Rēr Megacorp A partial acceptability ruined by detrimental incidents. This is the lingering sensation after repeated spins of GPS, a record that leaves us chin-scratching in regard to a judgment. Guitarist and composer MacLean – who handles a pretty impressive array of instruments, also linking them to electronic / synthetic auxiliary tools – fronts a [...]

JIN HI KIM / GERRY HEMINGWAY – Pulses The impressions immediately materializing since the very first listen of this beautifully unpretentious album are clear. For starters, the conspicuous sense of spiritual empathy between players who find themselves with eyes closed, systematically drawing instant charts as they choose the proper dynamic nuances when the music’s flow [...]

Alien8 The suspect that Aidan Baker’s droning structures could be suitable for an orchestral setting is partially confirmed by “Liminoid”, a track recorded live in Toronto which sees him guiding an octet comprising three guitars, two drum sets, two cellos and a violin, all instrumentalists also credited with vocals. The merging of acoustic and electric [...]

Another Timbre Two quiet improvisations recorded in Texas in 2010 for percussion, electronics and soprano saxophone, residing in a district of EAI that has become increasingly uninteresting of late. Nevertheless, Arena Ladridos reveals several qualities and deserves attention. Intuition of movement, emergence of acoustic ectoplasms, subtle purring starting to identify the essential ground. At the [...]

Kendra Steiner Nobody stops Alfred Harth’s inventiveness, a perpetual whirlwind of activity and experimentation that – at 61 – keeps him rolling fiercely and inexplicably with an energy that younger artists (ha!) would only dream about. Issued by a tiny Texan imprint that also publishes contemporary poetry, this limited edition (123 copies) represents the last [...]

Another Timbre In every unforced sonic setting, a thin line divides incident and plan. In fact, the best improvisers are usually those who let their behaviour presume an envisaged impression, despite the autonomy granted by the lack of a score. But there are exceptions, of course. It happens, for example, when a group of performers [...]

Another Timbre The Middle Distance is an intriguing proposition in terms of orchestration. Two pianos and a double bass warrant a definite shift of the timbral balance towards the low frequency region, a zone that is perhaps more conductive than anything else as far as concealed transmissions to the psyche of a listener are concerned. [...]

Another Timbre Two alto saxophones and an electric guitar, recorded in a church in Midhopestones, in the proximity of Sheffield. Glimpses of radio futility overwhelmed by metallic clatter and a by now customary damp whoosh, a battery fan, swift gestures in abundance. Razor-like buzzing, some wrongdoing, various thuds, the progressive addition of string resonance. A [...]

AP’STROPHE – Objects Sense Objectes Ap’strophe is the union of Ferran Fages and Dimitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga, on acoustic guitar and zither respectively. The pair is obviously interested in making the instruments resound in unusual ways, an aim achieved through different methods – detuning, adjacent pitches, relative contrasts between upper partials – and apparently constituting the [...]

Gruenrekorder This release is part of a label series devoted to field recordings, though the latter only constitute the groundwork of something more comparable to a minimalist opus than a collection of acoustic landscapes. Indeed the way in which Gilles Aubry processed and seamed voices and urban noises from Cairo – taped in 2007 during [...]

Monotype While I thoroughly admire La Casa and Guionnet’s attempt of rationalizing their research in the sector of location recording – they persevere with the detailed justifications in the liner notes of this superb CD – there’s nothing a man can do to get near the complexity and intensity of the sensations given by a [...]

Anoikis Italo-American Pasut is a choreographer and dancer who transcends strict definitions. In her bodily actions, she seems to have absorbed numberless influences and experiments, many of which touch on intimate issues of being. Through an unrepressed physicality – enhanced by a pronounced, if sinewy musculature – and a gamut of expressions that make the [...]

ConSouling Sounds / No Angels Around 1992 or so – the age in which your then 28-year old correspondent was introduced to the dark ambient milestones of that time – he would have thrown himself right inside the Lustmordian resonant domes of a record like this with pleasure. There was a genuine interest everywhere for [...]

FEDERICO DURAND – La Siesta Del Ciprés Argentinean Durand is interested – like many of us, probably – in the unconsciously creative aspects of the pre-sleep phase, the moment in which the brain executes a sort of disk-scanning retrieval, re-proposing the results to our dwindling awareness. In those moments, your reviewer usually pictures places more [...]

Basses Frequences About 20 minutes of mostly well-made minimalist ambient, four re-workings of an idea by Polish Bartosz Dziadosz whose foremost version has not been heard here; thus we’re left to judge what other people prepared. The opening track is perhaps my darling in its economical unfussiness, Glitch’s respect of a repetitive pattern infused by [...]

Pest Colors Cat When music is chock full of stylistic ingredients, choosing to limit the extent of an album to less than half an hour is a smart move; at 21 minutes, Thirteen! is almost perfect in that sense. Leader Jason Berry – a multi-instrumentalist, like most of the participants – defines VTH as “a [...]

Creative Sources Inspired by Kahn’s love for Albert Ayler’s work with strings, Sin Asunto (“No Subject”) is a composition scored for bass, violin and cello – respectively handled by Christian Weber, Vincent Millioud and Bo Wiget – in combination with the composer’s amplified percussion. The graphic score, a fascinating part of which is observable in [...]

Self Release The eight improvisations carried out by this trio (enlarged to a quartet in three tracks, thanks to the addition of Peet on organ and Theremin) are critical, refined and vivid, music that mixes ingenious intuition and lucidity with the classy awareness that only those who have been committed to a scrupulous evisceration of [...]

Auf Abwegen Furthering a collaboration started in 2003, the German/American pair initiates selected audiences to aural rites in which morphing silhouettes with impulsive contours ooze glowing liquids made of impassable resonances, immediately vanishing traits, ghosts of chords and acoustic mirages. The legitimacy of the underlying conception is confirmed in two compact discs through which a [...]

Works by a gentleman from Greece who – two years ago – sent me a couple of 3-inch CDs of legitimate acousmatic music, re-discovered today in a corner of my archive. Yet another example of what happens when the amount of packets becomes overwhelming: excellent recordings get misplaced, and I’m exchanged for a bad-mannered bastard [...]

Pogus Co-founder of Pogus with Al Margolis, Gen Ken Montgomery is often unfairly disregarded when assessing the history of radical music in the last half-century. This collection – another clarification of a unendingly probing creativity – examines works from the decade in which the American composer’s terminology was first met by yours truly, at that [...]

JOHN BERNDT – New Logic For Old Saxophones A 1933 Buescher soprano and a 1935 Conn alto are the illustrious reeds through which John Berndt shows us his attempts to create a “new logic”. Being too ignorant about the history of the saxophone (though I do cuddle several darling blowers), the lone question that enters [...]

FMR Recorded in St. Mary’s Old Church, Stoke Newington, London – according to the increasingly spreading habit of performing music that in ancient times would have scared religious people to death in their very homes – Brackish comprises a series of improvisations for flute and double bass, eight tracks segueing as in a single set. [...]

Grey Sparkle Sparkle In Grey (Matteo Uggeri, Alberto Carozzi, Franz Krostopovic and Cristiano Lupo) open their half of this split 12-inch vinyl with a rather stirring piece – “These Nightmares Are Ending” – that makes great use of unusual field recordings whose nature is at once grainy and evocative, opening towards vaster lands as the [...]

No Business Flanked by a pair of stalwarts who, in his own words, “have a history going back over thirty years”, guitarist Terrence McManus brings the right attitude and a considerable number of no-frills approaches to an instrument that, especially in jazz, has the potential to become the mother of all commonplaces. On the contrary, [...]

OKSRNA Marco Oppedisano stands among the very few guitarists able to take some of the tricks upon which certain fellow axemen build a career out of musical insignificance and insert them into legitimate configurations. Like his previous works, Mechanical Uprising – third CD of the Brooklyn-based cyber-slinger – is characterized by a quasi-chirurgical fastidiousness in [...]

Agua Prieta Founded by guitarist, bassist and “singer” (more about that later) Jeff Johnson, Teenage Boatpeople was/is a rock group if you will, minus the stigmata of idiocy that all rock groups reveal one day. Unsurprisingly, a thick blanket of utter ignorance has wrapped them since the year of birth, despite the publishing of (drum [...]

Leo Lapslap’s third release is this writer’s initial approach with their work. For the occasion, the improvising entity was represented by Michael Edwards, Martin Parker, Karin Schistek and Mark Summers. The group stresses the importance of a difficult distinction between acoustic and electronically processed sources, thus revealing a will of bamboozling the audience through varying [...]

Cubus The clever exploitation of a single concept across an ideal duration of just over 26 minutes makes a rewarding listen of Canto, a work for solo soprano saxophone by Swiss Christian Kobi. This website’s regular attendants are aware of my constant invectives concerning the standardization of formerly “extended” techniques in today’s improvisation, especially as [...]

Quintoquarto Utilizing a plentiful array of regular and exotic instruments, Pak Yan Lau, João Lobo, Grégoire Tirtiaux and Daysuke Takaoka are four improvisers who – gathering under the Kuruwasan moniker – produce music that appears rather uncertain in regard to a path to follow. The tendency to noir-ish drama heard in the opening “Schröder” is [...]

IAN HOLLOWAY – Passing Through Occasionally It’s been a while without enjoying Holloway’s ever-welcome electronic canvases. This piece lasts 37 minutes, a single track calling for the utilization of the “repeat” mode. There’s not much happening on the surface, but if you perk up your ears that “much” resides in the background, or in the [...]