Contour Editions A DVD containing 43 minutes of black and white footage (by Garet) accompanied by Asher’s acoustic suggestions of quiet malaise in a metropolitan mire. The video, previously subjected to a series of processing phases, was shot from a helicopter during a trip over an Alaskan glacier. The imagery, constantly flickering due to the [...]

Mutable The title refers to Kimura’s complete owning of a self-discovered technique which allows her to play solid notes in a gamut that, on the violin, is virtually impossible to utilize for mortal practitioners without pitch-disintegrating consequences. This collection – featuring pieces that exploit subharmonic investigations as well as computerized interactivity, such as “Izquierda Y [...]

Hors Oeil Editions A careless viewer of this touching film would not manage to assess the extent of Daunik Lazro’s mental picture by the sparse sentences that he releases. The reedist – a credit to improvisation, alone or as the teammate of a multitude of diverse artists over the years – speaks deliberately, sometimes struggling [...]

Trente Oiseaux For thirty minutes, Pierre Gérard puts the listeners in direct confrontation with the variability of perception, on a merely physical/aural level and in sheer introspective terms. There is no scheme to mentally clutch to feel “secure”; no recourse to categorizations such as “silence” or “minimalism”. Just the asymmetrical concurrence of variously dyed frequencies [...]

Edgetone Daniel Blomquist, Michael Addison Mersereau and Mark Wilson exercise an array of machines that includes analogue instruments – guitar and pedals, too – and digital expansions of those generators through laptop, samplers and a multitude of processing devices. Resting On A, third full-length CD of the trio, seems to have been conceived with two [...]

Northern Spy For sure a composer like Chatham is not hindered by external influences or commercial needs when deciding to issue his music, therefore the choice of exploiting models related to trodden paths in Outdoor Spell appears a little perplexing. It all starts with the title track’s consonant stillness, superimposed vocal overtones soon joined by [...]

Edgetone This music was influenced by writers such as Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft; it is quite fitting, then, that a typo in the cover says that it was recorded in October 2011, namely almost five months from the moment in which I’m writing these lines. In truth, there’s no ultramodern approach [...]

Northern Spy Flanked by comrades Aaron Hartman and Bryce Panic, multi-instrumentalist Arrington De Dionyso is the recognized entity behind this collection of songs dating 1993-1996 (half live, the rest from a 4-track session) almost entirely revolving around similar traits: an irrelevantly agitated raspy voice (think a nervous Captain Beefheart lacking a testicle), jangling detuned guitar, [...]

Leo Three extended pieces by two French artists whose visions coincide entirely, despite the difference of the respective means of expression (VCS3, electronics, trombone and voice for Foussat, tenor sax for Guérineau). There are several notable points in Aliquid that distinguish the musicality of the duo, the most obvious being their love for the sounds [...]

Dragon’s Eye A record featuring elements of improvisation suitable to the coincidence and management of a multitude of electroacoustic sources, Age Of Insects represents the crop of repeated meetings between the duo of Laura and Mark Cetilia – recent engenderers of the excellent Tetra on their own label Estuary Ltd. – and Stephen Vitiello, a [...]

Psi Although “it’s been clear for some time that Hans Koller is one of the finest jazz composers of our time” (quote from Mark Racz’s liners), not only this reviewer had never heard his albums before – he never heard about him, period (not something to be proud of, mind you). Someone must have thought [...]

Psi Serial Endosymbiosis Theory is a concept developed by biologist Lynn Margulis, to whom Evan Parker – a former student of biology – dedicates the album. To symbolize, or at least remind the processes of evolution “in terms of symbiotic associations of non-cellular organisms” that define SET, the saxophonist assembled an improvisational entity comprising musicians [...]

Clean Feed Weightless is a quartet shaped by pianist Alberto Braida, bassist John Edwards, saxophonist John Butcher and drummer Fabrizio Spera. These tracks were recorded during a German tour in 2008; they show the host of dynamics and the plausibility of the chromatic choices that should ideally constitute the starting point of nowadays’ jazz, but [...]

Absinth Two improvisations – the first at Dörner’s home, the second at Berlin’s Electronic Church – for trumpet, percussion and spoken word. The latter set – according to Chamy’s detailed recount – also included himself moving across the stage, striking poses and patterning gestures as to imply “a way of escaping from the old abstract/concrete [...]

Echomusic In a 19-year writing “career” (ha!) Yiorgis Sakellariou is the only artist who managed to have the same record reviewed twice (inadvertently, of course) by this mentally aging type-typist. It feels right then to analyze the latest CD with improved concentration, lest I get caught again in six months or so. Kidding aside, the [...]

Etude As the title implies, this is music of ample halos and untainted reverberation. Ghosts if you will, or mere psychological suggestions, generated by the superimposition of echoing phenomena within a silent background, the ideal situation in which the record should be approached (the composer recommends a “nocturnal” time for that; an opaque Sunday afternoon [...]

Moonjune So, this is what Paul Wertico and Steve Rodby – the historic rhythm section of Pat Metheny Group – do when they’re not snoring during the 447.345th rendition of “Last Train Home”? Good for them, and an important sponsorship for this duo of Israeli youngsters, who allegedly knocked at the drummer’s door one night [...]

Married Fox Having listened to a suite by Alex North comprising sequences from the soundtrack to A Streetcar Named Desire – the celebrated 1951 film with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh based upon Tennessee Williams’ novel – pianist Chie Sato Roden devised an enhancement of the existing material. According to the new conception, the themes [...]

Die Stadt One of this writer’s many hidden secrets is represented by his admiration of early Mike Oldfield. In particular Hergest Ridge, first occasion in which I read the name Clodagh Simonds, who sings on that album. This woman owns a great merit in front of my eyes: she has avoided overexposure, and heaven knows [...]

Mutable The protagonists need no foreword, such is the weight of their input in today’s music via the respective means of expression and utterly personal idioms. “In The Land Of Perfect Days” is originally epitomized by the acoustic similitude of the emissions during explorations of unclear cavities, before the discrepancies of the personalities ultimately emerge. [...]

Leo While I’m discreetly au fait with the work of percussionist Christian Wolfarth (we’re soon returning on the theme – stay tuned) this is the very first time in which alto and tenor saxophonist Fisch is met by these ears. If the liners were appropriately decoded this is their second CD, published in 2009 after [...]

Die Stadt Persevering in the slow but inexorable reissue program of Asmus Tietchens’ older recordings, Die Stadt retrieves a personal favorite, originally released on the Swedish Multimood imprint in 1989. Marches Funebres might sound a little atypical in regard to the in-depth eviscerations of definite sonic components to which the German has grown his fans [...]

Die Schachtel I’ll be explicit straight away. The ballyhoo surrounding this release, strategically put in action by the certified organs of so-called cultural development, is unjustified. According to what we read most everywhere The Electric Harpsichord is an alleged lost masterpiece of minimalism, an acoustic revelation revolving around laws incomprehensible to anyone but the person [...]

Misanthropic Agenda Naming an album with a 10-word review of its content is an excellent idea to assist poor scribblers. In fact, I was just given a chance of avoiding the umpteenth repeat of preposterous depictions, and concentrate on other types of analysis. For instance, Meirino’s ability of producing modern-sounding brilliance from such kinds of [...]

JOHN CAGE – Four4 In case it wasn’t noticed, the review’s title alludes to Phill Niblock. Now, that is silence. (“Oh, stop that Massimo, will you please?”) Alright then. A year before dying, John Cage wrote “Four4” for a quartet of percussionists, leaving to them the choice of the specific instruments. Without rehashing the “time [...]

JAMES TENNEY – Spectrum Pieces For James Tenney, who left us untimely in 2006, “spectrum” was a term containing numerous suggestions, at least as many as the acoustic traits shown by the eight namesake compositions – scored for diverse instrumental groupings – comprised by this double CD. It firstly had to do with his interest [...]