JONATHAN MC HUGH & MARK WASTELL – Hydriotaphia A combination of ARP 2600, mixing desk and 32” Paiste tam tam, recorded in 2009 at the Electronic Music Studios of London’s Goldsmiths College. The name of the synthesizer might justify the snoopy inquirer’s thinking to a certain French lady working with the same brand of wave [...]

Vexer Swiss saxophonist and composer Gallio is an affable chap and an intelligent artist. This is why he decided to send his last work to this asocial writer and less-than-clever human residue, surely the most indicated person to review two seven-inch vinyls and a CD revolving around the concept of “social music”. Kidding aside, the [...]

Leo In Ivo Perelman’s playing the tenor saxophone becomes a voice asking questions in growingly tense fashion, and even when some of the answers have been found a veritable placation of that edginess is not really achieved. This excellent record is a classic case of “just listen”: the quality of the interplay doesn’t admit critical [...]

Self Release Hailing from Connecticut, Frawley describes himself as a composer, pianist and visual artist. His field of interest, as transpiring from the 50 minutes of A Book Of Dreams, is the place where reality and hallucination meet, a no man’s land very similar to the images and sounds we all experience during nightmares, or [...]

Dragon’s Eye Many records born from the juxtaposition of outdoor environments and strictly musical materials impress with some kind of aural majesty on a first listen, then reveal a desperate shortage of ideas which in turn introduces an inevitable sense of saturation after half of their length. An Occupied Space – debut album of Los [...]

12k Influenced by French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson’s concept according to which “consciousness is a constant flow and not something that can be divided, reversed and measured” (how difficult, one thinks, reaching this conclusion must have been…), Durée sees Japanese quartet Minamo delivering a series of gentle pieces born from longer sessions of improvisation that were [...]

Line Perfectly in line (pun intended) with Richard Chartier’s label’s archetypical presentations, Australian Curgenven’s work belongs in the category of sound installation. Fortunately, it features the genre’s positive aspects more than the minimum (or overload) of self-satisfying commonplace that invariably characterizes a congested quarter where stressed lawyers and frustrated bank clerks can invent a new [...]

Waystyx In case you missed the latest news, Ralf Wehowsky is neither an overly prolific artist nor one who contents himself with formulas. Even when partially recycling materials – such as daughter Sonja singing Christmas tunes as an infant – the practice of utter transformation applied to the original source is advanced and rich in [...]

Humbug Behind the name Elektronavn operates Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Magnus Olsen Majmon, a bit of a mystery as far as an artistic “career” is concerned but positively gifted with a sort of rustic imagination that comes very welcome in these times of unjustified posturing. A good while ago, this writer had been impressed by a great [...]

Creative Sources A while back, director Pavel Borodin released a DVD documenting a concert of this quartet (Ute Wassermann, Phil Minton, Thomas Lehn and Martin Blume) at Cologne’s Loft. The final two tracks of this set were recorded in that very location, whereas the first three were captured in Bochum. It is definite that the [...]

Monotype Live takes from 2007 and 2008; both performances occurred in France. The instrumentation: alto and soprano sax (Gauguet), quarter-tone trumpet with electronics (Hautzinger), analogue synthesizer (Lehn). The CD features three improvisations of progressively growing length (circa 12, 18 and 26 minutes respectively). The fundamental character is immediately evident in the first chapter: the delicate [...]

Another Timbre Tuba for Hübsch, spinet for Schiller. An improbable combination on paper, but don’t you dare discounting the ability to extend the voice of an instrument. The duo’s chance to make something innovative with these machines arose during a Swiss residency in 2008/9 and, to quote the liners, “from our first meeting we felt [...]

Kye Vanessa Rossetto has reached the destination. The wholehearted approval of her work in the field of electroacoustic soundscaping by the elite of official criticism is seaming a dress of deserved reputation for the Austin-based artist. Mineral Orange is a fine sample of what this woman is able to do by mixing both known and [...]

Ferns I could consume much more than these twenty minutes and fifty seconds of storm recordings from Oregon, captured on tape between 2009 and 2010. Naturally Daniel Menche is not the first who attempts to create significant reactions in a listener’s psyche through the logic of acoustic threat elicited by the clout of blizzards; BJ [...]

1000Füssler A nice little 3-inch from 2008, comprising materials originally crafted for an installation to be held in an indoor swimming pool in Brussels. Gunter Adler (a nom d’art) carried his endeavour to realization by manipulating a concoction of field recordings (from the building’s insides), “antique heptatonic scales” and synthesized echoes. In subsequent parts, those [...]

Leo Scoolptures: a triad of Italians (bassist-cum-metallophone Nicola Negrini, reedist Achille Succi and sinewave wizard Antonio Della Marina) augmented by French drummer Philippe Garcia. Three of them utilize live electronics, doing it with intelligence to spare. In actuality, the whole of Materiale Umano sounds like a shrewdly conceived project, testifying about how often brilliant recordings [...]

Mutable Many people don’t seem to accept the fact that artists whose development is rooted in jazz can also show competence within a classic ambit. Instead, as George Lewis aptly underlines in his notes to this album, already in 1930 William Grant Still had talked about the feasibility, for those performers, of tackling “academic” music [...]

Mutable While not likely to cause ecstatic dyspnoea, these four improvisations by pianist Crothers – a protégée of Lennie Tristano during her formative years, and a frequent artistic partner of Max Roach – and restless bassist Bisio include fractions of absorbing spontaneous interaction. As a whole, though, Session At 475 Kent sounds like a string [...]

Mutable Baritone saxophonist and fervent campaigner Fred Ho has been wrestling against an aggressive cancer for almost five years now. The chronicles of this battle are easily available on the web, so any further detail on the issue is going to be circumvented in this write-up. The CD reviewed here – whose title will be [...]

HatOLOGY Instant Composers Pool Orchestra. What a great name and concept. Getting rid of worn-out schemes – or using those very commonplaces as means to mock “serious” ensembles – seems to be Misha Mengelberg’s unit primary objective. But there’s plenty more behind bounciness and sarcasm as these numbers, recorded in November 1997 in Zurich and [...]

HatOLOGY I’ll admit it straight away: Rotator features a kind of interaction that leaves me pretty cold despite the leader’s excellent intentions. Canadian saxophonist Adkins is first and foremost an avid learner of the history of the instrument, a voice on tenor not instantly comparable to anyone else’s in this “I’m-not-a-Downbeat-critic” memory but not fighting [...]

Mikroton Ever since the very first instants one realizes of being in front of a special record. The way in which Christian Wolfarth’s cymbals instantly find an accurate point of resonance, taking the listener by the hand as a swimming instructor leads a little kid into the pool for the initial lesson, gives the idea [...]

Clean Feed No chance of getting bored when two masters – albeit of different age and background – hold a course in immediate creation of uncontaminated, restorative music such as that contained by Tooth And Nail. A guitar/trumpet duo revealing hundreds of singular yet familiar-sounding facets, Joe Morris and Nate Wooley are stylistically unattached, both [...]

Clean Feed Theoretically led by drummer Tom Rainey, this trio is a democratic affair involving him with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock (on tenor and soprano) and guitarist Mary Halvorson. The general feel is one of complete improvisation, though I’m not aware if pre-composed structures were utilized at some stage. The musicianship is obviously top-notch; no time [...]

Room40 The expression “ambient sublimity” appears in the liners, but this is not ambient. The label “electronica” gives no satisfaction. Compositions? Too weak. And even considering the world’s nastiest stereotype, namely the “soundtrack for an imaginary movie” definition, The North Bend works just a tiny bit of a little. The essence of this outing is [...]

Zeitkratzer The psychological aggression and sense of distress allegedly originated by Whitehouse’s material vanishes in a few instants if one avoids the excessive scrutiny of what’s blatant and simply gives in to the vicious aural hammering that those fuzzily screaming blurs and membrane-shattering frequencies generate. Then again, are William Bennett’s topics that shocking nowadays? An [...]

Mikroton Seven live tracks – five recorded in Vienna, two in Wels – give us a rather splendid vision of four strong personalities sounding unassumingly intelligent across a 50-minute span. The instrumentation features electronics, bass, lloopp, clarinet, piano and hurdy-gurdy. After an introductory droning spell that had me thinking about a somewhat static dissertation, surprises [...]

Maybe he doesn’t remember, but Joe Williamson’s excellent The Ungrateful Carjacker (Grob) was among the very first reviews penned for this website. Great to hear from the man again via the initial three releases on his own imprint, needless to say arrived here quite a while ago. JOE WILLIAMSON & THE INCONVENIENCE – Everything Should [...]

From Ilse Kayn, January 5, 2011: “He left this world today from his home“. A worse way to start the new year I can’t think of. The main inspiration for this website and a strong influence on several aspects of my life, not only music-related, has gone. Rest in peace, Roland – and thanks for [...]

Hinterzimmer Thanks in particular to the unexpected (and long overdue) appearance of a profile on Wire in 2008, the web sees the inevitable surfacing of doodlers chanting the immensity of Ghédalia Tazartès. Someone even rants in pathetically self-aggrandizing manner, along the lines of “I’ve always needed this stuff for my daily doses of out-of-ordinariness”, and [...]

Emanem The joint effort exercised by Paul Hubweber and Philip Zoubek in this CD, containing a 2007 performance at Brussels’ L’Archiduc organized by Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg, will reward attentive ears with a multitude of gifts. Despite the 24 years of age difference between the performers (1954 the trombonist, 1978 the pianist), the music produced sounds [...]

Pogus This double CD gathers a number of fairly important opuses by Peruvian composer Bolaños, born in 1931 and part of a wave of local experimental musicians who in the mid-sixties tried to encompass the demands of the avant-garde in their approach to composition. The bulk of Bolaños’ activity occurred at Buenos Aires’ CLAEM (Centro [...]

Domizil The term “subsegmental” has to do with the “smallest units of sound in language, i.e. the phonemes”. In this disc, the concept is applied to sounds which Marcus Maeder recorded and slowed down, working on short fragments of the altered sources (the original ones are left unspecified), scrutinizing the intimate essence, magnifying the grain [...]