Orphan Sound

I’ve been missing from Jeff Gburek’s sonic microcosm for several years after the excellent Red Rose For The Sinking Ship on Triple Bath, and am seizing the chance to declare that – besides this new CD – my intention is revisiting some of the material he had published in the meantime. Initially, The Watermark might “just” resemble an album entirely revolving around an electrified acoustic guitar, indeed the most evident colouration with its clearly perceivable piezoelectric essence. However, repeated listens let us realize about the existence of hundreds of semi-disguised elements and ear-deceiving layers. What could appear as an evolved, if moderately stained prolongation of the Robbie Basho meditative canon to a superficial audience results instead in a series of tracks depicting various stages of an acousmatic journey, with all the implications that a complex mind can conceive (not completely graspable beyond the recording’s textural cloth – that’s a rule of this artist’s game).

The experience of a composer is gauged by how apparently insignificant details are deployed, and by the ability of influencing the music’s flow through those choices. The actual winning card is the juxtaposition of cleanness and deformation informing the large part of these pieces (which include a slow-as-snail, nearly stoned version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” sung by Anastasia Galkina, a homage to Jeff’s late father who used to love that tune). Certain progressions may sound uncomplicated, but the mixture of homespun echoes, decaying pianos, exotic instruments (Joseph Angelo plays sitar on the fourth chapter), real-time computer manipulation and by what Gburek calls “gnomic voices” (himself via a mouth-held microphone) contributes to an eeriness that grows parallel to the sense of familiarity. When he adds the bass recorder (*) to the palette in the seventh movement, our connection with the primary sensations dictated by a raw purity becomes stronger.

All in all, a fascinating disc needing utmost attention.

(* Note to the still-unaware Italians: a “recorder” is not a tape machine in this case, but the instrument we refer to as “flauto dolce”).

Emanem

Ah, 1972 (sigh). As this commentator was approaching Genesis, Yes and Pink Floyd during the post-post-toddler age, Paul Rutherford (trombone), Derek Bailey (amplified guitar) and Barry Guy (amplified double bass) were already tracing the lines of something very different from that path. Today we can listen to this concert at London’s Goldsmiths College – enriched by eight additional minutes taped somewhere else in the same period – thanks to the patience (and resignation, in a way) of Emanem’s honcho Martin Davidson, who waited for long years in the hope of getting an all-master-tape result before finally surrendering and deciding to use the copies in his possession, not of equivalent fidelity. Let’s ideally grab Davidson’s shoulders and tell him straight in the eye “who cares about flawlessness?”, for this set is not only a historic document of three geniuses of the improvisation at work, but a potential clinic for all sorts of undogmatic musician. Even more precious now that Guy has remained alone.

Don’t pretend of ignoring what Rutherford, Bailey and Guy have done for music, because I’m not rehashing the career-in-pills journalistic stratagem needed for the authorized press to fill up two thirds of a review. Let me focus instead on a couple of aspects. For instance, my surprise in realizing how the double bass and the trombone can emit imitative tones is authentic: there are lengthy pieces of conversation here whose humanity (meaning that the instruments sound like human beings talking) is astounding, and occasionally my ears had a hard time in understanding who was actually playing what in those egalitarian discussions. And – did anyone notice the resemblance of certain guitar swells by Bailey with the melted tumidity of subsequent experiments by Hans Reichel’s pre-Daxophone era? Of course these are just a few among the hundreds of cues that this great record offers for countless interpretations – pedantic or less. Refusal of counter-intuitive cogitation, intelligent regard for an instantaneously generated spatial arrangement, total control of the conversational dynamics, respect for an audience that never gets overwhelmed but rather entangled in the constitutional mechanics of the instrumental interaction. Valiant artists looking relaxed in the most important type of research, that which didn’t (and, for a multitude of unconnected musicians, still doesn’t) warrant too many helpings of bread and butter.

Fine art to revere for decades to come.

Die Schachtel

More than two years ago, Luigi Archetti produced a master stroke with the first volume of Null on this same label. A high degree of “artist’s pureness” – let’s even call it “intransigence”, which in this case is a major praise on my behalf – is also immediately detectable in the second and third chapters of that great opus. This set is the continuation of a timbral research that mostly has to do with the intangibles of resonance: not only of a note (or a noise for that matter) in a defined spot, but in relation to how different sensibilities generate different reactions in front of uncommon acoustic manifestations. Here comes the principal issue of this music: it works whatever environmental context you place it into, yet believing to casually stick an “ambient” tag on it is a stupid error, demonstrating that the record is not being assimilated as it should.

Traits of somewhat disheartened awareness of an abysmal “beyond” are perceivable throughout the over 130 minutes of the double CD. Guitars remain the first and foremost constituent of Archetti’s work, their stifled vibrations, post-minimalist repetitions and sudden outbreaks towards the realms of acridness allowing a continual genetic mutation of the aural (id)entity. This, improbably enough, represents a veritable continuum in which everything makes sense, small refractions of light piercing the many gloomy zones every once in a while. These sounds appear as propagations of a human conception, though, not the cold fruits of a tree of mechanical bitterness. We can envisage the concealed instigator bent upon the instruments in a laboratory, capturing on tape nuances that get translated into emotional response in few truly disciplined addressees on the other side. Darkish waves born from the insides of a soul, seemingly destined to the obliteration of intellectual meanings – which is, after all, the key to survival in this day and age.

Latham

Tremendous session released in 2009, and the second time that I come to a record involving trumpet and flugelhorn player Brian Groder with full years of delay after my previous review of his Torque, which perhaps explains why my writeup on that CD is the only missing from the artist’s website’s press section (hey, just kidding). Besides the main names – Burton Greene, of course, on piano – the other musicians are Adam Lane (bass), Rob Browne (alto sax) and Ray Sage (drums). As soon as the immersion in the music had started, I had wondered why there were mentions of “free jazz” on Bill Shoemaker’s lucid-as-ever considerations in the liners. What immediately emerges is in fact a sense of well-organized instrumental action and precise choice of what to play and when.

There are no scores involved, though, and Groder himself states that – except for the preliminary discussions of vague “forms” – everything occurred according to the spur of the moment. So this is indeed free jazz under any aspect: many events happening at once, overlapping contrapuntal portions working as an elastic container for a wider nucleus of energies pulling the interplay’s dynamics from every possible angle. The real charm, apart from the obviously superior playing by the quintet, lies in the lack of that pseudo-hermetic jargon that usually turns hypothetical breakaways into intellectual exercises without genuine depth (technical expertise notwithstanding). Groder & Greene sounds luminous, inspired and cleverly configured; even the segments in which the overall texture becomes thicker and the collective drive approaches the “inflammable” level, there’s always a chance to individuate what the single instruments are doing, which translates 75 minutes of music in a veritable breeze.

Shinkoyo

If you paid attention, my involvement in today’s electronica – excepting the bona fide masters of the game – has been gradually dwindling, and that’s being benevolent. Put in direct (and often reiterated) words, thousands of records sound exactly the same – thanks, laptops – and selected past reviews of mine have caused important labels of the sector to stop sending promos this way – thanks, sincerity. I vividly remember Doron Sadja’s A Piece Of String, A Sunset (A.D. 2003) on 12k as an album of subtle nuances and clear-cut individuality; nine years later, Sadja is back with something that, upon repeated listens, can be called “stirring” in some of its components but, contrarily to his previous solo CD, uses features from sonic specimens that already exist (in that sense there’s a honest “indirect” admission on the very press release, which quotes Fennesz, Drumm and several other “luminaries” of the area).

The four tracks do not display extravagant complications. The most intense, even touching ones are the first two, both defined by a slumberous start and a incremental growth into a monolithic superimposition of composite synthetic layers contaminated by distortion, but still preserving the x-ray of an elementary harmony. Elsewhere, fragments of equally simple melody might induce someone to attempt an improbable parallelism with certain products from the Cluster/Roedelius chain. This sensation lasts just a few minutes, though. The lingering feel throughout is that of a refined soundtrack, a work where the compositional values reside in the verification of how symmetric luminescences and long-lasting filaments achieve expressiveness rather than in an authentic construction. It is much better to appreciate the finer details via headphone, for a room tends to add a measure of flatness to the whole. Which would be unjust after all, since this writer’s experience considers Sadja more seriously than a lot of the ever-fecund parasites infesting this garden.

RēR Megacorp

Am I hyperbolizing by stating that the “Biota sound” is one of the most immediately identifiable in the history of modern music and, absurdly, also one of the less known? No matter. Quality prevailing upon quantity is a necessity when considering the potential audience of Cape Flyaway – which, like any release by this never-enough-lauded collective of multimedia artists, is destined to remain in the memory and the hearts of those who have been following them from the beginning and are conscious of the process of evolution, refinement and acknowledgement of artistic and cultural roots that has informed the group’s output.

It’s not a real surprise to see British folksong materials employed as a crucial element in this addictive album. Biota have been interested in purely acoustic fonts for a long while: steel-stringed guitars, accordion, violin and zither are a fixture in their palette since decades ago. The coexistence with the vintage sonorities generated by Micromoog and Hammond organ (or the by-now-mythical Biomellodrone *) turns the innumerable transitions to which the music is subjected into a reversal of roles between the sonic object and the listener. It is in fact the latter that gets studied, permeated and ultimately cleansed by a ceaselessly mutating cosmos of interlaced timbres, ever-shifting spectral dissections and incorporeal-yet-solid contrapuntal constituents. Fragments of traditional tunes, the “presence” of Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch, Judy Collins, Christy Moore, June Tabor, Bothy Band as ghost guides; textural remnants that touch the very depths of one’s soul (the ninth track – all are nameless – is literally moving in its juxtaposition of guitar arpeggios, bent-string peculiarity and orchestral evanescence).

Though singling out names in such an outstanding joint effort is profoundly unjust, I’ll force myself to point out the impressive-as-ever mixing and editing job performed by William Sharp (assembling scattered sources and giving them meaning and intensity in a coherent wholeness is not an everyday task), the nearly regretful apparitions of Charles O’Meara’s piano and, of course, the modestly excellent contribution by vocalist Kristianne Gale, whose heartfelt renditions add further humanity to the record. Expectedly (and luckily), the inside booklet contains a set of magnificent visual works by Mnemonists which no word of mine can describe (check www.biotamusic.com for more). The same feel of inadequacy is experienced by this writer whenever a new work by the ensemble is spinning in his player. How to set the continuum of many superimposed existences – biological and aural – into mere words? Can you detail a REM phase without producing nonsensical literature? Can you explain why certain combinations of frequencies make us suddenly envision a blurred phantom of events occurred thirty-five summers prior, in turn eliciting a state of melancholic torpor?

If you can, give me a call. The CD is still emanating its scents as I’m writing, but specifying my exact mental position at the moment is unusually tough. This sense of displacement recurs every five/seven years or so: bet your house that we’ll be there at the next meeting too, incongruously attempting to babble details about what refuses to be detailed.

(* To know what a Biomellodrone is, check this excellent interview to Sharp by Beppe Colli)

Prom Night

In Italian – but not only – “natura morta” means “still life”. Rather preposterously, the latter definition – entirely logical for me – is contrasted by the Latin-rooted languages using the literal translation “dead nature” for the kind of art that Saxon-derived idioms compare to something alive (if immobile). For sure, the trio of violist Frantz Loriot, double bassist Sean Ali and drummer Carlo Costa doesn’t sound lifeless at all. This, their first statement on disc (another, already recorded, is coming out within a few months) is a perspicaciously concise exploration of several aspects of the interrelation between timbre and dynamics. Highlighting the parallelism of varying instrumental hues and the mixing of diverse types of resounding acts – mostly giving a material indication of how the sonic fibre is set into vibration – these four tracks contain music that, while not exactly groundbreaking, possesses important qualities: it is acoustically gratifying, sturdily physical and delicate at once, and serious (minus the ostentation). The gestures might be known: scratched strings, bouncing arcos, bowed cymbals, rubbing of wood and skins. Yet the players do their job with a real interest in the perception of the interior demarcations, both individually and collectively. The investigations get them pretty close to the Polwechsel area, though the depths reached by Natura Morta are not the same. At just 32 minutes of duration, without tricks and “attitudes”, this listener feels like having been treated with respect and inclined to the repetition of the playback.

UgEXPLODE

The first adjective that comes to mind while listening to the sonic fusillades fired by this trio is “succulent”. This happens when three hyperactive improvisers are determined in showing to the listener what’s inside their arsenal without restrictions, and – a sadly overlooked issue by myriads of warts-and-all manglers – choose to show the fruits of their sessions in a very high quality standard of recording detail, which surely helps in the comprehension of the procedures. The positive consequences are evident: one, almost 80 minutes of interaction (a duration that usually causes an “oh, no!” exclamation here) are gulped, digested and entirely assimilated with ease, with beneficial effects for the synapses. Two, our faith in the ability to being engrossed by the sheer quality of complicated instrumental activity is strengthened. Three, the possibilities of finding genuinely fresh-cut stuff in this field improve dramatically.

Sandy Ewen is a new name for this reviewer. A guitarist interested in extended techniques without exaggerating with the number of appliances employed to achieve her goals, she possesses admirable insight and definitely knows the value of discipline, even during sections that would suggest the opposite. Controlling feedback, cutting the strings with the pick, emitting chipmunk destruction by working the pickups, letting the involuntary noises stay where they aren’t supposed to be, making silence where silence is due. All of this, and much more, is a part of Ewen’s jargon. The physicality evoked by the socialization with Damon Smith’s 7-string bass and Weasel Walter’s ever-reproducing fractions of already disunited tempos on the drum set is nothing short of astounding, especially because there’s no interest whatsoever – particularly on Smith’s side – in keeping the activities confined into the usual timbral palette (certain arco flights in the overacute area of that beast would make many chugging idiots armed with Strats envious). Attempting to anticipate Walter’s moves is like trying one of those “test-your-reflex” games: you never know what’s next and just get ready to react, systematically beaten by the (human) machine.

There’s no hint of impracticality around, though the action is firmly directed to what the press release rightly calls “structural disruption”. Everything transmits consistency, dynamic cognition and will of concretely translating instantaneous concepts into something worthy of being remembered (and replayed). If label-less music gifted with heart and brain is all you need, look no further.

Pan Y Rosas

One’s got to love someone whose family name’s pronunciation sounds like a truncated version of your own. Seriously, this is one of the many “first meetings” reported on these pages, in this circumstance with a cellist and composer who’s also a rare case of academically trained yet open-minded musician (punk is a part of her DNA) and human being (check her thoughts here) but, for some reason or another, hasn’t broken the ice of an inadequate visibility to date. String Theory should definitely help in achieving the goal thanks to its brilliantly multifaceted restraint. On the one hand, Ritch wanders across the galaxy of spectral-motionlessness-cum-throbbing-pulse, remaining there for long moments of magnetic sine wave-induced stasis (“16 Days”). On the other, the classic expertise of this inquiring mind emerges in “Sonata De Kinor – 1st Movement”, a soloist piece replete with echoes from a past age without romantic saccharine. In the middle of silence stands “Duo For Solo Cello”: “delicately strong” music halfway through timbral x-ray and very essential study of melodic collapse, confirming the validity of this woman’s talent which you’re strongly urged to further authenticate by downloading the album (it’s free!) and telling me that I was right (as always, haha).

Important

Feel Free can be performed in different kinds of setting (solo, group and installation). This plasticity reveals the openness of the methods applicable to Pitre’s broad scheme, essentially defined by a combination of “impermanent endlessness” (unless you decide to spin the CD in infinite repeat mode, which is highly recommended) and pitch fluctuation inside a Max/MSP-generated system where variable structures and conscious decisions by eventual players are all part of the equation. For this version the instrumentation includes guitar, hammer dulcimer, harp, cello, double bass and violin; this says a lot, in consideration of what we know about this composer’s past work. Pitre’s interest in just intonation and slowly flowering acoustic plants places him in the realm of psychoactive minimalism straight away, and this record is a glorious illustration of how relatively simple means can yield extraordinary results without the need of beatification processes. Adjectives like “consonant”, “balanced”, “warm”, “glowing” and “kaleidoscopic” can be utilized to describe how the sonic flow manifests itself to an open listener. Also, a slight tendency to more visible motions emerges amidst the stretched tones and the bright lights engendered by the superimposed strings. This is mostly induced by Pitre’s harmonics describing basic fragments of melody and by the ebbing and flowing of the other pitches, frequently grouped into organisms that literally breathe, thus attributing additional levels of soulful liveliness to the whole. Consciously or less, the ensemble never leaves the harbours of brain-reinforcing harmoniousness, still allowing the murmuring traits of the lower frequencies to affect our heartbeat, slowing it down for long minutes of anti-stress concentration. A wonderful piece of music, meditative and challenging at one and the same time.

Kendra Steiner

A meeting between two big names whose partnership would have been nearly unthinkable just a few years ago. But there’s something that links Alfred Harth with Carl Stone besides their indubitable artistry: the influence of Asian cultures on their respective lives and crafts (one is based in South Korea, the other in Japan). These six tracks constitute a compendium of two concerts occurred in 2009 and 2010 in Frankfurt and Tokyo, but the extremely high quality of the sound and the lack of audience noise makes the CD comparable to a studio work.

The set is basically built upon Stone’s transformation (via Max/MSP) of Harth’s emissions, with subsequent additions of further pre-existing materials. The palette is obviously homogeneous: Harth also treats his “babies” (which include Korean instruments like taepyeongso and dojirak) with a Kaoss pad, and uses bows on the instrument’s bell and in other parts too. Both employ samples and voice. But the description of the sources doesn’t excessively help clarifying how this uncompromising record sounds. The material, at least from what I gathered by repeated listens, appears mostly improvised. Many different scenes succeed in ever-radical spurts, without concessions to any kind of easiness or relief; a latent tension informs the bulk of the sonic settings, which in some moments approach a near-explosive configuration. Percussive aspects are frequently privileged, the mechanical features of the reeds amplified and expanded to become an out-and-out menace: imagine a giant crab walking towards you with bad intentions (“Adler_Kino 23 Gu II”). Somewhere, Harth’s pulmonary exhalations morph into powerful winds deprived of a chunk of the frequency spectrum. And I could go on.

In a way, there’s a “savage ritual” aspect to the whole. Squealing pitches and calmer floating mix, often in the ambit of a single section, with exceptional results. Not a minute passes before some sort of surprise materializes: sampled talkers telling incomprehensible things for us poor westerners, looping junctions attacking the brain from all sides. In the lengthy final track “Adler_Kino 1166-1215 IV” the progressive accumulation of acoustic substances produces such a level of eventful saturation that one foresees fire from the amplifier; maintaining a mental balance in there is not for everybody.

Ultimately, this is a seriously dissonant album that will represent a veritable nightmare if foolishly played as a background for conversation: it will grab you by the ears and destroy your social pleasures. Tough and totally unwilling to open autonomously; treat it like a shut oyster and use the knife of your concentration, provided that the edge is sharp. The pearls inside are several, but they’re not suitable for a glamorous necklace. 133 copies only – you’ve been warned.

Entr’acte

Everybody – except a few unlucky entities – knows that a rhetorical question, by definition, is not an actual request for an answer. If a normal question among a series of individual reflections related to the creative act appears on an artist’s website three years prior to the release of a CD, it is all the more unlikely that a reviewer can even entertain the idea of translating that fleeting snippet of an existence whose axis reads “making meaningful music” into an analysis of something linked to the current state of things. Incidentally, saturation can be referred to some aspects of the physics of sound or, I’m just hypothesizing, correspond to the sense of oppression rising inside a talented person when he/she sees the fruits of months of research blatantly bashed by incompetent simpletons whose verbal ejections may be temporarily nourished by recreational drugs or bad personal relations, and whose wisdom is usually built upon insignificant records believed to be masterpieces only because they were understandable enough on a first and, typically, only attempt.

In this era of laptop-induced boredom, finding an object worthy of keeping has become more and more difficult, especially when the risk is that bell-and-whistle snacks get highly praised and really significant works aren’t even really listened to before babbling about things that were never grasped in the first place. Coming in a classic Entr’acte sleeve that required surgical acts for the item to be finally extracted, Knot Invariants contains such a number of layers and intriguing revelations that confusing it with certain trash publicized by certain journalistic vending machines denotes symptoms of ADD at best, and the necessity of following an agenda at worst.

The source for the five pieces are two cellos (by Anthea Caddy and Anton Lukoszeviese). The instrument’s essence is perceptible in almost every minute of the disc, unless you start wandering around the house, perhaps washing the dishes while “assessing” the material, the golden rule of many “writers” endowed with the attention span of a mosquito. This music is made of innermost vibrations and conscious assemblage, the evident fruit of lengthy periods of systematization of the sonic substance and rethinking of the processes. Gough is a woman who puts herself in discussion, and loves being alone. A skilled audience will be able to understand this combination: intelligent restraint and will to start from zero each and every time. But there are elements that escape the limits of the compositions, the intangibles that – under the shape of abnormal subsonic resonance, dissonant partials or grating parallelism of pitches – distinguish a serious composer from the mass of dime-a-dozen impersonators.

Entirely devoid of the safety net that joyfully “inventive” dabblers use after declaring war to the conventions in pre-decided interviews, Gough relishes her seclusion with the sureness of a being that – deep down in the heart – knows that the path is right despite the many doubts. Though she’s classically trained, not a particle of her universe sounds vacuously intellectual or mentally contorted. Indeed, in its beautiful colours, this is a microcosm transmitting a type of inward-looking humanity that cannot be conceived by people whose level of comprehension is comparable to that of dozens of other equally meaningless purveyors of acoustic illiteracy, a superficial sameness seriously disturbed by statements that strike at unreachable levels. And no, mushrooms are not going to help them.

Sonoris

In an archetypical case of “less is more”, the 35 minutes of Obsidiana – a live recording – are indeed “more” than enough to establish a conception of unadulterated elemental power, conveyed by Maranha on a Hammond organ whereas Z’EV utilizes parts of his percussive array (in this context comprising stainless steel discs, bass drum and maracas). The initial phase sounds like a measuring of the currents in the place where the respective waters join, much similarly to a raga’s alap: the organ’s dark hues are surrounded by sparse touches introducing a progressive intensification of the metallic component. When the mechanism starts working at full stretch, we enter a psychoacoustic realm whose exterior facets have already induced someone among the many wannabe analysts to evoke the ghosts of celebrated names from the past (who, needless to say, have absolutely nothing to do with this music). Let these people be reminded that Z’EV is not a man who “bangs” nonchalantly and that this CD is not stuffed with mere droning psychedelia, despite vaguely analogous effects on a willing-to-be-overwhelmed audience. All the rhythmic structures respond to knotty paths of numerological quality, something that in an ideal world should be conscientiously studied for a better involvement in the composite propulsion that affects the whole piece’s systems. How those changing patterns get etched inside the massive clusters applied by Maranha – the man’s love for the first third of a keyboard is evident – is all for you to discover: I can only suggest that the trip will be instructive and fortifying, even if the light at the end of the tunnel is never visible. Comparisons are not necessary, opening the channels of perception is a must.

Western Vinyl

The late Rolf Julius was one of those not-enough-sung artists whose work with sound – particularly in his installations – contained crucial messages clothed in somewhat deceiving naturalness, which in a way corresponds to the famous “meaning of existence” that philosophers and researchers all over the world have forever been trying to set into words, miserably failing (unless you keep trusting “teachers”, the worst choice for a person’s delusional “improvement”). For the good luck of non-talkers, life’s sonic constituents are more than adequate for emphasizing the pathetic sterility of both written and verbal concepts when an individual needs to “know”. The title track’s atmosphere of soaked contemplation permits an experience that is concretely auditory and psychological at once, the listening environment filled by sharp frequencies prevailing amidst the hissing undercurrents generated by the downpours (and substantiated by the wind’s inconstant intensity). This, in turn, sets in motion a series of repetitive events – the creaking of the trees’ branches, assorted rattles, an unidentified cyclical whistle – that ultimately represent the piece’s trademark. It’s just marvellous, the overall vibe vaguely reminiscent of Nurse With Wound’s Salt Marie Celeste (minus the droning ebb and flow). This is followed by another resplendent example of “minimal innocence” called “Weitflächig” where gushing richness, praying insects and remote electronic emissions (think “amassed video games left to self-destroy in the rain”) depict a patchwork made of thousands of vital impulses while completely annihilating whatever theoretical “analysis” we could have attempted to conceive in the meantime. Unfortunately much shorter, “Music For A Glimpse Inward” concludes this exceptional album with a wet nocturnal soundscape apparently dominated by birds and crickets, but decisively enhanced by inscrutable faraway reverberations that add a touch of impalpable mystery, leaving the listener in a state of puzzled suspension when everything’s gone.

NurNichtNur

Why reviewing a record from 2006? Firstly, it’s an artistically legitimate statement even six years from its release. Secondly, a double bass duo always results in a somewhat clandestine pleasure when gifted players are implicated. And thirdly, I couldn’t manage to find a writeup about Tensid by searching with a lantern, which translated into an undeserved oblivion for an impressive CD. Starting from the basics, Philipp and Wolf recorded the set live in Frankfurt in 2002, in front of a rare example of quiet enough audience. Indeed, attentiveness is essential to enjoy this music, divided into a lengthy improvisation of circa 33 minutes and three shorter encores. The feeling after just a few instants is that of a refined fullness: the pair delivers hard knocks and light strokes, reciprocally engaging in a playscript that warrants enthralment thanks to a systematic emphasizing of the acoustic properties of the basses. While spinning the disc for the first time and attempting to get an idea of how it sounded, the room was soon filled with the scent of old woods exalted by the echoes of a bowed conscientiousness; and yet, the animation of the give-and-take action is sufficient in itself to focus on a lexicon that takes a little bit of everything of the instrument’s modern aspects, without a hint of deference to anything or anyone. The pursuit of a previously unheard lingo should ideally correspond to the primary aim of an improviser; a decade ago, these two fine partners accomplished the mission through a performance imbued with honest severity. Too bad that only a handful of persons saw and heard that.

Pax Recordings

I was noticing that the family name of Ernesto Diaz-Infante’s partner is Sturm which, after opportune anagramming, becomes “strum”. The latter constitutes today the primary technique amidst the Californian’s methods applied to his instruments (a pair of 12-string bajo sextos and several acoustic guitars, complemented by singing bowl and electronic tanpura). Civilian Life, issued almost simultaneously with the excellent Emilio on Kendra Steiner, is a collection of recordings from various studio and live settings framed in the 2003-2011 time span. It’s beautifully resounding music, as good as anything produced by Diaz-Infante in the last decade, a period where his interest has gradually shifted to what the calls “mantra guitar strumming” and, basically, has stayed there. The sound quality varies a little according to the original tapes, but the result is the same: a mind-relieving gratification bathed in droning serenity, pulsating inexorability – the man’s rhythmic consistency is astounding, he never slows down or accelerates – and an implicit trance as a main consequence. It’s a unique type of minimalism, halfway through Tony Conrad and Faust’s Outside The Dream Syndicate and the thousands of colours projected in the sky during a gorgeous sunset. Do yourselves a favour by getting a copy of both the CDs mentioned here and spin them continuously. Then look at Ernesto’s face and start wondering why there aren’t more persons like him around.

Potlatch

“E.E.” stands for Eileen Elizabeth, the name of Keith Rowe’s mother who passed away in 2009 and is the involuntary origin of this reunion, materially taking place December 17, 2010 at Les Instants Chavirés. The previous work by the duo – 2003’s masterpiece Duos for Doris, on Erstwhile – had been created right after Doris Tilbury’s passing. Basically, this CD is a prolongation of the subtle yet ever-present line that connects Rowe and Tilbury’s advancement in their life at large.

We must immediately mention how stunning the recording quality is. Everything – the smallest gesture, the faintest exhalation – appears so close to the listener’s perception that, more than once, I thought myself as an element of the stage setting. As Rowe picks various objects on the table, you can measure the indecision about manipulating one part or the other of the guitar’s neck and visualize some sort of emotional restraint, imagining slightly wavering hands applying cautious touches with the habitual respect for silence. When Tilbury rubs the piano strings with something, not only you hear the whispered pitch emitted, but also the soft, irregularly rounded noise that accompanies the motion. This sort of vibrant detail constitutes the reason for which listening to a record like this should be approached with the same self-disciplined commitment that needs to be applied to the serious practicing of a martial art.

In terms of individual response, no doubts here. We’re in presence of one of the finest ever records coming from members of the AMM circle, definitely at the altitudes of the aforementioned Duos For Doris. The initial pressure is palpable, similar to the interminable seconds preceding a uneasy yet heartfelt hug between reunited friends. The rupture of the silent spell that had divided the players following Rowe’s departure from the group unfolds gradually but without reservations. There seems to be a will of opening the respective personal diaries for the first time after many years, both men aware that only a person that they know so deeply might be able to understand the scribbling on those pages. During the set, at least three moments exist in which the joint textural escalation generates the kind of awe exclusively transmitted by influential improvisers, which – not by chance – coincide with the use of battery-powered appliances and bows. The conclusion returns to an excruciating stillness, in which we mentally pictured the audience collectively holding their breath. Even the four or five coughs previously captured by the live taping seem to fit the general sense of uncomfortable concentration rather than annoy.

Control of emotions, accurate channeling of a somewhat fluctuating creative inspiration. A precious lesson by two masters.

Creative Sources

One of the numerous merits of Ernesto Rodrigues’ Creative Sources has been, over the years, that of introducing this reviewer to brilliant players who somehow weren’t granted a proper attention on these shores. Take for example pianist Marjolaine Charbin: born in France, mostly working between Brussels and London, classically trained, a former student of Dave Douglas, Evan Parker and Joëlle Léandre, collaborations with several important names in the grassland of improvisation. With such a curriculum, I had never heard of her before, which is a shame in consideration of what was found in Kryscraft, a duo with equally unfamiliar Belgian alto saxophonist Frans Van Isacker, who’s also received good advices by artists at the level of Barre Phillips, Hayden Chisholm and Jean-Luc Guionnet.

The CD is not overly radical, yet for sure demonstrates the musicians’ finely tuned ears as far as the understated exploration of the character of an instrument is concerned. Both prefer to work “inside” their respective tools rather than exposing all they’ve learnt. The highlighting of appealing resonances in the piano’s body seems to be the primary focus in Charbin’s actions, however when she decides to let us know how skilled fingers sprint on the keyboard – track 4, there are no titles – we realize that the talent is not limited to an unnatural choice of narrow palettes. Van Isacker, too, steers clear of the many routines that saxophones can yield in nowadays’ EAI. Though he does occasionally employ the moist elements of the mouth/reed axis, the concern shown while visiting more stimulating regions – comprising sophisticated noises, quarter-tone refinement and genuinely physical pitches held everlastingly – ultimately prevails.

In essence, this is a record whose misleading caginess reveals instead a number of admirable insights. The fact that the music appears honest, discreetly stylish in a way and absolutely worthy of a further deepening of some of its aspects doesn’t hurt, either.

Desire Path

Janek Schaefer, who came to know Charlemagne Palestine’s art and human traits relatively late, narrates that their collaboration – which began in 2008 – was a way for him to bear the “keep it simple, stupid” concept in mind, as opposed to feeling “the need to make ideas complicated or clever to give them value”.

The same principle could be applied to Palestine himself as far as his famous vocal chanting is concerned: while, for example, in the overhyped Karenina he had produced two hours of unendurable falsetto howling that test the patience of anyone unwilling to pretend an appreciation, the invocations in “Raga De L’Aprés Midi Pour Aude” – first side of this magnificent vinyl LP – are delightfully suggestive and permeated with the right dose of spirituality, enhanced by a static mantle created with the aid of a sruti box, bells, various effects and unspecified “other instruments” that most probably comprise synthesizers and/or keyboards of some kind. Schaefer also vocalizes in a balanced yet floating prayer, a straightforwardly profound artistic gesture.

The second track “Fables From A Far Away Future” is opened and closed by location recordings and found sounds that the pair assembled in Brussels during the record’s groundwork, underlined at the outset by a classic ebb-and-flow wash à la Schaefer and by shrilling harmonium clusters. However the piece’s core lies in a massive organ drone – vaguely reminiscent of Palestine’s Schlingen-Blängen – that reveals its psychoactive might at sustained high volume, dynamic intensity and conflicting upper partials producing the anticipated result as everything around seems to lose materiality and definition. The voices heard at the end, just before the last pulse, appear as a reminder of the fact that – despite one’s ability of transcending states through sheer brainpower – there’s always someone near us who will bring things back to everyday normality, thus making those episodes of bodily desertion all the more memorable and precious in our memory.

Triple Bath

The correct intuitions for ever-puzzling music never abandon Alfredo Costa Monteiro in these last years, a period during which his recorded production has reached a level of solidity like never before. As we have repeatedly written in the past, the Portuguese gipsy of contemporary art can distill meaning from almost everything he touches, and – as a consequence – affecting sounds from any instrument (or object) that he decides to use. In the case of Umbralia, released quite a while ago but only recently sent to your reviewer, the choice fell on an electric organ. This decision, paired with the kind of output we’re usually furnished with by the Greek label run by Themis Pantelopoulos, reveals the area of research as that where drones, apparent motionlessness (pregnant with decisive events) and microtonality meet.

Since the very beginning one’s aware that this is not a typical “press-play-and-let-the-psyche-do-the-work” album. Costa Monteiro is an inquisitive musician, so he’s not content with a single solution; circa 12 minutes in, the strident clusters that open the program suddenly cease, and after a few instants of silence a wonderful series of sloping figurations draws arcs in the air like semi-invisible rainbows, soon “corroborated” by adjacent pitches that immediately destroy that sense of suspension with ear-piercing dissonant signals. This, in turn, morphs into another accrual of notes whose edgy traits bring out mind-intoxicating fumes: a constant flux of atypical codes and tones, the incessant rubbing constituting a veritable nirvana. This alternance of rarefaction and accumulation – at times relatively noisy – goes on for the whole extent of the composition, each time renewing our attraction towards this clever superimposition of diverse gradations: often discordant, generally bewitching.

Once again, a first-class statement that discloses its potential even at low volume but expresses it fully by playing it loud. Skilfully orientated upper partials can regulate a transitory sensory perspective of the cosmos, and Costa Monteiro doesn’t need cheap pseudonyms and “hear-me-pontificating” anonymity to perform the job.

Ini Itu

One of the various aliases of Frans De Waard, whose activity spans across the engendering of frequently captivating electronica, the organization of artistic events and his world-famous PacMan-like gulping of thousands of records for the brief reports that he and his comrades churn out in Vital Weekly. Stainless Steel is a vinyl album (playable at variable speeds and ending with locked grooves) that comes with two entirely different “styles” on each face. The first, organized around a treatment of gamelan sounds, is a decent episode of hypnotizing music whose main attraction lies in the continuous morphing of the timbral spectrum in a now static, now turbulent environment. The Balinese sources are partially recognizable in their essence, but the result is definitely electronic in its complexion, and sufficiently rewarding (I was tempted to write “DeWaarding”…). The second side is an exercise – and I’m being good-hearted in calling it so – for superimposed/looped toneless pulses-cum-click-and-pop that could even be called “stark minimalism”, but in reality is pretty boring and loses steam after just a few minutes. The press release mentions Steve Reich and Thomas Köner, both of whom might file a lawsuit for the disrespectful comparison. Overall, this record seems to work as an object for an ideological statement rather than the container of deeply meaningful sonic matter, despite the unquestionable appeal generated by some of the components (which ultimately recall the principal influence, Asmus Tietchens, more or less directly). Freiband has done, and can do, much better.
POST SCRIPTUM. Only a few hours after posting the review I realized that there was a 3-inch CD in the record’s sleeve, called Stainless Steel Redux & Finale. It’s a 19-minute track starting and ending with complete silence (except the very final moments, in which we’re offered a helping of the actual gamelan from which everything took shape). Sub-bass and hyper-acute frequencies have their say in a very sparse piece that, in some aspect, is better than its predecessor on the first side of the LP.

Absinth

Double bass and contrabass clarinet meet in a program of duos that cross the borders between a pulsating corporeality and the partial absence of organisms made of bona fide “notes”. Dafeldecker and Nabicht are long-time collaborators, but only in recent times they decided to set the results of their conjunct searching on record. In that sense they rehearse the music with the clear intent of developing structures from which they can move head-first into improvisation, thus attributing the work with a functional cohesion defined by elemental consistency and basic forms of beauty. The nine tracks are all titled “Vessels”, their large part revolving around the stylistic coordinates that had rendered EAI such an important progress a few years back; a still legitimate hypothesis when selected artistic specimens are involved. The instruments – except perhaps in the fourth and seventh parts, as we’re overcome by a potent joint drone and a correspondence of quaking and percussive energies respectively – are often voluntarily weakened in their vibrational properties, the artists inclined to the exaltation of microscopic partials and husky pitches. But this is not a “blow-air-and-scrape” kind of aesthetical backwardness. The pair is constantly aware of the implications deriving from tangible matters, and this fastidious analysis of a precise timbral ambit – totally deprived of staleness, always producing aurally gratifying substance – reveals a will of discarding conventional phenomena that elsewhere would be saluted as exceptional. The ninth episode closes the album with a juxtaposition of humming connectedness and whispered investigation of a limited scale of frequencies, ideally depicting the couple’s fundamental interest.

Leo

We had recently reviewed the work of bass clarinetist Gebhard Ullmann with Bassx3 (also featuring double bassists Chris Dahlgren and Clayton Thomas) when tackling the superb Transatlantic on this very label. Ullmann’s compositions form the spinal column of this CD, the fourth – obviously – by The Clarinet Trio (Ullmann plus Jürgen Kupke and Michael Thieke, the latter employing alto together with the “regular” version of the instrument). These eleven tracks – set apart by an extremely high level of technical conversancy – touch on several aspects that should attract audiences not necessarily limited to the practitioners of the same craft. Stylistically, the pieces range across a whole host of situations: Balkan influences, sloping swinging, stop-and-go scores where intricate contrapuntal layers are followed by linear developments and vice versa; the opening section of “Catwalk Müntzstrasse” sounds like a jarring parallelism between typewriting machines, its impelling power totally absorbing. The broken meters in the brilliant “Kleine Figuren #1” are contrasted by soloist snippets where the three expose their wide-ranging control and sensibility, whereas the subsequent “News? No News!” made me think of ROVA with clarinets in lieu of saxes. The most estimable quality in this music lies in the players’ ability to involve, despite the lack of concessions and the non-use of easy paths to capture the audience’s favours. The listening experience turns out to be a relaxing one, enriched by the sort of levelheaded, intelligently humored proficiency that separates complete musicians – willing to really communicate – from showing-off puppets.

Absinth

One of those records that instantly projects an aura of crucial gravity to the trained auditor, this joint effort by Hilton (guzheng, laptop) and Phillips (laptop) has been causing resounding ripples in this room and a couple of question marks in my head for two days now. It is also the kind of music that, built upon a pretty essential palette, transports its own complexity well beyond the initial appearance. The first two tracks “Sans Mouvement” – I and II – give more relevance to the altered lineaments of Hilton’s instrument, transmitting imagery linked to slowly mutating harmonic clouds meeting and meshing. The result is an impressive stack of semi-dissonant bowed shades, halfway through a mourning string orchestra and Bernhard Günter’s cellotar. The 24-minute title track deploys instead a succession of shorter episodes, apparently unlinked but entirely coherent as a whole, that mix additional types of (ever-splendid) resonances with the noisy/concrete details derived from the manipulation of the guzheng’s various parts. The way in which plucked chords, creaking wood and metallic intrusions are displayed and recombined into a composition characterized by several silent pauses and sudden returns of the above described stratified richness should be respected as a paradigm by many aspirants. The third part of “Sans Mouvement” is a fitting conclusion to this gorgeous release: the area of investigation is, for lack of a better description, that of underwater subsonic sonorities moving at the pace of a huge snail, barely dotted by acute computerized emissions. Superficially speaking, we could associate Lustmord (in his golden age) and Thomas Köner to the piece’s temperament. In actuality, this is the definitive seal on the envelope containing unfathomable messages by two expert operators of psyche-tingling frequencies.

Revolver Publishing

Known for numerous installations and an assortment of self-built instruments, Michael Vorfeld reveals himself to be a veritable authority in the history and functioning of light bulbs, a means that he’s often employed in his artistic enquiries. Thanks to this fascinating item (a 40-page hardbound book – written in German and English – comprising a series of splendid black and white photos of light bulbs, images taken from primeval eras to relative modernity) I found myself entirely absorbed by the wealth of details, shapes and sounds related to this progressively disappearing object, a fundamental piece of technical development in the chronicle of man’s existence and activity. Naturally the acoustic aspect remains essential, both in Vorfeld’s field of research and in this reviewer’s interest; thus it should not be surprising to learn that Light Bulb Music comes with a 42-minute, 5-track CD containing mesmeric sonic materials derived from the amplification of the noises coming from the insides of the emitters. As a light bulb has a soul – its filament – which the artist deems as an irreplaceable feature in the current lighting systems supplanting the older ones – the general sonority is defined by a natural warmth and a tendency to a physiological type of pulsation (at times enriched by toy xylophone-like accents) that is exactly what renders listening to this recording akin to a respectful nod to the pioneers who gave us a chance to “banish the shadows from our dwelling places” (Ernst Bloch, Technology And Ghost Apparitions). The disc – which should be played loud or enjoyed via headphones for best results – also constitutes a good method to develop a sense of protection, feeling surrounded by a magnified version of those infinitesimal buzzes and clicks that were a mainstay of our lonely studies late at night when we were younger. The standard of double excellence – printed matter and record alike – makes this 500-copy limited edition a must-have.

Mikroton

A collective assembled in 2003 by Australian harpist Clare Cooper, Hammeriver was originally born as a means to pay respect to Alice Coltrane while deepening the investigation of her music’s structures and spiritual meanings. For this recording, issued by Mikroton in 2010 but dating from a few years prior, Cooper surrounded herself with pianist Chris Abrahams, lloopp manipulator Christof Kurzmann, reedist Tobias Delius, double bassists Werner Dafeldecker and Clayton Thomas, and drummer Tony Buck. The ensemble’s founder stresses that “there are too many impulsive releases out there”, referring to her will of letting the music mature – even for long times – before the hypothetical publishing. She’s pretty much right – at least in principle – but it must be told that the kind of material we’re offered would have brought the same results if released the day after the session.

In essence, we perceive competent interaction around fixed elements; it might be a single note used as a pedal like in “E”, whose gradually growing layers make me think of a Branca/Tippett interbreeding rather than “laminal” (yet another journalistic compartmentalization that I have started to detest). The initial “Second Stabbing (Ohnedaruth)” is indeed a rendition of an Alice Coltrane tune, sounding as the preface to a ritual that never happens. In the droning sections, the low-register constituents make sure to impose their ascendancy: two double basses and a piano mostly played in the left half of the keyboard do mean something in terms of pulsing potential. The remaining episodes appear a little more connected with the “orthodox” aspects of a semi-libertarian instrumental performance: mindful percussiveness, cautiously plucked strings, well discernible jazz-derived tones (from Delius’ sax and clarinet, of course) and computerized complements superimposed in dignified fashion. In any case there’s always a sense of preconceived construction underlying the interplay, which mainly stays anchored in the harbour of a somewhat perturbed stillness. Several chunks are gripping, especially when Buck’s drumming starts affirming its force and the crescendos verge on the monolithic (again, “E” is the best example). However there’s no breaking new grounds in this concoction of vigorous mantras and not overly painstaking timbral research.

In a nutshell, quite effective but not indispensable.

Leonardo Pavkovic’s Moonjune is praiseworthy for a lot of different things but – from this perspective – especially for rejuvenating Allan Holdsworth’s career. I have declared it in the past and I’ll do it again: Holdsworth is considered a supreme being in this writer’s household. Firstly, as a human: he’s one of the nicest persons ever met, and I consider myself super fortunate for having had repeated chances of exchanging opinions with him before and after fifteen concerts or so. And, naturally, as a guitarist and composer, too often superficially categorized by a “fusion” label. Maybe the only fusion implied is related to many a wannabe’s brain attempting to understand what he does on the fretboard, getting their tendons strained in the meantime. In reality, Holdsworth is “just” a rare specimen of unselfish visionary… and in his (and our) mind probably still a kid, looking for the same kind of emotional messages that we used to get when we were playing records and learning an instrument step by step as youngsters. The program of issuing remastered editions of AH’s major albums, commenced by Moonjune with these two releases, will be followed regularly on Touching Extremes, the ultimate homage to a personal hero. However, it’s been eleven years that we’re expecting a new signal… But – knowing the persons involved – something tells me that the thirst could be quenched soonish. Hopefully.

ALLAN HOLDSWORTH – Hard Hat Area

This belongs to the very few Holdsworth’s darlings, which is saying a lot in consideration of the recurrent discontentment that he manifests when considering his past work. The playing unit – which includes bassist Skuli Sverrisson, keyboardist Steve Hunt and drummer Gary Husband – is very compact and extra-rehearsed, the result of having performed many of these tracks live in numerous occasions before entering the studio. This record contains one of my favourite pieces ever by the guitarist: “Tullio”, dedicated to Tullio Campagnolo (another visionary, but in the bicycling field – Holdsworth has always been a fervid pedaller, not only in a guitar-related sense). Other notable tunes include the explosive “Ruhkukah” (a friend’s term indicating the sexual act… so much for the “tranquil English gentleman” imagery) and the slower beauties “House Of Mirrors” and “Low Levels, High Stakes”. The title track is remembered for a brief edgy segment in which a sampled pizzicato violin (…cello?) inevitably makes me think to Sylvester the cat sneakily tiptoeing behind a wall in order to arrive at Tweety. “Prelude” and “Postlude” begin and close the disc with the sort of improvisational spurts we’ve (gladly) heard many times during Holdsworth’s concerts. The solos are… well, as ever with the man, they are stellar. Enough to get a copy of this fabulously sounding reissue, whose dynamical content literally zaps out of the speakers.

ALLAN HOLDSWORTH – None Too Soon

“It’s all Gordon Beck’s fault, God rest his soul”. Indeed. The late pianist, who encouraged the leader to undertake this project to increase his visibility among jazzbos, is one of the four members of the band playing in None Too Soon, perhaps the closest to “jazz” (or at least “jazz-rock”) to which Allan Holdsworth has come during his solo career. Bassist Gary Willis and drummer Kirk Covington are the other components of a charmingly bull-necked album, one that was not among my true favourites when it came out but now, after the remastering, is standing as a pretty essential statement, especially by virtue of its total lack of commonplace. John Coltrane’s “Countdown”, Bill Evans’ “Very Early” and Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is The Ocean” are gorgeous in their assortment of light-hearted quality and technically innovative regard for the original versions. The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” is a brilliant choice, the tune terrifically appropriate in the recording’s general temperament. Beck – with whom Holdsworth had recorded the glorious The Things You See in 1979 – contributes with the 2-part title track and “San Marcos”. Everything sounds tightly organized and instrumentally luminous, the atmospheres ranging between refined concentration and utterly smoking blow-out. Besides the obviousness of high-level soloism, Holdsworth’s work as chordal propeller in every song flies at unapproachable altitudes.

Moonjune

FMR

While Gjerstad (alto sax, clarinet) and Norton (drums, marimba, vibes) had already been collaborators in preceding projects, Tipples represents their first recorded meeting with Watson, here stripped of his far-famed bagpipes but offering extensive dosages of hard pressure – often in rather noxious fashion (it’s a praise…) – on the electric guitar. The music possesses an aura of impermanent practicalness, if you can forgive the oxymoron. At the very beginning, Gjerstad is the one who starts sniffing the air quite evidently, expelling a series of indoctrinate squeals and skew-whiff figures around which his companions try to build highly variable structures mostly defined by Watson’s grumblingly magmatic, unkind-yet-controlled distortion and by Norton’s propensity to depict diaphanous percussive textures highlighted by occasional spurts of complexity, either on tuned percussion or on the drum set. Over subsequent transitions, this type of organized anarchy leaves space to frequent episodes of proportional stillness, always with an eye (and both ears) open by all the participants. Under the apparent calm, boiling energies are waiting to be exploited for additional segments of unsettled dialogue. The entire record is flavoured with intelligence – not a pitch, or a noise for that matter, getting wasted – and technically erudite reactivity to the spur of the moment.

CORNSTAR – Lulla

The duo of John Latartara and Khristian Weeks, Cornstar emit cute signals from worlds where (almost) all corners appear to be rounded. In Lulla they blend a charmingly lightweight electronica with acoustic guitars and piano employed for undersized remains of melody and harmonizing textures. The resulting 35 minutes keep warm and pleasurable company if you don’t expect marvels to pop out your eyes at. Gentle digital ruptures, computerized grace, malleable liquidness, decent alteration, splintered looping: it’s all there, and it’s pretty much well made. Discreetly soothing risk-free music for late evenings. (Visceral Media)

CELER – All At Once Is What Eternity Is

Strings, samples and field recordings are the sources for this 3-inch by Celer. The soundscape stands nearer to the duo’s earlier work, with extensive washes of colossal loops ebbing and flowing without excessive changes. The layering of fixed tones and the resulting amassment of frequencies warrant an embracingly dramatic mood, interrupted every once in a while by a slight divergence towards the more concrete aspects of found sounds, and – around the fourteenth minute – by someone whispering (in Japanese?). Good one, even if not belonging among my very favorites by Will and Dani Long. (Taâlem)

VOICE OF EYE – Primaera

The husband and wife duo of Bonnie McNairn and Jim Wilson – remember Esoterica Landscape 7? – extracts implausible sonorities from who knows where, halfway through drugged seagulls and weird wind instruments (actually they build some of them). VOE situate those disturbing utterances right in the middle of a warren of stretched reverberations, ill-omened oscillations and what sounds like the synthetic warping of an already misrepresented veracity. The result is an excellent 18-minute piece, totally impulsive and brightly unpredictable in its absolute lack of comparable evidences; one that deserved four listens this afternoon. (Taâlem)

CHRISTOPHER MCFALL & ASHER – An Amber Hollowed Night

Collaboration between two masters of the respective games, sharing several traits in their methods of concocting suggestive sounds. Isolation, nocturnal settings, remote urban ambiences, a tendency to completely discard cuteness in favour of faraway rumbles accompanied by strange presences and unbalanced reception of signals. The use of what McFall calls “treated tape” adds further layers of organic decay, whereas Asher’s trademark shortwave/white noise-ish emissions define the essential (in)stability of the piece. Echoes of forlorn places, voices that are not really voices but alarming apparitions. The room is filled with black clouds, yet there are faint traces of light somewhere. For 24 minutes we forget practically everything, and start brooding on existential prospects looking even bleaker than expected. (Taâlem)

Clean Feed

Aggregat was born from Elliott Sharp’s interaction with bassist Brad Jones and drummer Ches Smith. The leader alternates tenor and soprano saxophones with guitar in twelve tracks whose level of verve is refreshingly high, from start to end. We’re introduced to unexpected aspects of Sharp’s playing in the opening tune “Nucular” – a tribute to Sonny Rollins – to the point that on a distracted first listen I found myself wondering why there was no mention of a saxophonist in the group, totally forgetting that the instrument was handled by E#. The tasty tone and sensual melodic content of that track is soon forgotten with the consecutiveness of the subsequent chapters. The customary outrageous combinations of stormy dirtiness and agglomerative structures visualized by Sharp on the fretboard, together with his avant-bluesy cries, are always something to be heard. Other methods of reed-based expression privilege squawking anti-patterns and headstrong repetition over the deceiving weightlessness of the record’s beginning. Jones’s robust timbre pervades the interplay with silently charismatic wisdom, while Smith’s drumming is expertly wayward, conscious of where accents need to fall to propel the pieces in the name of an unaffected restlessness. The trio’s improvisational shoulders are broad enough to sustain heavy burdens: no chance of getting confused in the constant shifts of outpouring energy.

Erstwhile

Surf the web and you’re going to find various types of commentary about Maruto. A writeup in particular amused me, that which starts with the reviewer’s enthusiasm for Toshimaru Nakamura’s “extreme frequencies” (as opposed to a supposed difficult acceptance by lots of people) followed by a nonchalant disclosure of the same writer’s damaged hearing. As illogical as this might appear – aural impairment and music analysis shouldn’t coexist in an ideal world – there’s a nucleus of seriousness in such a concept. Nakamura stands among the few sound artists I know of who is able to immediately get to the point through his work, entirely based on the handling of tones and noises born from a no-input mixing board. There’s no denying that the ensuing sonorities do affect a listener’s physical setting; occasionally, this might cause a psychological impact with unpredictable consequences. Maybe even catching something that in actuality does not exist, who knows.

Here’s how it works. Each being responds to subliminal impulses in individual and often aleatory ways, however there is a modicum of certainty in this area. One of them is that subsonic lows at consistent volume inevitably produce (in a sensible human aerial) a sense of half-clogged throbbing of the auricular membranes and a firm clutch on the skull’s back side, in turn putting the recipient in a state of partial immobility of their intellectual action. My long-time life companion – by now used, throughout 23 years, to all sorts of auditory torment (including records of much inferior pedigree), abruptly cut off a task of data transcription she was attempting to carry out, politely asking to halt the playback. On the diametric end of the compass, as soon as the higher frequencies materialized this morning, outside the window a group of birds – previously inaudible – started chirping involvedly, seemingly attracted by those capillary waves. My own experience brought the recognition of an impossibility to scan the entire gamut of pitches when listening via speakers, whereas a headphone session (we’re talking Beyerdynamic D 770 Pro, not bargain-priced iPod stuff) introduced a whole new range of presences that, if missed, lessen the record’s apparent worth quite a bit.

Those insidiously subtle nuances highlight the fundamental compositional traits in Maruto, whose formation is not that complex in spite of its protracted conception. The mixer’s hiss, ceaseless. An erratic preamble lasting five minutes or so, then a fixed hum taking command from then, with imperceptibly attenuating power in the final third and a minor variation in pitch, until the conclusion where this low tone – eventually left alone – is escorted by infinitesimal signals that only later reveal themselves to be coming from our ears. Temporary tinnitus, if you will. Over this foundation, all the variations devised by Nakamura – in conformation, colouration and dynamic, from virtually non-existent to penetratingly pragmatical – reinforce the work’s structure. A solid, no-frills set whose core value lies in its starkness, totally devoid of philosophies, immaterial implications and other kinds of verbose gadgetry.

In a word: let the sounds be, let the humans do the otiose talking. Some things never change.

Another Timbre

In consideration of the live setting (the CD was recorded in 2010 at Neue Musik In St Rupecht) I would like to preface this writeup with a rare praise to a specially quiet audience. Even the classic external noises of urban descent seem to behave more respectfully during the performance, almost a sign indicating the rigorousness of the procedure and the high quality of its results. A laptop duo, Taus (the synthesis of Tim and Klaus, for the inattentive ones) exploit the environment’s features with a combination of stringency, awareness of the spatial arrangement and discriminating ears. Sharing the frequency gamut according to a skilled practice, they start from utter silence with elusive waves acting as test tones of sorts, newborn sounds looking around the room to determine the corners from which they could better ricochet and the surfaces that might improve their development and dissemination. The evolution of the piece follows a design made of parallel arcs, attracting opposites and timbral ripening. Segments where the sheer movement of the head changes the complexion depicted by superimposed pitches are followed by masses of coarse mixtures and pressurized steam; never the sequence of the events appears less than logical. Circa 40 minutes in, we’re led to believe that the course of the sonic matter will end with a bang – a slowly growing quaking heftiness, a sense of latent hostility materializing bit by bit – but Blechmann and Filip displace the listeners once and for all by letting the whole return to the initial state in mere instants, their creature ultimately sheltered into the hole of stillness from where everything had begun.

Cuneiform

The precarious future of our planet is the underlying motif of Decline And Fall, the latest outing by Thinking Plague, impeccably described by the press release as an ensemble with a “fluid lineup”. For this occasion the scores were solely penned by guitarist Mike Johnson, the lone member who has played on every album. The six tracks also feature edgy performances by Dave Willey (bass), Kimara Sajn (drums, keyboards), Mark Harris (sax, clarinet) and Elaine Di Falco (all voices). The latter symbolizes perhaps the most conspicuous variation met by the ears as soon as the record starts. With deadpan accent, Di Falco enunciates all sorts of deplorable actions and ensuing consequences throughout a perpetually driving web of problematic arpeggios, systematic changes of tempo and discordantly pervasive harmonies. After a couple of listens we tend to regard her as another instrument rather than sticking a “singer” label. The lack of genuinely startling surprises (in comparison with TP’s previous records) is somehow expected, yet does not prevent us loyal devotees from wholly relishing this ingeniously contrived recipe of post-RIO complex emergency. Those whose ability of mentally processing a band’s dynamic interaction doesn’t go beyond the dragging 7/4 in Pink Floyd’s “Money” could argue that this music is appreciable by trained musicians exclusively. This must be considered a compliment: winking to the general public is not mandatory, and artistic coherence maintained across several decades of uncontaminated prowess is something that not many bands can brag about. This immersion in rhythmical ramification and discordant contrapuntal confidence strengthens the will of forgetting the easy-way-out-ness too often emerging from certain façade-only collectives who just seam a hundred of askew patterns without thinking (pun intended).

3Leaves

Though I always love listening to earth-born aural messages from the cosmos – it’s actually one of the very few pleasures remained in a life full of annoying trivial issues and constant harassments of a correct development as a human being – it’s not a secret that field recording-based activities have become one of the numerous ways in which banality establishes its dominance amidst people who don’t possess the capability of creating earnest art. But even in an overcrowded area like that, someone still manages to make me stop and think again. Enter Craig Vear – regrettably never met before spinning this CD – who recorded the waters and the surrounding environmental circumstances of the Esk river, which originates in North Yorkshire’s National Park and ends its course in the North Sea. The curiosity lies in Vear’s choice of gathering the sources by going backwards – from sea to spring – then organizing the results “in order of flow”, thus returning to the elemental consecutiveness linked to the water’s stream. Employing an array of hydrophones and air microphones, the composer (yes, he is) did a great job in understanding, with evident sensibility, if and when a sound or an incident were worth keeping; the sense of fatuous marginality that inhabits hundreds of comparable releases is completely missing here, as we sincerely felt ourselves as one of the many components of the various episodes. Fat gurgles, wooden creaks, out-of-town moans and hums, tweets (meaning real birds, not the act of highlighting sub-normality on the web) and the “modern” sounds of the harbour. A continual feeling of isolated security, sure about the fact that nature’s law is the one that really works in the end, and that the rules that it requires us to respect correspond to veritable justice.

Crippled Intellect Productions

A few thoughts on a triple LP set released towards the end of 2010 (preceded by a deluxe 45-copy “artist edition” that sold out in a flash – good luck, should you have any residual hope in a desperate hunt). Disasters Of Self has received critical acclaim everywhere, rightly so. Colley is a rather reticent sound assembler often categorized as a noise monger, but the term is extremely reductive. Let’s just say that he manages to extract absorbing musical kernels from galvanic interference and harmonic dissension, and that a dumbfounding ability in connecting the results inside concisely powerful arguments represents a major asset in his oeuvre. This particular work is a rewarding aural expedition in its thorough lack of frills; it sounds acerbically loaded, the acoustic rendering of rancid cream dripping from a three-day-old doughnut left under the sun.

The sources – as always – are not specified by the deus ex machina, though one can learn that malfunctioning gizmos, analogue synthesis and field recordings are important factors in the equation. A huge gratification is given by the loops, utilized with skilfulness to spare and characterized by a latent tension imbued with compositional talent. Colley devoted a third of the album to a series of pocket-sized cyclical scraps – including brief phrases enunciated by bleary-toned voices – encapsulated by locked grooves on the vinyl; my suggestion, in order to avoid becoming mad for the continuous visits to the turntable to push the needle forward, is recording the whole on an audio DVD and enjoying it all at once. A classic case of release in which density of substance and depth of consequence warrant hours upon hours of much needed enthralment. Elbow grease for our neural structure in absence of manifest messages.

Systems Neutralizers

The world première of this symphony occurred in Graz, Austria, at the 1989 edition of the Steirischer Herbst Festival; this recording, except for a few missing segments, is the lone evidence of its complete execution. Conducted by Gunter Meinhart, the Graz Festival Orchestra was taped in a somewhat problematic environment: throughout the performance, ear-catching audience noises tested my forbearance, partially disfiguring the positive stimulus given by the music (in particular, a woman’s compulsive coughing sounds so graphic at times that one sadistically envisions her termination in a sanatorium). In “Freeform” we hear a small explosion followed by shattered glass; perhaps a stage light’s failure.

This should not detract from the composition’s gripping attributes, reflected over a triangle of references whose corners can be identified as follows: 1) A distinct Steve Reich flavour in at least two movements (Branca has never masked his huge respect for the man, to the point of dedicating a piece of The Ascension: The Sequel to him). 2) A modern-day neoclassicism of sorts: I seemed to detect traces of Stravinsky and even Respighi in some of the most pictorial crescendos. 3) The ineluctable grandness of Branca’s forte, typified by clustered groupings, superimposed layers of pitches and non-tempered tunings. The best illustration in that sense is “Harmonic Series Chords: I”, grounded on a single-note piano impulse – curiously evocative of David Bowie’s “Warszawa” – and absolutely electrifying in its exhilarating conflict of upper partials.

Whatever the problems you might experience, getting engulfed by Branca’s monolithic vibe always constitutes a cardinal nourishment. Me? All it takes to shout “yeah!” once again is re-watching this interview and remembering the first sentences pronounced by the composer, feeling less alone in the meantime. The chordal movement had already conquered my brain many years ago: a firm belief shall not be altered by differing circumstances and futile issues linked to human amentia.

Psi

As in the recently reviewed Quartet Improvisations on this same label, Stops – released in 2010, credited to Tony Marsh but in reality a duo with Veryan Weston – was recorded at the Church of St. Peter, Whitstable. Percussion and organ give birth to stylistically unrelated interchanges, manifestly characterized by the thick gauge of the performers’ prowess. Besides the expected exercising of the resonating features of the setting – the origin of a good number of challenging frequency beats and bizarrely resounding clusters – these recordings are notable for a conspicuous, if not totally explicit sense of (warped) humour on Weston’s side. The way in which the keyboardist relates to Marsh’s ever-proficient breakage of percussive prescription via extremely disconnected figurations and trills; their joint fabrication of creepy ambiances oddly recalling B-movie soundtracks; the inherent complexity of Byzantine bursts that cast overly graphic pictures aside, pushing the music’s gravity around in a punctilious exploration of acoustic conflict. A difficult test after all; the substance is dense and stimulating, yet it takes a while to be persuaded. A nonchalant auditor is likely to throw this CD away inside ten minutes.

Porter

Dedicated to the late contrabass virtuoso Stefano Scodanibbio (with whom Thollem Mcdonas had recorded On Debussy’s Piano And… for Die Schachtel), The Gowanus Session gathers three prominent musicians turning the fruits of decades of individual research into agile vessels of compelling resonance. There are not fixed roles in this trio, though it’s impossible not to identify the voices as single elements when one pays attention. Mcdonas’ fierce flurries and harmonically complex cascades on the keyboard, William Parker’s literate motivation in dominating the double bass’ total orbit, Nels Cline’s rusted discharges, looped feedbacks and pricking snaps of his guitar strings. These characteristics tend to dissolve inside improvisational settings that privilege an overall picture of clustered intensity, barring rare exceptions in which the instruments are observable in their own unrepeatable traits. Before long, it becomes apparent that the artists’ primary purpose resides in investigating combinations that produce a rugged unity. Energies are released without falling into the traps of unconditional havoc, always maintaining an indispensable level of sanity; the power flow is kept in check, the players never dragged around by the brute force of the resultant acoustic mass. To be played loud and repetitively, in order to detect crucial nuances amidst tense crescendos and sinister intermissions.

Firehouse 12

By looking closely at Mary Halvorson’s countenance I can’t help but notice the same look of inquisitive tenacity typical of another eminent female instrumentalist, Iréne Schweizer. Both artists – though at completely different points of their careers and life – produce music whose strongest assets are intelligent concision and stubborn refusal of platitude. In that sense, it is curious to read that many of Halvorson’s titles come from scribblings of semi-coherent conceptions envisioned while falling asleep. They are amusing indeed – how about “Hemorrhaging Smiles”? At any rate, the idea of “bending bridges” rather makes one reflect on the leader’s guitar style: obliquely coiled chords, diagonal scales and sudden over-driven rowdiness surprising listeners during scores already brimming with crisscross interaction and extensive stretches for each member’s improvising skills.

The quintet is identical to the one that had performed on 2010’s Saturn Sings: Jon Irabagon on tenor sax, Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, John Hébert on bass and Ches Smith on drums. Halvorson declares an improved connection between the bandmates after two years of closeness, besides adding that she has recently listened to a lot of guitarists – from older and younger breeds – to see how the instrument fits in various orchestral/compositional contexts. The four sound tight when expanding her utterly un-memorizable awkward themes; they also act as effective opposites in the sections where a series of firmly picked notes would appear to be enough to explicit a musical thought. Irabagon and Finlayson walk across the parts with incisive figurations, now and again gambling with the most discordant traits of the melodic conjugation. Hébert and Smith jeopardise the attractive force of “official” pulses and accents, imprinting a body’s inherent aptitude with a sturdier type of vibrational wallop. When the group explodes into fusillades of jolting mayhem, it’s the logical consequence of a process. Creative tension is a crucial factor in the evolution of this difficult to categorize, but definitely impressive music.

Psi

The sense of guilt tormenting this writer when the eyes meet the hundreds of records still waiting on the desk turned into a renewed urgency to belatedly celebrate an unsung talent after reading that Tony Marsh left the planet on April 9, 2012. The analysis of the percussionist’s latest releases on this imprint had been scheduled for months; one of them – Stops, with Veryan Weston – will be dealt with very soon. More recent – though dating from nearly a year ago – is this fine offer, recorded at St. Peter’s Church, Whitstable. Marsh is accompanied by three artists – flutist Neil Metcalfe, cellist Hannah Marshall and violinist Alison Blunt – whose instrumental range naturally tends to the acute registers, the lone exception being Marshall’s rare ventures in lower regions. The players authenticate the expected high standards of skill, synthesizing the management of vulnerability and the keen ear necessary for fusing subtle nuances and transitory counterpoints in an ever-meaningful unbrokenness. The quartet’s inspection of the no man’s land separating slightly perturbed hush and fragile discrimination is carried out with a palpable respect of the dynamics of instantaneousness; flimsy textures and balanced timbral weights revolve around the same axis. While the spaces between the notes are generally ample and the volume never exceeds medium-to-whispered levels, there’s no risk of discontinuity in the music’s flux; Marsh’s total recognition of his partners is reflected in the almost circumspect manner through which he underlines ephemeral junctions and surrounds shivering pitches. The demonstration of an uncommon tendency to leave things untold when complete exposure is not an obligation, thus letting the listeners add their own inner suggestions.

AXIS TRIO – Anthem

A 2010 release from a trio featuring pianist and composer Amino Belyamani, bassist Sam Minaie and percussionist Qasim Naqvi. Though all three artists have family roots firmly planted in non-Western heritage, their music is frequently very Western in its attempt to bewitch the largest number of listeners through an occasionally fascinating formula, which inserts mild electronic disturbance amidst textures where softly evocative chord progressions interlock within cyclical patterns and structures that privilege soft transparency to extreme complication. It’s definitely a pleasing listen, not a hint to slapdash playing in sight. But it’s also one of the numerous cases in which the group’s real personality does not emerge in full, and too often we were brought to compare sonorities with those of more famous, and commercially compromised, entities (Lyle Mays, Rainer Brüninghaus). The fear – as always – is that the search for critical accolades will ultimately interfere with the genuinely creative urges. (Accretions)

CARLOS MAZA – Descanso Del Saltimbanqui

Let’s see. An excellent multi-instrumentalist, specializing in 10-string guitar and piano. Classical influences well displayed (more Romanticism than XX century). One of the projects – at least from what’s watchable at YouTube – is called “En Familia”. OK, I hear you say: Egberto Gismonti! Wrong: this man is named Carlos Maza and he hails from Chile, though Cuba also constitutes a sizeable component of his artistic development. Descanso Del Saltimbanqui is a beautifully executed record that should have no problem in establishing a direct connection with the heart of people who love a little bit of everything, provided that it is played with refinement and tenderness and not excessively straining on the nerves, or overly adventurous in terms of sonic investigation. It’s not exactly coinciding with this writer’s favourite type of listening, but there’s no question about the honesty and dedication of the composer. (La Buissonne)

Psi

The mission of Psi, according to the label’s website, is making records exclusively to support artists expressing unique individualities regardless of genre. In The Bleeding Edge – a place where the level of enlightenment by the participants defeats dumb-headed assessments influenced by personal taste – we reach such heights of fundamental interaction and mind-reading reactivity to the acoustic impulse that a parapsychologist would probably do a better reviewing job than an ill-prepared critic. Saxophones, cello and trumpets are oversimplified definitions indicating sources of aural satisfaction of the deepest kind.

One of the axiomatic traps an unconcerned commentator falls into is judging a record by seeing names and associating features that make those names vaguely familiar to the masses. Evan Parker, Okkyung Lee and Peter Evans are musicians at the top of the graduated table as far as sheer instrumental technique and command of emotional control are concerned, but – as systematically happening with non-musician audiences – the traits that remain impressed in the average retainer are the evidently vivacious, when not downright ferocious ones.

This CD – subdivided in duos and trios – lies, with few exceptions, at the opposite side. Since the very beginning, the keyword is “restraint”: composite phrases and lone pitches, whatever their grain, are carefully layered and left to naturally germinate, giving in the meantime a distinct impression of unselfish awareness of the others’ position in the room. Each performer is clearly conscious of the instant in which silence must be broken; all of them possess the rare ability of flicking the switches to dynamic escalation in amazing synchrony. And yet, even when the increase in volume and density does occur, the lingering sensation is that of a specific type of chamber ensemble-like creative reticulate, quite distant both from trivial hurly-burliness and equally undistinguishable environmental emptiness.

The above words are just a somewhat pitiable attempt to establish levels. However, outstanding music has its own way of doing that by itself.

Tzadik

“Dedicated To Shelley’s mother Fran, who could describe in the most vivid detail things that brought her pleasure (fried onion rings included!!!)”

Not only this quote from the liners lets us ascertain the genetic derivation of Shelley Hirsch’s endowment for narrative – I, for one, would spend days reading these meticulous accounts of existential shards, from apparently meaningless to hurting in the innermost – but it helps in establishing an important limit. We regularly forget about the border separating the love for our dears and the recognition of a reality that is often wholly different from what was hoped. In Where Were You Then?, Hirsch magically manages to slap the face with unforgiving truths masked as fairy tales of sorts. Not exactly with a happy ending, always replete with hundreds of barely noticeable particulars that, once joined, complete a sensational mosaic. A synthesis of adolescent adventure, violent scare, physical infatuation and sense of loss; a maturity that never thrusts childhood scents and uneasy recollections aside.

It takes a lot to pull wisdom out of such a weighty baggage through a mere record. Enter Swiss composer Simon Ho (short for Hostettler), a rather obscure and extremely talented keyboardist and arranger who, together with the more renowned partner, created sixteen delicious orchestral frames executed by musicians at the highest levels of competence (percussionist Tony Buck, bassist-cum-tuba Dave Hofstra and cellist Tomas Ulrich the “familiar” names amidst a grouping of less famous – but still fantastic – string players). Every episode of this CD is contextualized by stylistic connotations that highlight the dramatically engaging aspects of Hirsch’s recounting. The insistently shifting piano arpeggios accompanying the description of her mother’s declining health in the heartrending “The Nursing Home”. The washes of string drones ebbing and flowing under the text of “Earl And Me”, chronicle of two mature persons finally meeting after a fervid internet correspondence. The waltz typifying the opening “Kathy Ray”. The half-Mitteleuropean, half-extraterrestrial accents of “Julius”, for this writer the record’s top of gracefulness in describing the purest affection – that between a human and a dog – in a piece that will jeopardize self-imposed fortitudes in sympathetic receivers. Even the tracks gifted with a bizarre irony (“Baa Baa Black Sheep”) don’t succeed in diverting the attention from the inherent angst that informs the near entirety of this release, ideally symbolized by the memory of the Israeli athletes killed by Black September fanatics during the infamous massacre at 1972′s Olympic Games in Munich in a chapter titled “Hitchhiking/Heinz”.

Furthermore, Hirsch acknowledges a restricted group of peculiar characters – in some occasion, unsung heroes like Jim Gartenberg (a man who, in the middle of the terrorist attack at the World Trade Center, was trying to encourage live TV viewers while stuck on the 86th floor of a soon-to-crumble edifice). Throughout these stories – narrating everything from the variable effects of drugs on herself and friends to the curliness of an old woman’s pubic hair just instants before death – the vocalist epitomizes a unique role of medium: “individual experience” versus “sharing the facts of life”. How many times you’ve wished that someone understood a flux of intimate flashes that no word can express, yet a chord – or a song – perfectly conveys? With the help of a luminous compositional cohort, Shelley Hirsch has perhaps released her finest work to date, subverting roles in the meantime: at first accepting the audience as her own psychoanalyst, she ends extracting regret, affirmative smiles and utter admiration from the overwhelmed listener.

Annexia

I should start by declaring my absolute unawareness, among gazillions of other matters, of German poet Johannes Bobrowski (1917-1965) whose work apparently lies at the basis of Innerly. From a quick glance at Wikipedia one gathers that this man was very responsive to East European landscapes, and also an expert in the cultures of the people inhabiting several of those regions. Thomas Bel, who is French instead, tried to set into music the effect of Bobrowski’s words; to do this, he chose an instrumental palette mostly made of crepuscular hues, fragments of melancholic melodies (guitars, piano and cello as instantly recognizable sources) and a few touches of field recordings besides his voice.

Starting from the latter constituent, the segments in which Bel whispers and wheezes (the texts are voluntarily kept under a level of serious intelligibility in the mix) are, in all honesty, the less enticing ones. But by considering the sonic product as a whole, attributing the same value of an environmental component to those non-invasive gravelly susurrations, this is a politely cheerless good album that places itself in the middle of a line connecting various artists who use fairy-tale humidity and dim pastels as methods of expression. Indeed, its best attribute is perhaps the difficulty of sticking it with a “sounds like..” tag, despite the incidence of acoustic after-effects that you might have heard in a number of distantly related projects. Let’s play a bit of “name game”: a spongy facsimile of Richard Skelton meets a representative of Fovea Hex (in absence of Clodagh Simonds) at Eno’s mansion, a drunk David Tibet mixing the outcome while immersed to his thighs within the slimy waters of a marsh, influenced by Pink Floyd’s calmer selections from A Saucerful Of Secrets and More).

Almost dismissed at the outset, the CD is being liked more and more as the amount of spins increases. For a cold, rainy day such as that we’re subjected to at this moment, it’s just about ideal. Never give up without a second try.

Slam

Without posing as last-hour mutineers, Szilárd Mezei (viola), Ervin Malina (double bass) and István Czík (drums) pronounce the death of marginality in the jazz trio format. It is even reductive to use the word “jazz” in this case, for Mezei’s researching inventiveness is upgraded by a moving timbre that reflects East European ancestries more than anything else, travelling around quarter-tone trenchancy and melodic pathos with coordinate symmetry. Moreover, the Serbian’s playing is always sustained by an essential modesty that prevents his patent virtuosity from appearing as a protective cover for hypothetical lacks of substantial matter. In this environment, the compositions – all penned by the leader – consent the comrades’ active participation in the formulation of an argot that sounds both complex and indispensable for acquiring new perspectives on the score/improvisation kinship. Malina’s work benefits from its aggregation of architectural exactness and sinewy musculature, empiric elegance and sober propulsion well equalized throughout. Czík’s percussive solutions are blameless in a music that execrates anarchy while remaining “free” even when entirely written and orchestrated. Difficult scales in fractured tempos, evocative songs bathed in scarce tonal steadiness. There are chunks of pure excellency for everybody here, except lovers of “creative” orthodoxy.

Mikroton

Firstly, this Melbourne is in the Derbyshire county, not in Australia. In 2005, Rhodri Davies and Mark Wastell recorded a 36-minute performance at the local Festival, bringing along a number of small instruments and noise-generating devices that did NOT include their darling harp and tam-tams. Actually, if you look at the list of sources setting aside electronics and various disc players, mixers and pedals, then thinking about a duo of artisans practicing the craft in front of an audience would be nearly justified (ceramic tiles, sandpaper, wire wool and cardboard also connect the memory with some of Alfredo Costa Monteiro’s work). Anyhow, the product reflects the extreme variety and relative inexpensiveness of the sonic constituents, ultimately resulting in a short and sharp statement where one’s not afforded the luxury of sinking on the sofa or dwelling in contemplation. Initially, the shrapnel-like bursts of activity might recall a remote alien guerilla; it doesn’t take long before stabilizing factors appear, to the point that – prior to reading the instrumentation – I had thought that Davies’ eBowed strings were a part of the equation. On the contrary, the pale rainbows of harmonically layered hums are presumably the fruit of the Welshman’s lo-fi gadgets (to which perhaps a degree of singing bowl is added, though establishing roles and derivations in this kind of landscape is an ambitious task). At times, genuinely alarming crescendos defined by growling and whirring matters in charged tautness gain a considerable share of the music’s heterogeneous kinetics. Succinctly speaking, substance definitely prevails upon appearance in a set completely devoid of ornamental holiness in favour of an extremely practical, literally hands-on type of expression.

Kvitnu

“We live in a world full of information and in risk of permanent ignorance”. Vitor Joaquim is well aware of sensible people’s frustration at the impossibility of retaining significance nowadays, thus he devised Filament as a response to a situation that he obviously doesn’t like. The result is a five-track CD of elaborately mild electronica: calm enough to lull a relaxed listener into partial oblivion, organically active to the point of allowing the detection of thousands of different impulses and micro-codes. The trip is constellated by hints to the interchangeability of various states. Liquid to solid, to gaseous; synthetic to semi-vocal; rhythmically charged to almost motionless. Occasionally, the tones get very near to the darker sides of ambient, a level of oppressiveness taking command in bleak scenarios symbolizing a lack of human improvement. In the finest sections, Joaquim chose to utilize hypnotic looping, which he does with definite class and balance, protracting the mesmerism until it’s strictly necessary and never abandoning the music to a total dearth of structural development. Leaving certain cosmetic factors visible, but still keeping control on the depth of his statement, the Portuguese composer has created a milieu for fluctuating between nerve-balming meditation and the urgency of restoring a measure of normality in a gradually dissolving system of communication.

Aposiopese

A 23-minute assemblage of elemental sounds recorded in Oudon (in the proximities of Nantes) along the Loire, subsequently denatured and emulsified on a computer. It’s become quite arduous for me to convey meaningful words about this type of project; the intentions may be honourable, the aims are evidently different (in this case, the piece was utilized for something called “Radiophonic Creation Day 2011”) but, more often than not, the works end sounding basically the same. That said, Moire distinguishes himself a little bit: a conscientious processing method allowed him to seam a delicate tissue around the original materials (you can easily anticipate what they are). This gossamer membrane of pellucid harmonic shifts and timbral impermanence allows the music to be held close without transcending the limits of tedium. Halfway through semi-active ambient and the soundtrack for an installation concealed in between the river’s vegetation.

Eh?

We’re all acquainted with how a no-input mixing board works, aren’t we? Since the early age of David Myers (aka Arcane Device) until Toshimaru Nakamura’s brilliantly subtractive business, the pluralities of ever-changing shapes, abysmal droning purrs and barely contained feedback spurts have gained a more or less official existence in our listening habits. Add to the short list of practitioners of this art the name of Roger H. Smith, who in We Must Leave The Warren presents four pieces of manipulated frequencies (two of the tracks are augmented by the use of a sampler). Nothing truly hot gets added to the familiar recipe, but what Chefkirk does is absolutely on average with the conduct of his acknowledged fellow moulders. The alternance of stabilized whirr (slowly growing in thickness and quivering, but immobile just the same) and convulsive zaps amidst aleatory sequences is utterly assimilable – and at times very beautiful to hear – throughout the 51 minutes of this disc, which needs to be played loud in order to extract its finest scents.

Another Timbre

Quite inexplicably, not only I had never heard the music of Osvaldo Coluccino prior to Atto but even the name was completely foreign to my memory. Not that knowing better would have helped this time, as previous opuses by the Italian have been published and performed as scores with defined instrumentation and notation, whereas this is another type of proposal altogether.

Coluccino chose seclusion in remote places to seize the essence of undetermined objects – exclusive of any proper instrument – which he mostly struck, rubbed and in some way enlivened using his hands and breath. Affirming a necessity of being alone during the creative impulse, the performer tried to establish a connection between himself, the sonic items and the (unquestionably large) environments, looking for answers that a regular compositional process could not give him at the moment in which these tracks were conceived.

A single artist was loosely coupled by yours truly while coming to terms with this receptacle of ringing rattles, collapsing masses and assorted leftovers improved by vast reverberations: David Jackman (Organum, if you like). Not because of excessive similarities in the acoustic outcome – there aren’t many extensive drones herein, although the booming ambiences do ring a bell – but primarily for the introverted exploration of a rough palette that, upon repeated attempts, reveals surprising truths disguised amidst the relative normality of unprompted gestures.

Nothing made me vibrate to the point of authentic emotional elevation. Still, the nonexistence of standard musical components – no harmony, no melody, no rhythm, at least in the conventional acceptation of these definitions – constitutes an incentive for fine-tuning our listening abilities through what appears as a collection of echoes from an historically neglected long-ago. Not composition, not improvisation: just snapshots of states of mind, translated into substantial clatter and gentler cracks in a charged silence.