A
warm welcome this month to Massimo Ricci – and check out his
webzine Touching
Extremes when you have a moment – who comes bearing gifts,
in the form of an exclusive interview with John
Duncan (whose own website
is a treasure trove of information too) and the following introduction.
" John Duncan was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1953; after studying
with Allan Kaprow at the California Institute of the Arts, he started
performing concerts and "events" that were more or less
his own studies and reactions about human behaviour in its more intense
and often cruel forms. These performances could include ringing one's
door and shooting him in the face with a blank gun (Scare),
projecting a hard-core movie collage to an all-female audience and
making himself available for sexual abuse after the show (For
Women Only) , locking himself with more participants, naked and
blind, in a cellar space (Maze) and - maybe the hardest for
audiences to swallow - getting himself a vasectomy after a performance
with a corpse (Blind Date, which of course has been violently
attacked from everywhere). For Duncan, a great deal of influence on
all this was found in his study of Viennese Actionism movement (Hermann
Nitsch and the late Rudolf Schwarzkogler were probably the most famous
artists coming from that area). Actionism - as you will read - is
not at the basis of his work anymore today. Duncan is the author of
a series of interesting videos, too; apart from the pretty well known
John See Series, adult films directed by him and for which
he composed the score, from 1986 to 1988 he was able to override the
signal of Japanese NHK TV with a portable transmitter video set, broadcasting
his own pirate images. Some of this material has been released in
VHS (see his website - johnduncan.org - for more information on this
and all his activities). His musical output is variegated, strikingly
intense and beautiful to the point of stomach vibration; Duncan has
collaborated among others with Merzbow, CM Von Hausswolff, Christoph
Heemann (Incoming- Streamline 1995), Andrew McKenzie (Contact
- Touch 1990), Bernhard Günter (Home, Unspeakable -
Trente Oiseaux 1996), Elliott Sharp (Tongue - Allquestions
2004), Asmus Tietchens (Da Sich Die Machtgier...- Die Stadt
2003); he has composed music using the buzz emitted by the microwave
drivers in the Stanford Linear Accelerator tunnel (The Crackling
- Trente Oiseaux 1996, with Max Springer). His strict relationship
with photographer and mathematician Giuliana Stefani has been going
on for many years and Stefani's photos grace the covers of all of
John's recent releases on their own label, Allquestions. Most of his
last decade's CDs deal with installation soundtracks (The Keening
Towers - Allquestions 2003 - being his masterpiece), remodelling
of human voice (his works with Sharp, Tietchens, Peter Fleur and Edvard
Graham Lewis) and other sources and morphing of shortwave radio (Tap
Internal - Touch 2000, Palace Of Mind - Allquestions
2001, Phantom Broadcast - Allquestions 2003), of which the
American is probably the most gifted assembler existing: his music,
after the raging distortions and the sudden cries of the beginnings,
has developed to become a shifting tide of impressive drones, violent
buzzing, subterranean hisses and explorations of silence. But no word
of mine can do justice to this artist's enormous impact on modern
art in general; therefore, it's about time someone gives him his virtual
plaque in the hall of fame of most important innovators of our time."
Now read on.. et bonne
lecture.—DW
Marc-André
Dalbavie / L'Itinéraire, Feb. 1st 2005
The
15th annual Présences festival of concerts of contemporary
music organised by Radio France (all totally free – hooray!)
took place at the Maison de Radio on the banks of the Seine between
January 29th and February 13th. The festival is loosely organised
around several themes, the most prominent of which is a featured composer
– this year Marc-André Dalbavie. Born in 1961, Dalbavie's
music is usually thrown in the musique spectrale bag along
with Grisey and Murail, which is rather misleading for two reasons:
firstly, Dalbavie is a good 15 years younger than the pair of them,
and hence belongs to a different generation (he also studied with
Franco Donatoni – hardly a spectralist – and it shows),
and secondly he's openly admirative of American minimalism. In an
interview with Christian Wasselin included in the handsome festival
programme, he recalls with a smile how Pierre Boulez once asked him
how he could possibly be interested in "such music", referring
to Steve Reich.
The concert of Dalbavie chamber works on February 1st, in which the
dapper-looking composer conducted the Ensemble L'Itinéraire
(on magnificent form, as ever), revealed a few distinctive traces
of Reich, but considerably more European influences, notably Ligeti.
Opening with 1994's "In Advance of the Broken Time" –
the title is an allusion to Duchamp's readymades but the music certainly
isn't – for flute, clarinet, piano and string trio, Dalbavie's
obvious affection for Ligeti soon made itself felt, the bright flurries
of activity often recalling the older composer's "Chamber Concerto".
Dalbavie often uses the piano to double the other instruments, normally
a sign of weak orchestration but here an added sprinkle of clarity
and glitter. The opening minute's patient exploration of a whole tone
trill still sounds daring, as listeners hold their breath (the tension
in the hall was palpable), wondering how long the composer is going
to let it go on for. The ending of the piece is just as magical.
Written two years later, "Tactus" reveals another Ligeti
touch – and one that Dalbavie has very much made his own –
what one might call the "black hole effect", where the music
is suddenly and inexorably attracted to one particular pitch, accelerating
and compressing small repeated cycles until the target note is reached
with a heroic clang. This gesture reappears with almost annoying regularity
throughout the piece's four movements, the first of which also nods
at Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition and mid-period Xenakis's
fascination with irregular scale structures (in fact, it sounds very
much like Xenakis circa 1980 written by Messiaen circa 1950). The
programme notes mention Schubert's Octet (same instrumentation, plus
piano), but the motoric chug-a-lug of Stravinsky's is closer to hand.
There's also a distinct whiff of Berg's "Lyric Suite" at
the opening of the third movement. For sure, Grisey and Murail aren't
far off, but Dalbavie adopts a very pragmatic attitude towards spectralism,
taking the sonorities he needs as and when, and leaving the rest of
the dogma behind.
"Palimpseste" (hard to resist a comparison with Xenakis's
work of the same name, but I will) was written in 2002 and revised
last year. Inspired apparently by an unfinished novel by E.T.A. Hoffman
about the unintentional interweaving of two different narratives,
it finds Dalbavie drifting off in the direction of the siren song
of postmodernism, not only in its incorporation of a quote from Gesualdo's
"Beltà, poi che t'assenti" but in its oddly episodic
structure. There are indeed clear traces of minimalism, but the passages
of running semiquavers recall Vivaldi as much as they do Reich. Written
for the same ensemble as "In Advance of the Broken Time",
the work is beautifully scored (though the pianist's occasional forays
inside his instrument to play its strings zither style don't add up
to much), but it comes across somehow as more diffuse and less satisfying
than the earlier work.
If "Palimpseste" sowed a few seeds of doubt, the "Sextine
Cyclus" that ended the concert provoked mild panic, and even
a few sheepish boos from the otherwise well-heeled and politely ageing
audience. Not so much postmodern as pre-Renaissance, this cycle of
ten songs originally written – in part at least – by 13th
century troubadours, trouvères and Minnesänger, and scored
for soprano (Virginie Pesch) and 10 piece ensemble (including electric
keyboards, gongs – both used so sparingly one wonders why he
bothered – and harp – as desperately twee as you could
imagine) seriously tries the patience. In terms of songs with instrumental
accompaniment, Debussy and especially Ravel can't have been too far
away from Dalbavie's thoughts, but trapped in the excruciatingly bland
white note world of medieval modes, it all comes out sounding like
Arvo Pärt, without the mysticism – the mysticism being
the only thing that saves Pärt's music in the first place. One
imagines that even Papa Boulez, if faced with a stark choice between
this and "Music for 18 Musicians", would swallow hard and
plump for Steve Reich.—DW
Resonance
(Rob Brown / Henry Grimes / William Parker)
Billy Bang's Aftermath Band
Théâtre Jean Vilar, Vitry-sur-Seine Feb. 5th 2005
For a few years now the Sons d'Hiver Festival has played host to a
scaled-down version of William Parker's Vision Festival, inviting
some of the big names of what used to be called free jazz –
I'm beginning to wonder if the term has any meaning anymore –
to play to deliriously appreciative audiences in packed houses in
the dreary suburbs of the Val-de-Marne department Southeast of Paris.
Festival curator Fabien Barontini is evidently keen to give his punters
value for money, and has taken to programming three bands in the same
evening. However, when the musicians concerned have egos – perhaps
"personalities" would be a more diplomatic way of putting
it – as big as their discographies, you can be sure that they're
not going to oblige the management by playing a straight 45-minute
set and clearing off. The result in the case of the concert in Vitry
was that by the time the second band that evening had finished, it
was already 11.15pm and your roving reporter had to return home through
drunken and dangerous midnight traffic to pay the babysitter, moaning
all the while about having to miss the real reason for his going all
the bloody way to Vitry-sur-Seine, the Revolutionary Ensemble –
Leroy Jenkins, Sirone and Jerome Cooper. Anyway, I didn't pay for
my ticket, so I shouldn't complain, right?
Things
had got underway promptly enough at 8.40 (only ten minutes after the
scheduled 8.30 kick off – practically unheard of here in France,
where people think nothing of shambling in up to twenty minutes late),
when alto saxophonist Rob Brown walked calmly out on stage, joined
by arguably the two most influential free jazz bassists of them all,
Henry Grimes (photo, left), back with a vengeance after having disappeared
without trace for over three decades, and William Parker, who, if
he were to go AWOL himself, would be as sorely missed as Grimes has
been all these years. Grimes, sporting a tie that must have been going
out of fashion back when he dropped off the radar and a lapel badge
as big as a pie plate (looked from where we were sitting like a photo
of Albert Ayler, but don't quote me on that), was surprisingly agile,
running up and down the fingerboard of his enormous bass, alternating
bowed and plucked passages with seemingly limitless energy. His non-stop
flow of ideas inspired Parker to turn in the best and most passionate
arco solo I've ever heard him play, while Brown stood, head bowed
in reverence, smiling from time to time as he wondered how he would
ever get the two giants flanking him to stop. Not that he was squeezed
out – far from it. His four extended solos during the hour-long
set were clear proof that he is, with the possible exception of Marco
Eneidi, the most technically accomplished and inventive altoist since
Jimmy Lyons. Even so, bass fatigue (for this listener) set in after
about three quarters of an hour. While Parker and Brown were following
each other's moves closely, Grimes was unstoppable, so much so that
I began to wonder if he was actually listening all that closely to
what the other two cats were doing. What needed to be said had been
said after about 45 minutes, but another quarter of an hour went by
before the set finished – not surprisingly Grimes was the last
to stop playing.
I do wish
The Revolutionary Ensemble had gone on second and left the Billy Bang
band to round off the evening, not only because I ended up having
to miss their set but because Bang's outfit was definitely the most
accessible group on the bill. What he didn't seem to understand though
is that one can be accessible through the music alone, without having
to resort to cheap theatrics and witty repartee. Billed as "Vietnam
II – Billy Bang's The Aftermath Band Performing Music From The
Vietnam Trilogy", and featuring violinist Bang (photo, left -
thanks to Nicolas Perrier), aka Sgt. E5 William Walker US 51613087
(I kid you not, this was printed on the programme), James Spaulding
on alto sax and flute, Ted Daniel (Spec.4th Class RA 5169091) on trumpet,
Andrew Bemkey on piano, Todd Nicholson on bass, Michael Carvin (Spec.4th
Class RA 64101864) on drums and two Vietnamese musicians, Co Boi Nguyen
and Nhan Thanh Ngo, what we got was a selection of tracks from the
Aftermath album – the only instalment of the trilogy
so far, to the best of my knowledge – driven forward with the
style, elegance and finesse of a dirty great Mack truck by one of
the stodgiest rhythm sections known to man. The fault lay neither
with the bassist nor with the pianist (since it was abundantly clear
that they were both just obeying orders, i.e. following Sgt Walker's
conducted instructions) but with Carvin, who has to be not only the
loudest drummer on the planet – and coming from someone who's
seen Han Bennink outgun The Ex that's saying something – but
also the least subtle. Subtlety never was the name of the game with
Bang, though, a fact borne out by the facile exoticism of his primitive
pentatonic themes and his own histrionic solos (I solemnly swear I'll
never ever take the piss out of Didier Lockwood again, OK? –
unless he wears those fucking leather trousers), which have always
sounded far more technically impressive than they actually are. Put
enough rosin on your bow and cavort around and Joe and Josie Public
will be blown away by the white cloud of dust swirling around you
(I am not pulling your leg here, there were people having orgasms
listening to this stuff). As for the Vietnamese, who Bang says he
"met in New York" (he didn't supply the name of the restaurant),
Nhan Thanh Ngo could hardly tune let alone play the dan tranh,
and Co Boi Nguyen couldn't sing her way out of a paper bag, though
she was much nicer to look at than Sgt Bang strutting his stuff and
waggling his ass in front of his horn players while they turned in
par-for-the-course solos, at times impressive but never inspired.—DW
Various
Artists
ARCHIVES GRM
INA C 1030 5xCD
To
celebrate its 30th Anniversary, the French Institut National de l'Audiovisuel
has produced this handsome set of five colour-coded CDs and an 80-page
album compiling over a hundred photographs documenting the electronic
music produced under the auspices of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales,
including several seminal works that predate its creation in 1958
(the GRM was absorbed into the INA in 1975 after the break-up of the
old ORTF). Each volume comes with an informative background essay
written by an important player on the scene – François
Bayle, Régis Renouard Larivière, Yann Geslin, Daniel
Teruggi and Christian Zanési – though readers should
be aware that the English translations are not always accurate, and
on several occasions are actually misleading.
The first disc, entitled "Les visiteurs de la musique concrète",
opens with André Hodeir's "Jazz et jazz" (1951),
a lively if somewhat primitive montage of fragments of big band brass
with a bop rhythm section. It's an odd way to begin the retrospective,
perhaps, as it's the only explicitly "jazzy" piece in the
whole set, but kicking off with something as deadly as the two po-faced
Boulez "Etudes" (also 1951) that follow it would have been
unwise to say the least. Hodeir was just as enthusiastic about Stan
Kenton and Dizzy Gillespie as he was about the music of Jean Barraqué,
the unjustly neglected figure of French post-war serialism who died
in 1973 aged 45, but one wonders if Hodeir thrilled in quite the same
way to Barraqué's "Etude" (1951 – 54). Roughly
contemporary with his "Séquence", a forgotten masterpiece
of modern music if ever there was one, Barraqué's "Etude"
explores the same territory, trying to reclaim for the Darmstadt generation
the dramatic sweep and direct appeal to the emotions of Romanticism,
without in any way compromising the severe structural discipline of
the new music. The contrast with the arid Boulez "Etudes"
is striking. Darius Milhaud (1892 – 1974) isn't normally associated
with the cutting edge of the post-war avant-garde (though it's worth
bearing in mind his teaching at Mills College was enormously influential
on younger composers of note, including Steve Reich), so coming across
his "La rivière endormie", a brief radio hörspiel
dating from 1954, is a wonderful surprise. Milhaud's interest
in electronics was admittedly limited to rather simplistic mixing
and reverb effects, but despite its rather boxy sound and period wobbly
saxophone vibrato, the work's lyricism is still fresh and satisfying.
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati's "L’amen de verre" (1957)
is just as oneiric and evocative, but unlike Milhaud's tone poem makes
use of the latest technology, notably the phonogène, a variable-speed
tape recorder designed by Pierre Schaeffer and Jacques Poulin that
allowed sounds, played forward or backward, to be easily transposed
across a two octave register (a later version incorporated a keyboard,
in what was essentially a primitive precursor of the sampler).
The GRM studio was in no way off limits to the older generation; Henri
Sauguet (1901 – 89) was enthusiastic about its possibilities
(though his "Aspect sentimental" (1957) clings to the safety
net of ABA sonata form), as was, unsurprisingly Edgard Varèse,
who worked there on the electronic "interpolations" for
his "Déserts" (1954), the riotous world premiere
of which, as François Bayle is right to remind us in his accompanying
essay, was probably the last serious scandal in music history. The
full brute force of "Désert: Interpolation 1" must
have sounded as primitive and terrifying to the audience in the Théâtre
des Champs-Elysées as Stravinsky's "Sacre" had done
41 years earlier. Varèse subsequently toned down his three-minute
masterpiece in the studios of Columbia University, but here we have
the original in all its futurist industrial glory. While Varèse's
"Déserts" and the later "Poème Electronique"
are regarded as landmark works of electronic music, their incorporation
of recognisable and emotionally charged sonic signifiers (organs,
sirens, bells), though still undeniably powerful, sounds rather old-fashioned
compared to the technical wizardry of some of the younger lions. André
Boucourechliev's "Texte 2" (1959) is a veritable tour de
force – one wonders how many hundreds of hours went into its
creation – and the inscrutable crackling of Xenakis's "Concret
PH" still sounds so outrageously contemporary you can almost
smell the vine cuttings burning in the courtyard of the GRM studio
on rue de l'Université. It's always a pleasure to return to
"Concret PH", but the piece is well known enough to have
appeared on numerous occasions. The real revelation of this first
volume is Claude Ballif's "Points-Mouvements", a ten-minute
masterpiece dating from 1962, and, unfortunately, the only electronic
work ever created by Ballif (1924 – 2004). Its patient and beautifully-structured
investigation of tiny sonorities, scrapes, rattles and rubbings of
diverse materials, sounds more like the amplified textures of Mark
Wastell or the microsonic investigations of Morphogenesis than early
60s musique concrète. After Ballif and Xenakis, the
fifteen minutes of "Timbres Durées" (1952), Olivier
Messiaen's only serious foray into the world of electronic music (with
Pierre Henry as assistant), drag horribly. Messiaen's importance and
influence as a teacher cannot be overestimated, however, so the inclusion
of "Timbres Durées" is of considerable historical
interest, if only as a glimpse down the path not taken.
On the second disc, entitled "L'art de l'étude",
some of the more familiar GRM names make their first appearance, including
François-Bernard Mâche, Ivo Malec, Luc Ferrari and of
course Pierre Schaeffer, whose 1948 "Étude pathétique"
opens the set. Also known as the "Etude aux casseroles",
after one of its most recognisable sound sources, its oddball montage
of coughs, wheezes, blues harmonica and snippets of Sacha Guitry sounds
as wondrously strange now as it must have done at its premiere over
half a century ago. Equally fresh is the trilogy of Ferrari studies
from 1958, "Étude aux sons tendus", "Étude
floue" "Étude aux accidents", the cymbalom-like
sheen of Malec's "Reflets" (1961) and the thrilling brassy
blasts of Mâche's 1959 "Prélude", all proof
that a good pair of ears and a keen sense of structure and pacing
stand the test of time better than the chilly serial dogma of Michel
Philippot's "Étude n°1" (1952), which has aged
as badly as the Boulez and Messiaen on Disc 1. The offerings from
lesser-known figures are also impressive, from Philippe Arthuys' delightful
"Boîte à musique" to the Etudes of Mireille
Chamass-Kyrou and Akira Tamba, and "Mer d’Azov", by
Beatriz Ferreyra, who worked closely with Schaeffer on his Solfège
de l'Objet sonore.
By the end of the 1960s, changes were afoot, both in the streets of
Paris and in the heated discussions behind the closed doors of the
GRM itself. The ideological purity of Schaeffer's beloved solfège
had to come to terms with the possible incorporation of electronic
music into mixed media works involving dance, theatre and film. As
the barricades went up the barriers between genres came down, and
even members of Schaeffer's inner circle such as Bernard Parmegiani
found themselves experimenting with collage (Parmegiani's "De
pop à l'âne" and "Pop'eclectic" are not
included here, having been recently reissued elsewhere) and the use
of field recordings without disguising their origins. Alain Savouret's
1969 "Etude aux sons réalistes", though by no means
the first example of this – that honour probably goes to Luc
Ferrari's 1964 "Hétérozygote" – is a
fine and representative example of the kind of sounds Schaeffer referred
to as "mauvais concret".
The second disc closes with Savouret's "Étude numérique"
(1985), which by rights belongs on the third, "Le son en nombres".
This and volume 4, subtitled "Le temps du temps réel",
document the music produced when the GRM took its first small steps
into the digital world. In 1978 the Group moved into the fabled Studio
123 and acquired a DEC PDP 11/60 computer, which Yann Geslin describes
in his informative accompanying essay as "modern and powerful"
(though by today's standards 256K central memory and twice 16 minutes
of sound autonomy at 34kHz seem positively prehistoric), and composers
were soon queueing up to pore over 800-page Music V manuals. "One
year later", Geslin writes, "the first sound was produced,
just a weak grumble.." Geslin goes on to describe in entertaining
detail the trials and tribulations that accompanied those early digital
explorers, and, in an invaluable appendix (not translated into English,
as it turns out) also provides a complete and fascinating inventory
of the software available in Studio 123. Compared to today's ridiculously
simple-to-use (though hard to master) packages like ProTools and SoundForge,
the tools available at the end of the 1970s were cumbersome and time
consuming.
In François Bayle's "Eros Bleu" (1979), the first
work produced using the 123 software, you can hear the patience and
hard work, but also the distinctive frosty sheen – fluide
glaciale as Bayle called it – of early digital music. Gone
are the reassuringly primitive thuds and plunks of prepared pianos
and corrugated iron, the clang of kitchenware and the sighs of doors
– in comes the poised metallic quivering of stretched and frozen
time, a heavily filtered ring-modulated coldness just as present in
the eternal glissandi of Jean-Claude Risset's "Sud" as in
the calmer stretches of Denis Smalley's "Wind Chimes" (1987).
In the hands of craftsmen such as Bayle, Risset and Francis Dhomont
– whose genuinely thrilling and haunting "Novars"
(1989) closes Disc 3 – such tools could create sensitive and
impressive music, but the urge to "make it complex" clearly
got the better of many of their contemporaries. One only has to compare
the spare, often monophonic textures of the Etudes on Volume 2 of
this collection to the sprawl and whoosh of Gilles Racot's "Anamorphées"
or the precious tinklings of Bénédict Maillard's "Affleurements"
(both 1985) to realise how chilly the music soon became. Ivo Malec's
"Week-end" is a homage not to Walter Ruttmann (whose 1930
film of the same name was one of the pioneering masterpieces of electronic
music) but to Wagner, a kind of oppressively digitised rewrite of
the opening of the Ring. Adding human voices, either sung or spoken
– cf. Dieter Kaufmann's "Voyage au Paradis", Yann
Geslin's own "Variations didactiques" (that title says it
all) and Jean Schwarz's "Quatre saisons (Hiver)" –
only makes the electronics sound even more inhuman. Listening to Geslin's
dismantling of a Mallarmé poem is like reading a circuit diagram;
you might marvel at the ingenuity of the apparatus, and even admire
the abstract beauty of the graphics, but eventually you'll reach for
your copy of Pli Selon Pli.
Before long composers were getting rather fed up hanging about Studio
123 waiting for motorcycle couriers to bring back their precious snippets
of sound; 1984 saw the installation of the first version of SYTER,
which can stand either for "SYnthèse en TEmps Réel"
or "SYstème TEmps Réel". Not, as one composer
suspected, "SYstème TERuggi", though composer Daniel
Teruggi (today head honcho at the GRM) was so involved and in love
with the project he ended up writing his PhD thesis on it. As such
he's the perfect person to write the notes to Volume 4 of this set.
Much of the music on disc 4 not surprisingly belongs to the same shimmering
soundworld of disc 3 – Bernard Parmegiani's "Exercisme
3", the sliced and diced vocal riddle of Ake Parmerud's "Les
objets obscurs" and the Horacio Vaggione's "Ash", a
truly great exploration of the immensely small, to paraphrase Teruggi
– but one of the advantages of SYTER was that its real time
transformations allowed composers to integrate live performers and
traditional instruments into their work. Denis Dufour's "Pli
de perversion", which as it happens was the first work to be
completed on the system in 1984, uses two synthesizers (presumably
the then ubiquitous DX7s) and one violin, while Alain Savouret's "La
complainte du bossué" and Ramon Gonzales-Arroyo's "De
la distance" both use the double bass. In Savouret's piece the
bassist – Frédéric Stohl – also has to recite
a text, and though his extraordinary virtuosity is to be applauded,
the resulting catarrhal splattery poésie sonore isn't exactly
attractive. Nor is Gilles Racot's earnestly avant-garde "Subgestuel",
even with Les Percussions de Strasbourg along for the ride. It's exactly
the kind of stuff Bob Ostertag complained about in his excellent "Why
Computer Music Sucks" article a while back (originally in Resonance
magazine, now online at http://www.l-m-c.org.uk/). "I would venture
to say that the pieces created with today's cutting edge technology
have an even greater uniformity of sound among them than the pieces
done on MIDI modules available in any music store serving the popular
music market. [..] The problem of greater technological power failing
to produce more interesting timbral results would not be so central
were it not for the fact discussed above that Computer Music has made
timbral exploration its central concern. To put the matter in its
bluntest form, it appears that the more technology is thrown at the
problem, the more boring the results. People set out for new timbral
horizons, get lost along the way in the writing of the code, the trouble-shooting
of the systems, and the funding to make the whole thing possible,
then fail to notice that the results do not justify the effort."
Fortunately that can't be said of François Bayle's exquisite
"Mimaméta", or the four movements extracted from
Teruggi's "Instants d’hiver". Despite a clear affection
– nay, deep love – for the SYTER system, Daniel Teruggi
manages to keep one foot in the real world, incorporating fragments
of speech and instrumental music (and a real sense of harmony) into
the work without turning it into a hippy patchwork quilt. It's a shame
the extract from Michel Redolfi's 1991 "Appel d’air"
isn't a bit longer too.
The final disc is entitled "Le GRM sans le savoir", a cunning
little pun that might be translated as "GRM without knowledge"
or "GRM without knowing it", as in "bet you never realised
that was done by the GRM." The best example of this, and perhaps
the only piece of musique concrète ever to be heard by literally
millions, probably even billions, of people is Bernard Parmegiani's
"indicatif Roissy", the instantly recognisable (but infuriatingly
impossible to remember, let alone sing or whistle) 4 second jingle
that has been used to preface announcements over the PA system at
Charles De Gaulle Airport since 1974. One wonders what kind of royalty
deal Parmegiani signed, for this and the two other jingles included
here. The disc also includes jingles ("sonals") by Jean
Schwarz for Radio France Culture and Christian Zanési for RATP,
another four-second doodle that will be instantly familiar to anyone
who's ever ridden the Métro. Other oddities – the French
adjective "insolite" is most appropriate here – include
François Bayle's 1970 explorations with the voices of Robert
Wyatt and Kevin Ayers, extracted from Chapter 3 of Bayle's "L'expérience
acoustique", Savouret's deliciously Ravel-inflected "Valse
molle" (commissioned, amazingly, by ORTF's Light Music Service),
Jean Schwarz's gloomily repetitive ballet music for Carolyn Carson
"Il était une fois", Guy Reibel's decidedly minimalist
"Canon sur une trompe africaine" and a five-movement suite
extracted from Robert Cohen-Solal's incidental music to the cult TV
series "Les Shadoks", a timely and wonderful reminder that
some of the more daring innovations in electronic music at the time
on both sides of the English Channel were used in children's programmes.
Michel Portal's bass clarinet is given a thorough going over by Jean
Schwarz in "Chantakoa" (1986), and there are even two bona
fide chansons, Boris Vian's "L'alcool tue" (1962) and Edgardo
Canton's "Rengaine à pleurer" (1967), though you'll
never have heard them like this. Parmegiani turns the Vian into a
cartoon cutup worthy of John Zorn, while Canton's montage of the gentle
melancholy of Mouloudji's voice with frosty drones is arresting and
haunting.
Though the final disc of the set actually ends with Zanési's
abovementioned jingle for the RATP, the last substantial piece is
the one that precedes it, Parmegiani's "La roue Ferris"
(1971). It's a great way to go out on a high, if you'll forgive the
pun. His ear for detail has never been more evident than in this eleven-minute
meticulous masterpiece. One imagines that Parmegiani and the other
composers who worked late into the night, night after night in the
GRM studios to create a mere ten-second flurry of pure perfection
must be amused, maybe even mildly horrified and not a little jealous
to see the likes of Christian Fennesz surf an Endless Summer
tsunami with a petulant click of a mouse. It's fair to say though
that without the pioneering work of institutions like the GRM and
the tireless energy of the composers and technicians involved, today's
electronic music would not be what it is – and Archives
GRM provides an excellent overview of a fertile and influential
period in twentieth century music history.—DW
Ashtray
Navigations
TO YOUR FUCKING FEATHER'D WINGS
Absurd 42 / Goldsoundz 21
Howlin' Ghost Proletarians
DEAD ROADS
Absurd 49 / Ulan Titel 2
Joel Stern / Margarida Garcia / Anthony Guerra
HEY YA
Absurd 39 3"CD
Matt Davis / Graham Halliwell
OLD SCHOOL HOUSE
Absurd 47
Looper
SQUAREHORSE
Absurd 45 / Ulan Titel 1
Klimperei
LA TORDEUSE A BANDES OBLIQUES
Absurd 50 / Eclipsis 01
I've
probably said it before, but the very idea of reviewing discs on Nicolas
Malevitsis's CD/CDR label Absurd is probably, well.. absurd. Released
in ridiculously limited editions – anything more than 200 is
exceptional – they tend to disappear at alarming speed. One
day, though, someone's going to have a field day reissuing some of
these outstanding recordings (said that before too) covering every
area of work that a normal, healthy new music addict might possibly
be interested in, from eardrum throbbing noise to ultra-minimal improv,
spaced-out psychedelic stoner rock to intricate and delicate musique
concrète. This latest batch of Absurds is typically diverse,
and once again uniformly excellent in quality.
Unless
you've been following the Leeds scene closely you might not have come
across the work of Phil Todd before. Going under the moniker of Ashtray
Navigations – and I think it's fair to assume that it's not
an ordinary Marlboro smoking away in there – Todd has released
a sizeable amount of psych wah drone on swiftly deleted vinyl editions
and CDRs. To your fucking feather'd wings, however, is a
"real" CD, co-produced by Absurd and Gold Soundz, and might
therefore be easier to get hold of than other Todd releases. Consisting
of three pieces, "Fried Stars", "The Sweet Salamander"
and the epic 46-minute title track, this is strongly recommended to
anyone who's already lost their way in the JOMF archives, the various
incarnations of Godspeed and Vibracathedral, not to mention Bruce
Russell's various projects. Todd's basic working method is quite straightforward:
lay down a drone and then pile things on top of it, anything from
noodling keyboards to percussion to lo-fi electronics. Of course,
just about anyone can do this, but putting together a coherent and
engrossing piece of music lasting over three quarters of an hour needs
some doing: Todd has a sure sense of pace and a good pair of ears.
Perhaps those who have attained a chemically induced higher state
of awareness respond to it differently, but you don't need to be stoned
immaculate to appreciate good solid craftsmanship.
Metz-based
Michel Henritzi is known for his work running the A Bruit Secret label
(soon to be mothballed, sad to report), his splendid writing on music
in Revue & Corrigé, and the exhilarating noise
he produces with an old mange-disque (portable record player)
in the Dust Breeders. But he's no mean guitarist either, and nor is
his pardner in the Howlin' Ghost Proletarians, Fabrice Eglin, whose
work has already been released on A Bruit Secret. The eight tracks
that make up Dead Roads are magnificent proof that you don't
have to hail from the other side of the pond to play the blues –
meaning the raw dirty Howlin' Wolf blues as well as the melancholy
post-Fahey / Mazzacane blues. Unlike many exercises in the genre,
including unfortunately quite a few by Mazzacane himself, Dead
Roads never loses itself in inconsequential noodling; events
unfold at a leisurely pace, but there's a current of latent tension,
even menace to it all, a glint of knife blade in Henritzi's lapsteel.
Even the snatch of Peggy Lee's "Johnny Guitar" that drifts
in sounds somehow sinister. Patrick Boeuf's drawing of Robert Mitchum
as Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter is the perfect
image to accompany it all. A real gem of an album, and one you should
go out of your way to find a copy of at the earliest opportunity.
Though many of Malevitsis's releases come in creative and beautiful
packaging, notably the circular foldout editions (the Looper and Klimperei
productions being the latest example here), he sometimes makes no
bones about the fact that most Absurd productions are CDRs. The three
incher Hey Ya comes attached to a photograph of what could
be somebody's outside toilet (well, it's certainly some kind of outhouse
or shed) in what must be one of the most homemade of homemade releases
you're ever likely to have come across. Don't be put off, though:
this 20-minute slab of improv recorded in Lisbon in December 2002
and featuring bassist Margarida Garcia and visiting Aussies Anthony
Guerra (guitar and electronics) and Joel Stern (feedback, microphones
and electronics) is well worth hunting down. For some reason my disc
displays the title "3 Sarabandes #3" when inserted into
the computer, but the music it contains is about as far away from
stately courtly dance as you can possibly get. Not too dissimilar
from Phil Todd's work, in fact, the first half of the piece features
a stable middle A which the musicians progressively destabilise with
angry friction. The drone returns towards the end – a bowed
low G this time (Garcia, I assume) – but Stern and Guerra won't
let it go.
Slightly similar in feel but much less abrasive is Old School
House, featuring the trumpet and field recordings of Matt Davis
and the saxophone feedback of Graham Halliwell (whose old school house
in Norwich this was recorded in back in April 2003). Having more or
less ignored Hallliwell's contributions to the recent offering from
+minus, in which he plays with Mark Wastell and Bernhard Günter
(and having been roundly scolded for so doing), maybe I should set
the record straight by saying that I find this outing with Davis,
and Halliwell's earlier duo release on Absurd (Faktura, Absurd 34),
far more satisfying than either of the available +minus albums. The
delicate nuances of Halliwell's feedback are more easily appreciated
here than they were on A Rainy Koran Verse, where they were
partially submerged in the luscious harmonies of Günter's cellotar
and Wastell's Nepalese bowls. Instead, Davis's discreet field recordings
and occasional subterranean brassy gurgles counterpoint Halliwell's
work to perfection. Compared to the ultra minimal stuff these two
were putting out about three years ago – 2001, in retrospect,
may well be remembered as the year lowercase improv peaked (and that's
certainly the wrong word: troughed maybe) – the second
track is almost opulent, using a wide range of sounds to great effect
while retaining the characteristically sedate pace. The final piece
is a more austere affair, Halliwell's sustained pitches taking their
time to emerge from a cloud of breathy hiss.
Cellist
Nikos Veliotis is no stranger to the world of Absurd, having already
released two albums on the label. Looper is a trio also featuring
Martin Küchen on saxophone and Ingar Zach on percussion, and
the two extended tracks on Squarehorse (lasting respectively
23'31" and 37'57") represent the group's released output
to date. But not for long, one imagines. Veliotis has been increasingly
active lately, refining his technique with the BACHbow, a bow specially
designed and built by cellist Michael Bach that allows the performer
to play comfortably on three or even four strings at a time, gradually
refining a music that alternates long, rich chordal drones and stretches
of pregnant silence. Anyone familiar with his solo Radial on
Confront will recognise the cellist at once. Don't let the clinical
white cover fool you, either: adding Zach's elegant percussion (occasional
shades of Eddie Prévost and Burkhard Beins) and Küchen's
sustained tones (nice to hear he's as good at holding notes as he
is flying off them in all directions) adds colour and depth throughout.
The music shimmers like Veliotis's own video art, which it often accompanies:
superimposed icons gently rippling in and out of synch. Exquisite.
Also in the "classic" Absurd circular foldout cover, this
time in a tasty shade of hot pink, comes La Tordeuse à
Bandes Obliques (I'm not going make any attempts at translating
the title if that's OK with you), the latest offering from the quintessentially
underground and decidedly potty world of Klimperei. Essentially the
brainchild of Christophe Petchanatz (along with Los Paranos, Al and
Del, Deleted, Lapin Gris and Totentanz and goodness knows how many
other outfits), the group has been steadily amassing a huge archive
of deliciously naïve mini-compositions for piano, winds and lo-fi
electronics, to which can be added 28 more here. If you have a soft
spot for the loopier end of English Experimentalism (John White, Howard
Skempton, Christopher Hobbs, Penguin Café Orchestra..), or
the crankier corners of RIO (Pascal Comelade, ZNR..), you'll be as
happy with this as little Maria Amaryllis, for whose first birthday
the album has been released to celebrate. Behind all the above names
of course stands Satie, so it's no surprise to find a couple of decidedly
oblique – twisted, more like – references to Le Maître
d'Arcueil herein, notably "Les Dominos", which revamps one
of the well-worn "Gymnopédies" into something that
would make even the late great Les Dawson's toes curl up. Even better
is "Vive le Vent", which will have you reaching for the
tinsel and crackers in no time. Fewer than 300 shopping days left
to Christmas, kids – get buying right now.—DW
Kim
Cascone / Jason Kahn / Steinbrüchel
ATAK 004
Goem
ATAK 005
Keiichiro Shibuya
ATAK 000
Face it, kids, going to see a concert of DSP or EAI or whatever you
want to call the music people make with laptops these days is something
of a contradiction in terms, as there's usually hardly anything to
look it, unless watching Phil Durrant's index finger wiggle or Christian
Fennesz drag nonchalantly on a cigarette is your idea of performance
art. Legends even circulate in the Zone about musicians who load up
ProTools, hit PLAY and then spend the rest of the gig replying to
email (in my view not as scandalous as it seems: there are after all
plenty of fine musicians – bernhard günter and Asmus Tietchens
come to mind – whose concerts consist of merely playing pre-recorded
CDs), which might explain why many shows include some groovy live
video art by the likes of Billy Roisz, Tina Frank or Jeremy Bernstein
(to name but three), presumably to distract the viewers' attention.
Sure, it's there to showcase the creativity of the video artists too,
but one suspects that if the musicians themselves were doing anything
actually worth watching there'd be no need for it at all.
Similarly, some of the labels specialising in laptop music and EAI
are well-known for their high quality graphics (think Fällt,
Mego, Erstwhile, Cut..), but others prefer to keep packaging down
to a minimum, as an aesthetic statement in keeping with the music
itself (the transparent slimline jewel boxes of Francisco López's
early releases, or the various incarnations of the Raster Noton family..).
The Japanese ATAK label, distributed by Digital Narcis, belongs to
the latter category (there are some interesting discussions on the
design aspect of the label to be found at http://www.jidpo.or.jp/designnews/backnumber/dn266/index-e.html):
ATAKs 004 and 005 come in plain white cardboard sleeves with the word
ATAK braille-like in the corner, while the Keiichiro Shibuya release
is an all white affair – shades of Meme or A Bruit Secret, except
this one's a digipak with a cool, slightly sticky plastic finish.
After
releases on Mego, Fällt, Mutek and 12k, not to mention their
own Audio NL imprint, Goem (normally a trio consisting of Frans de
Waard, Roel Meelkop – both of Kapotte Muziek fame – and
Peter Duimelinks, but here a de Waard solo project) turn in the most
varied of these three releases, eleven tracks of well-crafted electronica
ranging from quintessentially inscrutable clicks and rumbles to precision-tooled
chilled funk, from cool cascading Eno-like arpeggios to cheap tinny
lo-fi dub. Far from being a stylistic hotchpotch though, it's a convincing
and enjoyable tour through many of contemporary electronica's fertile
landscapes, and perfectly in keeping with de Waard's own catholic
tastes in new music.
Meanwhile,
in Switzerland, there's a clutch of laptoppers who are quite happy
turning out predominantly static soundscapes whose bell-like resonances
hover in luminous clouds of gently clicking and crackling digital
dust – notably Jason Kahn and Ralph Steinbrüchel, who prefers
to go by his surname alone (sorry for blowing the gaff, mate). Both
have been particularly prolific of late – look out for Steinbrüchel's
superb duo with Günter Müller just out on Hervé Boghossian's
List imprint – though that could just be my reading of the vagaries
of the release schedule, since the eleven tracks that make up their
ATAK collaboration with that other frequent flier across the digital
diaspora, Kim Cascone, were recorded in Zürich back in November
2003. All three musicians subsequently reworked and processed the
material into finished tracks: Cascone contributed two, Kahn three
and Steinbrüchel the remaining six. I don't know how any of them
would feel about being compared to Papa Eno, but there's a distinctly
ambient feel to it all (and that isn't a dirty word in my book): listen
intently and there's a wealth of detail to appreciate, but the music
works just as well if you let it float along in the background.
That
certainly can't be said of Keiichiro Shibuya's work on this, his third
outing on his own label (after ATAKs 001 with Slipped Disc and 002
with Yuji Takahashi). Most of 000 – no I don't understand either
why 000 comes after 005 but never mind – will have your feet
tapping, even if it's not exactly the kind of stuff that will fill
the dance floor of the local disco. There's no info as such on the
package, but if you pop it in your computer the disc does display
some rather charming track titles, including "Sorry My Bad English",
"Nagasaki Nightmare" and "Godzilla Blues" (yeah,
well..). The first of these turns out to be a kind of click'n'cut
version of Aphex Twin's Didgeridoo. Shibuya favours the hard edged
precision-edited blip and buzz of Ryoji Ikeda, which makes occasional
splashes of colour like the piano on "Guinness Book Of Records"
(?) all the more welcome. It doesn't look very friendly, and it doesn't
always sound friendly, but it's an impressive and convincing piece
of work on a label to watch. I wonder what the live shows look like…—DW
O-Type
WESTERN CLASSICS
Family Vineyard FV 31
I'm always
a bit suspicious of that word "classic", whether it's used
to sell overpriced menswear or overhyped Chicago jazz, but as the
word "western" too is open to a number of possible interpretations
– the John Wayne variety being the one that most readily springs
to mind on listening to this music – we'll let it pass. This
latest offering from O-Type (guitarists Bruce Anderson and Jim Hrabetin,
percussionists Mark Weinstein and Dave Mahoney and the electronics
and post-prod of Dale Sophiea) is a real road movie of an album, so
much so that its seven tracks are named after films, some of them
arguably classics too (though only two are westerns as such): "The
Searchers", "The Manchurian Candidate", "3 Faces
of Eve", "Point Blank" (I take it that's the 1967 John
Boorman thriller with Lee Marvin and not the fucking awful thing from
1997 with Mickey Rourke), "Mean Streets", "Out of the
Past" (the 1947 Jacques Tourneur, I trust) and "McCabe and
Mrs. Miller". Come to think of it, "Bad Day at Black Rock"
would have been just as appropriate, and so would "Touch of Evil",
as O-Type's music is as sinister as the one-armed Spencer Tracy and
as imposing as Welles' Hank Quinlan, not to mention as sweaty and
seedy as what he gets up to. Dense and grimy as a congested rush hour
expressway snaking round some grey, humid Midwestern city, it's like
a cross between Neu! and Ennio Morricone recorded by Ribot and Quine
back at Ikue Mori's Painted Desert session, rearranged by
Craig Armstrong with a hangover, played by a pickup band in the Lee
Van Cleef Steak Experience, Columbus Ohio and recorded on a portable
DAT machine through a hole in the wall of the Mens' Room. I wouldn't
go searching for precise correspondences between individual pieces
and their titles – there's nothing particularly cowboyish about
the first and last tracks, for example, other than a distinct whiff
of Morricone (but that permeates the whole album) – in fact,
I wouldn't go searching for anything: this music works best
out on the road (honest, injun). If listened to too closely one soon
tires of its linearity (I'm tempted to say lack of structure, but
that's par for the course with today's post-rock, and in any case
you could probably say the same of a lot of Neu!) and its rather sludgy
arrangements. But out there on a rainy night in the suburbs of that
wretched town you drove into without even realising it, I can imagine
nothing better.
Cold
Bleak Heat
IT'S MAGNIFICENT, BUT IT ISN'T WAR
Family Vineyard FV35
The splendidly
named Cold Bleak Heat is in fact a free jazz quartet – the word
supergroup might not be inappropriate – consisting of Paul Flaherty
(alto and tenor saxophones), Greg Kelley (trumpet), Matt Heyner (bass)
and Chris Corsano (drums). Readers of these pages will be familiar
with Flaherty and Corsano's scorching duo release on Ecstatic Yod,
The Hated Music, as well as Sannyasi, on which they
were joined by Kelley, who of course had already appeared on 2000's
Boxholder release, The Ilya Tree. With the addition of NNCK's
Matt Heyner on bass, it's tempting to compare It's Magnificent,
But It Isn't War to that earlier album, which featured the rhythm
section of John Voigt and Laurence Cook. For musicality there's little
to choose between them (both are outstanding), but if you were taking
bets on pure stamina, you'd have to put your money on the younger
team of Heyner and Corsano. Heyner is in his element when digging
into a juicy drone – the difference between NNCK and other spacey
post-rock drifters like Godspeed and JOMF is that the drones come
out and grab you by the balls rather than float over you like clouds
– and with Corsano's ultra-precise rapid fire stick work (proof
that high energy and extreme subtlety can go hand in hand) paints
a thrilling backdrop for the horn players to dance in front of. Dance
they do, too; a lot of free jazz (actually I'm not sure whether these
chaps would approve of the term.. hell, maybe they'd just call it
improvisation) is real Boys Own swashbuckling walk the plank go ahead
punk make my day eat shit motherfucker mah dick's bigger than yuzz
sperm and sweat sprayed out over audiences of middle aged men trying
desperately to cover up mysterious hardons under shabby overcoats
in concert halls that end up smelling like porno booths, but for all
its force and momentum there's a lightness to CBH's music (I don't
see many WOMEN punching the air at Peter Brötzmann and Mats Gustafsson
gigs, but there were screaming girls aplenty at the last two Flaherty
/ Corsano gigs I went to, and it wasn't just because of their boyish
good looks). And a lyricism – check out the opening of "raising
the dead (freezer fight)" and the final "is that all you
got?" – Kelley, like fellow new trumpet heroes Axel Dörner
and Franz Hautzinger, split the extended techniques atom long ago
and has since returned from the outer reaches of planet nmperign with
a trick bag of sounds to kick-start jazz trumpet anew without turning
it into an empty display of chops. Meanwhile, Flaherty's just as at
home playing mournful late night deserted subway station blues as
he is exploring stratospheric meltdown. It's Magnificent, But
It Isn't War is even better than its title. If I might borrow
an adjective John Peel used to keep in reserve for The Fall: a mighty
disc.
Tigersmilk
FROM THE BOTTLE
Family Vineyard FV 28
Here
in old Europe the barriers between (free) jazz and (free) improv are
still pretty clearly defined, at least for festival promoters and
club owners – try putting together a group that plays both and
good luck getting gigs: you'll be too far out for the jazz clubs and
too far in for the improv set (I speak from experience). Don't be
in a hurry to give up the day job. Fortunately, across the pond, firstly
in New York in the early 80s, then in Chicago from the mid 90s, and
more recently on the West Coast, as far south as the Trummerfloras
in San Diego and as far north as Vancouver, such stylistic diversity
is more easily accepted, even encouraged and applauded. The three
musicians who make up Tigersmilk (not "the great-tasting candy
bar in four original carob coated flavors: peanut butter, protein
rich, peanut butter and honey, and peanut butter crunch" –
go Google!) are major players in the Chicago and Vancouver scenes.
Rob Mazurek's cornet and electronics have graced Isotope 217 and numerous
incarnations of the Chicago Underground, bassist Jason Roebke has
performed with groups as diverse as Rapid Croche, The Valentine Trio
and Terminal 4 and percussionist Dylan van der Schyff is just as at
home swinging the charts of the Peggy Lee Band and the NOW orchestra
as he is improvising freely with the likes of John Butcher. The title,
as any modern jazz loving Chicago resident will tell you, refers to
the Empty Bottle, where this set was recorded on November 4th 2003.
It's every bit as impressive as their earlier Family Vineyard debut
(FV 19), and superbly recorded to boot.
It's precisely the openness to two distinctive traditions –
free jazz and improv – that makes Tigersmilk such an exciting
outfit. The willingness to dare to take risks and accept the consequences,
even if it means sending the music in a radically different direction,
is the heritage of free improvisation. But where "classic"
improv outfits often opt for group consensus rather than individual
conflict – the all-for-one-one-for-allness of the SME, the "invisible
fourth member" of AMM (the group itself) – Mazurek, Roebke
and van der Schyff manage to keep a clear hold of their individual
personalities, recalling Archie Shepp's famous line: "in jazz,
the musician is the treasure." There are explicit references
to jazz language – van der Schyff's subtle, loping grooves,
Roebke's Charlie Haden-like low end and even what sounds like a quote
from Mingus' Cumbia and Jazz Fusion half way through track
4, and of course Mazurek's flirtations with the Harmon mute –
but their appearance is so natural and logical in context that any
suggestion that it's all just another exercise in hip Chicago postmodernism
can be dismissed out of hand. Splendid stuff. How about a European
tour, guys? Though God knows where you'd play.—DW
Patty
Waters
YOU THRILL ME
Water 137
The
importance of figures like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Albert
Ayler in the history of jazz is that they not only influenced scores
of saxophonists – Ayler himself was called “Little Bird”
as a Cleveland upstart – but their influence extended beyond
to other instruments. Bird’s influence on pianists like Bud
Powell has been well documented, as has Coltrane's. Ayler’s
impact was obvious not only on tenor saxophonists like Frank Wright
and Frank Smith, and trumpeters like his brother Don, but on figures
like singer Patty Waters, whose concept and delivery both owe much
to Ayler’s approach. Born in Iowa, raised in Denver, and musically
trained in Southern California, Waters moved to New York in the early
1960s, where, after working with Jaki Byard and sitting in with Charles
Mingus (one can only assume she was singing “Weird Nightmare”!),
Ayler heard her and recommended her to Bernard Stollman as an ESP-Disk’
possibility. She recorded Patty Waters Sings for the label
on December 19, 1965, accompanying herself on piano for seven short,
moody tracks on side one, and for side two, engaged pianist Burton
Greene and his usual working trio (with drummer Tom Price and bassist
Steve Tintweiss) on the mythic side-long exposition of “Black
is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” Waters, with the
trio rustling behind and around her, recites the first verse of the
tune in a hushed vibrato, then after a brief Greene solo, focuses
on the word “black,” abstracting it first into elongated
tendrils of sound, then becoming wordless as she sighs, wails like
a banshee, screams and shouts, hinging upon “black” again
as the music’s intensity builds and – eventually –
explodes. Like Ayler, she uses simple folk song motifs for most of
her free explorations (“Hush Little Baby” being another
favorite – see the follow up LP, College Tour), taking
a phrase and repeating it naggingly, at the same time altering it
into cathartic shouts and wails of pure emotion. At a fundamental
level, Waters took it farther ‘out’ than Ayler; the saxophone,
after all, separates the human from the sound being produced –
it is a machine. But when the sound is coming from human vocal chords,
its connection to our feelings is purer, more naked. Waters’
music is extremely direct, and this is probably the most bone-chilling
music ever recorded under the banner of free improvisation. Most listeners
of Waters’ music instinctively head for College Tour
or side two of Sings, yearning for sounds of soul-baring
and soul-probing intensity. We often forget about the music that takes
up side one of Sings, short ballads of love and loss sung
in a hushed voice, full of contradiction. The music on side one is
in effect ‘straight,’ not improvised upon, and yet it
is in some ways more impenetrably mysterious than her free singing.
Simultaneously smooth and gravelly, words are bent and extended in
ways that hint at what she is capable of, but stop short of the pyrotechnics.
You Thrill Me, a collection of previously unissued demo takes
and personal recordings, continues in this vein, proving that this
"side one" of her music is just as worth investigating.
Beginning with a jingle for Jax Beer (!?!), the disc follows with
1964 demos for Columbia including “You Thrill Me,” “Why
Can’t I Come To You” (both of which grace side one of
Sings) and “At Last I Found You.” Waters had
not yet reached her more "experimental" side, and though
differences between the recordings (beyond between-take banter) might
seem superficial, these are far straighter versions than appear on
the ESP date, particularly “Why Can’t I Come To You”,
whose tonality wavers far less than it does on Sings. Waters
returned to California in the late ‘60s, probably shortly after
recording with tenorman Marzette Watts for Savoy in 1968 (notably
an earth-shattering, lyrical version of “Lonely Woman”),
and the remainder of the disc comes from her previously undocumented
1970s sojourn on the West Coast. Apart from a lengthy, minimal solo
piano piece, “Touched by Rodin in a Paris Museum,” the
music consists of fairly brief voice-and-piano pieces. Her subtle
intervallic jumps, dissonant (vocal) chords and wavering notes are
all here, the way she growls and elides through “For All We
Know” and breathily futzes with “Love is the Warmth of
Togetherness” are proof that the experiments of 1965-66 made
her into one of the most startling and unique vocalists of the post-Billie
Holiday era.
In theory, one could say that Waters’ love songs are like Ayler’s
standards on Something Different! and My Name Is Albert
Ayler, a way to familiarize oneself with forms before tearing
them apart, but also a reinvigoration of the forms themselves through
experimentation. Ayler left an indelible mark on “Summertime”
– so much so that his is just about the only version worth hearing
– and Waters does the same, both on standards and her own ballads.
Ironic though that an album of unissued recordings only serves to
make her an even more enigmatic and curious figure than she was before.—CA
Less
of Five
ACROBATI FOLLI E INNAMORATI
Nine Winds NWCD0244
Less
of Five is an Italian quartet headed by pianist Giorgio Occhipinti,
and their debut album Acrobati folli e innamorati is a Mediterranean
holiday for Nine Winds, a label more usually associated with the Bay
Area improv scene. You could call what they do “free jazz,”
though if you’re expecting sonic assault or starchy abstraction
you’ll be surprised by the music’s charm and lightness
of touch. The fifteen pieces on the album are small enough to hold
in the palm of your hand – even the two extended tracks, “Uma
onda de mùsica continua” and “Témoignage
de proximité”, turn out to be montages of briefer segments.
The music has an elegantly playful flavour, at times curiously naïve-sounding:
the singsong waltz “Le calmar dans le bassin,” for example,
or Occhipinti’s whimsical nursery-rhyme interpolation on “Emulation”
(which is then, of course, merrily stomped flat). The band –
Occhipinti, alto saxophonist/clarinettist Olivia Bignardi, bassist
Giuseppe Guarrella and drummer Antonio Moncada – keep things
sprightly and consistently surprising, and Bignardi is especially
striking: she’s a player in the tradition of soulful free-but-almost-“inside”
players like Oliver Lake and Trevor Watts, and on “Témoignage
de proximité” even draws on the romanticized blues sound
of Johnny Hodges. This disc has been poorly served by jazz/improv
journalism, beyond a nice Jason Bivins write-up in Cadence;
even the usual year-end burst of retrospective music-journalism activity
bypassed it completely. It’s a hard world indeed, when a disc
as pleasurable and distinctive as this goes nearly unnoticed. Check
it out.—ND
Joe
Giardullo
WEATHER
Not Two MW 755-2
Solo soprano saxophone albums in so-called free improv are surprisingly
frequent these days (think Alessandro Bosetti, John Butcher, Stéphane
Rives, Michel Doneda..) but in jazz they're still relatively rare,
probably because the musicians concerned don't exactly relish being
compared to Steve Lacy, whose work still remains something a benchmark
in the genre, albeit an idiosyncratic one. In fact the distinction
I'm trying to draw is a rather silly, maybe even nonexistent one,
insofar as three of the four pieces on offer on Weather are
marked as Giardullo "compositions" (though they sound pretty
open and improvised to me). The fourth track though is most definitely
a composition, and a well-known one too: Coltrane's "A Love Supreme"
(rather sloppy titling, that: in fact it's "Acknowledgment").
Giardullo, taking advantage of an intimate acoustic and attentive
audience in Cracow's Klub Re (home base for Not Two's Marek Winiarski),
seeks to lift Coltrane's work gingerly down from the ridiculously
high pedestal on which it's been placed over recent years and return
it to the domain of the personal, the introspective. It's a lonely
business, playing solo, especially if you happen to choose a theme
that everyone in the room knows well enough to imagine the harmony
of (which is probably why the vast majority of solo horn albums don't
contain cover versions). Joe Giardullo might be pleased to read –
though I'm sure he knows it already – that I hear hardly any
Lacy in his work at all, either in terms of structure – he's
far more rhapsodic and given to flights of fancy than the clinically
precise (though never cold) Lacy – or sound. Lacy's sound, like
John Coltrane's on the instrument, was fat, round and rich in the
lower register, while Giardullo's is leaner, more fragile and feminine
and content to explore the cracks, especially on the beautiful title
track, which sustains interest effortlessly over nearly 19 minutes:
no mean feat. There is, though, another reference when it comes to
soprano sax playing, in the form of Evan Parker, particularly his
legendary circular breathing outings, and hearing Giardullo try his
hand at the same sort of thing on "Times Change" –
albeit using harmony that sounds more like Phil Glass – leads
to a twinge of regret. Not much of a twinge though, as it's still
a fine, coherent and impressive piece from an album well worth hunting
down.—DW
The
Cosmosamatics
REEDS AND BIRDS
Not Two MW 757-2
On this latest album from the Cosmosmatics, their fourth, the drum
stool for once isn't occupied exclusively by Jay Rosen, though it
is Rosen who drives the music forward in the closing track, "Avant
Garde Destruct", taken from a concert in Prague in April 2004,
five months before the remaining seven cuts were recorded in NYC.
The drummer on that date was Clifford Barbaro, whose hard bop chops
– he's worked among others with Lionel Hampton, Betty Carter,
Charles Tolliver, Jon Hendricks and the Sun Ra Arkestra – are
perfect for a collection of four Charlie Parker compositions (two
takes of "Cheryl", "Drifting on a Reed" and "Bird
Feathers") and a ballad medley – if two songs count as
a medley – consisting of "Autumn in New York" and
"In A Sentimental Mood". In such music one might regret
the absence of a bassist (earlier Cosmosamatics outings featured William
Parker and Curtis Lundy, but these days they're a trio), but Barbaro's
on magnificent form. Even so, the backbone of the Cosmosamatics remains
the double whammy reed team of Sonny Simmons (alto saxophone, English
horn and, on "Autumn in New York", vocals) and Michael Marcus
(tenor sax, saxello, Bb clarinet). The soloing is impressive throughout,
particularly Marcus's moving clarinet reading of "In A Sentimental
Mood", coming right after Simmons' touching Al Hibbleresque singing.
Recalling Sunny Murray's description of his playing as "free
bop", the Cosmosamatics is a free bop outfit par excellence,
an authentic bridge between the music of Parker – Simmons is,
after all, a first generation Bird disciple – and today's jazz.
Quite what the title "Avant Garde Destruct" is supposed
to signify isn't all that clear, but if the music is anything to go
by it's certainly nothing grouchy and Crouchy. All three musicians
fly high and free on this 24-minute finale, and you soon forget the
slight difference in recording quality between the Prague club and
the New York studio.—DW
David
Borgo
REVERENCE FOR UNCERTAINTY
Circumvention 042
As
its title might lead you to expect, the music of multi-instrumentalist
David Borgo goes in many directions, and, as is often the case, the
choice of instrument determines the character of the piece. Borgo's
chalumeau is brooding and introspective on the Eastern Europe-inflected
"Conversations with the Not-Self", while his soprano is
slinky and Liebmanesque on the opening "Sum-Thing from No-Thing";
the tenor, meanwhile, is cheeky and funky (a little David Murray-like)
on "Beantown Bounce", punchy and powerful on the title track,
and down home soulful on "Miko" with pianist Anthony Davis
(I'd never have guessed it was Davis if I hadn't consulted the sleeve,
though he is more recognisably out there on the later "Rivers
of Consciousness"). Murray's work with the WSQ also comes to
mind on listening to the two saxophone trio tracks with Andy Connell
and Robert Reigle, of which "Sync"'s exploration of timbral
and microtonal nuances of sustained tones is more substantial and
satisfying. No fewer than five of the 13 tracks are duets with percussionists,
two with Nathan Hubbard (on fine form throughout) and three with Gustavo
Aguilar, both of whom can't resist settling into a groove now and
then – though Aguilar's looser playing on "Tenochtitlan"
is as colourful as it is enjoyable. With bassist Bertram Turetsky
on board, the music swerves towards the free, with the loose homophony
of "On The Five" and the splendid, fiery and all-too-brief
title track. Indeed, the album might have benefited from more longer
cuts such as "Oddity", on which George Lewis blows some
typically wicked and rambunctious trombone, spurring Borgo and the
rest of the quintet to the most inspired music on the album.—DW
Achim
Kaufmann
KNIVES
Leo CD LR 409
Pandelis
Karayorgis
SEVENTEEN PIECES
Leo CD LR 417
Solo albums aren't all that easy to bring off, and solo piano albums
are no exception. Maybe Keith Jarrett would disagree, but among all
his boxes upon boxes of solo stuff there's only about an hour and
a half worth listening to. The near-simultaneous appearance on the
same label – Leo – of these individual offerings from
two pianists who have hitherto worked only with small ensembles provides
us with a good opportunity to survey and compare the work of Achim
Kaufmann and Pandelis Karayorgis, and try once more to re-explore
the territory between jazz and improv, somewhere in the middle of
which an imaginary boundary lies – with one of these albums
on either side of it. Achim Kaufmann, after a couple of deft and elegant
excursions into the domain of (post?) ECM-style jazz (Weave,
a trio on Jazz4ever with Ingmar Heller and Jochen Rückert, and
Double Exposure, his first Leo outing in 2000, with Michael
Moore, John Schröder and John Hollenbeck), has been moving slowly
but surely leftfield into improv, firstly with a few tentative steps
on 2002's gueuledeloup, once again with Moore, followed by
an enthusiastic leap on last year's Kwast (Konnex), with
Frank Gratkowski and Wilbert de Joode. With the exception of Herbie
Nichols' "2300 Skiddoo", of which more later, the seventeen
tracks on Knives are all Kaufmann improvisations whose titles
come from the work of his wife, poet Gabriele Guenther. She's also
responsible, it seems, for the Abstract Expressionist splat of red
and brown paint that adorns the wall behind Kaufmann in the booklet
photo (and the CD inner tray). Fortunately the pianist's playing is
a good deal more subtle and less violent than his spouse's artwork
– apart from a rash of angry clusters and glissandi in "Sheets
surfacing like an ocean" there's hardly any of the titanic piano
bashing one normally associates with the likes of Fred Van Hove or
Cecil Taylor. Stylistically it's refreshingly hard to pin down –
several tracks use "mixed techniques", i.e. Kaufmann plays
inside the instrument, sometimes partially preparing it, but there
the comparison ends with seasoned preparers like John Tilbury, Jacques
Demierre, Frédéric Blondy and Sophie Agnel (Keith Tippett
might be a better choice, though). The only track that goes beyond
the five minute mark – and only three exceed four minutes –
is the aforementioned Herbie Nichols cover. Interesting that Kaufmann
should opt for a Nichols piece, inviting as it does the comparison
with that other great Dutch pianist and Nichols champion, Misha Mengelberg.
There's not much to compare actually – though we'll have more
to say about Misha when we discuss the Karayorgis outing below –
Kaufmann is fluid, supple, exhibiting a relaxed and nuanced pianism
that owes as much to a classical training, and the tradition of the
Etude (Debussy and Ligeti..), while Mengelberg is gauche,
clunky and Monky. Kaufmann's reading of "2300 Skiddoo" is
a real treat (and reveals a thorough knowledge of Misha, Monk –
but also Messiaen), but it's only one of a whole bag of treats on
offer here.
The difference between Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, according to a
splendid documentary on the life and work of the former that came
my way recently as a bonus DVD with my copy of An American In
Paris, was that Astaire's centre of gravity was higher
than Kelly's; the same might be said of Kaufmann compared to Pandelis
Karayorgis. Not that Karayorgis is heavy-handed – far from it:
his reading of Warne Marsh's "Background Music" is loose-limbed
and supple – but, like Monk, he tends to treat the piano as
what it is first and foremost: a percussion instrument. Seventeen
Pieces, his first solo release, is his sixth outing on Leo (after
three splendid Leo Lab dates including Heart and Sack with
Nate McBride and Randy Peterson, and the trio Blood Ballad and
the quintet Disambiguation) and according to the liner notes
it's a project Karayorgis been working on and up to for a number of
years. It's not surprising then to come across a selection of material
that charts his development so far, from Ellington's "Prelude
to a Kiss" via Lennie Tristano's "Baby " to Dolphy's
"Gazzelloni". Monk's in there, of course – "Ugly
Beauty" and a cunning reading of "Criss Cross" –
as is Sun Ra ("Super Bronze"), but apart from a couple of
other old chestnuts the music is by Karayorgis himself. Mengelberg
once more comes to mind, not only because of the Monk connection,
but because Karayorgis is quite happy if need be to let his explorations
lead him off the beaten track (though he usually manages to find his
way back to the footpath before too long, whereas Misha is often quite
content to remain plunking away obstinately in the undergrowth, sometimes
never coming back in at all). Throughout, that centre of
gravity remains low: Karayorgis has little time for the top octaves
– ethereal tinkling is most definitely not his thing –
nor does he go for the clusters and fisticuffs that Kaufmann occasionally
indulges in. From a technical point of view Seventeen Pieces
is a much more straight ahead affair than Knives, and one
not afraid to use the J word (jazz), either; but Karyorgis's way of
working his material is just as advanced as Kaufmann's. His version
of "Gazzelloni" is as masterly as his cover of "Miss
Ann" on Heart and Sack (and not many musicians have
got the balls to tackle that thorny head), finding and exploring the
common ground between Dolphy and Monk – all angles and corners,
a world where interval counts more than pitch – and he can approach
a standard like "I Don't Stand A Ghost Of A Chance With You"
in a thoroughly oblique and constructivist manner without sounding
in any way deliberately ironic or subversive. Karayorgis's originals
are as strong and memorable as Kaufmann's extemporisations, and there's
little to choose between Kaufmann's reading of Nichols and Karayorgis's
covers. In fact, there's no point comparing these two albums any more.
You need them both.—DW
Territory Band-3
MAP THEORY
Okka Disk 12060
Gold
Sparkle Trio with Ken Vandermark
BROOKLYN CANTOS
Squealer 039
Triage
AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY
Okka Disk 12052
Given
Ken Vandermark’s impatience with most jazz criticism, I’m
almost hesitant to comment on Map Theory, the third outing
by his Territory Band, but it's an enjoyable example of Vandermark
extending his musical ideas to a larger group as well as exploring
non-jazz themes. The band’s instrumentation, augmenting the
Vandermark 5 with other playmates – Kevin Drumm on electronics,
trumpeter Axel Dörner, saxophonist Fredrik Ljungkvist, tuba-player
Per-Ake Holmlander, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, pianist Jim Baker and
percussionists Paul Lytton and Paal Nilssen-Love – gives the
music a flavor unlike anything else in Vandermark’s work. Territory
Band compositions are variations on the riff-driven “acoustic
machines” that have characterized the V5, with Drumm and Lytton
in particular adding quirky textures to the mix. Things get off to
a good start with “A Certain Light” (dedicated to the
memory of Peter Kowald), on which the propulsive motifs of Vandermark's
baritone sax initiate the piece’s thematic shifts. When he’s
joined by the entire group the effect is stirring, but the moments
when the ensemble breaks up into smaller, quieter units are just as
satisfying – the two versions of the composition “Slides”
explore the possible subgroupings of the ensemble to great effect.
The final “Image as Text” runs out of steam somewhat;
without it Map Theory might have been a satisfying single
disc release (the two discs together barely run more than 80 minutes)
– so if you’re looking for an introduction to the group
the single-CD release Atlas is perhaps the one to get.
Vandermark
fits in perfectly in the Ornettish agenda of the Gold Sparkle Trio.
Brooklyn Cantos begins with the Revolutionary Ensemble’s
“People’s Republic”, on which Charles Water’s
chattering alto subs nicely for Leroy Jenkins’ violin. Vandermark’s
blaring tenor sounds jarring and ill considered at first, but it ultimately
redefines the song. After the Colemanesque romp of “’Burg
Girl”, “Marcella Variations #1” is a lazily loping
song composed by drummer Andrew Barker on the banjo (the Marcella
in question is his wife), with Vandermark (on bass clarinet) and bassist
Adam Roberts managing to emulate the banjo’s syncopation. Not
everything is an unqualified success – “Architecture #12
(718)”, revived from the band’s earlier release Downsizing,
lurches through various tempo changes without turning up anything
of much consequence until too late – but by the time the final
rollicking New Orleans-influenced “Carpet Quarterbagger”
is over, you have a disc that is easy to recommend to fans as well
as the uninitiated.
Vandermark
5 member Dave Rempis’s band Triage features V5 drummer Tim Daisy
and bassist Jason Ajemian. Their previous release Twenty Minute
Cliff was characterized by songs that revealed their subtle charms
only after repeated listenings, and American Mythology is
in the same vein, but digs in harder and is much more immediately
engaging as a result. Rempis’s work on tenor and alto is getting
ever more personalized and intense, and Ajemian is a similarly powerful
player, sometimes attacking the open strings and body of the bass
with sticks (that might sound gimmicky, but he does it selectively
and effectively). Meanwhile Daisy, whose joyful clatter has been a
major contribution to the Vandermark 5 for two years now, really comes
into his own in this trio setting, which more fully illustrates his
ability to provide subtle colors and shading instead of just propelling
the songs forward. There isn’t a weak moment: each cut is full
of twists and turns, and the interplay is terrific, good enough even
to recall the work of the great Chicago trio Air. I’m already
looking forward to their next release.—SG
Michael
Renkel / Luca Venitucci
STILL
L'innomable 04
I've always been fond of the word "still" and its two dictionary
definitions, one the adjective meaning calm, immobile, the other the
adverb, as in "does Berlin Reductionism still exist?" (there's
also an outside chance Messrs Renkel and Venitucci are referring to
the large vessel used in the preparation of hard liquor, though I
seriously doubt it). The answer to that question above by the way
is probably no, since there's nothing remotely reductionist / minimal
/ lowercase about this latest outing from guitarist Renkel (of the
Phosphor collective) and accordionist Venitucci (of Zeitkratzer fame).
Not that either musician was ever really hardcore minimalist in the
first place – Renkel's other outings have revealed a guitarist
closer in spirit to the euphoric Olaf Rupp than the ascetic Annette
Krebs (compare Renkel and Rupp's respective contributions to Berlin
Strings a while back), a player evidently in love with the sheer
physicality of the guitar, and not afraid to make it sound like one.
This is a direct flouting of what shall hereafter be referred to as
Rowe's Law – "Thy guitar shall under no circumstances ever
sound like a guitar" – which of course has been applied
with missionary zeal to other instruments by various practitioners
over the past few years. Luca Venitucci, though certainly well versed
in extended techniques, is no dogmatic practitioner of Rowe's Law
either (my vote for the most "extreme" accordionist right
now would go to Alfredo Costa Monteiro): even the most reactionary
devotee of French bal musette could recognise the instrument
he's playing as an accordion. That said, they certainly won't be dancing
to this at the local guinguette. Going back to the
album title, there's nothing still (immobile) about these three extended
tracks, of which the first, entitled "Second Order Observation",
is the most substantial. The music is distinctly fluid, even if it
advances at reductionism's leisurely pace. Unlike seasoned practitioners
of "classic" reductionism though, Renkel doesn't go out
of his way to avoid repetition – check out the quiet but nervous
pattern making on "Serraglio" and "Interferenze".
Venitucci, who's also credited as playing his flight-case, adds some
well-timed thuds and bangs. It all adds up to a remarkably fresh and
surprising outing from two thoughtful and creative musicians on a
label to watch.—DW
Bertrand
Gauguet
ETWA
Creative Sources cs021
Etwa
consists of seven soprano and alto saxophone solos recorded by
Pierre-Olivier Boulant in February and July 2004 in two secluded French
chapels in the Morbihan and Tarn departments. As with Stéphane
Rives’ recent Potlatch release, Fibres, we are in the
world of closely observed airflows that determinedly avoid the physical
configurations that lead to the sounds conventionally associated with
the saxophone. Using circular breathing techniques, Gauguet produces
an array of sounds, including sliding exhalations, hisses, guttural
gurgles, subterraneous rumbles, ringing overtones, whistles, and a
sound like distant wind heard from within a tunnel. Such an unorthodox
approach to pitch and timbre is worthwhile in itself, but more successful
still is Gauguet’s fashioning of this material into articulated
streams of subtle changes and sharper modulations that challenge and
delight the ear and do so without recourse to schematic prefabricated
structures. One disadvantage of circular breathing is that its relentlessness
reduces the opportunity for effective deployment of silence, but Gauguet
does pause from time to time, which provides relief and allows the
sounds of the wider soundscape, especially the calls of the birds
around the chapel, to percolate evocatively into the recording.—WS
The
Scotch of St. James
LIVE AT AMPLIFY 2004: ADDITION
Confront Collectors Series CCS2
Live
at Amplify 2004: Addition was recorded by Tim Barnes and Mark
Wastell at one of the “side shows” that supplemented the
main events at the Amplify festival held in Berlin in May 2004. Comparing
the CD with my memories of the concert, which I attended, Barnes strikes
me as louder than he was on the night, while Wastell’s playing,
heard without the benefit of watching him physically shift between
his various instruments, conveys a less high-spirited and active impression
than it did in the small Labor Sonar venue. None of this makes much
difference, however: it was a fine performance and this is a fine
disc. Barnes plays a single amplified and prepared snare drum, from
which he elicits the sounds of cracking wood, rattling, clattering
metal and rubbed skin. He eschews bold gestures and rhythmic propulsion,
giving the impression in his more extended contributions of being
engaged in some troubling, mysterious and perhaps illicit process
of physical construction. Wastell employs a wider range of sound sources,
shifting adroitly between amplified textures, tuned metallic percussion
and simple electronics. But the magic in the music comes from their
work together rather than individual efforts viewed in isolation.
Sometimes this takes the form of immediate response, as when a blast
of white noise from Wastell prompts what sounds like the agitated
ringing of a broken bell from Barnes; but more often proceeds through
a less ostentatious complementarity that keeps their respective contributions
consistent with, and cognisant of, each other without a simple pattern
of call and response. Importantly, the music also possesses an enticing
spaciousness, perfectly captured in the beautifully clear recording,
and variety, as the duo shift through various textures, volumes, combinations
and timbres over the course of the 36-minute improvisation. This is
music that demands and rewards attention from the listener. Well worth
investigating.—WS
Fred
Frith/John Zorn
FRED FRITH/JOHN ZORN
Tzadik TZ 5005
This
album, recorded as part of John Zorn's 50th birthday celebrations
at Tonic in September 2003, finds him in stellar form, his alto sax
emitting cries of indignation, a surgical emancipation from trickery,
a freedom apparently inspired by his sense of supremacy in territorial
battles against soiled lyricism. Zorn and guitarist Frith know each
other's moves by heart, but you can't help being captivated by their
deranged conversations, as Fred morphs his instrument into a multi-faceted
timbral dialect that to this day has no equal. Frith predated a lot
of what has become standard practice in today's guitar world –
alternate tunings, dissonant strumming, masterly use of the volume
pedal and percussive treatment of the body of the instrument were
practically unheard of thirty years ago – yet he still brings
everything to the table with the same good-natured innocence of a
kid picking his nose looking into the window of a toy shop. It's as
if the quasi-silences and the rumbling contingencies of 1995's The
Art of Memory (Incus) were advance warning of the storm that
this latest duo represents; while the improvisations on the earlier
album seemed to be looking for the smallest conduit to squeeze through,
the energy level goes up a few notches here, as Zorn and Frith hammer
on our sense of aural fitness, shake us by the shoulders, and force
us to reassess who and what we too easily call great. Be in no doubt
though – this one will last.—MR
Chris
Brown
TALKING DRUM
Pogus 21034-2
A
student of Gordon Mumma, William Brooks and David Rosenboom, Chicagoan
Chris Brown is an active electronic composer and improviser, and an
important figure in installations and computer music networking. This
particular project, released on Al Margolis' Pogus imprint, one of
the most uncompromising new music labels, reflects all the basic aspects
of his work. Taking sounds from several locations (Bali, Philippines,
Cuba, Holland, Hawaii and several American cities) recorded through
binaural microphones attached to his sunglasses to obtain a spatialization
more or less impossible to reproduce in a studio, Brown organized
his field recordings on a system of four laptops interacting with
live musicians, including Wadada Leo Smith, William Winant and David
Gibson. The laptop network reproduces these recordings in different
ways according to the performance of the "acoustic" musicians,
the process splintering the music into a series of interchangeable
cells, a "free-regulation-far-from-chaos" kind of result
that elicits dense conversation and textural architecture. It's what
could really be called "world music", in which Balinese
processions, Cuban dance rhythms and the chatter of Filipino markets
mix with seabirds and instruments in a cavalcade of connections and
clashes that keeps notching up our attention span throughout.—MR
Pierre
Boulez
SUR INCISES, MESSAGESQUISSE, ANTHEMES 2
Deutsche Grammophon DG 476 2528
Now reissued as part of the Gramophone Awards Collection, this disc,
glorious proof that Pierre Boulez has managed to preserve his modernist
roots without ignoring the postmodernism's return to the past, has
been hailed as a classic by contemporary music enthusiasts and will
no doubt grow in stature as the years go by. It opens with a concertante
work for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists whose
material is derived from the short piano piece "Incises"
(1994). The resulting "Sur Incises" (1996/98), suggests
incisions, a cutting into, a reminder of what happens when a pianist
strikes a key: hammer cuts into string, which in turn cuts into hammer
– a sharp, violent effect. The piano's hammers are mirrored
in the percussion and its strings in the harps, meaning the work's
sound world is organically derived – a crucial feature of all
Boulez's work – but within the confines of this ensemble he
discovers an extraordinary range of colour, and, more surprisingly,
a wide range of stylistic reference. The piece opens with a passage
that could have come straight from a jazz set – again, organically
derived: the composer's previous experiments with indeterminacy have
led him to forms which sound more improvised, where elements can once
more "cut into” each other. One of the pianos reiterates
a defiant bass note, soon surrounded by a series of complex ornaments
that curl upwards to a strummed pedal point, as in Ravel’s "Scarbo".
In the following section there are echoes of several modernist classics,
including, most prominently, Stravinsky’s "Three Movements
from Petrushka". The work’s construction is indebted to
Stravinsky, not only to the concertante arrangement in "Les Noces"
but also to the older composer's love of static ostinato and homophony,
as reflected in the deceptively simple motifs Boulez employs. Repeated
notes play a vital role, and are best reflected in the percussion,
but they are counterbalanced by ascending and descending scales, which
are better suited to the sound-world offered by the harps (although
there is a moment about half way through the work when the harps take
up the strummed pedal-point, reversing the effect). Nowhere is this
more prevalent than in the toccata section after the opening, which
occasionally makes reference to Bartók but often seems more
akin to the "War Sonatas" of Prokofiev, in sharp contrast
to the preceding music, which is far more languorous and Scriabinesque
(particularly recalling his Ninth Sonata, the "Black Mass").
Given that Boulez regards Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Webern
and Berg as the five greatest composers to have worked almost wholly
in the twentieth century and is notoriously reluctant to perform music
by any of their contemporaries, it is surprising to find him echoing
Scriabin and Prokofiev. Even more surprising is his blatant indebtedness
to Messiaen. Boulez’s love-hate relationship towards his former
teacher is exorcised as much in a free use of Messiaen’s musical
gestures as in a reaction against how those gestures are interrelated.
Although Boulez’s rational conception of form is the antithesis
of Messiaen’s surrealist collage, it does not prevent him from
adapting collage elements. In "Sur Incises", these recur
with remarkable frequency; as the toccata subsides and the second
movement begins, Boulez shifts from Eastern Europe to early twentieth-century
Vienna, the harmonic vocabulary becoming noticeably less modal. The
work ends with a dramatic gesture similar to the closing bars of Mahler’s
Sixth Symphony: a massive “incision” followed by a few
faltering heartbeats before the music fades into nothingness. Geographically,
"Sur Incises" covers most of Continental Europe, or at least
those areas Boulez is interested in. It also covers a huge stretch
of time, from 1900 to 1950. There is then an ambiguity inherent in
the work: is this a retrospective by an older composer, complete with
quotes from his oeuvre as well as his musical childhood and adolescence,
or a nod towards a more postmodern aesthetic? Maybe both positions
are two sides of the same coin: Boulez has reached a stage where an
ironic stance towards the past is adopted to test it – and consequently
reaffirm or negate it. In this light, "Sur Incises" is both
as a glorious summary of his career and an attempt to uncover many
of the elements which it has repressed.
Similar observations can be made when one compares "Messagesquisse"
(1976-77) with "Anthèmes 2" (1997). In the earlier
work, for solo cello and six accompanying cellos, there is an obvious
affinity with Bartók’s string writing explored through
the medium of atonality. In opting for a twelve-note moto perpetuo,
Boulez is aiming to compose unambiguously Western, modernist music.
"Anthèmes 2" however is an entirely different proposition,
an extremely homogenous work exploiting a solo violin in ways that
radically depart from ultra-modernist orthodoxy. One of the most important
elements in "Anthèmes 2" is the strophic medieval
psalm chant, Boulez’s six variations on it warped and distorted
by live electronics like voices singing in a Gothic cathedral. The
distortion and multiplication of the violin sounds (Boulez has clearly
learnt from Nono’s experiments in "…sofferte onde
serene…" and "La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura")
often creates microtones or glissandi, which are then incorporated
as critical structural features in their own right. Boulez has never
been critical of such figurations in the Stockhausen "Klavierstücke"
or the music of Lachenmann where their appearance is always motivated
by a serialist or quasi-serialist logic, but most of his glissandi
sound more like Xenakis, a composer who refused to have any truck
with the serialism. Xenakis's "Metastasis" was the first
score to incorporate glissandi as a major structural device, establishing
him as the de facto head of the “texturalists”,
a group Boulez implacably opposed. But Boulez is aware of his relationship
with the past, and determined to explore it. Like Wagner, he has also
founded an imposing institution that has not only declared war with
everything outside itself but which also frequently swallows its enemies’
finest ideas and digests them into something it can accept. Where
Wagner’s interest in the medieval centred on knights and warriors,
though, Boulez’s IRCAM suggests more the image of the medieval
monk or scholar. In this age of the troubadour, "Anthèmes
2" is a timely reminder of the cloister.
The performances, needless to say, are exemplary.—NR
John
Cage
ONE8
Mode 141
ONE4 / FOUR / TWENTY-NINE
OgreOgress 643157342823
"One8"
(damn this sodding machine - does anyone know how to get superscript
numbers to display in Dreamweaver? send mail) was written for the
cellist Michael Bach, who first performed the work (simultaneously
with "108", an orchestral composition) in Stuttgart in 1991.
Cage's score makes specific use of Bach's self-designed curved BACHbow,
which allows him to play all four strings of the instrument comfortably
– that said, some of the triple and quadruple stop chords the
composer demands remain fiendishly difficult to execute. The work's
53 flexible time brackets actually overlap, allowing for a continuously
sounding 43'30" performance if desired. Whether Julius Berger
does that on the other available recording of the work (on Wergo,
WER 6288-2, coupled with Sofia Gubaidulina's "Twelve Preludes")
I don't know, as I don't have a copy of that release – woe betide
anyone who wants to collect every available version of Cage's number
pieces!– but it's not an option that Bach chooses. There's plenty
of space between events in his version, making the whole thing sound
in places remarkably like Nikos Veliotis's Radial (Confront).
Which is probably not all that surprising since Veliotis uses a BACHbow
to help him create his rich drones.
The OgreOgress label's Cage series continues with "One4"
(1990), for solo percussion, "Four" (1989) for string quartet,
and "Twenty-Nine" (1991), for strings and percussion. The
performers are, as ever, the label's stalwarts Christina Fong (violins
and violas) and Glenn Freeman (percussion), along with cellist Karen
Krummel and bassist Michael Crawford. Putting Rob Haskins' liner notes
on the CD itself prevents you from reading along while listening,
and that's certainly a good thing, but make sure you have a magnifying
glass to hand – and if you suffer from eyestrain, give them
a miss altogether. "One4" consists of just fourteen sounds
– the piece lasts seven minutes – Cage providing six time
brackets for the left hand and eight for the right hand, but leaving
questions of dynamics and choice of instrumentation up to the performer.
Freeman's version is as ascetic and frosty as his other Cage percussion
outings, but helps to prepare the ear for the following "Four".
This was originally written for and premiered by the Arditti Quartet,
who have also recorded it, twice (a 30-minute version for Mode and
a 20-minute version for Audivis Montaigne), and consists of four parts,
each of which may be played by any of the players. Cage chooses notes
that lie comfortably in the range of the violin, viola and cello,
allowing for interchangeability. Each part consists of three five-minute
sections (A, B and C), with flexible time brackets and one fixed time
bracket. In a performance, parts have to be exchanged and repeated
by another player after finishing one or more sections. Fong and Krummel's
version comes with instructions to programme your CD player to provide
an alternative 30-minute ordering, two 20-minute readings and a further
two 10-minute versions. The performance is serious and well-executed,
and the flexibility of Cage's score seems to accept the possibility
of multi-tracked recording (the case here), but, probably simply due
to the fact that it was recorded by four musicians playing together,
the Arditti reading on Mode (Mode 27) seems to have a little more
presence.
One might argue that a certain kind of presence is also what's lacking
on "Twenty-Nine", in that a recording of the piece performed
by 29 musicians, in the acoustic of a concert hall or large recording
studio, would sound rather different from this overdubbed version,
impressive and craggy though it is. There's something distinctly ominous,
even suffocating, about the piece, with its gloomy timpani rolls and
eerie percussion whooshes behind a curtain of thick static string
drone. Cage once described the number pieces as a kind of metaphor
for a better world in which we could live; from a democratic and humanist
perspective that may be true, but the light in this country is pale
and low, and the landscape drab and uninviting. The people who live
there though are the salt of the earth. Bit like Lancashire, really.—DW
Giacinto
Scelsi
THE PIANO WORKS 2
Mode 143
I feel a bit guilty, given the volume of great new music being produced
these days, about reviewing two pieces written over half a century
ago. Giacinto Scelsi's "Action Music" dates after all from
1955, and his "Suite No.2" from 1930, but as this latter
– one of twelve piano suites composed by Scelsi, along with
four sonatas and forty preludes – has never been recorded before
I guess that makes it new. Well, sort of. The Suite, subtitled "The
Twelve Minor Prophets" (after Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah,
Micah, Nahum, Habakuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi) is
proof that the heady perfume of Scriabin wasn't blown away by the
smoke and mustard gas of World War One. Scelsi might already have
been moving towards the original and esoteric concepts that occupied
him in the latter part of his life, but the piano writing here, with
its heroic octaves and Lisztian flourishes, is still very nineteenth
century. Oddities such as the end of the eighth movement and the excitable
Janacek-like flurries of activity in the ninth give the impression
that this work too was a transcribed improvisation, though Sabine
Feisst's fine (as ever) liner notes claim that the composer only started
recording and transcribing his piano extemporisations at the end of
the 1940s. Of course, wealthy chap that he was, he didn't transcribe
them himself, but employed a number – as many as twelve, Feisst
notes – of assistants to do the job. I pity the poor sod who
had to write out "Action Music" and its thousands of forearm
and palm clusters. The juxtaposition of black and white note splashes
hint both at Messiaen and Ligeti's later non-tonal diatonicism, but
the bombast is still rooted in tortured Romanticism. And, improvised
though it might have been, it certainly sounds written out in Stephen
Clarke's reading – try comparing this to one of Fred Van Hove's
extended improvisations and you'll hear the difference – and
comes across as rather stilted (Scelsi's fault, not Clarke's). One
supposes that the title was chosen to imply a parallel between Scelsi's
composition and the action painting of Pollock, but for genuine Abstract
Expressionist splurge, Boulez's First and Second sonatas and the later
Klavierstücken of Stockhausen pack more of a punch. Scelsi might
indeed have been a vessel through which music flowed, but that doesn't
mean to say that it was always all that good.—DW
Tod
Dockstader / David Lee Myers
POND
ReR TDDM 1
Tod Dockstader has long been regarded as a major figure in the history
of electronic music, though his work is still relatively little known
(even to other practitioners – Luc Ferrari failed to identify
Dockstader in a recent Invisible Jukebox for The Wire), probably because
his fame rests on a handful of releases – notably Eight
Electronic Pieces, Apocalypse, Drone / Water Music
and Quatermass – that have been long out of print,
though Dockstader champions Dawson Prater (of Locust Music) and Chris
Cutler (of ReR) have been doing their best to rectify that of late
with some timely reissues. Dockstader himself stopped composing back
in the late 1960s, after the ambitious Omniphony 1 (with
James Reichert, reissued on ReR). "It was a lousy experience.
I just walked away. I guess I'd done what I wanted to do," said
the composer, with characteristic frankness. Well, the good news is
that Tod Dockstader's back, in another collaborative work, this time
with David Lee Myers, another celebrated (cult?) electronics whiz
kid. The bad news is that Pond is about as exciting as its
cover, a Dockstader photomontage that wouldn't be out of place on
some hideous Goth outing. The music itself is not bad, just uninteresting.
Sourced – surprise – from recordings of insects living
in and around a pond, I suppose there's a fair amount of fun to be
had trying to tell where the noises come from, but as Dockstader was
using the sounds of crickets and gurgling water more creatively back
in 1963, one wonders why he felt the need for a comeback. And what
that doyen of abstract music, Asmus Tietchens, who's signed several
collaborative works with Myers over the years, would make of it all
is anyone's guess. If it sends punters off towards Dockstader's great
early works, all well and good, but it'll probably end up as great
soundtrack material for some insufferably trendy PBS documentary about
bugs fucking.—DW
Simon
H. Fell / SFQ
FOUR COMPOSITIONS
Red Toucan RT 9326
When
I began reviewing it didn’t take me long to figure out that
strong-but-unpleasant adjectives beat dull-but-nice ones. (One of
my proudest moments was a rave review of a disc that referred to it
as “disgusting.”) Bassist/composer Simon Fell takes a
similar tack: his liner notes to Four Compositions amiably
speak of the music’s “icy inflexibility,” “impassive
granite blocks”, “desiccated textures and monochromatic
intensity” – to take a few phrases at random. Quite the
sales job, eh? As the stark tactile and visual metaphors suggest,
Fell tends to think of his music in terms of the visual arts. (Thirteen
Rectangles, SFQ’s previous disc, was based on a Kandinsky
painting.) This means that the pieces are often what Fell himself
calls “non-developmental”, made up of short sections –
panels, you could call them – that are juxtaposed rather than
connected by an obvious narrative logic. You always feel they could
have been arranged differently – and in fact, they often are,
since Fell is an inveterate reviser and recycler.
Though both discs of this set are credited to “SFQ”, they
are the work of two very different ensembles. Disc one, recorded in
2003, contains three pieces performed by the Thirteen Rectangles
band: clarinettist Alex Ward, trombonist Gail Brand, pianist Alex
Maguire and drummer Steve Noble, in addition to Fell himself on bass.
“Köln Klang” is a rather inscrutable composition
“inspired by and partly depicting the soundworld of a hotel
bedroom in Köln.” (My impression is that the soundworld
in question involved church bells and snoring.) “Trapped by
Formalism 2” is a collapsing-wedding-cake of a piece bookended
by a barrage of fragments and an aphoristic piano coda. “Gruppen
Modulor 2” is the longest of the three, at 24 minutes, and falls
into five distinct parts: a frenzied introduction, a clangy drum feature
overlaid by stiff Braxtonian horns, a subdued trombone/clarinet/piano
trio, a somewhat ungainly freebop “Blues” (sic:
it doesn’t sound like a blues at all) that prompts a stunning
solo from Maguire, and a cryptic, drawn-out coda. My one reservation
about an otherwise excellent disc is the echoey and colourless Gateway
Studios recording; in the louder passages Fell himself is sometimes
hard to pick out.
Disc two, a single 44-minute piece recorded in January 2004 in Liverpool’s
Bluecoat Centre by Chris Trent, benefits from a brighter, clearer
recording. The band now consists of Ward, Fell, French-horn player
Guy Llewellyn, and drummer Mark Sanders. Though Fell says the music
is “less jazz orientated”, the open textures and seamless
knitting-together of improvisation and composition make it more familiar
territory for the jazz/improv fan than disc 1. As usual with Fell,
there’s nothing obvious about how it’s put together. In
addition to the three “Liverpool” pieces (numbered 1a,
1b and 2) there are two cut-ins from the “Gruppen Modulor”
series (a tempestuous free-jazz reading of “GM2 Blues”
and the Braxton-goes-samba “GM3 Rhythm”), a whistling-wind
“Quartet” that appears to be entirely improvised and a
stripped-down coda built around Fell’s arco bass, “Kandinsky
Lines”. As far as I know this is Llewellyn’s recording
debut, and he’s obviously a player to watch: he’s a powerhouse
on an instrument usually considered a tough go for improvised music,
and his work on “GM2 Blues” is little short of astonishing.
Sanders’ slippery-eel drumming makes a huge difference to the
band sound: with his acute ear for colour he makes the air come alive
with subtle washes of overtones. But it’s Alex Ward who pulls
off the disc’s biggest coup on “Liverpool 1a” with
a clarinet solo like a half-pierced dream, tender and self-consuming,
full of charged, quick-evaporating insights. If you want a single
reason to get the album, Ward’s solo is enough: it’s simply
one of the best improvised statements I’ve heard in recent years.
As for the rest of Four Compositions, I’m sure Fell
would prefer I called it “frigid” and “intractable”,
but I’m afraid I’ll just have to settle for “outstanding”
and – horror of horrors – “highly enjoyable”.—ND
Stephan
Mathieu
THESADMAC
Headz 33
As far as I can work out there don't seem to be any spaces between
the words "The", "Sad" and "Mac" that
make up the album title – though maybe I should double check.
After all, it's the little details in life that make all the difference,
and that's especially true of Stephan Mathieu's work. Like his close
friend Akira Rabelais, whose "wonderful software creatures"
he acknowledges using here, Mathieu shows that that most functional
and impersonal of musical instruments, the laptop, is capable of producing
work not only of great beauty, but of mysterious and powerful emotion.
Mathieu's trademark slowly shifting washes of sound – "drone"
is far too banal a word to describe them, and "stasis" won't
do either, as they're never static – are simply gorgeous. The
predominantly acoustic origins of the source material, however camouflaged
and extruded beyond recognition by the software, imbue Mathieu's music
with a warmth and richness of timbre often lacking in the overpopulated
world of contemporary electronica. "Theme for Oud Amelisweerd"
is based on fragments of a Händel violin sonata (Mathieu also
credits the performers on the recording he sampled, a friendly enough
gesture) morphed into long threads of plaintive slowmotion counterpoint
(Rabelais' work on Spellwauerinsherde isn't too far away),
and three of the tracks are mixed-down versions of music originally
composed as a soundtrack to an exhibition about Leonardo da Vinci,
sourced from the music of Monteverdi, notably the magnificent "icredevirrA
(The Last Supper)". Along with the slow, elegiac material Mathieu
also smuggles in some crunchy miniatures. The opening "Anakrousis"
is intriguingly described as an "overture in Ancient Greek style
featuring the OS of an Apple Lisa computer blended with some music
of Jacques Tati movies" (Janek Schaefer is credited on "records",
curiously enough) but good luck if you can identify which ones in
nine seconds. Mathieu doesn't only look to the past for source material
either – "Tinfoil Star", featuring some exquisitely
processed viola drones, reappears in a version for a 1909 Edison wax
cylinder phonograph. Similarly, there's something deliciously obscure
about informing listeners that the six-second swooping organ glissando
called "Portrait of the Composer as Turbonegro" is "a
photograph by Petra Kallsjö and Howard Suhr Perez as interpreted
by Tracy Rivers' Krachhaus". Interleaving the contemplative and
the melancholy with the playful and childlike is a Mathieu hallmark:
"Luft von anderen Planeten" (a titular homage to poet Stefan
George, but also to the second Schoenberg String Quartet) features
recordings of Mathieu's daughter Eva-Lucy, "making sticks and
stones soup" in the family garden, but the poignancy of the track
comes from the rich harmony underlying the field recordings. This,
is turns out, is sourced from Derek Holzer's recordings of radio emissions
from space, and another meaning is subtly mapped onto Mathieu's work,
the juxtaposition of the local and the universal, the tiny, gentle
gestures of a little girl and the inhuman immensity of the cosmos.
Is that going over the top? My esteemed colleague Brian Marley, reviewing
this one for The Wire last November, seemed to think it was all a
little too much, even going so far as to use the words "heavy-handed",
but as far as I'm concerned, you can "give me excess of it, that,
surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die."—DW
Darren
Tate
BY THE STREAM
Fungal 10
REMAINS
Fungal 11
STRANGE ARTIFACT
Fungal 12
Besides being
a mainstay of the Ora and Monos collectives, well known for various
masterpieces in the domain of electronica / field recordings, York's
Darren Tate has released a sizeable body of work on his own Fungal
label, including solo releases and collaborations with good friends
including Colin Potter, Andrew Chalk and Paul Bradley. These come
in ultra limited editions of 50 or 100 copies, so move quickly because
most of them are real gems, and highly desirable objects in their
own right thanks to Tate's fine accompanying artwork, often incorporating
real flowers, leaves and other organic materials.
Concentrate a little bit while listening to By The Stream and
soon a resinoid liquid composed of hypnotic electro-loops (courtesy
Colin Potter) will flood your mental space. The water flowing throughout
the record's course forms an environmental backdrop to unfathomable
materializations of concrete instrumental embellishment – an
acoustic guitar emits its lamentations for several minutes –
and revisitations of blurred snapshots in a radioactive quasi-serenity.
This is serious sound painting and its only drawback is its brevity,
at about 36 minutes.
Remains was composed in 1985-86 and was remastered by Andrew
Chalk in 2004. It's a sort of an improvised study of the low range
of a synthesizer mixed with distant noises such as motor engines (a
Tate trademark) and what sounds like muffled firecrackers towards
the end. With just these few elements, Tate sustains the interest
over 56 minutes very proficiently; the droning lows come and go, sometimes
a little louder to rouse us up from a dark crystal torpor of pacificatory
glissandos. The music effectively levitates, pure without being empty-headed,
imbued with a candour typical of its creator's approach to art in
general.
Only a guitar and a concertina were used along with the usual tape
work on Strange Artifact, but don't let the simple structure
of these improvisations fool you: Tate carefully calibrates his timbres
in a morass of shortwaves, alternating airy concertina fragments and
detuned guitar, sometimes raising the background disturbance level
to help him achieve an electroacoustic vibe while maintaining the
in-the-moment freedom of unadulterated experimentation. Further confirmation
that Darren Tate is one of the most open and sincere soundscapers,
well above the legions of nonentities on a bandwagon that's really
become too easy to jump on.—MR
Andrea
Ermke
PIKE
Zarek 09
Iovae
QUATERVOIS
Zarek 08
Ignaz Schick, who runs the Zarek label, was (is still?) a member of
Berlin's Phosphor collective and the trio Perlonex (with Burkhard
Beins and Jörg Maria Zeger), but has recently distanced himself
somewhat from the chilly lowercase aesthetic that characterised Phosphor's
debut album on Potlatch. These two latest outings from Zarek represent
a move away from the introvert asceticism of Petit Pale,
Schick's earlier outing with Andrea Neumann, towards a noisier outside
world. Berlin-based Andrea Ermke's Pike – she seems
to have a thing about fish.. the last track of hers I came across
was "Fish In A Box" on the excellent Charhizma compilation
Labor (either that or it's a homage to Ian Lavender's character
in the cult BBC comedy series Dads Army, though I seriously
doubt it) – is a splendidly active 20-minute piece using sampler,
minidisc and field recordings. Gritty clusters and oppressive hums
combine with gasps, sighs, roaring traffic, dripping taps and slamming
doors to produce a rich and rewarding listening experience. File this
one alongside Joel Stern and Michael Northam's Wormwood on
Ground Fault. Watch out for the surprise ending too while you're at
it.
If Pike has its nasty spots, Quatervois is unremittingly
raw and heavy going – and none the worse for it either. Iovae
(aka Cincinatti-based Ron Orovitz) also deserves an outing on Erik
Hoffman's Ground Fault imprint as one of the USA's more adventurous
noisicians. These five tracks, whose titles, like Toshiya Tsunoda's,
basically tell you all you need to know ("plastic water cooler
and drum kit", "air-rifle and wine bottles", "three
tone-generator oscillators channelled through reverb boxes",
"solar radio emissions with telemetry / morse code" and
– my favourite – "machine gun assortment courtesy
of Knob Creek Range, Fort Knox, Kentucky"). The music ranges
from the abstract ("Linn Drum machine with oscillators")
to the viscerally damaging ("air-rifle and wine bottles"
is great if you're feeling pissed off with the world but don't want
to vent your fury on your prized possessions), and the great thing
is that the whole album clocks in at well under half an hour, meaning
you can listen to it twice as often.—DW
Janek
Schaefer/Philip Jeck
SONGS FOR EUROPE
Asphodel ASP 2026
I
must confess a personal predisposition for Janek Schaefer's obscure
meanders, previously captured in fantastic recordings – see
his website audiOh.com on how to get hold of them – but this
collaboration with Philip Jeck, though not without its moments, is
unfortunately on a slightly lower level. Songs for Europe
sounds like two expert record manipulators on the job almost because
their notoriety demanded it. The sounds are nice, the assembling is
well done as usual but the whole package lacks mystery, nostalgia,
those melancholy reminiscences of unbearable torment that –
mixed with innovative droning and sapient subtractive processes –
are the hallmark of Schaefer's best work. Philip Jeck's previous albums,
though exalted by many, have never had a great impact on my emotional
system – the Stoke turntablist is certainly honest in his approach
but everything I've heard has a "been there, done that"
aura that still prevents me from fully appreciating his musical persona.
Which is why he comes out of this record more or less unscathed, while
I'm left hoping that Janek will return to his usual form soon. If
you want to listen to his tops, rewind a few frames and get hold of
a copy of Comae – I always sneak in a compliment to
Robert Hampson wherever I can.—MR
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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