-Holm
DIALOGS
Emanem 4109
 Among
the recordings made by Milo Fine during a five-week stay in London
in 2003, the sessions recorded with local musicians at Free Radicals
in the Red Rose will remain as some of the most interesting music
released by the Emanem label. Not necessarily the best or the most
successful – that depends on what you expect – but the
most interesting. The label has already released Scale Points
on the Fever Curve, Fine's club date with Derek Bailey, and a
quartet set at the Freedom of the City festival 2003 (on Freedom
of The City Small Groups 2003) featuring pocket trumpeter Paul
Shearsmith, bassist Tony Wren and instrument builder Hugh Davies.
Like those two albums, Ikebana (London Encounters) has its
lighter moments, but sometimes serious things happen. Minneapolis-based
pianist, clarinettist and drummer Fine is content to share the experiences
of his playing partners rather than setting his own musical agenda,
or following the now standard Berlin or London aesthetics. His duos
with clarinettist Alex Ward and the trio with Gail Brand and Paul
Shearsmith recorded at the Klinker are enjoyable and flexible, and
his gutsy clarinet playing makes a welcome change from the academic
approach of many others on this instrument. "April Radicals"
is a fine example of an in-the-moment situation succeeding against
expectations due to the openness and the experience of the eight players
involved (the London bass trio of Tony Wren, Simon H. Fell and Marcio
Mattos, violinists Phil Wachsmann and Angharad Davies, Marj McDaid
on vocals and Matt Hutchinson on electronics), its 37'40" moving
from agitated tutti to solo violin (Angharad Davies). A month later,
the May Radicals band consisted of Fine, the latest incarnation of
Wren's Quatuor Encorde (with Philipp Wachsmann on violin, Charlotte
Hug on viola and Mattos on cello) and Hugh Davies, in a rare and successful
appearance. Although Tim Fletcher's recording is far from ideal, the
interaction between Davies’ Multy Shozyg and the string quartet
is enthralling. The strings amplify Davies’ sounds, colouring
them with cunningly chosen pitches, while Fine provides an intelligent
instrumental commentary in complete communion with the breath and
flow of the five-headed sound machine. You'll wish you'd been in the
Red Rose that night.—JMVS.
 The
follow-up to 1999's Enter The Continent features a slightly
different line-up of the Masashi Harada Condanction Ensemble; out
go the heavy brasses of Tucker Dulin, Christian Pincock and Eric Carlson
and the electric guitar of Phil Tomasic, in comes the viola of Frederic
Viger, the cellos of Glynis Lomon (replacing Dan Levin on the earlier
disc) and Vic Rawlings, the accordion of Jonathan Vincent, the theremin
of James Coleman and the percussion of Tatsuya Nakatani. Still on
board are the nmperign duo of Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley, bassist
Mike Bullock and violinist Aleta Cole. All in all Harada's band features
then no fewer than five members of BSC, the other Boston-based large
improv outfit, but Enterprising Mass of Cilia couldn't be
more different from the BSC's Good.
It's a wild, stochastic sprawl of thrilling ugliness, a clot of instant
Xenakis, seething with glissandi and clusters (Vincent's accordion
is especially prominent). Small flashes of nmperignesque emptiness
poke through from time to time – soprano saxophonist Rainey
seems intent on re-exploring his microtonal Maneri roots – but
Harada likes his musical canvases as dense and colourful as his ice
paintings (examples of which appear in the CD booklet), and soon makes
sure that Kelley and Rainey's identifiable splutters are peppered
with screes of scratchy strings. A worthy addition to Emanem's large
ensemble catalogue (along with Markus Eichenberger's Domino Orchestra,
The Gathering and the inevitable LIO), but if I were Bhob,
Greg or Mike I'd think twice next time before letting Martin Davidson
get his paws on such dreadful photos.
 Davidson's
label is just as well known for its fine solo releases as its epic
large ensemble outings, and Fred Lonberg-Holm's Dialogs joins
Paul Rogers' Listen (2002) and Charlotte Hug's Neuland
(2004) as one of the most impressive solo stringed instrument
releases of recent times. "The cello will never be the same,
and neither will I", writes percussionist Michael Zerang in his
liners, and he should know, having partnered Lonberg-Holm on numerous
occasions, often teaming up with a third player to make a kickass
trio (with Axel Dörner on Claque,
John Butcher on Tincture,
Jaap Blonk on Meetings and Sten Sandell on Disappeared).
Be that as it may, though the album's title Dialogs is curious;
the idea of dialogue might apply to baroque counterpoint, but if your
idea of solo cello is Pierre Fournier playing the Bach suites, you'd
better steer weeeell clear of this one. Fred's one of the
few improvisers willing to get into the ring with the wild and wonderful
Weasel Walter (of Flying Luttenbachers fame) – go check out
Eruption with Kevin Drumm – and he's not afraid to
treat the instrument as what it is: a great big wooden box with potentially
dangerous high tension metal stretched precariously across it. Lonberg-Holm
is able to create textures of considerable complexity, using his piezo
pickups and tiny lo-fi speakers to set up grainy loops of nasty feedback
he can scrape along with quite happily, so the resulting counterpoint
– dialogue, if you will – is more one of confrontation
between the performer and his materials than an intramusical play
of pitches and rhythms (though there is a delicious snatch of melody,
yep that's right, you heard correctly, just before the end of "Dialog
2"). In this respect it recalls Brian Ferneyhough's supremely
ugly and ferociously difficult "Time and Motion Study II"
for cello and electronics, but whereas composer Ferneyhough apparently
seeks to destroy the performer altogether by providing him/her with
a score whose sheer technical difficulties are deliberately insurmountable,
Fred Lonberg-Holm shows that the same thoroughly enjoyable highly
invigorating snarling vicious mess can be achieved with relatively
simple equipment. What is needed though to pull it off is an intimate
knowledge of the instrument and its possibilities, and an impeccable
sense of timing. Technique, in a word. And Lonberg-Holm has plenty
of it.—DW
John
Abercrombie
CLASS TRIP
ECM 1846
Cat
’n’ Mouse, Abercrombie’s previous album
for ECM, was a small classic: the graceful, smouldering lyricism was
familiar territory for the guitarist, but it coexisted with an unusual
amount of openness, and the album even had a couple of freely improvised
pieces. For Class Trip he's reconvened the same band as before,
with violinist Mark Feldman and drummer Joey Baron (both of whom have
sterling inside/outside chops honed among the outcats of the New York
scene), and the great Marc Johnson on bass. As the band has become
a working unit there have been losses: the music has become sweeter
and more streamlined, and the open spaces largely filled in –
the two improvisations this time, for instance, are brief and not
all that substantial. But there are also compensations: by now Abercrombie
and Feldman are working hand-in-glove, and when they play together
it’s more twining two-horn duo than violin-plus-accompaniment.
Class Trip opens on a high with “Dansir,” a languorous
mood-piece with a sting in its tail, and although some of the tracks
are a tad soft-edged there’s plenty to keep the listener’s
ears perked, like the Ornettish “Swirls” or a lovely,
unexpected improvisation over Bartók’s “Soldier’s
Song.” Feldman is in particularly fine form: in the past I’ve
often found him too insistently dazzling – he’s a specialist
in flaring, licks-heavy arabesques – but the pairing with Abercrombie
brings out some of his subtlest and most intimate work.—ND
SURD
Live at Glenn Miller Café
Ayler aylCD 020
Step
through the front door of the Glenn Miller Café, tucked away
in a quiet Stockholm side street, turn sharp right and you'll probably
knock the upright piano over. The bandstand – that's a misnomer:
it's a corner – is barely ten feet square, and the club itself
isn't much bigger, and invariably packed to capacity. Food is served
from 5pm onwards (the Swedes are even worse than the British when
it comes to dining early) and you'd be well advised to reserve in
advance. The place and its atmosphere are warm and friendly, and the
food delicious: the chef's French, or at least the one they had a
year ago was. The sign "Skivinspelning" outside tells you
tonight's concert, which will probably consist of three 45 minute
sets, is going to be recorded, and the chances are the sandy-haired
gent at the bar nursing a bottle of best Belgian beer with a contented
smile on his face is Ayler Records' Jan Ström. After all, nearly
a quarter of all the albums he's released so far were recorded here,
and this is the latest.
SURD is a quartet consisting of guitarist David Stackenäs, alto
/ tenor man Fredrik Nordström, bassist Filip Augustson and drummer
Thomas Strønen, and the music on offer here was recorded on
June 14th and 15th 2004. In homage to Steve Lacy, whose death had
been announced a few days earlier, proceedings open with "38",
from the late great saxophonist's old Emanem treasure The Crust.
It's a great start to the album, with Augustson and Strønen
chopping merrily away at Lacy's trademark relentless major and minor
seconds. Stackenäs's guitar is taut and springy, with a rough
Sharrock bottleneck lyricism well suited to the Last Exit-ish unison
of his "Hello Paul". The rhythm section is inventive and
rubbery on the uptempo numbers, but sounds rather flabby on "Head
P", Nordström's homage to Bristol trip-hoppers Portishead,
whose music's intensity derives as much from the claustrophobic looped
samples of dirty vinyl as from its melancholy minor harmony (something
that, with the best will in the world, can't be pulled off by a live
rhythm section: Strønen's just aching to get busy with the
brushes and the piece just won't let him). The group effort that follows,
"Bye Bye Teddy" is much more effective, and the tough pedal
points of Augustson's "Magnum Bonum" – shades of Shannon
Jackson and the Decoding Society, yeah! – is a great way to
close the set and send the punters out on a high into the streets
of dear old Stockholm. Just mind you don't knock the piano over on
the way out.—DW
Per
Henrik Wallin Trio
THE STOCKHOLM TAPES
Ayler aylCD 032
One
of Jan Ström's missions with Ayler Records has been to showcase
Swedish free jazz, either by promoting young lions like SURD (see
above), or by unearthing archive recordings by older players who deserve
to be much better known: Bengt Frippe Nordström, Anders Gahnhold
and, with this extraordinary release, pianist Per Henrik Wallin. The
Stockholm Tapes compiles recordings made at the Jazz Club Fasching
on August 5th 1975 and two years later at the Kägelbanan, on
August 17th 1977. Wallin is joined by alto saxophonist Lars-Göran
Ulander and drummer Peter Olsen, who also apparently recorded the
sets. The piano / alto / drums line-up inevitably invites comparison
with the classic Cecil Taylor / Jimmy Lyons / Sunny Murray outfit
that set Scandinavia aflame in the early 60s (and arguably kick-started
what ultimately became European free improvisation), but, instrumentation
aside, there's little to compare. Wallin's pianism is closer to McCoy
Tyner, Dollar Brand and maybe even Keith Jarrett (recording quality
aside, you could almost mistake it for early Matthew Shipp too), with
plenty of piled up fourths and ecstatic flurries of arpeggios. He's
not averse to the odd CT-style fisticuffs and left hand power octaves,
but the lean, mean motivic workout that characterises the Taylor Units
is replaced here with florid lyricism, supple yet strong. Behind it
all lies the modality of the Coltrane quartet, but Ulander's alto
playing shows precious few signs of Trane's influence; instead, it's
a wonderfully loose, gangly affair, taking ideas like modelling clay
and twisting them into odd miniatures before moving on. Behind the
kit, Olsen has no intentions of outdoing Elvin either, preferring
painting to power with light, splattery cymbal and snare work (definite
shades of Murray here). But it's Wallin who steals the show –
the extended solo in the opening "E.V." is a thing of wonder.
Check it out.—DW
Faruq
Z. Bey & Northwoods Improvisers
AUZAR
Entropy Stereo ESR 015
If
"Northwoods Improvisers" sounds amateurish and hokey, don't
be put off – this outing, the third and best so far for Entropy
by Griot Galaxy former head honcho Faruq Z. Bey, is as solid, sincere
and satisfying a dose of new jazz as anything dished up in the past
two years by other better known US labels. The improvisers in question,
in addition to Bey on tenor and alto, are Mike Carey (tenor and bass
clarinet, though the booklet photo also shows him wielding a soprano),
Skeeter Shelton (tenor), Mike Gilmore (vibes and marimba), Mike Johnston
(bass) and Nick Ashton (drums). The three tenors – no puns intended,
Mr Pavarotti – manage to stay well out of each other's way,
thanks to some tight arrangement and judicious microphone placing,
leaving plenty of room for the splendid vibes / bass / drums rhythm
team to drive the music forward. After the invigorating uptempo modal
bop of the opening "Gemini", "Zychron" gets into
a delicious mid-tempo groove, with whole tone harmony reminiscent
of Bobby Hutcherson's work on Dolphy's "Hat and Beard".
"Isolation" is a supple and lyrical ballad penned by Gilmore
and Johnston, who also puts Gilmore's marimba to good use in "Vines",
swinging six as easily and seductively as vintage Max Roach. After
another Bey original, "Auzar (Osiris)", the final "The
Call" returns to the time-honoured Ascension tradition of letting
a tiny germinal motif spiral into orbit and explode into a constellation
of thrilling solos. Looking for some authentic fire music to burn
off the accumulated calories of the festive season? Look no further.—DW
Lisle
Ellis / Marco Eneidi / Peter Valsamis
AMERICAN ROADWORK
CIMP 312
Recorded
in CIMP's Spirit Room on May 17th and 18th 2004 (as usual Bob Rusch's
liners go into all kinds of detail, including even the local weather
forecast), this is a smoking session from a trio that deserves the
kind of attention and exposure usually reserved for the likes of Shipp,
Parker and Ware. Marco Eneidi's running head to head with Ivo Perelman
for the Most Unfairly Neglected Living Great Free Jazz Saxophonist
Award, but it's to be hoped that this outing and the recent Botticelli
release Live At Spruce Street Forum (with Peter Brötzmann,
Jackson Krall and Ellis once more) will turn some more heads his way.
The fact that no fewer than 7 out of 12 tracks on American Roadwork
are entitled "Blues" is significant, as Eneidi digs deep
into the blues – we're talking the spirit rather than
the letter of the law –to reveal some dirty and sweaty
roots to his playing. He's all too frequently compared to his erstwhile
teacher Jimmy Lyons, but as I've said elsewhere there's plenty of
Ornette and Moondoc in there too. Of course, Lyons has left his mark
in the fleet post-bop flurries of "Shock and Awe Shucks",
"Dreamt Up Blues #5" and the title track, all of which go
so damn fast you can almost hear a Doppler effect, but the dangerous
curves he drives on a dirty sheet (to quote Tom Waits) in the opening
"Baby Please Don't Go" and "Contractual Obligation
Blues" are low, slinky, musky and irresistible. Bassist Lisle
Ellis is the ideal partner, melodically curvaceous and suggestive
on the slower cuts and impossibly agile on the uptempo numbers, and
drummer Peter Valsamis inventive throughout, especially as a soloist.
Sorry to bitch once again about the CIMP recording aesthetic –
I have total respect for and understanding of Marc Rusch's work –
but I wonder if a slightly flashier drum sound might not have helped
matters a little. Still, a piddling quibble, to be honest. This is
great stuff and copies should be sent post-haste to every major festival
promoter throughout the civilised world.—DW
Cecil
Taylor
ALL THE NOTES
Cadence CJR 1169
Just
about everything that can be written on Cecil Taylor has already been
written, it often seems to me. The problem isn't Taylor, but any other
pianist who attacks the instrument flat out with palms, fists, and
forearms automatically gets compared to him, when in reality Taylor's
playing is utterly original and totally unmistakable, with its contrary
motion arpeggios, thumping left hand octaves and flurries of identical
chords (keep those fingers in the same position as you race up and
down the keyboard and harmonic coherence is guaranteed, as all the
individual elements of Taylor's monumental cluster volleys are transpositions
of each other). It's also absolutely exhausting and simultaneously
invigorating, as you struggle to follow the music's ferocious pitch
and rhythmic logic. I saw this particular incarnation of the CT trio
with Dominic Duval on bass and Jackson Krall on drums back in 1997
at the Village Vanguard and I actually found myself falling asleep
(no shit), so dense and overwhelming was the torrent of musical information
washing over me. This recording of the same trio in action in Minneapolis
three years later (for precise information on the way the album was
put together and fascinating recollections of those who attended the
concert itself on February 19th 2000, go to www.bagatellen.com) has
the same effect, if you let it. Much has been made of the Codanza
monster box documenting Taylor's trio with William Parker and Tony
Oxley, but the Duval / Krall line-up is equally worthy of your attention.
And that's about all I can say about this one – words fail.
Just listen.—DW
Joost
Buis
ASTRONOTES
Data 041
It
sometimes seems as if the Netherlands have a lock on Duke Ellington.
Sure, there are dyed-in-the-wool Ellingtonians in the States –
Ray Anderson, for instance – and plenty of Duke covers and tributes
and whatnot out there (don’t talk to me about that creep at
Lincoln Center), but if you want to hear great big bands in the Ellington
tradition, catch a flight to Amsterdam. Or get hold of trombonist
Joost Buis’s Astronotes, a tentet disc recorded last
year at the BimHuis. This is Ellington with a dose of hot sauce, and
a little grease too, courtesy Paul Pallesen’s steaming guitar
work and Cor Fuhler’s ice-cold organ. Buis’s pieces are
elegant sonic microcosms, complex little worlds spinning on their
own axes. The results are dizzying, like a roadhouse band playing
a 10-part canon; or sometimes voluptuous, as in “Tunguska Butterfly”,
which stretches out grandly like an expanse of sea, all sunlight and
rippling waves. Buis pays fine tribute to Tricky Sam Nanton on “Nantones”,
a piece whose inward-looking, dark-night-of-the-soul grandeur suggests
classic Gil Evans. He otherwise cedes the spotlight to fellow band
members: there are excellent spots for saxophonists Tobias Delius
(a tender-tough delight on “Ple4”), Frans Vermeerssen
and Jan Willem van der Ham; the Australian cornettist Felicity Provan
contributes an arresting talking-horn solo to “The Eggs”.
In addition to Pallesen and Fuhler the rhythm section features ubiquitous
bassist Wilbert de Joode and Alan Purves and Michael Vatcher –
drummers sharing a taste for mayhem but also capable of surprising
delicacy in tandem.
What’s most impressive is that despite its little-big-band format
Astronotes has the urgency and intimacy of a small-group
session; it’s not merely raucous or pretty or streamlined, like
so many big band albums. Along with the new discs by Paul Pallesen’s
Bite the Gnatze (Wilde dans in een afgelegen Berghut, Trytone)
and Bik Bent Braam (Growing Pains, BBB), both of which feature
many of the same players, Astronotes is one of the best large-ensemble
discs of 2004.—ND
Rudresh
Mahanthappa
MOTHER TONGUE
Pi 14
Listening
to the crying-in-the-wilderness alto of Rudresh Mahanthappa puts you
in mind of both Coltrane and Steve Coleman – which is to say
it’s an intense experience: apocalyptic, hyperintelligent and
rather humourless. His improvisations are insistent and slippery,
full of baroque tangles of phrases fast-forwarded unabsorbably past
the ear. It’s thrilling, sensuous music – not least because
of the fevered odd-meter grooves that set the head nodding even when
you haven’t the faintest where “one” is –
but it’s also unsettling and a little bruising.
Mother Tongue is his third album, featuring the same band
as its predecessor Black Water (Vijay Iyer, piano; François
Moutin, bass; Elliot Humberto Kavee, drums). Seven of the pieces come
from a recent project responding to American cross-cultural ignorance:
“In response to having been repeatedly asked ‘Do You Speak
Indian?’ or ‘Do You Speak Hindu?’ throughout my
life as a son of immigrants, my goal was to somehow musically convey
the fact there is no single Indian language. I did this by creating
compositions that are directly based on melodic transcriptions of
Indian-Americans responding to such questions in their native Indian
tongues.” (See Mahanthappa’s comments at http://pirecordings.com/features/mother_tongue.html.)
The results are alien, awkward streams of notes – urgent broadcasts
within a narrow frequency band, more like transmissions than melodies
but pressed into service as baleful ceremonial dances. The raw sonic
material isn’t perhaps all that diverse, but that hardly matters:
Mahanthappa makes dark, cathartic yet surprisingly varied music out
of it. Three "ordinary" tunes vary the program: “The
Preserver” (title-tune from an earlier, still-unreleased album),
the unexpectedly balmy “Circus”, and “Change of
Perspective”, which features a surprisingly tractable, Dolphyish
introduction from the leader.
The band’s rapport is intense and seamless; there are no signposted
beginnings or endings to solos, the leader almost never takes extended
spotlighted turns, and everything ends up more or less part of the
same fabric. Moutin and Kavee are terrific – sample their handling
of the blurred-motion beat-cycle on “The Preserver” for
starters – but in some ways the linchpin is Iyer, who can be
as heated as the leader but also introduces touches of light and whimsy:
bright Moranish runs flitting up the keyboard, oases of serene chords,
broken-backed two-handed fantasias, lines that slither around the
keyboard then vanish down a hole.
This is not an easy album to come to terms with: indeed, it’s
more challenging than the vast majority of “free” music
of whatever persuasion. Mahanthappa and Iyer are players pushing hard
from within jazz to reinvent it. What they're doing is perverse and
absolutely necessary.—ND
Stackenäs
/ Sandell / Parker / Guy / Lytton
GUBBRÖRA
psi 04.10
 This
new release on Evan Parker’s psi label was recorded at Freedom
of the City 2004 and features Swedish improvisers Sten Sandell (piano)
and David Stackenäs (guitar) in solo and duet improvisations
before they're joined by the Parker / Guy / Lytton trio for a 33-minute
collective quintet piece. psi has already released Parker-curated
events focusing on collaborative efforts where the saxophonist gives
free rein to his guests (cf Appleby Free Zone 2003 with the
string quartet of Phil Wachsmann, Sylvia Hallett, Marcio Mattos and
John Edwards, not to mention Kenny Wheeler, Tony Coe and Alan Hacker).
His message is clear: my music is also our music, a collective effort
of people sharing the musical moment (the Free Zone 2002
double has only two tracks featuring Parker). The first two tracks
on this disc, "Jansson's Temptation 1 & 2", formed the
second set of the Sunday afternoon concert of the festival, which
I attended and reviewed for the French magazine Improjazz –
see the July 2004 issue – while the quintet piece was that afternoon's
third set (the first was the London appearance of Parker / Guy / Lytton
in eight years). A Romantic / Germanic feel pervades the magnificent
piano playing of Sten Sandell, a former Mats Gustafsson associate
in the 90s power trio Gush, but his strong-arm attack doesn’t
detract from his precise fingering and lightness of touch. Although
not as idiosyncratic as the likes of Van Hove or Schlippenbach, Sandell
is a skilful and original improviser (check out Solyd on
Sofa). So is Stackenäs, whose acoustic guitar solo (track two)
was a personal highlight of FOTC 2004. Sounding a bit like a detuned
John Russell, Stackenäs evokes the strange lute and harp music
of Ethiopia, Kenya or Mauritania, sustaining pace and inspiration
throughout (knitting needles notwithstanding). Check out his Guitar
on Häpna while you're at it. "Gubbröra" itself,
the meeting of the Parker / Guy / Lytton trio with the Swedish, is
an opportunity for reflection, intense listening and true collective
effort rather than heated exchange, due one supposes to Stackenäs's
acoustic instrument and Sandell's continuous but discreet electronics.
Forget the virtuosic and spectacular soloing these guys are capable
of: this is music of patient exploration with nothing to prove or
show off, whose raison d'être is simply to communicate
and share. Recommended.—JMVS
Evan
Parker/Alex von Schlippenbach/Paul Lytton
AMERICA 2003
psi 04.06/7 2CD
The
two discs of this set were recorded a fortnight apart during a hectic
North American tour, and you can still feel the buzz. Both performances
start calmly enough, but within minutes they’ve reached whirlwind
speed – Lytton’s drumming in particular is almost absurdly
accelerated. Nowadays Parker sometimes seems trapped by his own mastery,
reproducing virtuosic, self-contained arabesques verbatim from album
to album, but his playing here is more varied and unexpected, occasionally
lyrical but more often gruff and urgent –check out the hoarse
climax to “Down With All Those Who Do Not Believe In Us”.
Even the obligatory soprano set piece, “The Breath of Coldness,”
offers a few twists once past the business-as-usual opening. Schlippenbach
keeps the music perpetually within sight of jazz idioms, shoving quartal
chords around like a hyperactive Mal Waldron, but also likes to lace
the piano’s interior with bric-a-brac, eliciting an impressive
array of clatterings, splats and buzzes. There are calm moments on
America 2003, even a track called “Perhaps This Was His Chance”
offering a weird mix of gamelan, Cage and Meade Lux Lewis –
but what gives the music its excitement is the sense that it’s
always a step away from another insanely accelerated spin-cycle. It’s
scary enough how fast and dense it gets; even scarier, it’s
delivered so lucidly you can actually follow it even at warp speed.—ND
KAINKWATETT
Schraum 1
Like
much recent improv, this trio outing featuring Antoine Chessex (saxophone),
Axel Haller (bass) and Torsten Papenheim (guitar) is deadly, even
dully, serious, either working itself up into a spitty fluster (track
one) or brooding grey à la Werner Dafeldecker (track
six – all seven cuts are, by the way, untitled). Their music
is at its least engaging when it tries to bring pitch into play, ending
up sounding like soggy second division Feldman. In opting to pursue
the elusive quarry of new sounds and extended techniques, there's
a definite risk these days of improvisers erasing all trace of individual
personality along with every vestige of classical technique –
the baby and the bath water syndrome – and for all its noble
intentions (this music proclaims its earnestness throughout) the lasting
impression one comes away with is one of mild frustration at something
well wrought, perfectly competent and listenable, but somewhat featureless
and lacking in identity.—DW
Tim
Olive / Buhnsho Nisikawa
TIM OLIVE / BUHNSHO NISIKAWA
Gule Disk Gule 001
"We
had fun recording this," runs the press release from Osaka-based
Gule Disk accompanying the label's first release. "A bunch of
time spent in a huge glass-wall room atop a vertical amusement park,
a roller coaster regularly banking past, eight floors above street
level, looking out on Osaka: neon suspended over every possible grey."
Eloquent stuff (we'll excuse the "bunch of time" bit), and
the view out of the window sounds spectacular, but the music that
Tim Olive and Buhnsho Nisikawa make using two guitars and a broken
record player is claustrophobic in the extreme, and as intriguing
and unfathomable as the track titles, which seem to be in both Japanese
and English. The longest piece, "tiNu / Supernatural Hot Rug
And Not Used" (told you), is the most interesting, sort of like
a trash version of Annette Krebs jamming with Sachiko M, dainty and
demure turned dangerous and dirty. It's a music of tiny gestures writ
large – crank the amps high enough and just rubbing your hand
along the neck of a guitar sounds like a wildlife documentary about
the Serengeti. "ankoU / The Great Bustard" sounds less like
a bird and more like a hippopotamus emerging from a mud bath to eat
the microphone and the sound engineer holding it. Real amusement park
stuff for sure.—DW
Serge
Baghdassarians / Boris Baltschun / Alessandro Bosetti / Michel Doneda
STROM
Potlach P204
Strom documents a March 2004 performance at Berlin’s
Ausland venue by a quartet consisting of three Berlin-based musicians
– Baghdassarians on guitar and mixing desk, Baltschun on sampler,
and Bosetti on soprano saxophone – and a visiting Frenchman,
Doneda, on soprano and sopranino saxophones. Constructed out of an
array of hissing, rumbling and spluttering electronics and respiring
reeds, its seven tracks exemplify electro-acoustic improvisation as
a process of rebuilding the ship while it’s still at sea, as
the constant entrances, changes and exits from each individual player
create a collective kaleidoscopic flow of evolving juxtapositions.
Free from teleology and fixed pulse, the group’s collages of
organic breath and inorganic machine shift unpredictably but engrossingly
between urgent intensity and brooding quietude, and in general the
music possesses a propensity to both gross and subtle change that
pleasantly distinguishes it from the rather petrified nullifications
sometimes to be heard at the more "lowercase" end of the
musical spectrum. A pleasure to the attentive ear, this is an excellent
and strongly recommended disc.—WS
Stéphane
Rives
FIBRES
Potlach P303
Fibres
brings together seven circular-breathing soprano saxophone solos,
grouped by Rives into three categories. The two tracks classified
as “Larsen et le roseau” feature a stream of breathy emissions
underlying a separate continuous high-pitched line shifting in frequency
and intensity as a result of what appear to be both controlled modulations
and the inevitable irregularities in the demanding process of simultaneously
breathing in and blowing out. In the three “Granulations”
the high-pitched line is dispensed with in favour of an exclusive
focus on the microscopic world of unpitched respiratory flows through
the interior of the saxophone. The final group of two tracks that
bear the title “Ébranlement” (harsh) are rather
more difficult to describe, and perhaps the siren-like “Ébranlement
#1” and the stridulous “Ébranlement #2” ultimately
share little more than a certain quality of harshness. However that
may be, Rives’ work across the CD is uniformly excellent. Recordings
of experimental solo saxophone run the risk of degenerating into quasi-scientific
reports of isolated sonic effects divorced from any interesting musical
application, but Fibres fortunately avoids such sterility,
not least because of its incorporation of frequent, subtle and engaging
shifts of pitch, volume and texture within each track. I was particularly
taken with the “Granulations”, a set of almost aquatic
coursings and undulations that seem to represent a signal advance
in the peculiar poetry of percolating phlegm that a small band of
advanced reeds and brass players have been developing over the last
decade. This is without doubt difficult and demanding music that demands
repeated close listening in favorable circumstances and may well prove
wholly inaccessible to many, but it is well worth expending some time
and attention on, for it holds out to the sympathetic listener a rewarding
intricacy of improvised passages with which to engage.—WS
CONTEMPORARY
Alvin
Curran
MARITIME RITES
New World 80625-2 2CD
"Hark,
now hear the sailors cry / Smell the sea and feel the sky /Let your
soul and spirit fly into the mystic" – Van Morrison
Previously
available "intermittently" on cassette through Pauline
Oliveros' Deep Listening Foundation, Alvin Curran's Maritime
Rites, commissioned in 1984 as a ten-part series for National
Public Radio in 1984 and subsequently broadcast on over 60 stations
throughout the USA, is now available at last as a double CD from
New World, complete with an informative booklet including an extended
essay by David Toop. It's fitting that the author of Haunted
Weather should have been involved in this project, as Curran's
exhaustive month-long tour of the Eastern seaboard of the USA with
producer Melissa Gould to record "virtually every foghorn,
bell buoy, maritime gong and whistle along the way" (not to
mention local wildlife and the recollections of local inhabitants,
from coastguards to museum curators to lobster fishermen) resulted
in a unique collection of what R. Murray Schaefer once called soundmarks,
many of which retained particular significance for Curran, who grew
up in Rhode Island. Moreover, many of the extraordinary sounds they
recorded have since disappeared, including the amazing hum of traffic
on the Brooklyn Bridge (since acoustically muted to appease local
residents) and the extraordinary diaphone horn of the now-decommissioned
Nantucket II Lightship. While many of today's talented young sound
artists would probably be quite content to leave such magnificent
sounds more or less alone, Curran's stroke of genius – the
word is not inappropriate – was to combine his sounds with
music provided by leading improvisers and composers of his acquaintance.
In addition to poet Clark Coolidge and Curran himself, the list
of the participating musicians reads like a Who's Who of new music
at the interface of composition and improvisation: Joseph Celli,
Jon Gibson, Malcolm Goldstein, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Pauline
Oliveros and Leo Smith. Additional spoken text roles are allotted
to John Cage, Anthony Braxton and Curran's former composition teacher,
Elliott Carter. But none of this description can prepare you for
Curran's ravishing montages of speech, music and environmental sound.
The ear is utterly outstanding, and examples are numerous, from
the marriage of Malcolm Goldstein's skittery harmonic-saturated
From Center of Rainbow and the honking seals and ducks
of Lime Island via the Robinson's Rock whistle buoy accompanying
Pauline Oliveros' Rattlesnake Mountain to the work's deeply
moving conclusion, folklorist Bill Bonyun of Westport Island Maine
singing "Rolling Home" along with the foghorns of Upper
New York Harbour. "When that fog horn blows I will be coming
home" indeed. Damn the deadlines that forced me to
select the best records of 2004 for The Wire before I'd
even received this one, because it's right up there sharing the
number one spot with Akira
Rabelais. A drop-dead masterpiece you cannot afford to be without.—DW
Lukas
Ligeti
MYSTERY SYSTEM
Tzadik TZ 7099
"Lukas
Ligeti's music is deeply rooted in a cosmopolitan cultural mix. Born
in Vienna, Austria, to Hungarian parents.." it says here. There's
probably something Oedipal about not wanting to publicise the fact
that you're the son of none other than György Ligeti, certainly
one of the twentieth century's major composers, but maybe we should
leave that question to another Viennese founding father, Mr Freud.
Whatever the relationship between father and son, it's clear Lukas
managed to inherit his dad's enthusiasm for music in all its forms,
as he lists influences as diverse as African drumming (he's also a
fine improvising percussionist, as those with a copy of Heavy
Meta will testify) and folk fiddling from Eastern Europe
and Scandinavia. The problem is that, unlike Ligeti Sr., who absorbed
the music of everyone from Brahms to Central African pygmies via Reich
and Nancarrow and distilled it into 100% pure Ligeti, it's hard to
find a distinctive Lukas Ligeti voice in the five pieces on offer
here. "Moving Houses" was originally written for Kronos,
and it's vintage Kronos stuff, a snazzy PoMo patchwork with nods to
the user-friendly end of the twentieth century string quartet repertoire
from Bartók to Riley. Its ability to sustain rhythmic momentum
while never really locking into one unifying groove (I'd love to see
a score of this one) is impressive, but in the midst of snatches of
Hardanger fiddle and tango, the attention seems to wander. The music
doesn't unfold as much as unravel. The two percussion pieces "Pattern
Transformation" and "Independence" are similarly accessible
and enjoyable without ever becoming really memorable. "New York
to Neptune", a 1'40" snapshot for string quartet and drum
machine (which "deliberately uses some of the oldest and most
well-worn drum box sounds", though I'm not complaining), serves
to clear the air before the final "Delta Space", which uses
a Yamaha Disklavier and sampler to simulate the rhythmic complexity
of West African music. This indeed "takes the African influence
full circle" but also recalls Clarence Barlow's celebrated deconstruction
of Beethoven's Op.111 Arietta in "Variazioni e un pianoforte
meccanico", and, inevitably, the fabulous polyphonic pile-ups
of Conlon Nancarrow's player piano studies – whose importance
for Ligeti père can't be overestimated. Fortunately,
Ligeti fils' sampler thickens the plot by throwing in the
sounds of voices, African harp, balaphone and n'goni, but the piece
still ends up treading water somewhat. One wonders how it'll age,
but I'll be happy come back to it ten years from now and find out.—DW
Joël-François
Durand
LA TERRE ET LE FEU
Mode 139
Joël-François Durand was born in Orléans, France,
in 1954, but studied with Brian Ferneyhough in Freiburg and Bülent
Arel and Daria Semegen at SUNY Stony Brook. Since 1991 he's been Professor
of Composition at the University of Washington. There's certainly
little evidence of a Ferneyhough influence to Durand's music, and
it's just as hard to spot anything particularly French about it, apart
from a good ear for instrumental timbre and spectral harmonic logic
(though since when was that the exclusively property of the French?)
in "La terre et le feu" and perhaps a fleck of Messiaen
in "Les raisons des forces mouvantes" – but that could
just be the fact it was written for a pipe organ: do please excuse
me, but I just can't get enthusiastic about that horrible instrument.
"La terre et le feu", an oboe concerto in all but name,
also spawned enough material for an extended oboe / viola duet, "La
mesure des choses III: La mesure de la terre et du feu". Both
works are expertly performed by oboist Gareth Hulse, violist Paul
Silverthorne and the London Sinfonietta. The concluding "Athanor",
an orchestral work dating from 2001, is more laboured though, and
not even the gifted Pierre-André Valade at the helm of the
BBCSO can stop it getting bogged down in lethargic and rather dull
19th century cliché. Durand should leave the "dramatic"
timpani rolls to bearded Estonian mystics and concentrate on the limpid
beauty of his chamber music.—DW
United
States of Belt
PANCAKE ALLEY
Chlöe 005 / Champ 05
Apparently
it's taken "years" for Seth Barger and Ross Goldstein, aka
USOB, to put together this "audio film of the all-American small
town at its very best". Sourced from recordings made across the
country and various live events, including a performance based around
a game of ping pong (dig the hand-painted signs by Mr. Joe Signs That
Go!") and some tasty banjo picking courtesy of Vic Rawlings.
The only comparable US travelogue hörspiel is Luc Ferrari's
Far West News, but Pancake Alley is richer and more
elusive than that; Barger and Goldstein avoid the aren't-I-cute narrative
interjections that spoil Ferrari's work (indeed, they disappear altogether:
Goldstein's credited on polaroids and mix and Barger not at all).
Most of the reviews that the album has garnered so far have dwelt
on the "American-ness" of it all, but the queasy Wurlitzer
that opens "Ping Pong Holiday" is playing nothing less than
Gerry and the Pacemakers' "You'll Never Walk Alone" (anthem
of Liverpool Football Club.. John Peel smiles down benignly from the
hereafter) a timely reminder that America, like this splendid album,
is itself a cunning and complex mix of diverse and surprising elements.—DW
Goh
Lee Kwang
INNERE FREUDEN
Herbal ISBN 3-937158-00-6
goh_lee_kwang@hotmail.com
Malaysian-born
Goh Lee Kwang's Innere Freuden ("Internal Pleasures")
comes with an A5 handout containing the following text: "By using
an analog DJ mixer with the line connection of 'output back to input',
the electronic signal becomes audioable [sic] NO synth, NO pre-programming,
NO on going effects and NO post-overdub." (That's almost as many
"no"s as a Lou Reed interview..) Dunno whether Lee's contemplating
teaming up with Toshimaru "No Input Mixing Desk" Nakamura,
Sachiko "No Samples In The Sampler" M and Otomo "No
Records On The Turntable" Yoshihide, but the seven tracks on
offer here are every bit as austere and compelling as that trio's
recent excellent Good Morning Good Night double on Erstwhile.
I admit I still have a soft spot for the more eclectic train wreck
electronica of GLK's Nerve
Center, but no matter – the vocabulary here is drastically
pared down but he still uses to poetic effect. Innere Freuden
is by no means an easy listen, but it's a very rewarding one.—DW
Pita
GET OFF
Häpna H 19
For
his first solo outing outside of the celebrated Mego label he joined
back in 1995 – has it really been so long?– Peter "Pita"
Rehberg delivers eight choice cuts of laptoppery running the gamut
from evanescent drone ("Eternel") to spikes and splinters
("By bath") and back again ("Retour"). The album
title (with an extra "t") was the name of a Prince song
a while back, but I seriously doubt Herr Rehberg intends this as a
homage to the Purple Dwarf of Paisley Park.. Instead it invites comparison
with 2002's Get Down LP (Mego 049) and especially 1999's
Get Out (Mego 029), but whereas that album was built around
the monumental and monumentally gritty third track, its equivalent
on this Häpna offering, the magnificently-titled "Like watching
shit on a shelf" comes off as a smoother, lighter affair (smoother
in part thanks to the classy mastering of Marcus Schmickler). But
lightness of touch does not mean loss of quality: Get Off,
along with Rehberg's recent riotous and raucous Work Hard Play
Harder with Zbigniew Karkowski, is further solid proof that he's
still floating up there with the cream of the laptop crop. Get Ur
Pita on.—DW
Julien
Ottavi
FOR DEGRADABLE MUSIC: THE CDR I WILL NEVER RELEASE
w.m.o/r 15
Mattin's
w.m.o/r label continues its uncompromising journey along the fringes
of sound art where ultra loud and ultra quiet find common ground with
this 65 minute composition by Nantes-based sound artist Julien Ottavi
(of Formanex fame). Using only extreme low and high frequencies, Ottavi's
work is based on the premise that sound recorded on CDR (as opposed
to commercially produced CDs) is destined to deteriorate. So is your
health, I imagine, if you have a sound system powerful enough to play
this one loud: the low-end frequencies gradually induce a feeling
of unease and claustrophobia verging on nausea. By the time the thing
fizzes into life after the 54-minute mark, you're ready to acknowledge
defeat, if you're not already lying on the floor in a pool of vomit.
As anyone familiar with this publication will know, we're hardly in
the business of covering Britney Spears here, and the idea that music
always has to be trivial poppy fluff is about a million miles wide
of the target, but, call me old fashioned, I like to find something
in the music to enjoy, or at least respect, and with Ottavi's offering,
it's hard. Elio Martusciello's Aesthetics
Of The Machine last year on Bowindo explored similar avenues
of extreme registers, but somehow came off as more musical. For Degradable
Music is another example of a project where the realisation of the
concept is nowhere near as interesting as the concept itself.—DW
ANP
ABSOLUT NULL PUNKT
Important Imprec 029
ANP
was originally formed in 1984 by Japanese noisician Kazuyuki K. Null
(of Zeni Geva fame, though ANP predates that hardcore combo by three
years) and ex-Fushitsusha percussionist Seijiro Murayama. After releasing
two cassettes and five LPs the two went their separate ways back in
1987 but have recently hooked up again, and the music on this disc,
their first American release (at last), comes from concerts the pair
recorded in Tokyo and the noise capital of the world, Osaka, in February
and December 2003. With the exception of the closing 21'41" track,
all the pieces are relatively short, which gives the affair something
of the feel of a sampler, and a very listenable one to boot. From
the point of view of music technology, the world's moved on considerably
since the mid 80s, and Null's arsenal of electronic equipment certainly
sounds more sophisticated, even elegant in comparison with the raw
early ANP stuff. Onstage, KK's always been the suave debonair gent
of Japanoise, especially compared to the likes of Jojo and Masonna,
and Murayama's drumming is decidedly painterly compared to the blood
and guts of a Weasel Walter. That said, this is not exactly something
you want to play to your granny over afternoon tea, unless you've
got plans to collect on the life insurance.—DW
Max
Eastley & David Toop
DOLL CREATURE
Bip Hop Bleep 25
Important
figures though they are among improvising musicians, instrument builders
(Max Eastley) and shrewd commentators on the scene (David Toop), Doll
Creature is only the third collaborative album between these
two good friends in thirty years. Their last outing was 1994's Buried
Dreams, and the one before that was New and Rediscovered
Musical Instruments (1975) on Brian Eno's mythic Obscure label
('bout time all of those were properly reissued, as I still can't
remember who I lent my copy of the Toop / Eastley to, though I do
know I never got it back). Doll Creature features Toop on
"computer, guitars, flutes, tubes, organic matter, book pages,
dog whistles and percussives" and Eastley on "mechanical
and whirling instruments, sculptures, bowed Arc, percussives, abrasives,
Purple Ray Vitalator, insectoids, weather, computer", and its
fifteen tracks come accompanied by a typically evocative swathe of
Toop's Exotica-style Conrad-obsessed humid tropical rainforest
prose. Tracks like "Eyelash turned inwards" inhabit the
same spooky war torn jungle Martin Sheen and his crew sailed into,
a landscape of sudden near-fatal surprises, undergrowth rustling with
venomous snakes, while "Cardiomancy" is nudged forward into
the darkness by an inscrutable didgeridoo drone that could be part
of some native shamanic ceremony, as could the ritual rubbing and
clacking of stones on "Nights, demixed, circles" (played
one supposes by Toop, whose admiration for Akio Suzuki's performances
with pebbles is well known). There's a constant sense of foreboding
to it all, a hidden danger in the distance and depth of the mix –
something by the way that was sadly lacking in Toop's recent Confront
release Breath Taking with Suzuki. It's exquisitely recorded
and mixed, thoroughly riveting stuff, though I imagine someone will
describe it all as Dark Ambient. Not too sure about that "ambient"
bit, though; we all know the story by now of how St Brian "discovered"
ambient music while lying ill in bed when a visiting friend put on
a record of harp music with the volume down a tad too low and Eno
just couldn't bring himself to move his butt out of bed far enough
to turn up the wick. I'll bet he could have made it to the stereo
all right if Doll Creature had been playing.—DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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