When the going gets tough, the tough get going. The celebrated Belushi call looks perfect to invite he/she who describes certain products of free improvisation as mere noise to discard this post right now, and keep fantasizing on music composed to satisfy the ego of kings and popes – the establishment, that is – as the foremost parameter upon which a theoretical cosmic sublimity is based. Throw the discordant stuff to the bastards, then.
However, another sarcastic line (the pleasure of discovering where it comes from is left to your good selves) says “the cosmos at large is so very big”. And, let me add, it is full of diverse agglomerations of vibrating particles, more often than not in shapes so unusual that one’s brain cannot even conceive. Musicians able to achieve a tiny measure of truth via this simple acknowledgement will definitely have an advantage in the relationship with themselves, and – in general – with the ability to perceive things in genuinely polyphonic fashion. It’s all Music, including what analphabetic oracles tag as “ugly”.
Incidentally, not many seem to realize that a considerable number of improvisers are better qualified to speak (quietly) about the classics than the “official” experts. That’s a different story, though.
BERP – recorded in 2001 (!) – takes its title from the names of the artists involved (Barbara Rose Lange, Ben Lind, Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Philip Gayle). Actually, there’s also a guest in a track, Domokos Benczedi. The instrumentation comprises stringed instruments, ping-pong, percussion, toys, baseball game, waterphone, violin, voice and a broken hurdy-gurdy. The album may appear “lengthy” for those in search of accomplished virtuosity and harmonic “resolutions”. In reality, it’s a snippet of physical eternity replete with scorching upper partials, glimmering jangle, fractal micro-rhythms, continuous pitch shifts and peculiar/raw vocalizations. The whole originates complex designs through maximum innocence; you just let it flow around, and settle inside the perennial transformation of the acoustic matter. No healthy method exists to define how the interaction develops; at the same time, there must be a reason if souls like Gayle and Diaz-Infante were among the first to be featured here, when this writer’s computer was still sputtering on Windows 98. Sound has its special way to put akin human aerials in touch across the universe. Voilà – third quote of this writeup.
So, leave us alone with the wealth of unadulterated frequencies that the aforementioned cosmos offers; the others can get ready for the next nervous breakdown. It’s not a secret that the average mind is severely limited in terms of contrapuntal analysis of our being alive; in that regard, the merely aesthetical “divineness” of a ringtone symphony which contradicts any evolutionary hypothesis remains an evergreen.
Evidently, long ago someone decided that the Grand Master’s musical taste never included anything beyond the 18th century.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 