OgreOgress When one listens to the utter consistency and spiritual coherence defining the character of the music contained by this audio DVD (over two hours of splendid material) it’s hard to believe that these works run along a 57-year span. But that’s the truth: the 55 (!) tracks depict a path that starts in 1935 [...]

Self-Release Yet another change of line-up in The Remote Viewers, now a septet consisting of four saxophonists (Dave Petts, Adrian Northover, Sue Lynch and Caroline Kraabel), an equally eminent rhythm section (bassist John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders) and Rosa Lynch-Northover on marimba. The compositions encompassed by To The North were entirely penned by Petts, [...]

Unseen Worlds How to cope with a stylistic collocation of Elodie Lauten’s creativity without recurring to inaccurate terms such as “post-minimalist”? Not an easy task – exactly like establishing the actual depth of her compositions, which intermittently appear several tads shallower than the early leaders of that area’s preeminent output. Yet they hold a distinctiveness [...]

PHIL MILLER / IN CAHOOTS – Conspiracy Theories Moonjune Are we still allowed to declare – three years from its release – that this is Phil Miller’s best solo record? Over 70 minutes of tunes that stretch, just the necessary bit, the boundaries of anything that the guitarist has touched along several decades. Hell, there [...]

Moonjune Recorded in concerts held in Austria and Germany in 2009, the tracks comprised in this easy-to-enjoy disc are not looking to dazzle with novelty – how could Soft Machine Legacy do that? – but they accomplish their mission, which is that of entertaining a good chunk of the fans of the group willing to [...]

Impressus Those who know me are aware of the almost inexistent sympathy with anything that has to do with Italy, but this does not detract from my objectiveness as a writer. When class is palpable, surely it won’t be denied from this keyboard; moreover, Miano is a compatriot transplanted in Bronx, NY, a doctor in [...]

3Leaves Field work from the North East Coast of England, a place where I really would like to go one day, yet convinced that – excluding highly improbable sudden turns for the better in the Italian economy – this is not going to happen. A partial idea of the echoes that can be caught while [...]

Another Timbre As opposed to the dubiously hermitic vacuous experiments we’ve grown up used to in this department – places where the wet hiss of an air current has really nothing new to transmit nowadays, and the crackling taps on the wood of an instrument have become parts of a universally known jargon – A.D. [...]

Bocian Sounds like ruthless locusts, capable of eating away at conventions and remain indestructible. Tapestries of acoustic information, now hypnotic now irksome, showing the way in which a mere audio message can sow seeds of enthralling inquietude that flourish in a sort of joyless enlightenment. In this LP we take delivery of recent communications from [...]

Clean Feed Hopefully, my friend Dan Warburton will take a look at Martin Küchen’s liners before daring to call me a “purple prose peddler” for a second time. Hard as I tried, it was impossible to understand them (just kidding, Martin!). Then again, what’s the matter with the interpretation of words when the music is, [...]

Clean Feed That this set was recorded in the summer – during the “Jazz Em Agosto” festival – is certified by the cicadas accompanying the first instants of “Introduction” and by the gentle wind heard blowing through the microphone at one particularly silent juncture of the same selection. What’s really hot is the playing we [...]

Another Timbre A compilation of (mostly) wobbling murmured tones – adjacent or not – whose temperament is symbolized by the definition of the instrumentation: microtonal tuba (Hayward) plus bass, contrabass and hyperbass flute (Fabbriciani). After a series of attentive listens of this set – recorded in Arezzo, Tuscany, in the Basilica Di San Domenico – [...]

Pogus In the 33 minutes of Equus a sensitive individual will find lots of places to visit, the only problem being that those spots keep changing mercilessly due to Capparos and Marchetti’s compositional decisions. They actually define the opus as a journey “through human memory and history”, and what better means than a radio snippet, [...]

Iorram Guitarist Burt and saxophonist MacDonald dabble in the type of improvisation that many “specialists” with a leaking nose will consider surpassed and not consequential enough as opposed to the hieratic gravity of a “performer” listening with firm concentration to buses and police alarms coming from the nearby boulevard, presumably interspersed with various types of [...]

Iorram Two duos, recorded live in Glasgow in 2005 and 2006, Fells being the common denominator on laptop. A conspicuous aspect is the welcome discretion of the latter, an instrument too often utilized unnecessarily; here the story is completely different, since in both performances the original fiber of the instrumental foundation (double bass for MacGlone, [...]

Utech Sum Of R (the pronunciation coincides with “samovar”, don’t know how voluntarily) are Reto Mäder (aka RM 74) on bass, strings, electronics, piano and effects, Christoph Hess on manipulated turntable and Roger Ziegler on harmonium and effects. A specialized magazine would stamp their stuff with some stupid term like “doom”, probably; it’s true that [...]

HatOLOGY Steve Lacy’s music is a mixture of irony, erudite dissonance and charmingly slanted geometries, whose significance can only be confirmed by musicians gifted with responsive wittiness. Unquestionably, pianist Oberg, trombonist Thewes and drummer Griener possess the physique du role for the task, and Lacy Pool is as a heartfelt and intelligent homage as you [...]

Touch Even before perusing the cover and the press release I had instinctively associated the materials heard in The Ontology Of Noise to names such as Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, Leif Elggren and Kent Tankred; in fact, Annika Von Hausswolff is thanked by the composer, a Swedish himself (born as Christofer Lämgren) who adopts various [...]

Interval The music comprised by Moraine may appear as pretty undemanding at first, but subsequent listens reveal details that tag the record as a convincing work as opposed to a mere compilation of atmospheric stratifications. Layering is indeed the chosen technique by Govrin, who exploits both real string instruments (cello and violin) and computerized processes [...]

Bedroom Community A movie soundtrack by Sigurđsson, and heaven knows how difficult this writer finds reviewing this kind of release without having watched the connected images, as in this circumstance. Sticking to sheer sounds, there’s no problem whatsoever in declaring that they’re as beautiful as we always anticipate from this label. Bedroom Community’s usual suspects [...]

Touch The (splendid) first and fifth tracks – respectively called “Elevation” and “Ascent” – are both indicative of a hypothetical ambition to a superior level. Had the whole CD maintained the kind of mournfully gripping distinction that characterizes these two episodes, and parts of the others, it would have been a masterpiece. It’s not, but [...]

Fungal Romanticizing the sonic art of Darren Tate comes pretty easy on these shores, as the most attentive readers already know. The music – or, in this case, the pure fragments of individual reality that come out from the inventive spurts of this Yorkshire-born reclusive audio painter, inevitably sheltered by the extremely limited editions in [...]

Audioguy Korean pianist Park (born March 4, 1964 – one day before yours truly) is endowed with an impressive curriculum, highlighted by various stints as the artistic director of major avant-garde festivals, a role as improvising accompanist of silent movies and dance performances, and collaborations with names such as Kang Tae Hwan, Alfred Harth and [...]

Monotype Essentially, Gadomski and Mirt are a percussionist and a trumpeter, but in Si Si they make good use of samplers, synths, processing and various kinds of concrete sounds – including wind, the whistle of a train and even a harmonium in the marvelously vague opening “Track With Harmonium And Gongs”. The music stands between [...]

Organized Music From Thessaloniki The source is, quite obviously, the buzzing of honeybees, which Farmer recorded at an apiary in Harpenden (UK), in 2007. The stripped nature of the insects characterizes the second track “And”, but the interesting stuff comes after and – especially – before that stark sample of reality. The final “Fro” was [...]

Organized Music From Thessaloniki Adam Sussmann and Matt Earle utilize empty samplers to concoct their music, which stands in the microsound category with dignity but also without particularly noteworthy results, at least in this case. At any rate, the first two tracks of 3 are stimulating enough for an approval, being both based on the [...]

Chmafu A valuable if slightly laconic release coming in a light cardboard box enriched with two evocative black and white photos, lasting approximately 26 minutes, published in 2008 but only now arrived in my player. Robert Lepenik, an Austrian sound artist, employs rarefied touches of an acoustic piano, letting the ensuing reverberations metamorphose over the [...]

Naxos Gloria Coates is the female composer who has written the biggest number of symphonies – fifteen, like Shostakovich. This notwithstanding, there’s still an unjustified discretion surrounding her amazing music, principally characterized by the use of glissando but also abounding in tone clusters and altered tunings that hide hundreds of mysteries, signified by the breathtaking [...]

Unsounds Rebetika is a popular type of Greek musical style which many people compare to a sort of local blues. The initiative that pushed Kyriakides and Moor to action, armed respectively with a computer and guitar, is the reinterpretation of well-known tunes in that genre. Although I’m not familiar with the original material, a sureness [...]

Waystyx Philip B. Klingler is a master of what he does, namely assembling soundscapes where all kinds of sources – drones, concrete elements, electronics, turntables, modified voices, warped instruments, electricity, animals, radio and television and so forth – generate a series of hallucinations that possess the great quality of sounding as vivid and sharp as [...]

Room40 Except for the (frankly awful) final track, characterized by poorly strummed acoustic guitar chords, A Path Less Travelled is a lovely listen, with several moments of somewhat abnormal poetry. Minamo – the Japanese quartet of Keiichi Sugimoto, Yuichiro Iwashita, Namiko Sasamoto and Tetsuro Yasunaga – are definitely more intelligent musicians than a worryingly growing [...]

Leo Triangulation, from Switzerland, is the quartet of vocalist (down to the sub-contrabass range) Bruno Amstad, guitarist Christy Doran, pianist John Wolf Brennan and percussionist (also employing voice) Patrice Héral. Besides their main instruments, these gentlemen use and abuse loops, upon which the structure of the near-entirety of the album is erected; Brennan adds electronic [...]

Cuneiform A double CD featuring live sets from different groups led by Wadada Leo Smith, the ever-dramatic (yet never inimical) sound of his trumpet pushing up the level of both recordings (and, possibly, constituting the chief motivation for owning this edition). In the first set, recorded in 2008 at New York’s Vision Festival XIII, the [...]

Elevator Bath Limited edition (233 copies) of a picture disc by a sound artist whose output I’m not completely familiar with; however, the previous labels with which he’s released his stuff (Trente Oiseaux, Mystery Sea, Twenty Hertz and Crouton) spell “seriousness” from the beginning. This positive introductory vibe is repaid by the quality of the [...]

Smeraldina-Rima A rare solo release by this young anti-anesthetic American fiend, coming on a heavy vinyl LP incredibly devoid of scratches, bumps and fizzles. Should someone miss something in that sense, no worry: Mr. Wooley provides his own penetrating views on how a trumpet can be employed outside the circles of “imitation of old masters”. [...]