EAGLE KEYS – Eagle Keys (Even Stilte)
Eagle Keys are Francisco Meirino (aka Phroq) on computer and “acoustics”, and Tim Olive on electric bass. While I’m familiar enough with the latter’s work and enjoyed his Supernatural Hot Rug And Not Used records with Nisikawa Bunsho quite a lot, this is my first approach to Meirino – unbelievably, one would say, since he’s released over 30 albums in various formats, working “on the tension between programmed and accidental results”. Introduced by the fabulous artwork of Marc Bell, the CD is riveting all the way, presenting loads of miasmatic drones and knotted contortions that spell “freedom” without the need of a programmatic manifesto. For large portions of the first track, Olive seems to be the motor after a series of impenetrable hums – often graduating to “impressive rumbles” – that create substrata over which Meirino clatters, chatters, wheels and deals, his riposte to his companion’s calmness an ever-dangerous, lucid destruction of conventional codes that maintains a firm stranglehold on our aesthetic desires. At the same time, we’re left contemplating finely chiseled sonic tissue and sparkling details, a testimony to the extreme care put by these musicians in their cultivated articulations; the jangling low-resonance string layers in the final section are a thing of beauty, propagations recalling motor airplanes in the sky before a massacre of Merzbow-like noise discharges. The same hypnotic mantle wraps the beginning of the second part, deranged music boxes and bell clocks lodged in what sounds like distorted shortwave to determine once and for all our extraneousness in a conversation that is as subliminal as bodily. Piercing high frequencies and half-discreet interference put a worn-out cloth on a subterranean pulse, then we’re back to desolation all over again, the final ten minutes of the album reminding of how charming ugliness can be, if only observed by a different perspective.
MATTHEW EARLE / WILL GUTHRIE / ADAM SUSSMANN – Bridges (Antboy)
“Bridges” is made of resonance, strange invading frequencies and semi-sparkling, fetching hypnotic daydreams. Its 37 minutes are enough to daze you, stuck in front of your monitors trying to figure out why you left that transistor radio on in the other room; of course, there’s nothing except your personal aural mirages. The sound never becomes daunting, tending instead to deactivate most of your defenses even when maintaining a light touch of venom, just adding to the overall subtlety. Earle’s underspoken electronics, Sussmann’s zinging pinches and Guthrie’s use of abnormalities in his self-made world of percussives take no heed of conventions: they stamp their feet deeply in the ground thanks to this stunning murmur of radioactive quagmires that will be repeatedly enjoyed by every electro-static lover.
EARZUMBA – Hermoso movimiento/Florece escondido (Dialsinfin)
Christian “C.D.” Dergarabedian, sound artist from Argentina also known as Earzumba and founder member of much hyped (and a little overestimated) Reynols, was kind enough to submit this impressive record which, I tell you, is truly involving and full of emotionally charged moments. Fusing two complete albums on a single disc, Earzumba is at home with surprising schizophrenic atmospheres; it can start from the mutilation of a rhumba to proceed through shadowy nebulous post-dark low freequency loops, to give finally place to concrete/field recordings of natural elements. While Christian is always balanced between a keen sense of humour and an almost sad outlook on certain aspects of his musical microcosmos, I’m sincerely struck by his audio collaging capacities and pretty enthusiast about his approach to an art that’s very difficult to master correctly. This release makes a person listen attentively and think for a while when it’s over; that means we’re in presence of excellence.
EARZUMBA – Simulando un refugio (Old Gold)
Finding a definition or a niche for Earzumba’s abstractions is not easy: “Simulando un refugio” is yet another collection of improvisations and juxtapositions sounding at the same time celestially absurd and totally unironical. The often surprising chains of events set in motion by Barcelona-based Argentine Christian Dergarabedian create instant apprehension, curiosity for future underground activities, resurrection of dead sensitiveness; in a few words, Earzumba discards the easy ways through the confused mind of a superficial listener, forcing the attention on those details which seem futile but constitute instead the missing link to coherence. Looking into the trashcans of audio rejections Dergarabedian, with effortless acumen, knits and seams engrossing parallel worlds of sonic mayhem and delicious instability of our auditive mechanics.
EARZUMBA – Cuccioli incatenati (AAB)
Christian Dergarabedian was asked to contribute to a project involving seven artists in various fields, who had to “react” in their own way to a series of gifts they reciprocally received from the others. In Earzumba’s case, the stymulus produced a CD EP containing brief audio pictures ranging from light electronic hypnosis, to a strange homemade funky, passing through distorted guitar chords, tons of sampled voices (both regular and slowed/accelerated) and a final meditation for superimposed harmonicas. Funny stuff, not deep as usual, but with the same enthusiastic vibe by the Argentinian, here sounding like a hyped kid in his room with dozens of instruments, a 4-track and a whole weekend in front of him to record every bizarre idea.
EARZUMBA – Bestia infernal (Dialsinfin)
This is probably one of Christian Dergarabedian’s best albums to date, if not THE best, presenting his greatly enjoyable, truly “delihilarious” work with samples and cut’n’paste in the first half and an engrossing exploration of the low realms of “cosmic vibration” in the very last track, which is a 30-minute live performance. A pretty strange thing that occurred to me is that – as it often happens in the back of one’s mind – these days I was repeatedly thinking of Billy Joel’s “Just the way you are”, without apparent reason. Then I put this disc in the player and – bang! – it begins with the massacre of that very song. This was enough of a signal for me, and the best was yet to come: bone-wrenching lunatic blues, Latin folk songs shredded into small pieces, a fantastic nightmare of loops based on David Bowie’s “Let’s dance” and a track full of James Brown-meets-heavy-metal-singer screams which is absolutely energetic. There’s also a piece which juxtaposes snippets of lounge music, minus the body of the song (example: the band leader’s count going straight into the final chord, with consequent audience applause, or a single piano note saluted by more enthusiasm…you get the picture, a wonderful idea). The fascinating final trip, 30 minutes of entrancing low-frequency radiation, shows how Earzumba is at total ease with this kind of sonic scenario, too. I still wonder why Reynols’ output is more considered than its single components’; listening to this and other Earzumba albums (and also to the solo works by Anla Courtis) is really a greater pleasure – and C.D. should be much less an underground phenomenon than a well known talent, which he certainly deserves to be. Maybe he prefers that way?
EARZUMBA – Real ruido pastizo (Editions Zero)
More sonic deconstruction by Earzumba, whose style does not require a rocket scientist to be decoded, all the while guaranteeing a lot of fun in his sampladelia world of broken illusions and harsh realities. “Real ruido pastizo” is another pretty short bulletin of disjointed beats, distorted television and disassembled instrumental parts, which in the hands of Dergarabedian lose their apparent discontinuity to become a whole mass of ambiguity covered with the dirt of a real life whose snippets are there to be observed bit by bit but never entirely, in order for us to keep the certainty of failure at a safe distance. “Failure”, taken in the mechanical acceptation of the term, is a good starting point to describe what Earzumba presents through his machines, which include “key sampler, harmonica, cintas y maus”. Sounds that are not supposed to work together, yet unquestionably do, incessantly, unpredictably, with that touch of naïveté typical of this man. This very earnestness in depicting scenes that could be defined as “normal”, but become instead the representation of a fractured truth is – together with a thorough unpretentiousness – what makes this and other releases by C.D. always welcome on this desk.
MAX EASTLEY / GRAHAM HALLIWELL / EVAN PARKER / MARK WASTELL – A life saved by a spider and two doves (Another Timbre)
These three improvisations were recorded at the Church of St. James The Great (North London), a venue whose mystical quietness seems to actively contribute to the lesson in restraint that the music appears to teach. It remains to be seen if there are enough alumni to learn, though, as it’s next to impossible finding an equal balance – let alone a superior one – in such a mixed-media kind of quartet, furthermore captured here during their very first encounter. Luckily, they decided to go on from then, and are currently active as a more or less definitive entity. Two voices are instantly recognizable: Parker, his soprano saxophone locating the environmental sweet spots in consecutive phraseologies that abandon typically reiterative outbursts in favour of delicate snippets of bird-like expressiveness, and Wastell’s tam-tam which materializes in rarefied moments, emerging from the background with the silent authority of a monk to assure everybody that a cosmologic order is going to be respected any time. The remaining gradations – Eastley’s electro acoustic monochord and Halliwell’s computer and electronics – are not so easily attributable, constituting the element of utter suspension that positively characterizes the most fascinating segments. In particular, on top of everything, the fabulous final minutes of “The chessboard cherry tree” where a minimal fluttering is the basis of a spellbinding alien counterpoint, the lot following an undercurrent of unidentified nervous satisfaction, the listener unaware of what’s really happening yet ready to accept all consequences. An album that leaves speechless for a long time after its conclusion, leaving us to ponder about the following move, both in the artists’ career and in our own life.
JOHN ECKHARDT – Xylobiont (Psi)
Enlightened double bassists such as Stefano Scodanibbio, Jöelle Léandre, Mark Dresser and Christian Weber have been unceasingly revealing the massive potential of an extremely difficult sonic tool, which in the hands of a technically advanced perceptive soloist can repay any effort with flashes of stunningly irrational beauty. With “Xylobiont” – a neologism for “organism of wood” according to Richard Barrett’s liners – John Eckhardt formally asks to be included in the pantheon of new music’s solo performers, not without a reason. For starters, the instrumental competence shown in these eight pieces by the Hamburg resident is nothing short of awesome, his curriculum portraying him as a teammate of important chamber groups (Klangforum Vienna, Musikfabrik NRW, Ensemble Intégrales to name but three) and a composer interested in the interrelations between dissimilar artistic forms and genres, including drum’n’bass (!). Still, no written explanation will get you prepared for the tremendous incisiveness of Eckhardt’s razor-sharp playing, which lays a hand on numerous facets of present-day creativity without losing an ounce of clear-headedness. Indeed what the bassist does best is finding a spot on the instrument and probing it up to the perfect combination of cyclical particles, incessant repetitions and choral prosperity that, quite often, places the results in districts adjacent to minimalism. An ideal exemplification in that sense is “Noo Bag”, where Eckhardt applies a continuous rebounding of the bow on the strings in the under-the-bridge region, extrapolating tiny notes and muffled partials that remind of intrinsic micro-cellular activities. Elsewhere, as in “Filum”, he executes a series of movements on an isolated string, generating surges of resonant incidents and minute linear units through the different positioning of the arco. Although declaring himself a jazz player in the depth of the spirit, the severe essentiality of Eckhardt’s concept makes him look like a contemplating being rather than a swinging lost soul. “Xylobiont” is unquestionably a major statement, a proclamation of existence for an extraordinarily accomplished virtuoso performer.
HARRIS EISENSTADT – The all seeing eye + Octets (Poo-Bah)
Composer and drummer Harris Eisenstadt has been recently featured in many amongst the most satisfying jazz-oriented projects on the U.S scene, and this record confirms that his young age – he was born in 1975 – belies his flourishing maturity as a composer and arranger. One of Eisenstadt’s main influences is Wayne Shorter’s “The all seeing eye”, thus he decided to pay homage to that album with a new version “by re-imagining it with new forms and different instrumentation”, assembling an impressive group of musicians including Chris Dingman (vibraphone), Andrew Pask and Brian Walsh (both on clarinet and bass clarinet), Daniel Rosenboom (trumpet), Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon), Scott Walton (contrabass). Eisenstadt reports that his intention was to create something like “open-ended chamber music with grooves” (which he beautifully achieves in “Face of the deep”, featuring a splendid solo by Schoenbeck) but the result is unquestionably jazz of the finest blend, with the right amount of time and space given to all the performers to shine, inventively executed themes and a rhythm section where the leader and Walton fuse their multiple-idiom knowledge to create a basis for the smooth resolution of any inconvenience that might have happened, and of course didn’t. Exploiting the potential of his partners in full, Eisenstadt decided to put reduced versions of his large ensemble pieces “Without roots” and “What we were told” to tape in the same day. Here they’re presented in forms of octets conducted by Marc Lowenstein and played by the same musicians, with Aaron Smith as a second trumpet. The first is a semi-tonal contrapuntal network without loci classici of sorts, “non cantabile” for its large part but still containing a few unballasted riffs and improvisations that could put feet in motion, provided that you’re familiar with odd metres. Instead, the fifteen minutes plus of the second octet sound like if the pages of the score had been scattered around by the wind, found after a long search and hastily positioned in a different order, which produced a better music than the original. Here, too, Eisenstadt’s command of sonic languages runs parallel to the methods that he applies to deliver them from the locks of commonplace, his snappy drumming adding meaty substance to an already robust piece which oddly ends with the most memorizable (so to speak) melodies of the whole CD.
MAX EASTLEY / MICHAEL PRIME – Hydrophony for Dagon (Absurd)
This haunting music was recorded in 1996 at “The Four Elements”, SKRAEP Copenhagen. Every sound was generated underwater by an array of instruments including hydroarcs, bubble machine, tubing, fans, motors, tapes and objects. Coherently with their work, which many times has employed water as means or texture, Eastley and Prime develop a convincing narrative whose obscurity is made desirable by a challenging exploitation of aquatic reverberations and refractions. This means that we’re neither in presence of a soundtrack for a dolphin exhibition, nor ambient music for swimming pools; try instead to conjure up images of an Organum/Noise-Maker’s Fifes hybrid whose clothes are slowly washed by a humongous machine that puts us in a suspended state through its monotonous cycles of deep regurgitations. Never intimidating, rather comfortable, this womb of gurgles is nicely balanced between abstraction and tangibleness, which results in a very appreciable release.
JULIUS EASTMAN – Unjust malaise (New World)
Thanks to the hard-headed commitment of composer Mary Jane Leach, who spent seven years in search of recorded and written material about her old comrade, we have now the chance to unveil the lost treasure that is the music by Julius Eastman, a black gay artist whose scores belong for the large part to the post-minimalist area (even if the opening track “Stay on it” dates from 1973, well before several masterpieces by Reich, Glass and Riley). Eastman was a deeply inquisitive man with a strong political conscience fueling a “chip-on-the-shoulder” attitude towards the musical establishment, whose members often considered him as “outrageous”, which was barely acceptable at that time. It is safe to assume that his life was destroyed by the lack of recognition for his art: Eastman could not accept that such a great talent lacked public appreciation and dissipated his being until he died homeless in 1990, less than 50 years old, this 3-CD set being the very first release presenting him as a composer. The first disc contains the above mentioned “Stay on it”, a truly great piece based on an obsessive cadenza alternated with improvised sections, that reaches its deepest level in its final part, where a well-perceivable irony leaves room to a reflective “rallentando” over pretty sad chords, developing a mournful atmosphere which already gained a high spot in my own graduatory of emotional minimalism; somehow, I associated this section to Gavin Bryars’ melancholically beautiful “Hommages”. The nicely titled “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” is a chromatic study for large ensemble, pretty hard for the uninitiated even if its architecture is perfectly detailed and comprehensible. “Prelude to the holy presence of Joan D’Arc” finds Julius in a vibrant solo voice performance which makes us clear why he admired Meredith Monk (he sang in “Dolmen music” and “Turtle dreams”) while the main section of the piece, scored for ten cellos, is an incredibly modern vision where a dissonant chain of repetitive figurations mix Led Zeppelin, Bela Bartok, Tony Conrad while predating Mikel Rouse and Andrew Poppy – but it’s unquestionably Eastman in his unique rhythmical/contrapuntal perception. The same insight moves the last works found here – divided onto the second and third disc – meaning the pieces for multiple pianos: “Gay guerilla” is an eight-handed creature whose lyricism spans through constantly morphing harmonies installed on a semi-spiral form reminding of Simeon Ten Holt’s ever-lasting piano cavalcades, only with more refined systems of chordal multiplication. “Evil nigger” is a propulsive series of rainbow arcs whose ends fall into raging tonal phenomena and melting dissonant ambiguities, its driving pulse affirming it as the most energetically intense composition in the whole set. “Crazy nigger”, the longest one here, alternates delicate raindrops with vehement redundancy, its passionate character mixing “traditional” minimalism and more uncontrollable tendencies to the disgregation of tonality. In various moments of this collection I clearly felt the pure desperation of a strained will force; no words or notes could help this man to break free from the mental prison which is injustice, the very same evil force deciding that mediocrities become rich and famous, while fiery intelligencies like Julius Eastman’s remain a mystery for decades. With the release of “Unjust malaise”, a deserving soul is not unknown anymore. Let’s just hope he can smile, now.
E.C.F.A. QUARTET – Die Mitte (Lenka Lente)
Tenor saxophonist Carl Smith’s E.C.F.A. collective came to my attention in 2005 thanks to their excellent “Die Fäden”, which is now followed by an equally intense chapter. Reportedly influenced by “late 90s free jazz in NYC, free improvisation and modern compositional techniques and traditional jazz”, this music resplends of intelligence and heart applied without inhibitions to every single note played. The emphatic phrasing of the Carl Smith/Holland Hopson sax tandem is obviously a strong point of the group, but it is the fine contrapuntal texture between the reeds and James Alexander’s entangling viola that renders all pieces appreciable both by “jazz” audiences and aficionados of the “new thing” – whatever that means. Jason Friedrich’s variegated drumming sustains the rhythm and contributes to the visceral feeling of the whole, a mixture of maturity and genuine productivity which affirms this beautiful Texan ensemble’s unique vision.
E.C.F.A. TRIO – Die Fäden (Pecan Crazy)
Emanation, Creation, Formation, Action – currently a quintet led by saxophonist Carl Smith – are here featured as a trio, with Jason Friederich (drums) and James Alexander (viola). The record is full of compositional excellence and improvisations based on restraint more than raging – and often meaningless – outbursts; themes and sketches are intelligently developed, not without a sense of humour, while the intercommunication among the musicians is one of the finest I’ve heard in recent jazz-and-beyond explorations. The coupling of viola and sax is consistently anti-metaphoric, elegantly fleshy, as Alexander and Smith work wonders understanding reciprocal directions without even thinking about their position. Friedrich sustains the rhythmic picture all alone, contributing with his own eclectic palette, underlining and stroking with utmost artistic education and gentle perspicacity. Alex Coke lends a fabulous flute in “3 eggs”, a piece that somehow reminds me of early Curlew. This is music for connoisseurs.
EDDIE THE RAT – Drop me off in Denpasar (Comfort Stand)
Active since 2000 and led by Peter Martin, Eddie The Rat is an avantgarde music collective that has been featured on Negativland’s Seeland label and is now at its fourth release. “Drop me off at Denpasar” is a 5-part composition lasting about 17 minutes, influenced by Balinese gamelan structures but with a strange ironical twist. Martin states that the piece originally took form from a series of exercises he wrote for his finger independence; he then glued some of them together in order to create a “real” score. Two pianos, drums and homemade percussion (played by Martin, Ches Smith, Dan Ake and Bianca Austin) constitute the skeleton of a lovely mixture of intersecting patterns and repetitive rhythms which sound like a small orchestra of puppets playing tiny instruments with enthusiastic sapience. Strange, curious, enjoyable music in every aspect.
EDDIE THE RAT – Once around the butterfly bush (Edgetone)
“Music made of wood, wind and wire”, played by Dan Ake (lobro, spike, 2×6), Ronnie Camaro (bass, vocals), Peter J. Martin (piano, cajon & bass drum with left & right foot respectively, vocals, balinese gangsa, long-boy, proto) and Molly Tascone (vocals, recorder, glockenspiel, steel drum, triangle). You can see for yourselves that this is not a rock group. “Once around the butterfly bush” is indeed a pseudo-Partchian structure, at times sounding like a strange kind of operetta, wholly based on the superimposition of polyrhythms and whose Indonesian influence and bastard minimalist complexion evolves until, in certain circumstances, we’re treated to complex arrangements recalling entities like early 5 UU’s and Motor Totemist Guild. Eddie The Rat highlight a sort of atavistic dependence on beat, here eviscerated in multiple ways without becoming a reason to overlook the compositional aspect. The unusual orchestration, which mixes the dynamics of a gamelan and the nervousness of avant rock, contributes to our embarassment in finding a starting point for definitions. Pulse rules, and everything follows accordingly; patterns that could be considered as ancient are modified in new combinations and meanings, while the piece’s overall architecture makes sure that room for improvisation is more or less inexistent. At the same time, the vocal arrangements mesh the luxurious and the primal in surprising mixtures. Like the interlocking figures that animate this score, we can treat “Once around the butterfly bush” like a rough kind of mandala, noticing its single geometric shapes until the picture is complete.
JOHN EDWARDS / MARK SANDERS – Nisus duets (Emanem)
It would be easy to define this music as “gesture/texture”. A duo of percussion and acoustic bass, as rightly told by Martin Davidson in the booklet notes, is almost entirely uncommon outside the usual “rhythm section” concept. Instead, Edwards and Sanders paint, construct, choose ways to play the very guts of their instruments that are absolutely new to ears; of course, prevailing timbral shades tend towards low, a rumble here, some tremor there… everything goes to achieve the best result: string plucking, grunting arco, a multi-dimensional drumming approach. But what actually must be observed and enjoyed in “Nisus duets” is the almost theatrical value of a simple instant decision, that note which is there because it has to be, without thinking too much about the reason, instead imagining a fitting choreography to this strange, introverted, untranslatable train of thought by John and Mark – two masters of their craft, if you ask me.
EFTUS SPECTUN – The tocks clicking (Public Eyesore)
Only 25 minutes, but almost perfect. A typical Public Eyesore chemical solution of craziness and geniality, this time illuminated by a well-developed technical expertise. Uncontrollable tempos alimenting skeletal arpeggios and dissonant riffs, played with thorough knowledge of the fretboard and without fussiness of sorts. A lot of different instruments appear in the mix, including what sounds like very cheap ones. Both the sounds and the (splendid!) babbling are clearly influenced by Captain Beefheart in my humble opinion (circa “Doc at the radar station”, maybe?); remaining in that zone, Zoogz Rift could also be a good comparison, yet Eftun Spectun are instrumentally more disciplined. In a word, these guys can really play – that’s what gives this music its value, together with a pungent irony (fabulous mellifluous-to-crooning vocals, but try to intone those intervallic jumps yourselves: not easy for sure). All the tracks are short and sharp, often ending inside a minute, except “Mullusc mollusc”, a description-defying, delirious studio monster lasting alone half the CD. Truly great stuff, quirky, intelligent, difficult and easily digestible at once.
EFTUS SPECTUN – The Talons Snag Binary (Void Of Ovals)
Fifteen minutes of improvised-with-discipline music by a group that doesn’t want to know of sounding sloppy, as already demonstrated in previous releases (check the archives). Acrid guitars – either jangling, saturated or just knocked – on a basis of semi-regular drums whose figurations are only partially trouble-free but always perfectly working, lots of breathing space left to the rest of the elements. Alternances between single hits and notes and jarring chords, with (rare) lunatic vocalizations for good measure. A sense of improbability defined by the permanent suspicion about what’s going to come after, abundant touches of ominous purposefulness that keep the overall level well over average and, in certain spots, near it to a worn-to-shreds excellence. These guys are seriously searching for new ways to express their vision, and mostly succeed.
EFZEG – Würm (Charhizma)
An electroacoustic quintet formed by Boris Hauf, Martin Siewert, Burkhard Stangl, Dieb 13 and Billy Roisz. Music full of enigmatic qualities and gentle curiosity, creeping around almost unnoticeably but manifesting itself very clearly. Sounds loaded with character, imposing themselves through softly radical contrasts – the gentle touch of guitars against sub-rumbling lows comes to mind. The musicians’ commitment appears as strong as ever; sharing common knowledge and aims, the companions raise a freezing humidity that reveal feeble sunrays leading the path to awakened memories. Potentially, this album is a milestone and its excellence is ready to be enjoyed at first listen; surely it’s one of the overall best Charhizma releases, mixing rigour and deliciousness.
EKKEHARD EHLERS – A life without fear (Staubgold)
One stumbles upon potential masterpieces almost by chance, but this time I must admit that the delay with which I came to this raw jewel is my exclusive fault, as I decided to give it a try after reading about it on various alternative sources. “A life without fear” is certainly a sleeper – and a keeper. Composed for “Lazarus Signs”, a coreography by Christoph Winkler, it’s a very lively album of disembodied blues, not necessarily American style (even if there are a few magnificent sequences that seem to be taken from a distant past and inserted in Ehlers’ personal time capsule) and no-genre, reflective atmospheres that mutate into dissonant preoccupation (check out “Maria & Martha”). At various times, Ehlers (processing and amps) is flanked by Joseph Suchy (guitar, balafon), Franz Hautzinger (trumpet), Howard Katz Firehart (vocals, mouthharp) and Björn Gottstein (viola). The many different nuances of the leader’s explorative manipulation elicit our visceral response only after a while, also because they almost sound ironic at a first listen. This music does not behave according to “canons” but looks for an aggregation point where all the confluences fuse in a single spiritual unit. The shining stars in this collection are many; my personal poor man’s Grammy goes to the heartwarming “Misorodzi”, a beautiful balafon-based African song which shapes as a perfect fusion of political and religious consciousness even without definite words. But it’s just the way the whole record sounds that is definitely attractive: it’s a homeless bastard that beats your heart remorselessly and, as a final touch, ends with an infinite loop transporting us into transcendental incoherence.
DIETRICH EICHMANN – Entre deux guerres (Oaksmus)
Composer and improviser Eichmann has kindly sent me a copious bunch of his recent and past releases, and I’m happy to report about them pretty regularly, since the man fathers music that is difficult, stimulating and provocative, often all of the above in a single outing. Such is the case of this “concerto for solo piano and fourteen instrumentalists”, where everything was carefully notated but I’ll be damned if these scores don’t sound like a complex collective improvisation, except for selected moments (for example pianist Christoph Grund’s soloist spots, which reveal him as a brilliant interpreter, very much in line with Eichmann’s score and intentions). The concert, of which the CD contains the première, was recorded in Karlsruhe on October 1999 and executed by the soloists of the SWR Symphony Orchestra conducted by David R.Coleman. Its concept is essentially based on the “beastly” characteristics of war, although detailing this without quoting large chunks of Harald Borges’ explicative notes would be too complicated for the scope of a review. Let’s just say that there is neither a “hook” or “refrain”, nor anything that could be memorized or instantly sung back. The aspects of Eichmann’s architecture range from bitter to violent: many bursts and explosions, scarcity of smooth sections (in any case scarred by acrid dissonances). A potentially unifying instrumental element may be Teodoro Anzellotti’s accordion, maybe the only fairly “static” presence in an otherwise perennially boiling cauldron, yet even that is soon swallowed by the general sense of barely repressed rage that the music seems to exalt. It’s an intriguing record that nevertheless won’t emerge as “appealing” after twenty tries. Certainly not for everyone, significant just the same.
DIETRICH EICHMANN ENSEMBLE – The hot days (Leo)
Instant creativity should ideally be observed while it happens, for no recorded medium is able to correctly reproduce the exchange of energies that occurs when high-calibre improvisers perform. Still, “The hot days” possesses the qualities of a live album while maintaining the essence of rare, pretty hard to delimit self-generated chamber music. The involved instrumentalists, featured in combinations ranging from duo to quintet, are Dietrich Eichmann (piano, harpsichord, bombarde), Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson (hearing aid, vocals, percussion), Michael Griener (drums, percussion), Chris Heenan (alto sax, contrabass clarinet), Alexander Frangenheim (double bass) and Christian Weber (double bass). No need to hide the truth: Eichmann’s procedures are complex, at times utterly impenetrable, mostly revolving around threatening silences only to explode in harsh outbursts and strident confrontations. The obscure crawl at the beginning of “The worm from the void” introduces a radical reshaping of an already bitter reality, dramatically underlined by the juxtaposition between the clarinet’s purring drone and the next-to-Armageddon intimidating mumble of the basses, here co-recruited to enforce the law of “no escape from the inevitable”. The initial “Sweets from above” and “Hot stuff” contain ironic exploitations of Sigurdsson’s electronics, a hearing aid becoming the means for duck-talking and compressed snorting, Eichmann hammering our stupefied reaction with clumsy dissonances produced on industrial scale. At almost 18 minutes, “Five star tragedy” is a histrionic piece where the immaculateness of the artist’s ideal is put through the ordeal, the musicians trying to reciprocally counterbalance despite a continuous push from those extraneous forces – the same ones that wrap superficial listeners with the “refusal of the atypical” cloth – that often define the exact junction point between experiment, constriction, emancipation and acceptance of the uneven, the latter being a major problem nowadays.
BRUCE EISENBEIL SEXTET – Inner constellation Volume One (Nemu)
In 2001, guitarist and composer Bruce Eisenbeil had a sort of epiphany while working in a 40-piece ensemble conducted by Cecil Taylor, feeling the urge to deepen his knowledge of Taylor’s sextet of the late 70s (Taylor plus Jimmy Lyons, Raphe Malik, Ramsey Ameen, Sirone and Ronald Shannon Jackson). Consequently he started writing himself for sextet, substituting the guitar to the piano, in search of that “development of individual voices in a clear democratic system” which he achieves through stratification-based (as opposed to imitation-based) counterpoint. Eisenbeil needed five fellow researchers in this venture, and he found them in Jean Cook (violin), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Aaron Ali Shaikh (alto sax), Tom Abbs (acoustic bass) and Nasheet Waits (drums). The 27 short movements of the title track, which took two years for Eisenbeil to complete, were composed by the guitarist through a computerized notation program, each musician learning the part by ear; he parallels the score to the image of stars in the sky at night, where everyone tries to figure out shapes and faces by virtually connecting the dots. On record, this results as a fertile ground of singular intuitions, reciprocal acceptance and ironic swing, often corroborated by thematic materials which somehow break the ever-mounting tension that the contrasting instrumental statements constantly ease. There’s a strong link to – get this – “traditional free jazz”, yet a name that crossed my mind at one point was Richard Woodson, another bright young man active on this scene whose compositional lucidity could probably be compared to Eisenbeil’s in more than one way. Still, the leader quotes people like Xenakis, Ligeti, Lachenmann, Ellington, Coltrane and Braxton among the many influences of “Inner constellation”, and who am I to dissent? Kudos also go to Wooley and Cook, who win my prize for the most interesting solos on offer, but believe me when I tell you that it’s the GROUP that burns – whichever way you try to handle it. It’s not over: as three is a perfect number – or so they say – the last three tracks are, you guessed it, trios; Eisenbeil, Abbs and Waits work at their acoustically-inspired best to picture wet dreams where Derek Bailey dances with Trilok Gurtu while listening to chanting shamans. The bassist and the drummer shine throughout these final ten minutes, Eisenbeil approving without interrupting their excitement, only reserving the final word to himself in the tranquil chordal shimmer of the very last song “Receding storm”. After “Carnival Skin”, another Bruce Eisenbeil must for those who are tired of eating “Autumn leaves” from the guts of corpses. This man here plays jazz with a Strat, you know.
EKG & GIUSEPPE IELASI – Group (Formed)
Mostly made of quietly unobtrusive concoctions of electronica and acoustic improvisation, “Group” sees Ernst Karel (trumpet, analog electronics), Kyle Bruckmann (oboe, English horn, analog electronics) and Giuseppe Ielasi (electric guitar, piano etc.) trying to locate invisible niches, in order to hide their timid inspections of vibration and hum right there, all the while working “in between” those zones where electroacoustic manipulation and quasi-biotic tranquillity are integrated in a coherent context. The qualities of the “regular” instruments are carefully put in reciprocal contact during short static contrapuntal segments, seemingly to represent a series of “stations” where the musicians gather to regroup and plan new theories for the exploitation of the concealed qualities of their sources. Yet it takes only a raise of the volume to bring out unexpected facets of deep resonance, riveting pulse and educated noise peeping at us behind an ever-lurking calmness. The “Providence-Middletown” track is my own highlight, with a splendid deformed cycle – about 2’30″ into the piece – opening the heart and preparing the expectancy to being brutalized by distorted overacute frequencies and slightly unsettling vignettes meshing earthquake and contemplation; one detects an AMM-like spirit, also enhanced by a discreet radiophonic presence. Taken in the right frame of mind, this is a gorgeous release.
ELLENDE – Natto (The Locus of Assemblage)
Pretty mysterious atmospheres where slow currents and high-pitched electronics mesh in a future(less) view. Without sounding grating “Natto” evokes organic if imperturbable intelligence, like a system appearing perfectly self regulated with no space for any kind of insurgence. Ellende’s mini CD is interesting throughout, with lots of anaesthetic vibrations to keep you snug and warm, but always with eyes open; it’s music you can’t stick an adjective on, well functioning and profound without being an exercise in pretentiousness.
LISLE ELLIS – Sucker punch requiem (Henceforth)
Bassist Lisle Ellis assembled a who’s who of sorts for this recording, which constitutes a personal homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of his biggest influences. The names involved comprise Pamela Z (voice, electronics), Holly Hofmann (flutes), Oliver Lake (saxophones), George Lewis (trombone), Mike Wofford (piano) and Susie Ibarra (drums and percussion) besides Ellis himself, who also utilizes electronics and is credited with “sound design”. The music – initially modelled after the same structure of the Mass for the Dead of the Roman Catholic Church and subsequently modified by an “overwriting” process – is certainly conceived and played with class and knowledge, all the participants having been fitted in a role exclusively designed according to their creative character. The jumps between modern conceptions of jazz and “acousmatic” tracks full of concrete snippets, synthetic malformations and Pamela Z’s cut-up vocals are at times intriguing, often slightly displacing. For sure the composer wasn’t thinking about an “obedient” kind of score in the beginning; still, as the time flows the whole becomes a bit comfortable, losing the initial push to adapt a little more to conventionality, despite several sumptuous moments (in certain sections, “For blues and other spells” sounds like a mixture of Bacharach and Zappa). What largely defines the album is the functional interconnection of different instrumental voices, their personality adding depth to the pieces. An interesting concept, developed through intelligent ideas and with plenty of pleasant moments – yet somehow I perceive the target as partially missed.
ELOINE – Green stump (Unread)
Recorded in 2004, “Green stump” is another short and sweet presentation by one of Bryan Day’s many aliases. Five genderless improvisations, all of them sounding as if they were mostly played on homemade instruments, or cheap ones in any case. There are strings, blown tubes (I am a little hesitant in calling them “flutes”, although that might be the case), various kinds of percussion and whatever we can imagine in terms of “get what you want if you’re going to have fun while improvising”. The nice part of this is that the CD – similarly to every Eloine record that I’ve heard – doesn’t really sound like “fun”, at least not in the commonly intended meaning. A distinct scent of ritualistic gesture, facilitated by reiterative rhythms, is often perceptible amidst the apparent chaos; and even that mess seems to be born with an intrinsic logic. Music that meshes acoustic and electric purity in equal doses, perfectly acceptable as it is without tricks or elaborations. The brief duration makes the whole all the more welcome, pushing us to immediately restart the listening session as soon as the disc has finished its spinning.
ELOINE – Sagebrush / Deimos (Stentorian Tapes/Public Eyesore)
Bryan Day, label honcho and improvising artist, is among those individuals who leave the music do the talking. In fact, he often sends me handfuls of great releases under various monikers, Eloine being one of them, usually lacking press releases or letters. The problem is that the CDR edition analyzed here (dated 2005 but released in 2007) doesn’t feature notes, either – only the track names – so I’d have to guess that this is a reissue of materials previously published on cassette (OK, it is – I checked the website, heh heh). Despite the absence of information, these thirty minutes for strings, percussion, noises and heaven-knows-what-else are, again, great. Unusual brilliance springing out from everywhere, zings, scrapes, howls and slight returns contrasting any plausible insurgence by something remotely associable to a “pattern” or a “groove”. Bizarre mixtures of hyperactivity and somnolence (check “Cloudkiln, the”. What a title, huh?), distortion and controlled feedback taking command towards the end of the disc, the sensation of being caught between “stylistic islands” without having a clue of what this stuff is all about, frequent detuning of strings recalling antique Asian instruments. A lot of movement which, curiously, sounds fairly tranquil throughout. Undecipherable music, appealing all the way and – on top of that – sounding beautiful from the first second to the last. Who needs liners?
ELOINE – Short community (Digitalis Industries)
Bryan Day, best known as founder of the perennially boiling Public Eyesore label and the mastermind behind the Eloine moniker, recently sent me a batch of releases where he’s involved as a player, and which I’ll be glad to report about in the upcoming issues of this webzine. “Short community” is an excellent introduction to Day’s improvisational methods, consisting of three lengthy segments in which he calmly deploys acoustic, electric and environmental sounds to create the equivalent of an aural Zen garden, but with a slightly deformed view of the objects comprised by the latter. “Bonanza illusion” is a perfect example, built as it is on the constant presence of a placidly plucked zither (or is it?) with minor intrusions and background noises. On the contrary, “Apples on a cutting board” is rather darkish, the acute frequencies leaving room to distant recollections of unquiet atmospheres where the manipulation of an electric guitar’s resonance generates a semi-ethereal concoction that moves the piece according to an unsteady, yet well-aimed intent. The initial “Dangling filaments” is developed over the sound of water à la Darren Tate and – differently from the rest of the album – is a little more variegated, boings and zings deriving from various sources to be fused with guitar and percussion in a peculiarly heartwarming kind of psychedelia. Remaining indecipherable enough, Eloine’s music is nevertheless a very welcome company whatever the occasion in which one enjoys it; in this writer’s opinion, it works the finest at low level in a tranquil setting.
EMBRACING THE GLASS / HASLAM – Split (Cohort)
Here we go with another chapter of the Cohort saga of split releases. This time, we are travelling towards lands featuring pseudo-lysergic explorations of a few remote corners of the psyche and consonant (but still pretty powerful) synthesizer-based washes of sound. Embracing The Glass is the duo of Sean Carroll (guitar-controlled sounds) and Jeff Sampson (voice-controlled sounds), creating improvised tapestries that range from quasi-religious invocations born from crystalline chords and intense vocal humming to abstract paintings where everything becomes blurred, mostly dissonant, at times characterized by reiterated electronic cascades seemingly out of a Star Trek episode yet going much deeper instead. Although not describing myself as a regular consumer of this kind of music, I surely detect love, care and seriousness in Carroll and Sampson’s attitude, which means that I appreciated the track enough to like it, naïveté and all. Haslam (Byron Paladin) responds with three pieces that one can’t do better than keep playing as a nice everyday life soundtrack, since they’re too simple in terms of harmonic movement to stand there and analyze them with a microscope. Still, the pulses generated by Paladin’s reassuring synthetic waves are something that is felt as beneficial, never disturbing, and that’s certainly positive. Sure enough I prefer no-frills, if quite elementary stuff like this as opposed to being annoyed by someone who camouflages incompetence under a pretentious appearance.
EMERGENCY STRING QUINTET – On the corner (Market and Sixth) (Public Eyesore)
Recorded in San Francisco in 2001, here’s one of the nicest string quintets I’ve ever heard. Jeff Hobbs and Kevin Van Yserloo (violins), Jonathan Fretheim (viola), Bob Marsh (cello) and Damon Smith (double bass) take the listener by the very ear and close him in a cellar where there are not many lights, just a lot of changes in mood and atmospheres. Emergency go from parallel glissando to scratching and hissing in a split second; they’re capable of producing the most involving phrases – always firmly circumnavigating any consonance, of course – and letting you fall deep down in a cluster inferno. Also, the percussive aspect of their music is something you have to do with; some of their parts are not so far by Frank Zappa’s music for strings contained on his “Yellow Shark”, at least as a distant impression. This is a group putting Kronos Quartets and similar yuppies to sleep, once and for all.
EMITER.ARSZYN.GADOMSKI – 29/30.11.06 (Sqrt)
The quality of the proposals churned out by this Polish label never lies under the limits of decency; quite often, it tends to excellence. Furthermore, the targets to which this imprint aims are variegated and multi-faceted, ranging from EAI-derived improvisations to low-budget electronica and educated noise, but with a typically genuine attitude that distances these elucubrations from the rest of the productions in the same fields. Not necessarily for the better or worse: this is just diverse stuff and as such it must be appreciated. This album was born from a 2-day recording session at St.John’s church in Gdansk; the sounds were captured direct to DAT by two microphones, the result left unmixed. The musicians: Tomasz Gadomski and Krysztof Topolski are percussionists, Marcin Dymiter plays electric guitar. Other participants, heard softly in the background, were “workers renovating the church”. Music of frequently changing dynamics, spanning through AMM/Morphogenesis introversions, next-to-silence tasting of the thin air surrounding the players, sudden raging outbursts where the six strings are bent to the rules of full acidity, the appearance of a “sample-and-hold” device helpful in creating nervous loops that occupy long segments. The calmer traits of the trio’s complexion are the ones that I like best, though, and the final meditation for (I believe) steel drums and clean-toned guitar – a Reichian pattern that goes on and on, resonating deliciously – closes the CD in style.
ENCOMIAST – Mers de sommeil (Mystery Sea)
Encomiast is the “nom d’art” of Ross Hagen, who studies at Colorado College of Music, where the great Stephen Scott is one of the professors; I wonder if Hagen is somehow influenced by Scott’s bowed piano compositions. Most of Encomiast’s pieces move slowly in impressive unidentifiable harmonies, surrounded by obscure vapors of disorientation. In some of the parts, unrelenting waves of shifting low frequencies create a chordal comfort for the soul to abandon in (“Reef” and “A visible myth of origin” being the example AND the best overall tracks) while more disturbing currents of melting dissonances build an environment where doubts and anguish prevail, leaving the sonics suspended between foggy power and repetitive nonentities. It’s for the most part an engrossing experience that highlights Hagen as an artist with solid fundamentals, which make the difference in his sound world’s consistency.
ENCOMIAST – Havens (Crucial Bliss)
Don’t let Megan Garland’s initial flute evolutions fool you into thinking about some sort of improvised 20th-century chamber music: after a few moments, Ross Hagen’s creature materializes to take you right into the glorious death of your senses in a furnace of gloomy dreams and textural oxidification. Reportedly generated by modifying the timbre of various sources (guitar, gamelan, shakuhachi, violin, vina, voice, flute and field recordings) until they become virtually unrecognizable, “Havens” is an enticing desolated landscape that brings right back to a time when this kind of music still had a meaning; Hagen explores the most obscure corners of those states of mind in which everything converges to a single desire, that of being completely alone in delusion. From a thick haze of condensed views, a giant wall of echoes from a visionary world slowly rises: their refractions are better enjoyed without headphones, in order to have your room’s natural reverberation contributing to this evocative blur of removed – but still scary – memories.
LAWRENCE ENGLISH – For varying degrees of winter (Baskaru)
This CD has plenty of reasons to be appreciated at a first listen, and several ones that will make you return to it often. Despite its title, it is full of digital sounds and looping atmospheres that sound, well, warm, ever since the very first minutes of the initial “End game”; then again, its inherent movements make me think about the prolification of bacteria under experimental conditions, small cells and minuscule fragments continuously reproducing in a sloping luminescence of uncertainty and dejection. Never for a moment the laptop criteria applied by English generate that unwelcome sense of overwhelming detachment typical of this kind of records, all the frequencies acting like directional instruments rather than auricular weaponry. Most sources are barely identifiable and I much prefer that way, remaining in the limbo of alien chorales (“Fleck”) and post-Thomas Köner degradation (“Swan”, the highest point of the whole album). Should you need a genuine subsonic brain-bombing instead, look no further than “Desert road”. Everything sounds familiar in a way, yet we often experience the same childhood feeling of being lost in a supermarket: lights, colours and faces a whole undifferentiated blur, while we anxiously wait for our mama to retrieve us. Less than 40 minutes long, “For varying degrees of winter” is almost perfect.
LAWRENCE ENGLISH – Kiri No Oto (Touch)
There’s a strange sensation in me after having spun “Kiri No Oto” for the third successive time and been somehow unable of breaking the cocoon of its buried secrets. If those secrets do exist, they’re barely discernible in the bulky amassing of mainly distorted frequencies characterizing the music. At the end, this writer even speculates about the original plan as being exactly that: no actual access to the quintessence of the sonic matter. The album title – something like “the sound of fog” from Japanese – also seems to be revelatory in that sense, which is in effect a contradiction in terms. The eight tracks are seamed uninterruptedly, as in a single piece; the sources include both normal instruments (definitely guitars, one would say) and field recordings captured in Poland, New Zealand, Australia and Japan. There are, in truth, a couple of dramatically stunning moments, the transition from “Organs lost at sea” to “Soft fuse” a personal favourite; breathtaking stuff indeed. The rest is predominantly spinning around that sort of harmonically cuddling saturated dispersion that could be, perchance, pretty warmly welcomed by fans of Birchville Cat Motel (minus the aggressiveness: the majority of the substance here tends in any case to rippled stasis, vu-meters on red or not). The choice of bathing the compositions in such a pool of corrosive liquids translates into a total incompatibility (at least for my taste) with headphone listening. Jury still out, but English’s earnestness is not debatable.
LAWRENCE ENGLISH / JEPH JERMAN – Lawrence English / Jeph Jerman (Compost And Height)
First episode for a label founded by Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes, aiming to focus “upon our responses to the surrounding environment and the development of awareness”. This 3-inch CD comes attached to a small wooden block, a limited edition of 50 copies (all the titles found on the label’s website are downloadable for free, though) and contains two pieces, both meticulous enough in their respective fields. Lawrence English’s “Gradually you feel the tide at your neck” is a sonic picture of what he calls “the grain of the ocean”, a sound deriving from the coupling of a fierce marine wash and the diverse kinds of sand – from very thin particles to bigger fragments – characterizing the Australian beaches. The outcome is akin to a series of muffled inward gurgles breaking silence up, plus other assorted turbulences, not exactly innovative (at times they recall damaged vinyl) yet successful in symbolizing the researcher’s effort, rendered all the more complicated by the raging waters. Jeph Jerman’s piece “9” is an interesting combination of “recordings of meteorites, sferics and radio emissions from Saturn” influenced by the concept of a hypothetical station broadcasting sounds from space 24/7, the whole originated by Jerman’s reminiscence about his continuous watching of a NASA cable TV channel while residing in Tucson. Aesthetically satisfying, maybe slightly elusive compared to English’s track, bizarrely resembled in a few spots. In general a nice artefact, more a collector’s item than a “can’t miss” release.
ENSEMBLE 0 – Music of wheel (Creative Sources)
“Music of wheel” is a composition by Joël Merah, in which the performers should follow “a course generated and determined by the tossing of the dice which decide and direct the musician towards the action of silence or the action of sound”. Thus, different interpretations yield music completely new each time in a style that, generally speaking, should remain “soft” according to the originator. The quartet is formed by Merah (piano, toy), Sylvain Chauveau (electric guitar, toy), Maitane Sebastian (cello, toy) and Stéphane Garin (trombone, glockenspiel, cymbal, toy). It goes without saying that there is an obvious point of reference in this kind of approach to chance composition, and I won’t even name it; on the other hand, a distinct Feldmanesque trait is clearly audible throughout the disc, which presents six extracts from the three versions that Ensemble 0 recorded in the studio. Given the above mentioned conditions, the sounds seem to respect silence all the way; after the rolling of the dice, clearly audible at various times during the piece, we get long pauses, rarefied shadows and elongated tones whose frailty is much more than a sheer nod to that kind of meditative concentration that this music requires and quite often generates. Every gesture seems to imply something deeply necessary, but we can’t really understand what it is. Nevertheless, the picture of seriousness resulting from these tracks remains bright and pretty easy to decode, making this album one of the most accessible releases by the Portuguese label.
HANNES ENZLBERGER – My dear Ferenc! (Löwenhertz)
Franz Léhar was a “celebrated operetta composer who failed as an opera composer” whose music has deeply affected Austrian double bassist Enzlberger, prompting him to record a program dedicated to his work. Celebrated or not, I had never heard a note of Léhar’s music until today; now, thanks to Enzlberger – who has been a member of Anthony Braxton’s Tricentric Ensemble among other projects – my ignorance about the subject is at least partially diminished, even if the cover says “All compositions Hannes Enzlberger”. Oh well… Scored for a quartet that includes the leader plus Thomas Berghammer (trumpet, flugelhorn, altohorn), Petra Ackermann (viola) and Oskar Aichinger (piano), “My dear Ferenc!” is an elegant album appreciable under several points of view, played in extreme composure yet not exceedingly formal. Parts of this material could be defined “chamber jazz”, since the classic approach of Ackermann’s viola and Aichinger’s piano, which move in accordance to something that’s silently intended to be precisely predetermined, contrasts in fascinating ways with the improvisational techniques deployed by Berghammer, who sounds a bit like the “wild card” of the group. On his side, Enzlberger figures as a tranquil supervisor dictating the music’s pace while keeping a steady pulse under the musicians’ feet. Although the compositions are for the large part exquisitely comprehensible even in their most dissonant sections, not once we experience that kind of tediousness which is typical of a too intellectual approach. On the contrary – between a touch of mysterious sensuality and the recurring East-European postcards that animate tracks like the captivating “Podgorica”, where Jacques Nobili’s trombone is guest – the CD flows with ease, absorbing attention without overstaying its welcome.
SABINE ERCKLENTZ – Steinschlag (L’innomable)
Here’s a compact, effective solo trumpet album which needs only 27 minutes to express a whole series of concepts that transport the instrument far enough from those EAI explorations memorably described as “fffplschpllllkrrrschfff” by good ol’ Dan Warburton. Five concise tracks (one uncredited) in which every sound heard was produced by a trumpet; some of them sound just like that (well, sort of) but when Ercklentz’s computer intervenes the scenario changes quite radically. The record starts with a kind of air flux behaviour highlighting the trumpet as a complex hydraulic system which no human element can render more effective than that, hiss and pop as the basis for rupturing a basic tranquillity within the realm of a still “comprehensible” approach. Then we shift to the core of bionic traffic jams-cum-ghoulish pastorals, whose dissonant alignment is something that could cause serious distress to Dave Douglas and Wynton Marsalis fans. Gradually, distortion and crunch attack our aura in lethal doses but, strangely enough, everything remains confined in the appearance of a metaphoric monologue, maybe with a few psychosomatic consequences for the non-experts. No pleasures allowed. It’s all fragmented in a multitude of (dys)functional parts, yet it works exactly as requested by our stretched biorhythms. This music’s cycle is short and eventful, its dismembered body dead on arrival after uselessly trying to look attractive. After a few listenings, you realize that its inherent beauty is right there. This is the best result that Ercklentz could have achieved, making us accept an ungodly nature as an accomplished and fully structured methodology.
SABINE ERCKLENTZ / ANDREA NEUMANN – Oberflächenspannung (Charhizma)
This couple’s sounds evacuate their original birthplaces (piano interiors and trumpet) to fill an evanescent atmosphere with laconic statements, electronic traps and computer nooses. To the non-specialist, Ercklentz and Neumann’s aerostatic pads and dirty water bubbles could almost appear like a joking reminder of acousmatic furore; on the contrary, a track like the beautiful “Rost” stands to demonstrate that manipulating sounds to make something interesting out of them is not for everyone. “Oberflächenspannung” is kindless in its absolute refusal to add some sugar to serious cells of uncompromising aural manifestations; yet, you get curious to know more about its structure, hitting the “play” button once again.
ERIKM – Sixpériodes (Sirr)
Described as a “display of ErikM compositions for dance, theatre and cinema between 2001 and 2004″, this album is a charming alternative in the congested field of laptop/acousmatics, being imbued with a determined research for a sonic biology whose purpose goes far beyond the “soundtrack” definition. ErikM’s target appears to be the action of freezing what moves into aural snapshots: he reduces his perceptions to the bare minimum, using fragments of intuition and sampled snippets to find a connection with the functions of the body, which most of this music seems to represent in an almost graphic manner. It feels like there is a strong correlation with the automatic reactions of our nervous system, most sounds zapping around like a stimulated grasshopper, therefore effectively fulfilling their scope of demarcating choreographic schemes and underlining images. This music is indeed extremely visual, yet absolutely suggestive when taken as pure electroacoustic circumstance, completely original and honestly transcendental but at the same time very substantial.
ERIKM – Variations opportunistes (Ronda)
Using short fragments of pre-existing music and synthetic materials, all the while subjecting CDs to heavy preparations with substances such as silicone (synthetic too, but in a different way…) ErikM designs new variations on contemporary minimalism and a few abstractions, never letting us without orientation points. A snippet of harpsichord music by Jean-Philippe Rameau is multiplied and superimposed to assume the semblance of a Reichian tapestry; an even shorter segment by Igor Stravinsky becomes a psychic elaboration of ample spaces, exalted by barely detectable oscillations. The final track makes good use of addictive and subtractive synthesis to cancel the contours of reality in an obscure electronic elucubration. ErikM started these studies in 1997; he refers to them as analyses of the degeneration of frequencies. I don’t hear this music as such, my instant reaction one of rather imperturbable, conscious tranquillity. No indigestible timbres, abstruse codes or pirate broadcasts, only the right touch of transcendence in an otherwise pretty consonant setting. It could very well amount to a nice introduction to this artist’s music for the uninitiated ones; the record stands on its own pretty strong legs, though, showing several alluring pictures disseminated throughout its 27 minutes.
ERIKM / GUNTER MULLER / TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA – Why not bechamel (For 4 Ears)
There’s a long track here – “Kabel” – where this trio’s sound is really hallucinogenic: it starts from random pulses, revolves around an axis linking Zoviet France and Jon Hassell then proceeds to wrap your ears in such a frequency cocoon that waking up your nerves from certain sections of the piece will take quite a little bit. This sort of neo-futurist suite is preceded and followed by two improvisations where silence, feedback and cold-blooded killing tones make their respective part to redefine the concept of “harmonics”. The adventurous three use their devices maintaining full control of timbre and space, managing to capture the essence of a perfectly organized exchange of almost bruising statements. It’s just incredible how reaching for an extreme level of freedom is often made easier by a structure that seems to impose its own rules on the participants.
ERIKM (LUC FERRARI) & THOMAS LEHN – Les protorythmiques (Room40)
This 30-minute composition was originally intended to be presented by ErikM and Luc Ferrari at Musique Action Festival, 2005. Unfortunately, due to his declining health, Ferrari had to renounce and was duly substituted by Thomas Lehn, whose analog synthesizer has become an important element of the piece. Instead of the “open working process” upon which the original idea was based (a semi-improvised mix of composed and concrete segments) “Les protorythmiques” was then developed by following the highly evocative power of ErikM and Ferrari’s samples, prepared while working on the latter’s “Les archives sauvées des eaux”, in deft conjunction with the unpredictable waves and sequences that Lehn brings out of his instrument’s viscera. Uproarious masses of choked utterances and over-segmented phrases constitute the most evident colour, giving the idea of an expanding universe mostly based on sensory overload and dissociated behaviour. Elsewhere, intense synthetic attacks throw us in the middle of a war game that, after a while, morphs into the soundtrack of an afternoon in some Italian province, tourists and natives gathered in a massive whirlwind of insignificant words. Indeed Luc Ferrari spent his last days in Tuscany, and I find pretty ironic that one of the most crystalline personalities in acousmatic music’s history ended his life in a country whose musical “achievements” in the last century look no more than a faded photocopy of something that occurred elsewhere way much before. But the final bleeps and farts, mixed with a splendid foundation of singing birds and additional oral cut’n'paste, tell me that what I perceive as mundane can sound delightful to someone else’s ears. Then again, Tuscany is so beautiful.
XABIER ERKIZIA – Entresol (Antifrost)
This is the debut of Basque sound/multimedia artist Erkizia, who works with sounds at the threshold of inaudibility for most of this CD, even if a violent discharge at the beginning of the second movement could cause a stroke to the fainted heart after the almost subsonic relaxation of the first part. “Entresol” creeps through holes, walls and pavements like electricity in your home’s wiring: sometimes you manage to perceive something through the ears, most times you just feel its invisible presence manifesting itself like passing breeze – or in form of ultrasonic waves that a bat or a dog could hear in full. The listener’s role in this case is defined by the efficacy of his/her body functions; of course, clear ears and total silence should be a must when approaching sonic materials standing between the mutism of sources and a nuclear catastrophe. Then you arrive to the last track, that sounds like a cross of field recordings and shortwave radio, and realize no word can do justice to this highly skilled work: again, silence should prevail.
ERRATIC – The invisible landscape (Mystery Sea)
Belgian sound artist Jan Robbe works under the Erratic pseudonym to explore the perilously slimy waters where dark ambient and musique concrete meet, places where dozens upon dozens of powerbook/loopstation/synthesizer/exotic instrument owners break all their bones when the music they believe “oh so deeply impacting” clashes against the crude reality of another hundred thousand albums like their own “masterpieces”, the whole resulting in a bunch of meaningless music. But this is not the case: Robbe knows a thing or two about the different perspectives of event placement, applying a serious dose of skilled engineering to his creation. Although not exactly chilling, Erratic’s pieces maintain a firm grip on the listener’s attention; they are mostly well-connected, splendidly detailed cinematic soundscapes. In several moments of the “Til” series, the engrossing crescendo of alarming muffled frequencies introduces a slide show of impressive still lives and unclassifiable energies, underlined by a contrast with rustling noises and pre-recorded environmental sources that light up a candle of hope for the presence of someone in an otherwise distressing desolation. The final track “Okaasan chi” touches the heart gently with faint luminescences and superimposition of insects – of all things – that sound like they’re reciting a supplication.
KIKO C. ESSEIVA – Sous les étoiles (Hinterzimmer)
When composers decide that their music will need, in the midst of everything else, environmental or concrete elements to better depict their vision, they’re entering the classic “some folks got it, some folks don’t” territory. Kiko C. Esseiva certainly “got it”, as this superb record demonstrates. Esseiva stands among those sound artists who – like, say, Cedric Peyronnet (aka Toy.Bizarre) – are able to provide an impression of ongoing life to their structures, thus rendering them not only palatable but also highly gratifying, a sense of delight hanging on even in the most dramatic sections. Although the sources are definitely too many to be listed or just guessed – and I know for sure that most soundscapers aren’t too anxious to reveal secrets – the essence of “Sous l’étoiles” is strictly electro/acoustic, in that we perceive the presence of real instruments amidst the unfamiliar ambiences created by the practised studio handler. Every incident is placed exactly where and when it should be, episodes succeeding according to a far-sighted architecture that nonetheless tends to forget rules every once in a while in favour of a healthy anarchy (well-regulated, too). Esseiva’s music is “hybrid” in a very interesting acceptation of the term, in that he constantly meshes the properties and the characteristics of the chosen bits and pieces to fuse them into a nimble-footed consecutiveness, where a natural occurrence is all but the obvious consequence of a scheme made of knowledgeable choices and subplots. This is the kind of listening experience that often leaves with the mouth agape, wanting more when the disc is over. Then it’s back to the miserable normality of “regular” everyday noise.
CHARLES EVANS / PETER EVANS AND THE LANGUAGE OF – No relation (Greatbend)
I often wonder “What am I looking for in jazz these days?” and, truth be told, rarely come up with a satisfactory answer. Too many times I listen to players showing disfunctional conditions and evident discrepancies between a fabulous technique and the correspondent absolute lack of sense of humour – not to mention the ability to WRITE serious music without resorting to the habitual (and often unconsciously used) formulas and definitions. That’s why I’m enjoying time and again this lively, articulate and – yes – humour-gifted album released in 2005 by Charles Evans (baritone sax), Peter Evans (trumpet and piccolo trumpet), Moppa Elliott (double bass) and Jan Roth (drums). As the title could suggest, no blood relation exists between the Evanses, but LOTS of relations are instantly audible as far as ingenious playing is concerned. This CD is what you’d usually call a “breath of fresh air”, in that it mixes excellent soloism and ensemble interplay of the highest calibre in eight tracks ranging from post-Braxton regulated freedom to various kinds of bipolar behavior during the exposition of more “popular” (?) motifs. The interaction between Charles Evans’ baritone sax – he’s a stunning virtuoso with irony to spare – and Peter Evans’ trumpet is such that one can sustain long minutes of microtonal nuances and unpredictable mental processes without any strain, feeling the buzz of an energy that is certainly not too common among today’s jazz groups. There is some sort of “unbalance” at work here, which gives the music an eccentric character, but there’s also a sense of ethical seriousness corroborated by an ever-active reciprocal listening (Elliott and Roth swing, mourn and – when necessary – rumble like madmen, for good measure). The booklet artwork is great too, in perfect line with the stimulating music and compositional intelligence that I perceive throughout the disc; the “counter-liner notes” (written in an undecipherable, fabulous jargon which could rival Christian Vander’s Kobaian in terms of incomprehensible meanings for us poor mortals) are alone worth a good laugh. This project spells “advanced communication”, representing a perfect antidote against the frigidity of many current composers – jazz or non-jazz. These guys are working at the margins of the market yet manage to fulfil our needs of smart syntactical deconstruction, and if you love body building there’s an additional reason to appreciate Charles Evans (don’t ask – check for yourself).
MICHAEL EVANS / JEFF ARNAL – MEJA (C3R)
Childhood secrets time. As a tiny toddler I was MAD for drums, to the point of convincing my parents to buy me a miniature set which I banged with nice attitude; they even used to carry Massimo and his drums around various Roman parks in order for me to make all the noise I wanted without breaking the condominium’s peace (well, in the early seventies there WAS some peace in condominiums every once in a while). I still can behave myself well enough with odd meters (sigh). With all the due respect, the great drumming that’s presented by Evans and Arnal in MEJA reminded me a lot of those happy times, such are the fantasy, the brisk joyfulness, the incredible variety of techniques and sources that these men apply in their music, in almost a full hour of genreless percussive delight. No wonder that these players have been active on many fronts of the improvisation warfare, including working with dancers and actors, as this music is an experience of gestural freedom that we can elaborate over or simply enjoy as it is, conscious of the fact that we’re in front of serious artistic value from every point of view. Structures and functions subside to unpredictable sketches, colours and timbral weights, the whole continuously shifting in total absence of complications – even if this is far from being an easy listen. Everything that Evans and Arnal play seems to be in logical correlation, whatever the form. Very, very nice.
PETER EVANS – More is more (Psi)
In “More is more”, the separation between the player’s physiology and the imaginary entities evoked by his effort is minimal, with a definite tendency to disappear. Peter Evans plays piccolo (and “regular”) trumpet but he sounds like a tabla player, a fly captured in a bottle, a helicopter, a nervous wreck. He’s gifted with a phenomenal fantasy, being able to carve small nicks of melody in the ancient trunk of undeserved freedom – once an apparent dreamland, now too often an oppressive set of plotless formulas – all the while saturating the surrounding air with trembling gurgles and bellowing invocations. Evans’ complex vibrations are felt in the nape of the neck, gripping statements of multivision authority that thoroughly use the instrument/body connection to steal our attention and nail it right in the middle of our own head, the only place where these signals could ever dream to nidify. This man doesn’t play a note half-heartedly but puts his whole spirit into tubes that propel his special brand of virtuosity towards an extreme consciousness, his and our bodies the only means through which these sequences of messages can be transmitted and translated. “More is more” sounds like it is dedicated to every shattered being who’s somehow capable of receiving it; it’s an album so intense that it almost scares me, but is also one of the very best instrumental solo recordings that I’ve heard in 2006.
EVAPORI – Na katarynce (1000Füssler)
The source material used by Oliver Peters, aka Evapori, for this inspection of cavernous resonances is, unbelievably, a seven-inch record found in a flea market containing an old Polish waltz after which this mini CD was titled. The only discernible vinyl trace is some initial crackle, but after a short while Peters takes off with a thorough processing, immersing the whole in an amniotic liquid made of semi-electronic morphing, a combination of chiaroscuro flanging, warped nightmares and impressive rumbles. Only in the last four minutes we manage to pick up deformed glimpses of the original song, under the guise of distorted piano fragments and incorporeal voices. An interesting end for a well composed, absolutely intriguing piece.
EVAPORI – Fumes (Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien)
This label brings my memory back to the second half of the 80s, a time in which I was going through a serious post-industrial trip and names such as Cranioclast, Core, Werkbund and Mechthild Von Leusch were the menu du jour at the house, usually through limited vinyl editions that nowadays command impressive prices when located on eBay. Oliver Peters (aka Evapori since 2002) is one of the younger elements of this breed of composers, his music being based upon “field recordings, processed found sounds, self built objects and special treatments of acoustic instruments like cello and piano”. That’s not all; the way in which Peters seams these sources is not exactly predictable, thus the outcome is perceived as one bad anarchic beast. Starting with noisy eruptions, listeners are pushed into mental confusion; beats from hell blind the eyes, throwing the poor men again in infernal cauldrons of menace. Then, suddenly, a magic loop or a hypnotic repetitive formula clears the sky all at once, giving them a chance to memorize at least a snippet of their previous state. Then again a pause of silence, wondering if the record is over; of course, when going to check the LP on the turntable, another salvo of pre-fabricated clangours and electronic emissions welcomes the unsuspecting victim. Pretty much unclassifiable, creatively assembled, this album is seriously considerable as an introduction to Evapori’s sonic world.
EVIDENCE – Out of town (Deep Listening)
Scott Smallwood and Stephan Moore perform together as Evidence since 2001. Their main goal, as far as I can understand from this nice release, is blowing the dust of humanity all over urban environmental recordings, creating a magical aura around what could be erroneously be confused at first glance with “postindustrial” sound. No way: “Out of town” is as alive and kicking as the heart of a patient just out of the emergency room. We’re talking about music with roots into the very concept of deep listening: Smallwood and Moore are really two masters in shifting the centre of your attention in any single moment of their artifacts, creating a pulse with the noises from a bathroom or using badly received voices on the edge of radio waves to picture entities from another galaxy trying to get in touch. In a word, Evidence jazz up sounds of everyday life and make art of them.
EXIT IN GREY – Nameless droplet (Mystery Sea)
Moscow-based Sergey and Stas are the motors after Exit In Grey, whose sound is established over guitar drones, field recordings and not better defined “analog devices”. Their CD presents more than a few characteristics that I liked, despite being part of a genre which rarely makes my pulse race for the emotion. First of all, these boys are good at choosing the quality of the low frequencies they use, which is not a given in this area: every throb, growl or thrum possesses its own particular light, and only those who are gifted with good measures of “inner ear” when working in creative sound manipulation (believe me, not too many) are able to avoid useless jumbles and indecent emotional sterilizations. Luckily, Exit In Grey seem to be competent enough, in that their music vibrates from the underground rather than annoying with promises of fake heavens. The environmental sources – always discernible in the mix – and the sensible flanging treatment utilized in certain segments do the rest (with special mention for the splendid second movement), putting these gentlemen amidst the names to keep an eye on when looking for drone music with a modicum of significance. Sometimes transcendence is better achieved by maintaining at least one foot on the ground: “Nameless droplet” fully demonstrates this theory.
EYES LIKE SAUCERS – Still living in the desert (and mostly inside my own head) (Last Visible Dog)
A man and a dog living in a van and traveling through the desert is already an inspiring concept per se. That the man also records on a 4-track cassette machine his improvisations on instruments such as harmonium, toy piano, glockenspiel, oscillator, Farfisa minicompact organ and ukulele adds further spice to the recipe. Throw in a drunken Robert Wyatt cover (“Sea song”), a series of clear references to Nico (“meet me on the desert shore”, repeated in “Desert song”, plus the main instrument’s choice) and serve with a bit of tape distortion and lo-fi attitude, and you’ve just had a faint idea of what Eyes Like Saucers does. Still, there are additional surprises; one for all, the fact that several moments of the harmonium-based tracks, built on repetitive washes and hypnotizing, if irregular phrases, had me thinking about a Moondog/Philip Glass mix (I hope that Mr. Glass won’t sue, even if ELS’ pieces are certainly more interesting than most of his music from the last 20 years or so). The title track features the protagonist playing a majestic-sounding Wurlitzer Theatre pipe organ (it saturates the mix, but you’d been already warned) and can easily be considered as the album’s most engrossing moment. I don’t exactly know how it happened but this record, which in other days I could have foolishly judged as a minor item, made me feel so trapped in a still-minded vicious circle that I suspect that something magic hides behind this man and his canine comrade. I must discover what it is.
KAI FAGASCHINSKI & BERNHARD GAL – Going round in serpentines (Charhizma)
This is an acousmatic handicraft of the finest cloth, made with clarinet and computer. The listener’s receptiveness plays a fundamental role here, as trying to interpretate the snippets of evolution transmitted by Fagaschinski and Gal requires maximum concentration and single-mindedness. Ear-stretching superimpositions of adjacent tones and snapshots of concrete sounds/voices and field recordings hammer – but at the same time disinfect – our auricular membranes, forcing our disposition to retreat to an almost defensive posture. The naked truth of these sounds is almost cruel in its effectiveness: we hear what the brain decides to let us hear, after the defoliation of every useless decoration or – god forbid – futile beauty. It’s a brutally honest representation of a mathematical poetry, where there is no way out of a consequential logic which sometimes gives the illusion of a better future, but finally asks us not to judge, because we as humans are not intelligent enough to understand this kind of fractal charm. Like it or not, sonic progress needs its victims.
FERRAN FAGES – A cavall entre dos cavalls (Creative Sources)
This record is pretty unusual for Fages; those who know him as a noise priest with Cremaster will have a hard time recognizing his hand in these segments, played on a guitar without effects, with just a naked “string-and-finger” approach to a slow meditation. Devoid of any trick, just left there like an immobile stone, these 33 minutes show Ferran in intimate settings studying combinations of resonant strums and humming bass, slight detunings and detached calm. Everything is left as played, including uncertainties and crackles, so that the whole work sounds austere and sombre throughout. Standing halfway through the quietest work by Noel Akchoté and Loren Connors, it’s likely one will appreciate “A cavall” more and more through repeated listenings; I suggest doing it through speakers more than headphones, as the peculiar mixtures of frequencies are better helped by objects and walls refracting them.
FERRAN FAGES – Cançons per a un lent retard (Etude)
Despite having composed this music to “accompany the slow decay” of his late father, Ferran Fages also states that “it is not a posthumous homage”. Indeed it doesn’t sound like that: no plangent melodies, no gloomy atmospheres. Only an acoustic guitar and its strings, which Ferran touches with surprising conviction and decision, mostly concentrating on the relations between the different harmonics’ resonances and contrasts with a slight experimental aura, at times sparkled by the use of real-time detunings. He shows intelligence, restraint and sensitiveness at one and the same time. Halfway through the barely moving lines of a “new silence” outing and Loren Connors’ post-modern blues, “Cançons” is a long meditation on death – yes – but also a hymn to the necessary simplicity of an expressive means applied to a far-sighted aesthetic, equal to the one characterizing the Catalan’s work with entities such as Cremaster, Will Guthrie and Norbert Möslang. It is not a short record at over 70 minutes, yet there’s not a single instance in which it overstays its welcome. These “songs” are skeletally defined but complete, made even better by well-placed choices which, in a way, dehumanize their structure while letting us peep at a course of action to which Fages himself seems to participate with a degree of detachment. It’s the sonic reproduction of that feeling of just apparent coldness acting as a protective barrier against the grieve of such a fundamental loss, and FF makes perfectly clear that he’s learnt from this experience rather than having been overwhelmed by it. The final result is a definite step forward from his previous solo CD “A cavall entre dos cavalls”, an important artistic statement, an overall satisfactory release.
FERRAN FAGES / RUTH BARBERAN / ALFREDO COSTA MONTEIRO – Atolon (Rossbin)
Stop for a moment. Listen carefully. Inhale what you’re hearing. Don’t be scared if your eyes burn – it’s only normal; did I ever introduce you to my friends? Of course I did – read the Cremaster reports for example. Now, there’s the third of a perfect pair here, trumpet player Ruth Barberan. Well, I dare you to recognize a single “regular” trumpet emission here – Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis are revolving in their graves right now. What? Did you say “inhospitable”? Well, you never know – one day, this could be the only music you need. Isn’t the daily life just like that? Motors, electricity, animals, screaming people, litigations, hotheads and those unbearable kids of your neighbours that you’d want to kill every time you hear their voice. Ferran, Ruth and Alfredo portray everything but the proverbial kitchen sink through turntable, trumpet and accordion and – guess what – they do a much better coffee than your neighbours.
FERRAN FAGES / ALFREDO COSTA MONTEIRO / RUTH BARBERAN – Istmo (Creative Sources)
A feral antidote to the “regular” concept of trio is furnished by these lucid assassins, who keep releasing great music standing halfway through dual-purpose jumbles of noisy poormouthing and a radical reinvention of the act of stripping sound of every tourist beauty. This is aural toxicity at the very top, in kindless perpetrations of instrumental throwaway: what Fages does with a simple turntable would make Pierre Henry proud – or envious? – while the damp air coming out of Barberàn’s trumpet grottoes meets Costa Monteiro’s accordion in catarrhal metamorphoses of phlegmatic triangulations. No need for hocus-pocus, hand tricks or complex organizations of useless gentle movements: feel yourself like crossing a creek, tripping on a rock, being overwhelmed by your own ridiculousness – then you realize you just fell into an industrial sewer.
FERRAN FAGES / RUTH BARBERAN / ALFREDO COSTA MONTEIRO – Semisferi (Esquilo)
“Semisferi”, a double CD recorded in studio (Barcelona) and live (Paris), is the occasion to promote a virtual round table about the path of Fages, Barberàn and Costa Monteiro and the places they have visited with their music, of which this release shows several new perspectives. If it’s true that the ever-changing combinations of this trio yield different results, it’s also a fact that the aesthetic choices implied by their improvisational adventures is doubtlessly unique, having nowadays found its nest in an evolved, if deformed acousticity which is detectable even in the less smooth inseminations. The studio disc comprises two tracks, in which a new percussive element is brought forth since the very beginning, also courtesy of Fages’ bass tom – not to mention his motorized deconsecrations – and Barberàn’s penchant for having stones and rounded objects rolling and bouncing on (usually) an upside-down biscuit tin. If a more polite emission happens to spring out of those things by chance, the nice fellows promptly tarnish its potential purity with some kind of humongous fluctuation or through their home-made hornblowing, the allure of which is contagious in its brazen-faced beatitude. And if you hear “chords” (it happens, too) be aware that you won’t find them in Schönberg’s “Harmonielehre”. More probably, it’s your head that has reached the zero point of the easy listening scale. The live concert presents a series of miniature meltdowns where short-tempered reflections grow and expand until there’s no escape from their genuine plentifulness; additional accordion dissonance, the clatter of the multitude of objects utilized by Fages on his acoustic turntable, Barberàn intent on blowing against flexible surfaces to elicit distortion, it’s all part of a lexicon that these artists have created without caring too much if it sounded “good” or, heaven forbid, like “someone else”. The sonic matter is eviscerated until exhaustion; a few seconds of regrouping is all they need to launch more signals around in search of questionable values and thorough intolerances, at times manifested with quivering intensity in a series of self-recycling spurts of – why not? – violence. Patience and concentration are a must, unless you want to get distracted on purpose by something more pleasing and surely mundane, too.
FERRAN FAGES / WILL GUTHRIE – Cinabri (Absurd)
Would you allow your daughter to date Fages and Guthrie? Disbelievers in everything remotely resembling the regular sound of an instrument, this HispAustralian odd couple manages to subvert most usual improvisational practices in less than 28 minutes of amplified consternation, whose effects on the psyche stand halfway through a virulent galvanization (while listening, I walked around the house doing four different things without finishing one) and the sudden depressing realization that you will make no new friends if you play them this album. Pragmatically deranged, the emissions coming from Guthrie’s amplified percussion are trackless ways to the discovery of your cranium’s secret broken bones; those splinters you just found can’t be glued together, yet they might be nicely used by Fages, who could feature them on the surface of his acoustic turntable together with his nylon threads and twanging springs, everything moved by ill fantasies overburdened with gracious cynicism. The effective interchange between these artists’ personalities calls for a scribbled condensation of adequately shredded timbral errata, which in the hands of Fages and Guthrie become as important as the contextual unpredictability they ferment in. Glazy eyed, you will nail-pinch your arm to understand if it’s true that sometimes bleeding for noise is healthier than crying for boredom.
FAGUS – Dans l’involucre entre ouvert (A question of re-entry)
Fagus is the duo of Ferran Fages (acoustic turntable) and Pascal Battus (acoustic walkman). Since the very first moments of the disc one is lulled into a false tranquillity – some tweaks and creaks, hissing, familiar noises – then all of a sudden a hell of piercing high frequencies, like a bat chorale through an overdrive pedal – had yours truly (with headphones on) instantly lowering the volume in order to avoid brain scathing. I could imagine Pascal and Ferran obliquely sneering at me in that moment. The whole album is an exercise in effervescence of circuital burns and – especially in its final parts – the music seems to embody a miniature hommage to cheap machinery, implying several tips of the hat to AMM and Morphogenesis minus the low frequency range. It is virtually impossible to depict the complexion of this difficult sampler of uneasy misprints; I’d rather define the six tracks herein as herpetic appearances on an already deformed mouth. Any aesthetical pretense is left out of the equation.
MICHAEL FAHRES – The tubes (Cold Blue)
Dutch composer Michael Fahres presents three gorgeous examples of his compositional skill, alimented by a responsive ear which allows him to translate a simple idea – or a few of them – into music that makes us dream at first, then also think hard about the gifts provided by a life that, more often than not, gets wasted by running after stupid things. Armenian singer Parik Nazarian lends her voice in “Sevan”, a haunting piece somehow reminiscent of Akira Rabelais’ “Spellewauerynsherde”, in which she sang through huge metal pipes that once were meant to be used in a water-recycling project but, on the contrary, had fallen in disuse. Mazarian’s voice evokes ghosts of lost memories, blurring our visual with limpid tones that Fahres modifies for us to get lost in hypnotic haze. The long title track is mostly based on the breathing quality of the ocean water pressed in the underground caves of El Hierro (Canary Islands); the roaring hiss and the wash of the waters are complemented by didjeridoo and trumpet – by Mark Atkins and Jon Hassell – adding further hues of impressive power to a piece that runs miles and miles away from any hypothesizeable new age canon, instead putting us in touch with an essential force of nature that owns probably the most beautiful voice on the earth. “Coimbra 4, Mundi Theatre” takes its name from an event organized by Carlos Alberto Augusto and R. Murray Schafer in the Portuguese city, but doesn’t use sources from that occasion. It’s a splendid specimen of modern acousmatics, a proximity of field recordings, crying children, sacred choirs and what sounds like a funeral held in an underwater cathedral – possibly the very best moment of an already excellent album that establishes Fahres among the elects in the contemporary electroacoustic field.
FAKTURA – Faktura (Absurd)
My suggestion is to listen to this without headphones, at good volume and walking around like in a sound installation. Mark Wastell and Graham Halliwell use amplified textures and saxophone feedback without wandering in meaningless bell-and-whistle types of audio art; they use noise and feedback like if trying to encode messages for future insightful analysts, making sure these studies in spectral refraction and subterranean trembling get marbled in a mantle of almost suffocating torrid air. “Faktura” is neither a conversation, nor a mere experiment; instead, it must be viewed as a series of aural protuberances springing out of an overwhelming sense of void. It’s a recording that could convert lots of non-believers into supporters of restriction – and also one of Absurd’s best CDs.
FANTASTIC MERLINS – Live (TFM)
Debut EP for a quartet playing an exquisite assortment of contemporary styles and whose lineup comprises Nathan Hanson (tenor sax), Jacqueline Ferrier-Ultan (cello), Brian Roessler (bass) and Federico Ughi (drums). Although some incontrovertible influences are caught here and there – Curlew circa Tom Cora, to name one – these people know what they’re doing; desolate themes, vigorous lines and engaging improvisations are intertwined with delicate concentration and a masterful pacing of every section, the tension/release ratio remaining at a constantly balanced grade. On top of everything, the musicians look for a collective coherence rather than straining themselves to put their excellent technical value in front of the listener, which is a major plus in this 30-minute CD anticipating a full-length album that I’ll be very curious to listen to.
FANTASTIC MERLINS – Look around (Innova)
This is a group that seems to be growing with each new step. My second encounter with the quartet, “Look around” doesn’t want to assail the senses with futile rage or drooling melancholy, neither is strictly classifiable in a category. It obviously shows jazz roots, but possesses the qualities of an enviable stylistic maturity explicated through the soundtrack-like features of several of the tracks. Curiously enough, cellist Jacqueline Ferrier-Ultan, probably the most prominent voice of the ensemble, is also the only member who didn’t originate a piece (except being credited in the final improvisation). Yet her heartfelt lines are the ones blurring the border between harmonic consciousness and desire to evade the canonic aspects of composition. Drummer Federico Ughi and bassist Brian Roessler don’t strive to capture a place in the sun, focusing instead on their capacities of generating the right tonalities for the music to evolve, while Nathan Hanson’s tenor sax is the “complementary alternative” to Ferrier-Ultan in the band’s choice of thematic delivery. Atmospheres are quite differentiated from a section to another, with predilection for a gradually opening slow motion revealing a multitude of facets that the ears welcome as a reminiscence of situations that we used to enjoy, and that now are no more. There’s even a riff-based, pseudo funk song (“Lenny”) that demonstrates Fantastic Merlins’ versatility and will to change the cards on the table throughout the game. Forget all the names and comparisons (hey, did anyone realize that Bill Frisell hasn’t been playing something meaningful for a decade?) which render no justice to this ensemble’s determination in finding a unique language. They’re doing pretty good in that respect.
FAR BLACK FURLONG – Far Black furlong (ICR)
An obscure, delicate gem – somehow belonging to the “contemporary psychedelic ambient” area (OK, I made up this one) yet starting with a recited poem – that needs to be brought to a wider audience’s attention, likely to be appreciated by people willing to open their channels a little bit more than usual to the elements of existence that should be considered fundamental and are plainly forgotten instead. The project’s components are Mark Baigent (baroque oboe), Andy Cotterill (electronics), Bryony Lees (poetry), John Letcher (dulcimer), Richard Moult (composer), Ian Tengwall (guitar) and Amanda Votta (flute). Six movements of “music that describes tides”, mostly recorded in outdoor spaces. The whisper of the wind, the wash of the sea and the singing of the birds cannot be ignored, and there are moments in which one literally feels like rewinding the tape back to childhood. “Far black furlong” crosses influences as diverse as celtic folk, experimental acoustic and drone-based electronica, amalgamating them in a synthesis of hypnosis and self-awareness. In a way, this record could make a nice pair with the Fovea Hex trilogy on Die Stadt, even if the vocal element is almost totally absent here, replaced by trance-inducing reverberant instrumental serenities verging on the bucolic, without added sugar. A gentle intensity that radiates warmly throughout a full hour, human problems momentarily left outside the window. Do yourself a favour and get a copy of the limited edition, which comes with a second disc featuring a masterful 34-minute droning remix of the original album, as spellbinding as the summer moon mirrored in the rippled waters of a harbour (and often very near to Paul Bradley’s most fascinating work). You know which side I’m on.
FAST COLOUR – Antwerp 1988 (Loose Torque)
Great stuff came out, on an August evening in 1988, by this septet including Pinise Saul (voice), Dudu Pukwana (alto and soprano saxes), Evan Parker (tenor sax), Harry Beckett (trumpet), Annie Whitehead (trombone, voice), Nick Stephens (double bass) and John Stevens (drums). Subtitled “Suite for Johnny Mbizo Dyani”, this concert is a mixture of invocations, African rhythms and chants and, in general, musical artistry of the finest class that leaves pretty dumbstruck for its intense spirituality. Great cohesion is to be found between Stevens and Stephens, truly the septet’s heart in their incessant four-legged run through the core of a primary instinct which animates the whole album. Parker and Pukwana foster a slender feeling of liberation via ceaseless reciprocities and invasions of forbidden territories, which they visit with nonchalant studiousness corroborated by a high degree of passion. Beckett’s trumpet is featured in a stubborn solo in “Johnny Dyani’s gone”, but he also performs beautifully as a team mate in literate decodings of certain aspects of free jazz. The lyrics are sung with ardent animosity by Whitehead and Saul, who inject their interventions with determination and fortitude in a square-shouldered effort to pay homage not only to their late friend, but seemingly to a whole current of artists whose fate was sealed before they could even have a chance to show their greatness to wider audiences. Thanks to this archival material, Loose Torque is affirming itself as one of the labels most enthusiastically interested in keeping an important slice of English jazz’s pie still preserved and palatable.
TIM FEENEY / VIC RAWLINGS – In six parts (Sedimental)
There are hundreds of systems that can be used to break the protective cocoon of an early morning’s hush. Certain silence-breaking records do so while remaining confined within sonic restraint, nevertheless giving an idea of potential trouble lurking behind. Tim Feeney is a percussionist interested in the most frictional aspects of his set, which he exploits both with manual techniques (scraping, bowing) and by subjecting it to the uncontrollable response of an array of machines including no-input mixer à la Nakamura, contact microphones and pedals. Curiously he’s also a performer of classical repertoires (one wonders about the conversations he entertains with that area’s colleagues). Vic Rawlings is “an improviser and instrument builder, specializing in modifications of existing instruments”, but his forte is something defined “open circuits”: an unstable electronic setup interacting with exposed speaker elements which generates unpredictable reactions and subdued turbulences, well beyond a synthesizer. The outcome of this juxtaposition of personalities is a music that, believe it or not, sounds pretty much composed. Each part exists in the very moment when we expect it to, living its life for five seconds or two minutes, then giving room to another manifestation which, miraculously, behaves according to a thorough logic of consecutiveness with what preceded it. It’s an experimental kind of chiaroscuro for which we might not feel at ease in expressing an opinion. And silence? It’s still there, ready to be splintered into quick particles, feedback and tiny noises playing hide-and-seek with our inner ear illusion, a “tinnitus versus subsonic radiation” match that manifests its grudge in the final fifteen minutes, the environment invaded by corpulent hums, piercing shrills and regular appearances of more concrete percussive shapes.
FEIGNER – Laughter only feigned reproach (Scrapple)
Feigner is the trio of Brendan Dougherty, Aaron Meicht and Matt Mitchell, who all play electronics. The anatomy of this album is quite complex, yet the overall sense is basically one of straightforwardness, although after a couple of listening sessions I still had to figure out what attracted me the most in its sonic genetics. We hear anarchic alternances, dichotomies and strict correlations, starting with noisy outbursts nourishing a growing sense of displacement to evolve into sections that may be calmer but still show an extraordinary variety of facets. Undistinguishable sonic snippets, at times similar to munchkin vocal emissions but more often travelling the lands of distorted spatiality, constitute a fruitful environment for a rational technology of buzzes, harsh caresses and – in general – unconventional electronica. The evolutionary network developed by this trio is unpredictable in its multidimensional nature, as patterns and schemes are completely thrashed in favour of a lumpy molecular structure which seems to represent the metaphor of a deficient organization. Of course that’s not the case; the logical destination of this long trip is a state of semi-relaxation, the most tranquil part of this suite being its conclusion, a quasi-static conformation of slowly unfolding, ghoulish composite waves. And it’s not over yet, I’ll be listening again and again, probably still without a clue about any material and/or verbal definition.
MORTON FELDMAN – Early and unknown piano works (OgreOgress)
The interpretation of these intense compositions by pianist Debora Petrina achieves the difficult aim of balancing the accumulation and release of tension that’s essential in Feldman. Even at a young age – the earliest piece here is from 1943 – the composer already had well printed in his DNA a trademark style evocating shades of doubt and unanswered questions, most striking when the music is listened at low volume in a tranquil environment. The contrast between the chordal affirmations of “First piano sonata” and the sparse clusters of 1966′s “Two pieces for three pianos” resembles a path to illumination rather than a change of perspective; young Feldman put well defined frames to a vision that has been rightly considered fundamental in contemporary music’s history. What’s more, these beautiful tracks sound like opening the door of an ancient room and smelling the rememberings of something we won’t be able to catch anymore.
MORTON FELDMAN – Violin and string quartet (OgreOgress)
Composed two years before his death, “Violin and string quartet” is probably one of the most strikingly beautiful pieces by Morton Feldman; you have to give OgreOgress a lot of credit for uncovering this one. Here Feldman seems to embrace most of his technical principles while keeping his paintbox devoid of everything except the strictly necessary tonalities of colour. The scores are, more than ever, stripped to an almost skeletal form where whisperings and slow phrasing find their place among moments of reflective sadness and peaceful figurations. Most of this music is permeated by a quasi-minimalist flavour, yet it remains exquisitely fructiferous from other perspectives; clusters and harmonics are like a magic powder capable to transform an apparently weak statement into a vision of future artistic illuminations. Dwindling away until disappearing, this deeply affecting work can be considered Feldman’s definitive affirmation of his original style and – without sounding too ceremonial – maybe it’s the aural photography through which he would have preferred to be remembered. Either way, it’s fundamental.
MORTON FELDMAN – Complete violin/viola and piano works (OgreOgress)
This double CD set is yet another breath of that rarefied air which contributes to the fascinating atmospheres of Morton Feldman’s music. Christina Fong and Paul Hersey give a masterful display of sensitive playing, tracing a narrow way through the immaterial world of recollections that listening to these tracks inevitably brings out; through this difficult path, the open structures and the delicate gradations of pieces like “[Composition]” or “The viola in my life” assume the role of functional architectures for a malleable melancholy, itself the most beautiful colour in this profound collection. Fong and Hersey fulfil the scores’ potential while eliciting murmuring echoes from a past existence, stimulating our relations with the inner self through unobtrusive technique, carefully overlapping their reciprocal awareness. Apart from the initial “[Sonata]“, written by a young Feldman in 1945 and pretty different from the rest, all the material contained here keeps its promise of suspending our memory in a difficult position between shadowy disorientation and thoughtful research of another starting point, to better savour the inevitable silence that this music breaks just slightly, like in the 66-minute “For John Cage”, the perfect lock in a casket of harmonic apprehensions.
MORTON FELDMAN / DAVID BEARDSLEY / DAVID KOTLOWY / JOHN PROKOP / DAVID TOUB – For Feldman (OgreOgress)
“For Feldman” is a self-explanatory audio DVD in which the Rangzen string quartet (Karen Krummel, Heather Storeng, Christopher Martin, Sieu Mahn Phong) and violinist Christina Fong tackle Feldman-related compositions by four young disciples, plus a series of short pieces for string quartet by Feldman himself, fragments from 1954-56 appearing as glimpses of noctambulism radiating from the lights of comprehensible dissonance, intermissions of past memories amidst the profound contemporary awareness of the young heirs. David Toub’s “MF” is the most agitated, so to speak, work on offer here, a continuative analysis of a series of interlocking cells and patterns that go back to early Philip Glass with a hint to Stephen Scott, but with a curiously oblique aura surrounding it. David Kotlowy’s “Of shade to light” alternates the most Feldmanesque “few notes, many thoughts” considerations to gorgeous, full-scale waves of droning strings that just can’t leave us indifferent. “New England, late summer” by John Prokop is defined by the composer “something that would not call attention to itself”, yet its back-and-forth, slightly alterated quiescence is like a sloping undertow in a moaning sea, causing the opposite effect on my own concentration. The final and longest track is David Beardsley’s “As beautiful as a crescent of a new moon on a cloudless spring evening”: Christina Fong’s interpretation of this piece tuned to just intonation is exquisite, the score’s soberness juxtaposing distant reminiscences of La Monte Young and a stripped bare version of Phill Niblock to the internal hums of our body when we’re immersed in impregnable hush.
FELIPE CARAMELOS – Se prohibe cantar (Waystyx)
Philippe Blanchard (aka Felipe Caramelos, aka bis Lieutenant Caramel) is a serious electroacoustic composer, worthy of comparison with the cream of the genre rather than being inserted in the post-industrial cauldron like it frequently – make that “always” – happens. This music, strangely divided in two CDs whose length is about 18 minutes each, lavishly packaged in apparently identical sleeves (that instead contain different artworks), constitutes the anticipated return by the Frenchman, who hadn’t released anything new for a long time. It is also a confirmation of his great ability in bringing out the most from very basic materials, which include masterfully recorded human activities and simple sketches and sequences based on sampling, looping and synthesis, gentle melodies accompanying myriads of sentences and reflections by disparate segments of mankind (prevalently in Spanish language). There’s not much else to say, except that the high quality of the work resides exactly in this sheer musicality, which should bring to a higher appreciation of the world that surrounds us – not an easy task these days. What’s curious is that placing people’s chatter within a compositional structure renders that a “colour” while, more often than not, the same voices experienced directly – especially when one’s nervous – are just a pain in the ass of tranquillity. There lies a composer’s touch, and Blanchard transform his and our ears in conduits for the correct reception of the flux of everyday life, this outing’s main inspiration being slavery, of all things. But people are indeed natural born slaves – of money, regimes, ideologies, pitiful quests for enlightenments that will never be – therefore it all makes sense.
SIMON H. FELL – Kaleidozyklen (Bruce’s Fingers)
Those who are interested in the interaction between an orchestra and selected improvisers need a copy of this CD from 2002, containing what’s defined as the “magnum opus” of this perennially thought-provoking musician. Originally, Fell’s composition no. 57 was intended to be a concerto grosso including the SFQ quintet; funding problems forced a change of plan and the creator to decide, among other things, of giving bigger “responsibilities” to certain soloists. The core of this concept is the attempt to “create a classical music realized with the sensibility, techniques and flexibility associated with experimental jazz and improvisation”. Over the course of five movements, that’s exactly what happens: the work – conducted by Simon Baines and basically informed by a “modified” approach to serialism – has a decidedly XX century aroma, especially because it comprises quotations and references to earlier composers such as Stravinsky, Strauss, Ives, Mahler, Messiaen and Brahms – which should also reveal that attentive students of Frank Zappa’s output are going to appreciate long segments of this piece more than likely. Each part revolves around well determined technical tools, all the instrumentalists (members of the ensemble LSTwo plus clarinettist Rachel Cocks, pianist Paul Kosciecha and the project leader on double bass) intent in attributing a beating heart to what, in other hands, might sound like a succession of sterile exercises. A fascinating investigation occurs in the third movement, which features “experiments in real-time xenochronicity” that required five assistant conductors to keep the complex architecture of different tempi and tonalities working without excessive clashes. Yet my personal favourite is the fourth, “(In)articulation”, which uses Mahler’s material re-interpreted by the strings after a computer treatment with a music-reading software designed to reproduce the scanned score with minimum accuracy. The result is a warped soundtrack for a hypothetical documentary about the Brontë sisters, the most mesmerizing section of an important recording still deserving the highest attention, six years from its original release date.
SIMON H. FELL – Composition No.62 (Bruce’s Fingers)
Trying to convene words for the countless ramifications of Simon Fell’s music is certainly not an easy task; this is clearly evident listening to the extremely mercurial score of “No.62″ (subtitled “Compilation IV”). Gathering a monstrous mass of top virtuosos, the Leeds University Postgraduate Improvisation Ensemble and the Anglia Sinfonia directed by Paul Jackson, Fell goes deep down the meat with his slicing writing – corroborated by elegance and irony – in about 80 minutes of difficult performance where emphatic approximations, curious orchestral hybrids influenced by Stockhausen and Henry Mancini and swinging unconventional structures are set in motion by their designer’s extraordinary fantasy and executed by “la creme de la creme” of the most gifted improvisers around the house – we’re talking Evan Parker, Clive Bell, Alex Ward, Philipp Wachsmann, Rhodri Davies, and the list goes on and on. This material is a veritable kaleidoscope of intuitions and hommages, with Fell tipping its hat both to “serious” contemporary music and to a more approachable, post-commercial nostalgia; everything’s solidified in a classical sense of mystery and shines with a genuine love for complex orchestration. Simon shows his elegantly dissenting compositional skill seemingly without effort, just like if the responsibilities for the functioning of such a large group were only a secondary concern.
FENCEPOST – Fencepost (Evelyn)
Graham Williams, from Leeds (UK), uses many monikers for his musical output and Fencepost is one of them. A CD-EP, this short essay on homemade electroacoustics is very well conceived and exquisitely balanced; it all starts with a glitch-cum-silence track, but the best comes later: four more pieces where the main principle appears to reside under a contraction/expansion zip code. The graphics of sound are finely granular, the use of space just perfect; though most sources remain obscure, the tracks are instead consistently brilliant. It’s a good example of a right attitude to experimentation where there’s more substance than flashy tricks.
FENNESZ / MAIN – Split (Fat Cat)
Another good one in the split 12″ series by this label. Christian Fennesz shows his usual care in destroying “normal” sounds without exaggerating, so that you can mantain a glimpse of the original source in your head and follow it, as the day comes to an end. Very evocative, sometimes tender, but also disturbing in its tentative, deconstructive way. Robert Hampson, back to his old self, presents a long static track in which guitar, cymbals and piano frame through a powerbook let rise a droning vibration, rarely interrupted and instead complemented by some electric pulse or by fragments of extraneous noise. Main fans will love it of course. Both sides of the 12″ are excellent and I urge you to listen.
DOUGLAS FERGUSON – No.2 (Black Orchid)
Using mostly treated guitars until making them virtually unrecognizable, Ferguson scores an excellent point with this “limited means/maximum result” release for this Slovakian label. “Dawning” starts with a deviated Eno/Fripp-like trance wash of abstract, pretty consonant chords that get harsher after a massive superimposition, all bathed in a nebulous atmosphere forcing all sounds in a small metallic globe. Other interesting tracks are “Front end loader”, where a flock of apparently unmovable clusters puts the listener straight into an incinerator; “Viriginia insects” (sic), a purgatory where no correct door to heaven is shown, like being lost amidst running tape reels and failing lights. “Extraterritorial” puts the accent upon a nice Krautrock similarity, while the final “Morning” is a collage of anguish and unresolving, nerve-wrecking tensions. But what really gets me pleasantly lost are the dark room fumes of the droning “Brooding”: I could listen to this piece for hours indeed. Excellent, personal music with lots of influences perfectly digested and synthesized by a man I’d really like to hear much more of.
DOUGLAS FERGUSON – Lexical passages (Evelyn)
“Lexical passages” is the third solo release by Texan guitarist/soundscaper Douglas Ferguson, whose work is consistently improving with each new record. A double CD, this is mostly based on atmospheric drones, icy static landscapes and jangly guitars (plus some other instrumental source) put into heavy effect treatment, sometimes with a few fuzzy lines lurking from the outside. If I linked this artist to other experimental guitarists you’d only perceive him superficially; instead, Douglas’ approaches the whole length of this opus with carefully constructed hoards of impressive, thoughtful sound remodeling. Unrecognizable shadows infiltrate an apparently serene setting while the mass of frequencies tends to petrify in a hardness you couldn’t break with a pick. This sort of stagnation does not filter out the listeners because, right from that layering of stillnesses, lots of moving harmonics and delightful timbral halos fly out, forcing your complete attention like you were put in a pillory. What remains when the music’s over is a sense of void, like getting used to a presence felt as unsettling but that instead was vital.
DOUGLAS FERGUSON – Untitled (Distillery)
It’s a cold, limpid November afternoon; while I’m writing the sunset is doing its slow course and Douglas Ferguson’s bewitching loops of guitar-and-who-knows-what-else have already thrown yours truly in what Frank Zappa would call a “semi-catatonic state”. Spirals of powerful dronegames mix with metal caresses, appearances of vocal subway ghosts, remote memories from deserted aircraft hangars. I should close the window, restore some order on my couch – but I’m nailed right here, like if an invisible body forced me in an uncomfortable sitting posture. Every once in a while, screaming masses of overdriven electric winds last five-minute eternities, in a whirling-flanging-reverberating celebration of six stringed disembodiment. Elsewhere, clouds of harmonic blasphemousness spell the death of consonance, sounding like a depressed church organ with a perforated lung. The CD timer becomes a useless option; this music wants your jugular like a seducing vampire. Fans of static deformation and solid-body illusion melting – you’ve all been warned.
MARCOS FERNANDES / HANS FJELLESTAD / HACO / JAKOB RIIS – Haco Hans Jakob Marcos (Accretions)
This music was improvised in a studio of Tijuana, Mexico in 2003. Four musicians/sound artists with pretty dissimilar backgrounds were riunited in an improbable place to set up a series of exchanges whose main result is a curious intersection of affected balances and discarded identities. At the beginning, Fernandes’ drums seem to prevail in the mix; but soon enough, synthetic eruptions and stuttered affirmations by Fjellestad and Riis begin to mould an ambiguous bed of thorns for Haco’s electronics, toys and (in “Speak”) quiet introverted utterances. Instantly, the whole gets instinctively connected to a bizarre underworld of biotic agglomerates with a collective lunatic personality, in which percussive fragments and an inexhaustible simultaneousness of electronic idiosyncrasies join, acquiring a soft polymorphic consciousness. An utterly impalpable sense of extraterrestrial counterpoint does the rest, giving our perceptive channels the right amount of time to get used to this strange concoction.
MARCOS FERNANDES / MIKE PRIDE – A mountain is a mammal (Accretions)
Fernandes and Pride are two renowned percussionists who have been active in the free music scene for many years, playing with a virtual who’s who of the most inquisitive minds of the “no pigeonhole” areas which include, among the others, George Lewis, Haco, Jack Wright, Anthony Braxton, Eugene Chadbourne, Nels Cline, Otomo Yoshihide (and counting). The splendidly titled “A mountain is a mammal” presents percussive dialogues that accept no stylish compromise, focusing on textural analysis and event-related spontaneousness. Austere if fantasy-gifted, this music offers a lot, ranging through various aspects of an anti-pattern approach that bristles with effervescent energy and denotes scrupulous attention for what the partner has to say. Metal, wood and skin are all parts of a context in which every component weights the same and no influence is noticed. There seems to be a struggle to achieve a controlled structural freedom, a semi-fractal kind of expression that borders on the ritualistic but also sounds rationally well behaved. Muscular playing is also featured, especially in the aptly named “A little more dangerous”, while “More than everything” is a great moment of serenity, rippled by electronic processing and rebellious clattering, ending the record in a “dadaist” light, Pride’s vocals halfway through a goose and throwing up his cookies. This stuff is made of many hits and few misses, moving with natural compulsion but always remaining extremely manageable as far as the degree of acceptability is concerned; Fernandes and Pride prove themselves to be two competent, keen-eared players with the capability of enhancing a conversational flow. The whole makes for 40 minutes of sober yet often exciting improvisation.
MARCOS FERNANDES / BILL HORIST – Jerks and creeps (Accretions)
Three improvisations that sound innovative, fresh and surprising, different outlooks on electroacoustic microcosms that hide many untold secrets worthy of being revealed. Fernandes works with “phonography and electronics”, while Horist is a great exponent from the latest wave of prepared guitar manipulators. Two segments were recorded in Kobe and feature Japanese experimental artist Haco (once the singer in After Dinner), herself distorting and camouflaging her voice behind electronic processing; the third was taped in Osaka together with Masafumi Ezaki (trumpet), Bunsho Nishikawa (electronics) and Tim Olive (electric bass). The tracks with Haco are probably better developed and, if I’m allowed to say that, a little bit glossier, the ones that tickle the unconsumed aesthetic sense of the audience, subjected to repeated doses of amorphous slinging, resonant clatter, colliding strings and introvert contractions spreading all over the place in about 32 minutes of truly alternative, almost neurotic action against sensual immobility. Hums and zings, mumbles and moans, radios and unrecognizable timbres, at times reaching unexpected apexes of incongruent beauty. The Osaka performance is certainly harsher yet not the least provocative, distortion and hiss more evident in the mix but very far from the “sheer noise” approach. Halfway through tenebrous and shattered, the sounds put forth by the quintet are enough to raise the eyebrows of sleepy consumers, forcing them to pay the utmost attention to a network made of myriads of tiny cells that – taken as a whole – transport the players in a collective poor man’s nirvana. An increase of the urge of freaking out will likely be measured in unstable by-passers.
AGUSTI’ FERNANDEZ / MATS GUSTAFSSON – Critical mass (Psi)
At one and the same time refined and hungry, Fernandez and Gustafsson’s music explicate its immeasurable intensity through ten piano/sax duets that touch aspects of improvisation ranging from lively conversation to fuming quarrelsomeness. While many fantasticate upon spiritual bonding and communion of intents, these hot heads like to show their discrepancies: ruinous stumbles, forced contrapuntal meetings, crumbling shouts, mouthfuls of saliva-drenched tough cookies and rumbling digital jugglery form a large mass of inequable, essentially anarchic sounds looking for the nearest way out of normalcy. Utterly unpredictable, always puzzling, all the tracks of which “Critical mass” is made contain scorching attacks to the casual listener, who will be scared by such a sclerotic tissue of dissonance; instead, this stuff is for long-standing connoisseurs, people whose renitency to artistic cheapness is well proven. To those ears, this album will sound as an instant classic.
FESSENDEN – Capture/Create (Entr’acte)
Hailing from Chicago, the trio of Joshua Convey (bass) Stephen Fiehn (CD players, guitar, iPod) and Steven Hess (drums, vibraphone) presents us with a pretty austere minimal music, much in the vein of labels like For 4 Ears and Longbox as far as the silent organicism of their sound is concerned. Recorded directly to minidisc using a single “strategically placed” stereo mike, these two compositions are born from a structured improvisation in which the three musicians exchange accomplice glances while remaining concentrated on hypnotically drifting circles, mostly building their rustling murmurs upon the cross of rumbling frequencies and gently clattering loops, amidst which Fiehn’s guitar plays sparse clean chords in a slow crescendo that’s abruptly cut off by the sudden end of the CD. A captivating release which left me curious to hear more.
FESSENDEN – Inside the ice factory (Utech)
Cyclical structures and timbral mimetism are the most evident features of this unadorned music, recorded in Chicago in 2005. Convey, Fiehn and Hess use bass, CD players, guitars, iPod and drums to move around organic systematizations of partially educated noises and found sounds converted to an inexhaustible mesmerism which is the main asset of this beautiful disc. In the hands of Fessenden, instruments become combustible, generating a growing penumbra of ruinous premonitions that never seem to really materialize. Playing on a rusty knife edge, these artists mould a new genre of inquisitive reduction of technical abuse, once again nearing the area of Günter Müller-based electroacoustic improvisations, with just a little less refined language but with the same amount of substance. “Inside the ice factory” encroaches new territories without too much of a movement, its latent shamanic energy well disguised by an appreciable “no frills” attitude on behalf of the players.
FEU FOLLET & MIINA VIRTANEN – The icicle lectures Vol.1 (Ex Ovo)
Looks like working in sub-human conditions brings nice side effects sometimes. While Tobias Fischer (aka Feu Follet) was intent in his writing job on the house journal of a huge German call center, he noticed repeated ads for piano music CDs. He checked them out and got in touch with Miina Virtanen, whose instrumental piece “Silence thoughts II” is at the basis of this collaboration, a very tranquil record featuring two tracks. In the first, played by Virtanen alone, an uncertain flute introduces pianistic phraseologies that border on the new ageish, very melodic and relaxing although not really saccharine-imbued (Tim Story is not too far away). The long suite that follows raises the bar quite a lot: fragments of Virtanen’s playing get processed and looped to create a mixture of minimalist ambient and mantric reverberations and arpeggios, exploiting the natural resonance of the instrument. Without throwing La Monte Young and Terry Riley out of their bed, as this music’s depth is not on par with those composers, the overtones caressing the air show respect for the audience. If you choose the right moments, this CD reveals a degree of seductive power with repeated listenings, its absence of emotional peaks notwithstanding. But you have to live in a silent place and avoid headphones, or it will make no sense at all.
JOE FIEDLER TRIO – The crab (Clean Feed)
A trombone, bass and drum trio that moves around coordinates of atonality and funk, featuring the leader plus the exciting rhythm section of John Hebert and Michael Sarin. Shaped by a 20-year studying period with Albert Mangelsdorff (whose music he had been tackling in a previous Clean Feed CD) Fiedler nevertheless propels his playing via large quantities of spicy angularity over the course of nine tracks. Modulating the compositions through harmonic progressions that sound all but not prefigured, the trombonist demonstrates himself to be a keen-scented researcher of the negation of predictability, managing to jump here and there according to intervals that probably look like graphic symbols of bungee-jumping on paper. Fiedler’s instrumental voice avoids magniloquence in favour of a lean and mean tone, which lies upon odd metres and tangential bass riffs with the same sweated sweetness of a satisfied lover after hours of funny games. Hebert shows technical prowess, not only via ever-involving solo spots but acting as an equable timbral counterpart to the leader’s fantasy. Sarin possesses tremendous sensitiveness and a quizzical capability of swinging for the fences when necessary, revealing his wrists’ elasticity in repeated occasions, all the good intentions of keeping the things straight ending in a dirty alley where the chief uses his friends’ comprehension to throw bumblebee-like lines up to the sky. They seem to go everywhere, as a hundred doves would do once set free.
ALVIN FIELDER TRIO – A measure of vision (Clean Feed)
“A measure of vision” was recorded – in six hours! – by Alvin Fielder (drums and percussion), Chris Parker (piano) and Dennis Gonzalez (C and Bb trumpets) with the occasional help of Aaron and Stefan Gonzalez (Dennis’ sons) on acoustic bass, drums and vibes. It’s a one-of-a-kind mixture of influences, glorified by uncommon sensitiveness by all the involved instrumentalists. The beauty of execution and deep feeling that the trio expresses in Federico Mompou’s “A mon frère” is a rare thing, followed straight away by the very lyrical “Camel”, a piece by Dennis Gonzalez that recalls – both in title and general disposition – some of Frank Zappa’s music in the “Hot Rats” and “Grand Wazoo” eras, something whose complexity belies a bottom structural limpidness that renders the listening a sheer exercise in pleasure. Fielder’s illustrious past collaborations (Roscoe Mitchell and Sun Ra to name just a couple) are present in spirit but, curiously enough, it looks like all the energies were channeled towards a pretty rational exploration of moods and states of mind, with only few moments of true liberation, if always in full check of the nervous levels of the music itself. Parker’s chordal work represents the most evident touch of grace in several of the tracks, which often become a hybrid canvas of harmonic architectures and impromptu decisions highlighting the musicians’ creative input. Gonzalez’s lines are as always serenely heartfelt, and the leader’s drumming is so discreetly knowledgeable that its presence is almost more guessed than heard. In these 68 minutes there’s not a single misstep.
SCOTT FIELDS ENSEMBLE – Beckett (Clean Feed)
“Beckett” was recorded by a strong quartet consisting of Scott Fields (electric guitar), John Hollenbeck (percussion), Scott Roller (cello) and Matthias Schubert (tenor sax). The leader uses “post-free jazz” and “exploratory music” as definitions to help us poor reviewers writing about his vision, in this case setting Samuel Beckett’s short plays in terms of sonic rendition. The CD contains five tracks of what one could call “radical comprovisation”, a no-genre-all-genres series of structural possibilities for instruments to dialogue calmly or look for litigation. On a first approach we could think about entities like Curlew or Doctor Nerve; sometimes things get a little more complicated, though. Fields privileges a clean timbre on his axe, which is fundamental to maintain absolute clarity in his pretty entangled lines. Roller excavates imaginative figurations while remaining an ideal partner for dissonant unisons and ever-evolving, intertwining dissertations with Schubert’s non-conservative vocabulary. Hollenbeck is a bright-minded participant to a collectively sensitive interplay that never ceases to amaze, alternating basic patterns, uncontrollable rolls and sheer bedlam with self-controlled gestural balance and almost exhilarating musicianship. Everything in this disc tends to the instantaneous generation of attitude-permeated linear and textural counterpoint, whose results add spice and intelligence to a music which is only apparently difficult to penetrate, revealing instead many layers and secrets that will make adventurous listeners seriously happy. An advertisement for well-regulated iconoclastic playing, “Beckett” is one of those releases carrying the same weight of a powerful political statement. Listen and learn, then decide if you still need the velvet touch of deadly boring “jazz”.
SCOTT FIELDS ENSEMBLE – Dénouement (Clean Feed)
Guitarist and composer Fields assembled a double trio to interpret the complex nuances of his half-written, half-improvised scores, giving the players circumstantial instructions in order for the compositions to sound like “puzzle pieces”, the six instrumentalists effectively intertwining rhythms and phraseologies yet resulting as a coherent, and ultimately delightful whole. No wonder that this stuff remained unpublished for years, while – to quote its originator – “label owners fell in and out of love with the music”: this is fairly difficult material, which in its presumed calmness offers many and one points of observation for a series of crosscurrents mixing modern jazz and quasi-chamber apparitions, spiced by mostly clean-toned if pretty dissonant guitars (Fields and Jeff Parker – yes, Tortoise’s), elegantly austere, beautifully sustaining basses (Jason Roebke, Hans Sturm), swinging-but-also-pensive drumming (Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang). Divided into seven tracks, whose names are a joy to read – take a look at the full title of “…His late wife…”to have an idea – the 72 minutes of “Dénouement” do not carry excessive weight at any moment, being instead gifted with considerable musicianship which transports the ensemble towards those heights where the rarefied air of clever interplay is present and easily breathable. Minimal in a way, communicative at various levels, these arrangements show Fields’ lucid vision and ability to remain within the realms of circuitousness while avoiding those sterile dialectic supplements that uncork the bottles of vintage listlessness typical of dead-end jazz. This is a commendable album to savour delicately, repeatedly, consciously.
SCOTT FIELDS FREETET – Bitter love songs (Clean Feed)
Everything in this CD – from the extremely sour liner notes, to the cruelly sneering track titles, to the leader’s “chip-on-a-shoulder” photo in the inlay card of my promo copy – reports of someone who is about to explode following a series of unlucky existential affairs. What better method to channel a potentially destructive fury into a handful of composition for guitar trio, and making them appear delivered from jazz stereotypes as well? That’s what happens in “Bitter love songs”, the latest news coming from Scott Fields, whose clean-but-not-too-much tone characterizes a fine brand of dissonant, almost irritating at times, angular tunes where he’s sustained by Sebastian Gramss on double bass and João Lobo on drums. Hammering down phrases that appear as acrid as one’s mood after a rollicking from the office’s chief, Fields sounds similar to a man obsessed, totally unmindful of the establishment of a harmonic permanence. Ostinato-based figurations and chords full of minor seconds and augmented fifths are served like hamburgers at McDonald’s, one after another in deadpan pessimism, until every honeymoon picture on the wall gets ripped off the frame. The calmer settings are tackled with a sort of extreme aloofness, all the more enhanced by a rhythm section that doesn’t want to know what “regularity of pace” means. The guitarist declares to have kept the words of these bitter songs to himself, but there’s no question that his music stings worse than a lawyer’s bill. If John Scofield (note the curious assonance) decided to go harmolodic, maybe he could ask here for a few lessons.
15 DEGREES BELOW ZERO – New travel (Edgetone)
Recently I’ve been surprised quite a bit by Edgetone, whose roster has enlarged to the point of including realities that one doesn’t exactly suppose as belonging in that context. Who are we to spit sentences anyway? If the music is good, fine with me. 15 Degrees Below Zero are Daniel Blomquist, Michael Addison Mersereau and Mark Wilson, their instrumentation comprising everything but the kitchen sink (read: laptop, samplers, keyboards, effects, mixing, processing, guitars, vocals, harmonica, pedals, contact microphones – whew). The record is a fascinating mixture of unknown and familiar, definitely recalling the sonic worlds of people such as Peter Wright and Howard Stelzer. That means a lot of mangled fragmentariness, disfigured voices, devastating drones and earthquake-like rumble. Does this mean that the stuff sounds the same throughout the CD? Hell no – the dynamics at work in “New travel” are impressive, so much that I had to repeatedly lower the volume in my headphone to avoid aural scathing. Still, when the engines get going we’re right in the eye of tornadoes of pure bliss: uncomfortable groans and jangling intolerance become a constant presence in soundscapes that might very well be the soundtrack to the last day of our life before the final judgement. These boys don’t cheat, don’t disguise fake ideals behind blasé façades and detached attitudes. There is some serious blood drawn in this collection of maelstroms that can drag depression out of a being, transforming it in a kind of rage that bubbles within while remaining unexpressed, thus alimenting the will of resisting for another couple of hours or so.
KEVIN FIGES QUARTET – Circular motion (Edition)
In the artistically enlightened area that’s Great Britain one can make a decision of undertaking the study of saxophone at 22 and find Elton Dean (RIP) as a first tutor, just by chance. This happened 20 years ago to alto saxophonist Figes, who went on to take part in diverse frameworks, including Keith Tippett’s Tapestry. Figes, who until that moment in time had only played in rock bands and never heard a note of jazz, was captured by a book given to him by his mother as a present. The kid learnt swiftly: his music is in fact a captivating integration of influences – he quotes Wayne Shorter, Chris Potter, Kenny Wheeler and Dave Holland – communicated with poise and empathy, nonchalantly neat but not at all inconsequential. The timbre is warm and charming, always in charge of the whole textural perspective, and the rest of the band (Jim Blomfield on piano, Riaan Vosloo on double bass and Tim Giles on drums) performs a laudable work of support, being also allowed a fair share of soloist evidence – a beautiful piano reflection opening the elegiac “Pastoral scenes”, for example – that not once gets wasted for egotist, look-ma-no-hands purposes. A lovely experience throughout, an album that accentuates level-headedness in your chance transits through mild unhappiness.
KEN FILIANO & STEVE ADAMS – The other side of this (Clean Feed)
Two extraordinary players do not necessarily imply the accomplishment of a good duo, but Filiano and Adams are endowed with a unique blend of exquisite discernment and listening ability which takes their improvisations to the highest realm of “modern chamber jazz”, if you forgive the definition. Twelve dialogues in which we enjoy the result of a light housekeeping between a crystal gazing bassist, whose sound is molecular, creamy and from time to time subjected to a discreet effect treatment to build whirlwinds and continuums, and one of the most eclectic reedists on the scene, a visionary who’s lucid enough to never let either lyricism or geometry take a leading role during his fabulously inventive linear investigations. It’s one of those cases when I’m left fence-sitting, unable to divide the merits of the musicians in something that’s equally intricate and heartwarming. These artists explore several directions with identical inspiration, their ideas igniting a far-reaching interplay whose appeal is inversely proportional to this music’s commercial potential. “The other side of this” does not contain anachronisms or conventional concepts; it’s rather a demonstration of the unnecessariness of being radical-viewed in order to create something remarkable and unpremeditated.
KLAUS FILIP / RADU MALFATTI / MATTIN / DEAN ROBERTS – Building excess (Grob)
I realize that I’m listening to a milestone whenever hearing sounds coming out of every small corner of my room, like silent creatures invisibly giving me their hand while heartbeats slow down and breath is almost stretched into stillness. Klaus Filip and Mattin’s computers are – paradoxically – a sort of guideline in the mist raised by Radu Malfatti, whose trombone is sanctified by the attention to textural speleology that only this man is capable of. Dean Roberts’ few statements deliver telluric news to silence, imposing their presence for a while before laying on the ground in a fantastic mimetism with the computers’ feedbacks and elongated drones by Mattin and Filip. For long moments we could be justified in giving up any physical activity, just to aspirate these ceaseless sonic wonders; but the manner in which this music finally takes control over everything else cannot be described by sheer words. Pity the unlucky people who won’t share this listening experience, or whose ears are still deaf to the evolution of broken silence.
MILO FINE – Ikebana (Emanem)
Milo Fine epitomizes the figure of a multi-instrumentalist improviser; this double CD sees him in company of illustrious fellow spirits during his 2003 London visit. “April radical” mingles various strings, electronics and voice with clarinet, piano and drums in an imaginative piece crossing chamber settings and piquant segmentation, with three double bass players (Tony Wren, Marcio Mattos, Simon H.Fell) in beautiful growling balance. Three clarinet (plus drums) duets with Alex Ward seem to file the cutting edge of a tetanic flick knife carving mouthpieces to deviate the regular blowing, until “Skinny frog” (with Gail Brand and Paul Shearsmith) brings back a measure of tranquillity – not without some flickering flame of ironic ludicrousness. The whole second disc is made of “May radicals”, a five-part sextet (including Hugh Davies on “invented instruments” and Charlotte Hug on viola) where the coordinates vary according to the spur of the moment: now a next-to-silence exploration of hollow timbral interiors, then a couple of piano reflections amidst a remarkably self-regulating group autonomy; all of which brings the musicians to a series of fair-minded exchanges of scrutinizing looks to each other. Philipp Wachsmann, Angharad Davies, Matt Hutchinson and Marj McDaid also appear in various parts of this excellent release.
JAMES FINN TRIO – Plaza de toros (Clean Feed)
If jazz is not method but purity of intents, then James Finn should be regarded as one of today’s saviours of the genre. His unrepressed, almost desperate spiralling pulmonary storms possess a propulsive energy which avoids any esoterism, his tenor sax a link to the visceral rage of total non-belonging. More than the hommage to the “corrida” that it symbolizes, “Plaza de toros” sounds like a fight against the worn out friendliness of many passionless lessons in futility; Dominic Duval’s fantastic arco work – listen to him in “El tercio de Varas” to get the picture – is like the silent companion of a crying man, ready to sustain him through lucidity of analysis and strength of limbs. The fractal drumming of Warren Smith is the completion of a long series of perfect natural spurts of life, which are also luminous portraits of three egoless artists whose playing is refreshingly deep and outrageously spiritual.
DAVID FIRST – Dave’s waves (Ants)
Four studies for sine waves, ring modulation, pitch shifting and – generally speaking – frequency superimposition, each one timed at 19 minutes and 33 seconds in a record that’s charmingly effective to the brain and geometrically perfect as far as sound diffusion is concerned. There’s no trace of weirdness or irregularity in this music; even if certainly not groundbreaking, the vibrational impact of the tracks is quite often inspiring and “traditionally relaxing”. Remaining autonomous in relation to the sacred realms of American trance mavericks, First achieves the goal of separating himself from the music – which is a plus in this case – and take a well definite position amidst the oppressive ambiguities and distracting overhypes that lie under the contemporary spotlights. All that said, “Dave’s waves” – except maybe for the more dynamic fourth part – should appeal to fans of Eliane Radigue and the likes, even if on a slightly detached, less profound level.
FLIM – Ohne Titel, 1916 (Plinkity Plonk)
To better enjoy this CD you should avoid headphones at all costs, as it shows its most beautiful shades by exploiting the natural reverberation of a room. That said, Enrico Wuttke (aka Flim) is a German pianist and composer who has released several albums, yet this is my very first encounter with him and unfortunately this happens in a sad occasion, as this music was composed in order for Wuttke to exorcise the pain deriving from the loss of his 8-year old daughter, Fanny. Needless to say, the atmosphere is far from happy. Picture a rarefied version of Roedelius’ gentle melodies cross-pollinated with Tim Story’s most melancholic expressions (if you never heard Story’s “Wheat and rust” you have missed something, by the way), the whole played with an array of keyboards, toy pianos and xylophones, additional assorted instrumentation and minimal processing, which gives the music a slightly sobbing quality – and I’m not riding Wuttke’s sorrow to affirm this, it’s really so. A few sparse piano droplets, shards of broken glass in a green field populated by frail-looking flowers. Grey afternoons and cloudy aggregates. An organ piece that’s as simple as closing the eyes in silence. These are a few of the visual and aural suggestions that I could recall while listening to this album, which elicits contrasting sensations but is certainly a deeply touching homage to an angel.
STEPHEN FLINN – Architect of adversity (Creative Sources)
One looks at the photo adorning the cover of this CD and sees a real lot of things: every conceivable object is there to be hit, scraped or somehow made appropriate for appearing in what we still persevere in defining a “solo percussion” record. But Stephen Flinn is among those artists for which the medium really doesn’t count. He makes music whose staying power in the brain is straight away evident, constructing entire soundscapes on a lone recurrence or circle – like, say, a rolling ball in a jar – or merely mangling and jumbling a thick layering of materials that may be born from direct gestures applied on wood or plastic yet sound, in truth, akin to collaged tapes containing disjointed mayhem left to putrefy in a soggy room then retrieved and put in a garden to dry under the summer sun, together with underpants and socks. In a word, amasses of distorted, transfigured colours and bitter dissonances whose inherent musicality might be unearthed through the listener’s facility to decipher their cloaked harmonic content. The equilibrium between the mechanisms looks nearly ideal, in that both the relatively short extent of the disc and the composer’s will not to surpass certain parameters of noise encrustation assure that illusionism and resourcefulness live in the same street.
STEPHEN FLINN / NOAH PHILLIPS DUO – Square circle (Pax Recordings)
Slipping this series of atypical improvisations into the envelope of a cathegory is not an easy task. What on paper reads as a guitar/drums duo is actually a mousetrap game of unpredictable sonorities taking their shape from basic elements – Phillips’ chordal tapping or Flinn’s lumpy snare rolls, just to name a couple – then planting uncertain roots in the quicksands of electronic modification (by Tim Perkis, who joins the duo in several tracks). The musicians deliver the “right” energetic mass from the rust of excessive prankishness, like scientists winking to each other after reaching an interesting result; the strange atmosphere generated by some of these conversations belies the accurate pondering that an expert ear will surely perceive in the large part of “Square circle”. Abstract propulsion and bulldozing methodology are parts of a complex vocabulary of adventurous sapience and inquisitive sonic exploration championed by Flinn and Phillips with scrupulous application.
FLORE DE CATACLYSMO – Flore de cataclysmo (Sedimental)
The trio of Michel Doneda (soprano & sopranino sax), Giuseppe Ielasi (guitar, electronics) and Ingar Zach (drums, percussion) is an unusual one, the three pieces here showing their combination of independent styles and cohesive functionalities. “Floating on the mass of blossoms” is heavily coloured by Doneda’s airy spurts and gurgles ripping the straightjacket of etiquette off himself; Zach builds arthritic percussive skeletons upon irregular blocks and rough tumbling materials, while Ielasi’s sparse plucked notes and frying pan-like frequencies define some kind of limit for the others to respect, in order to give the whole a frame of sorts. The shrilling highs in the last section of the track sound like a rebellion to that system. “One wing of matter” grows on an incessant subterranean pulse, Zach being the main protagonist at the start with increasingly complicated juxtapositions of potsherds, hits and collapses, Doneda following with unattached perturbed articulations and ear-splitting whistles, Ielasi acting as a sage through a compound of textural restraint and spirit of observation. The sum of the ingredients gives birth to an increasingly intriguing piece, the three instrumental voices morphing from anarchy to coalescence in a single spumous current over the course of the improvisation. “Run fingers over turquoise” approaches reductionism at first, Doneda and Zach exchanging roles and dresses in a who-plays-what silent representation of EAI’s most common aspects. When Ielasi’s electric friction comes in, everything moves towards a more uncertain future, flanging resonances and rough bowing as the main nuances of a nocturnal, ghostly undulation classifiable among the album’s best moments.
J.B. FLOYD – Transporting transmittance (Mutable)
The main working medium for Floyd is the Yamaha Disklavier, a programmable grand piano able to reproduce any part that a composer could conceive. You’d expect something similar to Conlon Nancarrow’s piano player masterpieces. Not this time, as J.B.Floyd’s scores maintain a “human” character that’s pretty evident throughout this excellent release. Particularly beautiful are the three poems by Daniel Moore, of which I appreciate both the melodic choices in the vocal lines (by Thomas Buckner) and the involving harmonic context, underlined by arpeggios and chordal colours that had me thinking – you won’t believe your ears – to Christian Vander’s solo sections with Magma and Offering. Also noteworthy are the excellent flute textures in the initial “Transporting transmittance”, courtesy of Lisa Hansen, while the variations on two Robert Ashley’s pieces are easier while keeping their own strong spiritual meaning in the overall record design. The CD ends with the boogie-influenced “Solos and Sequences II”, where intertwining patterns and tangential runs result in a very exciting tapestry, the perfect signature on a surprising discovery by your reviewer.
FLUE – Beyond the edge of nowhere (Diophantine)
I remembered guitarist Mason Jones from having reviewed his solo CD “The crystalline world of memory” on Public Eyesore back at the beginnings of Touching Extremes. I’m glad to find him again in Flue, still on guitar (and synthesizer) and together with Jason Stein (bass) and Chris Miller (guitar) plus guest Geoff Walker, the latter credited with “other sounds”. The password to this music is “heavy processing”; as a matter of fact the album reminds a lot of what in the 70s many people would call a “cosmic trip” through an ample spectrum of sonic deformations and ever-changing waves and resonances. Pretty undefinable stuff as far as a proper “genre” is concerned, but surely a mind-altering listening experience under the guise of fourteen tracks fused into a continuum, like in a suite. The basically analog character of the sources used by Flue makes sure that adjectives like “warm”, “boiling” and “distorted” are more convenient in the description than something like “articulated” or “glacial”. Rarely the guitars are heard in their regular timbre, and that sensation lasts just a few seconds; the rest is a call from the translucid edges of outer space investigation where nothing is really as it appears, any simulacrum of harmony refracted by hundreds of deforming mirrors. A psychedelic record, then? You bet, and even a pretty interesting one.
ELISABETH FLUNGER – Songs (Löwenhertz)
This record is my very first contact with the art of Elisabeth Flunger, who was born in Italy but is a long-time Austrian resident. She makes music with metals, but not according to the usual percussive canons and schemes; as a matter of fact, Flunger uses what she calls “heaps of metal pieces” to execute materials that do have a structure, usually based on some sort of pulse that does not behave like a “pattern” or a “sequence”, but seems more related to a precise choice of gestures and physical activities, thus maintaining a “minimal” architecture that nevertheless is extremely variegated and, for lack of a better expression, natural sounding even in their most circuitous versions. These objects are the sort of “instrument” that have more to do with installations than concerts (although Flunger regularly performs live, both alone and with other improvising artists); she makes good use of “found stuff, trash, tools, instruments, toys, souvenirs and presents” to start fascinating processes of conscious deconstruction which, in the case of this CD, preserve the purity of her artistic intent rather than alluding to disguised messages. It’s an interesting outlook on the sonic properties of many objects that people meet and use on daily basis, without realizing that they can also be a means to creative ends.
FLUORESCENT GREY – Gaseous Opal Orbs (Record Label)
Robbie Martin is the deus ex machina behind Fluorescent Grey and this is his second outing under this moniker, following the impossibly titled debut (let’s call it “Tijuana Motel Room”). One thing is for sure, this music is chock full of any kind of data: sounds, files, waves, rhythms, voices, noises, whatever. It might be exciting for someone, horrible for others – especially if those “others” don’t appreciate the complexity of hyperactive techno. But, contrarily to the previous release, which was literally too overwhelming for yours truly and not really “musical” (to me, it actually sounded like a crazed catalogue of studio tricks), this time Martin has allowed the creature to breathe a little more (well, sort of – the velocity is still dazzling), thus giving us the chance of appreciating the compositional techniques inside the whirlwind. And, quite often, that work is indeed good: there’s a track (short, alas) where all kinds of Celtic samples were used to engender a curious hybrid of tradition and cyber-disco, truly great stuff. Elsewhere, this writer cherished the pleasure of being completely surrounded by swarms of buzzes, clicks and purrs – not to mention altered utterances – while looking, like every morning, at the absurdly ugly faces of commuters talking about their usual shit (that means soccer or TV shows – the highest average culture level around here). Should Martin be willing to cut a few overloaded repetitions in some of his pieces, reducing the whole to a 35-to-45-minute program with the very best ideas, the next CD wouldn’t certainly suffer. This one functions better than expected, though.
FOCUS QUINTET – 1-8 in 1 (Sachimay)
Focus Quintet are Anita and Dan DeChellis, Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Chris Forsyth and Jeff Arnal. This recording’s tracks range from “comprovisation” to absolutely free music, played with the skills and capacities that are always to be expected from improvisers at this technical level. Anita DeChellis’ vocalism is like an instrument in a collective rather than a real “protagonist” and this is a plus, because I often have problems listening to egocentric female voices when they’re not a simple “colour” or part of a structured composition (unless we talk about Diamanda Galas, Meredith Monk or ladies belonging to that class, of course). Diaz-Infante, Forsyth and Dan DeChellis act sparsely and intelligently, and Arnal keeps looking for nuances while fracturing rhythms all over the place. Ultimately, Focus Quintet are serious – and that’s all we want.
JEAN-MARC FOLTZ / BRUNO CHEVILLON – Cette opacité (Clean Feed)
Foltz plays clarinet and bass clarinet, while Chevillon’s instrument is double bass. With irreprehensible discipline, they give up every milligram of flamboyant lettering in order to achieve an emotional standstill, which is reflected by a wobbly inertness breaking its frail cocoon to become an obscure conversation between two souls waiting in limbo. Indeed, this duo’s interaction – excellent by all means – does not detract from their personal technical prowess: Foltz’s commitment to inner feeling gives his consistent tone a push towards an almost torturous path, where useless humour is banned in favour of a detached shelving of countless discoveries, while Chevillon’s playing is mental, eclectic, relentlessy logical in its outstanding control of passing ideas, his knowledgeable attitude perfectly balanced in this performance’s give-and-take.
FORBIDDEN FIELDS – Field 1 – Night (Nulll)
It’s not easy leaving a distinct mark in the world of atmospheric darkness, especially today – an era in which home recording and the pushing of a few buttons plus a ton of digital reverb turn any trick. Forbidden Fields comes to fight for a premier position, thanks to this long segment of spacey low drones, rarely punctuated by sparse percussive snaps. “Field 1″ is a perfect companion in those moments when one gets that intense feeling of being alone, troubles and all, really desiring to find an escape towards a new kind of life. The sound is beautifully mazy, like watching the blackest part of the sky, being able to do absolutely nothing – except the proverbial deep sigh. This music is not flaunty yet arrives where most “ambient” musicians don’t: intense vibration and rational thought interlock to make a further step towards mental shelter from the bad influences.
FORCH – Spin networks (Psi)
Here’s my friendly advice for the wretched ones who look for big doors, black holes, celestial harmonies and pearly gates of heaven: stand well clear off “Spin networks” or you could be in for a heart attack. The quantity of sonic information that this 2-CD set contains is inhuman but, needless to say, it’s just what the doctor orders for brains able to perform three or four tasks at once, because the uncontrollable fragmentation of these pieces is a multi-vitamin injection for increasing the capacity of instant reaction to an impulse. Yet, I wonder, how many braves can afford to be affected by this work without running to their favourite Tibetan bowl scraper after thirty seconds? Very few, one surmises. Forch is the sum of Furt (Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer on electronics) and six monstrous improvisers (John Butcher, Rhodri Davies, Paul Lovens, Phil Minton, Wolfgang Mitterer and Ute Wassermann). The gathering of these living wires occurred for the first time in 2005 at the NEWJazz Meeting of the South West German Radio. Later on, Barrett and Obermayer started labouring on a basis of ten hours of recorded music (live and in the studio) to build a cerebral millefeuille with multitudes of layers, each one of the participants’ evident attributes scientifically mutilated, with particular attention to Minton and Wassermann’s vocal utterances that – in real time or heavily altered, pitch transposed, somehow processed – constitute the fulcrum around which most of the creative process rotates. The successive phase, namely the diverse combinations of improvisation and rearrangement of the subsequent results are better explained by Barrett in the liners; summarizing would be pointless. I’ll leave to the most audacious among the readers the weird pleasure of discovering a reality that’s light years different from what those hoggish jacks of all trades and master of none show as “the Truth”, camouflaging an utter ignorance under sampled choirs, soft caresses of Korg presets, thick fudges of reverberating nothingness. In Forch’s music, samples strain nerves, pianos pinch and sting, voices appear as fiendish burps and purulent screams until they sound like drunk seagulls, saxophones encourage the imbalance of the senses, percussion is everywhere. Here you can’t lay that fat boy scout ass on the couch while pretending to get illuminated by a holy loop set in action by a musical retard. Put this stuff in your car stereo, an accident will happen within two minutes unless you’re gifted with a serious data-retaining system. Play loud, using speakers to be hated, headphones to keep hating. It’s gonna take a few more pills and the customary dose of imbecility to see those doors, holes and gates, and the third eye is blind. But thoughts are clouds, aren’t they?
CHRIS FORSYTH / CHRIS HEENAN – Forsyth Heenan (Reify)
Silent creeping and articulated flurries come out of guitars, sax and clarinet like the most natural thing in the world. Even in its “uneasy” parts, Forsyth and Heenan’s speech flows and pads, making itsy-bitsy particles on the course to an absolutely non-viable consonance. The music, characteristically imaginative and full of breathing spaces, also consists of plunks and whirring hoaxes likely to have your nose itchy and your ears in need of a good reassessment of their sound-catching capabilities. Sudden illusory hooks make you follow invisible patterns, through which the two Chrises will leave you naked with all your presumptions while their instruments keep the placid sabotage going, its results finding you still wandering clueless.
FORWARD ENERGY – Where are they? (Jazzheads/Edgetone)
I’m always glad when I find musicians whose spirit is rooted in real, pure free jazz; Forward Energy – led by poet and sax/flute player Jim Ryan – is a fantastic collective including Eddie Gale (trumpet), Alicia Mangan (tenor sax), Scott R. Looney (piano), Kristjan Bondesson (bass) and Marshall Trammell (drums). After the initial title track, a poem by Ryan about people suffering because of “the US war of greed”, all that follows is fabulous playing from everyone in a continuously shifting dynamic memory which is imprinted with the lessons from the past (well represented by Gale who, among others, has played with Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and John Coltrane) but is also looking for the very future of jazz expressionism. The tracks condense rage, desperation and intelligence in an amazingly beautiful music which really seems to know no boundaries in his sensual and – at the same time – staggering force. Never the intricacies of a sextet sounded so naturally poignant; “Where are they?” stands right there, among the top recent albums of the genre.
Jim Ryan’s FORWARD ENERGY TRIO – FE3 Oakland (Edgetone) – FE3 Portland (Edgetone)
The world needs more people like Jim Ryan. This incessantly active poet, musician, conscience agitator and visionary sax player is one of those artists who render subdivisions and classifications meaningless, in the name of a single torrential flood of creativity that mixes exuberance, enthusiasm and meditative portions of extraterritorial improvisation, the whole reinforced by a technical knowledge that only many years of playing at the forefront and on the fringes of convention can develop. Ryan has fine-tuned his skill with the likes of Shepp, Ayler and Braxton – enough said. The Oakland disc is probably the most satisfying as far as the recording quality and artistic level of the music go: flanked by Stephen Flinn on drums and Scott R.Looney on piano, Ryan produces the goods during outasight improvisations that move on the borders of recognizability, harmonically evolved in a short-distance biochemical combination that causes reciprocal listening and involuntary communication to produce that extroverted entanglement of anti-singalong lines and incomparable suspended transitions that characterizes only the players at the very hilltop of unadulterated music. The Portland Trio features Ryan with double bassist Robert Jones and drummer Andrew Wilshusen. It’s the (relatively) calmer of the two recordings, a trait d’union between a symbolical – and material – communion of intents and the firing, blazing representation of those instances in which the music dictates the path to the artist and viceversa. Ryan grows his beautifully intricate lines in a favourable timbral environment, but also finds the time to elevate deep thoughts to the memory of his mentors, his music self-regenerating with every change of wind, the three players fused in a single voice, with the leader as the most visible light. There is actually no sense in listening to these albums separately, as they seem to be born together, even in their different complexion. Either way, absolutely great stuff.
JACQUES FOSCHIA – Clair Obscur (Creative Sources)
The artist’s family name is an Italian word that translates “haze” or “mist”, yet there’s nothing in the music of this clarinettist that could even tenuously make us believe about a lack of clear-mindedness. Using three different clarinets – bass, Eb and a homemade – the man interprets a cycle of ideas that straddle the majority of the existing techniques, more or less extended. Contrarily to many colleagues in this copiously inhabited area of improvisation, Foschia is not averse to letting the voice of the instruments go: the listeners are in fact treated with an assortment of sounds that come across either as weird or purely striking for the density of their harmonic constituents, at times substantiated by the principal’s uttered grunts. We perceive the vibration of the reed and the hot dampness in the pipe, and it’s just great. Two are the discs comprised by the set: one realized in the studio and dedicated by Jacques to his mother, the other a live recording. In “Puff pull”, on the first half, we’re given a display of exceptional bravura, nervy phrasing and broken scales interchanging with airy disappearances of tone. Then Foschia switches to distressing gradations, halfway through a cello and a throat cancer, in the subsequent “Phoenix”. Listening to the beautiful timbre of the bass clarinet in “Noodly way” is untainted delight instead, a prosperity of emissions liable to persuade both experts and non. Equally demanding for the player – and rewarding for the audience – the live improvisations introduce a larger quantity of sweat and blood, so to speak, but the value of these instant designs remains unhurt.
JOSEPH FOSTER / ALFRED HARTH – Heart/Po$ter (Rasbliutto)
The CD cover, a beautiful black and white close up of what looks like a beehive (but I wouldn’t bet my house on it) credits Foster and Harth with “trumpet, etc.” and “reeds, etc.” respectively. Now, it’s just that “etcetera” that gives this album its distinguished personality; as a matter of fact, “Heart/Po$ter” is a record that mixes improvisation and musique concrete, an audio documentary full of unusual thinking patterns (“unusual” being the rule when dealing with this particular breed of musicians). Standing well clear off populist declarations, Foster and Harth are not afraid to get their hands dirty with the soil of unlawful object rustling, which they practice without premeditation even when the land appears unfruitful. Tampering with the exhalations produced by their instruments, they feel compelled to show the grainy details of noise as generated by everyday’s objects, be it a radio, a Tibetan bell (I know what you’re gonna say, but every fashionable zen home has its own “Tibetan something” nowadays – therefore that’s an “everyday object”, too), a Jew’s harp or some other sonic infection. Trumpet and reeds themselves describe a special way of navigating against the odd current: at times it looks like the multiphonics and the tiny wheezing cries of desperation coming out of that blowing wrestle would be better returning into Joseph and Alfred’s lungs and stay there, observers – from within – of an unlikely landscape. And what’s the method of understanding if what we hear is an helicopter or just a slowed down tongue oscillation? What’s the line separating the uniqueness of these artists’ voice from an involuntary portrait of Meredith Monk’s glottal lamentations? No answer. Not from musicians that never mince tones, preferring instead to surprise their audience with a homemade poetry in which every sound acts as a birdcall for concentration. Thus, the most correct approach to this release is standing firmly in front of its almost nihilist appearance, sure about the fact that Joseph Foster and Alfred Harth will lead you through their impromptu structuralism without reticence.
FOURM – Fourm remixes Keith Berry (White Line)
As I’m writing, the player is spinning this disc for the fourth consecutive time. One of the many things that define Keith Berry’s seriousness is his reluctance to publish unnecessary albums, in an obvious countertendency with practically everybody in the world of in-depth electronica. Therefore, along the wait for the next official CD, this 3-inch by Fourm (B.G. Nichols) can help in reminding why people should always remember the Londoner’s contribution to the elevation of post-ambient soundscaping to a real form of art. Although starting with a pretty dramatic, almost cinematic throbbing drive, the 21-minute composition “Void path” possesses a sacred aura of sorts, particularly explicated in the second half, which sounds like a muted funeral mourning wrapped by a bubble of liquefied rubber foam. The current generated by these pseudo (?) vocalizations – slowed-down records, maybe? – evidences its low-frequency component by spreading all over my listening space, while being slightly disturbed by abundantly reverberating noises and samples that agitate the music only the strict necessary to avoid a complete standstill. A luxuriously intense piece, where both the original sources and the manipulation work contribute in equal measure to the achievement of the prefixed goal. The hunger for new material by Berry is now even more biting.
FOVEA HEX – Allure / An answer (Die Stadt)
Many years ago, when Jochen Schwarz first got in touch by sending me a still treasured copy of John Duncan’s “Crucible”, I’d never have imagined that Die Stadt would have arrived at the current level of value and respect by listeners and musicians alike, although expert ears (and eyes) could already understand that, beyond the music and the artworks, lied the heart of a man who really loves sound in all its components and whom Clodagh Simonds – mastermind behind the Fovea Hex vision – thanks on the cover referring to his “calm wisdom”. Let’s not forget that this wise man’s creature, among hundreds of beautiful things, has published the best releases by Mirror including their epochal masterpiece “Front Row Centre”; that alone is enough for this writer. But I’ll throw other names up: Tietchens, Jackman, O’Rourke, Basinski, Hafler Trio (also a participant in this project). These are the stigmata of high quality and “Allure”, third and final episode of the “Neither speak nor remain silent” trilogy, confirms the axiom in style. The CD itself lasts about 25 minutes, sufficient to realize that the three tracks are just like a wholesome dream where “contour” and “definition” are virtual concepts that never translate into reality. Indeed the sonic circumstances follow a continuous flow and a scheme of sorts: a hypnotic background where acoustic instruments such as violin, zither, bodhran and harmonium blend with an exquisitely evocative electronica is complemented by Simonds’ detached yet delicate voice singing her own lyrics in the first half of the songs. After she’s through, the soundscapes reveal an underworld of conscious loss of control on the senses for long moments, finely enhanced by humble contributions by illustrious guests (this time Steven Wilson, Robert Fripp, Donal Lunny and Percy Jones). As usual with Fovea Hex, the only advice is to listen carefully, bearing in mind that Nico, Current 93 and Irish roots are influences that work splendidly as parts of a whole that doesn’t cease to amaze. The first limited edition includes a bonus disc (“An answer”). Sixty minutes by Hafler Trio reworking and remodeling the allure (pun intended) of Simonds’ compositions according to his well known enigmatic vision, muffled drones, oneiric scenes and, at one point towards the end, resonating whangs vaguely recalling Organum’s “Amen” (on Die Stadt, by the way) that are better left undescribed: either you vibrate or you don’t, and there are at least a couple of sections here that will send the ready ones up there with the satellites and the shooting stars. Of course, H3O fans won’t live without this one, the perfect complement to a gorgeous release coming in a black box that should include all three chapters.
BILLY FOX – The Uncle Wiggly suite (Clean Feed)
Billy Fox is a percussionist and composer who for the occasion surrounded himself with a medium-size band (12 elements) whose names may be relatively unknown – except Mark Dresser on bass – yet their enthusiastic, technically gifted participation to this melange of “composition, arrangement and improvisation” yields many moments of considerable interest, especially when one realizes about the extreme variety of influences that this material presents. While most everything was born from fragments of inconsistent playing performed by Fox as an experiment while on the verge of sleep, the result certainly doesn’t cause the same reaction to the listeners, who are treated with a no-nonsense recipe in which dissonant lines and propulsive interplay lead to music that is both dense in thematic significance and driven by the desire of “sounding different”. An example is “Guzzle”, whose Arabian flavour is enhanced by a bass groove that could even be associated to some kind of rock vamp; over this, a series of pretty spectacular yet effective solos from reeds and violin throws us right in the middle of a desert. “Eyeball eyeball” is a finely textured jazz ballad in 3/4, in which Deanna Witkowski’s chordal work on the piano lays the pavement for an inspired trumpet solo by Percy Pursglove in one of the most enjoyable spots of the CD, followed by a tenor sax improvisation by Gary Pickard that remains lyrical enough to be savoured even without excess of concentration. Again, Witkowski closes the section with her own solo, which defines a track that according to Fox was born from “harmonic and melodic patterns that I never intended”. On the contrary, “The ghost of Col.Cobb” is a one-minute minimal experiment for shamisen and strings, as lighthearted as you might want to have it. When one’s reasonable enough not to expect complexity from everywhere, that’s the moment in which an album like “The Uncle Wiggly suite” comes and saves the weekend.
ROBIN FOX / CLAYTON THOMAS – Substation (Room40)
All sounds contained in “Substation” derive from Clayton Thomas’ double bass and various objects, to which Robin Fox adds many measures of transformation via live processing (he’s an authority in the MAXMSP program). The improvised sketches get projected and disjointed in a multitude of ever-moving crystals of sound that create an abstract yet essential quilt of tangential refractions, transcendental obsessions and incessant dispotic tickles. The fractal-like irregular forms that Fox and Thomas are capable of drawing with their experimentations direct our attention towards their objective gravitational pull, as the listener spirals into an individual bliss of continuously looping contingencies and more-than-perceptible rotations. This music is neither strident nor confrontational – it just wants your ears to have some unconventional fun; but, in its most evocative segments, its approximations of nocturnal activity awaken a hidden desire of abandon of our alertness.
FOXES FOX – Naan Tso (Psi)
In 2004, Louis Moholo-Moholo – the only survivor among the legendary “Blue Notes” – returned to live in South Africa after decades in London, where he became one of the leading forces in a field crowded with hundreds of beautiful artistic souls. “Naan Tso” is a goodbye concert featuring Evan Parker on tenor sax, Steve Beresford on piano and John Edwards on double bass flanked by Moholo, whose anti-rule drumming is the launching ramp for many long moments of uncontaminated jazz. Playing with teenage fervour, Parker nods respectfully towards the Coltrane icon, at the same time affirming his own royalty during intense opinion exchanges, while Beresford often forgets that he only owns ten fingers as he shapes chords upon chords of nonpareil harmonic sapience released little by little, therefore avoiding any chance of a “devil may care” stampede. Edwards confirms his technical solidity and fanciful grammar on the bass, celebrating a communion of intents that should always be a given in such occasions. Heart and class transpire in healthy doses from this album, a deserved salute to a great percussionist – and to freedom at large.
RICHARD FRANCIS – Together alone, together apart (CMR)
Still wondering if the water in New Zealand contains a tiny dose of nuclear power enabling its artistically endowed inhabitants to produce music whose depth is always in direct proportion with pertinence and, quite frequently, characterized by the harsh beauty of contemporary uneasiness (that often borders with the approximation of awareness – but that’s a story that words don’t explain, whatever one tries to find in them). Richard Francis – participant to/father of over 40 releases since 1996 – conceived these three tracks around “field recordings of indoor and outdoor spaces; handling of fabric, wood, plastic; self noise of home stereo amplifiers, loudspeakers and record players”. The composer reports that the pieces were inspired by “sound moments”, something captured from the surroundings and somehow combined in segments of 10 to 20 seconds “until each piece took on a feel and sense of its own”. The outcome is indeed repeatedly breathtaking, a vibe of utter suspension-in-tension that waits for the flick of a switch to be released in copious quantities of fury. The problem is that the switch can’t be found anywhere, so everything remains unexploded in between corpulent quakes from the underground, shortwave densities and hissing parameters for the garnishment of a weakened rarefaction. A blurred parallelism could be delineated in a hybrid of John Duncan, Asher and Bernhard Günter, minus the dynamic oscillations, more towards the “dissipation of energy” zone. An impression of penumbral reclusion – lasting under 30 minutes – that places this artifact just a step below the chef-d’oeuvre pinnacle.
FREE BASE – The ins and outs (Emanem)
Alan Wilkinson (sax, voice) Marcio Mattos (double bass, electronics) and Steve Noble (percussion) use an instant performance setting for the development of a language which is firmly rooted in free jazz – if this definition still has a sense – and they are not afraid to let everyone know it. This trio washes away any doubt through intelligence and belligerency in a wide-ranging multitude of involving sketches; the squawking alto and baritone detours by Wilkinson satisfy the need for a meaty presence amidst a remarkably intelligible fusion of individual spirits; Mattos’ engaging playing shows his full commitment, not only to this elaboration of openness but above all to an extensive, ongoing enchantment with the mirage of transforming the role of bass into a powerful lyrical source. Noble’s drumming shows his understanding of these improvisations’ complexion while elegantly remaining within the margins of a politically incorrect ascendance to pristine forms of self-expression.
FREE RANGE RAT – Nut Club (Clean Feed)
The association of John Carlson (trumpet, pocket trumpet, flugelhorn) Eric Hipp (tenor sax) Shawn McGloin (bass) George Schuller (drums, percussion) and special guest Douglas Yates (clarinets) yields some considerable results in “Nut Club”, a record which tackles several aspects of free jazz – does this definition still carry some sense anyway? – without disguising the players’ main influences (admittedly, Sun Ra on top of them: they execute “The satellites are spinning” in stunning fashion) all the while channeling the whole in a complex intersection of both cerebral and physical efforts. Free Range Rat also play a great version of James Blood Ulmer’s “Non believer” and a very intense rendering of Bob Marley’s “So much trouble in the world”, where the group’s extremely conscious energy transforms the music in a sort of invocation for a peace that will never exist. The always splendid, truly Clean Feed-style vividness of the recording does full justice to these musicians, whose exciting enthusiasm and well detailed mastery is captured in all of their gestural nuances. Strikingly muscular yet delicate as a rose petal in more than an instance, the sound of this album is similar to a concentrated conversation among strong personalities: everybody is persuaded about the strength of their own affirmations but this does not prevent the others from expressing a valuable opinion that, in turn, is analyzed and dissected.
FREIBAND – Leise (Cronica)
Simple, yet effective idea by Frans De Waard, who let his daughter Elise (note the title’s anagram of her name) play with “sheets of metal, paper, sticks, plastic and other junk” on which he placed contact microphones, then elaborated the resulting sounds via computer translating them into a 10-part electroacoustic performance. Elise’s voice opens and closes the record (I particularly love the end, the tiny lady singing “toot toot” with her voice slightly deformed by De Waard’s software) but there are several noteworthy moments in there, the most beguiling ones when loops and interlocked pulses are brought forth in the mix amidst glitches and clicks that not for a second get annoying, thanks to a perfect percentage in the treatment of the sources and an even better timing of the related sequences. My favourite track is the fascinating “Daisee”, a hypnotic landscape with short background disturbances which, somehow, brought memories of Jon Hassell. At the end of the day, “Leise” is a nice, classy work by this hyperactive artist.
FREIBAND – Sijis_rmx expanded edition (Sijis)
There are records that just refuse description, as their sheer existence is the very reason of their meaning. Just like certain kinds of metaphysical phenomena should be enjoyed as they are, without asking what, why or when – those nerve-wrecking questions that ignite most people’s struggle with depression – this CD is one of those objects that we should use as a “presence”; if it can also help to achieve the goal of relaxing, reflecting, or even canceling the surrounding people’s pandemonium, that’s perfectly fine. Originally released in 2004, “Sijis_rmx” is Freiband/Frans De Waard’s try to synthesize the back catalogue of this label into a static soundscape, which to this day remains splendid in his protective impenetrability, one of those drone/non drone tapestries that one could just put in eternal reply mode and be happy. Five artists from the world of contemporary electronica (Sluggo, Scott Taylor, J Torrance, Srmeixner, Mutton Deluxe) offer their own remodeling of that remix, each one altering or just slightly transforming the pre-existing material to bring out new particulars, deeper growls, ambiguous rhythms. The excellence of the basic source allows the project to function at its very best, constituting a fascinating introduction to the many possible ways to create what REALLY should be called “trance music”. This stuff predisposes the audience in “full receive” mode, all channels ready to accept the most abundant flows of transcendental energy. Speakers recommended.
FREIBAND – Replicas (Monochrome Vision)
Utilizing the tracks of Asmus Tietchens’ “Daseinsverfehlung” as a starting place, it took Frans De Waard approximately three years to finish “Replicas”, his “last analogue work” as he calls it despite a sonic nature noticeably recalling the digitized sounds of a laptop. Indeed digital is at the base of the Freiband project, which began when De Waard had access to an 8-track machine that produced “an extraordinary scratching sound”. Not that scratch is actually the root of this music, which is tending to microsounds on the one hand and, more occasionally, to the examination of hardly classifiable, often discordant frequencies and their correlations in an aesthetic background made of disruptions and irregularities, something that, time and again, might be compared to a faulty radio whose signal goes on and off intermittently. What we hear during the “on” phases is usually complicated to depict, a nonexistent harmonic content and extensive moments of stillness turning the CD into the ideal means of active listening in the absolute peace of a hot August day. Essentially, Freiband’s substances are frozen in the absence of canonical delight, hybrid matters that stimulate – or just baffle – according to the circumstance.
FREIBAND / BOCA RATON – Product (Cronica)
While it’s true that many concrete/electronic projects on the current scene sound more or less similar, some of them are made with a care for the detail which distances them from the crowd. Such is the case of this split CD: Freiband, one of the many names of Frans De Waard, produces music through the reworking of pre-recorded materials going into a process of hard disk scratching; just another glitch and noise release, right? Dead wrong: the sounds mostly manifest themselves in pretty tranquil spirals, their slowly mutating skin showing a mixture of static sweetness and menacing sub-distortion inviting not to lower your guard any moment. Boca Raton (Martijn Tellinga) works within the realms of pregnant austerity through acousmatic tracks mixing field recordings, white noise whirlwinds, small-sound activity à la Asmus Tietchens and more than one wink to silence itself. The sapient assembling and scarce processing of the source material adds a touch of spontaneous ingenuity that elevates this music from the cauldron of the “already heard”; it meshes fine with my own environment, too – and the last track “Circle ’8″ is a profound Ilios-like planetary vibration.
HERIBERT FRIEDL – Raumzitate (And-Oar)
“Raumzitate” is a brief essay on microsounds by Viennese Heribert Friedl, whose work is centripetal towards silence – itself an important factor in these pieces. Observation and purpose yield a series of sonic fingerprints which stand alone or accompanied by suggestive faraway drones, like in a fascinating segment of the final track “Proposal”. The crumbling of patterns juxtaposed with these distant evocations are always of interest, while the rippling hiss of certain separated frequencies works well when listened amidst the sounds of outside world, provided it’s not a noisy urban ambience. Friedl seems to know where his direction is and I’m willing to trust him for future elaborations: for sure, there’s more than glitches and pops than meets the ear.
HERIBERT FRIEDL – Converge (Conv.net Lab)
Another short composition by sound artist Friedl, “Converge” is mostly made of micro structures of quiet feedback and barely audible crackling in a well designed alternance with longer conjectures of metallic dragging and softly resonant timbral phantoms. Like in his previous “Raumzitate”, the external ambience comes out as basic in the overall listening process; there is no complacency in these naked sounds, only the curiosity of seeing their air-rippling effect once they’re almost randomly thrown in silence, just like children throw a small handful of stones in a calm lake, breaking the tranquillity just for those few seconds needed to understand they’re alive. While listening to “Converge”, reflection and looming remembrances seem to be unavoidable.
HERIBERT FRIEDL – Bradycard (Nonvisualobjects)
In “Expand”, first piece of the CD, an engrossing field recording of a rainstorm comprises a series of improvisations on the hackbrett (a kind of cymbalom) by Friedl, who has rapidly become an outstanding member of my listening circle thanks to his deeply affecting recent releases. The body of vibrations propagating from the bowed strings generates a concrete kind of compensation between an ample space for reflection, constituting this music’s main individuality, and a state of preoccupied uncomfortableness which is even more pronounced in the second track, “Contract”; here the digital processing of the hackbrett elongates shapes and resonances until a grudging scepticism opens slightly, remodelling the sound into a shadow mantra where the fear of humans walking alone in realms of apprehension is almost tangible. A powerful statement, moving Heribert’s position towards the highest rank of evocative composers such as Andrew Chalk, Christoph Heemann, Jonathan Coleclough – not to mention Bernhard Günter, who mastered this album.
HERIBERT FRIEDL – Back_forward (Nonvisualobjects)
Tackling a whole album with a single instrument is a difficult task in itself; when that instrument is not a guitar or a cello, but a hackbrett (or cymbalom, or hammer dulcimer) the chore becomes even more prohibitive. Heribert Friedl, who certainly is not the kind of glossy useless virtuoso who isolates himself from the rest of the world releasing sterilized plunk-plunking records, decided to record his improvisations on the hackbrett in a naked, crude setting, then subjected the live playing to an effective processing which lets the sounds breathe and fluctuate at one moment, then modifies them radically the next. The instrument is at first intuitable in a stark, almost scrappy aesthetic, a cross between the raw yet delicate shining of Rhodri Davies’ harp and the rusty noise escalations of Michael Vorfeld’s selfmades. When the electronic treatment comes in, the shapes get morphed and reconfigured according to a not-too-bizarre scheme that, on a distract listen, could appear as the result of some sort of stochastic mechanism but, in reality, is totally self-sufficient. On a pure level of aural pleasure, this is not one of those nerve-caressing releases which one plays for hours; it’s rather the documentation of a honest, no-frills experimentation which Friedl decided to make public and – given his artistic depth both as an improviser and a composer – represents an important chronicle of one of his creative phases.
HERIBERT FRIEDL – Trac[k]_t (Line)
In an interview published on the excellent “Extract” book on his Nonvisualobjects label, Heribert Friedl states that, when creating his music, he’s mainly interested in the “soul of the sound”. One would think to a form of purity, to some sort of unadulterated timbral research; but the sounds contained by this disc will rather convince you that the acceptation of the term “soul” differs pretty much, depending on who uses it. “Trac[k]_t” is the final chapter in Friedl’s exploration of the cymbalom, an instrument that he started playing as a young kid then abandoned for a while, only to return to it in recent years in an obviously more radical fashion. Friedl uses every nuance of his stringed machine as food for a complex apparatus of digital processing that transforms the original voice into a series of electronic outbursts, percussive throbs, electro-static activities and ill-conceived Morse-coded messages. Just every once in a while, the original source makes itself heard in one or a few hit-and-pluck peek-a-boos, just to remind us about the cymbalom’s real (?) character. I can’t help but think to the buskers playing it on Rome’s subway trains; sure enough, they won’t go beyond Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and I wonder if they’d have a nervous wreck if hearing what can be made with that box instead. Like his previous explorations of the same area in albums like “Bradycard” and “Back_forward” (both on Nonvisualobjects), Friedl’s music is glacially austere, almost uninviting, yet gifted with the disciplined intelligence of a multi-talented artist for whom a scent, a shape or a sound are only means to a creative end, or to a new definition of “tone”.
REINHOLD FRIEDL – Xenakis [a]live! (Asphodel)
Every once in a while, someone decides that your reviewer must be subjected to a showcase of “profound cognizance”. A common method is talking in my proximity about matters that, hypothetically, should stimulate admiration or at least a minor response on my behalf. Enjoy this nip and tuck exchange between two nerds, captured a while back by these very ears. “Oh, come on, you don’t know Xenakis? He was the one who used stochastic principles in his music!” “Uh, that means that everything happens by chance, right?”. Et voila, a too common example of nano-brained ramblers putting names and terms in their mouths without even knowing what they’re talking about (which, let’s make this perfectly clear, is Italy’s second national sport after soccer, but I’m currently verifying that the plague is spreading on illustrious international sources, too). Among the appropriate correctional (…repressive?) methods that I would apply in such an occasion is strapping those flag-bearers of cerebrosclerosis to a seat and forcing them to listen, full blast, to this homage that Reinhold Friedl dedicated to the late Greek composer, music which – to quote Andy Partridge – sounds “louder than tanks on the highway, louder than bombers in flight”. And it is just outstanding, if you ask me. Performed with scary intensity by Zeitkratzer (in this instance comprising the leader plus Burkhard Schlothauer, Anton Lukoszevieze, Uli Philipp, Frank Gratkowski, Franz Hautzinger, Melvyn Poore, Marc Weiser, Maurice de Martin and Ralf Meinz) “Xenakis [a]live!” lasts 54 minutes that, except for the dust-settling, pre-standing ovation finale, are perceived as a continuous eruption of held notes, contrasting tremolos, membrane-drilling highs, rippling oscillations, majestic drones, awesome rumbles which, taken as a whole, recall the terrifying power of a destructive natural phenomenon, its ever morphing mass a death sentence for the comfort of those who “know” someone’s art by reading a couple of lines on a magazine. Paradoxically, the huge wall of sound created by Zeitkratzer is somehow comparable to Phill Niblock’s domes of clashing frequencies. Both in fact are received as all-embracing massive entities despite being formed by a myriad of components which, in Friedl’s case, are born from different instruments while in Niblock’s the overtones of a single source do all the work. Far from “reassuring” whichever way we look at it, this is a crucial demonstration of force that should be played LOUD for best results. Pacemakers and peacemakers will be put at risk, though. The same composition constitutes the soundtrack to a DVD containing an experimental video by Lillevan (from Rechenzentrum) who fathered unrecognizable shapes and gradations from photos and fragments of films of the Iranian city of Persepolis. This is also beautiful, but the real winner is Friedl’s electroacoustic roar, which might even be a candidate to “my favourite thing” of 2007.
REINHOLD FRIEDL / MICHAEL VORFELD – Pech (Room40)
These improvisations, recorded at Berlin’s Podewil in 2005, were performed on inside and prepared piano (Friedl) plus percussion and “stringed instruments” (Vorfeld). We’re talking a fractal kind of beauty here, an aural chiaroscuro landscape hardened by contrasting overtones running through the whole length of the strings to their maximum frictional degree. The sounds are forced to find a difficult equilibrium in a sonic body whose pigmentation tends inexorably to “metallic harshness” and “dynamic stridency” gradations; the softer sections woke up memories of +Minus in my mind, but another term of comparison is certainly “Message urgent”, the CD that Vorfeld and Friedl recorded with Bernhard Günter, both trios working in the same realms of extracurricular string bowing. “Pech” really takes off when the opposite harmonic forces clash, sharp acute frequencies and acrid streaks invading the space and propagating in a sort of cajoling threat that won’t sound extraneous to the adorers of the Organum/Dave Jackman sacrament. Without the need of fathering a new breed of monsters, Friedl and Vorfeld manage to have us sleep with one eye open, scraping sapient nails on the surface of a blackboard containing the mathematic formulas for captivating apprehensiveness.
REINHOLD FRIEDL / BERNHARD GUNTER / MICHAEL VORFELD – Message urgent (Trente Oiseaux)
This is quite a departure from the main Trente Oiseaux aesthetics of ghostly shades of uncertainty and masterful explorations of silence. Hazarding a decisive step into stringed dissonance, Friedl (inside piano) Günter (electric cellotar) and Vorfeld (stringed instruments, percussion) raise serious questions, bringing out spectral rumblings and cavernous basses, rejecting heavenward messages, replenishing the air with an abundance of evil crunching and tsunamis of vociferous fuzziness. Full of sense of incumbency, “Message urgent” speaks its language through holding back every memory, leaving a stark naked impression of some hidden threat the artists just leave at our own guessing. It’s thoroughbred improvisation, impartial and dangerously sincere, depositary of an uncommon grade of crudity that’s also its best value.
FROM BETWEEN – No stranger to air (Sprout)
Michel Doneda, Jack Wright and Tatsuya Nakatani recorded this album in Le Havre (France) in 2005, using saxophones, percussion and various objects. Opulence not included. Splashy panoramas of restricted areas are sapiently sabotaged by these undersellers of expressive freedom, their urge of playing coalescing with omnivorous fantasies in fertile terrains of impetus and geniality. Doneda and Wright are two cavaliers of the unpredictable, launching questions without thinking about the efficacy of what should have been planned in advance and instead was discarded; their saxophones gauge the thickness of presumed inquiring minds, demonstrating that there’s still too much to learn before being able to instantly decode their gestures. Nakatani closes the doors after them, sometimes through impressive bass drum thunders, somewhere else finding a percussive lyricism which he loves to strain until it shatters into lyophilized metallic riptides. Given the less than normal circumstances, it’s a miracle that the brain is still working after listening to this material. Then again, mine seems to work much better now.
FROXEL / KARINA ESP – Turbine wars/Lightfall (Evelyn)
Evelyn’s quest for low-budget-high-quality productions continues with this 8-inch transparent vinyl featuring two short industrial ambient niceties. “Turbine wars” by Froxel has a little movement, behaving like a muffled soundtrack to an imaginary documentary about the effects of a radioactive disaster, with static waves and minor disturbances joining in a gloomy atmosphere. Better still is Karina ESP’s “Lightfall”: unidentified sources generate a mass of drones which – pretty inharmonic and lo-fi oriented in their 4-track aesthetics – immediately throw in a state of pre-prostration and anguish, where one feels surrounded by a vulturous absence of perspectives.
LIMPE FUCHS – Pianobody 2002 (Seven Legged Spiders & Co.)
German sound artist Limpe Fuchs is not the kind of name that one sees popping out in trendy festivals and hip “avant” magazines. This is confirmed by the wholly spartan black and white cover lodging this CD: no modernist graphics, no liner or biographical notes (her website, as far as I could see, doesn’t feature an English version), no explanations whatsoever. But, once the disc starts, it dawns on us that no words are necessary when music speaks for itself; and speak it does, with Fuchs using the few means at her disposal to translate them into first-rate instant compositions and impromptu (or less) installations. “Odessa” pairs the instrument with a ring modulator and “metal discs rolling in a tube” to stretch the sounds until different kinds of resonance moisten the furrows of our old listening habits. “Pavolding” exploits the overtones deriving from the uncertain tunings and the preparations of an old piano, filling the air with infinite dissonances that sound celestial to these ears. “Erlangen” is a curious duet between an escalator and Fuchs’ harmonium, a “machine-rhythm versus airy clusters” tolerance that Pierre Schaeffer would have applauded and early Kraftwerk could have been willing to steal. “Orplid” sees Fuchs accompanying herself with dissonant touches while vocalizing in a style not too distant from early Meredith Monk’s, while “Karpathos” juxtaposes more prepared piano with the ambience of a sea cave, water sounds enhancing the artist’s expressive freedom. But my soft spot is for the two versions of “Berlin”, ironically the only piano-less tracks of the album, being performed on an harpsichord which sounds more like a koto or a harp; Fuchs reaches for perfect chords and gentle arpeggios managing to level any residual thorn in our spirit, which receives this timeless music like some sort of gift from a delicate-looking, sad-smiled creature. It’s almost like a soundtrack for a fairy tale, the most evident example of sensitiveness by an often overlooked artist who, in this particular instance, has given birth to what’s likely to become an obscure masterpiece.
LIMPE FUCHS – Vogel Musik (Robot)
Limpe Fuchs’ performances and music are animated by that kind of ingenuous purity that connects all the elements – really present or just implied – which develop that instantaneous sense of amazement deriving from a new discovery, all the while avoiding any excess of mushiness. “Vogel Musik” collects seven live improvisations where Fuchs utilizes an array of self-made instruments (lithophon, ballaststring, tubedrums, kettledrums) together with her violin and voice in duets with Christoph Reiserer (clarinet and saxes); Julia Schoelzel adds her piano in “Flying”, easily the most abstract improvisation on offer. There’s no chance of finding intuitions yoked to typical aesthetic canons here, as a basic concept of artistic freedom is well visible, but still needing to be reaffirmed until hoarseness every once in a while. Structures of sorts are obviously there to be respected at first, disintegrated a minute later; “Dialogue” crosses chamber-influenced finesse and anarchic detours in an absolutely unclassifiable piece, while in “March” the pairing of Fuchs’ metallic timbres and Reiserer’s delicate insufflations gives the music an almost ritualistic flavour, which brings us back to certain aspects of theatrical action where sound is strictly linked with the movement of bodies. Still, the title “Vogel Musik” (which means “Bird music”) refers of course to volatility, but we struggle – without the aid of the visual aspect – to associate that idea to the material consistency of most of the sources. This notwithstanding the album, whose cover was beautifully illustrated by Christoph Heemann’s pictorial mastery, remains an example of uncontaminated artistry by a sensible woman who has really nothing to demonstrate. Fuchs is not a mass agitator, rather a silent leader of an intelligent team of one.
FULL CIRCLE – Explorations (Red Eye)
Equimolecular improvisation by a Welsh multi-instrumentalist quartet whose youth contrasts with the maturity of their proposal. Using a well assorted range of timbres (sax, trombone, didgeridoo, wooden flute, piano, bass, guitar, electronics, percussion and drums) Deri Roberts, Dave Stapleton, Matthew Lovett and Elliott Bennett have been playing together since 2003 and their debut is soulful and balanced throughout a perfect length of about 45 minutes. Waiving sterile noodling to erect a sound platform as distinguishable as an emerging series of rocks from navigable waters, Full Circle touch several points of lyrical interrelation while keeping a firm foot on the harmonic ground. The contrapuntal combinations show a high degree of idiosyncrasy to any “jazz” formula, revealing emotions and establishing patterns for consciousness. The music is never cumulative, privileging airy vistas to hypertechnical virulence; nevertheless this group can really play and if this first step is well worth an applause, their path will lead pretty far.
ELLEN FULLMAN + SEAN MEEHAN – Ellen Fullman + Sean Meehan (Cut)
This CD features a live recording of improvisations by Fullman and Meehan, whose “combination tones, sympathetic resonances, beating and even cancellation of each other’s sound” are all generated by the sheer juxtaposition of two sources, namely Fullman’s long string instrument and Meehan’s snare drum with cymbals. The former is an impressive creature, counting on dozens of strings whose length can reach up to 20 metres, played with rosined fingers while walking along the installation; the harsher, frictional timbres deriving from Meehan’s atypical use of percussion instruments are almost perfectly complementary to Fullman’s invention, the whole often raising a true “overtone symphony” whose results in terms of sonority range from Stephen Scott-like majestic chordal suspensions – only in a more skeletal harmonic environment – to the upper partial-derived hypnotic howl characterizing the final segment, which somehow reminds of Alvin Lucier but with a number of slight variations and peculiar morphologies underneath. To better enjoy the multiplicity of shapes and morphing rebounds elicited by these fine sound artists, listening from the speakers – possibly in a large room – comes once again highly recommended, as corners and walls are the places where these reverberant tones take their energy from, before coming back to the listener with stirring force, even in moments of apparent tranquillity.
FULL MONTE – Spark in the dark (Slam/Happydays)
Looking for humoral, questioning, undepreciated improvisation? Chris Biscoe (sax, clarinet) Brian Godding (guitar synth) Marcio Mattos (double bass) and Tony Marsh (drums) have all the necessary tools for one abundant hour of jazz-stereotype removal music, histrionics-free virtuosity and emotional mordancy. “Spark in the dark”, recorded live and in the studio between 1990 and 1994, wraps you like slipstream smoke: you’ll find yourself around flares of massive turbulence sapiently alternated with whispered suggestions amidst spurious atmospheres – satisfaction is guaranteed. This is craftmanship at its best, a collection for any season, integrity and seriousness of the participants out of any doubt; each one of the involved artists comes out a winner in this motley, forward-looking meeting of half-brother inquisitive spirits.
FURT – Dead or alive (Psi)
Two long electroacoustic patchworks by Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer confirm the current interest of Evan Parker’s label in releasing music from the radical fringes of contemporary electronic piercers. “Mice” and “Sad fantasy” are two relativistic journeys through extreme unease and syntactical dismemberment, a saturated conjunction of strategical audio traps revealing a false sense of jauntiness where, on the contrary, menacing perspectives are lurking. Miraculously variegated and brain-stimulating, Furt’s music doesn’t follow any protocol; instead, it jumps right out of its corner with bunches of ubiquitous incidents, leading to labyrinths of incognoscibility and displacement. “Dead or alive” is a magnifying glass over a whole world of undefined microanxieties.
FURT – Omnivm (Psi)
No regular brain can pretend to be able to absorb the thousands of rapid changes of scenery that this incredible piece presents in over 77 minutes at a first try. “Omnivm”, whose title derives from one of the infernal visions of writer Flann O’Brien, is a four-part acousmatic wonder by the duo of Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, who created a “composite” of two live performances to give birth to this beguiling million-headed monster. The composers speak about “four centres of gravity” around which the piece moves; these are formed by sounds of gamelan instruments, distorted voices that speak in different languages, an analogue synthesizer and the playing of Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Paul Lytton. At the beginning of the second movement, a “forgotten Xenakis sound” is also featured, in a sort of homage to one of Furt’s greatest influences (read the CD booklet for details). The unbelievably quick, yet totally intelligible hypermutation of the sources gives the music a head-spinning quality that, absurdly in a way, often becomes the reason of a tendency to physical relaxation; after the first approaches, I even tried listening to the CD while reading on a train and it worked fabulously. This happens – at least in my case – because the perceived sounds are quite familiar in their extreme variety and, modified or not, are all part of an alternative conception of music that probably belongs to the ones who are not afraid of radically changing their listening perspective when necessary. Although there is not a single peaceful moment throughout the album, every percussive eruption, warped voice or instrumental alteration seems to be placed right there where it’s needed but incidental at one and the same time. This intelligent method of mixing spontaneity and pre-designed hypotheses is the very reason of “Omnivm”‘s value, and at the moment in which I’m writing I can’t remember a more interesting recent release in this genre. Shuffle play without the need of pushing the shuffle button. Amazing.
FURT PLUS – Equals (Psi)
It is by now extremely clear that FURT, the electronic duo of Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, is the right pick to obliterate any lingering attachment to “average” music, at least in the logic of “event-mental digestion of the event-move to the next event”. The course of action underlying an oeuvre this intricate can’t be accurately described by a simple review and, what’s more, Richard Barrett’s extensive liners give an ideal account of the involved mechanics through the narration of the origin of these performances. Let’s just say that in this scenery the machines assume a dynamic role, responding to thousands of inputs bequeathed by the soloists as if endowed with their own individuality, and that the project’s management does a masterful job of connection of the right wires. The contributors here include Phil Minton, Paul Lovens, John Butcher, Ute Wassermann (the track where she’s featured is extraordinary), Rhodri Davies and Wolfgang Mitterer. FURT lay bare, once and for all, that truth is only a gadget: by listening to such a recording one discovers dozens of different realities amassed in time frames of milliseconds. Obsequiousness? Forget about it. We’re attacked more often than not, although many spots exist where an indisputable will of scattering the elements at work around becomes evident, the gibber-and-chatter of instruments and voices occupying our psychological space in ways that, apparently regular, reveal instead to be reasonably paranormal. A series of electroacoustic dismemberments that might cause serious damage to the unprepared (Where is my rhythm? Where is my melody?), no way to retaliate: this is physical matter that must be shipped, swallowed and acknowledged, a corpulent wrestler jumping on a frail body, forcing the victim to listen – in painful detail – to all the sounds that squeezed muscles and fractured bones emit. There isn’t room for that sort of coyness that renders improvisational units a marketable commodity after the initial illusion of self-sufficiency, that blasé, bourgeois stance transforming free music into a “class” giving shelter to flocks of inverted snobs. The aesthetic of the grotesque and the sharpest kind of reactivity to the impulse share a roof in FURT’s vision, alimenting our only recent hopes in the struggle against musical obsolescence. Tremendous substance everywhere in a greatly recommended (plus) release.
KENNETH GABURO – Lingua II: Maledetto/Antiphony VIII (Pogus)
Firstly conceived in 1967-68, “Maledetto” is a composition for seven virtuoso speakers that sounds as modern as anything in the last five years, a commanding statement by a largely ignored composer. What Kenneth Gaburo declares in the notes is essential to comprehend the aesthetic significance of this work: “One can view each human as a unique and complex linguistic system, capable of generating more than one kind of language at a time (…) Thus each human can be viewed as a contrapuntal, rather than a mono-lingual system”. This explains just about everything. The building block at the core of this piece is the word “screw” in its various connotations, both in terms of meaning and sonic structure; from that, a whole edifice of intersecting expressions is raised, up to a point in which the attentive listener gets gradually pushed away from any theatrical interpretation of the score (which, oddly enough, is indeed part of a six-hour theatre performance) to enter a thoroughly musical realm, the voices perceived as assorted typologies of unusual instruments. Over the course of these 45 minutes, whose complexity can’t possibly be illustrated by a sheer review, we’re literally immersed in technological imagery and, above all, bodily reactions, either described or simply perceptible (sibilance, syllables, breath, chuckling, call-and-response). As Warren Burt rightly states, this is “a deep and profound celebration of the body, the physical, the sexual”. The power of this material just overwhelms the other music contained here, even though the latter deals with the important issue of people reacting to the notion that “nuclear war has made their lives expendable”. A percussionist interacts with tapes of individual views (or non-views) about the main topic along the lines of a dramatic performance that should be seen live for better understanding. Having the gravity of the implication been established, there’s not a single minute of the (still interesting) “Antiphony VIII” that equals the emotional and technical intensity of “Maledetto” which alone is worth of the purchase of this disc, as it’s definitely indispensable listening.
CHRISTOPH GALLIO / BEAT STREULI – Hits / Stills (Percaso)
This release is indeed a double layer disc: one side CD, the other DVD (in European Pal format). In both sides the music was composed by Christoph Gallio and interpreted by Claudia Rüegg on piano. The “Hits” are eighty short segments (that’s right, eighty) of sketches, glimpses and delicacies that follow a kind of artistic ideal which I share completely, as I myself have always been fascinated by the idea of suggesting without concluding, like planting a small seed that the receivers will water with their own imagination. These vignettes alternate refined harmonies, barely imagined scale fragments and ironic outbursts (OK, very few of the latter ones) but never leave the ambit of an inquisitive, reflective mood that, in some moments, made me mentally define them like a compound of Chick Corea’s “Children songs” and certain well-known pages from Erik Satie’s book. Rüegg plays with competent technique and semi-detached approach, the compositional depth clearly audible throughout the program. On the DVD, the tracks accompany a series of photographs and “Stills” by Beat Streuli, shot in Tokyo in 2006. The strange pairing of Gallio’s music with images of huge buildings and people from the street (the large part of them dealing with a cell phone, one would say) works well, the highlight being Rüegg’s digital adroitness underlining splendid nocturnal visions featuring the anti-crash red lights of the skyscrapers, continuously on and off in a flickering game of hide-and-seek with blackness.
CHRISTOPH GALLIO / MÖSIÖBLÖ – Ample food (Percaso)
In little more than 33 minutes, Swiss reedman and composer Gallio managed to musically transpose 92 questions, those published in Fluxus artist Robert Filliou’s book “Ample food for stupid thought” (dating from 1965). This obviously means that the pieces are extremely short – one-liners, like in the written version – but their brevity is exactly what exalts the perfection of the concept. In fact, I don’t hesitate in calling this one of the best albums of 2008 – a strong, concise record that must be carefully considered and savoured, and that will be admired by many different specimens of genre lover, including those who are well acquainted with RIO and posthumous derivations. The players sustain the work of a technically impeccable soprano, Sylvia Nopper, who performs a basic role – giving voice to those “stupid thoughts” and rendering them marvellous. The rest of the small (tiny?) chamber ensemble that’s Mösiöblö is tightly rehearsed and absolutely surefooted: guitarist Marino Pliakas, clarinettist Thomas Eckert and the leader on saxophone manage to enshrine the pure lyricism of scores that are redemptive of all the hopeless noodling that often I’m forced to listen to, in the name of nondescript freedom. Here the audience can appreciate the fascination of the rule instead: every sound falls precisely where it should, without foppery or affectation – just sheer clarity of intent, setting the music at heights where artistry can’t possibly be mystified. Other participants include Peter Schärli, Bernhard Bamert, Dominique Girod, Martin Lorenz, Ernst Thoma. High recommendations are reserved for this surprisingly great CD.
GANELIN TRIO PRIORITY – Live at the Lithuanian National Philarmony Vilnius 2005 (Nemu)
I vividly remember the original Ganelin Trio being constantly quoted – together with the late Sergey Kuryokhin – as the torch bearers for free music in the Soviet Union, real symbols of a movement that would explicate through a sound that was as free of predictability and constrictions as the wildest dreams of people living under a regime. After the dissolution of U.S.S.R. Vyacheslav Ganelin went to Israel and practically disappeared; yet, surprisingly, the Ganelin Trio is back in action, with a slightly modified name but also new maturity and consciousness to fuel their most recent music, which in this magnificent DVD was captured in its deepest essence. The leader’s new companions respond to the names of Petras Vysniauskas (alto & soprano sax) and Klaus Kugel (drums and percussion). Two long tracks range from melancholic themes, hinted by Ganelin on his Korg synthesizer, almost evoking ECM-like atmospheres full of chiaroscuro intersections, to furious improvisational surges in which the musicians play like possessed by an inner strength multiplying their efforts until the sunlight seems to enter the hall and shine brighter on players and receivers alike. The final encore is instead a beautifully mourning tune, “Homage to friends”, magnified by additional impromptu ramifications that confirm the reciprocal responsiveness of the involved artists, not to mention the mental and physical participation that they show throughout the concert. It’s a must-see documentary of a great performance, and a virtual applause should also go to the incredibly silent, attentive audience of Vilnius whose age span is noteworthy – young kids to elderly indeed; but this didn’t prevent them to respond to the Trio’s heartfelt communication with all the respect that serious music should always receive.
MARGARIDA GARCIA / MATTIN – For permitted consumption (L’innomable)
Just over 33 minutes of ear stinging, brain scathing radiographies by Garcia on electric double bass and Mattin on computer feedback. Complex, refreshing, the noise/sound perfect placing by the pair yields lots of rippling distorted waves alternating with bass frequencies often sounding so underneath, you could probably measure them on the Richter scale. Trying to give a name to this genre of sound deconstruction is an unpronounceable heresy; but – lo and behold – I opened my window in this torrid summer day and everything fitted magnificently with cicadas chanting in the outside fields. Concise and straight faced, there is nothing that could be said against this effort.
RICHARD GARET – Intrinsic motion (Nonvisualobjects)
“Intrinsic motion” is a record whose beauty is revealed in the very moment in which we become able to penetrate its many subtle layers. Only a repeated attentive listening in a quiet environment can let us decipher its contents in their essential significance. Richard Garet created these four pieces through “combinations of various sound sources such as field recordings, found sound appropriations, contact microphone play, feedback and studio processing”. “For Shimpei Takeda” is a fulgid example of Garet’s poetic: imperceptible frequency modulations intertwine in religious silence, then it rapidly cuts to birds singing in a garden and distant road sounds that, once treated, become similar to a nocturnal backwash, the piece ending with a hypnotic feedback blemished by a more evident, if scarcely decipherable rustling noise. “Ascending” fuses overacute waves, some of them pretty near the ultrasonic range, to additional field recordings (water and barking dogs can be heard) then it gradually starts to alter – probably reinforce – our sense of equilibrium through a progressively denser, thicker amassment of splendid drones bringing the piece to its completion. While the initial “Endless scenery” is a sort of muted meditation about the uselessness of words in trying to define what a “sound” is, and a preparation for our brain to be delivered from preconceptions, the 25’46″ of “Field of monochrome” combine the album’s basic ingredients in a wonderful succession of solitary experiences and faraway echoes of a surrounding life which still has some significance in terms of aural colours, but not anymore as far as intellectual motivations are concerned. Throughout this track – and the whole record – time seems to freeze in a delicate sequence of compelling, profound memory snapshots.
RICHARD GARET – L’avenir (Winds Measure)
The difference between the future and “l’avenir”, according to Jacques Derrida, lies in the almost planned predictability of the former as opposed to the eventual unexpectedness of the latter. For Richard Garet, the concept “played a significant role in scoring the work from a subjective and intuitive perspective”. The composition was “constructed” in 2006 and 2007, no information given about its generation, although we can assume that laptop-processed found sounds and some kind of complex synthesis might have been used. The results are not too far away from the aesthetic vision of another Richard (Chartier), maintaining a general stillness often adjoining silence. Everything starts with a few minutes of softly rustling secretions, after which we’re initiated to the first layers of temperate electronic drones which take only a short moment to start diffusing all around our body, a little bit of holographic sonic architecture whose vibrational power is fair but firm. The beneficial effect of this mild-mannered rubbing is instantaneous, as one experiences that sense of fitting in the immediate environment that masterful soundscapers are able to elicit. Garet shows that he belongs, both in the above mentioned background and the upper echelon of contemporary sound artists, his music both a considerable means for vanquishing the gravitational pull and the key to reach a state of respite of the nerves.
RICHARD GARET / DALE LLOYD / JOS SMOLDERS / UBEBOET – Territorium (Nonvisualobjects)
“Circle” by Richard Garet is a gorgeous juxtaposition of field recordings and studio treatments, in which inherent manifestations and mechanical sounds create an ambience accepted by our ears like a perfectly natural thing; the powerful images conjured up by Garet can be filed in the archives of the most deeply captivating electroacoustic music. Dale Lloyd underlines that there aren’t actual insects or amphibians in his “Anamorphic_AT”; indeed one could be deceived by the cricket-like sounds characterizing the piece, a high frequency electronic meditation over an underground rumbling whisper, akin to the wind as heard from afar. Speaking of which, the wind itself is the leading source in Jos Smolders’ “Aiolos (Vangsaa exterior)”; the composer mixes “the continuous pushing and tearing” of several air currents, what he calls “tiny bell-like anomalies” made with Bhajis Loops and environmental sounds for what’s maybe the most “concrete” track of the disc, which itself is ended by Ubeboet’s tracks, “The wait”, “Doubts” and “Waking up (Misty)”, three shorter nocturnal pieces defined by their creator as a sort of reproduction of “urban, unnatural environments without human presence” – and I could not put it better than this; these enigmatic textures constitute a “post-industrial” conclusion for another intriguing album by this excellent label.
GARRICK’S FAIRGROUND – Epiphany/Mr. Smith’s Apocalypse (Vocalion)
Michael Garrick – born in 1933 – is a peculiar character of English music who undoubtedly should be better known and appreciated by a larger segment of record-consuming population. His compositional attitude shows both admiration for traditions and the urge of trying new solutions in settings and orchestrations that mix lots of different ideas and influences. This probably derives from being self-taught (hey – the best talents own gifts, did you ever notice that?) and, in fact, he was once expelled by a piano lesson for inserting a quote from “In the mood” during a pupils’ exhibition. The main feature Garrick is remembered for, though, is the fusion of jazz and poetry, of which this CD – reissuing an LP from 1971 – is a great example. The basic concept underlying poet John Smith’s writings is that “god never seems to listen, never intervenes when most desperately needed and prayed to” (this was then; one wonders what Mr. Smith would have written today). The leader, who plays organ throughout, adapted the lyrics to the score in such a fashion that the outcome, a so called “jazz cantata”, sounds like a cross of twisted excerpts from musicals – “Jesus Christ Superstar” to “Tommy”, to name a couple that sprang to mind – enhanced by strange intervallic designs and harmonically complicated passages nearing the whole to the most intricate progressive rock. The principal vocalists are Norma Winstone, George Murcell and Betty Mulcahy besides Smith himself; the band comprises Henry Lowther (trumpet, flugelhorn), Don Rendell and Art Themen (tenor & soprano saxes, clarinet, flute), Coleridge Goode (double bass), Trevor Tompkins (percussion). Eccentric, abnormal music that requires attention in large doses and repays it in full. The reissue is completed by two tracks, “Epiphany” and “Blessed are the peacemakers”, that came out in the same year on an EP, then disappeared; the latter in particular is a splendid song, somehow recalling the work of Christian and Stella Vander in Magma and Offering, a reinforcement of my suggestion to get a copy of this forgotten gem. Bizarre, yet so interesting.
GART & SEEKATZE – The secret life (of Alvin Tsunoda) (Audiobot)
If this music had been released by Hafler Trio or Rapoon, we’d be praising it as just another example of their masterful work on hypnosis and transcendence; instead, this is a thoroughly spartan edition – no cover notes at all – containing two long segments of immobile beauty, something like an infinite lo-fi loop of a hybryd entity comprising the two above mentioned artists, the muffled noise of a boiler, the menacing clouds of a bad winter afternoon and the quiet depression of someone already knowing their death’s exact date. Everything resonates around a more or less fixed spurious frequency made with guitars, eBow and layered tapes, slightly crippled by small disturbances sounding like the wind as heard from within your house with windows shut; very rarely, a tiny gong toll apparently defines the length of these ceremonials. This flux is interrupted by a final crackle, which abruptly stops the ongoing hallucination.
STEPHEN GAUCI TRIO – Substratum (CIMP)
Tenor saxophonist Gauci demonstrates his ability in maintaining a balance between restraint and urgent momentum in “Substratum”, a snake of an album that sounds just like classic jazz at a first listen, but sinuously excavates tunnels of attention-eliciting virtuosity delivered by any patina of gratuitous technical wizardry (that’s right, the cat can play the damn instrument: the CD’s head and tail, “Threshold” and “Here and now”, are truly incendiary tunes in that sense). The lyrical aspect of the leader’s voice is also fascinating, embodying a style which mixes influences only to instantly discard them in favour of a keen linearity that renders the music vivid, touching, serenely meditative at times. This prepares for the frequent outbursts of emancipated phraseology pushing the trio towards dissonant shores. The rhythm section of Michael Bisio on bass and Jay Rosen on drums is perfect, amalgamation and elegance distributed in equal doses throughout the compositions, Gauci leaving ample room for both to exhibit their mastery: in “Song of Sundaram”, Bisio meshes tranquil composure and his will of frequenting the most dangerous zones of uncoagulated improvisation, Rosen swings and shifts accents with the same detached coldness that he’d use during a poker game. The bassist’s arco work in “This cannot be lost” is impressive to say the least. “Substratum” is definitely a pleasurable experience, giving us back some measure of trust in the future of jazz.
STEPHEN GAUCI’S BASSO CONTINUO – Nididhyasana (Clean Feed)
This is a quite atypical lineup, in that it presents two double basses (Mike Bisio and Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten) as a thick backbone for the evolutions of Stephen Gauci on tenor saxophone and Nate Wooley on trumpet. Upon reading the instrumentation, one could be justified in thinking of a god-awful jumble of low-frequency pumping with squealing swords agitated everywhere. Not so, and I had no doubt about that after having seen the involved names. There’s no abundance of moonbeams here: every note coming from Gauci and Wooley seem to derive from triturated melodies whose crumbles scourge the face of the listener like burning sand carried by the desert wind. In there, we can easily locate refined scribbles of intuitive geniality, which cancel whatever remote influence might have been traced (it takes a good auricular effort to realize that the leader was a student of Joe Lovano). Flaten and Bisio do what expected and a little more, building a booming cage of buzz, drone and pluck lodging their speculative philosophy of the bass, all the while remaining in the undetermined area of instant creation without losing a longitudinal vision of the whole. Being struck by the music at a first try is not easy: give it the necessary attention and the reward is all but assured, also thanks to a fabulously vivid recording quality.
BERTRAND GAUGUET – Etwa (Creative Sources)
“Etwa” is a pretty harsh work, not easy to absorb at a first try but full of propulsive energy anyhow. Gauguet is one of the several saxophonists exploring the peculiar aspects of his instrument; he’s from the “air team” of the Bosettis and the Donedas (the first track of the album is dedicated to the French improviser) yet his bubbling saliva, incredible harmonics and most of the sounds coming out of those tubes and keys are permeated by a kind of “lo-fi” character, like if Bertrand had placed microphones in experimental manners or even used some effects, which gives the music a spartan, “post-radiation” pale skin. That doesn’t detract in any way from the pieces, all very interesting and expressing a well definite identity in a not easy to penetrate sense of aesthetic value that is surely the most notable character in Bertrand’s world. I really believe that repeated listening will help in a full comprehension of this musician’s attitude.
CHARLES GAYLE – Shout! (Clean Feed)
Feasting on the remnants of perishing modulations and switching metrical tails, this trio – Gayle on tenor sax, Sirone and Gerald Cleaver as a fractally propulsive rhythm section – stands between controlled racketing and the need of curbing cries, for they will never resign to a complete disembodiment of their primal sketches. Gayle’s harassment of commonplace thematic rituals footstomps its authority through pieces that pour a hangdog spiritual reverberation over precarious lightings, like hearing the last notes coming out of desperate individuals struggling for a cheap ticket to innocence. Questioning each one of their steps, the musicians leave no room for easy neighbourliness as their interplay takes all of your concentration to be fully acknowledged; yet, theirs is that sort of constructive empathy that – even during the most dust-encrusted pages – links the need to escape from life’s ugly evidences with the desire of belonging to a disintegrating tradition that Charles has absorbed in full. The fascinating perfume emanating from his (uncredited) piano in the fabulous version of Vernon Jordan’s “I can’t get started” is yet another tasteful morsel of his uncompromising talent.
CHARLES GAYLE TRIO – Consider the lilies… (Clean Feed)
Soul can be extremely pierceable, and Charles Gayle is one of those musicians that is able to perform the job. One listens to such a strong collection of cries, emotions and intensely visceral communions, and the ground just subsides under your feet, preventing any further description or interpretation. “Consider the lilies…” was recorded live in New York in 2005 and features Gayle on alto sax and piano, Hilliard Greene on double bass and Jay Rosen on drums. These guys don’t lollop around, instead going straight to the core of their music with short excursions through thematic expositions that immediately get transformed into furious altercation and scorching free jazz granules, sometimes alleviated by slightly calmer, predicative solo sections. The colours never change, it’s all there: a peculiar kind of brazenness meshed with an almost religious fervour, the whole causing the same effects of a sparkle on a matchbox, with Rosen and Greene prolonging the duration of the flame until Gayle reaches the point of no return with his endless quest for rousing phrases and fierce enthusiasm for life. No more words; it’s just great stuff, truly “blood, sweat and tears” and highly recommended.
PHILIP GAYLE – The mommy row (Family Vineyard)
One has to wonder why, in times of abundant self-release jackoffing and overexposure to “talents” destined to eternal oblivion within months, an inquiring musician like Philip Gayle puts out a solo CD so rarely. Listening to “The mommy row” I came up with an answer: too many good ideas for these days of one-chorded sapience, too many directions taken – it can’t be used as background music like the 99% of people do while immersed in something else – timbral variety like a pouring rain, detuning of strings, toy pianos and tibetan bells, complex stratifications of guitar and…water. In his explorations Philip goes for parallel significances, passing through Henry Kaiser/Derek Bailey wastelands of harmonic bending and behind-the-bridge picking to find his own, unique voice which refracts in every corner of our being through hundreds of pleasant diversions, each and everyone with its well defined meaning. This is Gayle’s best work and also one of the nicest improvisation albums I’ve met in many years.
JEFF GBUREK – Virtuous circles (A question of re_entry)
Taping environmental sounds and releasing them is one thing; using those recordings in the context of a proper composition – or, as it happens here, in a live performance (Berlin, 2007) – is another matter altogether. This usually distinguishes the ones who jumped on the field recording bandwagon only to see their name on a publication from serious men like Jeff Gburek. The composer closes his insightful presentation of the work with this sentence: “There is God in Godless. But there is also more in less”. He proceeds to demonstrate the axiom with an intriguing bastard piece that uses both electronics – at times pretty evil-tempered, check the piercing tones and the vicious distortions taking command from around minute 17 – and sources captured by Gburek in a large variety of places (Berlin, Paris, San Francisco, New York, Java, Morocco, Kenya, Egypt and Iraq). Halfway through the fascination of Francisco Lopez’s absorbing solitudes amidst the natural elements and the semi-desperation deriving from the view of a desolate suburban landscape, “Virtuous circles” subtracts rather than adding, revealing human presence (mostly Middle-Eastern voices, with a few beautiful faraway calls to prayer) in a finely textured laminate where events succeed without prior notice in fluid consecutiveness. We have heard similar things before, no question about it; still, Gburek applies the right lights and the perfect doses of noise to bring out details otherwise invisible and pollute silence just that tiny bit necessary to synthesize a state of precarious suspension which is all the more welcome, inviting me to an immediate replay when the record ends.
GUNNAR GEISSE – Meta (Creative Sources)
The mystery surrounding this music is equal to my ignorance about the composer, but this is one of the most fascinating releases that I’ve heard in 2008. Geisse used electric guitar and bass, signal processing, field recordings and voice to father a fairly unpredictable album that stands halfway through serious acousmatics and the living room experiments of an evolved home recording geek. “Per sona” opens the CD with a mix of rarefied movements and contrasting frequencies, mostly remaining on the dark side of the sonic spectrum. The title track exploits processed hums, vocal fragments, interference and various types of glitches together with extended techniques on the instruments, the whole manifesting its significance in ever-surprising spurts where scenes changes continuously in a concentrated exposition of accurate tampering and heterogeneous noise. “Grattager”, the longest selection on offer, is also the one where bass and guitar – although treated with effects – are initially recognizable, chiming harmonics and rumbling tremolos sparkling ethereal combustions of long reverbs and delicate dissonance. But after a few minutes the piece becomes a nightmare of slanted waves paralleled by morphing ambiences, dramatically turning the whole into a rather inharmonious picture – which is even more absorbing from this point of observation. “Das diskrete Jetzt” is a cross of free improvisation and selected studio manipulations, coming off as the most anarchic segment of the lot (it recalls both Tim Olive and Paul Dolden to these ears), while “Die Quelle” ends the show with a juxtaposition of elongated utterances and electronic titillations. A record that deserves repeated attentive listens from a musician whom I’d easily define as a revelation.
GEN 26 – BLN (Self release)
A very peculiar item comes from Slovenia’s Matjaz Galicic, who recorded this 3-inch CD using a microphone and a set of deflated coloured balloons which he rubs and drags around the mike’s capsule obtaining a “sheer raw microcosm” of hand-generated noise. Surprisingly enough, the outcome is some sort of low-budget micro-concrete music which sounds like if it was generated by a laptop. The matter crumbles and breaks in absolutely uncontrollable ways, at the same time maintaining an overall cohesiveness comparable to more “evolutional” projects; it could well be a recording of a volcano’s rumble and you couldn’t tell the difference. I’m looking forward to hear more from Galicic – maybe a structured noise piece?
GEN 26 – F*/Jesen/Live (Smell The Stench)
Matjaz Galicic’s relationship with inanimate objects is unbelievably creative: he manages to get usable sounds from a floor, various pieces of furniture, rubber. In the vein of early Daniel Menche, Gen 26 puts contact microphones in every conceivable spot to generate a world of distorted babbling, jet-propelled chorales and electrostatic discharges that seem to spring out of a high-priced laptop, while instead are just the result of this Slovenian sound artist’s curiosity and love for self-expression. Unconventional to the bone, Galicic never loses his focus on the core of significance, showing aspects of his music which we could not be completely accustomed to; yet, his imagination makes sure that the sounds he conjures up keep their artistic value while establishing a new interesting lingo.
GEN 26 – A door to… (Mask of the Slave)
Two tracks on a 3-inch, yet another example of Matjaz Galicic’s explosive noise potential through ridiculously cheap means like rubber balloons, kitchen forks, spoons and electronics. The first: screaming fire, subversive violence, piercing distortion, unclassifiable stridency, compressed steam, ears in jeopardy. No aesthetic of sorts, no declaration of intents; the sounds comes out as it is, and it blows your socks off. The second: disturbed hum, pops, zaps, scratches, interference upon hissing, crackle, pernicious tranquillity, prelude to devastation. Non-biodegradable birds chirping a single ultrasound after being splattered on a grill machine, or – if you prefer – a referee who ingested his whistle and dies suffocated while trying to throw it up. All of this was made with domestic materials, but it sounds like a crazed computer circuit. Move over Merzbow, there’s a new kid in town.
GEORGE STEELTOE ENSEMBLE – Church of Yuh (Heat Retention)
Active since 1999, the George Steeltoe Ensemble is an ever-changing group of multi-instrumentalists and performing artists; “Church of Yuh” – a vinyl album – is their first release. In this particular occasion, the instrumentation comprises electronics, basses, vocals, guitars, saxes, trumpet, flute, piano, contact microphone, tin can, tone generator, percussion and tapes. Nine musicians in different combinations were recorded in two different sessions, each featured on a side of the LP. One of the keywords here is “free jazz”, but there’s more than just powerful blasting and liberating clangour. At times – especially at the beginning of the second side – the performers engage in hypnotic repetitions and interlocking arpeggios; picture La Monte Young(er) relaxing in a NYC avant-jazz club. Yet, when the group’s engine gets going, the Steeltoes build thick walls of dissonant belligerency, interspersing flows of hoarse rage with strange languages that mix treated vocals and electronic undercurrents. It’s difficult but not intimidating music that does not look for appreciation at all costs but rather seeks the best way to leave a lasting impression.
GESTALT ET JIVE – Gestalt et Jive (Creative Works)
The concept behind Gestalt et Jive is pretty easy to explain, and inversely proportional to the complexity of their music. Comprising members from three different countries and languages, the group was founded in 1984 by Alfred Harth with the intent of creating “hot and danceable free improvisation”. The original line-up was made of Harth, Ferdinand Richard (of Etron Fou LeLoublan fame), Steve Beresford and Uwe Schmitt. The latter was replaced on drums by Anton Fier and, later on, Peter Hollinger. All of these astute musicians except Hollinger were involved in the “Mark I” version of G&J, well represented by their first album “Nouvelle Cuisine” (which I’ll talk about in another occasion). But I felt necessary to start this argument with the “Mark II”, as the skeletal-yet-athletic trio of Harth, Hollinger and Richard is an accurate example of the so-called “poetic” of such an abnormal band. This record – originally released as a double vinyl LP in 1986 – fully satisfies Harth’s demand of “never making up pre-concepts and never playing compositions” in this setting. The instant architectures of “Gestalt et Jive” follow a modicum of rules, one of them being the development of several “fragments” (“Versatzstuecke”, in 23’s words) within a single “tune”, snippets that the musicians can mix, destroy and shift in a brain-wrecking cut-up (John Zorn is not the only one who used to do these things, you know…). To facilitate this feeling of perennial mutability, the artists also included sudden changes of instruments during the performance; while Hollinger “limits” himself to drums and percussion (which is enough to send many colleagues into hiding for years; Hollinger is BAD), Harth uses tenor and alto sax, trombone, trumpet, bass clarinet, mouthpieces and voice, while Richard gives birth to oblique figurations and odd-metred arpeggios on the neck of his Fender VI. There is much to like for everybody, including – well, yes – fans of Etron Fou (are there any still around?), as Richard’s timbre is very influential in its unmistakable coolness, at times literally cloning the irony of that group’s peg-legged time signatures. The riff-based follies characterizing some of the “tunes” highlight the unstoppable cerebral activity of the players, Harth genially fathering one incongruous coup de téte after another while he transforms himself in a depraved muezzin first, a dejected Tuvan later on, all the while incinerating everyone trying to get to terms with his honking promiscuity and blaring rage. Hollinger, whose semi-obscurity is totally unjustified, is one of the best drummers of the last thirty years, a scary independence of the limbs at the basis of a style that lets us picture sparkles flying from his set. Get revitalized by three ugly ducklings who, more than 20 years ago, were already looking down from the top of the hill; matter-of-factly, there’s nobody today playing music at this technical level with the same evil intentions. Dance on that 15/8, nerd, or these piranhas will eat you.
GHIDRA – The sound of speed (Sol Disk)
Arrived at their second CD on this label after “Strawberry Skinflint”, Ghidra rekindle a stagnating evening with lightning attacks, hitting the audience with a solid punch to the liver under the guise of an improvising power trio which could rival the first version of Massacre (Frith, Laswell, Maher) with saxophonist Wally Shoup emitting competent cries and barbaric howls in lieu of the bass. The other members are guitarist Bill Horist – who can appear both a unique specimen and an imitator at the same time, given a schizophrenic sonic personality that brings him to play loquacious nonsense and Frisell-esque chordal swells in the space of thirty seconds – and drummer Mike Peterson, a punkish scrambler whose scratch-card style would make many “names” envious, the veritable motor behind the flexible bedlam generated by the unit. Having already quoted another famous group, you’ve been warned about the places where Ghidra are going to take you: technical command and velocity, extreme bombast and sudden rallentando just to let us breathe a little bit before plunging again into the refractive angularity of this music. Shoup’s will to emphasize and corroborate Horist’s playing makes for an awful lot of mortal combat exchanges, the sharpened blades of irrepressible anarchy ready to cut through the butter of self-complacence. No scumbled contours in this recording, only that kind of bright creativity needed for a substantial confrontation with the incipient decline.
GHOSTS ON WATER – Ghosts on water (Faraway Press)
Another treasurable item by Faraway Press, adorned by an exquisitely evocative artwork and rendered in sounds by Naoko and Daisuke Suzuki with Andrew Chalk. “Pale shadow” whispers its intentions to the wind amidst gentle melodies (courtesy of Chalk’s keyboards and kantele) whose East-tinged imperturbability attribute a deep thrust to something that, coming from other hands, could even have been classified as an outtake. Both “Fall and flow” and “In October skies” are heavily typified by Naoko and Daisuke Suzuki’s voices, first through uncertain lines on a field recording-based, extremely subtle background, then in a dissonant prayer made of intersecting improvised chants that depict strange colours and shapes for about three minutes. “Snowy fields sparkle aglow” is the record’s top as far as sheer beauty is concerned, a mix of melancholically tranquil piano figures over murmuring layers of uncertain origin, moving between remembrance and pastel-like sadness with the right touch of naïveté. “Wings of day” ends this (unfortunately) short CD with the same atmospheres, keyboards and vocals informing a barely seamed tapestry whose levity is directly proportional to its soulful substance.
JOE GIARDULLO – No work today: nine for Steve Lacy (Drimala)
With this brilliant effort, Joe Giardullo not only succeeds in celebrating one of the finest soprano saxophone masters; he also reinforces his right to be considered among the most accomplished virtuosos in today’s panorama. Even more noticeably, he does this without reaching out for transcendence or – worse still – for that sensual deterioration which often lurks behind the apparent freedom given by a doleful distruction of what seemed a bad world of constrictions and was instead the chrysalis of a structural charm. Giardullo wanders around linear sketches whose hard-boned skeleton is perfectly delineated in modal improvisations where silence and notes have veritably the same specific weight; the evidence of this unbelievably limpid dexterity stands out in the gorgeous rendition of “Prospectus”, a piece that Steve Lacy wrote using all the notes in the C major scale; in Joe’s hands, it becomes a softly confident preparation to a clear-headed dimension of ambivalent intelligence and geometric poetry. Giardullo’s own creations “follow the music”, as he writes on the liner notes of a beautiful booklet, meeting his dedicatee’s concepts and furtherly adorning them with a composed expressiveness brimming with emphatic simplicity even in the moments where the saxophonist lets the reins just that bit necessary to direct the sound towards the fringes of the soprano’s range, in exciting attempts to portray the molecular movement of the surrounding air waves.
JOE GIARDULLO / CHRIS SULLIVAN / MICHAEL THOMPSON – Language of Swans (Drimala)
This is a work resplending in its sheer beauty, perfectly balanced in a mixture of delicate and complex atmospheres. Multi-instrumentalist (saxes, flute and bass clarinet) and composer Giardullo, who I remember involved with Pauline Oliveros among the many, has utter command of the linear aspects of an improvisation – this means he’s one of the few people who can sound like playing written parts while instead he’s creating them on the spot; here, he’s flanked by the great duo of Carl Sullivan, whose bass is punchy and articulate at the same time, and Michael Thompson on drums and piano, both played with elegance and sense of deep meaning. No need to find a genre or a precise definition for this music, just think about serenity, awareness of life and a little bit of primordial energy.
JOE GIARDULLO QUARTET – Now Is (Drimala)
Third effort by the excellent Giardullo on this label, “Now Is” presents four musicians at their very expressive high. Starting with the swinging, jazzy outburst – with a ” full freedom” imprint – of the title track, the record guarantees skill and heart in enormous doses in the following pieces, where the magnificent eruptions and flights of the saxes and the deep inquiries of Joe McPhee’s pocket trumpet’s lines are perfectly at ease with a rhythm section consistently imaginative and turbulent when the right moment comes. While Joe Giardullo and Joe McPhee are those kind of masters you can always trust because they’ll NEVER fail to produce emotional moments, I’d just like to take my hat off in front of the technical capability and soulful equilibrium of a great bassist, Mike Bisio; last but not least, the scintillating drumming (not to mention his djembe) of Tani Tabbal also deserves a spot in the light – that very light that surely was caressing the heads of these four gentlemen while recording this beauty. A must for lovers of contemporary jazz.
CARLOS GIFFONI – The beauty of skylines (Feld)
An unquestionably rich soundscape, Carlos Giffoni’s 3-inch is just 21 minutes but sounds like a whole CD collection put into an electric egg-beater and eaten by a six-head insect that vomits sound fragments all around while flying zig-zag trajectories. Noise eruptions, minimalist orgasms, skipping discs and decomposed organs play their fundamental role in a piece which is intelligent and funny, with nary a moment of dullness. Giffoni is rapidly establishing his name around; based on this work the credit is deserved.
CARLOS GIFFONI / LEE RANALDO / JIM O’ROURKE – North six (Antiopic)
Antiopic presents a mini CD with three gunslinging noisemakers at their raging best. Chirping cybersynths and short circuit sparks by sulphurous guitars at full blast constitute the complete plot of “North six”: the three take no prisoners, attacking the Brooklyn audience from the first bell and never leaving them off the squalls. Exhilarating sputters and wobbly distorted fingerings transmit a sense overload all around the place; no time for judgement or comprehension. This is do-or-die listening, like being slapped by violent rain while riding a bike.
LISA GILL / KURT HEYL – Mortar & Pestle (Reckless Faith)
The pairing of a poetess delivering her verses with almost deadpan voice (somehow reminiscent of Annette Peacock) and an improvising trombone player who defines coyotes as his main influence could sound absurd on paper, but it works just fine in “Mortar & Pestle”. It’s a collection of 26 poems plus a final trombone/voice solo by Heyl, born from the meeting of two strangely akin sensibilities whose difference in age (Gill was born in 1970, Heyl in 1942) is not a factor in the artistic equation; indeed, Gill describes the duo as an “intense partnership” in the liners and it shows throughout. Every poem becomes a “vis a vis” dialogue, in which Heyl establishes a coherent pace for his phrasing while managing to underline, court and at times embrace his partner’s vocal presence. The poems are not transcribed on the CD booklet (although they’re recited with good intelligibility) thus I enjoyed listening to this curious album with an open attitude towards two “instruments” morphing into each other (Heyl uses his own voice and various preparations to complement the trombone’s timbre). If you want to know more about Lisa Gill visit her website (lisagill.org) and discover a one-of-a-kind artist.
JOE GILMORE – On Quasi-Convergence and Quiet Spaces (Cut)
The last couple of Cut releases tends towards the harsh side of the sonic spectrum and – except for the long conclusive track “U+221E” which is as hypnotizing as we can get, and verily desirable to these ears – this CD by Joe Gilmore is a fine specimen of that kind of experimental computer-ism that manages to sound fresh enough to erase any doubt about the fact that its creator is for real. A multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer, Gilmore has published his music on various labels (I recall a pretty lively split 3-inch with George Rogers on Entr’acte). He privileges a certain rawness as opposed to over-refinement, which is very helpful for the sounds to lacerate any chance of indifference and, better still, to cover quite a bit of extraneous chit-chat if you decide to isolate yourself and your walkman amidst the urban tribes that infest an already scarcely digestible social participation. A veritable festival of impractical frequencies, rusty impermanences, flexible grumbles, but also several moments of rewarding investigation of deeply convulsive, revolving figures that look for a stabilizing mechanism – which they usually can’t find. Uneasy yet, at the same time, pretty accessible if you’re well acquainted with problematic improbabilities. Many convergences, dearth of quiet spaces. Finding the latter ones within ourselves is the key to better penetrate Gilmore’s procedures.
JOE GILMORE & GEORGE ROGERS – Elseif (Entr’acte)
A quarter of an hour – yes, it is just another 3-inch – can be enough to declare war to tranquillity. Try to play “Elseif” at a good volume, then expect your relatives to knock on your door to check if you’re OK. Me, I was delighted by this alternance of ear-stinging synthetic needles and pins; three tracks are similar to a vinyl record played with Freddy Kruger’s nails, while the remaining ones are sorts of “parallel convergences” among spaghetti-like bunches of more static lines. All were made using dynamic stochastic synthesis, a topic that’s too difficult to be explained in a few lines – go study a little Iannis Xenakis on the web. Even if quite serious in its intentions, I had a lot of fun by listening to this music, which should be enjoyed as the unexpected result of peculiar experiments.
GINTAS K – Lengvai/60 x one minute audio colours of 2kHz sound (Cronica)
I’m certainly not attracted by the large part of contemporary glitch-and-skip electronica, but this double CD by Gintas Kraptavicius is surely a good antidote against the “light-hearted laptop” syndrome that is affecting the world today. Will anyone ever prevent all these nondescript twiddlers from releasing neat-sounding “bell-and-whistle” tiny songs slightly disturbed by electrostatics to give them that oh-so-experimental aroma? Luckily, Gintas K is not one of these entities. “Lengvai” contains five pretty long pieces of “techno vs industrial” with perfectly clean, but also horribly dirty crunches to spare (a few sections sound like a cybernetic version of Muslimgauze’s late production); ear-tickling frequencies and harsh stabs of hissing noise alternate with nerve-massaging combinations of distorted/flanged waves. The title of the second disc is self-explanatory: starting from a single 2kHz tone we’re pierced, intrigued, distracted and often amused by the bleeping hypnosis and test-like pulse of this digital ultra-minimalism. Near-inaudibility deprivations and ice-cold headaches are all contained in a simple concept that work better than honey-dripping, third rate Fennesz-ism. With this stuff you could even punish, if so desired, your “thing-that-wouldn’t-leave” kind of undesired home guests.
GIRAFFE – Hear here (Eh?)
“Composed in real time”. Now that’s an expression that I appreciate. It’s true: some improvisations sound, well, improvised; other ones could indeed be exchanged for compositions. The third case is that many improvisations are shit, but this is not the right moment for a tirade. Joseph Jaros and Luke Polipnick generated this nicely bubbling brew while probably having fun, since the resulting music is very lively, intelligently concocted and variegated enough to sustain the attention test, although not without pauses. Circuit bending and tape alteration would seem to be the name of the game (just guessing – the sleeve doesn’t help and I’m not willing to surf at 9:30 AM). There are additional kinds of oddities, too, such as a syllable-uttering baby appearing out of nowhere at one point amidst sci-fi noise and humming warfare. Mixtures of distorted emissions, piercing shrieks, electronic pulses, even beautifully unusual radioactive frequencies. An FM station tries to unwrap from the mud in the last track. Untranslatable blather and nerve-stimulating dynamic shifts flying all around during one’s try to give a sense to a Sunday morning besides feeding the cats and watching the fight taped the evening before. A day at Cape Canaveral after the officers have smoked quite a lot of pot; the astronauts are still waiting for technical advice from ground control, yet more likely they will end like Major Tom.
FRODE GJERSTAD / DEREK BAILEY – Nearly a D (Emanem)
Classic free music from two excellent conversationalists. No need to tell you about Bailey’s importance in new areas of playing, throughout his life; both on electric and acoustic guitar, his sound becomes better the more he gets older, getting free from the last remaining pieces of web to pick the occasional crystal in the sky. Here, his chordal approach transforms even the harsher dissonances into melting malt, a complete pleasure to listen to. Gjerstad’s phrasing is often very fragmented, trying to escape from cliches at any cost, always reaching a good compromise point between technical difficulty and freshness. He could sound a little frosty at times but you can detect a multitude of melodic electrons under the crusty skin of his talkative runs. This is a recording you have to doublecheck in order to get its maximum potential; it will be worth the time you put in there.
FRODE GJERSTAD / LOUIS MOHOLO / HASSE POULSEN / NICK STEPHENS – Calling signals (Loose Torque)
In the liner notes Nick Stephens describes this music beautifully: “…four voices in conversation agreeing, disagreeing, shouting, soothing, answering the question or not, but always listening”. During several of these parallel dialogues one gets the picture of a division between the ones who talk more calmly (Gjerstad’s ever-articulated emissions, Stephens’ patient excavations in the multiple opportunities offered by an acoustic bass) and those who instead mostly hit, run then stop thinking about their next move but decide to do the opposite (Poulsen’s phrasing mixes Frith, Rypdal and noise in equal doses). Moholo is just wonderfully selective, always in the thick of the action with controlled angularity, his playing showing no sign of repetitiveness whatsoever. The menage a trois between Gjerstad, an arcoed Stephens and Poulsen in “Dots and dashes” is highly charged and totally vicious, while “The breeze and us” whispers memories of Ovary Lodge. “Calling signals” is an album permeated by sheer sincerity and bursting with lucid visions by four artists whose aerials fear no interference or bad weather, totally contradicting the theory according to which records of improvised music should ideally be listened only once.
FRODE GJERSTAD / EIVIN ONE PEDERSEN / KEVIN NORTON – The walk (FMR)
Certain trios move according to an utilitarian way of thinking, which privileges the “less is more” only because they have indeed nothing much to say. Not this time, as Gjerstad (Eb and Bb clarinets), Pedersen (accordion) and Norton (vibraphone and percussion) submit a kind of crepuscular music which is based on a softly dissonant psychological dimension that implies more than declaring. A steady, slow flow of reflective atmospheres bathed in a sort of conscious dejection characterizes most of the tracks; Norton’s glimmering phrasing maintains the music in a space between concreteness and magic, generating a series of images that are used by Gjerstad for putting himself in relation with many non-existent tonalities at once. Pedersen is the trio’s glue and also their “droning factor”, his accordion seaming and stroking hypnotic textures and almost transcendental, wavering chords that balance the whole splendidly, his movements always gifted with quiet harmonic knowledge that anchors the music in a pretty safe harbour, made nonetheless of commestible difficulty. It’s that kind of improvisation that seems to make the most of a preconceived terminology, but it’s that very security that pushes it towards the highest level of reciprocal perception. An excellent outing by three of the most technically proficient names involved in such a difficult art, “The walk” is a persuasive statement and comes highly recommended.
GLASGOW IMPROVISERS ORCHESTRA with BARRY GUY – Falkirk (FMR)
Although they have already released two discs with the likes of Evan Parker and Maggie Nicols, “Falkirk” marks my first encounter with the GIO, a collective of clever musicians coming from the most disparate backgrounds (the press release defines them as “jazz, contemporary classical, experimental pop and sound art”). The CD, recorded live at Falkirk’s Callendar House in 2005, contains a graciously variegated 16-minute improvisation and a very long piece by double bassist and composer Barry Guy – a collaborator of the Orchestra since the beginning in 2002 – called “Witch Gong Game II/10”. In this track, which is obviously the album’s backbone, the score consists of a set of panels containing painter and percussionist Alan Davie’s graphic signs, which should indicate “different kinds of music floating over a black void”. This implies a symbolic message of unity and communion through the act of playing together, whatever the genre and the technical expertise involved, in “the darkness of an indifferent universe”. Besides Guy, violinist Maya Homburger is featured as a special guest. The aim is high given the artistic intent, yet the ensemble is tight enough to guarantee several moments of really interesting emotional outburst, swaying music that changes in speed and intensity at the flick of a switch but succeeds in making the listener “reflect about the difficulty” rather than “look for distractions”. In a few occasions, the mixture of articulation and freedom made me think of Keith Tippett’s Centipede; elsewhere, beautiful horn arrangements lead to territories associable to Frank Zappa’s work with the London Symphony Orchestra. This stuff blasts frequently and rubs rarely, all the while giving the idea of a serious commitment from the concerned parts.
GOALKEEPER WANTED – Mouthful of cherries (Void Of Ovals)
This has to be one of the best band names in years. Goalkeeper Wanted. Gosh, what do these guys drink, I wonder. And they do sound lovely to these ears: an incoherent-yet-delicious series of improvised rough copies and first attempts, with a prevalence of uneven thumping, outlandish timbres deriving (just maybe) from collapsed keyboards, guitars that look at an average logic of tuning with absolute horror, resonating nicely nevertheless. There are also camouflaged fragments of melody and, in general, a large-limbed predisposition to sonic encrustation that grows as time elapses. As the disc lasts less than 15 minutes, we’re left wanting for more morsels of this cake, dredged with hallucinated dissonances and pustulous microenvironments. I’m asking myself until which age of my life I’ll be prepared to appreciate stuff like this but really don’t care after all, as this is sincere, if not exactly meaningful music.
GILLES GOBEIL – Trilogie d’ondes (Empreintes DIGITALes)
The sound world of Gilles Gobeil mostly revolves around the philosophy of “break” or “rupture”, where “large-scale musical gestures are developed and brought to their acme before being immediately crushed to silence”. This audio DVD contains three impressive tracks scored for taped/computerized sounds and Ondes Martenot, the latter fabulously handled by Suzanne Binet-Audet, who studied the instrument with the inventor himself; the resulting soundscapes affect our sense of doubt deeply, carrying an unforeseeable, almost fearful aura which puts them on the same level of excellence of the best electroacoustic mavericks we highly revere. “Voix blanche” is a highly creative mixture of slowly unfolding irregular drones and digital descriptions of an outside world we are not allowed to judge, where the violence of facts is just a pretext to transform our susceptibility through the congruous reward of a rehabilitated brain, able to classify any new colour just to achieve the pleasure of scare. “Là ou vont les nuages…” sees more dramatically intriguing junctions among the railways of hope and despair; slow glissando vapors meet pre-recorded voices, strings, car horns and percussive outbursts in a monstrous acousmatic pandemonium which has one reeling punchdrunk at times, oneirically displaced moments later. “La perle et l’oubli” is based on “Hymn of the Soul”, a gnostic text by Bardesanes, and in its 21+ minutes length is maybe the narrative high of the whole set, alternating the feeling of total loneliness with outgrowths of sapient, relentless sonic activity in which samples of eternal void and heartbreaking choirs by invisible creatures are underlined by a masterful use of the “event-silence-event” consecutio; the striking puissance of these explorations of the listener’s psyche closes “Trilogie d’ondes” with an exclamation mark, immediately awarding it a “classic” stamp.
GILLES GOBEIL – Trois songes (Empreintes DIGITALes)
“Cinema for the ear” is a much exploited expression in the acousmatic field – including the description of Gilles Gobeil’s work on the liner notes of this DVD – yet there is no doubt that few artists are able to challenge the Quebecoise’s visionary aptitude when it comes to assembling materials that fuse concrete matters and ethereal essences in such a masterful fashion. “Trois songes” was entirely realized in Karlsruhe, Germany over the course of four residencies between 2005 and 2007, the designer of these complex, often breathtaking architectures inspired both by literature (Jacques Lacarrière, Dante Alighieri) and an unemployed scenario by mythical movie director Andrey Tarkovsky. The most graceful piece on offer is “Entre les deux rives du printemps”, an impressive consecutiveness of events characterized by large quantities of nocturnal ambiences, crickets underlining unfathomable secluded reverberations, and a magnificent recurrence of echoing ghosts of early polyphonic music. The latter element is indeed a foundation for various circumstances in the record, whose aura is repeatedly wounded by distressed utterances (usually equalized until they become unrecognizable), natural elements – an example being the storm at the beginning of the splendidly exciting “Le miroir triste”, complete with different species of birds, bells and additional voices – and, last but not least, the surprising presence of René Lussier’s daxophone, a disembodied timbre sounding at times like a voice from the netherworld (the composer describes the instrument as “stunning and rather frightening”). The initial “Ombres, espaces, silences…” is more or less self-explanatory while trying to sonically describe the life of the “Desert Fathers” at the beginning of the Christian age, strikingly dramatic for the large part with a disquieting closing chorale that might give you the urge to cry. Needless to say, sacred music is again an essential tool in Gobeil’s compositional method for this chapter, but it’s the whole album that deserves to be eulogized for poignant substance and sheer brilliance of the overall result. The best of 2008 for the Canadian label, together with John Young’s “Lieu-temps”.
BRIAN GODDING – Slaughter on Shaftesbury Avenue (The Wild Places)
No matter what anyone could think, Brian Godding is a Touching Extremes’ hero. If there’s a musician that I believe has been unjustly overlooked, this has to be the Welsh/London based guitarist, a master of integrity and an example to follow according to your reviewer. I’ve been waiting a digital reissue of this 1988 album for years; now here’s my chance to do something right and invite those who don’t know to enjoy a collection of bloody jazz rock instrumentals played with absolute commitment, soul and explosive energy. Beautiful chordal rainbows, volcanic runs, chromatic blues riffs, Brian has something for everyone; he’s backed by gorgeous companions making “free” music even if the pieces are generally composed. Godding’s not afraid to be scrutinized, he leaves everything on the floor forcing me to nod approvingly in any minute of the record, enjoying complexities and quirks, perfect harmonies and little errors. Everything defines the vision of these artists, people who hasn’t accepted anything but a harsh reality, even if that reality means making no money. Brian is currently active in the English improvisation area: keep an eye here for future reviews of his works in those contexts, already available at his website (www.lotsawatts.co.uk).
BRIAN GODDING – Kebab ala’ twang (Happydays)
Directly from Brian Godding’s vault, here comes a series of real-time guitar synth improvisations recorded at the end of the 80′s. “Kebab” is lively and variable, mostly permeated of an almost childish disbelief in front of new harmonic discoveries (which always should be the first goal during these kinds of self-absorbing playing experiences). Linking his Stratocaster to a Roland GR-50 and an array of delays, reverbs and additional modules Godding crosses a lot of different fields with results going from an ironic outlook on apparently “serious” progressions, all the way through controlled chaos regurgitating plastic spasms and discarded phrases rebelling to their fate. Many “infinite repeat” moments also constitute the backbone for more open-air solo meditations that will be appealing to more hypno-oriented people. The remains of this “warts-and-all” concoction are tasty and sincere; among hundreds of overhyped so-called “avantgarde” guitarists, Brian shows an intriguing side of his musicianship that will surprise many listeners if they approach this record with the right frame of mind.
BRIAN GODDING – The colour of sound.. (Happydays)
More six-string explorations by Brian Godding, these very beautiful – sometimes I’d say radiant – aural landscapes are sensitively touching and delicate in their open-hearted process to see “what comes after”. Orchestrating guitars has always been Brian’s forte: just listen to his “Blue sun” piece in “Slaughter on Shaftesbury Avenue”; here you’ll find chorales and spacey textures mixed with more radical twinkling of noises and metallic parts of the instrument, plus additional dynamic moments that could fit perfectly in a movie soundtrack. Pretty striking to me is Godding’s will to uncover different shades of timbre (…the title is self explanatory in this sense…) without losing focus on the general concept of the music itself, which often sounds like an “instant well-regulated composition” rather than improvised. This CD is so highly enjoyable and impregnated by Brian’s character that I can’t help but inviting anyone to discover it, thereby helping this unsung hero to get more of the credit he deserves.
HEINER GOEBBELS / ALFRED HARTH – Hommage/Vier Fäuste für Hanns Eisler (FMP) – Vom Sprengen des Gartens (FMP)
We’re in the middle of the seventies, punk and new wave thoroughly dominate the music world. Heiner Goebbels and Alfred Harth couldn’t care less, though; their own time capsule contains the germs of true evolution and such a process cannot occur without an accurate study of the past. “Hommage” is just that: a tribute to Hanns Eisler through heartfelt versions of some of his songs and pieces, plus duo compositions that graciously nod to the great German artist. The album was recorded live in Berlin but luckily the audience is completely mixed out; we can thus enjoy robust doses of bloody virtuosity balanced by the peculiar mixture of modern and retro typical of Goebbels and Harth, a distinct trait that can be counted among the basic influences of many groups belonging to the Rock In Opposition area. “Vom Sprengen des Gartens” came out in 1979 and, from this receiver’s spiritual point of observation, is a little more complex. In it, the two companions find many ways of exploring profound emotions with a preference towards an introspective melancholy, like in the intensely pensive “Almelo” on side B. Eisler is still revered, but there’s also some Bach, Schumann and a gorgeous rendition of Rameau’s “Le rappel des oiseaux”. Both albums constitute a fulgid example of how respectfully music, whatever the genre, should always be treated. The enormous multi-instrumentalist abilities of both men (Goebbels a fantastic pianist and accordionist doubling on reeds, Harth a monster sax and clarinet player) are never used as an excuse for meaningless boring exercises. Offering coherent richness of expressive means and abundance of stirring playing, these two FMP releases should be regarded as milestones, while instead are criminally overlooked. Here’s my hope of a fully detailed reissue of Goebbels and Harth’s opera omnia – no compilations, please, we want them all and COMPLETE. Meanwhile, spend some eBay dollar on these two; I’ll be returning soon to talk about the rest of this pair’s production.
GOEM – Acht centimeter (Testing Ground)
A short essay about gradual growth, permutations of repetitive straitness directed to hermetic centres, Goem’s music is made of brilliant crystal particles rather than electronic gases. Suggesting dominance of machine upon human element, nevertheless in this series of stellar cracks Duimelinks, De Waard and Meelkop trace a direct sign, releasing energies without chaos, adapting their above average mastery of sound to a more common way of listening. No need of gratuitous noise or useless shouting for this project, perfectly sequential in Testing Ground’s gallery of interesting recordings.
[sic] TIM GOLDIE – Abjector [sic] (h.m.o/r)
Trying to convince people about the good and the bad in a record like this is completely useless. A classic love/hate dichotomy: someone will think that it’s art, someone else that it’s shit. Tim Goldie himself seems to have chosen a black/white approach in releasing this pair of CDs. In fact, the first one features a piece – “White peristaltic interrogations” – where the experimentation with drums and voice reaches points of high interest, as Goldie transforms the instruments (which also include credit card and bird whistle) into machines producing several kinds of groans, growls and thunders, the whole interspersed with long silences in the final section. Some of the materials are not too distant from Z’EV, but there’s probably a larger dose of anarchy in what we find here (you’ve got to love the absurd track subdivision, take a look to your player while listening). The second disc finds TG in full-scream mode in “Devocalised Fluchtverdächtiger”, as he meshes his shrieking rants with the resonance of a snare drum or throws them up by themselves, overdriving the mess via a guitar amplifier. This is obviously the part that you might want to keep secret to your relatives, a pure act of anger and liberation that has no musical sense at all yet perhaps does imply a degree of artistry, more or less on the coordinates of Viennese Aktionist movement – or nearby areas. Not that the depth is the same, though. Or is it? I can’t decide myself. Still, this is a keeper if only for disc one, which contains seriously absorbing, brain-enhancing noise in abundant quantities.
MALCOLM GOLDSTEIN & MASASHI HARADA – Soil (Emanem)
Against the pestilential self-contradictions of many and one duets that I often happen to watch on the classical music channel, where the search for a standing ovation is in direct proportion with amplitude of gestural pomp and musical vacuity, here come Malcolm Goldstein’s visceral playing of a violin that often crackles and vibrates under his intensity, in conjunction with the piano of Masashi Harada, who frequently can’t contain the energies which animate his system during these fervent conversations, therefore he releases them through guttural utterances and far-from-formal chanting. Diabolically contorted but – in many cases – desperately lyrical in their melting of any preconceived significance, these fourteen improvisations reconcile with our barely disguised indiscipline, which is now free to champion these artists as an example of seriousness of intents and indiscrimination between what sounds “good” and what instead would be instantly eliminated from the above mentioned contexts, which sure enough sounds even better to yours truly’s callous ears.
VINNY GOLIA QUARTET – Sfumato (Clean Feed)
Assuming a neutral stance in front of this music is like pretending not to be there after being testimony to a car crash at a crossroads. The difficulty of adapting our “regular” predisposition to the wildcat venture that is the serious comprehension of “Sfumato”‘s many directions is largely repaid by this spectacular ensemble, comprising Bobby Bradford on trumpet, Ken Filiano on double bass and Alex Cline on drums in addition to the leader, splendidly articulating his spontaneous ideas on saxes, bass clarinet, piccolo and contrabass flute. The quartet chops like a double-edged knife through a series of dissonant themes – proof of Golia’s variegated list of influences but also of his total non-acceptance of commonly used jazz idioms – which are nothing more than the erudite description of processes in which the only possible result is a prodigious species of anti-histrionic, extremely complex improvisation by a group of artists who simply refuse to accept the easiest solution as a given. “Sfumato” is arduous to grasp with just a couple of tries: it deserves many, each one more attentive – and it’s a great album in every department.
VINNY GOLIA / AURORA JOSEPHSON / HENRY KAISER / MIKE KENEALLY / JOE MORRIS / DAMON SMITH / WEASEL WALTER – Healing force: the songs of Albert Ayler (Cuneiform)
One day Henry Kaiser, a man with very open ears and extremely nimble fingers, decided that the critically destroyed late recordings released by Albert Ayler before dying – “Love Cry”, “New Grass” and “Music is the Healing Force of the Universe” – were due an attentive revision, to enhance what the press release calls “ideas that were not fully realized at the time, nor appreciated up to the present”. By reading the names of the participants, we realize that: A) Kaiser has a lot of extraordinary musicians as friends, and B) there is no limitation of fantasy in approaching the artistry of a musician that literally epitomizes free-jazz. Still, linking jazz stalwarts such as Vinny Golia and Joe Morris with Zappa alumnus Keneally and a pair of rather uncontrollable improvisers (Smith and Walter), the whole complemented by the suave-voiced Josephson, who’s adept in both academics and improvisation, means that troubles might surface. There are some indeed. Not in the correct functioning of the interplay, which is fabulous everywhere – the long “Music is the Healing Force of the Universe” and “Japan / Universal Indians” are alone worth of owning the CD. What leaves a tad perplexed is the multi-genre procedure for the rendition of Ayler’s music, which probably would benefit from a measure of channelling in this circumstance. As good as they sound, sometimes the tracks appear a little light for their original goal (“Oh! Love of Life” and parts of “New Generation” being the perfect example in that sense) and in a couple of instances the intensely refined sax of Golia, who does a great job throughout, is just displaced amidst rock-ish energy, hyper-processed overdriven guitars and crashing drums. Josephson herself sounds too educated to these ears, her technical posture noticeable even in the potentially most liberated segments. On the other hand, we have to appreciate the seriousness of the artistic commitment, undeniable from the very start. Part of the problem is mine: I’m not a lover of tribute albums anyway, yet listeners can rest assured that at Cuneiform only instrumentalists whose prowess is all but ascertained are featured. The fact is that, as earnestly as this material was interpreted, it’s neither achingly deep nor usable for social purposes, if you get my point. A modicum of scissoring would have certainly helped.
NIKITA GOLYSHEV – Solaris (Monochrome Vision)
I’m rather flabbergasted by the excellence of this album, marking the first time in which the fruits of Nikita Golyshev’s mind grace my ears. This Russian composer started doing his things in 2003, when he was involved in a duo called CD-R (that’s right). Golyshev’s prior work, we’re told, ranges from “rhythmic noise mayhem to diverse and heterogeneous experiments”, but “Solaris” is clearly a disc of static electronica in the best tradition of those artists who individuate our soft spot with just a couple of elements and make them work for about one hour. Divided in two parts, the composition is almost immobile for lengthy tracts: a single suspended chord, not exactly consonant yet not really pungent, goes on and on for the initial half, only faintly disturbed by nearly unidentifiable backdrop presences that remain unconcealed at the end of the section. The second part is characterized by a splendid roomy drone who lets the imagination portray a typical flight amidst thick clouds, sun rays filtering through the algid amassing. A release that every enthusiast still believing in – don’t laugh – the “healing power of serious esoteric music” (with a tendency to acute stillness) should enjoy no problem. This writer, unbelievably enough, liked it very much: a faultlessly executed straightforward concept. It takes a little intelligence and a “less is more” attitude to do way better than overproduced bulimic odes to the gods of ridiculousness.
ANDRE’ GONCALVES & KENNETH KIRSCHNER – Resonant objects (Sirr)
The principles and the necessary setup for this piece were conceived and designed to create “a soundscape of resonance frequencies triggered by sinewaves moving in tidal motion”. André Gonçalves and Kenneth Kirschner recorded this fabulous thing at Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation in March 2005 and, quite sincerely, no words of mine can describe the pure intensity and the breathtaking tension that these slow oscillations are able to originate, a perceptible aura which is only broken by the presence – inevitable, one would think – of some idiot coughing loud between minutes 35 and 38 of the flow (I can’t help but hate these acoustic polluters). But the sheer magic of these sounds speaks for itself: we’re in front of a two-headed creature with Alvin Lucier’s brain and Eliane Radigue’s beatitude, gently raising its eyes to allure us in a false sense of security only to start stinging our membranes with the sweetest frequency torture, as the waves remember their place in the room like if they had always lived there. For the lucky ones who participated, a beautiful reminder; for all the rest, a must.
DENNIS GONZÁLEZ ‘S SPIRIT MERIDIAN – Idle wild (Clean Feed)
Since the very first minutes of “Elechi – Elegy for Malachi Favors” one can detect the perfect functioning of this combination of gifted musicians, as Spirit Meridian keep a convincingly balanced attitude, playing with devotional fervour yet not devoid of cerebral challenges; the final “Document for Toshinori Kondo” could have been penned by early Curlew, such is the detached independence of the thematic lines. The interaction between the leader’s trumpet and Oliver Lake’s alto sax is extraordinarily coherent, both during their burning blowouts and in its calligraphic beauty; bassist Ken Filiano and drummer Michael T.A.Thompson form an addicting rhythm section whose timbral palette and instrumental dexterity are sapiently captured by a highly skilled recording. The four companions create their own special alchemy without macho postures, their personality already greatly evident throughout the whole record.
DENNIS GONZÁLEZ BOSTON PROJECT – No photograph available (Clean Feed)
This band was assembled by Gonzalez during a quick trip to Boston and New York; he wanted to play with musicians he hadn’t met until then and spread this wish around the web. The resulting group includes a peculiar double bass duo (Joe Morris, Nate Mc Bride), a sax (Charles Kohlhase) and a young drummer (Croix Galipault) besides the leader’s trumpet. The music is built on two basic foundations, namely the “rounded angularity” of the themes and the obstinate alternance of passionate melodies and free-form dialogues. The bass-to-bass conversation between Morris and Mc Bride raises several stimulating questions, while Kohlhase runs the whole distance between bebop and Tim Berne. Despite his age, Galipault’s drumming ignites serious accidents while keeping all soloists in check with a coordinated swinging feel when necessary. Gonzalez’s tone is luscious and serene; as usual, he’s virtually incapable of playing an out-of-context note, remaining anchored to a quite accessible combination of elegant dissonance and consistent improvisational phraseology.
DENNIS GONZÁLEZ NY QUARTET AT TONIC – Dance of the soothsayer’s tongue (Clean Feed)
This record was born from a rescued 34-minute tape of a performance that Dennis González (trumpets), Ellery Eskelin (tenor sax), Mark Helias (contrabass) and Michael T.A. Thompson (soundrhythium percussionist) delivered at the now dormant New York’s Tonic in the August of 2003 complemented by a studio recording from 2004, directly inspired by the previous year’s set. The whole can be considered as a homage to that historic site, which in 2007 was forced to closure due to the excessive raise of the rents in the Lower East Side. González doesn’t play too much yet he makes sure that every note counts heavily, the timbre softly scorching, the phrases always puzzling under simple dresses seamed with economy and intelligence. Indeed, this music might appear as deceptively skeletal, all the instrumentalists seemingly taking ideas from patterns and shapes that frequently get thoroughly disintegrated, ending their regular life in the clamour of scarcely controllable rituals. The most prominent presence as far as this writer’s feeling is concerned is Thompson’s – probably the true protagonist of the large part of the disc – who is often left free in expressing a total command of the anarchic mathematics of drumming in lengthy solo spots. Eskelin symbolizes the intricacies of jazz more than anyone else here, his reversible logic at the basis of smouldering fragments of lyricism camouflaged as blowing fuses. Helias’ bass is strong-armed and long-ranged, shouting the will of abandoning the constrictions of a rhythm section with thudding mementos that don’t go unnoticed, but also accompanying the leader’s voice with brilliant arco counterpoints when necessary. Bloody passion and killer-like coldness. Just perfect.
GOREHALLREIDER – A blow to the head (Cohort)
Much more than “psychedelic ambient”, which is how John Gore calls his project with Steve Hall and C.Reider, this music sounds like a machine washing away the sins from the blemished souls of those who believe in the relaxing power of ambient itself, the presumed “real thing” which sometimes makes us even more nervous due to lack of contents. On the contrary, “A blow to the head” is an accomplished work, a group of abstract reminiscences where the apparent absurdity of contorted voices from the ground suggests multidimensional narratives wandering through emotional relationships between uncommon synthetic parabolas and slowly falling black angels. The quality of these suggestions grows with the passage of time, so that concepts started with a touch of nice violence find their own significance at last, mirroring themselves in a finely displayed droning.
HELENA GOUGH – With what remains (Entr’acte)
A sending station of messages that we could even perceive as takeaway illuminations, fragments of glorified externalizations whose significance is not born from casualness but derives instead from the very kernel of sound, modified by the skills of a bright-minded electroacoustic architect who is “working to create something from nearly nothing”. This is “With what remains”, a brilliant effort by Helena Gough, a Birmingham-based academically trained composer and violinist, currently interested in exploiting the “abstract properties” of everyday’s sounds, which she deploys with extreme care and accuracy through a sensitive multicellular method rarely observed before, at least by this listener. The intrinsic qualities of what might just seem a collection of noises to untrained ears are right there for the intellect to process, but it takes much more than a distracted look to fully unveil this record’s enormous value. Speckled mirrors, bumpy instantaneousness, biotic pseudo-tranquillity, all are just illusions of a forward movement that we must repeatedly postpone to make sure that these messages and codes are properly assimilated. The germinations of Gough’s complex connections of decomposed frequencies and impenetrable permanences produce superb aural emulsions of otherwise extraneous substances, keeping us suspended between a surgical reviviscence of our secret fears and a special kind of ecstatic indecision that – once again – highlights the retard of the human brain’s predisposition to “classify” and “define” when facing pure acoustic noumena. It all translates as “unpigeonholeable masterpiece”, one of Entr’acte’s most precious releases.
GOVERNMENT ALPHA / PBK – Auditory hallucination of drowsy afternoon (Xerxes)
Yasutoshi Yoshida and Philip B. Klinger are neither the kind of desirable guests at a typical lounge party, nor advisable as neighbours (just kidding, I’d be happy to share tea with them). Their collaboration was recorded during a 2004 tour named “Family Reunion”. I know for sure that certain family reunions end in dishes thrown from a relative to another, but nothing approaches the level of noisy intractability and corruption of tranquillity that this disc presents. If you’re thinking to the “dark hypnosis” side of PBK, forget about it – here we’re dealing with acrid looping, deviated turntablism, whamming-and-thrumming cycles of violence. Yoshida is happy to oblige, featuring all sorts of extravagant mauling of whatever instrument he may be willing to use, imposing a malignant if intelligible regime of perforation of the poor auricular membranes who are going to enjoy this via headphone (once more, be careful if you do). Artistry at work, even in this not exactly pleasing context – and that’s enough with me. Still, don’t play this as a soundtrack for your wedding, or the priest will call an exorcist. Not really a fundamental outing, yet functional at the right time.
PAWEL GRABOWSKI / THE BEAUTIFUL SCHIZOPHONIC / JAMES ECK RIPPIE + PAULO RAPOSO – Product (Cronica)
Sixth in the “Product” series, here comes a beautiful split CD which is rather different from the usual criteria of this ever-so-surprising label, being mostly centred around hypnosis and bewitching soundscapes, with engrossing effects on the psyche as a primary consequence. Ireland-based, Poland-born Pawel Grabowski presents a long composition called “But I’m not”, where obfuscated resonance and electronic haze ensure a lot of room for the mind to roam; his music springs from pretty unrecognizable sources, a malleable yet quite mysterious matter generating what’s the most static piece on the album. Portuguese Jorge Mantas (The Beautiful Schizophonic) who – like Grabowski – has had a recent release on Belgian ambient label Mystery Sea, here offers his most accomplished work to date; “Love songs for a psychoacoustic girl” is made of ten interesting episodes where voices, environmental sounds and samples – even from thrash and death metal – find a unique confluence into an alien marine atmosphere in which subsonics and haunting repetitions get their due space without overstaying their welcome. But the disc’s masterpiece is “Natureza morta”: James Eck Rippie’s fascination with turntables playing looped snippets of classical music is finely balanced by Paulo Raposo’s puzzling digital disturbance and attentive processing. The couple takes our hand to lead an incomparable dance towards oblivion, forgetting everything else around in almost 20 minutes of blissful indetermination.
ANDY GRAYDON – At bay (Winds Measure)
Influenced by a quantity of factors, such as “musique concrete, minimalist and environmental art, cinema auteurs and the constellation of artists and musicians he works with today”, Andy Graydon is a name to keep an eye on – and an attentive one, too. Concerned with having the listeners “experience natural or found sounds in new ways”, the composer presents six soundscapes – mostly superlative – dealing with the diverse derivations of a well-definite aesthetic, that leaving those “found sounds” impose their weight on the psyche smoothly but definitively. “At bay” is, in that sense, both a record that does not actually strike as an awe-inspiring discovery, as it tends to a poetry of the unspeakable more than an in-your-face explicitness of meaning – this if we really want to find a connotation in there. What Graydon seems to be looking for is the traceability of an internal logic in something that, at a first glance, could emerge as a study on a particular kind of aural stimulus or the different viewpoint on materials that other explorers might have examined according to dissimilar perspectives. Field recordings, static electronic waves or almost indistinct, bottomless activities all belong to a single vital organism whose sonic rendition is decidedly anti-intellectual, wholly in touch with a material necessity of perceiving the emission as an ordinary phenomenon, not the result of a microscopic test. Accordingly, this is also a just right example of forward-minded ambient music. In any case, the results are worthy of being not only mentioned, but conscientiously measured.
BURTON GREENE – Live at Grasland (Drimala)
Exquisitely savoury, Burton Greene’s pianism is a perfect mixture of thematic exploration and free runs. Lots of influences spring out continuously during the abundant hour of “Live at Grasland”: fractured Eastern Europe melodies or Bill Evans-ish harmonic ghosts get further fragmentation by a dancing left hand depicting the utter power of a tangent bass line, while on the right side of the keyboard Greene lets droplets of percussive sketches fall like exploded popcorns. The playing is emphatically rich of humour and – yes – romanticism, but only if strictly necessary. This is music that needs no stylistic framework to be appreciated; it only gets better with listening, while several shimmering moments distance it from the bunch of “automatic pilot” piano solo releases, those with lots of technique but desperately lacking the will of being apppreciated by all.
GRILLY BIGGS – New Orleans : Katrina = Santa Fe + Chicago (High Mayhem)
Defined as a “not-so-traditional drum’n'bass band” by the press release, Grilly Biggs is the quartet of Matthew Golombisky (bass, live samples), Matthew McClimon (vibraphone), Quin Kirchner (drums, live and recorded samples) and Milton Villarrubia (same as Kirchner). The band “was formed with the intention of making people dance, think and scream”; it sure produces a good wealth of entertaining music. The first improvisation is conducted along the lines of loopscape-based hypnosis, all parts converging to a focal point lasting several minutes, in which cyclical patterns à la David Torn lull us into semi-oblivion. “Frantic fix” is a decomposed jazz-rock experiment, uncertain obliqueness and odd-metred phrasing apparently dissociated yet cohesive enough to establish a sort of groove. McClimon’s vibes are pretty central to the whole discourse; their evidence in between the pre-recorded sources of “Twenty-one” is what produces a sense of hurry that at times becomes vertiginous. Brand X, Gary Burton and Last Exit seem to have been pillaged into a low budget, but not disfunctional three-head replica. “Doo Doo Cha Ka” is moulded upon samples and driving percussion, a strange alternance of thunder and repetition that could be useful for a modern choreography, then it becomes an unglued nightmare where TV snippets and electronics gain the spotlight. “Dig on McClimon” starts as dub, then works as a launchpad for the volcanic “Coda” in which I was reminded – at safe distance – of certain explosions and flurries typical of Mothers Of Invention, minus the iconoclast factor. Permeated by enthusiast creativity and gifted with technical expertise, this stuff is not bad at all.
JOE GRIMM – Brain Cloud (Spekk)
The familiarity with an artist’s oeuvre can be a double-edge sword sometimes, and Joe Grimm’s “Brain Cloud” falls precisely in the land of the reviewer’s indecision. What are we to do? Be thankful for the aesthetical gratification – because there is pleasure in listening to it, indeed – or dismiss it as a too-obvious reverence to something that already exists and, in this case, is firmly admired? Having participated in a 100-guitar symphony by Glenn Branca (“Hallucination City”, I surmise) and, subsequently, deepened his interest in overtone-based composition by scrupulously studying Charlemagne Palestine’s body of work, Grimm decided to write “music that presents itself as a single mass of varying density, comprised of tens of thousands of individual events”. The five tracks are unquestionably well realized, one of them – the initial “Brain Cloud IV” – approaching superior status; yet there are very few, if not zero, elements here that we might deem isolated from the Great Influence (that’s right, Palestine). Resounding quietude, hovering harmonics, throat singing, stationary superimpositions of violins and horns. “Brain Cloud III”, for three pianos played by three persons (18 hands total) concludes the whole, and it’s also quite beautiful to hear. Still, nothing new under the sun. Ear pleasing material, not exactly innovative; while in a particularly constructive spirit, several parts of this record could be related to certain chapters of the Cold Blue book. Which is a compliment.
ERIK GRISWOLD – More than my old piano (Clocked Out Productions)
Completely conceived and executed on prepared and toy pianos with no overdubs, this CD reveals that we definitely have a new arrival in the gallery of interesting musicians. Erik Griswold plays his keyboards in eloquently brilliant fashion, without thinking too much if he’s doing right with an Ellington cover or if he can mix Brazilian patterns with minimal harmonies that one could compare to Steve Reich. None of these names should detract from the uniqueness of Griswold’s personality, though: his sense of spacing and timing is so accurate and carefully developed that listeners are always participating with some or all of their body parts – boy, does this music invite you to dance and play yourself. Ever present in Griswold’s mind are Chinese folk tunes, which through his hands become beautiful artworks. All in all, this is a masterful release, full of positive vibration, splendid technique and rare intelligence.
GROSSE ABFAHRT – Erstes Luftschiff zu Kalifornien (Creative Sources)
Somehow dedicated to John A. Morrell, visionary builder of a potentially revolutionary airship whose dramatic technical failure is narrated in the CD leaflet, this work gathers an octet of improvisers consisting of Serge Baghdassarians, Boris Baltschun, Chris Brown, Tom Djll, Matt Ingalls, Tim Perkis, Gino Robair and John Shiurba; the instrumentation comprises electronics, piano, trumpet, clarinet, analog synthesizer and guitar. After an initial period in which microscopic high frequencies literally struggle to be heard, the music begins to shape up and combine its different elements through various settings, not totally devoid of moments of quasi-silence. Frictional proximities between trumpet and clarinet are complemented by apprehensive touches from the piano innards; side-to-side analog waveforms and hyper-acute emissions create a background over which the guitar is manipulated like a percussive tool, almost losing all its stringed instrument features until a weak reminiscence of vibration advise us that the “spirit of the axe” still has a pulse. The dynamics brought in action by the players often inhabit the “ppp” neighbourhood, forcing our attention to appreciate the exquisite finesse that these strained synchronies involuntarily generate, the “lowercase factor” still in evidence during various segments of almost imperceptible “pneumo-electrology”. The final movement reveals the large part of the missing links, fusing the instrumental voices in a marginalization of the unnecessary aspects of technique, nearing the whole to a more recognizable collective exchange, though ever deprived of any chance of typical interplay. A difficult, stimulating record that gradually uncovers fibres of grimy beauty.
GROSSE ABFAHRT – Everything that disappears (Emanem)
Is headwork allowed in collective visions? Sometimes, slight traumas can be experienced even by those who presume to know everything in today’s improvisation. A good flogging might be arriving from this, the latest effort by Tom Djll’s Grosse Abfahrt which for the occasion employs the talents of Matt Ingalls, Frédèric Blondy, John Shiurba, George Cremaschi, Lê Quan Ninh, John Bischoff, Tim Perkis and Gino Robair. Recorded at Oakland’s Mills College Ensemble Room in March 2007, these four tracks were conceived following a single directive by Djll: “strive toward long structures”. The longest one lasts almost 39 minutes, of which we almost didn’t realize about the flowing; the music is vivid, pulsating, a perennial burning coal under the ashes of an only apparent tranquillity. Frustrating our attempt to categorize the happenings, the musicians move in, out and around their instrumental characters, reciprocally reacting to whatever exhalation they sniff. The nominal leader, besides its deceptively vacant trumpet and pocket cornet disguising a voraciousness for anything unpredictable, is also credited with “preparations”; indeed, the continuously appearing extraneous factors disfiguring the regular acoustic voice of the machines, in conjunction with entities such as Robair’s “voltage made audible” and “energized surfaces”, are exactly what gives this concoction a unique tone, something that stands halfway through an incomplete vision (which is already enough to undermine a non-selfgoverning personality) and the moderate incoherence of a somnambulist walking on rusty nails and broken glass. There is no frequency left unattended, not a minimal tonal fraction whose activity is not felt. Electronic bleeps and harsh scraping coexist, different ethnic minorities in a suburban neighbourhood, fighting or embracing depending on the circumstance. Cremaschi’s double bass in “Geometric undulating driveway symmetrical, all the road of masters” (the titles are fragments of Jean Baudrillard’s “America”) is akin to the peculiarly reassuring presence of an old dog in a shabby garden. Doesn’t defend the property, but growls and barks anyway. Excellent record, a typical “new-layer-with-each-listen” release which creeps on you like ivy, sucking juices from trunks and bodies.
ANTHONY GUERRA / NISHIDE TAKEHIRO – Scopa possibilities (TwoThousandAnd)
Compressed in a series of “appearances” from an almost silent background, the extremes of a chaotic world capsule are contained in this concise proposition by Guerra and Nishide, using guitar, electronics and “various” to send their unconventional bulletins to people with sharp ears. This landscape does not preview neither the threaten of claustrophobic strategies, nor any opening to a better disposition if your mood is not in the right frame; these guys report from the wayside, controllers of an interchanging assemblage of muffled eruptions filtered by undetectable radio codes, noisy frequencies and the wonderful “silent rumble” of Anthony’s guitar, coming every once in a while to remind us that all the bedlam generated by billions of different voices notwithstanding, there’s always one power ruling the universe: a big vibration, better still if coming from an oddly tuned string instrument.
ANTHONY GUERRA / PAUL HOOD / JOEL STERN – Low resistance group (Paradisc)
Due to the extremely various types of sounds used and also to the high degree of human element carried by the resulting music, this electroacoustic patchwork by Guerra, Hood and Stern is lively and convincing. The mix of guitar, electronics, turntable and field recordings is a nice multidimensional concoction of dynamic ranges and “beyond-the-limits” sonic palettes, conducing the listener through the six improvisations without effort or ear straining. Textural abrasions are sapiently alternated with oneiric gatherings in a place where originality and creativity are not confused with amateurish tentativeness. Everyone knows exactly where to put his hands, so that apparently raw sketches gradually evolve and morph themselves into a dense architecture of fresh ideas. Substantial and intelligent, this kind of stuff is what the “new music department” needs to get a shot in the arm by well deserving and inquisitive-minded sonic experimenters.
ANTHONY GUERRA / MATT EARLE – In (L’Innomable)
“In” is an album of classic electr(on)ic lowercase, where extremely acute frequencies keep company to silence, which in itself contains a few static crackles, amorphous structures, fluorescent hums and late-night searches for a light switch that reveals itself to be already zapped. Guerra and Earle don’t have time to waste with bell-and-whistle production, instead concentrating their attention on epileptic microsounds and subatomic particles of burning oils; their self-restraint works finely in a tightly designed record whose effects we can actively contribute to, thanks to head movement and body placement according to which the frequencies cancel or reinforce themselves, showing their various gradations in a demonstration of non-standard deceiving complexity. Or – maybe – this is just how disconnected synapses sound like.
JEAN-LUC GUIONNET / SEIJIRO MURAYAMA – Le bruit du toit (Xing Wu)
Recorded in the hon gaku temple in Mishima, Japan, this is a thoughtful and rewarding duo for alto sax (Guionnet) and percussion (Murayama) that starts from invisible gestures and utter quietness to carve a sonic niche out of the wood of respect. What kind of respect, you might ask. Firstly, reciprocal consciousness – the basic form of regard, perennially forgotten in this era of “I am here occupying this space, don’t care about the others and want their place too”. Then, the obedience to the rules of environmental harmony: in “Part I” the instruments seem to look for a tuning with the resonant spaces of the setting, Guionnet exploring the thin nuances of a quarter tone interval and selected overtones, Murayama responding with delicate colours first, with a modicum of roll, wash and tumble a moment later. The nods between the musicians can be intuited when, all of a sudden, the sounds stop and die in silence again, slightly broken by a subdued clatter. Only during the second part we are allowed to hear a few peaking saxophone dots and pops, but they soon return to that species of nonverbal reflection which attributes dimensions to an otherwise unmeasurable large room. Short cries and rapid strikes are thrown in the air, to see if the temple’s ceiling is ready to absorb these strange prayers. This lesson in restraint is all but classy, the winning feature of a disc yielding unheard results even if known constituents were utilized.
JEAN-LUC GUIONNET & TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA – Map (Potlatch)
This couple of intelligent silence-breakers uses alto saxophone and no-input mixing board in three of the pieces, Guionnet playing organ in the final track. Somehow I was expecting total quietness, which is not the case. First of all, while listening through headphones we distinctly perceive radio sounds in the background – a little bit of Keith Rowe in there – thus one wonders if Nakamura made unconfessed use of shortwaves or it is just an interference. The Japanese artist often slips the horniness of his signals in front of the mix, finely complemented by Guionnet’s fragmentary gymnastics based upon pages ripped off the book of unconventional technique. Both explore the barely visible hues of a semi-noisy tranquillity, only rarely rising over the horizon of a wrinkled immobility built upon implausible, disturbed murmur and pre-operative gestures. In the fourth movement, the organ attributes a droning factor to the music without remaining in the same places for long; strangely enough, this is probably the most satisfactory segment of the album when compared to the protagonists’ past frequentations, although we all know that Nakamura is a multifaceted feedback-manipulating cat, so it is not correct to necessarily link him with Onkyo-related activities. The French saxophonist confirms what he already had been demonstrating in recent years, namely being one of the truly sensitive reed players active in the EAI scene. This CD, actually not a major statement but a very interesting listen throughout, is a worthy addition to their career’s documentation.
AREK GULBENKOGLU – Points alone (Impermanent.Recordings)
Melbourne-based Gulbenkoglu’s solo debut “highlights the visceral sonic possibilities of wood and steel” in acoustic and amplified wooden guitar. That said – after reading the list of artists who have played with Arek, which includes Will Guthrie, Anthony Guerra and Mattin among many others – I expected new observation angles to deform a lowercase reality which, in truth, is currently risking to welcome too many dilettantes aboard. My fears were dead wrong: Gulbenkoglu sounds like the result of a cross-pollination of fertile artists of the genre – I thought about Michel Doneda, Nikos Veliotis, Taku Sugimoto (yes) and many more; indeed, the final track – nameless, like the others – is a massive dance of spurious frequencies for (…eBowed?) guitar strings which Phill Niblock would certainly bless. The guy is serious, then; he plays with silence while playing in the silence – and after long minutes where all I heard was the rain pouring on the outside, he proceeded to pierce my brain with the return of the son of a killer test-tone which I presume is controlled feedback (Arek is credited with “preparations”, too…). Short fragments of concrete sounds from the various parts of the instruments are used – especially in the first half of the disc – to let everyone remember there is no electronic involved; but this man does everything so attentively, he could have found a way to put that ingredient too without ruining an already tasty plate.
AREK GULBENKOGLU – Document 09 (Document)
Get this: the only featured instrument is an unamplified acoustic guitar and the record’s length is indicated at about 19 minutes. Instead, here’s what happened: I was instantly incinerated – right after wearing my headphones and turning the volume up – by a discharge of something cruel, sort of a crazed Morse code transmitted through the electric instruments of those who kill animals and peel their skin off to make furs. After that, what sounds like a brushed cymbal vanishes into silence in less than three minutes. To avoid a new cardiospasm, I lowered the level just in time for the second coming of the mother piercer, which is finally cancelled by a few minor disturbances. Then – I’m not kidding you – my CD player’s timer began to go backwards, starting from -95’45″ for a minute or so, then I heard a crackle and a whirr and saw “error” written in the display. An acoustic guitar. Yeah, right. Time to get a camomile and go to bed.
GUM – Vinyl anthology (23five)
The short and very intense adventure of Andrew Curtis and Philip Samartzis as Gum is entirely contained in this revitalizing double CD that could turn many late-hour aficionados of turntablism to a bitter truth: yes, before the advent of installation messiahs and their auras of momentous looping majesty, two young lads from Australia ruffled some feathers with dangerous attitude, amassing rotting corpses of disco desperation, noises of skipping/hiccuping chanteurs, miscellanea of classical piano concerts and war bulletins, hotline beauties moaning in funky monstrosities – and much more. The development of an aesthetic seemed to be the last thought crossing Andrew and Philip’s mind; yet, their puzzling blueprint of record noise-cum-frenzied phasing superimpositions not only came well earlier than any equal artistic personality but also gave lo-fi minimalism that much needed kick in the ass, liberating the genre from the quagmire of dumb “industrial” insignificance and projecting it to a future which – at that time – was certainly not predictable. Now, I can look at my 1987 original copy of “Vinyl” and be proud.
BERNHARD GÜNTER / HERIBERT FRIEDL – Trans~ (Nonvisualobjects)
This album is a gorgeous example of the new course of sonic action that Günter and Friedl started with “Ataraxia”, a kind of EAI crossing various similarities (Organum, Paul Panhuysen, Ellen Fullman came to mind while I was intent in listening) with a new consciousness of physical vibration that yields the best results by allowing the music to diffuse in a room rather than utilizing headphones. The basic foundation of “Trans~” is a superimposition of recordings that Günter made of three power transformers, placing microphones in different positions “to cull different sounds and overtone spectra from their intense hum”. Given this constantly shifting drone, the musicians add their own excursions, additions and subtractions using electric cellotar, a self-made bamboo flute, harmonicas and hackbrett (cymbalom). Even in a gathering of speckled meditations and semi-anxious adjacences like this very one, we can detect an inner linearity in a sort of domesticated rebellion whose acoustic properties are sapiently exploited by conveying them into an irregular “om” – particularly in evidence around the 28-minute mark – in which the contiguous frequencies at the opposites of their range behave like fog lamps in a sensual haze, maintaining the alertness of our senses on despite the basically hypnotic nature of the piece. Quite often, the flux is broken by hits and drops of varying entity, like if the musicians wanted to test the echo in a virtual valley. It all makes sense. Essentially, an excellent CD in need of very attentive ears.
WILL GUTHRIE – Building blocks (Antboy)
This is the solo CD debut of Australian percussion/electronic experimenter Will Guthrie, consisting of studio and live tracks. Glorious droning and intransigent metallic growth are the seeds for the flourishing sonorities of this music; Will is at ease and in control throughout, never hinting at solemnity but with lots of intelligent suggestions for the active eardrums. Like a little power station, this man is incessant in his quest for new ways of using all timbral characters of his arsenal and – unlike lots of solo percussion albums full of queasy rattles and nonsense tumbling – “Building blocks” is concise and very mature; you can listen with attention at 10 or instead using it as mischievous ambience while you do something else. The outcome remains valuable and justifies my will (pun intended) of hearing more from this musician.
WILL GUTHRIE – Spear (Antboy)
“Spear” is a short but very intense electroacoustic effort by Will Guthrie, who is equally accomplished in percussion and studio work. This 8’28″ piece is a war bulletin mixing David Jackman and Keith Rowe with “musique concrete” spicy condiments; noise, radio and charged stimulation maintain the level of vigilance very high – no time for deep breathing here, Guthrie is on the top of his bemusing irritability in doses that are proportional to his first class assembling skills.
WILL GUTHRIE – Body and limbs still look to light (Cathnor)
If you expect sparkle and chime, look somewhere else. Will Guthrie’s latest solo effort goes for the grimy gusto of a multitude of intertwining sound collages layered over the course of three pretty long pieces, the sources being voices, noises and signals – from both the ether and the (un)real world – and more orthodox (?) instruments (Guthrie remains first and foremost a percussionist). Many of the malformed onslaughts heard in this CD come from quite undefinable patches sapiently handled by the Nantes-based Australian, who puts them in relation with transversal landscapes made with radio waves and broadcast snippets, cut-and-paste-and-cut-again economical discordances subordinated to the sheer beauty of a bell sound or to the transgressing grumble of some kind of human/instrumental bionic chorale, apparently born from a shapeless harmonic conformation which gets constantly mashed, gulped and digested by Guthrie to fight sonic obsolescence. But what really stands out in this artist’s work is the effective – striking, one would say – raw allure he’s able to generate by adjoining “poor” and “rich” qualities in the space of short segments, thus creating a “pariah vs brahman” stratum of progressively unquiet calmness that is enthralling to say the least. At first, the mind needs to adapt a little bit, then its cognitive capabilities progressively respond with positive impulses; as the process goes on, we develop immunity against the addiction to consonance, which has been – and always will be – the ruining factor in many brains destined to perennially refuse sonic evolution. “Body and limbs still look to light” is a fulgid example of improvement in that sense, a thoroughly intelligent effort by an acute dissenter whose creative output grows more and more in terms of artistic quality and wry-smiled, illuminated bitterness.
GUTPUPPET – Gutpuppet 2 (Woetone)
Now here’s something quite atypical for Touching Extremes – but when the standards are so high, even a slide guitar/harmonica duo like this one becomes relevant in my search for talent and ear pleasure. Scot Ray, born as a trombone player, is a real slinger on dobro, banjo, 12-string guitar and gobjen; his slide expressiveness is at one and the same time surgical and full of hearty joy, a true set of firecracks for any guitarist AND acoustic music aficionado in general. Bill Barrett, a chromatic harmonica virtuoso, uses his instrument in a million different ways – trills, distortion, vowel-like utterances, mourning lamentations – with a keen melodic instinct and great mental opening. These guys interact in mysteriously unpredictable manners, spanning their attention over a multitude of interests: acoustic blues, eastern melisma, total improvisation, no-boundary dissonant melody all sound like a drink of water; Gutpuppet really have one for every crowd (and they play much better than Eric Clapton). Warning – don’t use as background music, concentrate while listening.
GUTPUPPET – Gutpuppet 3 (Woetone)
The first time I heard Gutpuppet – not a long time ago – I was pleasantly surprised; now I’m hooked. The third album from the duo of Scot Ray and Bill Barrett is another nail in the coffin of dead-end blues, the demonstration that, if we’re lucky enough, heaven-made acoustic music enters our humble garden one way or another. Scot Ray, who plays “dobro, cumbus, 6 & 12 string slide guitar and 22-string chaturangui” (check his solo CD “Rumi”), is a sensible master of the objective sliding truth and I wouldn’t hesitate to compare him to players on the same level of Ry Cooder and Sonny Landreth. He’s a diversified velvet-touch fingerstylist whose evolved phrasing fuses past and future seamlessly, a true joy to hear – and not only for guitarists. Bill Barrett, as I already mentioned reviewing his work with Steuart Liebig’s Mentones, is the Allan Holdsworth of the chromatic harmonica, and let it be known that I consider Holdsworth light years ahead of any other guitarist. His instrument has never sounded so “belonging” in such disparate contexts and genres: Barrett catches you relaxed and stings your soul with heartbreaking cries, then invites you for a ride around both Eastern and Western syntactic macrocosms, all the while interspersing his playing with gun-cotton phrasing and mind-twisting, technically impossible triumphs. All this from a guy who, having seen his photo on the CD cover, I would love as a close neighbour (provided that he comes every night to my house and plays, plays, plays). Need I say more? “Gutpuppet 3” is a healthy dose of optimism in a dying world of sterile pyrotechnics. Make it yours – and the rest of their output, too.
GUTPUPPET – Gutpuppet 4 (Woetone)
Bill Barrett and Scot Ray are back, and this time the path is made comfortable for everyone who wants to get acquainted with Gutpuppet’s world. The instruments are their usual ones (Barrett on chromatic harmonica, Ray on 6, 12 and 22-string slide guitar and slide banjo), what’s required on your behalf instead is an open disposition and the will of relaxing at least every once in a while amidst all those doubtful silences, zen scrapes and post-everything cages (pun intended). The fourth chapter of this duo’s saga is largely reminiscing of their atavistic influences, the variety of genres that they touch indeed baffling, all the more effective when they mix them over the course of a single piece. Flamenco and blues, Arabian and fingerpicking. Melancholic serenades and intense rasgueado, serene under-the-porch blowing and distorted tongue-tying chromatisms. Odd-metred bluegrass a go-go. Everything very visible, totally deployed in the warm sun of a music that puts listeners at ease but can’t really be defined “easy”. One perceives the smile on the musicians’ faces while giving birth to these ragas for the few untroubled fragments of a difficult life; in the right moments and doses, Gutpuppet’s thoroughly acoustic expression is the sign of a joy that still exists somewhere. Virtuosity at the service of heartiness by two of the nicest fellows.
BRENT GUTZEIT – Drugmoney (Kranky)
There are records that should be saved in our inner hard disk – forever. There are composers working in semi-obscurity that should be brought out to trace the path to our future. Brent Gutzeit’s “Drugmoney”, a perpetual bliss for resonant piano strings, is a work that I played thrice in 24 hours from the first time I heard it. After a slow, softened tumbling of metal sounds starting the process, Gutzeit unwraps a series of unconsciously hallucinatory submarine fadings with the same emotional consistence of motor airplanes’ rumbling sound when perceived from a long distance. These almost fossilized drones position themselves overhead, like menacing clouds that don’t want to release a single rain drop; every vibration follows its course according to a pattern of pulses everyone will experience differently, depending on his body/mind relation at that moment. The almost immobile mass of lows is actually imperceptibly shifting, until a trace of light is showed towards the record’s end: here natural and animal field recordings diminish the tension for a while, only to be quieted – again – by a final resurgence of claustrophobic entrapment.
BARRY GUY / HOWARD RILEY / PHILIPP WACHSMANN – Improvisations are forever now (Emanem)
This is a very welcome reissue of an old LP on the Vinyl label, consisting of excellent improvising sessions by three “big ones” of my beloved British jazz/improv scene. The double bass in the hands of Guy gives anything you can think springing from a string instrument, being exposed in its whole range and then some; you all should know Howard Riley and his imaginative piano touches, going from calm chordal work to quicksilver dissonant runs (and don’t you ever miss his duos with Keith Tippett); Philipp Wachsmann’s violin chirps and sings, giving these sessions a strong flavour of contemporary classic music…just much, much more vital. Open your ears and enjoy another fundamental Emanem release, you won’t be disappointed.
GYDIA / MARU – Ma-mo Rbad Gtong (Chmafu)
Please don’t ask me about the title – one of the best in recent times anyway – and go straight down the dark boulevards of space with this cryptic duo, which offers a nice helping of obscure electronica that, for once, sounds instinctive and fresh instead of boring the listener to pieces with festivals of presets and fake seeking of a non-existent truth. Divided into four movements, “Ma-mo Rbad Gtong” requires attention: it’s not wallpaper ambient, there are all kinds of disguised figures and translucent sonic holograms enhanced by pseudo-aquatic atmospheres and resonating in caves populated by nicely decomposed throat singers who, just like sirens, invite your brain to follow them in the middle of an extrasensorial perdition. This well conceived, free-floating architecture – no sequencers to tear your hair off – is like a giant black shadow, only rarely illuminated by spurts of synthesized sounds that soon disappear like shooting stars in the summer sky, giving back our consciousness to the dominant sense of physical abandon.
GYUDMED TANTRIC MONASTERY – Tantric chants (OgreOgress)
“Tantric chants” presents four tracks of intense involvement, atmospheres and energies nearing the centre of a man’s consciousness. It’s a pure ritual, a participation to something leading to a better knowledge of ourselves without the need of speaking, or reading anything. The monks create the most incredible involuntary harmonies through almost unnatural shifts, rich in overtones with lots of close intervals, a continuous pulsation of their throats pushing us towards the realms of body absence, a call from reed instruments or a percussive crescendo separates the sections every once in a while. Unfortunately this 1996 CD is currently out of print but a good use of your browser could help finding a copy somewhere.
GYUDMED TANTRIC UNIVERSITY – Voices of Buddhism (OgreOgress)
This record is composed of five chants where voices and percussion are used prominently. Floating in the air, the mind-healing power of this incredibly elusive music is hypnotic and hallucinative yet also highly engrossing. While the spirit’s enrichment is guaranteed, “Voices of Buddhism” is so far from this area’s commonplaces that you can’t help but feeling enshielded by the sound of these people’s will, totally insusceptible to any kind of rage or violence. Beautiful prayers inswathed by self-command and sense of communion, a single soul manifestating itself through lots of throats.
GYUTO TANTRIC UNIVERSITY – Chant retrospective 2000 (OgreOgress)
Impressive, almost unnatural harmonies take you by the hand, opening the ears to new ways of understanding vocal codes. Though these voices mostly range in the low registers, they own an almost phosphorescent quality that makes them resplend in an immutable sense of predestination. These chants invite us to renounce to any corporal necessity, springing out of nowhere trying to recompose our shattered lives; after a daily routine amidst all kinds of mediocrity, this record is one of the best relieves you can hope for. Self-examination, reflection, conscious sleep, controlled pain, evidence – all of the above becomes a single concept. “Chant retrospective 2000″ surely helps focusing our attention on it.
HAFLER TRIO – Cleave: 9 great openings (Nextera – Die Stadt)
Andrew McKenzie’s project is currently in a very prolific phase; a series of releases exploring – as usual – various facets of the human psyche and the inter-relation between sound and one’s own life moments. “Cleave” belongs with full merit to the great tradition of low-frequency droning music without too much of a movement, except for some wash of different strokes coming to shift the audioscape every once in a while. Useful comparisons could be made with records like Klaus Wiese’s “Space” or some of Lull’s works. The low resonance surrounding the listener for about an hour comforts and at one and the same time provokes deep thought about what’s about to come, hovering all around the house and raising a thick haze during your active – or passive, if you will – acceptance of that instant’s happening.
HAFLER TRIO – No Man put Asunder. Part the Second (Die Stadt)
This is the second release of a tryptich by NextEra and Die Stadt; it continues delivering the goods for lovers of serious drones. Very similar to “Cleave” in its conception, this new CD by Hafler Trio is just slightly more menacing in some of its sections, nevertheless maintaining a strong base of cathartic low frequencies and maybe an ever stronger belief in the healing powers of the sound itself. Contrarily to older episodes by McKenzie, usually very fragmented and continuously changing in their form and dynamics, these last outings find him in an almost static flow of thoughts, just like a perpetual instrumental “Om”, while everyone – including himself – is waiting for something showing us the right way.
HAJSCH – 1992 (Sonig)
Originally released in 1992 on vinyl limited editions, these five tracks find now a new digital life in this masterpiece of contemporary sound treatment. “1992″ is an intelligent record and a well crafted artifact, made with perfect ingredients and likely to appeal to most acousmatic music lovers. Hajsch privileges exploring timbres and frequencies through simple means, like the humming of an electric guitar, an oscillator or a gentle couple of violin notes. After a while, you come to realize these sources have started to pave the way to a very high degree of inner listening and thoughtful sound meditations, especially when the ear-splitting synthetic vibrations characterizing some of the initial segments leave room to concrete and found sounds accompanying looped electroacoustics or peculiar samplings. In almost one hour of music I could not find a moment which I didn’t like and that’s a rare feature indeed.
SYLVIA HALLETT – White fog (Emanem)
Many roads have been crossed by Hallett since I first listened to her (I remember it was a British Summer Time Ends LP); could I have ever imagined then I’d be in total love with her solo work in the 2000′s? “White fog” strikes hard with its grieving depth manifested through a stream of delayed and superimposed fragments; only bycicle wheel, violin, voice and tapes are used throughout. Every track is just fascinating, hypnotic and completely desirable, a wonderful collection of time capsules that can be listened alone (“Woman with dustpan and brush” and “White fog” on top of everything else) even if they’re all part of a continuum; as a matter of fact, Sylvia’s music is usually designed to accompany films or choreographic events. There’s more: the voice/violin improvisation named “The onyx rook” is one of the most stunningly beautiful things I have heard in my whole life and the same can be told about most digital loops used by Sylvia: something like the slowing of a wheel spike rubbed with the bow resembles a faraway moan by an unidentified ghost. This music contains childhood memories and adult nightmares: all together they depict the multi-faceted soul of this gentle, “…unpigeonholeable” woman.
SYLVIA HALLETT – Skimming (Mash)
Sylvia Hallett’s first solo CD is already a complete work, so discreetly profound and always halfway between simple realities and complex dreams – or viceversa. Be it a song form, an accordion harmony, a tape collage (like the final “Soft shell”, an electronic/concrete collage worthy of the best acousmatics I’ve listened to) or just the perfect sense of sound placement that accompanies Hallett’s music, I can honestly say there’s no one sounding like her. What’s more, her lyrics are so beautiful to read, even if they probably have something in disguise that only she who wrote them could explain. Reading the booklet I came to know Sylvia has studied composition with Max Deutsch – we’re speaking genius here – but it’s wonderful to think how magically she was able to free herself from the “dots on paper”, as Hallett puts it, to leave a little bit of her own world to our ears – the most beautiful gift one could expect from a musician – and this particular one with a capital “M”.
SYLVIA HALLETT – Let’s fall out (Mash)
After listening to this 1994 record I am now completely sure of my already strong belief that it’s genial artists’ destiny to be operating at the margins of everything commonly accepted as “normal”. “Let’s fall out” is an appropriate example of what I’m talking about: Hallett plays lots of instruments so well – and with the uttermost sense of dedication to the essence of life itself; plus, she sings with a voice so delicately pure, I could not help thinking how much more interest she should raise in anyone oriented to non-commercial artistic expression. Even in the “simpler” songs, such as “One more holiday”, the various facets of Sylvia’s music are so perfectly layered there’s not a single note I would like to be placed differently. Some of the compositions contained here should give the listeners goosebumps while evoking a distant remembering: simple snapshots of forgotten corners of our existence. A great indication of this woman’s prowess is her splendid violin/digital delay solo on the title track: maybe – just maybe – that’s the easiest way to enter the mirror room of this English rare flower.
GRAHAM HALLIWELL – Recorded delivery (Confront)
Graham Halliwell’s feedback saxophone is one of the purest sound one can hear, therefore I’m not surprised at all that these joinings with the akin minds of Rhodri Davies, Steve Roden and Mark Wastell brought the expected results – and more. The piece with Davies (on eBowed harp) explores the realms of frequency beating in adjacent tones, eliciting pale memories of Michael J.Schumacher and Bernhard Günter in a bichromatic aural print of transmittable messages, where waves of perfection remove the pad from the ear of any listener with a preconception, forcing a total reassessment of everyone’s acoustic priorities. Roden’s “Resonantflighttones” mesh a little more conventionally – but still with a totally satisfactory result – with Graham’s sparse pitches, bringing us back to an appreciation of the spacial qualities that this music can pursuit. Dulcis in fundo, the breathtaking resonance of Wastell’s tam-tam coupled with distant tides of almost environmental saxophone harmonics make sure that even your room sends its own prayers from its walls’ corners; it’s right then and there that our own essence starts a sort of radiant levitation, which is probably obtainable only through such impressive coalescences among talented, uncompromising artists.
GRAHAM HALLIWELL / TOMAS KORBER – The large glass (Cathnor)
“The large glass” was recorded in the summer of 2006 at Graham Halliwell’s home studio in Norfolk’s countryside; it is subdivided into three tracks. “The essence of things” starts with tremulant sonic dirt becoming a steady shortwave waterfall, exalted by fluctuations in the intensity level and a series of overacute impulses that put the head in a frequency-alimented cerebral garotte. A phenomenic similarity with Keith Rowe’s most recent explorations lingers, but is soon forgotten when – about six minutes into the piece – background rumble and controlled feedback sculpt and carve strangely familiar shapes of nervous, non-docile deep vibration. What sounds like radiophonic interference remains a constant presence, while the superimposition of “very low” and “very high” in the mix generate a multi-octave static texture that is panned on the extreme left and right at first, then it all morphs into an impressive surrounding pulse, like a giant pacing an overhead room. Calm is restored after a while, but it’s that kind of hush that anticipates an environmental disaster. Additional electronic undulations lull our willpower until the process is completed; eyeballs rotate slowly, while feedback and electrostatic popcorn make sure that everything’s alright. “In mezzo, nel mezzo” (a rough translation from Italian would be “Halfway, in between”) begins with elongated bleeping signals that pierce our membranes, almost instantly flowing into a caressing texture whose dissonant complexion is deemed more than acceptable by the brain, which soon after is tested by a multi-directional attack of penetrating oscillation pushing back and forth with the same attitude of an alien emitting killing noises in the wrong belief that humans possess the same level of knowledge and resistance. Slow unfolding, gradual modification, apparent paralysis; it feels like being on a highway’s emergency lane at 3:00 AM, looking at the night lights while waiting for a tow truck that won’t arrive: no certainty of returning home, and it’s probably better that way. Sure enough, everything fades out at that very moment. “Coarse ashes” opens with murmuring glissando – totally stunning, the most beautiful spot of the whole disc. I suspect that treated guitar sounds are being used here but my idea becomes irrelevant in a matter of seconds, as the resonating mass assumes the command of each and every move of the psyche. A million voices become a single moan, the throb becomes unstable and irregular. It all amounts to a corpulent roar, reinforced by muscular feedback that squeezes any idea of rebellion out of the skull. What is perceived as processed Gregorian choirs leads to a more ethereal, esoteric section which ends this magnificent work in style.
HAMAYÔKO – hamaYôko 4/29 (Entr’acte)
This strangely enticing, sometimes annoying, more frequently fascinating contrivance was created by Yôko Higashi, a Japanese vocalist and composer never met before by this old babbler. Noticing the participation (on mix and mastering) of Lionel Marchetti, whose work I respect, trust was granted. Indeed the welcome was not what expected: a deranged “song” with an electronic arrangement verging on dissonant mayhem, full of distorted patterns and sequences. As the subsequent pieces alternate in our ears we start to be seduced little by little, despite a few minor harsh spots and a couple of slightly “constricted” difficulties. Higashi knows what she’s doing, though. Besides pushing her less inviting vocal utterances towards the audience, at times causing them to long for something more, er, heartwarming, she literally cuts and pastes hundreds of different crumbles and snippets whose range covers drum’n’bass as heard from a distant room, looped post-rock guitar riffage, melancho-lisergic vocalism and repeated whirlwinds of modified electronics, often based on the deformation of her voice. It takes several tries to finally understand that this theatrical pot-pourri does possess its own depth, and my best suggestion could be “do not exaggerate with the volume at first”, because the multi-faceted aggressiveness of “4/29” demands a toll if one approaches it à la Frank Capra, all wonderful things and happy endings. Not so – but even the ugly components seem to carry a special meaning in this artist’s sonic poetry. Give her music time, and you’ll be repaid.
HAMAYÔKO – Ygun -n9- (Entr’acte)
Here we go again with this Japanese girl, Yôko Higashi, captured in full-karate attitude in a superb black and white photo on the folded poster that acts as sleeve. In the 38 minutes of this CD, Higashi confirms (and betters) what she had let us glimpse in “4/29” on this same imprint. A lot of things indeed: dramatic vocalizations amidst field recordings, a chain of samples that enhance the affecting qualities of the music, a sense of action-packed consecutiveness perceivable all the way through, a penchant for detecting when enough is enough, a gazillion sounds layered one upon another, absorbing collages that won’t necessarily secure nerve-shattering to the listener. Maybe. Lionel Marchetti is once more an integral part of the work but Hamayôko is definitely walking with her own legs: you might love or hate the stuff (difficult to remain in the middle in this case), yet at all times be sure that it doesn’t sound like anything else: an absurdist punkish theatre, flooded by acousmatic streams, in which meanings must be dug out from singular settings, the sources ranging from ping-pong balls to looped voices, the whole absolutely un-beautiful – at least according to the current canons of “beauty” – and mostly great. In actuality, not for the faint-brained. A major step forward from the previous outing, and I’m more than happy for this improvement. The young woman is indeed strong.
ROBERT HAMPSON / STEVEN HESS – Robert Hampson + Steven Hess (Crouton)
All the sounds heard in this four-movement, 19-minute piece coming in a semi-transparent disc derive from Steven Hess’ drums and percussion. If you have a hard time believing that there aren’t electronics involved, then send a card to Robert Hampson, whose mix transforms the original sources into skipping beats, abnormal liquids, gelatinous halos, lost quasars. The translation is a fluttering kind of music halfway through Hampson’s now terminated Main alias and the inspections of resonant percussive objects typical of sound artists like Jason Kahn and – why not – Crouton’s boss Jon Mueller. These four segments are moved by similar energies, short loops and repetitive geometries carefully deployed, progressively establishing a series of nimble movements in the stereo image. This spurious tissue is treated with a mixture of concreteness and hermetism, so that one is forced to look for camouflaged meanings with each new listen.
DAVID HANEY & JULIAN PRIESTER – Ota Benga of the Batwa (CIMP)
This album is a tribute to Ota Benga (1884-1916), a member of the Batwa tribe of pygmies, who killed himself at 32 after having been ripped off his native land as a kid to be exposed at the St. Louis World’s Fair and – once unable to return to Africa since his family had been erased – being used as a popular attraction, even bigger than the animals, in the Bronx Zoo where initially he had a job as cage-cleaner. Pianist Haney and trombonist Priester, separated by 20 years of age but sharing an acute sensibility as players, recorded thirteen pieces whose pronounced intimacy and exquisite harmonic shapes throw back to an era when listening to a jazz duo was a moment to be savoured in full tranquillity, without external interference to break the magic. Haney and Priester had to front a monstrous heat wave in the day of this session, the experience described by Haney in the liners as “somewhat as a blur”. Yet the different reactions to the circumstances, also including a potentially devastating technical inconvenience, seem to have summoned forth a stronger spiritual bond between the pair. The music unfolds in gentle quietness, the artists exchanging melodic seeds and sketches that the lingering silence helps to highlight in a beautiful example of polite reciprocal listening. When dissonant geometries happen to materialize during the creative instant, their potential contrast is decreased by the soft-spoken communion between the instruments, making us appreciate their glowing light like sunrise finally breaking through after a sleepless night.
MIKE HANSEN – At every point (Etude)
Canadian turntablist and improviser Hansen created an album that’s as impenetrable as the contorted psychology of a person who hears voices, and that after several consecutive listenings leaves no describable impression, inviting me to try again in the vain effort of conforming “At every point” to some useful definition. Despite this artifact being based on the exploration of the “possibilities of a purely digital medium”, many of its passages let us think about tape-collage techniques, with Hansen using his turntables in joint forces with an array of different instruments and sources (the liners talk about cowbells, harmonicas, Vietnamese drums, electric guitar and amp) to prepare a fuming potion of timbres and atmospheres that range from the menacingly oneiric of “The alarm went off sooner than expected” and “An example of what I meant” through the metallic friction of “Tidying up after” and the electric pot-pourri of “Once held a lighter high in the sky”. Most of this music is finely composed, its articulation quite evident even in presence of sensual twilight; but it still leaves no space for interpretation, existing only in the very moment in which we listen to it then disappearing without leaving memories, only a wake of uncomfortableness. It’s a good sign.
HAPTIC – Correction (Entr’acte/Absurd)
Steven Hess, Joseph Mills and Adam Sonderberg show two ways of creating awesome music which is both sharp-minded and unclassifiable. This 7-inch, contained by the customary Entr’acte vacuum-sealed sleeve that needs scissors to be opened, comprises “Ybo” – an impressive resonant quake that sounds like a meeting of Organum and Mark Wastell’s tam tam in “Vibra” at Klaus (not John…) Wiese’s house – and “Sum”, which starts with percussive clatter, then introduces deep hums and subsonic adjacencies to finally end in an ebullient amalgam of field recordings where the voices of a crowd become progressively engulfed in a frequency subtraction until they figure as the sonic portrait of a turbulent underwater population. A 70-minute CD of stuff like this after such a taster is not “desirable” – it’s demanded.
MASASHI HARADA CONDANCTION ENSEMBLE – Enterprising mass of cilia (Emanem)
Are we really sure everything’s already been said about conducted improvisation? After listening to the Condanction Ensemble I’m not looking for answers, because this music is so naturally good that one doesn’t feel any urge to give it a definition. Devoid of every obnoxious routine, Harada’s mature gathering encloses a large variety of timbral royalty, so that each and every moment carries a sense of significance, enhanced by an unsubdued randomization of fluctuating phrasing and peaceable mutability. Handpicking notes is carefully alternated with a well perceivable bodily offsetting; each one of the involved musicians is like a torch-bearer against the obscurity of stagnation. Masashi Harada is the perfect shaman through which the pure water of free music warbles, only to be channeled and transformed into wall-breaking force.
YORIYUKI HARADA / CHOI SUN BAE / ALFRED HARTH – Homura (Off Note)
Coming in a gorgeous edition whose cover is illustrated with pictures by Japanese painter Eitaro Takenaka (1906-1988), “Homura” is the memorization in digital format of a three-way meeting between pianist Yoriyuki Harada, trumpeter Choi Sun Bae and Alfred Harth, here doubling on tenor sax and clarinet. The album was recorded in March 2007 at Seoul’s Evans during Harada’s tour of Korea and fully justifies its name, as “Homura” means “flame” in the Japanese language; the musicians referred to several variations on this very notion in each piece (the titles’ meanings are explained in detail in the liners) while building the whole concept upon “the violence lurking in and filling our hearts”. If the music produced by the trio is a direct consequence of this kind of feeling, one can only hope to see these guys waiting for someone to kill; the playing is in fact vivaciously engrossing, stretching among schematic difficulties and angular approaches to evolve in scathing soloism of extremely high complexity and discernment. The most incontestable feature in this outing is the ability, typical of genuine virtuosos, of being able to raise hell after dipping toes in pseudo-tranquillity. The opener “Seika” begins with almost meditative recollections – sparse chords by Harada, long tones by Choi and Harth – then dramatically mounts to a splendidly articulated marasmus of dissonant uncontrollable urges morphing into an Art Zoydian march that dissolves into chaos in about fifteen seconds, then it’s back to an unstable calmness destroyed by a collective being envisioning a fractal graphic of the still-to-be-found Rosetta Stone of impossible improvisation. Hard hat area for new age lovers, indeed. More or less the same happens at the start of “Onibi”, a clarinet/piano duet, beginning with Harada in reflective pensiveness, his chords introducing a mutated revision of atmospheres that Debussy would have loved, had he lived 200 years. But when Harth enters the scene, the gear is repeatedly shifted, the music’s speed and intensity reaching nearly inhuman levels, the clarinet an indelible symbol of veritable destruction of ordinariness. How the Seoul-resident Frankfurter manages to shoot hundreds of ever-perfect pitches in such restricted temporal frames without sounding completely crazy is, to this day, one of life’s enigmas for your reviewer. What Mr.23 puts forth in “Noroshi” is beyond any chance of transcription (are you listening, Berklee-graduated bamboozlers?). In the subsequent “Uzumibi”, Choi’s heavily breathy harmonic wheezes and powerful releases of untainted energies characterize another devastating duo with Harada, whose style at times recalls the late Sergey Kuryokhin – check also the monstrous “Kitsunebi” for evidence. The title track, ending the program (too soon!) in stunning fashion, declares – with an official stamp – that free jazz is alive and kicking, Harth and Choi animatedly discussing and reciprocally launching venomous darts over Harada’s lucid fingering madness, symbolized by his mechanical banging and combinations of notes that no “legitimate” theory will ever accept as valid. “New silence” zealots could well decide to look for a place to hang themselves should they venture around these proximities. Me? Next time I’m going to increase the number of my morning press-ups before listening. This is fabulously tough stuff.
Post Scriptum: the set includes a DVD containing peculiar edits and superimposed images besides different live versions of “Homura”: “Shadow blue” for trio (identical line up of the CD), “Crimson” for solo piano (Harada) and “Purple” for small flute/percussion duo (Kim Ju Hong on jing, Kwark Jae Hyuk on piri). A nice document about three unique ways of kindling the flame, finely complementing an exceptional release.
MARINA HARDY – Pink violin (Eh?)
Marina Hardy plays just everything. The fact is, she plays everything well enough to compose lots of different pieces by overdubbing herself in several stylistic contexts. I’m not talking guitar noodling and workstation-fuelled plink-plonking; the girls is at home with instruments such as harp, trombone, drums, violin, all kinds of percussion, piano, banjo, I mean anything emitting sounds, Hardy’s able to more or less bend to some rule. That said, this CD appears like a collection of demos – some of them excellent, a few over average, a couple too naïve. Sometimes it’s nice to do so, because this cancels any excess of intellectual fat. What’s to be really liked, besides this conceptual freedom, is Hardy’s oscillation between total consonance (she even executes standards and folk tunes – the rendition of “Ain’t necessarily so” is great) and push-to-the-limit dissonant improvisation. The best level of technical proficiency is shown on the violin (the album title should tell); quirky tempos and scarcely predictable variations are also part of the scenery. The only thing that left me stunned was looking at the influences in her MySpace page and finding, although misspelled, two or three Italian nonentities in there, such as pathetic clones of Tom Waits and deceased third-rate popular singers. Marina must be good-hearted and have connections around these shores, I surmise. It only adds to the strangeness of this disc, whose most interesting parts let us hope for the best.
JOEL HARRISON – The wheel (Innova)
Countless musicians have tried to mix, more or less masterfully, the often conflicting worlds of notated scores and improvisation. Guitarist and composer Joel Harrison, resolute in extracting the juice of his many influences from this juxtaposition, used a real lot of ingredients in “The wheel” (subtitled “A five movement suite for double quartet and guitar”). The cross-pollination of jazz constituents and a classic string quartet, blended with elements of African and Appalachian music, a nod to Ellington and the awareness of a relatively recent past that includes Zappa, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report – all pretty much perceptible as inspirational supervisors at various phases in the CD – make sure that the task is performed almost impeccably. Harrison was able to compensate the different weights quite excellently, contrapuntal exhilaration framed by composed metres generated by enthusiastic participants whose slight uncertainties in the “ridiculously hard to play” third track “Rising” are nothing when compared with the class they show all the way through. This album is exquisitely gifted with the typical scent of the 70s, inventiveness still nourished by technical competence and, especially, enquiring minds. Numerous references but no effortless copying, which is an accomplishment in itself, and no excess of guitar solos (much appreciated, thanks). I thought about a couple of forgotten artists populating my assortment of mini nostalgias. Does someone remember Joel Dugrenot? Parts of the compositions somehow brought him back to mind. Ultimately, what can be told is that three spins in one day by your reviewer might justify curiosity towards this unfashionable yet charming release.
JONTY HARRISON – Environs (Empreintes DIGITALes)
In presence of records such as Jonty Harrison’s “Environs” one is tempted to leave the leaf totally bare, with the exception of a solitary word: listen. The English composer and director of Birmingham’s BEAST fully deserves to be put side by side with the Ferraris and the Parmegianis of the world, that’s for sure. Few recent acousmatic releases have succeeded in keeping my interest levels persistently high, a program length of circa 76 minutes notwithstanding. Yet it’s right there, on the long distance, that we’re in the condition of sizing up the diverse abilities of those who play in the electroacoustic ground. While most of them need to methodically slice, glue, juxtapose and reinvent their sonic clothes only to sound more or less musty at the end, Harrison focalizes his awareness on the purest elements of life, both from a biotic point of view and the perspective of personal experience. He constructs amazing pieces entirely based on aquatic constituents which, contrarily to many bathed-in-obviousness mélanges, appear psychologically overwhelming to the extent of making us literally feel like drowning (“Undertow”). Otherwise, he stitches together car engines and other means of transportation to engender a whole range of inner-city rhythms and patterns (“Internal combustion”). The last track “Afterthoughts” is built upon “sounds of a suburban garden in early summer”, yet it resembles an alarming sequence of snapshots of disheartening isolation, the human factor all but absent in favour of intimidating roars, sharp clangour and ominous crescendos of insurmountable metropolitan unease. The whole toughened by superlative skills in the assessment of timbral structure and a sense of architectural symmetry that not many names operating in this area can challenge.
ALFRED HARTH – Akupunktur in Gruen (Self Release)
Never try to find a kinship with something else when dealing with Alfred Harth’s music. This intriguing collection is a collage that spoons us up with continuous remissions of definitions, homemade low-budget sophistries, semi-accessible metaphores and unpredictable pot-pourris. Maimed drum’n'bass patterns hide intertwining lines of muted trumpet, sax and clarinet, the whole surrounded by environmental euphemisms where loops of ceremonial singing and male voices filtered by dictaphones mix with synthetic evacuations of the mind. A fixed pattern of “one-chord-plus-drum machine” can reveal a whole mainland of sampling hazardousness (you gotta love those short glissando brass…) while threatening growls from the urban underworld are morphed into distant echoes of just apparent contradictions. What’s to be appreciated more than anything else is the absolute lack of self-aggrandizement that this artist brings to the table; take it or leave it, these are a few of his many facets and this complex vision finds us wordless in a desert of interpretations. Harth illegitimates the remains of muzak’s grime by juxtaposing singing monks and commonplaces: hear for yourself the difference with what today is peddled as “spiritually evolved”. This music touches many points and connects them all with a single stroke, affecting our opinions about sound placement and teaching us how to affirm our independence from the imperial vulgarity we’ve grown subjected to.
ALFRED HARTH – Pollock (Orkestrion Schallfolien)
“Pollock” derives from a particular moment in Alfred Harth’s artistic life. Between the end of the 80s and the first half of the 90s, he was a semi-constant presence in Paris, trying to get engaged with the local avant scene (he also played with the Christian Vander Trio in an unpleasing occasion: he was in fact assaulted by a Magma fan on the stage, luckily without physical consequence). Although both Cassiber and Goebbels & Harth had been very well received in the past by the French audiences, 23 was finding some difficulty to penetrate a “fraternity” that seemed hermetically sealed, at least for certain kinds of musical personalities. He decided then to take it easy and dedicate himself to his own activities and personal life, which resulted in the “Sweet Paris” CD. Just before he left – we’re talking 1995 – Harth got in touch with several smarter local guys like Steve Arguilles and Noel Akchote and, above all, with Corin Curschellas, who introduced him to Frank Holger Rothkamm, a “fresh and brilliant remixer in NYC” at that time. Meanwhile a guy named Ben Oofana, a healer and great admirer of Harth’s work, had financed him with 2000 US dollars, which were reinvested in the creation of “Pollock”. The circle was finally closed. Harth, Rothkamm, Elliott Sharp and Tomas Peter Fey are the hands and brains that remodeled the music of nine then out of print LPs by the boss, transforming a remix project in something quite different. The thirteen tracks are indeed mysterious, spreading unquietly and frantically self-decomposing in completely different ways. Extremely musical beguiling loops are the main ingredient, especially during some charming, literally spell-binding sections (one of them is the splendid “Eatronic” which closes the CD) but there’s also a distinct resemblance to Muslimgauze’s music in a couple of pieces featuring Rothkamm, and a great mixture of schizoid jazz and disjointed minimalism in Fey & Harth’s “Stereodyn” (all track names are invented). Elsewhere, musique concrete and cyberpunk – yes, Elliott Sharp makes himself heard – go hand in hand with extreme ease, and there are instances in which slowed down voices actually sound like whale songs. In a way, “Pollock” created a genre, maybe more than one, preceding of many years less valuable imitations; yet it went practically forgotten in 1996, year of its release. In this case it’s not too late to remedy.
ALFRED HARTH – eShip sum (1000 CD)
Mother of pearl is very much loved by Alfred Harth, for several reasons. The inlays of the 23 keys in his saxophone, first of all; also, the traditional Corean artworks, attentively studied by our man. The first CD in his “mother of pearl” series, whose cover represents longevity, sun and moon through symbols made of the same material, “eShip sum” (2003) is also one of his most accomplished and beautiful records, being veiled with deep consciousness and permeated by a lingering sadness that no irony can overcome. Limited to 1000 signed copies (of which Mr.23 has still a few left – act now), it was composed in Harth’s own Laubhuette Studio in Seoul and represents his homage to Corea and “its virtues and beauties”. Besides the boss, who played about ten instruments and fine-tuned all the parts into cohesion, Choi Sun Bae’s cornet is featured in four tracks while Yi Soonjoo lends her voice and Joe Foster his cornet, one track each. The first pieces are so intensely profound that alone are worth of owning the record. “Sejongno Boulevard” is, as Harth describes it, the “Champs Elysees of Seoul”; its melancholy is elicited by recurring piano chords that, remaining undercurrent throughout the piece, define a sort of “jazz minimalism” upon which the reeds describe a crepuscular atmosphere with very sensual slow lines, multitracked in hypnotic fashion; a splendid opening. “Neoview Mine” is a thoughtful reflection for bass clarinet that after a few measures flows into a pastiche of sampladelia and circular repetition, yet maintaining the mood on the sombre side, while in “Der Feinheit Wesentliches” more sax superimpositions intertwine with a McCoy Tyner-like pianistic progression that halfway through the piece becomes a hiccuping loop upon which muted trumpet lines and vocal moans go hand in hand. Things move faster in “Celadon”, which is the name of the ancient Corean art of porcelain (whose fruits, according to the composer’s view, were mostly stolen during the Japanese occupation from 1906 to 1945) and above all in “De gloria Oliviae”, a peculiar cross-pollination of sequenced techno-dissonance and snippets of orchestral music, reminiscent of black-and-white movie soundtracks, that morphs into a gorgeous layering of strings, reeds and car horns blemished by studio-conceived interferences. “Godswing” sounds like a Coltrane cut-up in a muffled mix, swarmed by an army of voices and reversed tapes that ends in pure mayhem, while another milestone of the album is “Buy the way”, a slow “ballad” where a voice that I perceive as familiar (Chet Baker?) mumbles a few words before Harth tears our heart out with a sorrowful, if oblique recollection of unknown memories. “Shambhala” could inculcate a few notions of mentally disturbed ambient muzak to many dilettantes, being a fabulous voyage through the oneirism of our unconfessed radiophonic fantasies: from warm psychedelic illusions to fractured post-jazz rock in two minutes. “Leganza Daewoo Call Taxi” would make Glenn Miller proud at first, angry at last (picture a sci-fi variation on “Moonlight Serenade” bothered by alien videogames), and the conclusive “Nitya-mukta” is Alfred’s response to lounge music, in his hands becoming an obsessive nightmare, a never ending two-chord samba danced by a couple of drunkards at 4 in the morning. But the bar has already closed and the orchestra didn’t realize it. Fabulous stuff – give me this over Arto Lindsay anytime. How do you spell “delightful” in Corean?
ALFRED HARTH – Nu:clear re:actor (0 Back)
This double helping of intelligent chaos and refined cut’n'paste, a fundamental chapter in Alfred Harth’s “Mother Of Pearl” series, is essentially a computer music treasure trove containing an awful lot of messages camouflaged in its complex, often impregnable structure. In this case, the composer’s political statement is very clear, as the two discs are respectively an aural manifestation of his thoughts about the North Korean nuclear issue and a “sonic time-lapse/slow-motion of 911 twentyhundredone & its aftermath” (sic). By the way, the sum of 9, 11 and 2+0+0+1 totals 23 – not the first coincidence that parallels the protagonist’s life (and favourite number) with historical events. Even the record’s title comes handy for multi-reference purpose: Harth used indeed sounds of reactors among the various sources, but the double dots divide it into “New clear (re) actor” which is a hint to Kim Jong II, ruler of North Korea, notorious film fanatic and “one of the first guys (after the Cold War) before Iranians to re-act to US politics in a very astonishing self-conscious way”. Who else could have ever concealed such a wealth of information in two words? Harth reports that he also utilized “distorted shouts of Korean shamans, archaic sounds, voices, trumpets as well as the plateaux of clicks and cuts”. Especially in the second CD, the results of this preparation are breathtaking, eliciting a sense of acute, if conscious anxiousness. Additional contributors include Olivier Griem, Yi Soonjoo, Choi Sun Bae, Joe Foster, Phil Minton, Domestic Stories. With “Nu:clear re:actor” Harth confirms himself to be one of the most perceptive artists around, in constant search of definitions for something that looks evident on the surface but hides lots of obscure, often undesirable truths instead. Those who can’t decode his forebodings and consequent elucubrations will find this music difficult to penetrate, despite the presence of several elements that sound familiar. Speaking about the first disc, “Tat tvam asi (das bist du)” is built upon a deep vocal growl whose mystical nuances become pretty scary with the passage of time, while all around percussion and electronics create a series of drops and bumps that contribute to the painting of a desolated landscape of hopeless abandon, the whole surrounded by an electronic mantle that causes the receivers to remain stuck to their seat, uncapable of changing their mind about the next gesture or even the next thought to be made. The subsequent “Nodong” contains elements that border on the primitive, yet the studio treatment deforms those possibilities into utter distortion and outlandish degradation until our mind enters a real-time nightmare of the worst species. “Vestiges of Japanese imperialism” is a wonderful trip through premonitory whirlwinds and minimalist melodies of a remodelled song, constantly scarred by shortwave frequencies and definitively altered by what sounds like a dozen radios playing all at once. “Magic lantern” uses irregular drumming and shapeless utterances to build its momentum amidst interferences of any kind; one feels compelled to close the eyes and travel through uncommon psychic dimensions. “Stellen des Todes” features whispers that are impressively similar to the ones used in Frank Zappa’s “Are you hung up?”, opening track of “We’re only in it for the money”, and is terminated by some kind of looped mechanic seagull. The second disc – whose titles all begin with the letter “T” – immediately finds Phil Minton’s employment as a strangled shouter introducing amorphous rappers in “Trace”. “Tower” is a clamorous juxtaposition of explosions and various dramatic noises, probably the most detailed aural photograph that Harth could have taken to represent “the moment”; everything seems to dissolve and self-destroy in a growingly apprehensive audiodrama, an electronic low drone underlining the whole in selected moments of the piece. “Tat” gives hiss a rhythmic significance, the music based on an incessant propulsion highlighted by almost incomprehensible disturbance and omnipresent distorted voices. The superimposition of trumpets and menacing buzz in “Tinctur” is an important juncture in the totality of this record, demonstrating that we can never expect anything foreseeable from this outsider. Particularly fascinating to these ears is the use of “fake Hollywood” soundtrack snippets in this segment, a shot to the “many American cinematic models of the real destruction of the skyscrapers”. “Tube” mixes drum’n'bass and no-input counter-sociology to wake us up from the narcotic belief in a “better world”, while “Tang” is, purely and simply, a masterpiece that I’ll let yourself to discover and enjoy. I’d need another thousand words to better explain something that, more than a sheer “release”, is basically the detailed portrait of an artist’s awareness. This music punches hard and sharp, still retaining its ferocious drive and documentary power after years from its release (in 2003). “Nu:clear re:actor” is an unsung gem that needs to be heard, one of the very best efforts by Alfred Harth.
ALFRED HARTH – T_ERROR + kr ./. jp (Slowalk)
There is no doubt that Alfred Harth is a man whose sense of rebellion against injustice and overlooked historical occurrences is extremely developed, and his refusal to behave like an ignorant – shrugging shoulders, raising eyebrows, wearing smirk smiles and “who cares?” looks – resides inside his life’s principles. This DVD/CD set contains many examples of Harth’s unapologetic creativity, constituting one of the best openings for those who would like to try and sketch a path through his artistic career and human convictions. “Terror is error”, an apparently obvious statement, is not so evident when we think about our daily doses of fake news and false demons that governments and their media networks would like us to believe in. Harth’s stance about these facts is adamant, and no anti-war movement or Michael Moore movie will convince the knowledgeable ones that things can really change. All it takes to seduce these self-proclaimed dissidents is a bundle, and the involved forces in this struggle are clearly uneven.
The “T_ERROR” DVD is a nerve-twitching document in that sense. It is mostly built upon a continuos vortical superimposition of sources that belong both to Harth and his partner, visual artist Yi Soonjoo, seamed with historical films from the Second World War and various kinds of TV samples, complete with short clips of William S. Burroughs. To represent disinformation, Harth uses a technique called “walk through tools”: he photographs a video monitor, xeroxes the photo, records the xerox with a camcorder and so forth, thus alterating shapes and colours of the original object until it becomes another thing altogether. What television constantly perpetrates, Harth symbolizes through his pictorial work. Describing this video in detail would be foolish; one should go with the flow and remain nailed to the couch, iced by thousands of multidimensional frames, all the while listening to a fantastic soundtrack which melts the best and the worst of our daily listening: the composer’s polychrome visions and the bloodcurdling cries of an about-to-be-beheaded prisoner are nearer than you might think. As a bonus, there is also a short extract from a live performance by AH and Kim Hyung Tae at the Ssamzie Space in Seoul, “Provisional Government”; you can see the artists improvising over some of the images that became the basis of “T_ERROR”. Nice touch.
One of Alfred Harth’s main goals is bringing to a wider attention the cultural and material damages that Japan subjected Korea to between 1910 and 1945, and for which Koreans have never received sufficient repayment or excuses. In the notes, the principal raises five sharp questions dealing with this issue, his hope being that, sooner or later, Japan will act civilly and recognize their past (T)errors. The “kr ./. jp” CD is Harth’s way to represent this proposition; lasting less than 40 minutes, it is once again a sock in the eye of convention à la 23. “1st Question” is a classic attraction of opposites, in the form of a “hardship vs symphonic” melange born from Harth’s collation of orchestral samples and abrasive string instruments. “3rd Question” continues that war of attrition, this time in a more electroacoustic-oriented style, as strident acuteness (perilous for the ears, if you wear headphones!), repeated skips and interferent emissions are layered upon Harth’s sweeter wind tones and synthetic waves in a fascinating futuristic counterpoint that’s also one of the most minimal pieces ever conceived by the Frankfurter, although somehow connected with EAI’s more attended quarters. “5th Question” is quintessential Harth, an omnicomprehensive pastiche of radio samples, accelerated tapes and rhythm machines working at an infernal rate while warped orchestras and over-energized, fast-forwarded saxophones whose tone is a munchkin alien’s cry take our cerebrum into new dimensions of explosive hyperactivity, culminating in a snippet of the “Jaws” soundtrack that brings the whole to conclusion in an oceanic wash – or is that a white-noise cumulus? “Contury Cheiron MMV” (you have to love these titles…) is the final and longest track: Harth’s dangerously intelligent sax fantasies introduce a collage of oblong shortwaves, pulsating hiss and dismembered articulations over which all kinds of wind-instrument evolutions create a frighteningly dense texture; one can choose to follow a single pattern – the noise, the slow melodies, the fly-buzz nervousness, the marching band-like fragments – or just decide to be completely bubbled over by the majestic mayhem. Things get kinda calmer halfway through the piece; a tranquil piano enters the picture, a few reflective chords underlining simpler scenes, but it doesn’t last. In fact, a techno-scented sequenced pattern becomes the basis of robotical anarchy, where outlandish harmonies and dissonant acquaintances between different timbral families flow into a conscious sense of guilt (which is exclusively mine, though…) until cut’n'paste devastation is finally reached. Everything is disobedience, and Alfred’s never ending phrases get glued all over the place with convincing authority, forcing us to reconsider our position in the superficial chit-chats about matters that decide millions of people’s destiny. Pre-recorded bagpipes, jew’s harp and faraway melancholic sax lines seal another obscure genreless crystal. Total music? Yes it is.
ALFRED HARTH – Chic Ago (Laubhuette)
In Alfred Harth’s website – if you’re snoopy like I surmise – there’s a page that should tickle unpronounceable fantasies, a place full of CDRs documenting unofficially recorded adventures that quite often are even worthier than what’s already known (and believe me, it ain’t easy: this man’s archival material will turn many collectors crazy). This is a compilation that the protagonist prepared for his own pleasure, and could certainly act as a perfect introduction to the sonic universe of our favourite “Frank-S(e)oul-Further” (pun definitely intended).
The opening couple of pieces is the one that, curiously, sounds “older” in terms of recording quality despite being the newest, so to speak, in date. Captured at Chicago’s Empty Bottle in 1997, the trio of Harth, Kent Kessler and Hamid Drake are the nearest thing to pure jazz that we can find in this disc. The playing is instantly superb; in “Chic Ago” we see A23H blowing fuses pretty soon with typical lyrical fury and firing desperation, Kessler mixing swing, knottiness and consciousness, Drake utilizing drums like a painter stroking a canvas, placing “those” snare hits and “those” tom rolls exactly where not expected. A magmatic flow with serious purpose, a great start altogether. “At the Empty Bottle” exploits a calmer mood, yet the music remains intense to the level of pregnant self-containment, a gorgeous dialogue between clarinet and double bass highlighting the most beautiful section.
“Han Guk” – from the Frankfurt Jazzfestival 1995 – is a charming selection with David Murray, Fred Hopkins and Dougie Bowne, based on the common elements that Harth found in traditional Korean court music and jazz. It moves slowly upon repetitive bass figurations, the saxophones trading serene chants and bad intentions at the same time, the boiling drummer launching at times the piece towards the stratosphere in washes of pure bliss for the audience. The project was meant to be continued but, unfortunately, the death of Hopkins and a severe accident occurred to Bowne prevented this fine group to proceed to a future.
A quasi Coltranesque prologue is featured in “Ending peace”, played in 1993 by the QuasarQuartet (check the review of “POPendingEYE”, ladies and gentlemen). Simon Nabatov, Mark Dresser and Vladimir Tarasov join the Reed Man in a joint venture which, in the space of a few minutes, patchworks a deviated Tschaikovskij, free jazz and a hymn to the high spheres of sax-ism which, between you, me and the gatepost, works better for the lusty side of our ears than a dose of reductionism. You didn’t hear a word from this spy, though.
The duo of Mr.23 and Heinz Sauer, Parcours Bleu a Deux (more about that in the next instalments of the “Memories”) gains help from electronics and tapes in a kind of improvisational poetic that’s as theatrically concentrated as technically advanced, and might probably be appreciated by experts exclusively (time to shift mental gears, people). Excellent material it does remain, with unexpected vocal apparitions and ethereal dissonances as a morphing background to the sax pairing. Taped in Frankfurt in 1990, this is the most impenetrable segment of the whole set. A long shot from Charlie Parker indeed.
Did someone remember that Günter Müller was a drummer before devoting himself to present-day EAI? Listen to him remodelling the audience’s faces in this fabulous track at Willisau, 1987. Wanna know who else plays here? Get a seat: AH, Phil Minton, Sonny Sharrock, Andres Bosshard. They all go WAY out in various circumstances. Harth appears in need of an exorcism first, then recollects the shreds, finally deciding to cry his lungs skywards to impossible upper partials. Sharrock goes from involuntary serialism to the ghost version of “My Sharona” travelling through the outer spaces of overdriven dissonant plucking, just as Minton enters the scene with that bunch of strange guttural animals that he always carries in the belly. I would have loved being a microphone stand that night. Fantastic stuff – anything else in your cardboard boxes by this lineup, Alfred?
The record ends with “Honeymoon after 1st world marriage”. It’s a tranquil – yet not overly sweet – composition from 1984, with Charlie Mariano, Karl Berger, Peter Kowald, Trilok Gurtu and Barry Altschul. It was penned as a commemorative response to the participation to a “conference call improvisation”, where artists contributed with sounds and poems while in simultaneous communication (a relatively pioneer concept in that period). The name of that performance was “Marry the world by conference call”, so there you go. When an artist has such a wealth of ideas in the brain, they must exit one way or another. Come think of it, look at the names that played with A23H on this CDR only: enough for three “regular” careers elsewhere.
ALFRED HARTH – Ballet music (Laubhuette)
From 2002 to 2007, Alfred Harth collaborated with a dance company in Seoul, which gave him the opportunity to work on some of his most radical and difficult to assimilate music of the XXI century (well, at least for tenderfoots). When the principal shuts the door of Laubhuette studio, something outlandish is definitely going to come out from there, this CDR being no exception. The five tracks represent a validation of the unrestrained creativity of this man, should you have any residual doubts. “Mercury I” takes strength from asymmetrical glissandos and psychedelic-like organ chords that relentlessly grow, get modified and flourish in hundreds of different streaks over a rhythmic device that sounds like the cheap drum machine of the typical electric organ received as a Christmas present, the one which many people tried to learn to play stupid songs on, usually with next-to-desperation results. The piece is a hodgepodge of discordant designs and splintered electronica, causing a reasonable quantity of saturation and, ultimately, resulting as devastating for a regular intellect as an involuntary bad trip. “That person then” starts with synthetic washes and altered vocal mumbles amidst what’s liable to be processed water, then enters the realm of gloom through anxious deviations from the norm, uttered twists and daily life occurrences (…of whom?) as heard from within a sealed rubber suit. I won’t be surprised to know that a radio was the source for the preponderance of the things we catch a glimpse of, a feel of “air surfing” defining certain rather disconcerting segments. Right here one comes to terms with Harth’s rational use of the spiritual aspects of sound, concreteness and ceremonialism finding a common ground in upsetting mixtures of sonic pragmatism and thoroughly made-up timbral concurrences. “55 Quintets” was, in the composer’s words, a “kind of sketch” for the ballet music in question, but works quite fine as a stand-alone miscellany, corroborated by the illustrious presence of frequent collaborator Choi Sun Bae on trumpet and electronics. It’s a very long track, pregnant with events: TV scraps, voices from just everywhere, fabulous cut-ups of Bee Gees and other assorted absurdities, humans and instruments crying and squealing all over the place. Still, the basic pulsation of this piece is nourished by a simple pattern turning round and round, partially shrouded by a majestic hell generated by the couple’s myriads of abnormal suggestions. In a record whose axis – for once – is not AH’s saxophone, a lot of it is found exactly in this place, the intercourse with the uncontrollable anarchy of Choi’s blowing fury at times staggering, if more lo-fi than usual. “Direct jazz”, says the boss, is an etude. An etude? Forget the standard meaning of the term: this time, corroded beats, lamentations bathed in stretched reverbs, sloping sax lines and a variety of sequenced oddities will put your sense of “belonging somewhere” in serious trouble. The final “Gobi powder”, a soundtrack for an as yet unedited video, was inspired by the effects of the “…annual yellow dust in the air above Seoul around springtime, which originates from the Gobi desert and is full of Chinese petrochemicals”. Coherently, the result is an intoxicating blend of static interference, maybe a pinch of shortwave, and tampered tools which wouldn’t be out of context on labels such as Confront or Erstwhile. Only a further aspect of the inventiveness that this gentleman constantly fecundates to engender meaningful ideas, one way or another.
ALFRED 23 HARTH – Anything goes (Creative Works) – Plan Eden (Creative Works)
Those who think of constantly changing music as enervating should immediately turn their “attention” somewhere else, since these two albums, recorded by Harth halfway through the 80′s, a truly bad period for artistic intelligence (indeed, not very much has changed), present hundreds of different approaches and genders which, fused together, feel like a riptide of brain-zapping instantaneity. “Anything goes”, released in 1986, is Harth’s second production on this label after “Red art” (more about this one later) and also his first remix; its title refers both to the era in which the record came out and the works of Paul Feyerabend. The LP itself is purely and simply a sampladelia-cum-plunderphonic composition divided in two parts, “Beethoven, anything goes” and “Eris”. The saxophonist tried, in his own words, to “take three of the strongest music sources of those years, Goebbels, Oswald and Zorn, and make something stronger out of them”. By collaging fragments from these artists’ releases, Harth engineers a lucid pastiche of electroacoustic matter; the operation’s success is guaranteed by a perfect balance of fantasy and technical maturity, for the mix – in terms of volume, imaging and variety of ideas – is next to perfection. This is the deranged TV channel we all dream about: a CNN permutation, hybrid of horror movie and soap opera whose background music could include birds, regular singing, screaming children, nuclear fusion and the 20th Century Fox theme, but also spacey reverberations, a chainsaw-operating maniac and perpendicular TV themes. Whichever side you look at it, a great album. The titles of “Plan Eden”, out in 1987, refer to Doris Lessing, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Anton Wilson and Harth himself. It’s another “separated at birth” statement: the first side is Harth solo on the tenor sax, playing a series of short improvisations whose atmosphere changes like tropical weather: a serene reverb-drenched meditation one moment, a torrent of multiphonic schizophrenia a minute later, and the firm reminder that what we currently worship in the so-called “reductionist” movement had already been tackled by Mr.23 at least a decade earlier. The second side features a clutch of duets with Lindsay Cooper – on bassoon and sopranino, while Harth uses clarinets – and a furious one with John Zorn, plus a three-minute improvised “mini opera” with Phil Minton gurgling his tonsils out and a pre-iPod, pre-electronics Günter Müller on drums among the others. In this album, just like in “Anything goes”, the composer also took good care of the cover artwork; the LPs include inserts with Harth’s drawings, and the nostalgic collector who replaces my good self every once in a while is still moved by the carton’s smell of his treasured copies. Sniff….Aaaahhh….
ALFRED 23 HARTH – Sweet Paris (Free Flow Music)
Alfred Harth says that “Paris is a city where clichés are so much alive, and love and death are really close to each other; you can feel it intensely when you live there”. Thus it should not come as a surprise that “Sweet Paris” is quite a difficult listen at first: one needs to give it full dedication to be completely rewarded. We could define it a studio collage, or a long text-sound piece if you will, even if it’s divided into 14 different tracks. Among the basic foundations of the album are computer processed music, cassette recordings with short extracts of Harth’s various projects over the years (including his oldest recording, a pretty sad “dixie jazz-like” blues from 1965 aptly named “Melancholy blues”) and of course the record’s basic theme, namely the numerous letters that the composer received from his friend Wolf Pehlke, who portrayed a city in which he reportedly “was exploding” and sent his reflections to Harth (at that time moving backward and forward between Frankfurt and the French capital), who finally edited them into fragments of texts that Rebecca Pauli and Peter Bauer read throughout the CD. The importance of “Sweet Paris” resides in Harth’s desire to leave behind the bitterness deriving from the end of important personal and artistic relationships from the previous years and find new grounds to explore, both in art and architecture. Those who – like yours truly – aren’t familiar with the German language should approach the record without thinking too much about meanings and interpretations, concentrating instead on the voices’ timbral character and cadenzas amidst the urban recordings and segments of “regular” music that grace the disc. There’s a lot to be discovered in that sense: Peter Kowald, Paul Lovens, Steve Beresford, Ferdinand Richard, Christoph Anders are only a few of the grey eminences present here. In particular, the Gestalt Et Jive track is great: from free improvisation to pop riffing in two minutes, Harth soloing like a madman over an idiotic vamp at the end. There are also a couple of strange “soundtrack-like” instrumentals characterized by the preset sounds of Korg synthesizers, so warped that they sound great nevertheless, fake drums and all; one of them is the pensive “Sweet & bitter little death”, the album’s “end titles song”, with the boss engaged in a sensitive bass clarinet contemplation. But, forced to choose a favourite, I’d say “Crimée Rome”, an easy-going (but not too much) melodic cutie with a few angularities, played by LA Guardia (Lars Rudolph, Stephan Wittwer, Wietn Wito plus Mr.23) that reminds me of the times in which I run a program in a “democratic” Roman radio whose honchos were so open minded that I was thrown out – twice – after a few months of serious music (yes, I played this track too) and on-the-air uneasy truths. Sweet Freedom of Speech.
ALFRED 23 HARTH – Micro-saxo-phone (Laubhuette)
Unbelievably, “Micro-saxo-phone” is only the second solo album in this artist’s lengthy career. That’s right – the first was “Plan Eden”, and in that LP we could already find the germs of what Alfred Harth presents here, with particular reference to electronically-enhanced reeds. This CD’s title has to do with the Frankfurter’s renewed interest with microtones, a constant object of research and exploration in recent times. A sample of the advanced techniques utilized (which include playing parts of the machines with a violin bow, modifying the sound through a Kaoss Pad and applying contact microphones wherever an interesting nuance can be captured) was also present in “Test for Tokyo”, a track from the 2005 release “NUN”. Now A23H uses these sonic weapons pretty extensively, also in group settings – his command of noisy harmonics and altered drones with 7K Oaks, for example, adds a great deal of colours to that ensemble’s palette.
The instrumentation for this particular occasion comprises tenor and baritone saxophones, bass clarinet and all the above mentioned devices. This record should probably appeal to the ones who love having their hair combed by the most spurious frequencies and unclassifiable emissions that a reed instrument might produce, all the while remaining within the confines of EAI. Music that fans of labels like Creative Sources and L’Innomable and improvisers such as Birgit Ulher, Nate Wooley, Sabine Vogel, Alessandro Bosetti, should appreciate an awful lot. The labial & lingual factor remains the solid basis for the large part of the pieces, and even the clattering pressure on the keys finds a way to get utterly modified by a knowledgeable processing method. In addition, this meditative rebel doesn’t close windows to melody (contrarily to the tendencies of today’s “silent sainthood”), which he proceeds to dismantle whenever possible. The profoundly blowing man mineralizes minimal squeals and upper partials in perplexing fashion, following the action with relaxed thematic fragments subsequently catapulted in the higher galaxies of musical quick-sightedness, alimenting modern versions of sci-fi deliria with combustible gases ready to be put on fire during acrid instant compositions. Five of the eighteen tracks were recorded without editing or effects, but in that case too Mr. 23 manages to extract longitudinal exhalations and sudden swoops, the revivification of a timbre which had been fragmented in a thousand crumbles only a minute earlier. No question: this is not an easy listening affair, worthy as it is of reiterated visits. Then again, Alfred Harth compromising his artistic view – even just slightly – is among the various things in life that we must not think of suggesting. You don’t want to risk your tongue to be cut and fed to a Kaoss Pad, do you?
ALFRED 23 HARTH / QUASARQUARTET – POPendingEYE (Free Flow Music)
“I want more POPEYE”, writes Alfred Harth. “Possessing uncompromising moral standards and resorting to force when threatened”. He also refers to “my artist’s way through postmodernism”, which at the beginning of the 90s brought him to grow tired of “all those mixes, remixes, postmodernisms and pop” that he had gone through during the previous decade: he was ready to return to a “pure” approach, essentially based on real players and real instruments. Enter Russian drummer Vladimir Tarasov from the Ganelin Trio, a long-time admirer of Harth, met for the first time in 1992 when Mr.23 was invited by Moscow TV for a program about him; the next character after his portrait would be none other that Popeye the Sailor (hence the album’s title, a word game with the ironical “end” of the “pop phase” of Alfred’s career). Tarasov had imported all the early Harth albums in the USSR, contributing to make him a Michael Jackson-like star in the Northern area of the country; playing together became a necessary consequence. The QuasarQuartet, formed by the saxophonist in the same year, sees Harth on tenor sax and bass clarinet and Tarasov on drums and percussion, plus the fabulous pianist Simon Nabatov and the excellent Vitold Rek on bass. “POPendingEYE” features two half-hour tracks in which everything (Coltrane-derived ascensions, logical freedom, contaminations of marching band rhythms, folk melodies, pyrotechnical pianism, sadly pensive reed lines) obeys to a logic that’s inspired by Harth’s idea of “opening to the East”: in fact, besides this new musical situation, he met his current partner – South Korea’s visual artist Soonjoo Lee – right at that time (hers is Alfred’s photo gracing the digipak). Even the track titles, “1st2nd3rd&4th” and “BukzokWestWostokSude”, respectively refer to the world’s divisions (“…we know what the 3rd world is, but which would be the 1st?” says Harth) and to a mixture of Korean and English language to describe directions. And many directions this music points at, with a stimulating alternance of high-charge improvisations and melodic crystals that doesn’t remind us about the players’ originary lands, but it rather stands as a primary example of reciprocal instant comprehension: no language is a barrier when the instruments are the ones doing the talking. “POPendingEYE” – a meaningful record in the free music scene of the early 90s – has remained pretty obscure despite its quality; but it sure helped Alfred Harth to be “strong to the finish”, as the Sailor himself would have it. The fact is, his creativity shined then and it still does. What finish, then? And what’s your favourite brand of spinach, Alf?
ALFRED HARTH / KANG TAE HWAN – Achter Atem (Self Release)
“Seven breath”, an album by Korean saxophonist Kang Tae Hwan, is the only source for this remix work by Harth, who used exclusively sounds from Kang’s alto sax to conceive a kind of aural network which works at various levels of efficiency. Is this a soundtrack for a series of hallucinations? A new kind of ectoplasmic minimalism? For sure, the different plans upon which the German artist lays his perspectives of creative modification are an involuntary example of “static conceptual movement”, a paradox in definition but not far from what we concretely hear. Droning loops constitute a sort of parallel authority that hosts long melodic phrases spreading their wings in infinite reverberations, while snippets of gorgeous tone are ruminated and re-distributed within structures whose limits are only designed by our disposition in that very moment. The flanging echoes and unstable oscillations utilized by Harth for the large part of the tracks represent the immunity from boredom, colouring the music with a sense of impendence which is “Achter Atem”‘s strongest asset.
ALFRED HARTH / BOB DEGEN – Melchior (Biber)
Not even your reviewer was aware of this release until a few months ago, and it felt compulsory to investigate a little bit with its originator. What came out easily stands out among the hidden treasures in the huge A23H discography, a crusty jewel that someone should deliver from the status of extremely rare limited edition (on vinyl, no less) by retrieving the master tape and refurbishing it, up to the condition of a proper reissue.
Melchior is the main character in Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play “Spring Awakening”, once banned in Germany as it dealt with themes such as masturbation, abortion, rape and suicide, which in a sexually repressed society – thus the author considered the place where he lived – were not acceptable. In 1984, director Harald Clemen asked Alfred Harth for a collaboration in a restaging of the play at the Nationaltheater in Mannheim. The couple divided it in 22 short episodes around which our man built 23 (!) miniatures as a sort of intermissions, in order for the scenes to be changed. The aim in terms of musical concept was, in the composer’s words, “creating something that has to do with beauty and tenderness, and even dare to be romantic again after a period of rough student’s protests and open trials of developing free sexuality in Germany from the 60s on”. Impressed by Paul Bley’s prowess during a previous session, the Frankfurter called American pianist Bob Degen to help him in the work; every other instrument is played by Mr. 23.
It must be instantly clarified that this isn’t a typical album, in that it’s missing that element of “sitting back on laurels” that defines records where a theme, an idea, a suite are the centre of the vinyl universe. The fragmentation of this music causes a repeated sense of amazement for the surprising efficacy of simple constituents, immediately followed by a kind of frustration due to the too early conclusion of the same. One can’t get to enjoy the thrill of a fascinating melody, because the interruption comes – systematically – to cut to a new scene. Absurdly enough, it feels like this continuous motion is the record’s veritable winning card, the whole resulting as a charming patchwork where romanticism, experimentation, commentary, ritualism, sheer description of a movement seem to delimit a spiritual coherence of sorts. Another component that characterizes “Melchior” as scarcely classifiable is Harth and Degen’s apparent want of leaving everything in temporal suspension, in a way recalling different eras and habits in a series of past occurrences. There are memorable moments in which the instrumental voices tread parallel paths until their harmonic compatibility becomes a port for tired sailors, and one’s vaguely reminded of certain instalments in Lindsay Cooper’s career. There are also segments where we could openly talk about sweetness, Harth’s most lyrical brilliance under the spotlight both on tenor and soprano, Degen’s timbral clearness helping to describe picturesque vistas and sorrowful reflections. Striking as a sudden light in the obscurity, the immense evocative power of these brief pieces raises our awareness of diverse forms of grace, where the external appearance is totally forgotten in favour of pure meaningfulness. A highly significant yet rather obscure chapter that might force us to push for additional soundtrack work to be given to its originator.
ALFRED HARTH / JOSEPH FOSTER / CHOI SUN BAE – Alfred Harth, Joseph Foster & 5 more with Choi Sun Bae (Laubhuette)
Yet another succulent CDR from the Harthlands, this time an obscure, efficient, reductionist, anarchic one. These tracks – partially titled after words by Sufi Attah – were taped at the Laubhuette Studio in two sessions around the New Year’s Eve in December 2002 and January 2003. The historic situation was gloomy, as those were the days preceding the US attack to Iraq, a quite depressing mood for the couple of artists who had just shifted their lives to Seoul. Harth and Foster (hailing from Portland, Oregon) were pretty thrilled and enthusiastic of the latest living environment. In that period, they spent a lot of hours at Harth’s, playing “for our joy and relief” (as reported by the Frankfurter) and also started collaborating live: for example, at Bulgasari, a series of avant-garde concerts held in the South Korean metropolis, or at the Juksan International Arts Festival. In the latter circumstance, the saxophonist invited Korean trumpeter Bae (the pair had met earlier in 2002 and already recorded together) and, after a while, the communion of the three personalities came more or less natural (not surprisingly, Foster and Bae ended lending their skill in Harth’s “Mother Of Pearl” CDs). In his description, AH talks about a measure of “sorrow” when referring to some of this music, which is a little surprising when I first tried to approach the disc. The duo pieces are in fact mostly built upon the purest type of subdued improvisation, so much that an engaging method of approaching it was enjoying the record amidst the external noises (in a torrid summer day at 2:30 PM – all people gone to the seaside – consisting almost exclusively of cicada-fuelled mantras). With brilliant results indeed: given that no instrument is specified, the sense of freedom and amusement that liberated music should always warrant is quite omnipresent, in an ideal correlation with profuse silence – or something in between. Whistles, screeching harmonics, hissing and blowing, manipulation of small items near the microphones, jingling metals, power-driven appliances, snooping counterpoints among apparently out-of-tune instruments, bubbling liquids, drum skins, guttural emissions. Everything belongs to the exact moment in which the sound is produced, without a slim chance of defining an aesthetic commandment. In actuality, there is none: either we accept the unequal occurrences, or it’s back to the customary way of listening. Which translates into “passiveness”. That’s right, this stuff develops the capacity of the mind to finish what the players throw in the air; if that outlandish substance is heard as “noise” or “sound” depends on us. Both methods work, in any case. The five segments with Bae obviously add a quantity of “free jazz aroma” to the blend, minus the strain on the performance’s humanity. In essence, we never detect the illogicality that may launch artists towards the faraway galaxies of artistic implication but, on the other hand, often exposes a loss of focus on the basic model. The musicians let the soul be undressed, the utter absence of academic connotations revealing the material as it’s generated. Harbingers of an instrumental paucity which, once again, will be completed by the sensitive listener – or by praying insects, for that matter.
HANNA HARTMAN – Longitude/Cratere (Komplott)
Consisting of splendid field recordings on sailing boats plus prepared guitar and horn (by Annette Krebs and Robert G.Patterson respectively), “Longitude 013°26′E” is an evocative, intriguing acousmatic piece by Hanna Hartman, who has received various awards in recent years while also working on sound installations. The timbre of wood and water is almost undistinguishable from the body parts of Krebs’ guitar, which participates unassumingly yet very effectively in the deployment of a series of scenes where the concrete sounds sustain the composition through their own beguiling charm and intrinsic force. Even more impressive, almost spectacular in the hovering majesty of its audio impact, is “Cratere” which takes its name from the source used by Hartman, who recorded various rumbles, emissions and utterances of the volcano Etna in Sicily mixing its breathtakingly mysterious temper with additional environmental material; David Balzer and Reinhold Friedl are featured on “Neobechstein”. Both tracks are a confirmation of this composer’s penchant for emotionally involving aural documentaries, to which she adds her strong personality.
HANNA HARTMAN – Ailanthus (Komplott)
Swedish electroacoustic composer Hanna Hartman gifts us with four new pieces in a CD that is as short in duration – just over 28 minutes – as full of intriguing sonic successions. For the large part of the music, silence is an important factor as it’s from those long pauses that the events take form and invade the listening field with their raw power, furnishing Hartman’s creations with a distinct trait of personality. Most of these occurrences derive from natural or biotic sources like in “Wespen Vesper”, vocal snippets and insects rhythmically interspersed over a foundation of long-distance forestal ambiences, whales and prayers. A little more explosive is “Plåtmås”, where sudden outburst and clamorous eruptions are decorated with fragments of a seagull’s shriek. Contrarily to what happens in the work of many sound artists active in the acousmatic area, who seem to privilege treatment as opposed to the inherent value of a recorded sound, Hartman is genuinely interested in the “voice of everyday”, often mixing sacred and profane, ethereal and mundane (the chickens in “Musik För Dansstycket Jag Glömmer Bort” are just delightful), always giving her ideas the necessary time to grow into something that is more the picture of concrete phenomena than a sheer documentation of a studio process.
PAUL HARTSAW / KRISTIAN ASPELIN / DAMON SMITH / JEROME BRYERTON – Ausfegen (Balance Point Acoustics)
This collection of difficult-to-fathom improvisations is subtitled “Dedicated to Joseph Beuys” for a reason. Nearing the end of this session, bassist Damon Smith recalled a performance that Beuys made in 1972 in Karl-Marx-Platz, Berlin, consisting in sweeping the square and depositing the materials in a vitrine, a recording of the sonic content of the action reproduced through a nearby speaker. As a homage to this artistic gesture, the last recorded track “Broom with red bristles” finds Smith playing (standing, with two bows) two prepared double basses lying on their backs, guitarist Aspelin approaching his instrument with a shop broom in the meantime. The whole CD features the same kind of introvert interplay and five listens haven’t been sufficient for me to sketch something akin to a vague idea of the non-idiom around which these carvers move. Besides Smith and Aspelin’s tools, also soprano and tenor sax (Hartsaw) and percussion (Bryerton) are featured, the latter players coming from Chicago while the previously mentioned ones hail from the Bay Area. The artists’ curricula include a who’s who of the major improvisers from various decades of free expression, such as Kyle Bruckmann, Joe Morris, Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Cecil Taylor, Peter Brötzmann to name just a few; moreover, the bassist has collaborated with film director Werner Herzog and the Merce Cunningham dance company (talk about polyhedral visual angles). Does this give you the necessary clues to understand what we’re referring to? Nope of course. These elements will help, though: scraping virtuosity, instrumental photodisintegration, four-dimensional anarchy, systematic refusal of snugness. Figures are revealed for a handful of seconds, then they disappear into themselves like timid creatures whose back is full of spikes. Phrases are repeated then dismembered in dirty crystals of speculation, significance outweighing handy-dandy guessing games in a counter-textualism worthy of this caliber of instrumentalists. Still no definition, and it will probably remain so – another excuse for returning. A substantial work under any point of view, deserving hours of dedicated concentration only to scratch its surface.
GARY HASSAY / ELLEN CHRISTI – Tribute to paradise (Drimala)
Most improvisations are intrinsically doomed to vanish, but what was created by Christi and Hassay in this session goes much further than the short distance of a vague reminiscence. This music can scream or sigh, most of all it pants while holding for dear life; Gary takes his alto sax away from a meditative line and puts it around a chain of melodic oddities, all the way through spinning phrases hovering like a bee intoxicated by the barbecue fumes of a garden party. Ellen has a commanding vocal authority that makes her able to choose the right path in every context; you get free-style stutterings, (Meredith) Monkish hommages and in general a display of genuine virtuosity going after new dialects rather than post-bebop littlenesses. Pursing their lips, staring each other, armed with a deep-rooted love for what they do, this couple conceived one of the best duets you can hope for, the greatness of which – if what I just wrote is not enough – is demonstrated by the three all-vocal beauties they dedicated to mouthpiece craftsman Jon Van Wie, really thrilling stuff in an already considerable album.
HAT MELTER – Unknown album (Crouton)
Hat Melter is a strangely conceived quartet: Jeff Klatt and Matt Turner, Jon Mueller and Steve Hess – two celloists and two percussionists. Their music is pretty strange, too: a mixture of improvised settings, looping segments, long moments of almost complete silence, contrary motions, sudden awakenings and abandon of any conventional way of playing. The final result is a record where the single timbral voices are almost forgotten, put apart in favor of a comprehensive “total design”. Graced with intelligence and a pretty developed sense of humor, “Unknown album” doesn’t fail to create interest and it’s meant to open new listening paths even to the usual guests of new music parties.
FRITZ HAUSER – Deep time (Deep Listening)
“Deep time” is a composition for tape and improvising musicians (Pauline Oliveros, David Gamper, Urs Leimgruber, Fritz Hauser) based on percussive and tuned sounds of resonant stones and various clocks, upon which the four artists build a variegated wall of indetermination; this set contains two versions of the piece, both 32 minutes long and (strangely) divided onto two separate discs. The music’s complexion is rather dark, percussion mostly tracing a sombre ambience acting as a malleable springboard for Leimgruber’s saxophones and Oliveros’ modified accordion, caressing the taped material with accurate sensitiveness and almost monastical tactility; the whole is slightly deformed by Gamper’s electronics transforming most sounds into ectoplasmic entities which take Hauser by the hand, leading the group towards perceptible disfigurements of compositional logicality. The outcome links many different contemporary realities but sounds extremely individual as far as the timbral/textural aspects are concerned.
FRANZ HAUTZINGER – Gomberg II “Profile” (Loewenhertz)
Austrian trumpeter Franz Hautzinger published “Gomberg” on Grob in 2000; this, after seven years of waiting, is the second chapter. The only featured instrument is quartertone trumpet, superimposed and processed; on the contrary, the live performance of this piece, premiered at the “Contrasts 07 – Strange Music” festival in Krems, was presented by an ensemble of real wind players. Sticking to the recorded version under examination here, we’re in front of an instantly captivating work whose main influence seems to reside in historic minimalism – Steve Reich on top – as Hautzinger’s repetitive figurations and harmonic constancy manage to elicit in the listeners that virtual perception of imaginary lines, and even voices, that a massive superimposition of akin timbres and geometric patterns generate. The different tracks build their momentum on this incessant flow of contrapuntal stability, just slightly perturbed by thematic embryos (“Tara”) or vaguely reminiscent of more esoteric settings, Jon Hassell-style (“S.Gone”, “Fahne”). The composer succeeds because, right where one would expect some sort of orchestral representation of “EAI absence”, he strikes instead with a bodily sonic phenomenon welcomed by the ears as a battalion liberating the music from a sense of restraint that, in such an occasion, is not necessary. The bomber-like rumble of the amassed trumpets in “Loha” recalls indeed an attack from the sky, and the conclusive, Niblockian “Pitch” is yet another outstanding moment of intrigue in a very solid outing.
FRANZ HAUTZINGER / MAZEN KERBAJ – Abu Tarek (Creative Sources)
The extraction of specific languages from conventional instruments – in this case a pair of trumpets – comes pretty comfortably to Hautzinger and Kerbaj, whose two-edged duo offers a series of sockets where we can plug to recharge the spent batteries of the “been there, done that” mechanism alimenting certain improvisations. Franz and Mazen are pushed by a delightful crosswind, directing their music towards the open waters of implausible remodeling of common sense; among telluric lingual utterances and labial contortions eliciting animal chatter in a rust-eaten power station, the couple puts the finishing touches to a fresco made of prickly suggestions and sultry currents. Throughout this well-mannered series of nitty-gritty duets, these artists managed to spoon-feed our curiosity for new timbral explorations without losing their grip on an almost schematic precision that’s this record’s best quality, especially considering that it was recorded as played, with no cuts or overdubs.
EMILY HAY – Like minds (pfMENTUM)
Hard-working Emily Hay – musician, paralegal, promoter, radio host and heaven knows what else – put together a flamboyant representation of her multiple artistic personality in this articulated and highly enjoyable album, which was completely improvised with practically no overdubbing. Flanked by some of the hottest heads active in the West Coast avantgarde movement (Brad Dutz, Wayne Peet, Rich West, Steuart Liebig, Michael Intriere to name just a few) Emily plays and sings with unstained earnestness through a group of pieces so well accomplished that they made me believe they were charted. Hay’s flute excavates in pluralities of escapes from the obvious, without giving up to the silliness of impulsive gesture per se; her vocal personas, not too distant from the poetic of a Shelley Hirsch, contain sparkles of a fragmented bright look, mere illusions of unrestricted behaviour amidst a severe-looking emptiness of content that this artist tried to fight on her own terms. Needless to say, she won.
EMILY HAY / BRAD DUTZ / WAYNE PEET – Emily Hay / Brad Dutz / Wayne Peet (pfMENTUM)
With backgrounds as diverse as the ones characterizing these artists, we were almost forced to expect music at a high level. This gathering of “intuitive improvs and smokin’ grooves”, as the press release has it, contains all the necessary ingredients. Hay is featured on flute, alto flute and vocals; Dutz plays all sorts of percussion, while Peet works with organ, piano and theremin. The trio show their considerable percentage of virtuosism through a mature and ever-focused interplay, perfectly explicated by tracks like “Filthy washer”, where a mysterious shady aura is depicted by a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t courting among the instruments that, in its own special way, hints to a score for chamber ensemble. “It can be thick” is a riff-ish, Hammond-based piece over which Emily Hay smokes the ashes of Ian Anderson and spreads their remnants to open sea in a high-voltage flute solo, while “Amnesia dealer” is an East-tinged meditation mirroring itself in the faint lights of a gorgeous aurora. Hay’s voice is often as strong as her main instrument as far as fantasy is concerned; she’s also found playing extremely melodic lines that one would rather link to progressive rock. When she’s sustained by Peet’s extracorporeal piano juggling and Dutz’s more than elastic rhythmic concepts, right then and there the music reaches the perfect balance between expected and unexpected, moving effortlessly from a genre to another without really landing anywhere. A definite example is “Coming!”, a track in which sparse organ chords and subtle percussive work call for Hay to bring out all her vocal nuances, in a thorough demonstration of musicianship which is truly something to admire. After listening to this stuff, we’re left none the wiser about a cathegory label to stick on the CD, which is open to everyone willing to forget about the commonplaces of improvisation.
JIM HAYNES – Telegraphy by the sea (The Helen Scarsdale Agency)
It took several years for Jim Haynes to fully develop this gathering of “mangled field recordings and droning techniques perched at the allegorical intersection of electromagnetic landscapes and meteorological phenomena”. The final outcome is a long haunting piece whose effect is often stunning. The first 20 minutes comprise a background urban activity that quite rapidly mounts to a distressing cataleptic mayhem, a distant guerilla heard from a hilltop with hands covering the ears in terror. Then the sonic mass becomes a meagre, bewitching loop that, in its frequency blur, is associable to some of Richard Chartier’s work but with a little more underground organic activity. The comparisons with William Basinski and Hafler Trio read in the press release are nowhere to be found as far as I can hear. Just before the halfway point, an imageless suffocated clangour shifts the focus on an illuminated schizophrenia, with sudden alterations of the mix creating a sense of harrowing instability, like a badly tuned radio transmitting alien bulletins. Inescapably, these modifications gain a repercussive energy on the whole, forcing us to disregard the pain and be wide-eyed testimonies of the quick decomposition of a ruthless entity. Blistering distortions introduce us to the final section, where a kind of metastatic quietness shrouds our uneasy feeling in a splendidly suggestive recollection of previous existences. It’s the worthy closure of a well devised, enthralling record.
GREG HEADLEY – A bulletin on vertigo (28 Angles)
Although the rough material comes from electric guitar, there’s not a single moment of “A bulletin on vertigo” where you can detect it. Greg Headley, from L.A., works with his computers mixing, mangling and reshaping forms until he comes out with a “post-space, post-laptop” kind of sound science which has lots of interesting features and a well definite character. I didn’t get a real emotional response by listening to this material, but – as the minutes flow away – the music acquires a sense of imminence, finally arriving to compare itself with the best of nowadays’ electro/computer releases. Headley’s sound is occlusive: it starts from hidden cells, slowly coming to the surface through hell-bent force, finally librating in the daylight in its own full meaning. Nothing more can be seen backing up these pieces, which sound really peculiar, looking at you stone-faced.
GREG HEADLEY – It can leave, it must leave (28 Angles)
While I’m listening, the sun is setting and a strange light irradiates the surroundings. It’s a perfect context for a music full of melancholy and shadowy atmospheres, even if it springs out of a computer treatment of guitar sounds. Greg Headley’s self-contained mimesis is similar to watching a multiform rock while it sinks in the waters of a limpid sea: initially you can still see its contour, then everything gets blurred and opaque until it’s swallowed by the blue. Accordingly, guitar chords get multiplied, fragmented, looped and transformed into minimal particles; halos of consonant harmonics suddenly disappear in favour of ferruginous resonances keeping a detached poise. Quite often the vibrations protract their stay, contributing to an unconformable strange quietness before a storm that won’t come anyway.
GREG HEADLEY – The Operation of the Heavens (28 Angles)
The new album by Greg Headley comes in a 50-copy limited edition containing the CDR and an accompanying illustrated booklet, which is complementary to the music. The seven movements comprised by “The operations of the Heavens” sound like an indivisible unit and there is actually no sense in appreciating them singularly. Headley used sections of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” – together with his own ideas – to lead an engrossing trip fueled by “the base elements of Holst’s music” that “were reconfigured to bring about new sounds”. The composer refers to ancient alchemic models to describe his intention of transforming the original parts into a wholly new matter, which constitutes the fascinating substratum we can perceive all over. This is an intelligent hybrid of classical, space and ambient music, causing a “slow response” syndrome when we thoroughly abandon ourselves to its caress. On the other hand, I was reminded of some of Biosphere’s emotional atmospheres, as the long shadows of Headley’s creations wrapped the silence in my room while starting a process of gradual mutation that annihilated every residual nervousness. If you’re after serious transfigurations of classical music without excessive agonies look no further, as this is a finely conceived, accomplished release.
GREG HEADLEY – There comes a violent love (28 Angles)
“There comes a violent love” is a strange yet intriguing four-part suite that was influenced both by Greek playwright Aeschylus and the author of “Histoire d’O”, Pauline Reage. Headley does not think of it as a “soundtrack for their work, but the structure of the music found shape in their writing”. A simple fragment of piano melody introduces a heavy drone, then sounds of rain, wind chimes and additional melodic particles are heard from a distance. Amidst silences, metallic frictions, scribbling sounds and keyboard stabs break up the stasis, after which layered organ notes create distortion, dissonance and flanged beatings of adjacent frequencies. More concrete sources appear, and echoes from the past are depicted through locked loops and TV evocations; even the most apparently “romantic” moments contain the seeds of unquietness. The third part, which the composer defines as the “signature” movement, presents a consecutiveness of organ strokes over which semi-improvised flute pitches and piano chords (by Toshi Osawa and Yvette Caldwell) leave us in a state of detached, if a little apprehensive contemplation; the resonance elicited by the organ is at times extremely powerful. The mini suite ends with a synthetic theme that leaves puzzled enough, then the sound of the ocean stamps the final signature. “Pulse”, which completes the release, is a long two-chord study for a pair of real-time synthesizers, definitely consonant and vaguely hypnotic, slightly rippled by metallic intromissions and “outer space” waves; not exactly groundbreaking, but delicate enough, it balances the more fragmentary character of the title track, and it’s dedicated to the pioneering artist Marina Abramovic, herself an explorer of repetition and duration. The CD is a limited edition of 50 copies.
TIM HECKER – Norberg, Sweden (Room40)
Listening to a live recording in this genre – described as “focusing on exploring the intersection of noise, dissonance and melody” by the press release – is pretty uncommon, but this 20-minute disc by Canadian Hecker is exactly that, the title referring of course to the performance site. The whole piece is encrusted with digital dirtiness, the deteriorated equalization making it sound like heard from within a vehicle in a car wash, pseudo-watery discharges and ripping strokes of unescapable arctic wind slapping the basic content all over the place. Speaking of which, the different harmonic contexts “ruined” by the Hecker treatment might be associated, at various times, to a scarred mélange of simplified Fennesz with an initial nod to Reich and just a pinch of Basinski. Ben Frost moved around analogous coordinates recently, too. In general, this would seem to amount to a destructive look at a hypothetical old snapshot album (which seems to have become a little bit of a trademark in these kinds of scarred sonic presentations). To be filed in a rather jammed archive of similar albums, among the artifacts classified as “interesting”. I suggest headphones, as a wealth of disguised details will be brought forth and better appreciated.
HEDREN – Sun to snow (Evelyn)
This is a concrete/laptop music project by Graham Williams, completely based upon animal sounds subjected to computerized manipulation. Though I’ve listened to many works where birds, cats and sheep are protagonists, Hedren gets a good mark because he maintains things quite simple, even when timbral distortion gets crunchy beyond recognizability. By using repeats, morphing and washes of noise, Williams throws an useful bridge linking a rough country life environment to a less than joyous suburban ambience where the main purpose is making it through the day without hoping too much for the future.
CHRISTOPH HEEMANN – Time is the simplest thing (Three Poplars)
Solo releases by Heemann are getting scarce these days, so I instantly got hold of this very short (28 minutes) ultra-limited edition. Christoph moves around his signature artistic coordinates: starting from silence, a trembling low frequency slowly rises, sometimes in company of metallic spasms and noises not distant from the ones I remember hearing far away when in my youth I passed my summers near a marble-cutting facility. In these sections, Heemann’s work could be associated to several Organum recordings. Then, everything comes up and starts shaking my conscience, to return to complete silence in the end. Too short indeed, but extremely significant, as always expected by this man.
CHRIS HEENAN / MICHAEL VORFELD – Half cloud, half plain (Esquilo)
The five tracks of “Half cloud, half plain” show different facets of the interaction and responsiveness between Heenan and Vorfeld. This music doesn’t ingratiate itself with listeners, constructed as it is upon piliferous activity zones highlighting the musicians’ confidence and reciprocal trust; each sound seems to respond to a previous signal, thrown as a seed which gets carefully cultivated and grown. Abundant ideas bounce in between conscious silences, sonic shards and contrapuntal illusions first disappearing then coming back in totally new configurations after a few doubtful questions. Essentially circumstantial, never furious, these improvisations are not really an unknown species to this writer; yet it’s the oblique light in which they’re developed that acts as a catalyzer for my own aural gratification. Heenan’s contrabass clarinet’s range does not allow theatrical gestures, it’s rather a low-frequency generator whose puzzling mixture of spuriousness and harmonic-drenched undercurrents maintains a fascinating grip on our focus throughout the album; in certain sections of the title track, the link between its fibrotic timbre and Vorfeld’s rumbling background generates intriguing uncertainties and chiaroscuro perspectives. At the end of the day, “Half cloud, half plain” is a no-compromise conversation between two sound explorers who aren’t averse to see what happens when factors like “style”, “pattern” or “tone” are left behind in favour of inventive playing, through which they delve into extremely serious music.
GERRY HEMINGWAY QUARTET – Devils Paradise (Clean Feed)
What a class. This quartet, led by the always excellent drummer Gerry Hemingway and completed by sax player Ellery Eskelin, trombonist Ray Anderson and bassist Mark Dresser, shows competency and savoir faire throughout this masterful recording. Music that has a jump start over most jazz records issued today; compositions that brings power, energy and thematic brilliance at the same intensity level, drawing the shortest line between two or more points and maintaining concision and concentration even during blowouts and free improvisations. No one stays in the background but there’s absolutely no hint of protagonism; all four parts here are leaders in their own game and the resulting sum is one of those rare records you instantly recognize as a classic, an important release for the ones who really want to see beyond the point of their nose, just once in a while.
GERRY HEMINGWAY QUARTET – The Whimbler (Clean Feed)
Far from the abstruse non-forms of hermetic “freedoms” where regulations overexceed escapes, this music dictates its own contemporary style at a brisk pace, developing formal observations while accurately delivering bruising statements in a perfect balance of propulsion and lyricism. Thematic sketches are austere but full of driving force, leading the quartet into the realms of masterful abandon; the Hemingway/Mark Helias rhythm section is something to listen to and learn from continuously, their interplay seducing to say the least, their solo ventures intelligently eloquent. Herb Robertson’s trumpet is the key to a multi-dimensional series of compelling phraseologies whose exquisite inspiration feeds the need of freshness; the tenor sax of Ellery Eskelin operates in the subdivisions of visceral convulsions and almost religious serenities throughout the disc. Classy stuff all over again in a top release for this Portuguese label, one of the few maintaining jazz at the level it always should be.
HERPES O DELUXE – Kielholen (Hinterzimmer)
Hailing from Bern, Switzerland, Herpes O Deluxe work with analog electronics, tape loops, old turntables and self-built instruments to raise some serious hell, well symbolized by the many “terrible” sounds featured in this attention-calling release. Progressions of slurred fantasies reach apexes of epic proportion, while deformations of uncatchable memories are left under the rain in stinky alleys. During an eternal symphony for the disapperance of hope, all of a sudden tapes accelerate trying to escape an inevitable deoxidation process, the music reminding us of a forgotten past swallowed by a mangling machine, then an aeroplane is heard taking off from within a desolate church. Electronic ingrowths overwhelm the voices of unsatisfied women who are heading straight to the nearest mental health center; one feels like shouting in despair. Seagulls cry while flying over a polluted river, forgetting their destination and concluding their trip in a furnace’s chimney, accompanied by an amoebic version of Philip Glass. In another track, Donald Duck gets massacred with a chainsaw. In “6″, a caressing frequency seems to appear as an error, but it is soon covered with the dirt generated by deconstructed mechanical bats. The disc’s final part reminds of the glorious times of Cold Meat Industry (Morthound, are you still there?). A great, great album that positively surprised even this old curmudgeon.
JOHN HEWARD TRIO – Let them pass (Drimala)
If music is an indicator of freedom, then the trio of John Heward (drums), Joe Giardullo (sax, clarinet, flute) and Mike Bisio (bass) should be used to point the right direction where so-called “freeform music” (or free jazz, for that matter) should go. If you think of improvisation as an often unclear, incomprehensible series of intersected soliloquies, listen to the sixth track of this CD: while Bisio raises distant rememberings with his caressing tone, Heward and Giardullo whisper to each other like if wanting to describe what the beauty of life and the sorrow of memories are about. Don’t think this is a soft record, though; when the boys decide to get rapacious there’s no turning back, their instruments conjuring up raging statements and quicksand-like dangerous allure. In the era of ignorance and utter disengagement from anything having a significance, these holdovers still want to keep a flickering flame of sincerity well alive and burning.
KURT E. HEYL AND BEN WRIGHT – Gross motor music (GMM)
Heyl plays soprano and tenor trombones, while Wright is an acoustic bassist. They emphasize microtonality, “because that’s the music we hear in our heads”, writes Kurt in the liner notes. Inspired by a wealth of contemporary composers and improvisers (they quote Xenakis, Berio, Stockhausen, Rose, Minton, Butcher among the others) the duo presents twelve improvisations sounding as pure as you can find; natural machinations and plucky assertions find their way in an effervescent compound where Heyl’s phrasing depicts the emergence of new necessities for alternative ways of expressing the core of his mind, also with the help of vocal utterances and strange phonemes; on his way, Wright privileges rather oblique speech patterns but he, too, is ready to explode in belligerent flare-ups and scorching arco dissonances to complement his partner’s agitation in the best possible fashion. Even if quite long at 72+ minutes, the album never skips a beat of interest, adding one lively element after another in an almost ferocious will to find an unequalled sound – which, sure enough, is right there.
SHELLEY HIRSCH / UCHIHASHI KAZUHISA – Duets (Innocent)
One of the best pairing of personalities that one could imagine, Hirsch and Kazuhisa show all their magnificent talent in a flawless live recording. The American vocalist is her usual self, her interpretation ranging from one genre to another with a fantasy and an intelligence that are rare to see nowadays; her technical ability is well known, so is the sense of humour that she always puts in front of us, a trademark for which Shelley is recognizable at the first note she hits. Uchihashi Kazuhisa complements her in stunningly perfect fashion, accompanying and counterpointing through a fresh sense of technical abandon that never cancels the simple beauty of the “gesture of playing”. His use of delays and effects to reach different timbral zones is a perfect balance to Shelley’s crazy yet lucid evolutions. And when they try to subvert “In a sentimental mood” with their cross between anarchy and loving homage, well – I think that the circle is closed. This is a masterpiece.
HL – A449/19 (Work in progress) (No Ground-R)
Almost all the sounds used for this interesting 3-inch CD were recorded by Dan Hopkins on the road between Newport and Monmouth (South Wales), hence the title. The A449/19, explains Hopkins, is a 19-mile no u-turn road; its sense of predefined destiny – no chance of returning once entered – hovers all around the composition, mostly built upon engine loops in their low-frequency detachment, related environmental effects and what I believe is an organ (or a synth) which, about halfway from the beginning, gently sustains the pleasant regularity of the other noises, just for a little while. It’s an excellent work, whose crafty assemblage and emotional content are both the indication of a thorough groundwork.
HL – Takuma / Fields that speak (No Ground-R)
Dan Hopkins returns with a couple of 3-inch discs (a CD and a DVD). “Takuma” is dedicated to Japanese Formula One driver Takuma Sato, sort of eternal loser. The four tracks are mostly based on skips, extraneous noise and convulsive rhythms breaking a general sense of calmness, the whole enhanced by deep drones, (s)low guitar arpeggios and pinched crystals, an atmosphere of meagre oneirology at times spotted by voices and external interference. “Field that speak” is a 10-minute film that depicts particulars of the Somerset Levels and Moors, the places where Hopkins grew up and that, according to him, haven’t changed since his childhood. Trees, grass and clouds are observed by a fixed camera accompanied by an austere and pretty obscure soundtrack based on droneyish ambient music, mostly revolving around tantalizing low frequencies that electrostatics and various hisses contribute to tangle a little bit. The DVD also contains a data section with a few extras (more films, the soundtrack as a MP3 and “various source materials”). A nice helping of good multimedia art by a talented man.
HL / FICKLE – Distraction (No Ground-R)
Another nice oddity from this interesting multimedia label. “Distraction” is a 3-inch CD whose audio section is an edited version of a longer concert from 2004, which is available as MP3 in the data segment of the mini disc; the music is a satisfying blend of atmospherical darkness and post-industrial pulse, appreciable by fans of Zoviet France and surroundings but also by lovers of esoterica labels such as Cold Meat Industry, as most sounds gravitate around the low-frequency area with some minor interference, the result being quite good if played at consistent volume. Like in every No Ground release, the cover picture is also very beautiful, contributing quite lovely to an unique collection.
HMUTE – Mutable tension (Echo Music)
Yorgos Sioros uses MAX/MSP programs to generate mathematic patterns that constitute the structure of a pretty detached music, articulated in five movements over the course of about 65 minutes, whose commercial value is probably next to zero but that’s not a problem with us, right? “Mutable tension” is one of those records that grows with each listening; it’s indeed full of subdued pulses and underground rhythms that indicate an access door to the ones who feel lost without something to tap their feet to – and I’m not talking drum’n'bass, rather a constantly mutating skeleton of advanced electronica affected by Tourette syndrome, with a futuristic aroma. Yet, Hmute gets our highest degree of approval when he manages to let us assimilate the darkest nuances of his sound, subsonic heartbeat and hazy concoctions of twilight scenes invading the listening space for long bewitching spells, before they’re totally disintegrated by industrial harshness at the end. This CD will be enjoyed by lovers of Esplendor Geometrico and De Fabriek, but also by those interested in the extreme fringes of the shadowy galaxies of space music.
TIM HODGKINSON – Sketch of now (Mode)
Tim Hodgkinson’s output is not exactly for gentle hearts, as it seemingly refers to those existential movements whose epicentre is to be found in what blatantly endangers our most inner possessions, those treasured certainties – which in music could be identified with concepts like “tonality” or “cadence” – to which one sticks hoping to remain undistinguished, camouflaged amidst life’s nondescript experiences. “Sketch of now” is Hodgkinson’s best effort in years, way much superior to the previous, fragmentary “Sang”, which mixed excellent material with less concise ideas and mediocre external contributions. The composer individuates a selection of events that can derive either from personal choices, natural events or sheer reflection about the less predictable schemes of things. Six pieces are included, each one shining with Hodgkinson’s attitude, formalism totally excluded in favour of a conjunction of forces determining a high grade of power-for-pleasure feeling throughout the record. “Vers Kongsu II” features Vinny Golia on bass clarinet and Gustavo Aguilar on percussion, plus the Hyperion Ensemble conducted by Iancu Dumitrescu in a spectacular contrast between a series of thunderous blasts and an adroit elaboration of skeletal solo clarinet playing. The Hyperion is also featured in “Aici schiteaza pe acum” (a Rumanian expression comprising the disc’s title), probably the most emotionally involving work of the whole album, an aggregation of orchestral uncertainty imposing its will with engrossing splashes of indetermination, and in the final “Further into hard stone”, an enigmatic structure where the chance of locating its originator’s ego is next to absolute zero, just like everywhere else. The most aggressive track to these ears is the aptly named “Fragor” for computer-modified cello and electric guitar, which lives off its inherent qualities of semi-disharmonious refractions and functional distorted radiance, managing to subvert a pre-imposed order without necessarily sounding “revolutionary”. This release brims with music that’s riding on the threshold of unacceptability for most (unprepared) listeners yet is dense with profound messages, repeatedly trying to deliver us from the aural and mental straitjackets that even the most advanced sonic physicists sometimes force us to wear. Unconditionally recommended.
IAN HOLLOWAY – Walking through fireflies (Quiet World)
There are records that just don’t ask for more than their sheer existence, and that people play hundreds of times without any real reason, simply content of keeping them functioning in that fragment of time in which they’re enjoyed. Ian Holloway’s “Walking through fireflies” is one of these items. This music’s constituents are few and not necessarily new: familiar-sounding low frequencies (probably deriving from synthesizers), processed guitars, piano, altered voices (I’m not fond of the latter, but Holloway being a serious man I’ll gladly accept this, too) and, whenever a melody appears, it’s extremely simple, slow, almost uncertain. This would seem to depict a customary darkish ambient outing, one of the dozens that visit my CD player once, then will be forgotten until I die. Not so, as this album gains its strength when we insert its unassuming tranquillity amidst the regular activities, especially if the weather allows us to leave windows open. Yes, I’m aware that I keep repeating this advice in too many occasions. Still, take advantage of quietness when you have a chance: barely hinted keyboard clusters and echoing resonant waves can work wonders together with the hiss of the wind, a distant barking dog or the faraway cars accelerating for a quicker return to home. Everything seems to fall in place, our soul finally distracted from preoccupations but, at the same time, conscious that another difficult tomorrow is knocking at the door. We all know that music (meaning the essential vibration, not Mozart or Madonna) is not what prevents mankind from getting nerve-wrecked; unfortunately, this depends on the absence of an actual cerebral evolution, because instead it could. Working on such a subliminal level, this stuff goes well beyond the surface of a distract judgement. Remember: whispering volume in a peaceful environment, otherwise it won’t help.
IAN HOLLOWAY – A lonely place (Quiet World)
Drifting grey clouds that, for once, do not imply obscure presages but seem to perfectly fit in the momentary lapse of consciousness that one experiences while not exactly concentrated on something. This is the principal sensation that listening to this album causes. “A lonely place” sounds warm in a way, putting us at a complete ease through a long sequence of morphing resonances and wavering drones. Ian Holloway has by now shown to all the hungry experts of the dark ambient scene that he is for real: the consistency of this artist’s presentations is tangible and I can’t remember ever having thought about any of his CDs as not satisfactory. Impossible to say what Holloway used for this 38-minute piece, as the sources could very well be potentially compared to whatever can be subjected to alteration by heavy processing – wind to motors, didjeridoo to voices. Keyboards, guitars maybe? Heaven knows. The fact is that the outcome is next to splendid, an electronic release that definitely doesn’t weigh on the listener’s patience. It’s a perfect example of that kind of sound art that does not actually “invent”, yet is so beautifully made that we just don’t need anything else to feel good. And good I felt throughout the whole program. Another high mark for Quiet World’s boss.
WILL HOLSHOUSER TRIO – Singing to a bee (Clean Feed)
An unlikely instrumental combination is at the basis of an album whose title refers to Steven Tye Culbert’s novel “Love song for the Giant Contessa”. Two members of the trio descend from respected artists: accordionist Holshouser’s father Bill is an accomplished poet while bassist David Phillips is the son of Barre Phillips (enough said); the excellent Ron Horton is featured on trumpet. The particular amalgam of quasi-cantabile themes and dissonant crossroads, more akin to a small chamber ensemble than any form of “jazz”, establishes the ideal playground for about 45 minutes of peaceful reflections corroborated by distinct “popular” influences. This music does not need to overstretch its arms to be noticed and understood, being imbued of a sense of ease which could be erroneously defined as “simplicity”. But have a look between the lines and you’ll discover several touches of finesse revealing an undiscussed technical dexterity which raises the overall level of the record quite a bit.
ANNA HOMLER / STEUART LIEBIG – Kelpland serenades (pfMENTUM)
In improvisation there is no right or wrong; whatever happens must be accepted and, if possible, enjoyed. The pairing of Homler’s voice, toys and objects with Liebig’s contrabass guitar and treatments yields a multitude of results: distressing claustrophobic cages of low frequency diffidence and deformed utterances of ancient spirits contrast the “lighter” moments, where Anna intones difficult-to-decipher idioms in a totally unconventional series of song fragments reminiscent of Julie Tippetts and Shelley Hirsch’s work, with the concomitance of Steuart’s outbursts of nervous energy burning through reductive surrogates of undisclosed sonic earthquakes. The music is often comparable to what’s commonly – and superficially – defined as “avantgarde composition”, showing few openings, tending to remain in its own cold microcosm only to reveal various forms of bitter truth where gloomy atmospheres and borderline poetry ask for the permission to engulf us in their indeterminacy. Call it high-level introversion.
PAUL HOOD – Cplastsics (TwoThousandAnd)
Working with turntables and mixers can guarantee fecundity or total absence of results, depending on circumstances and on some sort of irrational desire creeping out of artists’ mind. Paul Hood is instantly excluded by several cathegories as he doesn’t plunder anything, avoids old-style music loops like the plague and doesn’t try to lull you in the constitutional “classical-orchestra-locked-pattern” trap. “Cplastsics”is first and foremost centered around hum and feedback; its energy combustion is rather irregular, the sound moving in zig-zags and semicircles to plummet into a sudden silence, to start again with more low rumbles, ground noises and shifting phases of various clattering phenomena. Hood’s substance is corrosive and must necessarily be handled with care: this excellent record is certainly nearer to Cremaster and Morphogenesis than to Janek Schaefer or Philip Jeck – call it “minimalist seasick turntablism”.
HOOD & RODGERS – Castles (TwoThousandAnd)
Released in a 100-copy limited edition, this 3-inch CD is a conjunction of different sensibilities explicated through turntables and amplified objects (Paul Hood) and acoustic guitar (Michael Rodgers), both active since many years on the improvisation scene. “Castles” comprises vignettes and elucubrations, pastels and gentle noise; everything is nicely displayed in a series of rather short pieces where vinyl crackle, amorphous loops and nebulous speeches annihilate the bucolic (…) tendency of the acoustic guitar to generate an unusual, slightly disjointed but totally ear-pleasing dreamy atmosphere. Between plucked and arpeggiated strings creeps an underworld of recorded remembrances that just want to be retrieved; this duo performs the task admirably.
TETSUYA HORI – Tetsuya Hori (Naivsuper)
Sapporo-born, Berlin resident Tetsuya Hori is a composer who applies his methods both on instruments and “things”, as perfectly demonstrated by this record which contains three notebook-enhanced works for, respectively, beer bottle, glass of water and flute, the latter played by Ryoko Sakurai. “My compositions have no concept. That’s my concept” declares Hori, whose work fundamentally exploits the juxtaposition of deeply booming pulses while travelling across territories that spread parallel to improvisation; the picture is one of a monk intent in caring for a bonsai but also keeping an eye on what happens in the monastery’s courtyard, strangely not exactly peaceful as it should be. Stretched out shapes and nebulous geometries are generated from a scarcity of basic elements that, in this case, is unquestionably a plus: the music is in fact particularly concentrated, its power broadening through long-lasting structures filled by extraordinary low-frequency throbs, especially evident in “For beer bottle and laptop” where apparently unproblematic insufflations gradually mutate into an affecting texture of non-combustible gaseous matter. The same cavernous atmospheric alterations emphasize the bubbling character of “For glass of water and laptop”, which makes splendid use of the impressively resounding qualities of an element that by now has become an easy-to-the-ear commonplace (I myself admit that listening to it still gives me pleasure, though). “For flute and laptop” begins with an echoing dearth of sonic constituents – sparse bouncing droplets of note scraps – but, sure enough, slowly increases its population of events minute after minute, soon reaching the intensity level of the other two pieces despite a measure of rarefaction. Sakurai fuses her voice with semi-regular breathy emissions and selected technical tricks, the whole transformed in a wordless homage to the manumission of instrumental certitude, ending with the flute morphed into a desert wind. This writer’s first investigation of Tetsuya Hori’s theories signifies a positive reception, including the will of telling “listen to this” to a lot of counterfeit computer-twiddling “artists”.
SCOTT HORSCROFT – 8 guitars (Quecksilber)
For those of you loving both minimalism and the so-called “Krautrock” (a term I always hated, by the way) this will be a wonderful discovery of a well hidden treasure. Scott comes from Australia and this 38-minute composition is a pumping, energizing, brain-massaging steady basic rhythm all made through electric guitars and basses (among the participants, Oren Ambarchi and Brendan Walls). My reference to German avant-rock of the seventies comes from the strange similarity between this music and some of Neu!’s tracks, but there’s also a few slices of bread for Rhys Chatham/Glenn Branca aficionados, even if Horscroft tends to explore a single movement until the end as opposed to the Americans’ walls of electricity. Don’t think “8 guitars” is soft, though: its medium-to-low frequency superimpositions mixed with scorching highs coming from distorted and looped parts in the upper register, linked together with a bass line that’s similar to a Mike Tyson’s uppercut, will do for some of the most exciting new music you could have heard in a long time.
HOTELGASTE – Flowers you can eat (Schraum)
This is the debut recording of Hotelgäste, a trio formed by Canadian Dave Bennett and Derek Shirley (on guitar and bass respectively) plus Michael Thieke on clarinet, alto sax and zither. Since the very first moments a mechanism of continuous emission is set up by the musicians, who remain within the limits of slightly powered microsounds alimented by organic composites of acoustic and electronic means, filling every space with an unobtrusive spreading of colours deriving from the AMM/Morphogenesis palette. In this sense, “Sleepy Lady” – not coincidentally the longest track – is the most involving segment, developing its motory force gradually yet incessantly, in an amorphous deprivation of aural breath where the deep resonance of Thieke’s reed accompanies Bennett and Shirley in an infinite try to raise their heads out of the poisoned waters of pseudo-industrial loops. The rest of the album also shows good class, the music ranging from clustering isolationist dissonances to opaque transparences, where the sources keep their visibility even if blurred by a diffuse dust of distortion; a flash of truly great interaction is “Wintermusic”, in which Shirley’s bass arcoes a hole in the ground for levity to be buried in, while Thieke and Bennett throw dirt through their playing in a commemorative gesture, all faces pointing to the crumbling ground under their feet.
FRANÇOIS HOULE / EVAN PARKER / BENOÎT DELBECQ – La lumière de pierres (Psi)
While Parker, here on tenor saxophone, really needs no introduction, Canadian Houle was once his student despite being first and foremost a gifted clarinettist; Delbecq – an important figure in Paris’ Hask Collective – performs on prepared piano. This is their first meeting, recorded in 2005 in Montréal and, in a way, made possible by Ken Pickering, a friend of all three and also the artistic director of the Vancouver International Festival. The recording is based upon three improvisations whose properties are immediately visible, one of them being the credible proximity between Parker and Houle’s reeds, the two avoiding shortcuts to the core of repercussion in any possible way. Nourished by Delbecq’s spurious resonances and chordal splashes, the trio advances with significant renouncement to meaningless trickery, preferring to watch their developed intuitions grow through situations of uncertain tranquillity and sudden incisiveness, curiously better expressed in their less extreme positioning during the flux of the creative juices. Totally rid of presumptuous postures, the musicians receive signals from the environment while appearing self-determined, playing around continuously reorganized structures that nevertheless make us think of a limpid ideal of emancipation from the norm. Affirmations that exploit coincidence and possibility, coalescing into a consistent vision that no one can afford to call “utopian”, as these men look like the components of a natural cycle in which everything – physically existent or just intuited – forces listeners to become believers. Reality is not unacceptable, except for the ones who want to forget about their own senses; Houle, Parker and Delbecq differentiate their approaches slightly, all the while converging on a single focal point, our aural gratification a sure thing.
FRANÇOIS HOULE / JOËLLE LÉANDRE / RAYMOND STRID – 9 moments (Red Toucan)
Five of these “nine moments” were recorded in studio, while the remaining four come from a live recording at the Open Space Gallery in Victoria. The whole happened in a couple of days, in 2006; it’s pretty difficult to discern what was played in front of an audience and what not, as Laurence Svirchev correctly points out in the sleeve notes. A clarinet, double bass and drum trio that offers no typical point of entry, as the scintillating interplay occurring between the parts is at the same level of the brilliance of the single interpreters, with a few impressive glimpses of parallel awareness (“Moment tendu” and “Moment clé” spring to mind, but they’re just two of the various possible examples). Houle’s clarinet lines are fluorescent, at times ferine, otherwise squeezed, perennially in the centre of a spiral of intelligence – not an unnecessary note from him. Léandre, what words can we invent again to describe the almost furious energy animating this woman? Being able to savour those arcoed harmonics and that ogress-like tone in so many different contexts is always a beautiful happening. Strid is both discreet and inquisitive, capturing fragments of his comrades’ timbre to metabolize them in a silent proportion of percussive shapes and fine-grained listening ability. The light that comes out from the most spectacular conversations is nothing short of gleaming, our familiarity with educated improvisation enhanced thanks to the musicians’ visible will to give to the listeners. They give indeed, a lot.
ALAN HOVHANESS – Violin/viola and keyboard works (OgreOgress)
The flawless execution of these scores by Alan Hovhaness, courtesy of violist Christina Fong and pianist Arved Ashby, opens the doors on unknown dimensions for the ones who are used to the sterile, calligraphic pretentiousness of twentieth century’s academia. For their large part not excessively long, these pieces could be seen as snapshots of a gradual research, a spiritual quest that distanced this composer from practically every other artist of his era. An oriental influence characterizes almost the totality of the melodic lines, typically underlined by shimmering piano chords or doubling themselves in intertwining weaves. There are a few exceptions, as in the final “Three visions of Saint Mesrob”, where the use of clusters adds a gentle touch of mystery to the rarefied atmosphere. This music sounds like if it was played in an ancient time, its magic melancholy evoking closed-room silences and intense portraits.
ALAN HOVHANESS – Janabar / Talin / Shambala (OgreOgress)
The music of Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000) risks to disguise its profundity under the veil of apparently weightless peaceful melodies. Yet he was the first who tried to put in contact transcontinental cultures in his work, being a precursor even without necessarily sounding like one. Still the fact that, even in the present day, this artist’s background is fairly unknown to the masses is quite shameful, as these scores possess levity, spiritual nuances and melancholic gloom in equal doses, which – interconnected with Eastern jargons and well evident Armenian influences – results in a cycle of intense moments characterized by the vivid lights of vehement inspiration. This edition comes on a dual disc (a one-hour CD and a two-hour DVD on the respective faces) and contains executions by the Slovenská Filharmónia, conducted by Rastislav Štúr and featuring soloists Christina Fong (violin and viola), Gaurav Mazumdar (sitar), Paul Hersey (piano) and Michael Bowman (trumpet). The commitment of each of the involved musicians is perceptible throughout, their rendering of the grief characterizing “Janabar” plainly impressive, the piece amounting to an authorized soundtrack to break the silence of inner reflection. On the other hand, “Shambala” – the first-ever concerto for orchestra including sitar, originally commissioned to Hovhaness by violinist Yehudi Menuhin – often approaches territories that, in certain sections, call to mind a sonic commentary to an epic movie, not losing an ounce of its suggestive clout and transcendental charm in the meantime. Qualities that are more or less lying at the bottom of the barrel of ignorance, in favour of many overhyped icons of the classical world’s history. This set could embody an ideal introduction to this man’s conceptions while helping to dissolve the fog surrounding them.
EARL HOWARD – Strong force (Mutable)
A fascinating record by a quintet of great performers: Anthony Davis – piano, Gerry Hemingway – percussion, Anne Le Baron – harp and Ernst Reijseger – cello plus the leader, Earl Howard, on synthesizer. The forms created by the group are virtually undescribable, since this is a kind of composition sounding extremely free, so that it could be easily mistaken for free improvisation. Single instrumental voices are never predominant, even if it’s easy paying a little more attention when Le Baron’s plucking fingers evoke sparkling lights in the obscurity; anyway, all the five pieces on the CD are homogeneous to the maximum level, mixing very well with my surroundings and allowing a kind of listening that doesn’t need cranking up the volume. Oddly, the music’s dynamics tend to diminish noticeably in the last two tracks – the shortest ones – where the quintet comes to an almost silent conversation, ending in the nothingness from where everything took off. Uneasy, provocative, evolved material; great musicianship all over.
HOWLIN’ GHOST PROLETARIANS – The singer (Absurd/Phase)
Now this is what I call a homage to blues, postmodern-style and if there’s irony to be detected, well, I failed. Fabrice Eglin and Michel Henritzi play “guitars, slide guitar, amp” in the vein of Loren Mazzacane Connors in conjunction with Robert Johnson’s soul creeping up the cables. Henritzi adds a harmonica somewhere and Benjamin Renard brings in a fabulous bell in “Heavy slow train”. Every physical instrumental element – including the loop noise of the amps and the scraping on detuned strings – is used to create a fascinating flourishing of ghost harmonics, quarter-tone bendings and uncontrolled distortions which Sonic Youth would be envious of. Eglin and Henritzi are not ashamed for a second of their apparent lack of technical six-stringed expertise (and if they do have some, it’s very well disguised) because all that counts here is a feeling of rusty disenchantment in an exploration of those particulars that a purist would always choose to cut off the final mix. This is a picture of realism whose grain is the memory of a past which is strangely coincident with today. And, believe me, “The singer” works great as ambient music too: try it at a very low volume in complete silence and enjoy the spirits crawling around.
STEVE HUBBACK – Ambiance de la cave a vin (Utech)
Strange things happen when a poor writer is overwhelmed by records, as I had completely lost track of Steve Hubback’s production since the late eighties; mea culpa. This recording brought me back to an intelligent percussionist who works in anti-pyrotechnical territories, his minimal economy of movement giving birth to a rich resonance that the mind accepts like a necessary law to restore some degree of discipline in a disposition that often can become chaotic. Divided in three parts, the album was recorded in a wine cellar in France (hence the title) using three gongs and a stainless steel sculpture made by the man himself. While the large part of the CD privileges a continuous virulent beat exalted by the natural reverberation of Hubback’s small arsenal, the final movement presents wider spaces and repeated moments of stasis which are all the more useful as a counter-attraction against the persistent ceremonials of the first two tracks. It takes a while to appreciate this release, but it works very well at the end.
NATHAN HUBBARD – Blind orchid (Accretions)
Among today’s percussionists, Nathan Hubbard is the anti-paradigm par excellence. His music is “free” in an almost absurd acceptation, but sounds composed; he uses self-made apparata and a no-input mixer to enrich his world with devastating ulcerations and triturated patterns, often accompanying the fruits of creativity with uttered syllables, desiccated rapping and indecipherable wording. To obtain different washes and contrasts, machineries, percussion and microphones are frequently re-positioned into other things and instruments (including the room, perceived by Hubbard as a single entity with the drum, both “resonant objects with an implied need for activity”). The outcome of this “activity” could well rival a natural catastrophe as far as damage to the landscape of commonplace is concerned: there’s nothing in “Blind orchid” that can be conjugated with other people’s material. Hubbard produces an incredible amount of different projections, which he renders even more unpredictable through processes of multiple re-recording and playback of pre-existing tracks, with the effect of completely displacing any notion of commonly intended “pulse”, putting us in communication with a regulated chaos that is much nearer to life’s happenings than those boxed subdivisions invented centuries ago because men needed something to clutch at to remain anchored to their retrograde conceptions. The problem is, the same still happens nowadays and we’re lucky that smart guys like Nathan cross our road trying to show what the real rhythms of the earth are. A nimble musician, whose exciting hyperactivity wakes up from the incantations of expectation and the sortileges of delusion; a gorgeous album that vibrates and quivers with intelligent ideas, great cleverness in sound placement and the joy of showing everybody that, when one meets serious artists whose main intent is “playing with their playing”, anything can happen. Unconditionally guaranteed against mental apathy, to be enjoyed loudly and repeatedly.
CARL LUDWIG HÜBSCH – Primordial soup (Red Toucan)
“Primordial soup” is a lively quartet led by tuba player and composer Carl Ludwig Hübsch, whose members feature Axel Dörner (trumpet), Frank Gratkowski (reeds) and Michael Griener (drums, percussion). Together, the musicians analyze the subtle interrelations between composition and improvisation, which seems to be one of the main interests in Hübsch’s method. In his own words, “…even when notating musical ideas completely, hoping for and expecting the unpredictable” becomes the main goal. The ensemble’s eccentric instrumental deployment facilitates the process, as these nine pieces show an optimal balance of virtuoso playing, respect for some sort of implied regulation and tendency to freedom, the whole giving the music a distinct, classy attribute that suspends it between liberalism and scored discipline or, if you will, a character that oscillates between a marching band and a post-Eisler chamber group. In that sense, the tuba is a not-so-frequent colour to observe; once mostly associated with Dixieland and funerals, only rarely utilized in avant contexts, it now becomes a sort of etoile polaire for the music to move through unconventional arrangements that call for compelling explorations of uneasy timbral mixtures, where artists like Dörner and Gratkowski, pretty much used to move silently all over ample spaces in other situations, find a typically intelligent way to repackage their technical prowess without sounding stale, while Griener’s percussive demeanour is more another contrapuntal voice than an effective rhythmic element. To quote Hübsch again, “Prepare for serious moments filled with joyful noise!”
PAUL HUBWEBER – Tromboneos (Nurnichtnur)
You’ll rarely find a more funny, lively and interesting solo album such as this one. Paul Hubweber’s masterful control of any timbral aspect of the instrument guarantees music that transcends the trombone itself to become a soulful expression, a creature that continually moves and modifies its forms, appearing and disappearing just like a ghost. Breath and voice also contribute to a festival of changing parts, from raspy and raucous noises to perfectly tuned diaphonics, passing through harmonics a la Diamanda Galas (or Demetrio Stratos, if you prefer). Hubweber’s techniques are absolutely flawless and one can detect years of playing and tone research in any of these tracks, but this is a classic case in which technique itself becomes a means to an end and not – never – the opposite. Really excellent stuff.
PAUL HUBWEBER / ULI BOTTCHER – Schnack (Anthro Pometrics)
Absolutely no compromise for this electronics and trombone duo, recorded in ten short live improvisations in 2004. In both sides of this vinyl album, Hubweber – one of the finest European trombonists, if you ask me – supplies raw materials and evolved phraseologies that Böttcher is able to mould and fuse in infinite quibbles where instrumental acoustics and radical effect incendiarism maintain a loquacious intercourse. Pinching each other with unexpected twists, the musicians govern the behaviour of their own peculiar artistic molecules with ease, putting irony and paradox on the top of the list; thus, a two-voice potential becomes an omnibus bag of squalls and strange sonic prints that no one will ask to explain, in a “love it or hate it” stance which – I believe – is just what these fine improvisers desire most of all.
PAUL HUBWEBER / PHILIP ZOUBEK – Nobody’s matter but our own (Nurnichtnur)
Hubweber owns one of the most distinguishable voices on a very difficult instrument – the trombone – and is probably my personal favorite player in that sense, while Zoubek is an excellent pianist, partially modelled after Tippett-esque canons, whose beautiful playing was not familiar to these ears until this CD, which is one of the best improvisation albums of the last five years. Over the course of seven tracks, Hubweber pirouettes and splashes nuances of total unpredictability which, absurdly enough, sound as controlled as the temperament of a cool-headed jazzbo; yet he remains a fine raconteur of protuberant dreams, his instrumental knowledge enough to jettison every hint of confrontational attitude while privileging quietness and maturity, even when strange occurrences make the music a little punch-drunk. Zoubek’s fingers flutter with determination, focus and inventive questioning, instantly generating anti-pattern electricity during peripheral conversations about non-existent tonalities. When he clatters and zings the prepared strings of his instrument, a typical perfume is spread around, soon replaced by gossamer piano phonetics based on sparse notes and meagre contrapuntal discolourments. Classy substance, highly recommended.
PAUL HUBWEBER / PAUL LOVENS / JOHN EDWARDS – PaPaJo (Emanem)
File under “excellent free improvisation”. Percussion, trombone and double bass are just sound sources for a very engaging and unpredictable music; this is the classic album that will be appreciated and loved by the ones who already know the players involved (whose very high instrumental mastery is well documented) but could be a little harder for the neophyte, even if there’s always time to learn something in life. What really impresses is everyone’s full capacity of reinventing the voice of a single instrument in order to put it to work in unexpected contests; trombone becomes a voice, double bass gets everywhere, while Lovens is not exactly known for sounding “traditional” on drums and percussion. The result is, as usual for Emanem’s standards, so new and fresh you’ll probably forget who’s playing what.
JOHN HUDAK / JASON KAHN / BRUCE TOVSKY – For the time being (Cut)
Sonic experimenter John Hudak is the common denominator in the two long tracks of “For the time being”. The first sees him flanked by Jason Kahn, both armed with laptops working on field recordings and sounds of snow falling taken from “Winter”, an installation by Kahn. Combining thick post-nuclear winds and gentle taps plus captivating – if a little hermetic – blankets of undefined electronic matter, the artists gradually focus our sense of perception without making noise, remaining consistent throughout a very interesting and finely tuned composition. Hudak is joined by Bruce Tovsky in the second piece, a sort of neo-minimalist approach to guitar manipulation that’s equally satisfying and even tranquilizing. The nicely chiselled string tapestries are moved in various speeds and forms through a Max MSP program, depositing beautiful prints and luminescent images wherever they decide to land, while the resonance of the surrounding treatments opens and closes doors upon doors of delicate anxiety and child-like curiosity.
JEAN-LOUIS HUHTA – Halfway between the world and death (Slottet)
Given both the title and the well-established Swedish tradition in everything gothic, dark ambient and blood-dripping industrial, I was afraid of subjecting myself to one of those apparently menacing, yet totally ridiculous records of gloomy thuds and hellish lower-octave voices that somehow seem to be loved by a growing mass of enthusiasts (usually their nails are painted in black, and they all look like a second-hand Robert Smith or Diamanda Galàs). But no – we’re in presence of something completely different and quite attractive, too. Jean-Louis Huhta works in a lot of different contexts, including “improvisational lounge music” in the Ocsid trio with CM Von Hausswolff and Graham Lewis and “a dub-inspired form of techno” in his Brommage Dub project. But the revealing news in the liners is that he’s a film, theatre and dance music composer; as a matter of fact, this CD collects 16 segments (plus a phantom track) that I’d really like to see associated to a modern silent movie, genre and location to be decided (with preference to god-forsaken urban landscaping). The tracks are for the large part laptop-made and loop-based, but Huhta used mostly analog sources (many acoustic guitars in there) that mix effectively with the background hiss and noise of pre-recorded tapes to elicit appealing spectral atmospheres in which Pink Floyd, Neu, Dif Juz, Tortoise and Asmus Tietchens are only a handful of names that could give a distant idea of what this album evokes. It feels, in a word, natural. Taken as a whole and listened with a detached attitude (try it as a on-and-off soundtrack for a bad morning) this is appreciably sincere stuff.
WYNDEL HUNT – Nk Ak (Dragon’s Eye)
While the majority of electronic musicians uses synthesis to create soundscapes, Seattle’s audio-visual artist Wyndel Hunt strives to “create a synthetic environment with sound”. This translates into a music that’s at one and the same time charged with a sort of repressed violence, which Hunt somehow keeps in check through strata of noisy dirtiness or, in other words, digital saturation lacquering most everything one hears, yet is sweetened by the semblance of a semi-consonant conformation that never transcends the limit of a minimal (make that “null”) harmonic movement. Also, Hunt makes good use of repeated dynamic changes that often surprise and at times – if the volume is way up – could definitely scare the hell out of your pants if you made the mistake of relaxing too much. “Nk Ak”, an album whose tracks’ names are as incomprehensible as its title (“Raktz”, “D Leofl”, “Sikn Rn” being nice examples) is one of those outings that do not evidence huge qualities at a first listen but reveal new secrets with each try. It’s not even remotely associable with anything I know, and this should be taken as a big compliment. It could appeal to fans of early Fripp & Eno as much as Phill Niblock’s, maybe also to those who are appreciative of labels like Mego, yet remains fairly incomparable, a soundtrack for an invisible urban underworld which one would never get in touch with. Nevertheless, it sends signals that an organically developed, actively thinking being will catch and try to follow, curiously fascinated by something that lets us peep at a new kind of elegance covered with horrible scars. Play loud for maximum psychological impact. Uncommon and galvanizing.
HURRA CAINE LANDCRASH – Moving (No Ground-R)
Dan Hopkins, aka HL, aka Hurra caine Landcrash, achieves with “Moving” some of his best results meshing low-budget electronics and treatments of very simple guitar phrases and chords (often held for a long time with the help of signal processors) whose beauty is best represented by a masterpiece called “March”, a drone so intense that had me thinking about inner spiritual resonance more than music, something that can also be experienced in the work of people like Peter Wright. Expressing his feelings about a particular moment where many things changed in his life, Hopkins hesitates a little bit at first, the sounds almost shy to manifest their significance while remaining scarcely decipherable and even irksome; but as the music flows, it all starts to look like a terse sky after a storm has passed, with the shimmering lights of the strings and the currents of vibrating liquids slowly taking possession of the ambience around us. Elusive yet powerful reflections by a profound artist.
[-HYPH-] – Alter.tenacio (Tourette)
Music for audiovisual performances composed by Nicolas Wiese, engendered through an excellent work of juxtaposition of pre-existing environmental sources and real instruments (xylophone, double bass, alto sax and clarinet). Besides Wiese, other musicians involved include Nice New Outfit, John Hughes and Lars Scherzberg. No qualms about concepts even remotely associated to “chords” or “melodies” here: we’re instantly incinerated by a succession of loud noises, ghost-like or otherwise warped voices, free-climbing electronics and metropolitan echoes. But there’s no risk of becoming tired: the composer knows when it’s time to stop, so that intervals of almost complete quietness are utilized as a much needed relief amidst the carnage of samples and the crescendos of anguish characterizing the large part of the record. Essentially, this sound like latter-day musique concrete with a tendency to nervous breakdown: all sounds seem designed to create anxiety in the listener, who feels perennially surrounded by something scarcely comprehensible yet unpreventable. The mechanics of intrusive imagination are put at work heavily, and often the results are not exactly what an ordinary individual would auspicate. This stuff might unsettle, or cancel at least part of your confidences; it surely makes us think hard about how wrong certain artistic canons are, especially after listening to the conclusive “Suspend values”, as disconcerting a piece as you can find. A highly recommended release.
ID – From cause to effect (Evelyn)
The first twelve minutes could have you thinking it’s all a joke, as a continuous drop is filtered through a phasing effect without anything else. While you’re ready to give up, an electronic low note comes up in the mix, replacing the rhythmical still and filling the air. Later on, more “watery” elements are treated in a fusion that inexorably takes control of your space; meanwhile, the droning has become steady and incessant in its perennial immobility. Simple parts linked together form a total that buzzes and roams, lifting the intensity level up more than a few notches. At the end of the day, this stuff is “impersonally involving” and, quite certainly, owns the keys to an interesting outlook over low-budget sound canvases.
IF, BWANA – Fire chorus (Ants)
The four tracks in “Fire chorus” represent a sort of dichotomy between two main facets of Al Margolis’ main recording project. On one hand, the title track and “Day 8: McKenna’s brain” are an escape from normality to a postmodern “musique concrete” where a preconscious state of haziness of common knowledge meets the staring eyes of a person desperately trying to maintain a grip on his life’s time frames, without actually succeeding. Instead, the opening “Chimes” is a magnificent, Alvin Lucier-style looping still, enriched by its own slight spacial alterations and by a sad vocal fragment repeating itself at the end of the piece. “Accidentally Angelica” closes this excellent release with 21-plus minutes of classic If, Bwana: tension and contemplation seem to proceed in parallel ways to finally find their fusion point just when the sounds looked on their way out there, to nowhere, yet still perceivable by the ones who know how to listen.
IF, BWANA – Gruntle (Absurd)
Let it be declared that Al Margolis/If, Bwana is some sort of evil genius working with raw materials which are never adapted to a genre or a context, because they create one in that very moment. Those sources are radically altered up to an utterly unrecognizable state, anarchic manifestations moving in compact determination; the eBowed basses of “Bwana bass loops mit eBow” sound like a hybrid of ocarinas in love with feedback escaped from Toshi Nakamura’s control, while “Violins (v.2)” could represent a thousand transistor radios broadcasting midgets trying to tune their wrecked hurdy-gurdies through a Geiger counter with a low battery. “Gruntle” gives the right of expression to all the parts of a synthesizer that usually work silently, so that oscillators and valves bath in a freakish minimalist quagmire, while “(Dis)Gruntle” lets finally out what every composer should have the audacity to release after being saved from the tentacles of cerebral sterility. Through a light-hearted (???) attitude to the act of making music, If, Bwana arrives at a much deeper level than many of the sacred untouchable shepherds of hollow headed crowds.
IF, BWANA – Radio Slaves (Monochrome Vision)
Remember those strange things called cassettes? IPod addicts will have a hard time believing that those gatherers of hiss, distortion and lo-fi sounds once were an integral part of the avant-garde world. Through his Sound of Pig imprint, Al Margolis/If, Bwana was one of the greatest agitators of that wave of dirty creativity which used that method to put out bulletins that no level-headed manager would even try to release on a proper “label”. “Radio Slaves”, originally issued on Medicinal Tapes in 1986, is completely based on the samples of a Casio SK-1 that, coupled with the cheap-as-you-can-get sonic assemblage poetry of the maker, makes for fine specimens of highly creative music made with really basic means. Margolis captured just everything on those memory snippets, fragmenting concepts and transcending reality with typically unclassifiable bitterness not deprived of irony. He used pre-existent music as well as actual environmental sources and media blather – lots of TV preaching in there – to interconnect jumbles of sonic material that might imply some sort of disguised meaning but, as a primary result, strikes a nerve. A masterful example is the utilization of a Philip Glass loop (circa Koyaanisqatsi) as the foundation for the vocal cut-up in “Fish tales from the Bible”, according to a principle of therapeutic “learn-and-soon-forget” which delivers the listening process from the constrictions of concepts such as “taste” and “expectancy”. The whole record is chock full of short items: the samples, the tracks, the events, yet this shortness yields a result that exceeds the sum of the single parts. Those who are acquainted with If, Bwana’s vision already know what I’m referring to. Novices, they could be in for some serious bewilderment and maybe a tickle to the desire of knowing more about this unique composer.
JAMES ILGENFRITZ / MIKE KHOURY / PIOTR MICHALOWSKI / SARAH WEAVER – Babardah (Abzu)
The elegant improvisations presented in “Babardah” are built upon appealing sounds and extreme respect for every instrument’s voice. Each and every concept is carefully analyzed, becoming an element of reflection and observation rather than an obstentation of useless power. The instrumentation (bass, violin, sax and trombone) is appealing as it works perfectly in a sort of “chamber free music” where seemingly nothing is discarded. There’s nothing too conceptual here, not a reason that could prevent this record to calmly sail in that sea of “discreet” avantgarde where virtuosity and studies of possibilities never exceed a mature and insightful approach to playing. Essentially, this is intelligent stuff – neither too dense, nor too reductive – that must be listened to with the same poised stance of the musicians involved.
ILIOS – Vento elektra (Antifrost)
Broken only by a few minor interferences, the sound of “electric wind” by Ilios is one intense physical experience. A fixed frequency – effectively similar to a distant desert air propulsion – voids the brain of any meaningful thought, creating a hollow space for the body to crouch into. Small noises coming from the external life become mere glimpses of regular monotony, luckily washed out of our aural reach within a few seconds. In the last ten minutes the electric flow captured by the composer mounts slightly, forming slow-motion glissandos similar to the noise of faraway cars in the night silence or, when the volume finally increases, of motor airplanes – bombers, if you will – closing the stomach with riveting emotional droning parabolas. Antifrost must be thanked for releasing this record; Ilios gave birth to an electroacoustic climatological masterwork.
ILIOS – Balls (No label CD)
Described as a soundtrack for sexual stimulation – the title should tell you something – and also being an installation concept by artist Poka-Yio, “Balls” comes on two CDs – 25 minutes of sound in total – lodged on a bare cardboard sheet in an ultra-limited 50-copy edition. The first part, “For a quick stimulation” is a slightly distorted drone in an electrostatic context; beautiful, if a bit short at little more than 4 minutes…The remaining 20+ minutes of the second disc, “For a prolonged stimulation”, bring us back to the exciting subterranean vibrations of “Vento elektra”: a continuous pumping of black blood, sometimes accompanied by a stinging, tinnitus-like high frequency, is sufficient to get your equilibrium lost in the deep waters of useless detail’s confrontational void.
ILIOS – Love is my motor (Antifrost)
The 2007 of Ilios starts with one of his most impenetrable ever releases, its sonic wastelands touching so deep that their uniquely gloomy atmospheres constitute the key that open doors leading to seriously affecting auricular awareness. The music is set in motion by superimpositions of unhurried parabolas and glissandos made of muted timbral exhalations, instantly throwing the listener into an unescapable state of apprehension; it sounds like a choir of shooting stars highlighting our fear of being unqualified for sustaining hard times. The third movement features an undetectable Nikos Veliotis on cello amidst intrusions and interferences that break the initial continuity, a thousand shortwave pulses lyophilized into meaningless dust. Ilios then recurs to alternating short silences and digital warp, gradually focusing his attention on the discrepancy between frequencies until a potent surge from the low region nailed me to the couch, making the whole room buzz with sympathetic resonance in one of the most impressive moments of the disc. It cuts to an apparently calmer hiss, but a deadly stinging discharge has “protect yourselves at all times” stamped all over it: it’s the noisy zenith of the album, whose final part features heavily processed adulterations of urban pandemonium, then forces us to further raise our aerials to detect the last radiations from this world of forebodings that nevertheless allures. Try to figure out the components of the last ten minutes and you’re likely to come up with a dozen answers, or plain none. This is not an easily digestible work, yet one absorbs its glacial beauty with each new listen, as Ilios creates mysteries that are better left unsolved.
ILIOS – Iyleilops / Music for dance 2001-2007 (Antifrost)
This record contains fourteen tracks constituting the soundtrack for six pieces by the Yelp Dance Company, with whom Ilios has been collaborating since 2001 according to a logic of continuous disagreement regarding many aspects of the involved processes. In their search for a connection within a common structure, Ilios and Yelp try to elaborate a series of impressions whose aspect – both in terms of visuals and frequencies – can influence the audience until their “emotional perception of the space” is altered. Compared to Ilios’ most recent work, born from unnerving visions that made for gradual developments of tensions and intensities, this music sounds obviously more fractured and fragmented, ranging from subsonic surges that, even at low volume, put my room in full rumbling mode to the ear-cleansing high frequencies of the final and longest track “In silence”, for which one wonders what kind of choreographic solution is applied in the live performance without putting the dancers in the condition of being perforated by emissions that are still hissing in my brain three hours after I finished listening to the CD. Halfway through these extremes, Ilios refuses to merely highlight the potential of a body in motion, but furnishes us with the coordinates of a sonic concept alimented by disc-skipping, sampling and white noise-ing. A sort of disjointed electro-beat that seems to describe the simultaneous, often contrasting behavioural tendencies that characterize humanity at large.
ILLUSION OF SAFETY – In opposition to our acceleration (Die Stadt)
Wonderfully packaged – following the high quality standards of this label – comes this new release by Dan Burke (somewhere along the line helped by Mark Klein, Thymme Jones and Kurt Griesch) that showcases IOS at its very best in various live and studio settings. The sound oscillates between dark ambient and musique concrete, with just a slight touch of repetitive electronics here and there, made to measure for giving some life in an otherwise cloudy, oppressive atmosphere, rarely broken by pictures that make me think to an ant-hill with all its internal rules and processions. All in all, Illusion Of Safety keep setting a brisk pace to musical excellence.
ILLUSION OF SAFETY – More violence and geography (Die Stadt)
I didn’t expect Die Stadt reissuing this but it’s great having the first IOS album available again in digital format. Originally released in 1988, “More violence” is a classic of cut and paste and the tension one breathes during listening is much amplified if using a high volume playback level. Dan Burke’s tapes, distorted guitars, anguishing use of looped voices and the general nervous feeling of the recordings give you a good idea of life troubles usually hidden behind a glossy way of life, something we occidental are WAY accustomed to by now. Compared to more recent IOS releases, the overall sound is pretty raw – sometimes reminiscent of low-budget cassette projects – but this must not detract from the historical importance of this record. Additional live material and a beautiful ghost track are welcome gifts.
IMAGHO – Someone controls electric guitar (Hitomi)
The third part of a trilogy – “Lunt” and “Baka!” being the first two – “Someone controls electric guitar” needs no more explanation than its title, as it consists of a seven-part series of manipulations of crystal-clear guitar pluckings and resonances, slightly intoxicated by a nice placement of switches, hums and buzzes constituting the real “electric body” of the sound. The whole record is built upon delayed/looped parts, partially treated by a laptop, in a gentle and very personal hommage to Fripp and Eno’s recent work (the couple is even thanked by the maker in the notes). Even if Imagho, whose real name is Jean-Louis Prades, maintains everything under a pretty reassuring transparent mantle, the music is not devoid of mysterious atmospheres and a certain dose of unquietness, which makes me want to go back and listen again as soon as the disc is over. Slowly but firmly, Hitomi is carving a niche of its own – keep your ears up.
IN CAMERA – In Camera (Some Fine Legacy)
In Camera is the duo of Christoph Heemann and Timo Van Luyck; their first release is a vinyl album in a limited edition of 500 copies, featuring the typically detailed cover artwork characterizing all of Heemann’s projects. The obscurities and the slow transformations to which the German composer grew us accustomed to are still there, nicely complemented by sparse concrete sounds (presumably by Van Luyck, a former member of Noise-Maker’s Fifes) which are just perfect for the “carpet crawling” resonance of repeated notes by an obfuscated, almost out of tune piano and the additional dampened bumps seemingly coming from the same source. The overall plumbeous atmosphere is also influenced by a barely perceptible underground activity, like if small sculptures of suspicion acquired a life of their own, following a process of separation between the detection of an impulse and its immediate analysis by the brain. This music is alluring and deceivingly complex, its presence absolutely necessary after a while.
IN CAMERA – Open air (Robot)
Christoph Heemann and Timo Van Luijk take a few sources – which remain, as always, nearly unidentifiable – and stretch them to the limit of significance, giving birth to yet another unmissable link in a chain of albums that every serious drone cultivator should treasure. The two partners also share a fondness for LPs, but the irregular clusters and subsonic jumbles characterizing this kind of offering can sometimes generate vinyl-related distortion and impurities that in my opinion overcome the beauty of a cover picture or the excitement of a limited edition artwork (I’m still praying for those Mirror CD reissues, incidentally). The static pregnancy of “Open air” is tangible throughout and, although we’re familiar with the half-caressing, half-inauspicious resonances and mythical slow crescendos of Heemann’s music, the partnership with Van Luijk brings a different kind of fruit, as the animate quality of these barely moving processions reveals an underworld of event-related modifications, thoroughly explicated by heartstopping desolate glissandos halfway through the second side of the album. The music revolves around its own centre of gravity, invading the listening space discreetly at first, then placing its mark all over the place to finally saturate the ambience with piercing waves that change according to volume and head positioning. Completists beware: the first edition contains a second disc featuring two solo compositions by the principals, one side each. Heemann’s “The tambourine people” is a splendid, ever-growing mantra in which one seems to perceive voices, strings and heaven knows what else, a sonic pathway to some sort of obscure galaxy. Van Luijk’s “10 past 9″ is another trip to the Land of Stasis, but visits more acute regions, organ and flute (?) superimpositions somehow recalling a 21st century version of Popol Vuh. Both tracks totally justify the different price tag of this issue.
IN MEDITARIUM – Mare internum (Drone)
From Ukraine, In Meditarium try to astonish the listener with perennially suspended morphing harmonies and deep emissions seemingly crossing extraterrestrial gregorian chants and rumbles from the centre of the earth. The liner notes talk about creatures in the “warm walls of mother’s womb” and that’s probably true – if that mom got some acid moments before. But make no mistake: this is an excellent product, not really breaking any new ground but overall very well conceived. Its cryptical messages are involving to the very last minute and I strongly recommend to listen to this limited edition 7-inch at medium-to-low volume for best results.
INSTINCTUAL EYE – Born in Brooklyn (Barking Hoop)
Kevin Norton tells us that in free improvisation “the tone color of the instruments is of prime importance”; this album, one of the best Barking Hoop outings, certainly confirms this. The fierce contrasts between freeform chamber music and complex atonal jazz arising from the association of Norton himself, Frode Gjerstad and Nick Stephens are enough to classify “Born in Brooklyn” as a genderless textural trip through the meanders of contemporary impromptu music. Recorded live at Barbés in Brooklyn – the percussionist’s birthplace – the CD portraits the multifaceted talents of three artists whose technical sapience is just a means to an extremely creative end. The elastic brilliance of Norton on drums and vibes launches these spontaneous compositions towards altitudes which only masters with a unique vision can embrace; Gjerstad’s enthusiastic playing on sax and clarinet is malleable and revelatory at one and the same time, while Stephens’ beautiful arco underlines the most intriguing sections, while his fingered phrasing constitutes the backbone of short bursts of total freedom. Instinctual Eye are a six-leg, one-heart creature whose language must be patiently translated in order to achieve the maximum listening pleasure.
JON IRABAGON – Jon Irabagon’s Outright! (Innova)
Alto saxophonist Jon Irabagon’s debut is a delight. Simple as that. The motives are in our face since the very beginning: great tones, sharp tunes, lots of tongue-in-cheek hints and winks, an outrageous technical grounding by the concerned musicians: Russ Johnson (trumpet), Kris Davis (piano, organ), Eivind Opsvik (acoustic bass) and Jeff Davis (drums). A quintet that’s a pleasure to hear, carrying out a fresh intermingling of jazz and related stories, spitting pieces of lungs in choral hymns, nearly mimicking Carlos Santana’s heartfelt unhurriedness, going bonkers as in the best freeform traditions. It’s difficult to wear the critic’s clothing when one puts this CD in the Discman at 8:00 AM and begins to sense the liveliness springing off each note, while the sun starts mounting and the hill in front of the train station reveals its greenest green. This is what occurred a few mornings ago to yours truly, a day that had been preceded by an almost sleepless night thus deviated on the right track. I should let you know more on the curriculum of the leader, whom the author had first encountered in the amazing “Shamokin!!!” by Moppa Elliott’s Mostly Other People Do The Killing, a reference point for an album like this. Irabagon is academically trained yet his musicianship comes from the incalculable number of live gigs that he attends in Chicago and New York, plus the myriad of experiences as a sideman in groups whose genres correspond to the whole extent of contemporary music. There’s something for most everybody here, just follow the good vibrations and you’re going to be in high spirits, at least for an abundant hour.
IRR. APP. (EXT.) – Ozeanische Gefühle (The Helen Scarsdale Agency)
Lustmord. Zoviet France. Christoph Heemann. None of the above. This is my head’s train of thoughts while trying to (stupidly) associate this creation to something I know; the fact is, Matt Waldron’s music emerges with a personality that’s strong and incomparable. His methods in “Ozeanische Gefühle” are nearer to acousmatics than to droning soundscapes: in fact, when Matt lulls you into repetition, then he adds some dirty string plucking; or, in between powerful dramatic shots of contemporary sapience, he gives you distant mantras of frogs and maybe a distorted rotation of a classical orchestra. Then again, somehow a piping choir emerges from a tense discordance of unspecified indetermination. For sure you can’t expect the obvious from Irr. App. (Ext.); his music is made of reversible directions and non-volatile substance – fragments of human dedication amidst articulated hybrids of strange distillates.
IRR. APP. (EXT.) – Drone works #10 (Twenty Hertz)
All things considered, Matt Waldron’s contribution to Twenty Hertz’s “Drone works” ongoing saga has probably to be regarded as the best until now. Picture a conglomerate of scorching vibrations coming from what sounds like bowed metals sheets and strings, whose impressive force resembles a cross of Dave Jackman/Organum’s best stuff – I’m thinking of “Birds’ wings were glued to their bodies” in particular – and a sweeter version of Tony Conrad’s aggressive violin “oms”. The piece is fantastic, a ruthless quivering surrounding our body with vehemence but also harmonically evolved, in the spirit of the “right” reiterative music of our time. Such a listening experience can seriously alter your perceptive channels and is useful to separate the drone masters from their cheap imitators. Irr. App. (Ext.) should release a boxset worth of these majestically emotional overtones; play loud.
IRR. APP. (EXT.) – Cosmic superimposition (Errata in Excelsis)
Matt Waldron took the original sources for his great “Ozeanische Gefühle” and seamed them in different ways over “a framework of five field recordings” to get a new exciting result, an album that – by using the same materials of an already wonderful release – approximates and probably increases the value of its predecessor. Amidst the frequent presence of natural and treated sounds of water, hazy landscapes of uncertainty open in front of eyes that are willing to observe the shapes of things under a different perspective. A majestic static crescendo characterizes the first section and, when that hypnotic rubbing of the skull ends, emissions between the amorphous and the synthetic surround us paralleled by series of percussive manifestations, irregular yet constant. After a while, something like a giant squeezebox puffs and huffs fetid air upon scarcely responsive bodies. At times the music is almost visible, appearing as an unsolvable puzzle, its pieces scattered by the wind whenever we near completion. The picture is one of a bow-legged entity whose difficult walk towards the light of the day is rendered impossible by the excessive intertwining of bushes and branches. Birds watch and tweet the solution, which nevertheless remains a mystery for wingless beings. Another intriguing specimen of sonic abstract expressionism by Irr. App. (Ext.) containing layers of new revelations for our next day’s life divided with cheap-minded characters. Revelations that, as usual, we will do well to keep for ourselves.
Harry Miller’s ISIPINGO – Which way now (Cuneiform)
One can only be thankful to Steven Feigenbaum, who keeps retrieving fantastic archival recordings – first two CDs by Chris Mc Gregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, now this – of those fringes of English jazz that could have been lost in the darkest oblivion while instead were formed by the most active agitators of a scene that’s always been a true breeding ground for artists gifted with vision, sensibility and painful love for music. Harry Miller was a great, if undersung, bass player and a talented composer and band leader, besides being the co-founder of the famous Ogun label; this live recording captures his group Isipingo – the name was a homage to a holiday location which Miller and his wife Hazel remembered fondly – in a 1975 concert at the Post-Aula in Bremen, Germany. The band is formed by Miller (bass), Nick Evans (trombone), Mongezi Feza (trumpet) Louis Moholo (drums), Mike Osborne (alto sax) and Keith Tippett (piano). Four tracks, all around the 20 minute mark except the last one who lasts about 14, show what kind of emancipation and relentless quest for freedom a group of like-minded musicians can aspire to, even in a context where the compositions are preconceived and written by a single entity. The thematic excursions are magnificently exposed by Feza, Osborne and Evans over the rock-solid foundation built by Miller and Moholo, with Tippett switching between the roles of harmonic coordinator and second-line soloist, his piano work always a reference point to look at in this perfect six-part interplay. The solos are a thing of beauty: starting from a regular melody, a mourning phrase or a raging cry, all the involved parties take the whole content of their soul out of their bodies, remaining totally focused even in the most intense moments, never losing their way to the functioning of the piece. The music follows the same “theme-solos-theme-finale” path in every track, and each time the applause at the end is warm and convinced. High-calibre material, which we’re lucky to be able to enjoy. One of the best recent Cuneiform releases and an absolute must for the connoisseurs, this CD should be required in every music college.
ISKRA 1903 – Chapter two: 1981-3 (Emanem)
This triple CD collection features five live sets from 1983 and one from 1981, concerts that – luckily for us – Philipp Wachsmann recorded and kept in good shape, so that we can now appreciate what Martin Davidson calls “a wealth of very fine music”. This lineup of Iskra existed from 1977 to 1995 and comprised the “leader” Paul Rutherford on trombone, the above mentioned Wachsmann on violin and Barry Guy on double bass, all three utilizing custom-made electronic devices extensively; Evan Parker appears on tenor sax in the final track “Epis”, contributing with some of his mercurial lines to an already extremely mottled scenario. I listened to this music repeatedly for days, in every possible situation: the silence of a room, by headphones in front of a muted TV, by walkman on a train, while reading, mixing it with the wind, the birds, the faraway noises. Each of these settings seemed to work, a sure sign of the sonic value produced by these creative visionaries. What transpires from every performance is a high-class musicianship alimented by many flights of fancy which allow the trio to navigate waters whose XX-century chamber music undercurrents are evident at various times, all the while maintaining a peripheral far-sightedness on the borders of relevance. In some of the sections the music seems to come from another era, like opening the door of a room whose content is connected to a forgotten past; those are the instances in which the musicians retrieve simulacra of melody by crumbling the involuntary counterpoints raised by their exchanges into small particles of melancholia, starting a phrase only to shut it off when realizing that the heart starts warming up. In more ways than one, the use of electronics adds doses of “calm urgency”, transforming the instrumental timbres just that necessary bit for the flanged harmonics and ring-modulated arcoing to fuse in a collective voice that somehow responds to the outside world’s calls with unpredictable yet alluring affinities. In other occasions, everything almost stops and only a minimal hum – like an organic standby – remains, as Iskra look over this condition with controlled apprehension in order not to let that flickering flame extinguish in silence. When the fire is rekindled, we’re ready to start again, as always with no chance to file this fabulous music in stupid boxes labeled “time”, “place” or “genre”.
ISOLDE – You’re alone in red riding picture (Penny Poppet)
How can one talk about something that lasts 10 minutes, contains sounds that put in connection with a superior scheme of things and fades away during the climax of that very connection, without sounding ridiculous? Andrew Chalk and Robin Barnes don’t exactly “play” things; they suggest. Theirs is not music, but a miniature reproduction of that complex phenomenon – the “sunset of the soul” – that placed a hundred knives into our heart during many and one childhood afternoons. We were bent over our books, then suddenly captured by a glimpse of awareness; it could have been a voice, the smell of mum’s flowers on the balcony, the bee that buzzed around them. It could have been an old radio program, or the terrible feeling of being unprepared for the maths test the day after. Or the fear of entering again those depths that had no rational explanation, and when you only thought of speaking about them to some of your friends… forget about it. You can’t describe the sounds of your growth. But Isolde – in ten minutes – have managed to do it. I’m still wondering how they knew. “Infinite repeat” is not just a necessary button this time: it’s a condition of the mind, the loop that keeps us alive – at least for a little longer than today.
ISOLDE – On waving and drowning (Penny Poppet)
Isolde is the duo of Andrew Chalk and Robin Barnes, this being their first full-length release after a cassette and a 3-inch CD. The connections deployed in “On waving and drowning” are pretty much the same of Chalk’s productions under his own name, but with a different kind of tension, possibly deriving from the use of urban sources that get mixed with the “regular” sounds – if this adjective has still a value in music like this. The first section is a calm introduction of sorts, rarefied plucked strings (…piano notes?) as usual immersed in a thick fog with distant surrounding whispers and temporally undetermined recollections. During the second movement the music reaches an intense climax, as the sonic mass grows into an overwhelming scary clangour that nevertheless maintains a mantric relevance – think Mirror’s crescendos bathed in post-industrial enigmatic illness. The third and final part is the best, with deep drones similar to bombers in flight taking centre stage, putting our wholeness in a vibrational catharsis, transforming our body into an aerial through which the sounds of life are amplified and reproduced in different guises. Once again, we find ourselves in the condition of having to re-evaluate our lists of priorities according to a temporary mental state. On top of all this, Isolde’s deeply meaningful emanations are protected by a gatefold cover featuring a splendid artwork. Not to be missed.
IST – Lodi (Confront)
Rhodri Davies (harp), Simon H.Fell (double bass) and Mark Wastell (violoncello) recorded this music in 2002 at the Tempio Civico dell’Incoronata in Lodi, Italy. At the outset there’s still something from the outside world creeping in: a bell tower, voices of toddlers. The musicians taste the air with a few touches. Then, an almost unnatural hush fades in and a slow dance comprising explorations of the most obscure innards of interplay begins. Davies conjures up intramural reminiscences and ghosts, alternating acrid squeals and hollow-voiced bumps that are perfectly related to the venue’s natural reverberation. A game of percussive call-and-response is then initiated, with Wastell and Fell introducing their own voices via tentative inquiries first, then through mute scrapings that raise questions destined to remain in some sort of pleasing limbo, before one realizes they were answers instead. One of the most interesting effects of this process is the state of alertness it generates, which is also reflected by a tangible concentration both among the artists and by the audience. Beginning the second movement, an impressive example of control in which only feeble faraway harmonics and laconic orchestrations of zinging strings are heard, we cuddle an illusion of definitive return to silence but are soon deluded by the most vibrant series of intersecting discharges, complete with scientifically placed wooden thuds and droning jolts, unfortunately too short to be adequately enjoyed. We’re also treated with harshly shrieking, short-length ostinatos intoducing us to passages of subsonic grumble that would love to be turned into a gorgeous lyrical swan; but it’s too late, as a thick mist of doubt comes right back to suffocate everything, a final conversation of clicking and ticking imagery closing the show, final silence broken by a hearty, well deserved applause.
I TRENI INERTI – Ura (Creative Sources)
A pair of trumpets – Matt Davis and Ruth Barberàn – plus Alfredo Costa Monteiro on accordion: this is “I treni inerti”, italian translation of “Inert trains” and, of course, a palindrome name for the trio. Here, nothing can be judged for its appearance, for the musicians seem intent to analyze the organic results of their alchemy through (and around) their body more than any kind of tonal/harmonic context: just think that the first “real”, long note coming out of your speakers is after about 10 minutes from the CD’s start. The whole concept is based on what you’d call the “new silence” current of improvisation: a lot of space, rare moments in which a form or a line seems to take over, only to disappear in the no man’s land of forgotten memories. This is a record that can be enjoyed at medium volume, mixing it with your ordinary everyday activities; otherwise, you should seat in front of this creature in utter silence, try to find an impossible definition for it.
I TRENI INERTI – Aérea (Creative Sources)
While the first movement of “Aérea” shows the most “opulent” aspect of Ruth Barberan and Alfredo Costa Monteiro, who blow into trumpet and accordion with all their force like if they had to deliver themselves from years of frustrating muteness, the remaining parts are more typical of these artists’ “post-timbral” harshness and irony. Ruth’s initial sequences of more polite notes soon become a skating figure rotating all over your teeth, her cynical games of air and tongue assuming the role of a pulmonary power plant emitting shrieks and metallic fury. Alfredo approaches his accordion with a bright sense of investigation, generating layer upon layer of disembodied harmonics that are washed away by the tides of a dirty insistency, his dissonant potential at times exquisitely refined and detailed but more often tending to a barely controlled pressure. The couple is venomous – but this music is delicious.
ITTO – Sound on an empty road (Elvis Coffee)
Another interesting outing from this Welsh label, which releases very good music in limited editions charging only the postage fee, “Sound on an empty road” was assembled by Ian Holloway (Psychic Space Invasion) and Neil Rowling. Indeed everything seems to begin with muffled car sounds, but very soon those humming, murmuring noises are submerged by processed ambiences, infinite low frequencies (I wouldn’t be surprised if they were treated motor sounds too) and harsher timbres, similar to the continuous whirr of high-tension lines. The scene changes several times in the 38+ minutes of the piece; one remains puzzled in front of this gloomy atmosphere, yet there are also more piercing emissions that sound like held feedback and – when less expected – a very slow hint of “melody”, possibly coming from a keyboard. The arc of this soundscape is pretty smooth, the whole remaining unpretentious and very pleasing in its pretty sad character. Nice alternative ambient with (very few) touches of Zoviet France, Lull and the most obscure Roedelius, just to give you some vague reference point. Definitely praiseworthy stuff. And, should you want to check the good level of ECR’s productions, get a copy of their very nice compilation “The eternal present”, where seven different artists unveil their graces guaranteeing many nice moments of bliss and fun.
IAN-M. IVERSEN – 1.05 drone (Triple Bath)
The title is a little misleading, as Iversen’s single track on this CDR is not a real “drone” – although it rumbles quite deeply in several occasions – but rather sounds like a bulletin from a dark hole: a continuous, powerful vortex of whirling insufflations and wooshing noise made of various sources, all camouflaged into a “educately roaring” mass (imagine a strong wind over a microphone’s capsule rendered more exciting through competent studio treatment) that constantly charges and retreats until its presence is accepted and, in a way, welcomed. Nothing exactly groundbreaking, but the piece can easily defend itself in the arena of space and post-ambient music, which is growing into an increasingly stressing zone to live in, given the impossibility of a careful evaluation of the huge quantity of home projects released these days. Iversen sounds a little more “professional”, though, and its “Drone” caught me in a moment of total relax, generating an interesting sonic domain through which I closed my eyes and abandoned myself, only to be brought back to my senses at the end by a heavier, more (in)tense radiation. It can stay with me.
I:WOUND – Punish the guilty (The Locus of Assemblage)
The way we perceive sound geography can depend on many factors, being them a recollection of visited places, a fantasy journey or the sheer appreciation of a work made by other visitors; in that sense, I:Wound’s double CD is one of the best collages of local recordings and electronic splicing that I can name right now. The whole set revolves around loops and cut’n'paste memories of Indian sources, from radio and public gathering noise to praying chants and children playing, all slightly dipped in halos of ambience that modify timbral characters just that necessary bit to transform the thing in a magic layering of Fourth World sonic circumstances. Auto horns, tablas and sitars, reels of concrete sounds and a recurring “I love my India” fragment mesh in a truly beautiful aural documentary. Barely noticeable, droning of underneath frequencies make their presence felt here and there, amidst people’s clamour and variegated emissions, to give the album a well earned touch of seriousness. I don’t hesitate in declaring “Punish the guilty” as an acousmatic low budget gem; get it while it lasts.
I:WOUND – Quit India (Absurd)
I:Wound epitomizes that kind of sound art which, in theory, everyone could perform with the few means at their disposal (the initiator defines it “riotambient and soundscapes using manipulated field recordings”). Then you start listening with the due attention and realize that what’s caught on tape is more an intimate essence of well determined concepts than what we usually call “music”. Naturally, Indian life is one of the main interests in this artist’s work, this CD EP being another highly charged cheap documentary that scrapes the sonic ground under poor people’s feet in a very distant overcrowded area. Radio and television are mixed with traditional melodies, while children scream and cry; political speech is used as a sort of official introduction to this intriguing underworld. The whole is treated with low budget yet effective processing, thus every voice and sound degenerates into an unfamiliar, metallic aura of promiscuity.
EDORTA IZARZUGAZA – Autoerregistroa (Hamaika)
This is the first solo outing by Izarzugaza, who had previously participated in the Antifrost compilation of Basque artists “Euskal Interpretatzaile Berriak I”. As a debut album it’s a seducing artefact, the obsessive inquirer who lives within my “analyzing self” feeling the urge of playing it repeatedly to better understand its complexion. The protagonist utilizes voice, amplifiers, software and sometimes guitars to concoct long improvisations where the colours remain pretty basic, recalling in this very occasion several terms of comparison, from Jason Kahn’s most subdued cymbal work to the menacing soundscapes of KTL. Tranquillity is not an option, though. In fact, the man brushes the static development of his creature with anything that might be prominent in a mix – saturated discharges, treated vocals, acrid humming – so that either we’re awaken from any mental loop we could fall in, or introduced to hypnotic circles after having been welcomed by violent dynamic changes. In a way or another, it works well. Every once in a while, a “simple” appearance falls into the cauldron – a minimal guitar arpeggio in “Onarpen”, peculiar alien lullabies ending both “Bide Gurutzea” and the CD – but the general sense is one of thrumming power ready to explode, often influencing the listeners’ expectations by wrapping them with a mantle of low frequencies that, for a change, do not sound cheaply arranged and hastily thrown on disc. A release that would deserve a wider distribution, quite good indeed.
DAVID JACKMAN – Edge of nothing (Die Stadt)
Like it or not, Jackman’s uncompromising stance is one of the most admirable today and it clearly reflects in his music, which keeps being released in a plurality of formats. In this 10 inch we’re gifted with the reissue of a 1983 track – here presented in two versions – originally released in the “Elephant table album” compilation. “Edge of nothing” is classic Jackman, a cauldron of tuned metals, scorching feedback, deranged resonances and an absolutely free approach. Each piece by the Organum deus ex machina, even in short time spans, is a shocking delivery of sonic surcharge which, at high volume, speaks with more eloquence than anything else. These recordings literally sneer at us, raising a cloud of smoke behind which long moments of violent beauty can be repeatedly tasted. We surely need more than only 12 minutes, anyway!
VIKKI JACKMAN – Of beauty reminiscing (Faraway Press)
Vikki Jackman (no relation to David of Organum fame) is the pianist that we first met in Andrew Chalk’s “Goldfall”, her impalpable chords and notes a preponderant element of that delicate music. Now Faraway Press issues her solo debut, which comes in a stunningly beautiful sleeve, a time-consumed photo in which little Vikki is portrayed near a snowman. One can’t escape memory, which is often all that remains after a good portion of life has passed by without letting us have a clue of what it’s all about. A piano that sounds slightly out of tune could be a symbolic homage to remembrances that fade away; Jackman approaches the keyboard with the same unconscious wonder of that tiny lady discovering music for the first time, letting one note, two or more tones spread their cloaked reverberation in mysterious clouds and suspended waves. Differently from the above mentioned “Goldfall”, in which the instrument’s voice was more or less unrecognizable, “Of beauty reminiscing” uses both aspects – the attack and decay of the note, the superimposition of different aural ripples – to evoke a sense of void that no future project or achievement can really completely dissipate. That void must remain, though – because it’s by filling it that our existence, in a way, would stop suggesting those meanings that we just guess without really understanding, and that constitute the fuel to keep us going.
JAMES CHOICE ORCHESTRA – Live at Moers (Moers Music)
The James Choice Orchestra is a collective of composers and improvisers whose “leaders” are Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Frank Gratkowski, Matthias Schubert and Norbert Stein, each represented here by a piece. Its main scope is pursuing a blend of music which exploits aleatory constituents, most of them dictated by the musicians themselves who – given a set of instructions – move smartly amidst improvisation and pre-determined scores, in a way orientating the original ideas towards (potentially) unpredictable twists and turns. Among the performers, luminaries such as Melvyn Poore, Scott Fields, Thomas Lehn, Philip Zoubek are found. Everything perfect, then? Well, not completely. The positives: instrumental prowess all over the place, scintillating timbres, blocks of extremely functional movements of the parts shifting the weight of the composition in a systematic search for dynamic change. The other side of the coin is that this kind of artistic conception seems to be born with an inner tendency to adhere to certain theatrical manifestations that sometimes appear pretty dated, with particular reference to female vocalism (sorry, one of my limits is that I always hated Cathy Berberian-like burlesque soprano virtuosity, including shrieks, laughs and the likes, and even when the male participants join in, it just recalls a pale imitation of Frank Zappa’s “200 Motels”). That said, the music still possesses lots of different qualities, needing attentive scrutiny as any difficult orchestral proposition would. Still, three consecutive listens of this complex performance (which, furthermore, lasts almost 80 minutes – that doesn’t help) didn’t deliver me from a few residual doubts. Translation: an interesting release, but several prominent branches needed to be pruned.
JASCH – Shimmer (Doc)
From a Swiss artist comes this digital pastiche that touches many points hovering around with no chance of decisive definition. “Shimmer” is variegated and alluring; its timbral fluctuations remind of minimalism, tape composition a la William Basinski, impressionistic acousmatics. Jasch works without presumption, exploring concepts, trying to give cohesion to a mass of potentially straggling sounds; he certainly succeeds through surprising assignments and surefooted perspectives. Mostly made of malleable materials, this record keeps your interest level quite high and it’s surely not likely to be used as background music.
JASPER LEYLAND – Margin (Stray Dog Army)
From Norwich, England comes Jonathan Brewster with a surprisingly effective disc under the Jasper Leyland moniker. With just a few means and rather intelligent compositional skills, “Margin” manages to outshine many lavishly produced albums where microsounds often seem to have been deployed by microbrains. Brewster assembled various instruments (especially guitars, gently strummed and/or looped in exquisite fashion) and a little bit of field recordings and electronics to release a statement which is concise and straight to the point, as the five tracks comprised by this CD are oriented to a heartwarming – at times delightful – organic minimalism that finds its best expression in the cinematic “Riseholme” and in the truly gorgeous resonant waves of the final “Prospect”. To add another compliment, this is a rare case of music that works well in every setting: I tried it by headphones first, discovering a whole subterranean activity of hisses, clicks and cicadas accompanying the basic constructions of the tracks; then I played “Margin” at low volume in my room, which almost instantly returned the favour with warm reverberations and almost joyful contributions from those whitewashed walls that usually accept much worse offences from yours truly; but they looked even brighter this time.
JASPER LEYLAND – Field stone (Benbecula)
The process according to which Jonathan Brewster defines the gently hypnotic frames that surround the most beautiful moments of “Fieldstone” is not really new, but the music sounds fresh and captivating throughout. The main sources are Brewster’s acoustic guitars, whose sparkling harmonics and acute timbral refractions are put in evidence through a careful work of layering and cut’n'paste. Yet there is no trace of techno here; picture instead a heartwarming compound of Eno, Darren Tate, Fennesz and Christopher Willits with some environmental additions – water, birds – every once in a while. During “Wheatear” I was also somehow reminded of one of the few Italian albums that I still like, namely Pepe Maina’s “Il canto dell’arpa e del flauto” (look for it!); this piece is a mono-chordal elegy whose bucolic serenity is very welcome when all kinds of tension run free through your life. Jasper Leyland exploits both the melodic and harmonic properties of his instruments: decomposed arpeggios and lightly touched chordal shapes go hand in hand with elongated loops, everything remaining for the large part in the realm of consonant accuracy. Not an ounce of pretentiousness in sight. A well assembled album that smothers many diversities by fusing them into a cohesive unit, perfectly symbolized by the spellbinding, dream-like title track that closes the CD.
JDG – Living underground (Cohort)
JDG stands for John D. Gore, alias the man in charge of this and other fine labels active in the lands of low-profile-good-quality abstract music and a very prolific artist under various monikers (for example, Kirchenkampf). In “Living underground”, Gore used as exclusive source material Robert Carlberg’s field recordings from the “Anode Urban Soundscape Series”; it goes without saying that the idea of vast metropolitan areas as seen (and heard) from long distances is what defines the “discouraging beauty” of this opus, whose platform is the unpromising whooshing that the compositional preference inevitably determines. We manage to distinguish engines, metallic clangours, even birds, sirens or whatever the mind suggests it’s there (and usually is) but, by and large, the feel is one of a massive droning undercurrent. It doesn’t take an eternity for the sounds to establish their authority on the nerves, in that peculiarly habitual occurrence according to which an accumulation of noise gets nearer to the beneficial effects of silence almost more successfully than a semi-quiet environment. The same applies here, an entrancing fusion of nihilism and beatitude that works wonders when echoing in your own setting.
LAURENT JEANNEAU / KING GONG – Soundscape China (KwanYin)
Both artists were unfamiliar to this reviewer before playing the disc, but discovering people able to organize electroacoustic hotchpotches at such a level of dexterity and evocativeness is always a great delight. Coming in a light paper pink sleeve, complete with black and white unexplained photographs, this album was efficiently assembled by juxtaposing “original field recordings, ethnic minorities of Yunnan, TV, Chinese scratched CDs” and subjecting the whole to an all-inclusive studio enhancement. For obvious reasons (the most evident being my total ignorance of the local idiom) this record must be enjoyed as pure sonic substance on this side, and guess what – it feels gorgeous. It’s unbelievable how a culture perceived as extraneous can reveal musically attractive aspects down to its everyday components: the rhythmic scansion of what sounds like teachers instructing alumni in gym exercises becomes a cavernous pulse, folk tunes underlined by electronic malformations morph into chants of achingly beautiful charm, children’s voices become disfigured amidst violin lines that wouldn’t be out of context in Western improvisation. As usual, all it takes is a pair of open ears and a clear mind: then you start seeing what those different permutations yield in terms of exquisite textural polytheism. Minimalism on broken discs? We even get that – and finely working, too. The more the time slips away, the heavier one gets addicted. Good stuff, highly recommended to the audience sector whose taste ranges from plunderphonics to modified environments – and maybe also to the ones who love satellite-zapping on exotic channels at late night.
JEBUS – The ants are eating my head (Elvis Coffee)
Jebus is made by members of Psychic Space Invasion, Green End Listening Station and Directive 4. This record is the outcome of a 6-hour session where the musicians exchanged roles amidst an array of instruments including guitars, samplers and theremin bathed in effects and assorted “electrical gadgetry”. Three long improvised tracks containing noise, drones and surprises in large doses; these psychedelic pastiches of incorporeal abrasions have their own character, yet they function best as filling material for your head to forget about life’s troubles. Nevertheless, the partially menacing environment surrounding the atmosphere is enough to keep an eye open, even when concentration starts dwindling. Like all Elvis Coffee releases, this CD is sold at postage cost only. What a class!
PHILIP JECK – Sand (Touch)
The art of suggestion via the manipulation of old vinyl records was not born yesterday, and there is not much that a performer can do to add or subtract meanings to objects that seem to exist exactly for the purpose of fixing an era in some sort of artificial mental environment that only our own personality will determine. Together with Janek Schaefer (my personal favourite in this field, I must admit), Philip Jeck has been active for many years now trying to convey the spirits of a past that might still be useful as far as introspection and self-analysis are concerned. “Sand” is a selection of live recordings from Holland and England (2006-7) which the composer re-edited in a consistent whole this year. During the concerts, Jeck utilized Fidelity record players, Casio SK keyboards, a Behringer mixer and a Sony minidisc. As it usually happens with this kind of composition, repetition and blurred edges are the main constituents of a series of trance-inducing soundscapes whose complexion is spoiled by the scars of distortion and crackle, which PJ exploits as one of the numerous shades to maintain the half-nostalgic, half-scary area that this music generates. Heavenliness is not allowed: we’re talking about the short-lived sensations that one experiences while wandering through the “zone”, that jumble of incomprehensible joy of existing and fear of the future, the unrecognized fuel allowing the so-called sentient beings to go on in their clueless quest towards a non-existent completion, an afterwards where the “after” is missing.
GEIR JENSSEN – Cho Oyu 8201m (Touch)
In 2001, Geir Jenssen (aka Biosphere) travelled to Tibet with the aim of climbing the Cho Oyu mountain – sixth highest top of the world – armed with minidisc, microphone, shortwave radio and photographic equipment. Jenssen’s trip is now documented by the diary that he wrote during the climb – which is transcribed in the CD booklet and, with additional photos, in his website biosphere.no – and by the twelve tracks of this splendid CD, one of those items that, when received in a certain frame of mind, make me feel literally inadequate and – in this particular case – full with admiration for people like Jenssen, who endure huge efforts to fulfil their quest for something that no word can define correctly. The sounds of “Cho Oyu” are radiant in their simplicity, presenting us with lots of suggestive views of the Tibetan environment while working effectively as a spirit-heightening background. A herd of yaks is led by the shepherds with melodic whistling, eliciting a heartwarming sense of purity; shortwave interferences of an airplane’s staff communicating with ground control, casually recorded at night by Jenssen while he was at 6400m, remind us how lonely we can be – wherever we are. The wind is omnipresent: one can feel the limbs freezing even while sitting on the couch. When the raw materials get treated, the magic springs out in large quantities, like in the fantastic loop of Tibetan music in “Jobo Rabzang”, which is as good as any Jon Hassell masterpiece. “Cho Oyu” is deeply significant in every aspect, uncovering our most hidden sense of non-belonging and subjecting it to the universal laws, to see if there is still a chance of avoiding everyday’s useless gestures and comments. Jenssen’s aural and written narrative are straightforwardly efficient: I found myself reading the text, surrounded by these sounds and voices both at late night and very early morning, trying to adapt my imagination to a similar ordeal, something that I’m almost sure I won’t be able to experience in my life. Thanks to Geir Jenssen’s profoundness, I can at least feel it a little nearer. It’s not enough, though.
JETZMANN – Hölderlin: Unter die Deutschen (AIC)
This is a fine mini-CD lasting only 16 minutes by an artist who was totally extraneous to my acquaintances until this evening. Two tracks are featured: in the first, an extract of “Hyperion” by Friedrich Hölderlin is read by Gerhard Fiedler upon a string of rather polished nonfigurative electronic symptoms and microsounds. I don’t comprehend German, therefore applied a standard tactic, that is to say considering the voice as a further instrument. This made me very relaxed, almost to the point of sleep given the late hour after a hard day; it was just like listening to a reverse-tape cultural debate on a badly tuned radio. The second and shorter segment contains numerous elements of asymmetrical abstractness, uneven gases and intoxicating drone vapors smelling of the smoke of harmonic waste materials burned on the dark side of electronica. Good stuff.
JGRZINICH – Insular regions (Sirr)
It’s 6:30 in the morning while I’m listening to one of those handiworks designed to modulate your living smoothness, channelling unfinished thoughts and gruelling grief into a stream of healing vibrations. Having captured all sounds in Mooste (Estonia) and reworked the sources in the studio, John Grzinich shows to the dead-end amateurs of this genre how a drone based record should be done: the recurring sound waves move like in a slow turnstile, setting the field for a prodigious recycling of self-regenerating hidden fears; the environmental echoes, coming out sparsely throughout the two long tracks, expand the dimension of your mental room, which gets ready to accept new forms of aural intercourse. Although it’s pretty much a gradual revelation process, “Insular regions” rouses the awareness of the receivers, becoming part of that moment of their life without imposition, just seducing the nerves until it’s a necessary presence.
JGRZINICH – Rudiment of two (Edition Sonoro)
The materialization of new forms of aural beauty through means of expression that many artists have already exploited, often abusing of them – not a rare occurrence in this field – is what John Grzinich achieves in most everything he releases, “Rudiment of two” being another brilliant outing that celebrates the wedding between processed acoustic sources and massive effects on the receivers. Three tracks, whose length ranges from 11 to 30 minutes, show what Grzinich is capable of doing through a careful selection of frequencies extracted from sounds that he captured in Estonia, Italy, Portugal and Japan, nuances that he subsequently proceeded to edit in his studio. The longest piece “Bounds and magnitudes” is also the most emotionally charged, a steady growth of wavering resonances acting as a memory generator for the brain, which treats these images as backward photographs of our self-doubt while furnishing us with the necessary nervous strength to accept any consequence deriving from indecision. “Stimulus and resolve” is slightly more active-listening oriented, its fixed background flow interspersed with metallic intrusions, gamelan-like patterns and sudden dynamic changes. “Pebble and star” raises clouds of upper partial-derived timbral ambiguities and fuses them in a slow underground pulse, linking the American’s sound with unfathomable realities that still border with the “industrial” in terms of sonority. Yet, just like willing to add a dose of security to the overall feel, Grzinich makes use of water sounds throughout; one of the purest elements (despite the modifications) is perceived amidst complex interchanges between the being and the space surrounding it, put in vibration through mechanisms that one can only guess but never really grasp. Here lies this music’s most intriguing aspect, which also highlights its composer’s talent.
JOÃO PAULO – Memorias de quem (Clean Feed)
João Paulo Esteves Da Silva is a pianist, composer and improviser who someone associates to Keith Jarrett. Sincerely, I don’t understand the reason of this comparison, given that I perceive his music as much more genuine, at least in regard to the current state of things. If releasing a set for solo piano is enough to be compared to Jarrett, there are still many different ways to touch the audience’s sensibility; this man explores most of them. Academically trained, he discarded an obvious predestination to the classical course to embrace jazz; but a jazz album this ain’t. Over the course of nine pieces, João Paulo shows his personal view of romanticism and, in a way, tradition through his splendid technique, which he always puts at the service of a well rooted spiritual profoundness; case in point is the adaptation of popular themes that he performs, an example being the heartbreaking “Durme”, a stark contrast with the sterile exercises of many so called virtuosos that have me snoring after five minutes. But wait – maybe you also want to hear some serious digital juggling. No problem: “O incêndio” and “Fantasmas” contain enough zigzagging counter-parallelisms to convince even the most skeptical sentimentalist-buster that the guy is also damn good in treating the ears to bittersweet harmonic candies coated with non-impossible dissonance. Both here and in the title track – enriched by its originator’s chanting – a light went on in my mind, making me ponder about the more obscure work by Egberto Gismonti, certainly a more plausible choice to depict similarities in styles that, in any case, remain completely independent. Together with Bernardo Sassetti, João Paulo represents the most fulgid example of pianism from Portugal, music that doesn’t need explanations or clarifications to be enjoyed in all its delicate, melancholic grace.
TOM JOHNSON – Rational melodies/Bedtime stories (Ants)
According to Tom Johnson, music already exists, it’s just a matter of finding and organizing it. Yet, affirmations like this are better supported by this composer’s most “extremely mathematical” works, notably the much hated (not by me) “The chord catalogue”, of which various dissonant chord sequences can be hard to swallow for regular “leisure time” listeners (and a lot of reviewers, too). Instead, both “Rational melodies” and “Bedtime stories”- here splendidly played and narrated by clarinettist Roger Heaton – are a tad more accessible, mainly due to the monodic character of their score and their ever-perceptible irony, which transforms even the less “cantabile” segments in something nearer to a children lullaby than to a minimalist configuration. Heaton’s fabulous tone endows this music with a light transparence, corroborated by the short duration of the large part of these, er, songs. A good method to enjoy this CD (although it probably doesn’t make any sense if we had to respect Johnson’s compositional rigour) is listening to it in “random” mode, thus shaking all the ingredients for an even more palatable, all-mixed-up version. Compared to the previous release by Tom Johnson on the same label, the not unforgettable “Organ and silence”, this album ascends several steps.
TOM JOHNSON – Symmetries (Karnatic Lab)
“Symmetries” is a cycle of 49 short pieces for four-hand piano, here played by Amsterdam-based Dante Oei and Samuel Vriezen, that translates into music a series of “visual arrangements” (check the CD leaflet) originated at the beginning of the 80′s with Stephen Dydo’s music typewriter. As Johnson correctly points out in the liners, there are a few differences in the visual and aural perceptions, in that “sometimes rhythms were much easier to hear than to see”. What transpires to these ears is an intriguing, almost perplexing study on tangential resonance, as the cross-pollination of simultaneous figurations, parallel inversions and at times unpredictable correlations remain as “Johnson” as ever, geometries in the rarefied air of an inflexible logic. Yet there are at least three resemblances that I came across in my mind during the playback, their names being Satie, Feldman and Stravinsky. Don’t ask me why, it’s just how these fascinating counterpoints behave, like if those artists’ spirit had silently guided the composer’s hands while he was typing the notes on paper, spraying the mathematic aspect of “Symmetries” with a luminescent powder, an aura of past remembrance that gives this work an additional dose of charm, transforming it in one of the best things that Johnson has ever published. It’s that good.
MIKE JOHNSTON / MIKE GILMORE / MIKE KHOURY / KIRK LUCAS – The hidden (Triple Bath)
“The hidden” is the first release by a quartet of improvising artists coming from the Michigan improvised-jazz scene. The instrumentation is divided as follows: Johnston on bass, shenhai and wooden flutes, Gilmore on vibes, marimba, saz, cheng, percussion, Khoury on violin and Lucas on cello. Nine tracks who mix Eastern traditional influences in conjunction with the contributors’ differentiated backgrounds yet, unquestionably, appear like an evolved “popular chamber music” spiced with intercontinental elements, definitely better than the bells and whistles which many so called multiethnic collectives show nowadays. The majority of the pieces moves quite deliberately, no stress or hurrying up, everybody (including the listeners) free to choose a line to follow or a couple of details to observe, as everything remains clearly articulated and extremely comprehensible throughout, the interlocking fragments generated by the most dissonant melodic factors as well. Gilmore’s vibraphone in combination with Johnston’s mysterious bass figures in “Prayer for Maury Coles” might recall a variation on Gary Burton’s work with Astor Piazzolla, and the subsequent “Hidden 10” is a gratifying example of virtuoso playing in a pseudo-esoteric context by all the participants. “Sweet Saba interlude” is a magnificent slow track where the parts sound all but scored such is the perfect interaction among the players, while “Orient” is a ritualistic meditation halfway through traditional and contemporary raga. Not really a groundbreaking effort but very well crafted and played, worth of attention especially in virtue of its limited availability (96 copies).
DANIEL JONES / DAVID PAPAPOSTOLOU – Leaving room (Adjacent)
In the barbed-wired pastures of what we used to identify as “reductionism”, coming out with something sounding fresh beyond doubt has by now become next to unfeasible. Yet this production by Daniel Jones and David Papapostolou is brilliant under any aspect, a sense of charily conceived composition demonstrated across circa 42 minutes of rather inscrutable improvisation. Jones, who performs on turntables, dulcimer and acoustic guitar, is the “warm” side of the duo: he plays sparsely, letting each gesture weigh conspicuously in the recurring frames of stillness that the music frequently proposes. The combination of straightforward thud ‘n’ pluck and unkind string resonance (frequently bordering on saturation-filled neighbourhoods) which forms the basis of his vocabulary is balanced by a sensitively deployed arrangement of different varieties of held tones, often “just” piercing, in some instance even nerve-twitching. Papapostolou utilizes a computer with pickup and the feedback of a mixing desk to generate abrupt stabs of unsympathetic thickness and protracted segments of buzzing enchantment, quite distant from conventionally intended “Nakamura purposes” and, exactly for this reason, endowed with a distinctive, enticing trait causing an immediate acceptance of the conveyed message. Wobbly pulses and subsonic grumbles are augmented by dazzling halos generated by rarely materializing “regular” harmonic waves, single touches of stringed wealth vanishing in the land of hum and hiss, our concentration remaining indefatigably acute after several increasingly rigorous listens. Outstanding stuff.
MATHIAS JOSEFSON – Suihkulähde (Isoramara)
Probably better known under the Moljebka Pvlse nom d’art, in this occasion Mathias Josefson comes back with an album bearing his true identity, a vinyl LP whose primary quality is its Spartan sonic (and visual) outlook. Black and white cover with no notes, an exclusive source: a nondescript yet functional “found sound” which, once set in continuous motion with a few initial bounces and plucks, causes a hypnotic cross of buzz and hum that lasts the course of an entire side. In the first, the vibration is left untouched and unprocessed, assuming after a handful of minutes the semblance of an electric Om, the kind of situation in which one is able to disconnect mental links while staring at an undefined spot on the wall – or out of the window – without realizing that time is inexorably flowing. The second version is a remix of the basic track with a dose of studio treatment, and it’s possibly even more gratifying from the point of view of instant aural enjoyment, the whole approaching the obscure crosscurrents where Josefson is used to swim in his other projects. Essentially, the record is all here. It is one of those cases in which we must decide a stance, either appreciating or ignoring the value (real or presumed) of a single idea. Given the effect on the psyche of long segments of this piece, I believe that the release works quite well in a classic “less is more” scenario.
JOSETXO GRIETA – Reminder of a precious life (Audiobot)
The “revolutionary” power trio comprising Josetxo Anitua (vocals), Mattin (guitar & noises) and Inigo Eguillor (drums & percussion) is at home both with handmade explosions of venomous dissonance and sibylline whispers of silently mounting rage morphed into words that bath in desperate awareness and effective nihilism. The four messages delivered here constitute a continuity link to La Grieta’s “Hermana hostia” (see below) minus the bitter sarcasm and with a more “acid” disposition as far as the music is concerned. It’s incredible how Mattin sounds Mattin even with just a guitar; on the other hand, Anitua – who wrote all the lyrics – and Eguillor are an unlikely duo of companions, perfect for the low-budget blasphemy of this venture and gifted with a thoroughly uncontrollable anarchic spirit which can almost be smelled. “Reminder of a precious life” is sonic dust which refuses to be swept away.
JOSETXO GRIETA – Euskal semea (w.m.o/r)
Given that: a) there is a peeled banana on the cover and b) the title means “Basque son”, Velvet Underground fans might be sniffing the air right now. They would be right: this CD is in fact wholly referencing to the song “European Son”, in turn another homage (from Lou Reed to his mentor Delmore Schwarz) from which Josetxo Anitua, Iñigo Eguillor and Mattin – on voices, radio, guitar and drums – created something totally new in terms of sonority, divided onto two selections. In the first and most “transcendental” one, several tracks were recorded starting from a bass line rebuilt from the original, the guitars tuned according to La Monte Young’s ratios, percussion added successively together with lyrics – both from Schwarz himself and Eduardo Haro Ibars, a Spanish counter-cultural poet from the late era of Francisco Franco’s regime. The second episode contains text in Spanish fabricated by the trio through automatic writing, in which they ask themselves “if being hit and hitting back is the only way to learn in this mousetrap that is carefully prepared for us”. In strictly musical sense, it’s a classic work from the fringes of provocative delivery, punk-ish rage and inhuman screaming vomited inside structures that seem to derive from a malfunctioning computer whose hard disk has been carved with scissors. Differently from the depressing dilettantism that usually infests the noise scene this stuff sounds, uh, “experimental”. I don’t know if Tony Conrad could ever acknowledge his own influence in Mattin’s string tuning, as a comparison to a jumble of drunken woofers wouldn’t be out of place instead. Yet it is possible that Schwarz could even pat Mr. Reed’s shoulder from the sky and whisper “Now that’s what I meant, Lou”. One imagines that the above mentioned VU aficionados will get an overdose of “Venus in furs” pronto.
ROLF JULIUS – Julius (halb) schwarz (Edition RZ)
Rolf Julius uses his so called “small sounds” to create a huge wall of sound. Could seem a contradiction but it is not: sonic development is so explicit and well conceived that most pieces contained here literally growl and rumble, giving serious trouble to my woofers even at low volume level. Of course, not only low frequencies are to be found here; the last part of this physically engaging work moves its focus towards different shades – not so lighter, anyway – mixing and superimposing new resonating creatures (all of them born from electric/electronic sources) conducing to a more mercurial ambience verging on the post-industrial side. Quite difficult to cathegorize, Julius’ art is particularly noteworthy – by all of us.
JULIUS HEMPHILL SEXTET – The hard blues (Clean Feed)
Julius Hemphill’s writing for saxophone sextet is absolutely demanding; these six greats play with reckless sympathy and bleeding joy in one of the most beautiful jazz recordings I’ve heard in several decades. The mouth watering timbral perfection is paired only by the flourishing score orchestration, so that when one of the men takes a solo it just sounds like a logical consequence of a more than rational compositional design. What’s more beautiful in music than coupling lucid linearity and passionate freedom? “The hard blues” is a highlight reel of pedigree virtuosity, never poisoned by selfish posing; it’s music that’s capable of caressing and hitting the solar plexus at the very same time. Notes flow directly from the musicians’ heart through their whole bodies, springing out in the air like a rare essence. Marty Erlich, Aaron Stewart, Andy Laster, Alex Harding, Andrew White, Sam Furnace (1954-2004, R.I.P.): a heartfelt thank you for this marvel; Julius would be proud of you.
JUMALA QUINTET – Turtle crossing (Clean Feed)
“Turtle crossing” is the testimony of the one and only occasion when Paul Flaherty, Joe McPhee, Steve Swell, John Voigt and Lawrence Cook met and spontaneously played together, five years ago. A quintet armed with two saxophones, trombone, double bass and drums, Jumala spins its wheels right from the start, moving away from jurisdictional phraseologies and adding a few ounces of haywire poorhouse energy as a product of intense interactions during some challenging propositions. Swell’s trombone in “Weighing of the heart” is something to be clinching to in the context of what’s maybe the best track in the disc; the smart arco elucubrations by Voigt often help avoiding the fall into the feared (at least by me) “swingy/jazzy” vibe. The real best comes when the group travels near to well behaved – if never rehearsed – organic counterpoints, thus liberating the music from any aura of “domestic freedom” that could have ruined even the best intentions. Ever the perfect players, Flaherty and McPhee exchange educated opinions, bitter darts and incendiary omens, finding reciprocal comprehension in Cook’s rhythmic discrepancies even during the most abundant blowing tides.
ELSA JUSTEL – Mâts (Empreintes DIGITALes)
Elsa Justel (Mar del Plata 1944) is an Argentine electroacoustic composer whose work I had never met before. On the press release, Horacio Vaggione correctly describes her music as “canvases made of minuscule yet consistently varied sounds”. While it’s true that the same could be told about the majority of the names active in the acousmatic field, this is a case in which the expert listener will likely detect new intriguing factors in apparently common structures. One of these elements is Justel’s prowess in choosing an efficient spatial collocation for every sonic event: each sound seems to possess a life of its own, even independent from the context of the composition, albeit that span is usually very short. The amorphous resonances found in the more percussively fragmented pieces – such as “Puntos, comas y refritos” – are sufficient in themselves to establish an aura of mystery in pieces whose architecture had already been planned amidst manifold shades and shapes. My favourite ones are “Midi de sable”, a study on the modification of the timbre of recorders (played by Joan Izquierdo in their alto, tenor, basset and contrabass versions) and “Au loin…bleu”, entirely based on processed and juxtaposed vocal snippets. Episodes that size up the real possibilities of a talented, if pretty much obscure artist who deserves to gain some notoriety in a rather overcrowded sector that often features people who destroy the beauty of a regular emission by transforming it into an insignificant crumble of noise. On the contrary, Justel appears as still interested in forms of elemental purity, and that’s a major plus.
JUST MUSIC – Just Music (ECM)
Luckily, in the so-called “summer of love” of 1967 there were people who didn’t necessarily need to dance to the tune of Jefferson Airplane and the likes. An interchangeable collective of classically trained German instrumentalists, Just Music (aka “New Thing Orchestra” in a few occasions) was also the first “humble but ambitious” ensemble that Alfred Harth formed to express different “opinions” about that unpronounceable disease named “free jazz”. This task was made much harder by the mental closure of Frankfurt’s jazz scene, at that time mostly revolving around a single deity – Albert Mangelsdorff – who kept refusing any contact whatsoever with Harth and his comrades, also calling free improvisers with unrepeatable adjectives. The same Mangelsdorff will ironically become an icon of the genre later on, but that’s another story; as we all know, official reports almost never coincide with the reality of facts. After several participations to various European festivals and TV shows, in 1970 the group got in touch with members of AACM, and both Harth and bassist Peter Stock became a part of the European Free Jazz Orchestra for an important festival in Frankfurt. In the 1967-70 span, the saxophonist had extended his interests in multimedia performances, including fireworks, breaking glass, concerts in churches playing other instruments without knowing the necessary techniques, and so forth. Many events and many sounds, contributing to define Just Music like an underground icon for which, mysteriously, there seems to be no real interest in resurrecting the scarce recordings that they released. One of them is this 1969 album, which – if you spotted the label – could look like a surprise given what Manfred Eicher’s imprint publishes nowadays (needless to say, the record is long out of print). Divided into two long improvisations, one per side, “Just Music” sounds extremely modern to this day; it wouldn’t fall out of place on Martin Davidson’s Emanem, the extreme variety of timbres and dynamics at the basis of a spontaneous expression that results as completely unincorporated to these ears. The involved players in this instance were Alfred Harth (tenor sax, clarinet, trumpet), Dieter Herrmann (trombone), Johannes Krämer (electric guitar), Franz Volhard (cello), Thomas Stöwsand (cello), Peter Stock (bass) and Thomas Cremer (drums, clarinet). The musicians also use voices, mouthpieces, whistles, percussion and other useful things to create an anarchic swarm of howling tones, crying jams and cultivated virtuosity, the latter clashing – very effectively – with the air of thorough freedom that transpires from every minute of the LP. The presence of two cellos establishes a “contemporary classic” feel which is often negated by roaring outbreaks where both percussion and voices contribute to almost orgiastic environments; there are even a few moments of relative tranquillity, but one always has to sleep with one eye open. Probably, Mr.Eicher got a little bit scared by these guys, despite the fact that it was Just Music. Old Uncle Garbarek is certainly a more reassuring presence these days, but what about giving the reissue rights to someone who still wants to release Good Music?
KASSEL JAEGER – Ee[nd] – (Mystery Sea)
Behind this moniker hides a French sound engineer who works at GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). It comes then as a direct consequence that this music strays a little from the usual patterns of the Belgian label, in favour of something that in effect borders on musique concrete territories (especially in “Cis”, fourth track of the CD). This doesn’t mean that the album lacks drones, rumbles and cavernous reverbs; they’re all there, only better integrated in a series of more tangible elements and variously speeded tapes, which for sure is not bad. Indeed, various parts of this record recall the work of artists whose camouflaging of real-life materials is at the basis of their brand of suspension and displacement (I’m thinking of names such as Jim Haynes or Matt Waldron). In this case the scarce visibility, caused by a thick curtain of low frequencies and often incomprehensible “presences”, is a basic element of the majority of the tracks. There’s also a sense of slowed-down vocal emission, particularly in the conclusive “Infra”, that gives the idea of some monstrous creature hiding under a layer of sand, ready to swallow any unfortunate walker who puts a foot on its body. If a well-prepared dronescaper (put your favourite name here) decided to collaborate with Nessie, probably the result would partially resemble this air-saturating piece. Kind of oppressive stuff, but overall quite good.
JASON KAHN – Miramar (Sirr.ecords)
Jason Kahn is one of those artists perennially needing to challenge limitations of human sound perception; the results he obtains in “Miramar” are in that sense truly astounding. Using an analogue synth as a basic source plus a floor tom (as a resonator) and small cymbals, the New York/Zurich-based sound carver achieves that kind of phenomenon where the vibrating propagations turn ears into resonance instruments themselves, something varying through placing our stance in different listening perspective while in our room (preferably large). The sound quality ranges from tidy oscillations to semi-distorted beating of frequencies, both cases yielding membranes’ movement and strange responses from the brain. Looks like you’re undergoing a transformation of the way you accept an acoustic code, it takes a while before your body reacts correctly – and I’m still trying to define what “correctly” means in this case. Fact is, this is a radical approach to a delicate argument but Jason demonstrates much more about physics with such a few means than hundreds of theories could ever explain with hollow words and formulas.
JASON KAHN – Timelines (Cut)
This “monster band”, a cross of computers, electronics, analogue and digital sources plus a contrabass, was conceived by Kahn in order to transform a graphic score into sound. The team is formed by Tomas Korber, Norbert Möslang, Günter Müller, Steinbrüchel and Christian Weber but the single personalities are barely recognizable, as the mass of energies springing out of “Timelines” is a fusion of frequencies that, in some instance, becomes a thing of beauty. The deeply affecting impact of this vibrational force is similar to an underground movement sending measuring apparata in total overload, generating a halogenous aura of sinusoidal meltdowns: human bodies can become radiosensitive if the brain is properly trained. Obviously, this is stuff for connoisseurs and there’s no chance for late-hour twaddlers’ ignorant theories. “Timelines” has all the riveting characters necessary for a basic moment in new music and its long-haul effect on the psyche speaks for itself, even after minutes from the end of the record.
JASON KAHN – Sihl (Sirr)
The thing I like most about “Sihl” – and Jason Kahn’s music in general – is that these sounds start as a clearly perceptible entity but, after a while, inhibit our body from performing its ordinary activities by gulping our mental disposition, making a pincushion of the brain through hypnotic waves, malleable percussive rolling and bowing, frequency-based earpricking. Jason uses just two sources – percussion and analogue synthesizer – to arrive right there where more verbose composers fail, as they become titubant in a sea of useless sounds when a genuine conciseness would be the easiest path to the core of the matter. All the pretty short segments forming this album – which was inspired by Kahn’s reflections on one of the rivers crossing his hometown of Zurich – abandon us abruptly after having lulled various fragments of our life with their scintillating effectiveness; Kahn seemingly admonishes against the excessive trust in an unstable immunity to the pain of conscience, instead welcoming the apparent struggle between unusual sounds and saturated silence, meanwhile confirming himself at the very front of that echelon of deep-thinkers who try to develop a minimalism for the new millennium.
JASON KAHN – Fields (Cut)
“Fields” comprises seven tracks that Jason Kahn recorded using analogue synth, shortwave, percussion and location recordings from various parts of the world. While treating the receivers with the same “Kahn vibe” to which the connoisseurs are anxious of being submitted every time that one of his releases hits the desk, this album is somehow different from our man’s most recent output. For starters, “Fields” features various moments in which several strata of digital and/or analog dirtiness blur the visual, although after just a few minutes of attentive scrutiny the typical stigmata of the composer become evident, one of them being the customary regular cymbal pulse generated by his soft-handed playing. The field recordings, the use of shortwave and, in general, the album’s overall mix point to a sense of unadorned, sometimes even muddy definition that orients these soundscapes towards slightly more “earthly” territories, where the sounds surge and glide according to models of behaviour that are scarcely collocable in terms of aesthetic, something halfway through sheer experimental documentation and chemical reaction; but, let me stress it, everything sounds unquestionably Kahn, complete with those involuntary analyses of the inward parts of the psyche that he’s able to elicit with just a couple of masterful layerings. Therefore, we can define “Fields” as a means for the conveyance of transfixed emotions, its compositions carriers of messages that our body recognizes as familiar after a short period of adaptation. It takes only a few listenings before we can use it as a source of concentrated self-awareness, which indeed seems to be Jason Kahn’s music’s most evident quality.
JASON KAHN / GUNTER MULLER – Blinks (For 4 Ears)
Both ex drummers, Kahn and Müller have retained very little of old instrumental habits as their music of today is more an imploding narcotization than a percussive course. Sustaining long moments of bliss while elongating their introverted vibe, the couple is methodical, austere and destabilizing; all the “blinks” walk a slow, undetermined pace where electronics control both the orientation and the intensity of the message. Muffled turbulences and morphing loops relate very well with our organism, leaving no space for escaping from this modern way of interpreting computerized trance. Yet the music is extremely focused, letting your will free to accept these new messages as already decoded, like if you were listening to a familiar lexicon. As always with these two guys, technically sound composition/improvisation is in cahoots with light touches of well-channeled energy.
JASON KAHN / JASON LESCALLEET – Red room (Chloe)
For those who think that music designed to accompany an installation is always frigid or passionless at best, “Red room” could be the opening key to a full rethinking of the problem. The sounds, coming from keyboards, percussion and tapes, gently mix with the visitors’ movement; a never excruciating, always rather restrained manifestation of cyclical undercover activity resembles those undefinable outside-the-house noises that constitute the perfect company of many introversions. In such a context, it looks like the composers’ choices are left to the receiving end: just walking a few steps, turning your head, changing the listening settings yields surprising results. This reveals a fuming cauldron of unsettling anxiousness which moves forward to take possession of our dynamism, forcing a fixed sitting posture from where we feel involved to the point of breath holding but never – ever – scared, even when the music raises its menace over the subconscious tag.
JASON KAHN / NORBERT MÖSLANG / GÜNTER MÜLLER / KEIICHIRO SHIBUYA / MARIA – Signal to noise Vol. 1 (For 4 Ears)
This is the first disc, in a series of five, containing collaborations between the most advanced Swiss electroacoustic composers/improvisers and selected Japanese musicians of the same area, everything recorded in the spring of 2006 in various combinations. This particular record features Kahn on analog synth, Möslang on cracked everyday electronics, Müller on iPod and electronics, Shibuya on keyboard and laptop, Maria on laptop. Siliconized tubercles and mounting strata seem to have no problem in a reciprocal acceptance; shrapnel-like larvae produce massive clouds of amorphous scintillas. A sequence, a foreign pattern, a pseudo helicopter rotation, then an undergrumble of awesome low frequencies. Surgical juxtapositions form bionic organisms whose voice is surcharged by a million computers, all working against their real will. Fake ghosts bicycle around our perspective hearing, blazing us with spatial weapons in one hand and frying popcorn in a pan with the other. Our feet get stuck in a bog full of electro-parasites but there’s no more blood to feed them. Intensity rises with parching emissions which we know very well, yet it is always great to be able to solve at least some of their riddles. Specular geometries and reverberant propagations flicker like the moon’s luminescence over the sea, while the power of feedback finds an agreement with the less blistering outbursts to determine, once and for all, if we’re intelligent enough to avoid being ridiculed by their raison d’etre.
JASON KAHN / TOMAS KORBER / CHRISTIAN WEBER – Zürcher Aufnahmen (Longbox)
There’s no need of a foreword. As soon as we push the “play” button, the flux of a familiar, barely animate hum comes out of the speakers; high-pitched frequencies predominate but the unobtrusive, subtle interaction is more active than our first instinct would suggest. The sound causes a psychological reaction, instantly directing the concentration towards the third eye region; amidst the transcendental dirtiness of Korber’s electricity and Kahn’s analogue synth, Weber acts like the gong player in a Zen ritual, liberating the trio from the absence of a pulse via tolling hits of the bass strings or by joining the quasi-static correspondence of intents with sculptural arco drones. The most rewarding aspect of this self-regenerating inscrutable mechanism is that the voice of each of the three involved artists remains perfectly recognizable, even if the whole sounds like a conscious condivision of blurred ideals rather than a recorded session. The subtle work of Kahn on cymbals is a welcome trademark occurrence, his caressing overtones sending signals of perceptiveness in between a collapsing concreteness; the minute components of Korber’s guitar, including the flicking switches and the pickup noise, enhance the sequencing of events rather than obstructing the overall scheme of things; yet his timbres are nowhere near prominent, constituting instead an invisible yet fundamental muscular tissue. Subdividing this work into six movements seems to be more an encouragement for us to change the listening settings at every try than a real necessity for the music, which remains as continuously entrancing as a single idea of abstraction from the corporeal necessities but, in a way, still comes from the guts. All three artists confirm their deserved status, once again enriching our personal experience with their sensitive, masterful manipulation of the proximities of muteness. At least for the time being, this is Longbox’s last release; Adam Sonderberg’s label couldn’t have ended its history in a better way. Go get a copy now.
JASON KAHN / NORBERT MÖSLANG / GÜNTER MÜLLER – Signal to noise Vol.3 (For 4 Ears)
Kahn (analog synth, percussion), Möslang (cracked everyday electronics) and Müller (iPod, percussion electronics) accumulate a lot of contrasting forces, putting them at work in a music that’s driven by a ferocious will to exist beyond the necessity of documentation. Two basic factors reinforce the backbone of these improvisations, one being an almost obsessive “beat” – most probably born from Möslang’s malfunctioning apparata, yet basically sounding like a skipping CD in infinite repeat – while the other is the huge body of rumble that a simple clockwise turn of the volume knob elicits in the house, creating a sense of menace that characterizes the record in a much more evident way when compared with other “subtler” releases by the same names. This mass of self-perpetuating thick fumes effectively camouflages its single components; not that we necessarily need to know who plays what – experts will find several clues, though – but this is probably the very first time in a CD by this label in which I felt swallowed by an oppressive pessimism rather than encouraged to individuate the implied gradations. I needed to leave my chair and nervously pace the room while listening, the music causing a reaction in my systems. And if this happens – provided that I’m not facing some kind of opprobrium, and that I respect the involved artists – it’s a sure sign that it works. Life is not only blue skies and golden sunsets. Translation: this is a keeper – and fans of Voice Crack will love it even more.
JASON KAHN / TOMAS KORBER / NORBERT MÖSLANG / GÜNTER MÜLLER / CHRISTIAN WEBER / KATSURA YAMAUCHI – Signal to noise Vol.4 (For 4 Ears)
Difficult not to remain impressed by the quality of this CD, for sure among the best in this series, recorded in 2006 at YCAM Yamaguchi in Japan. The instrumentation comprises analog synthesizer, percussion, guitar, electronics, cracked everyday-electronics, iPod, contrabass and saxophone. The record features two lengthy tracks: the sonic spectrum of the first is extremely obscure, an inner pulse underlining the sub-volcanic, magmatic characteristics of the improvisation, while the second shifts to areas where feedback, squealing emissions and sax harmonics let the listeners focus the attention on nerve-shattering thin pitches for a long time. Since the very beginning of the initial section it’s indubitable that there is no light on the horizon: ultra-lows take instant command, discreetly early on, then with a progressive increase of their power. An immediate sense of throbbing in the back of the head lets us realize that distinguishing who plays what is completely useless, in spite of the fact that Yamauchi’s insufflations and Weber’s incessant bass tolling are easily traceable. The music becomes progressively louder minus an explosion, at last showing a kind of healing force way beyond its threatening appearance; as such, the end comes pretty much undesired – one would like to go on indeed. The remaining half is more nervous and a little bit unstable, the juxtaposition of high frequencies scarring an otherwise pseudo-static background (which, anyway, hides several traps – listen carefully). Definitely not relaxing, the noisy parallelisms create a growing feel of anguish typical of thought-provoking sound art that goes straight to the core of physical systems. We manage to control responses, but undoubtedly this is a harsher method of stimulation that could be accepted less serenely by many. That does not detract from the significance of the piece, which continues on the same elevated standards of the previous instalment. Serious stuff without a second of pause, deserving repeated listens both via speakers and headphones.
JASON KAHN / NORBERT MÖSLANG / GÜNTER MÜLLER / AUBE – Signal to noise vol. 5 (For 4 Ears)
I’m not that familiar with the work of Aube (alias Akifumi Nakajima), despite him being acknowledged among “the pioneers and great masters of electronic music in Japan”. One thing is for sure: together with Müller’s iPod and electronics, Kahn’s analog synthesizer and Möslang’s cracked everyday electronics, Nakajima’s laptop generates lots of inquisitive turbulences, which the quartet uses quite well in large chunks of stimulating intramuscular conversations. “Signal to Noise 5″ is probably the episode from this gorgeous series where the latter element (noise) is preponderant over the former, and also the CD in which the dynamics are less differentiated, more tending to a massive cohesion of all powers and forces. At times saturated blubbery, elsewhere boiling electricity, most often anxious pulse, this matter doesn’t look for subconscious action but it’s definitely “in your face”, with a dose of extraterrestrial aromas for good measure. Slow undulations get chain-sawed by terminally ill frequencies, still able to determine a nervous wreck in unsuspecting listeners; rhythmically spastic pops and bleeps are submerged by superimposed particles and cells that start as short and, with the passing of time, extend their shape until becoming oblong ectoplasms of pseudo-organic creatures. What sounds disorganized at a first listen reveals instead a deployment of mutating features which place the improvisations exactly at the border between ultra-modern sci-fi and regulated chaos. Turn the volume way up and mama will come and see if you’re OK, unless she has already decided to commit suicide after being administered another similar record a while back. Again, necessary stuff from Günter Müller’s label: indeed they do not skip a beat, electro-acoustic jumbles notwithstanding.
JEFF KAISER OCKODEKTET – 13 themes for a triskaidekaphobic (pfMENTUM)
The nineteen free-thinkers in action during these 73 minutes of barely governable, outspoken sonic mayhem are among the finest American improvisers, all coming from the more energizing fringes of radical contemporary expression. Kaiser’s alarmingly remorseless discarding of any kind of mindless convenience keeps the whole companionship navigating the perilous waters of earnest dissonance; this could alienate some superficial sympathy but surely rewards unorthodox listeners, which is a major ammunition for border operators with such a pedigree. The timbral orientation tends towards a large use of the wind instruments: it doesn’t come as a surprise, given the presence of luminaries like Vinny Golia, Eric Barber, Emily Hay & Lynn Johnston (from Motor Totemist Guild, one of the most overlooked ensembles in decades) plus the leader’s trumpet. Anyhow, the music is never overblown, maintaining a certain grade of meticulous activism that defines this brew of composed/decomposed parts as an immaculate self-government struggling to survive in a horde of neurotic humdrum values.
JEFF KAISER OCKODEKTET – KAISER/DIAZ-INFANTE SEXTET – The alchemical mass/Suite Solutio (pfMENTUM)
The only moments where “The alchemical mass” effectively sounds as such is during the extremely dissonant choral parts sung by the Ojai Camerata, whose intervention brings some measure of “sacred relief” in an otherwise lively, acute and positively chaotic composition. Shirking any responsibility about any possible audience reaction, the Ockodektet breaks ancient rules and pushes contemplation away, respelling both chamber wording and free jazz idiomatic juggles with no shortage of introversion and useful fake errata. The piece has natural escalations and sudden mementos but, when the choir enters the scene, my personal vu-meters measure the highest emotional intensity. On the other hand, “Suite Solutio” is a new look on the results of cross pollinating free swinging and gradually maturing virtuosity; sometimes it seems like the musicians are mocking “straight” jazz’s accents and nervous tics, but if they’re really doing it I couldn’t care less, as the level of interplay is top rank. More a divertissement than a “serious” composition, this is a perfect tractwalker to a road leading far out of quick-setting cliches.
JEFF KAISER / ANDREW PASK – The choir boys (pfMENTUM)
Horns, woodwinds and real time processing can go a long way if manipulated by inventive and inquisitive musicians. Leaving well behaved transgressions within delineated contours of judgement and irony, Pask and Kaiser draw an alternative way to multi-dimensional explorations of airy territories that – even considering the scarcity of instruments – maintain an oblique orchestral flavour which is the record’s very strength. Both artists wear their remarkable technique without a whiff of megalomania, questioning their directions every minute, leaving precious thinking room to each other and emanating contrapuntal intelligence over the course of the whole work. And if hints of irreverence appear, they are promptly wrestled by a unanimous connection to bittersweet melancholies and independency statements that a sapient effect treatment transforms into architectures of extravagant lucid dreams.
JEFF KAISER / ANDREW PASK – The choir boys with strings (pfMENTUM)
The contorted motion of these unorthodox bursts of free music guarantees an engaging listen for almost 80 minutes, during which this quartet – the Kaiser/Pask duo plus G.E.Stinson and Steuart Liebig – manages to reach rarely heard levels of alienation from genres. Decidedly complex, rich of twists and turns, deliberately helter-skelter at various times, this spontaneous composition is a combination of virtuoso reed playing on an invariably modified platform of electronics that often sound like generated by obscure forces beyond the musicians’ control. Various kinds of trumpets, clarinets and saxes get cross-pollinated by Kaiser and Pask in fractured hybrids (often engulfed in a pretty heavy-handed signal processing) while Stinson and Liebig remain free of applying their own rationale, either drone-oriented in powerful backgrounds or during sudden close-ups in the audio imagery, distorting in a full-blast overload. A pretty unquiet sonic journey fusing research and cumulative uniqueness.
KALLABRIS – Off mind (Entr’acte)
In line with Entr’acte’s impossibly packaged releases, this 3-inch CD comes in a folded newspaper where every page contains a single sentence, except for the central two that are blank. Two of the three tracks are constructed upon a female voice continuously reciting a sort of cut-up litany in German language: “Apologia” is a warm, involving minimal neurosis with translucent sounds over a bulky subterranean pulse, while “Epilogus” is a little bit more agitated, with the electronic sources moving around the voice in a sort of disembodied telegraphic code. “Corpus maior” is a short, wordless intermission that, in a sense, acts as the conclusion of the first track. Quite engrossing stuff, this could be excellent background music for a cyber-sex shop.
MARGARETH KAMMERER – To be an animal of real flesh (Charhizma)
You’d make a fatal error misprizing Margareth Kammerer’s apparently basic, almost autistic song crumbles. Under the skin they travel and – like a piker amassing large sums of money with tiny wins – this woman uses her guitar inventing small angular phrases and off-centre riffs, singing over all this with expressionless stare and a detached voice that’s her very strength. Kammerer’s scope is pretty limpid, though; even radical treatments and cut-up remixes by the likes of Fred Frith, Philip Jeck and Christof Kurzmann fail to change her perspective, instead accenting the unobtrusive, observational playing of this very particular artist. It’s a record that must be listened more than a few times to catch all its hidden beauties: “As your nightly dreams 2″, with Chris Abrahams on piano, is lovely and so is “I carry your heart with me”, where Axel Dörner’s trumpet works wonders around Margareth. The only thing I really can’t like is the out of tune guitar of “Somewhere I have never travelled” – all the rest is really nice indeed.
YUKI KANEKO – Rut (mOAR)
Incalculable. Such is the number of records that I’ve listened to featuring computer-based melodic materials constructed upon fragments of samples, regular instruments and tiny bell-like snippets, with the inevitable addition of glitch, white noise interference, small fractures, environmental shades. This particular one – a different remake of a CD originally released by Magic Book in Japan and which this writer is not familiar with – has the merit of sounding a little more suggestive, even touching in parts (“Cycle” and “Moment” are very much likeable “songs” indeed). Those snapshots seem to evoke memories from childhood and summers spent in useless search of meanings while staring at the sea. But, we ask, how many chances are given to artists who release music that just places itself in a veritable mass of similar outings? On the other hand, dedicating a hour or less to a record like “Rut” is always better than watching a single minute of TV, therefore I’ll keep the similarities, shut up and enjoy this electronic concoction – if not with gratitude, at least thinking that it sounds nice for its large part. Now that I’m listening to it again, relaxed and semi-sleepy, it is almost perfect for the occasion.
ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI / ATSUKO NOJIRI – Continuity (Asphodel)
Here we have one of those items which I can afford to risk my face for, sentencing it as a must. This is a set comprising a CD and a DVD containing five compositions by the great Zbigniew Karkowski, deriving either from acoustic instruments or the reworking of pre-existing materials. The DVD adds three intriguing videos by Japanese Atsuko Nojiri, which finely complement the complexity of the aural message (should I say “massage”?). In both instances, it’s very strong material which at the same time keeps suspended between a puzzled responsiveness and the conscious participation to those sonic phenomena that separate computer-shielded nonentities from far-reaching artists such as the Tokyo-adopted stalwart. It is certainly not easy to penetrate the kernel of Karkowski’s music. It needs space to manifest its power, yet there are hundreds of minute details that only absolute silence – or headphone listening, if you prefer – will reveal. Multitudes of particles in a cosmos of deadly radiations which, as a whole, make feel like repressing violence (or fuelling a blissful beatitude, depending on the evolution level). To effectively assimilate all the tangential nuances and almost physiologic contents of this stuff, total focus and mental functions at their maximum speed are required. This is not wallpaper ambient. One of the tracks stands out as a true milestone, alone worth of owning the goodies: I’m referring to “Float”, opening track of the DVD, a glissando-based piece whose enormous evocative force all but throws in a state of desperation, something that comes from being unable of understand what’s going on in the depth of our entity. 16 fabulous minutes at the emotional heights of the best Roland Kayn, the sole term of comparison that came to mind while overwhelmed by this fantastic composition, which probably seals a career-defining release for Karkowski. Get a copy – you will thank me.
GRUNDIK KASYANSKY – Light and roundchair (Creative Sources)
Utilizing feedback synthesizer, radios, a small theremin and computer, Kasyansky modulates air particles and luminescent frequencies into intermittent contacts with a sonic aura that’s pretty difficult to delineate. The fascination brought by the ether’s byproducts – enhanced by the difficulty of clearly detecting the contained messages – has always been an excellent territory of exploration and invention for artists such as John Duncan and Keith Rowe, not to mention the CONET project. “Light and roundchair” adds the synthesis element to the equation, transforming these barely discernible presences into an appreciation of seclusion where voices, strange noises and acute sybilances establish an invisible control over the brain, which is forced to recognize those signals by anomalously filing them in an unusual archive. Listening by headphones is recommended to catch the minuscule particulars of this silently effective album, which in one of its tracks – precisely, “Turnover” – is also somehow comparable to a stripped down version of David Lee Myers’ digital delay-based investigations.
LOUKIA KATSIMERI – Sohos (Edition Zero)
Following an unexpected rescue in Edition Zero’s archives, we’re now in presence of a peculiar item featuring field recordings by the late Loukia Katsimeri, a member of the Greek experimental movement “Oi Mihanologoi”, who was sadly killed in 1991 at only 28 years of age while bycicling in Paris. It looks like Katsimeri was a natural born traveller, her tape recorder constantly ready to capture local expressions and rituals that she would then utilize within her group. “Sohos” lasts about half an hour and, despite the low quality of some of the tape parts, contains sounds that facilitate states of boisterous stupor. During the carnival, people in Sohos walk or run around the village wearing goat masks and dresses while agitating enormous cowbells; underneath this continuous tolling we also hear wind instruments, whose tone recalls a bagpipe or a zurna, getting mixed with the natives’ voices and laughs. The deriving mayhem is really something to be heard, a never ending clamour which could be associated – at very large – with other hullabaloo-based environmental compositions. Two references come to mind: Hermann Nitsch’s Aktions and Charlemagne Palestine’s “Jamaica Heinekens in Brooklyn”. We’re not on that refined status, but this material deserves to be carefully considered.
ACHIM KAUFMANN / MICHAEL MOORE / DYLAN VAN DER SCHYFF – Kamosc (Red Toucan)
“We rarely improvise on forms, rather we spontaneously create forms from the core elements of a piece, and sometimes we deviate from the piece altogether”. These words are by pianist Achim Kaufmann about this trio, active since several years back and whose quite light-hearted multigenre walk mixes jazz, its derivates and more atonal material with a good dose of nonchalance, to the point that one would expect to hear Randy Newman’s voice appearing to underline some of the parts. The most structured interactions, though, are expressed by Van Der Schyff and Moore during sensitive exchanges where the vital elements of timbre – the drum skin, the air in the tube – seem to gain additional weight as long as the music stays on the border between definition and no-kind-of-anythingness, with Kaufmann in the uneasy role of harmonic coordinator who finds the time for melancholic sporadicalnesses acting as a liquidizing element. Trombone player Wolter Wierbos is featured in two tracks, adding a few touches of unrule to these otherwise collected conversations. “Kamosc” is a correspondence among three long-standing colleagues who feel joyful and rewarded when they chance meet on their way to artistic momentariness. Not a milestone, but still a very enjoyable album.
MASAMI KAWAGUCHI – Live in December (Public Eyesore)
Try figuring a monstrous cross of Peter Hammill, David Sylvian, “Space Oddity”-era David Bowie and Marc Bolan improvising stoned melodies with typical Japanese intonation. Imagine a slightly out of tune guitar strumming VERY few chords a la “Wish you were here” or in some kind of twisted bluesy rhythm, sometimes blasting out apocalyptic distortion that completely cancels any harmonic content. Put all this in a large room at medium to low volume and listen to the result; also thanks to a “transistor radio” recording quality, it will instantly become one of the strangest things you’ve heard in a while – all those open detuned strums working wonders…I can’t believe myself – but I liked it.
JAMES P. KEELER – Polelight (Evelyn)
Working with recorders, found sounds and a few instruments, Keeler conjures up scattered pages of an album full of sepia polaroids, a cross between several dimensions of underdeveloped tiny aural landscapes and a personal diary where reflection and irony about the surrounding happenings manifest in various surprising ways. You just have to add your own sensitivity to bring out the rough beauty of some of the tracks, lurking in the mass of audio remnants that could easily cover them if your ears are not careful enough.
MICHAEL KEITH / JOHN OSWALD / ROGER TURNER – Number nine (Emanem)
While John Oswald and Roger Turner are two artists whose work I’m pretty familiar with, I was completely extraneous to Canadian guitarist Michael Keith, here featured on acoustic but with a self-declared background as a blues/rock player. The seven tracks of “Number nine” are mostly effervescent examples of those malfunctioning mechanisms that give an improvising trio its most interesting features. Keeping well clear off clichés, the musicians have energy to spare: bunches of bubbling-crackling-rippling notes by Oswald, mixtures of entangled strings and kraut-tasting woodiness by Keith, the two sounding like a pair of bycicle racers struggling for victory in the last mile, only to suddenly realize they took a detour and the contest’s already finished. Turner’s incessant outbursts portray him as that kind of drummer who can begin a roll on toms and end it on your Ming-dynasty vase, then will throw the potsherds at you after the crash. The three comrades strike an unlikely instrumental friendship on their way back to normal life, each one always finding the time to listen to what the others have to say. An album of funny vignettes and volcanic articulations that is a delight to listen.
MAZEN KERBAJ – Brt Vrt Zrt Krt (Al Maslakh)
Mazen Kerbaj is an astounding improviser, as clearly demonstrated by this adventure for solo trumpet. On the CD cover, he writes “No cuts, no overdubbing, no use of electronics”; he’s right in advising us, because the sounds emitted by his instrument are beyond the limits of believable. Each track is aptly titled with a tentative onomatopoeic transcription of the noises he generates – there is some fabulous poetry here, just listen to “Tagadagadaga” or “Flooka Brooka Clooka” to realize that they truly sound that way. Industrial blare, malfunctioning electric plants, distant helicopters, firemen wrestling against a hell of flames and exotic chirps are all parts of the repertoire; “Ffffss” lets us experience the numbing effect of a guerilla happening right outside your window, something that this Lebanese musician has tattooed in his mind (he was born during one of the harshest time frames in that area’s history). Music made with few means, exquisitely mature in its conscious suggestive force, “Brt Vrt Zrt Krt” is a necessary addition in every serious collection of contemporary creativity.
MAZEN KERBAJ / CHRISTINE SEHNAOUI / SHARIF SEHNAOUI / INGAR ZACH – Rouba 3i5 (Al Maslakh)
I like doing experiments on myself while listening to music. One of them is remaining stuck with headphones in front of muted TV; this way, the most astonishing comparisons between unusual sounds and absurd faces and situations coming from the screen create a mental state where the mix of aural and visual messages literally take any chance of reason out of the equation. I tried this approach with “Rouba 3i5″, but the effective raw energy of this quartet is alone capable of generating transcendence without additional tricks. Kerbaj’s playing has been influenced by the war sounds he grew accustomed to; indeed there are moments here in which the tension reaches a high degree with only a few instrumental touches. The Sehnaoui brothers, on alto sax and guitar respectively, create a unique fusion of intents with the trumpet player from Beirut; an impressive performance by Zach, who raises percussive clouds of doubt and fear in more than one instance, is the perfect finishing touch in this rational/emotional encounter. A truly engrossing release, revealing sincere communion among four level-headed artists.
MAZEN KERBAJ / BIRGIT ULHER / SHARIF SEHNAOUI – 3:1 (Creative Sources)
Wondering to what soccer game the result refers to, but my queries hang about unanswered. The same happens when I pose myself this question: “How come that many people state that certain kinds of post-reductionist improvisation – especially if based on breath instruments – sound predictable?” It reminds, somehow, of that idiot commonplace regarding song plagiarism, when the accused “artists” defend themselves by saying that “you can only use seven notes”, a classic demonstration of downright ignorance (just try telling to an Indian, or an Arab, about those seven notes – they’ll laugh your socks off). In truth, thousands of combinations and nuances are often there to be individuated yet remain unspotted due to mental (and auricular) apathy: let’s not forget the listener’s individual level of preparation and perceptiveness in discerning something innovative even in a two-chord, 30-minute minimalist piece. What this grumpy writer means is that a release like “3:1” could easily be placed in the “been there, done that” cauldron of current instrumental inventiveness, and we would be dead wrong in doing this. True, the connoisseurs more or less know what to expect from Ulher – back on record after a period of relative inactivity – and Kerbaj, their trumpets perennially bubbling, hissing, fizzing and popping in settings that recognize a regular triad or a typical counterpoint as an alien presence. This time, though, it’s Sehnaoui that acts as a catalyzer of positive energies, the (mainly harsh) sounds he manages to extract from a mere acoustic guitar as uneducated and diffident as a brat raised in an urban underbrush and abruptly thrown in a jet set party. The sum of the parts amounts to the anticipated total, and I keep loving pure mathematics in spite of all.
DAVE KERMAN / 5 UUs – Abandonship (Cuneiform)
The intricacy of Kerman’s music is once again manifested in this new UUs release; sometimes I felt like undergoing a sensory overload, such are the parts’ complexity and their oblique construction. Now based in Tel Aviv, Kerman plays all instruments – one can only wonder how long you have to be working on a record like this in order to bring it to its definitive form! “Old fans” like yours truly will find “Abandonship” the usual treat: great music in every sense, dramatic panoramas, anguishing crescendos, well rehearsed scores – but the ones who never listened to this stuff should maybe start from older records (look on the Cuneiform website!) because this particular one could be hard to digest for the newcomer.
STEFAN KEUNE / JOHN RUSSELL – Excerpts & offerings (Acta)
The Keune/Russell duo is surely one of the most energetic improvisation settings I’ve experienced lately. Without a trace of lassitude their sound is always prosperous and full of fantasies, catching your attention even in those moments when you’re not completely concentrated. Stefan’s contrasting proposals keep being enthusiastically accepted by a guitarist like Russell, who can’t produce a dull moment in his playing even if he wanted to; any useless accessory gets thrown out to leave room to incisive statements and fractured moonbeams of never boring timbral radiographies. The perfect acoustic balance between the two transforms even squeaks and string-hitting into instant composition and gorgeous interplay, all for the best results in a very sinuous mode of communicating.
STEFAN KEUNE / JOHN RUSSELL – Frequency of use (Nurnichtnur)
“Frequency of use” shows Keune’s impressively inventive phrasing finding an excellent counterpart in the bristly string plucking-cum-harmonic picking of Russell; the couple makes great use of dynamics and broken splinters of melody in a series of duets showing a strong will to be fluent but not domesticable. The fluttering notes coming out of Stefan’s saxophones behave like those inflated balloons rapidly running out of air: they go everywhere like crazy, without a chance of being trapped and boringly lined according to rules. John, on the other hand, is his usual self: he’s one of the few “liberated” guitarists keeping attention levels high thanks to his acoustic hollowbody timbral mark – always free from any theoretical gymnastics – and also to his distinct percussive way of attacking strings. This is a dangerous pair, lots of know-how included…and 72+ minutes of fresh ideas is a rare feature nowadays.
STEFAN KEUNE / HANS SCHNEIDER / ACHIM KRÄMER – The long and the short of it (Creative Sources)
The enormous variety of improvisational styles offered by Creative Sources is once again explicated by this trio for sopranino and alto sax (Keune), double bass (Schneider), drums and percussion (Krämer). More punched in combinations than whispered, these conversations are vaguely reminiscent of what the world knows as “free jazz”, a noticeable step in a different direction for a label that welcomes EAI artists from literally everywhere. Keune’s garrulous style finds places for silence, too; his listening ability allows for a spacing between the hits and misses which draws the map of tolerance among three spontaneous personalities. Schneider is a complete instrumentalist, at his very best when he plays long arco drones constituting the low-frequency bed of a turbulent river of loquacious explanations; Krämer is one of those drummers who seem to have forgotten the “correct” disposition of the pieces in the set, such is the perplexing ease with which he executes figurations that one would expect to obey to a handful of technical rules but, instead, come from somewhere else altogether. Mostly fast-paced, often tending to hot with a few tranquil exceptions, the nine tracks sound both like a photograph of the trio’s playful spirit and, in a way, a parody of that jazz club whose members take themselves too seriously. In any case, the result equals “very good”.
MIKE KHOURY / JASON SHEARER / BENJAMIN HALL – Insignia (Public Eyesore)
Intelligent and various, “Insigna” marks my first meeting with these musicians. The main instruments are woodwinds, violin and percussion; the record’s beginning induced your writer to think about a typical “modern free jazz” situation, but this is not the case. In a word, what you get here is not blowouts, but mostly pieces that are thoughtfully played and have a spacial and dynamic quality that renders them almost like they were written in advance. This kind of feeling is usually the best compliment one can do when listening to improvisations – and it’s the one sign saying that you can endure and enjoy the whole album. For sure, one of this label’s best releases and something to keep an eye on if you’re into this artistic area.
MIKE KHOURY / JASON SHEARER/BENJAMIN HALL – Braille (Public Eyesore)
Credit these guys with courage and taste in equivalent doses, as the music they improvise is difficult AND very beautiful. Khoury’s violin animates the muse of discovery, roaming about the inherent open structure of the pieces, providing a heartfelt statement of creativity; Shearer plays clarinet in truly inspiring fashion, choosing the right holes to look into while glueing complex visuals and candid annihilations of any trace of boredom one could expect. Hall’s task on percussion is not one of the easiest but he too succeeds, by a perfect understanding of the sound dynamics in open minded coordination, going from background commentary to contrapuntal extensions. Listening to musicians like these is an underrated treat, likely to polish your ears from tons of stupid riffage and idiotic posing.
MIKE KHOURY / BRIAN MACKIE / MICHAEL WELCH – Live at the Stardust Café (Detroit Improvisation)
This trio was recorded at Winter Park, Florida in the spring of 2003. It originates from violinist Mike Khoury’s will to play with “some of Orlando’s finest”, which in this case included Mackie – a pupil of Sam Rivers – on saxophone and Welch on drums (he played with Jon Rose and Derek Bailey among others, and developed a unique four-stick methodology). Two “untitled improvisations” and a “Blues for Sam Rivers” contain several sketches featuring rather involving playing from the forces at work. Mackie and Khoury’s voices function together well, as they concoct rage and delicacy at the flick of a switch while interspersing their phrases with twisted melodies and witty escapes from the norm. Welch is a strong drummer, able to camouflage an expert vision of the classic instrumental techniques behind a multitude of fermenting cells and shattered particles which, more than sustaining his companions’ reciprocity, set them on a flaming fire of passionate indefatigability. We’re not left without breathing space, as even in the most feverish instances the comrades look towards a horizon delimiting their conscious belonging to a superior scheme of things aptly represented by the beginning of the “Blues”, a sudden aura of thorough respect for the past materializing around Khoury and Mackie’s intersected chants before the improvisation takes off in serene beauty. Quite often I couldn’t help but think of Sugarcane Harris – that’s a deviation of mine, though. Nice album.
KOSTIS KILYMIS – .accumulated (Organized Music From Thessaloniki)
Difficult to remain captured by microsounds, controlled feedback and environmental recordings nowadays if one doesn’t know the exact measure of their gatherer’s seriousness. Yet Kilymis has found a way to sustain attention by depicting simple views with even simpler means, his music nearly tending to what once was called “reductionism”, at least in spurts. What distinguishes this from other similar offers is the efficacy of the source placement process set in action by the Greek artist, who puts all eventualities in the most accurate contexts by forcing disturbances and natural emissions to live together in harmony, as Stevie and Paul would say. Penetrating squeals sound like the most obvious occurrence in a regular world, modified granular complexities leaving room to strange tones and farting bleeps while we hear background activities, either from a street or from the room itself where all these things happen. In the last track an electric guitar manifests its presence more clearly, but it’s instantly forgotten because of the growing stratification of hiss and feedback that constitutes the main foundation of the piece, until the “white noise wind” at the end. Both enigmatic and analyzable in the tiniest detail, this is a very interesting record which at 32 minutes of duration leaves the listeners in the hands of a blemished perplexity, bordering on admiration.
HARALD KIMMIG / CHRISTOPH SCHILLER – Regen (Creative Sources)
Through their systematic deconstruction of violin and spinet’s technical canons, Harald Kimmig and Christoph Schiller try to react as creatively as they can against the constrictions of Western counterpoint, all the while utilizing microsounds and (un)common practices to stay nearer to headquarters that might show a “lowercase” flickering neon lamp outside the front door. Instead, in a track like “Schütten” a succession of evident contrasts is brought to the fore in a more typical free music setting. Exploring the realms of high frequency, which comes easier given the range of both instruments, the duo moves through snippets of phrases and stringed chit-chat-hit-and-pluck to realize a fascinating language that fuses abstruse aspects of chamber music with a constant fall from grace, despite the fact that knowledgeable ears won’t certainly find too many new reasons to cry miracle. This doesn’t mean that Kimmig and Schiller don’t produce interesting integrations; indeed they share a remarkable dexterity that allows them to find lots of sweet spots, from which raindrops of sparkling clicks and juxtapositions of bowed frailties (“Regen”, “Streifen”) fuse into the mummified simultaneousness of an obscure experimental movie soundtrack. Most of all, this album sounds like a learning process where all the components are lined up to symbolize elements that don’t really exist; gradually, the duo become aware that their reward is to be found elsewhere, and they look for it by refracting their instrumental abilities through the shards of a broken compatibility.
KAZUSHIGE KINOSHITA / MASAHIKO OKURA / MASAFUMI EZAKI – Kenon (Creative Sources)
Nibbles and leakages of anorexic timbres raise a few preoccupations for the maintainance of the system but the level of alertness is already quite high since the very first minutes. Metallic deformations of bottled hydrogen spring out of exquisite anti-structures, forming small complexities of salivary foliage which extends its reach even during dead silences. Okura and Ezaki breathe through gentle radioactivity, their flash bulbs emitting a series of microfaunae whose lifespan is measurable in the range of seconds, while Kinoshita’s pluckings sound like he left his violin out in the cold, then in the sun, so that wood fibers’ contractions and expansions move the instrument without a human touch. An improvisation, yes, but also the exposition of a silent ideology that manages to nail the listener until its appeal becomes evident.
KIRCHENKAMPF – The secret life of machines (Cohort)
Through his aesthetic of tension and release and a fresh variety of electronic and natural sounds, John Gore – Kirchenkampf being one of his projects – offers many truly haunting moments during the 19-plus minutes of this mini CD. Capturing the enchantment of strange creatures whose voices sound like a howling wolf morphing into a meteorite, moving around sparse darkish loops punctuated by barely audible crickets and other assorted microfaunae, Kirchenkampf lets the adjective “cold” out of the resulting fluctuating meditation; this composition – more than having me think about machines – is spacy and poetic. I believe John must be followed very carefully after listening to this piece, which I strongly recommend.
KIRCHENKAMPF – Transmissions (Diophantine)
John Gore is a very prolific and creative musician and his Kirchenkampf outings never fail to raise my interest one way or another. “Transmissions” could almost be filed as “contemporary space music”, since these tracks are reminiscent of forms of life in some invisible galaxy; either slowed down or somehow altered, human voices are often the most distinctive feature of the album in a symbolism (of sorts) of alienated personality. What’s even more striking is Gore’s use of treated environmental recordings, which become nocturnal evocations of the passing of a lifetime thanks to a sapient manipulation of birds chirping, car horns, ocean waves and truly unheard electronic concoctions which keep in suspension without entangling us in the boredom that frequently gravitates around these kinds of sonic abstraction. I’ve already given this CD repeated spins and it sure looks like we’re in presence of an excellent sleeper; you’ll come back to it time and again.
KIRCHENKAMPF – Island of the dead (Cohort)
After listening to this new chapter of the Kirchenkampf saga, I am left pondering on the fact that this is one of the few artists working in the field of space music/electronica whose releases don’t end sounding like a crazed broken pinball machine or, worse yet, like a funeral for creativity. “Island of the dead” is a cloudy trippish voyage through the realms of abstraction, an album that presents a multiplicity of situations, sounds and ideas that are, for their large part, quite refreshing if not stimulating. It contains drones, but also ever-changing evolutions of uncorporeal exudations ranging from the semi-disfigured to the out-and-out ethereal. It gets in touch with several aspects of inner communication while never sounding sanctimonious or pretentious. Furthermore, it works fine both as active background – low frequencies and shortwave shards diffusing effortlessly in your environment – but often requires full concentration to penetrate its many subtleties, and its instrumentation is neither described nor easily recognizable – no presets in sight, a major plus in my judgement criteria. John Gore seems to understand our psychological zones in advance, elaborating chains of functional events to enhance our responsive system. Listening to “Island of the dead” is like wandering in the void remaining completely lucid. I doubt that this album could cause intolerance in some of you, as it’s as finely detailed as a perfect picture from another planet. Dig the cover artwork, too.
KIRCHENKAMPF – Babel (Diophantine)
What strikes at a first glance is the incredible similarity of the cover graphics with many of Muslimgauze’s releases; there are even titles that recall Bryn Jones’ past albums. But the content of the two discs comprised by “Babel” has nothing to do with trance, dub or magnetic percussion. The first CD, “Red Babylon”, is one of the best examples of Kirchenkampf’s extremely variegated, absolutely personal blend of electronica. John Gore wants us to know that he didn’t use any radio in realizing this work; I don’t know the exact reason of his preoccupation with this matter, but rest assured that the indecipherable decays, polymorphic emissions and demanding synthetic landscapes that he presents are truly a one-of-a-kind affair, making us forget about the dumbness of many practitioners in this field, whose number of releases is directly proportional to the money received by thousands of fishes swallowing their obviousness-based hooks. The second disc, “Citadel Of The Nevermind”, is even better as far as mental displacement is concerned; Gore’s inventions make good use of darker sonorities, the roaring, fluorescent blackness of his inauspicious visions constituting a convincing reason for our consciousness to better accept the universal laws – or, at least, what we believe them to be. Despite lasting over two hours “Babel” is not ear-taxing, and it must be considered among Kirchenkampf’s overall best albums, likely to lift you up and send you floating in many directions.
KENNETH KIRSCHNER – Three compositions (Sirr)
Composer and sound artist Kirschner shows three different aspects of his craft in this mysterious album. The initial “July 17, 2006″ is the shorter track and also the most minimal, with very few electronic beams that – alone or in parallel emissions – blemish an apparently impregnable silence. On the contrary, “May 3, 1997″ is over 37 minutes long and is characterized by a distinctly oneiric spirit; Kirschner does not specify his sources on the CD cover, but I’m willing to believe that processed field recordings are always his favourite background over which, in this particular case, strange oblique piano phrases – like a cross of Claude Debussy and Andrew Liles in a thick Harry Partch-esque fog – appear and disappear to lull our alertness into a half-catatonic state. From the “pure aural satisfaction” point of view, “April 27, 2004″ is my favourite piece; it’s a slightly more agitated work, reminding me of the best loop-based music from the nineties in the realm of what we – sometimes superficially – used to define “postindustrial”, meaning projects like :zoviet*france: and early Hafler Trio. Kirschner shifts the balance all over the “low-frequency rumble” grey zone, preventing the listeners from abandoning their defenses, forcing them instead to expect a menacing worst that, in reality, never fully materializes.
CIVYIU KKLIU + ILYA MONOSOV – Cartolina postale (Winds Measure)
Two specialists of the most genuine kind of reductionism. The instruments: a metal plate tipped with 24 edges “meeting or drawn across an uncut (empty) piece of vinyl revolving on a platter at a determined, constant rate”, a music box played with three toothpicks. The resulting “music”: your own environment slightly enhanced by sparse dissonant pings, barely perceptible hiss and scratch, extraneous activities that can only be guessed or imagined. Play it in a silent afternoon and remain perplexed, for this is that sort of art that may be dismissed as a joke or fully enjoyed in its “depth of content”. In this listener’s view, a little bit of both. John Cage’s zealots might love this one, despite the fact that it’s very short.
CORDELL KLIER – Winter (Ad Noiseam)
According to commonplace, a title like “Winter” should imply a “cold” kind of music; Cordell Klier’s approach tries instead to get some life out of a grey electronic foundation adding pulse, beat, skip and glitch as ingredients in a cauldron basically full of obscure tones and late evening reflections. Cordell’s compositions aren’t certainly dashed off: everything sounds precise and meant to be right there where you find it. These pieces have a constant tendency to an infinitesimal particularity, to micro-movements under your skin. Neither frisky nor frightening, Klier’s creations inhabit those time holes our lives dig when we’re not so sure of the reasons why we aren’t completely at ease with ourselves. These entities could help you or trouble you some more – of course, we’ll try adapting to artist’s intentions when listening to a creative process: here lies the secret to this rewarding hour of aural stimulation.
CORDELL KLIER – Traces (Mystery Sea)
Though it looks like there’s no apparent end to certain sonic tunnels, Cordell Klier’s soundscapes in “Traces” possess a touch of relaxing gloom that finds its perfect definition in long decaying pieces able to bring me to a semiconscious state while listening. Klier’s scenarios shift quite slowly; in every section there’s a tendency to a total occupation of space so that – while lulled – nevertheless you’re not left with scarcity of alteration for both ears and mind. Sounds are well considered and better placed through a pretty “pure” generation often morphing into heavily filtered resonances. This music works well if your concentration is high and – helped by a spectacular October afternoon complete with tolling bells from outside – I can safely say this is more than a dull soundtrack for lost souls, it’s rather an absorbing flight through images of unadulterated entities.
CORDELL KLIER – Measure here and be now (Afe)
The parallel lives of high and low frequencies are always intriguing to follow, especially when an expert manipulator like Cordell Klier sketches their paths and defines their meanings through compositional choices and psychoacoustic experiments. “Measure here and be now” – a concise, rational album that nevertheless causes our speakers to diffuse vapours of hypnotizing aural substances – comprises four tracks feeding our desire of being wrapped by a protective cocoon of timbral indefinition, all the while making sure that the external world is still part of our transitory union with concrete beatitude, those rare serendipitous moments in which we believe to be invincible only to be knocked down, feet back on the ground, by the inevitable contact with daily cheapness. But in the 41 minutes of this work there’s not a single opening for the listeners to escape from a thorough dominance of beneficial radiance. Klier’s music is like an iceberg, floating slowly, barely moving, progressively if undetectably melting. Its harmonic complexion tends to a sinister kind of pale, full of perplexing hints that leave us guessing the hypothetical place in which we were transported. The few distortions and glitches, mostly appearing in the final track “Live”, are there as a reminder of the harsh normality to which one’s destined to return after having passed through invisible walls of indetermination and mystery. Bleak, cold emissions that succeed in kindling a soft-spoken awe.
CAMPBELL KNEALE / MATTIN – Untitled (Conv.net Lab)
This collaboration between the penetrating intelligencies of Kneale and Mattin brought out some fascinating, mysterious music. The anxious silences and indistinguishable small sounds that break the imaginary continuity of an admirable incoherence introduce us to a world in which the greatest available perspective is equal to being shut into an elevator during an electric blackout. There’s a pretty explicit correspondence between the subsonic activity featured in some of these tracks and the tumult made by the psyche during long stints of isolation, here nicely rendered in the shape of whirring buzzes, low-noise montages and, in general, post-industrial aromas – only, painted with the pale shades of evanescent frequencies that at times flutter around a deep drone, amidst the broken barriers of an invisible, yet tangible anguish. In a couple of instances, Mattin’s vocal emissions sound like words thrown out by a corpse during an autopsy, like if they had to complete that last sentence uttered just before dying. Another low-budget electroacoustic gem on behalf of two hard-headed sonic anarchists.
KNOT + OVER – Knot + Over (Public Eyesore)
The odd coupling of banjo and electronics is the mould for some placid improvisations by this Japanese duo. In such a situation, no preconception is allowed about problems of “style” and after listening to these tracks, recorded live in 2004, I’m not left much the wiser about a definition. Let’s just say that the banjo is approached with a koto-like technique of pluck and arpeggio, without caring too much about modulation or clean fingering; the electronics are constantly present, always shifting to fluttering repetitions and stoned textures. All this makes for several enjoyable segments in a music that, strangely enough, accompanied my activities as an almost relaxing background, even if you couldn’t really say that it’s “beautiful”.
JORGEN KNUDSEN – Wealth (Quasi Pop)
A Norwegian composer who records his album in Thailand and issues it on a label from Ukraine is a combination of interesting factors per se. But the music alone has enough personality to stand the test of repeated listenings, as Knudsen has a knack for sewing absurd electronic songs, piano dissonance, disturbed techno, engrossing ambient and intriguing field recordings in intelligently conceived tracks that not even once overstay their welcome. Even the most warped implications sound completely enjoyable in their unwrinkled, elegant naiveté; plus, the sound placement is near perfect, so that medium-to-low frequencies resonate as they always should, a car engine almost finds you turning your head back to avoid being struck and the alternance of astral reverbs and forest birds makes all the sense in the world. On top of everything a stunning cover photo, a villa’s garden completely swallowed by the snow except for its swimming pool. Overall, this is an excellent product from an artist who should be carefully observed from now on.
KOMMANDO RAUMSCHIFF ZITRONE – First time ever I saw your face (Quincunx)
The most unlikely elements are gathered in this first release by Quincunx starting from the cover, a close-up of a girl named Marisol Sanchez in less-than-pin-up attitude and, in the internal side, the nicely disquieting faces of the protagonists, Christof Kurzmann (lloopp software, devices and clarinet in one track) and Kai Fagaschinski (clarinet throughout – but it’s not so easy). The CD title, plus the first and the last tracks are all respectful tips of the hat to Roberta Flack, whose sampled song acts as a launching pad for Fagaschinski to perform a slant accompaniment with beautiful clarinet tones that after a few minutes get into the flesh of the matter, with Kurzmann activating his deforming mastery to proceed through lapses and faults of the otherwise perfect harmony, schmaltzy chords warped into smoke rings of inexplicable anti-harmony interrupted by hissing, clucking and sharp acute signals, the overall results almost sublime. The “Marisol” track is particularly loved by this writer: at one point in the general circuit there’s a sudden slowdown of asymmetric repetitions, everything converging in a pulsating hum that’s so unconsciously consonant, one almost feels like being splashed right back into mummy’s amniotic liquid. Fagaschinski’s “style”, if you listen close enough (and that means by headphones), gives the illusion of being able to vivisection the unbelievable control he exercises on every segment of his instrument. I regularly remain astonished by his multiphonics, within which the clarinettist manages to carve tiny fragments of shattered melodies that travel the same internal paths of the contrapuntal harmonics generated by Tuvan throat singers (and their descendents). One feels at one and the same time lobotomized and schooled when approaching this release, which constitutes a banging start for this London-based label and a milestone in Kurzmann and Fagaschinski’s careers.
THOMAS KONER – Unerforschtes Gebiet (Die Stadt)
Would you believe it? A 16 mm film, full of dust, its tone recorded while playing onto a projector. The final result is another stunningly beautiful release by Die Stadt and maybe one of the best Köner albums ever. The whole CD is a trip into the realm of low drones and black holes, quite usual for Thomas, but this time no gongs were used; just think about something like a “caressing rumble” or a ” distant choir of heavenly volcanoes”, if you get the picture. Differently from the vinyl version, this release presents a third track, “Les soeurs Lumiere”, which is just fantastically interpenetrating with the rest, being a soundtrack to a video project and based upon a female voice speaking words upon a canvas of subliminal frequencies and awesome ultrabass sounds. As usual, this is a limited edition and you don’t want to miss this superb work – even if you already own the LP.
THOMAS KONER – Zyklop (Mille Plateaux)
Thomas Köner’s sound is something that on a purely descriptive point of view resembles the slow movement of enormous ice blocks in the northern seas or, if you prefer, the perfect soundtrack to those moments preceding a contact with new dimensions (passing of seasons, a changing landscape while driving, life meshing with death and both fuseing towards transcendental paths). A double-disc release, this is another masterful example of how to make your house – and your mind – resonate with serious thoughts while the body’s perceiving potent humming cycles of waves; this time, though, Thomas uses concrete materials more than usual, accompanying his customary terrifying dark powerdrones with birds, traffic noise, spoken word, various urban atmospheres. In my opinion, “Zyklop” is one of the best Köner records ever; while listening to it, you’ll never realize how the time has passed by, right in front of you; instead, you’ll find out that after a voyage of almost two hours there’s still no time to reflect about the future: discovering and inhaling the very scent of existence is something you must do right now.
KONK PACK – Off leash (Grob)
Tim Hodgkinson, Roger Turner and Thomas Lehn confirm their status of extravagant arsonists in this concert, recorded in Utrecht in 2001, where they indulge in deliberate mishandling of instrumental discretion. After a few initial moments of protectiveness the factions start their cryptic lingo, administering an artful shellacking to institutional sonic common sense: under the repeated barrages of Turner, who alternates disintegrated mayhem and marching band scansions, the EMS synth played by Lehn sputters to eternal damnation through burps, squeaks and spastic waves smelling of burnt valves and putting vintage Oberheim jackoffers to shame. Hodgkinson’s steel strings and clarinet are like those scapular aches after a sleepless night: penetrating and uncontrollable, your body learns to move accordingly until a couple of internal cracks announce it’s all OK and you can return to your “regular” activity, which is dull like listening to Mozart after you have finished enjoying this fine effort.
TOMAS KORBER – Mass production (w.m.o/r)
The way Korber gets unusual sounds from his electronically modified guitar is probably the next step to the impossibility of recognizing a source, which seems to be an interesting challenge for most adventurous experimentalists in these days. Going from motorized mechanisms soliciting the strings up to feedback modulations and ear-pinching, almost inaudible frequencies slowly conducting the listener in a splendid finale with a low-droning time capsule, Tomas throws the coordinates for a post-Keith Rowe new direction of elemental guitar dismemberment, all the way to a new definition of listening without being surcharged – instead riding on the basic properties of the chosen matter.
TOMAS KORBER – Effacement (Cut)
In Korber’s music, a continuous investigation of the space where the sounds propagate is absolutely basic; “Effacement” is an important step in the Swiss/Spanish alchemist’s discography, revealing a decisive evolution in his organization of silence and sound in parallel ways with uncharted paths to accidental ear stimulation. Tomas’ efficacy in alternating dynamics, velocities and timbral choices keeps the tension level quite high, as he mixes percussive continuums of gently hammered guitar strings with ground noise shaking the auricular membranes, feedback ghosts, laptop-generated hail, microsonic gestures which fall right out of the conventions. What is found between these lines is a new listening code where we lose every control on expectation but – for a change – are guided by the firm hands of aural self-determination, far from the hostility of dangerous places yet with all the systemic alerts in full-function mode anyway.
TOMAS KORBER / GUNTER MULLER / STEINBRUCHEL – Momentan_def (Cut)
Beautiful sound colours for one of the best computer/electronic releases I put my hands on in 2003. Recorded live in Zurich, this record shows Tomas Korber, Günter Müller and Steinbruchel at perfect ease handling and dissecting sounds springing out of various sources, including a guitar. Of course you won’t be left without the familiar clicking and glitching but those common factors almost disappear in a blue sea of obscure, sometimes barely perceivable low/middle frequencies. Out-of-nowhere purrs and electric massages wander all around the brain, relaxing the nerves and letting out many different messages; it could be perplexing at first but – as time passes and you get acquainted with the music – a sort of addiction grows and you’ll miss these dronescapes when everything’s over.
TOMAS KORBER / KAZUYA ISHIGAMI – Mistakes (Neus)
In this record, two tracks are assembled by Ishigami with Korber’s sounds, the remaining one viceversa. It looks like these two artists were searching for some answers to profound experimentations: the sound, ranging from impressive sub-low frequencies to brittle waves made of light electronic snowfalls, often leaves a lot of space for thought – particularly in Korber’s case – under the guise of long silent periods. There are more than a few sections where the hypnotic quality of these audio snapshots gets trance-inducing, but suddenly charges of dissonant whirring and purring come to change the scenario. Overall I believe “Mistakes” is a very well conceived work of sound placement – first quality aural architecture.
TOMAS KORBER / ERIK M / TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA / OTOMO YOSHIHIDE – Brackwater (For 4 Ears)
Electroacoustic improvisation with a purpose, achieved through electronics, sampler, guitar, turntables, no-input mixing board and 3-K.pad.system; volatile rather than incendiary, “Brackwater” has instruments meshing well in a very organic balance. Apparently inanimate creatures suddenly start flying; well defined procedures begin scrambling to borderline atmospheres after minutes, while sound palettes near to chaos get regulated and march onwards to a coherent fusion made of throbbing electro-breaths. This quartet’s inspired frequency manipulation fills the air with statements of unconventional swiftness and outreaches for deeper goals; like sonic peace keepers, the musicians never let the noise gain complete control, allowing it just a little eruptive spontaneity to keep things fresh. This is no slapdash reunion of “names”, rather a well planned and better still developed quadrangular exchange among smart miscreants.
TOMAS KORBER / KEITH ROWE / GUNTER MULLER – Fibre (For 4 Ears)
Intracutaneous tickles and rimless phonetics rule the roost in “Fibre”, its millions of sounds crawling through impervious roads full of barely gaugeable ear-piercing mechanisms, whose polyvalent guise resembles an ancestral character that couldn’t be removed even using a white paint on the memory. In a sort of grudging give-and-take, the involved parties produce silent squalls and incidental conversations amidst the freezing electricity coming from the windows of murky unstableness left ajar. Longing for the smallest available lights, these sounds fuse their own goals, diffusing through corridors and rooms while emitting signals and radiations that could melt the earwax of timbral ignorance, finding niches and cavities from where they can only be intuited, never clutched. This rusty piling is a masterpiece of unconceivable mutability, whose inspissations are indeed clusters of energy shot by a network of psychoactive thought-transfering artists generating innovative, age-resisting music.
TOMAS KORBER / DAN WARBURTON – Conspiracy theory (L’innomable)
The imaginary corkscrew staircases supposedly leading to the revelations contained by the uncompromising minds of Tomas Korber and Dan Warburton headed me instead towards obscure meanders, populated by small biotic monstrosities and double-dealing malformations that allure into their shameless timbral deterioration while illuding us that we are still in charge; but, after a while, imageless electrocutions and sudden punishing shocks transform these sonic stubs into a sensational hoedown, where the transgression of suspense breaks all the barriers of refusal of the still unheard. This articulation of pre-masticated concepts whips our logical enslavement to what we already know, pretending not to hear our incessant requests for the restoration of a fake tonal paradise. Forget about your customary laptop gimmickry and sultry voids masqued as dogmatic “reductionism”: with “Conspiracy theory”, this odd couple applied a suggestive vision to the negativism of aural griminess, redesigning our mental tapestry with insinuating determination and rare discernment, all the while filling the house with glass-shattering frequencies, a much needed supplement for our consumpted ears.
TOMAS KORBER / CHRISTIAN WEBER / CHRISTIAN WOLFARTH – Mersault (Quakebasket)
One can perceive a fantastic connection of intents between these three fine sonic geologists, a common scope that results in one of the best electroacoustic fusions that have graced my ears in 2006. The accurate choice of the right moment in which an element must be released, the keen sensitiveness of ears and fingers capturing invisible signals to reproduce them in combinations that are extremely palatable in their timbral uniqueness: these are just a couple among the various reasons of “Mersault”‘s high value. Not to mention the sheer beauty of the single sources: Korber’s guitar-cum-electronics travel paths of subterranean burrows and Tuvan throat singing – just listen to the beginning of the third movement to understand what I’m saying. Wolfarth’s hands modify his percussive gathering like a sculptor does with raw clay. Weber approaches his double bass as a faithful kneeling in front of an icon, getting sounds of decomposing substances and falling helicopters as a reward. There’s a serious chance that this album will become a milestone after just two or three intensive listening sessions.
TOMAS KORBER / CHRISTIAN WEBER / KATSURA YAMAUCHI – Signal to noise Vol.2 (For 4 Ears)
Korber (guitar, electronics) and Weber (contrabass), namely two thirds of the Mersault trio, are here flanked by saxophonist Yamauchi in a typically restrained setting recorded in Japan in 2006. The initiated ones will immediately figure out that the most recognizable instrument is Weber’s bass which, incidentally, is slowly but steadily becoming one of the most notable voices in this field, thanks to its combination of fibrous growl and radical subtlety that fuse pure acousticity and exploration of impenetrable low frequencies. Korber mostly tends to catch glimpses of elusive harmonics and keep them visible in the haze for a long time, to the point of recalling the luminous vibration of a Tibetan bowl during the most concentrated parts. On the other hand, Yamauchi preferrably releases hissing statements and almost silent nods, only rarely making an attack or a proper note heard just to reassure us about the original nature of his machine. One of the most intriguing aspects in this kind of electroacoustic consciousness is that we’ve come to a point where we do know exactly what to expect from the artists, yet this is perceived more as strength than weakness. The musicians’ deftness in modifying their soundfields, giving life to bewitching spectra with a few basic moves and preparations, is the reason that makes this album so beautiful, standing as it is on the border line between complexity of significance and instant enlightenment. A confirmation of how deep the Swiss school of EAI has been digging in the last decade.
TOMAS KORBER / BERND SCHURER – 250904 (Balloon & Needle)
Balloon & Needle is a South Korean label run by Choi Joonyong and this CD, containing a brief performance by Korber (electronics) and Schurer (computer) recorded in Zürich on the record title’s date, is my very first meeting with it. Schurer “triggered and mixed” sinewaves, while Korber used a feedback system and a contact microphone. Although the recording lasts only 18 minutes, it is full of events that shape up silence while clearly altering the relationship between the artists and the space that surrounds them. Overacute emissions start the process, only to be swatted away by a violent, shrilling hiss à la Mattin; then infrasounds, sinewaves and feedback take center stage, with both artists content of letting undulating frequencies penetrate our skulls, complemented by micro-clicks and barely audible digital minutiae. Stinging highs and bleeping signals introduce a sort of harmonic undercurrent, then again soft glissandos and additional doses of ear-pricking stuff cancel any hope for wallpaper ambient lullabies. When all the elements combine, rhythmic modules appear between the most entrancing tones to generate a kind of emotional growth that instantly fades out, leaving room to a strong pulse which projects the sound towards the back of our head. The record ends with gentle clusters in a slight distortion, subdued “concrete” elucubrations and a final crescendo where a harsher saturation flows into complete silence. Short and non-sweet, as everything should always be in these lands.
KRABATOF PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA – Insect’s brain (Krabatof)
Out of the blue a CDR arrives in my hands, a little more than 31 minutes of very interesting “bruit art” by Geneva-based Ludovic Guerry, who manipulates “noises, field recordings and many weird sounds” in seven personal definitions of a peculiar world of embryonic utterances and disembodied dreams about the inhospitality of life. “Insect’s brain” is available in MP3 format from Krabatof’s website; most of its tracks are constructed upon the subsonic pulse of slowed down frequencies mixed with warped sampling and hazy environments; “Void” is the sound of war as heard from the toilet of a train, while “Obscene morning” gathers Asmus Tietchens and Keith Emerson under the effects of mushrooms; instead, “Negative emperor” and “Frozen monk” are nice examples of alien harmony. The thing I like most about Ludovic is that his music is raw but extremely individual – I really couldn’t find any comparison. Remember this guy’s name, as he’s got the potential to become at least a cult figure.
JESSE KRAKOW – World without nachos (Eh?)
Mr. Krakow – check him on You Tube, he’s quite a guy – stuffed 72 tunes in about 38 minutes. Some of them last three seconds, others a little more than that, all belong to the four-track-in-my-bedroom aesthetic. The titles are often hilariously in your face (“Why are you so ugly?”, “Fuck me on Christmas”, “When the clown is gay” to name just some), the music sounds at times excellently executed and very surprisingly styled according to a warped visual of the pop format; in other occasions it is full of distortion and small recording typos that, in any case, one is almost glad to hear. We’re given no respite, the songs go on and on without pauses and probably – absurdly, maybe – that’s exactly the limit of the album: a short joke is always a nice one. Krakow does possess intelligence and irony in good quantities, though, and that saves the day. Think something like a mind-altered Todd Rundgren crossing his path with a selection of unknown participants to an “idiot new wave group” contest, and you’re halfway there. Lovely for a couple of spins, not really essential in any case.
TOMASZ KRAKOWIAK – La ciutat ets tu (Etude)
Poland-born, Toronto resident Krakowiak is a percussionist and composer who has worked with several of the great improvisers who regularly appear here (some names: Oswald, Bosetti, Yoshihide, Minton, Butcher – you get the picture, the artist’s resume is a serious one). What was used in this CD is only “percussion and microphone placement”, the result being an interesting kind of raw minimalism with various highs and very few lows. Just to give a vague idea of the territory, imagine a working method comprising the roaring power of Z’EV and Pholde mixed with a corpulent yet entrancing approach à la Jon Mueller. Krakowiak’s timbres, thanks to the different ways of recording its instruments, range from subaqueous to grinding, his rolling thunders and gnarly abrasions appreciable on the medium distance yet pretty much the same from beginning to end. Only a track, totally based on an almost insignificant creak, is subpar; the rest is good enough for consideration, with a couple of impressive moments. I’d like to hear this man in more evolved contexts, but I smell substance anyway. Nice try.
ANNETTE KREBS / DAVID LACEY / KEITH ROWE / PAUL VOGEL – Annette Krebs / David Lacey / Keith Rowe / Paul Vogel (Homefront)
Just a little less than 32 minutes for two guitars, percussion, computer and electronics, recorded at Dublin’s i-and-e festival in 2006. The first moments of the performance depict the manipulation of microevents in an arctic climate of insistent hiss and under-the-skin electricity. Redefining their positions, the musicians start exchanging more noticeable discharges and outbursts, creating a series of substrata by layering harsher timbres, their scope apparently the development of a fictitious immobility that, soon enough, leaves room to a single overacute tone surrounded by all kinds of processed signals. Moistened by rare openings to stringed standstill, the music maintains its nervous intensity through perturbed manifestations, walking through impervious paths until about 14 minutes into the piece, when a threatening drone (which I suspect Rowe’s guitar for) places our corporeal awareness in a state of suspended anticipation. At the same time, slowed down voices – sort of a chorale from hell – trace the most obscure connotations of the whole act, which reaches its sonic zenith right then and there, shortwave and electronics taking full command. Calm is restored after a while, yet subterranean movements and continuous migrations of frequencies advise us not to consider the story as ended. The final minutes affirm a sense of ineluctable dissatisfaction – not with the quality of the improvisation which is expectedly high, but for our impossibility of looking at the ghost of intuition that moves the brains of musicians who emit previously unheard sounds as soon as they decide that the time is right. It falls on us to try and find the correct words to describe phenomena that have less to do with music than neuropsychology. Mostly failing.
K.M. KREBS – Alchymy (Con-V)
Kevin M. Krebs recorded “Alchymy” over a three-year span; the only thing that can be said is that the hard work that was put into it is easily detectable, this CD representing a worthy example of how this kind of music – which seems to mix field recordings, computerized manipulations and electronics – should always be made. An album that deals with concepts like morphing and transformation, leading from a scene to another without really letting us know, as we find ourselves immersed in a new set of aural parameters minute by minute. Nine tracks that insert Krebs in an artistic realm that looks to Paul Schütze on the one hand, to top-notch acousmatics on the other (regular attendants of the Empreintes DIGITALes’ soundworld will get a lot of food for thought here). Krebs meshes his colours with the utmost attention, depicting visions in semi-blurred detail but never leaving the composition scramble up the nonsense hill. Everything is perfectly placed and, although there is no real awareness of “fulfilled anticipation”, one has the impression of revisiting a forgotten memory after many years, suddenly rediscovering all of the familiar features that were there in the first place. Communication and transcendence do not fight, a measure of concreteness delimiting even the most amorphous manifestations. A fascinating and sometimes revealing record, with several fragments characterized by a more emotional, radiating beauty (the beginning of “As red as rubies” or the treated car horns in “Garlick blades” come to mind). High-class sound art.
ULRICH KRIEGER plays JOHN CAGE – A Cage of saxophones Vol.1 (Mode)
Those who are used to listening to Phill Niblock will instantly recognize the name of saxophone great Ulrich Krieger, who besides Phill has played with – and for – the cream of the avantgarde scene everywhere. Here, the German reedist undertakes the not easy task of playing John Cage’s music: a difficulty arising from the very same freedom that Cage’s “chances” yield to everyone involved in its interpretation. In fact, a set of instructions can be musically dangerous if not properly used – how long we’ll still have to tolerate lots of artistic trash while defining “freedom” or “new art” is anyone’s guess. But, as I knew before listening, Ulrich is a master of the understatement and his exceptional balance guarantees a splendid work. “Five” is made of almost static tones, reminiscing of the best historical minimalism; “Ryoanji” has the same taste and the beautifully scarce movement of Japanese theatre music; the final “Hymnkus” mixes sax, piano, accordion and percussion for one of the best Cage pieces I heard in a long time. Uli Krieger’s colours are absolutely flawless, his use of technique never overwhelming but always in line with the necessary attention to every detail. This is a superb recording!
ULRICH KRIEGER – Early American minimalism – Walls of sound II (Sub Rosa)
The perfect antidote against today’s lifeless representations of minimalism is the mannish approach of saxophone overlord Ulrich Krieger, whose impressive authority on the instrument is well documented. Uli tackles three pre-eminent fathers of the genre, mixing phraseology and technical devices with rigorous detachment coalesced with excruciating fervour. After the relative coldness of Philip Glass’ “Music in fifths”, for which one must have the right inclination of mind, the droning holiness of Steve Reich’s “Pendulum music” and a shockingly ravishing version of Terry Riley’s “Dorian reeds” instigated your reviewer to bring out his old vinyl paraphernalia to reminisce about what once was in the mind of true innovators. Glass’ percussive ritual “1+1″ and Reich’s “Reed phase” close the show in spectacular fashion, giving Krieger the opportunity to shine again in his fight against the narrow-minded people who like to subdivide and classify what is indeed just heartening excellent music.
KRYPTOGEN RUNDFUNK + HLADNA – Rokton + Formanta (Zhelezobeton)
The picture given by the press release – “abstract electronics, minimalism and a little noise” – perfectly recapitulates the 23 minutes of this 3-inch that sees a pair of St. Petersburg-based artists under fictitious names having fun (and letting us have it, too) with two basic models of Russian rhythm synthesizers, which give the name to the record and can also be exploited as tone and noise generators. Devotees to old analogue sonorities will stumble on something to cheer for, as the legitimate candour of this music, fed by characteristically prosperous pulses and stout frequencies, make for dynamic combinations of humble tests with a modicum of danger for one of the protagonists: Hladna is in fact used to manipulating the inside contacts of the instruments with his bare hands, a practice that has caused him to be struck by current twice. Honest stuff, highly likable sounds. I wouldn’t mind listening to a full album of these niceties.
KTL – 2 (Editions Mego)
Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg arrive at the second chapter of their collaboration with a bang, “2” being a massive powerpunch of a record still reserving long moments of dazed bliss in a “soft-hard-hard-soft” succession of four lengthy tracks – “Game”, “Theme”, “Abattoir” and “Snow 2” – for a total of about 72 minutes, part of which were also used as soundtrack for “Kindertotenlieder”, a theatre piece by Gisele Vienne and Dennis Cooper. The couple manipulated digital and tube oscillators, strings, effects, amps and drives to lead the audience through ambiences and atmospheres that range from subsonic drones and ghostly intuitions to the crescendos of distorted maelstrom typical of the central and longest sections of the CD, elongated melodies of superimposed saturated guitars gradually becoming hymns to shattered woofers (be careful: some of this stuff will have your roof quaking if played over a certain level). Despite the devastation brought by this huge wall of sound, the whole remains somehow suspended, like the wait for a ray of sun coming back after a violent storm. One can almost imagine the alternance between static poses and explosive movement in a virtual choreography to accompany the consecutive scenarios, and the slow arpeggio that lulls the music into its natural decay in the final “Snow 2” lets us return to a starting point of conscious perception of danger, a threatening excitement that never annoys. Birchville Cat Motel’s fans could be interested – a lot.
MARTIN KÜCHEN – Music from one of the provinces in the empire (Confront)
The first solo effort by Martin Küchen is a thorough exploration of the most hidden resources of that complex machine which is the saxophone. Many of the fifteen miniatures contained here are consecrated to the achievement of sounds verging on the percussive side of the instrument, be it the click of its keys or the scraping of metal – real or just imaginary. But it’s the bewitching quality of Küchen’s airy patterns that overcomes any listening difficulty, manoeuvring our sense of concentration through simple procedures yielding lots of fascinating sonic hypotheses. In this sense, Martin is an astounding researcher, finding myriads of idiosyncratic designs to regurgitate them in short spans of explicit bluntness; he develops a lingo which is accessible even if totally decentralized, reconditioning the saxophone improvisation building with new touches of non-violent fantasy colours.
MARTIN KÜCHEN – Homo Sacer (Sillon)
Swedish saxophonist Martin Küchen is among those names who aren’t immediately quoted when dealing with new music’s major protagonists, given also a not overly abundant production. But there’s no doubt about his seriousness, as this work for alto and baritone saxophones plus pocket radio clearly demonstrates. The underlying concept is an intriguing one, as “Homo Sacer” was, in short, a banned person deprived of all the civil rights by the Roman laws or, in the words of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, “a creature legally dead while biologically still alive”. Comparisons with this collection of improvisations are not really suggested by the inventor, if not on a vague reference level; their titles allude in fact to more or less remembered (…forgotten?) historical acts of violence. The five tracks of this CD don’t contain a single “regular” sax tone, built as they are upon the channeled flux of often vehement air into the instrument, regulated by Küchen according to systems of continuousness and repetition. For the large part, it’s a rather oppressive mass of hissing expertise, where non-existent notes are anyway fancied by our mind, as the only handles to grip are the reiterations of the imaginary (or less) designs that this succession of scenarios allows to be released in the surrounding ambience. Yet there are moments – such as “Killing the houses, killing the trees”- where a more percussive factor enters the scene, giving us a reminder of the experimental aesthetic privileged by artists like Lebanese trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, the sax becoming akin to a helicopter’s rotor. Still, it is when Küchen’s harmonically lurking steam gets corroborated by the juxtaposition with the shortwave content that a corporeality of the sound does indeed materialize. Those are the moments in which the magic of this understated, yet significant music is revealed in full.
MARTIN KUCHEN / DAVID STACKENAS – Agape (Creative Sources)
The fantastic, memory-eliciting photos of the cover, portraying family members in pretty advanced age posing in their old-style living rooms, plus the recording date – May 16th 2004, seventieth birthday of my mother – constitute a pretty interesting coincidence; the oblique conjectures by Küchen on prepared and unprepared alto sax and Stackenäs on guitar and low-budget electronics do the rest in this “dynamically static” release, where ears are literally forced to to invent colourful gradations in what apparently manifests as a series of irregular blocks of almost repressed energy, whose tonality comes from just a bunch of clashing harmonics and jangling sustained string vibrations. Righteous angers are kept at bay, indeed they get moulded into dozens of stimulating projections that the brain has a hard time decoding, accepting them only after a few seconds; what starts as a juxtaposition of quivering electric flows is watered by humid pipes of uncertainty, the intertwining structural networks becoming a saturating isolation from substantial relationships with the external world. A subtle thread divides the couple from a complete implosion, yet this never happens and the observation of this progressive counterbalance of obstinations yields truly appreciable consistency and a wholly new definition of “artistic responsibility”
HENRY KUNTZ – Wayang Saxophony Shadow Saxophone (Humming Bird)
This is a classic case of recording that undoubtedly possesses spiritual richness yet doesn’t necessarily attract the average listener’s ear. It took three sessions even for yours truly to finally understand that, rather to analyze every tiny detail under a microscope, it was much better exposing my body and mind to the flow of half-notes, half vocalizations and perturbed air that Kuntz generates with his saxophone throughout the whole duration of the disc. All the tracks were conceived as soundtracks to performances in which the protagonist used his Balinese shadow puppets while playing; the philosophy behind this kind of art is too complex to be reported here, but Kuntz explains it in detail in the liners. All of the above implies, at least in my imagination, that a change of approach to the instrument is more or less obligatory; it translates in something that, despite the often insubstantial sonic matter explicated through wheezing currents and howling moans, sounds – in a way – carnal, gifted with a sort of sensuality. And if you listen to the music relaxed enough, its vortex of energetic bursts will furnish some memorable moment of much needed mental absence. The suite “Tenor of the Times” (for four multitracked tenor saxes) that completes the CD demonstrates that Kuntz (who, let’s not forget it, has been a mainstay of the radical fringes of avantgarde, also playing in fundamental albums like Henry Kaiser’s “Ice death”) is an intriguing composer, too. Don’t rush your final sentence.
CHRISTOF KURZMANN – The air between (Charizma)
This record – influenced by the rise of Gulf War II – is an aural description of the desolation and the void brought by the “air between” explosions and bombing during war, but also the composer’s try to represent the space between “hope and despair, waiting and surrender”. What Kurzmann has meant to achieve is very difficult to put to words, but it’s sufficient to say he manages to guarantee an involving listening experience. This is music with a firm belief underneath, a sober response to a highly emotional anxiety, a constant presence into your blood system. Its low-frequency pulses sound like a half broken heartbeat; the faraway grey shadows one’s detecting smell like damp dust. Every once in a while the pace is fragmented/interrupted by little noises or sudden swarms of digital interference, only to start again and leaving us on the edge of doubt. Laptop music for our crumbling thoughts.
GOH LEE KWANG – Innere Freuden (Herbal)
All that’s needed by Goh Lee Kwang is a “prepared stereo DJ mixer”; the rest is up to your volume control, which is the key for deciding if “Innere Freuden” (“internal pleasures”) will be a nice frequency massage for your ears while you read or – god forbid – watch TV, or if instead you prefer trying to communicate with animals and/or extraterrestrial creatures while risking to shatter all the glass in your house. Everything nearing hiss, feedback, white noise and subterranean gulps and bumps is contained in these tense soundscapes of “next-to-nothing” intimacy. Ectoplasmic forms succeed to electrostatic currents and popping/glitching penetrations, an invisible net of infectious microsounds which Kwang has assembled with a spartan yet functional compositional touch. The coldness of this sequence of events inside a dead-blank framework is alluring in its peculiar way, leaving many open possibilities for the self to become a part of the process.
YANNIS KYRIAKIDES – The buffer zone (Unsounds)
Originally conceived for theatre, this is the most beautiful music I’ve heard from the ever excellent Cypriot. The 1974 attempted coup d’etat against Arcibishop Makarios brought the creation of the “buffer zone” (or “nekri zoni” – “dead zone” – for the Greeks) which to this day is patrolled by United Nations soldiers; this area comprehends various abandoned villages and “ghost towns”, like the modern part of Famagosta, that are deserted since then. The piece looks into the head of a soldier who’s surveying this no man’s land and is surrounded only by his own thoughts, feelings and body signals in a growing sense of loneliness and displacement; this compares with what many Cypriots feel, knowing that they will never be able to enter these sectors of their own country if not through guided trips (and since 2003 only). Accordingly, Kyriakides’ music goes from a stream of consciousness-like flux of dislocated voices and sounds to extremely agitated transactions where electronic impulses and field recordings (by the composer himself) accompany the progressive disgregation in the mind of the soldier, convincingly interpreted by baritone Tido Visser. Pianist Marc Reichow’s rarefied chords and inside piano techniques mix wonderfully with Nikos Veliotis’ cello, whose bowed arco expands both the harmonic suspensions characterizing the drama and our conscience of listeners willing to go beyond a somnolent acceptance of unjust realities.
YANNIS KYRIAKIDES – Wordless (Unsounds)
A 2004 commission by the Argos festival in Brussels, “Wordless” is an unsettling collection of pieces composed by Kyriakides by cutting the words off a series of interviews retrieved from the archives of BNA (Bruxelles Nous Appartient) and leaving the remaining sonic residues – sighs, giggles, coughs, utterances plus eventual background environmental noise – doing the speaking amidst configurations of electronic/pulse music. This Greek sound artist had already given a nice demonstration of his talent in the recent, excellent “The buffer zone”; here, he easily escapes from the risks implied by a quite vulnerable structure of more or less similar concepts. Kyriakides succeeds because of his choice of vocal timbres and sequences, avoiding a sterile game of easy oral tourbillons to bring out the most peculiar aspects of each subject, so that one gets an instant picture of characters who – destined to anonymity – reveal instead themselves as protagonists of a narrative where recollections, uncertainties, fun and anguish are all amalgamated in a series of microcosmic flashes. Indeed, while listening to “Wordless” the last thing one could feel is a sense of serenity, as we seem to be unauthorized peepers of other people’s neuroses. Let me tell you, though, that the ear stimulation received through these fragments of reality is truly unique.
YANNIS KYRIAKIDES / ANDY MOOR – Red v Green (Unsounds)
Music made of striking imagery, assembled with a dose of ingenuity carefully mixed with knowledge of the most interior aspects of human reactions to ear stimulation. Sounds that live alone very well, yet when Moor and Kyriakides work on their fusion we’re in presence of spare parts that could be the rusted remnants of a non-existent song, crumbling definitions of electroacoustic simplicity, patterns of abnormal speech becoming the most natural thing in the world. Naturally tending to organic disintegration, this material is a great company if you’re in the right mood to embrace it; the beautiful photo booklet contained in the digipak cover is a perfect addition to a record that demonstrates how sound making is a matter of right choices rather than technical preparations. Moor’s guitar and radio codes seem to be born only to figure here, while Kyriakides’ treatments are natural and miraculously biodegradable. A well conceived documentary about acoustic life in some hidden spheres – I just love it.
YANNIS KYRIAKIDES / VEENFABRIEK – The thing like us (Unsounds)
All of this music is based upon Baruch Spinoza’s writings, being the soundtrack to an experimental theatre/sound project dated 2002, the origin of which is well detailed in the CD booklet. Having not seen the performance I approached the record like an installation in my own room: at discreet volume, Kyriakides’ electronics invisibly wrap your head while percussion and harpsichord give the main recognizable timbral guide. The voices whisper and claim according to circumstances, becoming entangled in a net of repetitive dismemberment, quite often distracting from the essential value of the beautiful sound canvas created by the musicians. I’d also advise you against doing other activities while listening because you’d lose focus on the music, which must not happen if you really want to try appreciating this difficult release.
