PIERRE GERARD / SHINKEI – Static Forms 33 minutes subdivided in two individual pieces. Gerard’s is the longest one, inspired by John Cage (repeatedly quoted in the press release; let’s not forget that those sentences opened the road to all kinds of artistic nonentity, thus I tend to read them with a mixture of perplexity [...]

Another Timbre Heartland – consisting of two long improvised segments from 2008, one recorded in studio, the other live at New York’s Roulette – stands among the few piano solo records heard in recent times that didn’t initiate the mild sense of “been there, done that” which by now tends to affect even some of [...]

Flux With indefensible delay – as usual, I hear someone muttering – we land in the second chapter of Frank Rothkamm’s Tetralogy series, which meanwhile has arrived at the fourth (stay tuned, I’ll try and catch up soon-ish). Zahra Fugues – first acoustic release by the German artist in 25 years – is a collection [...]

Neos The theorbo is a lute with an incredibly long neck, Stephan Rath a master of this instrument specialized in early music repertoires. Scott Fields is, well, Scott Fields – in this occasion picking a gorgeously sounding nylon string guitar made by Robert Ruck. In 2007, MusikTriennale Köln run the series “Solos For Duos, Improvisation [...]

Shih Shih Wu Ai Was Zen invented by someone whose ordinary brain was not able to control simultaneity, then the concept evolved until the truths went upside down? Perhaps. Where do we place artists who, on the contrary, manage to exploit those unstoppable concomitances while curtailing half-witted statements? These were questions that came to mind [...]

Leo Always a great pleasure returning to the exuberant ebullience and sensitive reminiscing of Sainkho Namchylak’s voice. In this case, though, it’s perhaps her comrade Nick Sudnick (credited as composer) who causes the outcome to be well over average. By utilizing an array of peculiar stringed instruments – which he calls “electro-acoustic sound objects” – [...]

Entr’acte Helena Gough’s sound art makes you feel in need of a password in order to access her world, and it’s not a given that you’ll be able to identify with what’s really meant in there. The previous With What Remains (same label) had been a fantastic debut, certainly not easy to duplicate. Now Mikroklimata [...]

New World Look for the probable in Scott Fields’ work and prepare yourselves to bang your head hard, for a record like Samuel – the successor to Beckett on Clean Feed – is designed to pose questions, not answer them. The lone certainty derived from weeks of attentive scrutiny is the acceptance of my fraught [...]

Creative Sources Better known as a guitarist, O’Leary presents a different outlook on the (admittedly worn-out) subject of field recordings in a metropolitan environment, the Irish city of Cork in this case. The four chapters comprise classic recipes – largely based on church bells, traffic noise, car engines, people’s voices – in which we can [...]

Another Timbre Byways Cornford, regularly active in the area of installation and sound sculpture, exploits piano feedback; Rodgers – unknown to me until today – uses the same instrument, with the aid of unspecified objects. Three movements in which the predominant colour is generated by the ebb and flow of the feedback, related gradations of [...]

NoBusiness The piano trio is a receptacle for triteness and idée fixe, we all know that. There’s no stylish virtuosity able to defeat the sickly taste of a frazzled standard or the exhaustion elicited by an unconvincing improvisation. Luckily, there are also types of three-headed ensembles where waywardness and lucidity seem to reach an ideal [...]

Leo In the first half of this CD, Argentinean singer Katja Cruz (nee Kruscher) evokes vague similarities to Meredith Monk, though on a decidedly inferior procedural level. Still, her solo improvisations sound genuine, dictated by a veritable desire of penetrating the actual spirit of the ancient eras to which the record’s title refers. The timbre [...]

Scissor Death Nick Hoffmann’s Scissor Death imprint is the domicile of several artistic derivations led by the same man, who – about two years ago – was so kind to mail various samples of his multifaceted work. This comprises captivatingly convoluted drawings (a booklet called How To Make Things Happen is quite attractive in that [...]

Leo The initial “Sunrise, Twice” – cellist Ernst Reijseger and trombonist Nils Wogram depicting a slow parabola under the leader’s melancholic figures – is already deserving of a mention among the classics. But Simon Nabatov won’t stop there: he’s indeed one of the few piano virtuosos around that doesn’t need to flex his technical muscles, [...]

Psi Stephen Grew, Richard Scott, Nick Grew and David Ross constitute the vital organs of Grutronics, an improvising body formed by musicians endowed with ascertained technical preparation on acoustic instruments. Alternatively, for this project they make the most of the possibilities of electronics, sampling, analogue synthesis and processing to create music that is extraordinarily multicolored, [...]

Psi In the accompanying booklet, the protagonists spend thousands of words trying to define a series of coordinates to characterize the essence of their collaboration, framing it in a succession of intellectual clarifications and considerations that, in all sincerity, are more a detriment to the natural evolution of the music presented than a concrete contribution [...]

Creative Sources The instrumentation comprises violin, viola, two drums, bamboo, breath, voice and objects. The quartet tries to affirm concepts in the “purely organic” ambit: small noises, minor rustling, whispered crepitations are a constant presence, the quietness of the environment attempting to attribute significance to something that, from the beginning, does not appear that precious. [...]

Satelita In January and February of 2010, Cologne’s Kunst-Station Sankt Peter hosted a composite multimedia installation, described in detail – in German – on the cover. Its soundtrack was created by Polish artist Maciej Sledziecki with the local “contemporary organ”. This instrument is endowed with a series of features that distinguish it from a regular [...]

Ping Pong Right after pushing “play” on my Discman, the suspicion arose of having inserted a wrong CD: a barrage of fuzzy guitar shards and rollercoaster drumming that put in connection with Last Exit’s warmonger attitude. It’s a great beginning for this set, consisting of twelve duos recorded in 1999 in a London studio and [...]

FMR The quartet of Pat Thomas (piano), Simon H. Fell (double bass, prerecordings), Han Bennink (drums) and Steve Noble (turntables, manipulations) creates a veritable hallucination consisting of exquisite free playing interspersed with fragments of evergreen themes by Henry Mancini such as “Moon River”, “Peter Gunn”, an unrecognizable “Pink Panther” and other less legendary songs. The [...]

Thankyou Third release featuring trombonist Vlatkovich with a rhythm section – in this occasion Chris Lee (drums) and Kent McLagen (acoustic bass) – after No Zee Two Es and Queen Dynamo (both of which were missed here). The music was recorded live in Denver in 2007, the briskness of the interplay justifying its origin. This [...]

Cuneiform At this juncture I can’t possibly agree with the label’s enthusiastic propaganda for this trio of young men. Guitarist Mike Eber, bassist Johnny DeBlase and drummer Jeff Eber are described as a “21st century update” to entities such as Massacre, Ronald Shannon Jackson, James Blood Ulmer. Seriously, I’m ever appreciative of the juvenile infatuation [...]

Clean Feed A set of complex compositions and a few improvisations that at times sound as vivaciously articulate as a drunken teacher’s excursion in front of blank-eyed pupils, elsewhere giving a chance to the protagonists for starting their own brand of Pindaric flight, always with technically impeccable flamboyance but, alas, only occasionally warming this listener’s [...]

Antifrost Ilios, Coti K and Nikos Veliotis are Mohammad. Except for the first and the last track, in which there’s a sort of vague hint to the structure of a “tune” (actually, a couple of passages in the opening “Vildblomma” remind me of the mellotron intro to Genesis’ “Watcher Of The Skies”…) the whole CD [...]

Cuneiform Always count on Cuneiform when you want to retrieve some of those good post-RIO flavours. Brown Vs Brown are a quartet of which I’m familiar with just one of the members (saxophonist Dirk Bruinsma, of Blast renown – his baritone is still punching hard), but it doesn’t matter: their mix of explicit reference to [...]

Split “198 scratches, itches and ailments”. This is the succinct description given by the blurb for this intriguing item, consisting in a double CD and a wall chart containing a drawing (“by colleagues and friends, from Otomo Yoshihide to Clare’s mum”) related to each of the 99 + 99 tracks, recorded between 2003 and 2008 [...]