Tagged: art music

May 11, 2013

Call Me Animal

Exotic item of the month comes from Maria Monti, the Italian actress and cabaret singer who has a film career going back to 1962 and had a starring role in Leone’s A Fistful Of Dynamite. The album Il Bestiario (UNSEEN WORLDS UW08) was a 1974 showcase for the assured and unusual vocal mannerisms of this Italian chanteuse, whose nearest equivalents might be Lotte Lenya or Gisela May. Monti clearly had this unerring ability to interpret a song through acting it as much as singing it, and her wiry acrobatics on this album are just amazing to hear. There’s a real clarity of intent and meaning in Maria Monti’s singing, which is rare; not a single fudged word or a smeared note. Listeners who enjoy authentic craft in song delivery are in for a treat, and may want to start looking for her 1972 double album Memoria Di Milano for further examples of how she might approach cabaret, chanson and ballad styles. But beyond the technical ability, we are struck by her emotional range, the sharpness of her observations. On a song like ‘L’Uomo’, even to non-Italian speakers, there’s no mistaking the meaning of the lyric from her no-nonsense and slightly world-weary tone. It genuinely is one of those songs with a theme the whole world can recognise. And there’s also the poignant and nostalgic beauty of ‘Aria, Terra, Acqua E Fuoco’, with its understated acoustic guitars and piano arrangement, a yearning piece sung with a crystal-clear purity that could bring an ache to the hearts of all the statues in Lombardy. On this account, I suppose Jacques Brel or Scott Walker come to mind as similarly tempest-tossed souls performing a balancing act between detachment and compassion, attempting to resolve their personal test-tube full of conflicting feelings and mental storms. But few performers have the grace or poise, the understated power, of a Maria Monti.

The other point of interest to us here is the credit roster: Alvin Curran, now widely known for his very extreme synth experiments and avant-garde compositions, did the arrangements for the album and contributed synth backdrops, and Steve Lacy (soprano sax) is one of the session players – along with two guitarists and a baritone sax player. While the results may not be the wild mix of MEV with free jazz this combination might promise, it is still an unusual-sounding record with some daring and startling dynamics in evidence on tracks such as ‘La Pecora Crede Di Essere Un Cavallo’, a stark and bony thing which is almost like a more approachable version of John Cale’s production for Nico. And ‘Il Serpente Innamorato’ is a dramatic tour de force, a slice of apocalyptic poetry-recit and crazy mutant cinematic music compacted into two and a half minutes of precision-tooled mayhem. Slices of sonic art like this ought to make Il Bestiario a must-have item for fans of art music, soundtrack LPs, chanteuse records, and the cinema of Jess Franco. Maybe it’s some kind of missing link between all of these strands of buried wayward European madness. The producer was Ezio Leoni, a titan of the Italian music industry who’s been involved in the production and arrangement of about two hundred records from the late 1950s onwards. This was released in June 2012, a limited pressing, and sorry to tell you it seems to be sold out already from the label, but surely must be available somewhere. Highly recommended.

December 28, 2012

Synchronisms

I think we last heard from Noah Creshevsky with his 2010 album Twilight of the Gods, released on the Tzadik label, and there is also the 2008 item Favorite Encores where he teamed up with If, Bwana. Now here he is on Al Margolis’ label Pogus Productions with Rounded With A Sleep (POGUS 21063-2), containing seven recent-ish examples of his dazzling and impressive “hyperrealism” compositions. Creshevsky is a meticulous electro-acoustic maestro who uses an extreme form of editing, cutting and pasting together sounds from multiple sources; on this record, he does it using the recorded performances of numerous musicians, so we have a rich array of musical notes and sounds from clarinet, voices, guitar, banjo, steel guitar, cello, bass, and improvised piano music. Twilight of the Gods went all-out for the wow-factor with its intense and utterly impossible layered compositions, its runs of notes rushing past at ridiculous speeds, and a generally breathless tone throughout most of the album. Rounded With A Sleep feels somewhat more manageable than that tornado, and its keynote to me seems to be an intimate contemporary form of chamber music. This may be simply because there aren’t as many instruments to listen to, but this outlandish composer does not skimp on the “can such things be?” factor, presenting us with a lavish feast of layered, cropped, varispeeded and intricately assembled musical phrases, the like of which hasn’t really been heard since Frank Zappa overworked the Apostolic Studios board on the Uncle Meat album in 1968. This is particularly evident on the clarinet and keyboard interplay on ‘La Sonnambula’, and the astonishing recastings made out of Stuart Isacoff’s piano work on ‘What If’, which is like a surrealistic walkthrough the history of classical European keyboard music. If I knew more about the field, I might be able to identify resonances with Bach, Mozart and Haydn with more confidence, but as it is I can only effuse my vague ill-informed impressions. I’m on slightly safer ground with the guitar-based piece ‘The Kindness of Strangers’, which offers us a virtual trio of guitar, bass, lap steel and banjo players, refashioned in the studio to create an utterly mangled form of anguloid country and western music, where not even the singing voice is spared the full Creshevsky treatment. One is usually left somewhat exhausted by listening to only ten minutes of this dense music, but it is clear Creshevsky is not simply out to surprise or stun the listener with a zillion cultural references and juxtapositions in the manner of many plunderphonics artists over the last 20 years. On the contrary, he aims to advance music. His sleeve notes here offer a robust critique of the norms of classical music performance, highlighting the “bad economics” of paying “good wages to a live performer who merely sings a 10-second coda at the end of a string quartet”. Creshevsky’s hyperrealism, and by extension any music that has been collaged in a studio through judicious selection of the best performances ¹, offers a viable alternative to that old 19th century concert-hall based model. However the composer is not out to completely junk the past, and he is driven by traditional musical values of virtuosity, sonic palettes, and the production of an expressive musical language. His edits produce a form of super-virtuosity from the work of the already highly-capable musicians he works with. If his music seems exaggerated to us, it’s because he feels he also has to compete with the excesses of the information age, where we have been exposed to so much culture that he fears the power of music may be diminished. Creshevsky’s response to the situation is far from pessimistic; he devotes himself to creating energised and uplifting music, that truly refreshes the sensory passages. From 17 February 2012.

The American composer John Bischoff studied with Robert Ashley at Mills, and was also a member of the League of Automatic Music Composers. The latter team of experimenters made use of early (late 1970s-early 1980s) computer technology to generate random electronic music in endearingly home-made ways. On Audio Combine (NEW WORLD RECORDS 80727-2), we hear five of his more recent works dating from 2004 to 2011, which are broadly related in their use of physical objects or instruments being employed to trigger electronic sounds. There are subtle variations to do with the use of amplification, timing patterns, and attempts to subvert or re-order the original time sequences by ingenious methods. Most of this very process-heavy music seemed uneventful to me, but I enjoyed parts of ‘Sidewalk Chatter’ which was made using the STEIM crackle box ² and effectively documents some sort of interactive hands-on dialogue between the performer and a computer, via the exposed metal circuits of the box. ‘Surface Effect’ is also sporadically exciting and works on similar principles, that is the interaction between a trigger device and a computer program, but this piece makes more extensive use of pre-planned random structures and allows, in a control-freak sort of way, the oscillators to create unpredictable patterns. A complex form of a detuned and unstable synthesiser, if you will, which benefits from being entirely hand-made by Bischoff. From 20 February 2012.

Trophies is the oddball project of the Italian composer Alessandro Bosetti, a vehicle for his complex prose-poem concoctions which he intones rather emotionlessly on top of a free-form musical structure provided by the drummer Ches Smith and the guitarist Kenta Nagai. Bosetii also adds uncertain electronic tones, colours and washes, and Nagai’s guitar is fretless, meaning he is able to make music while avoiding constructing familiar riffs or tunes. These strategies add to the deliberately obtuse contours of the sound and the open-ended nature of the compositions, producing sensations in the listener that are very hard to explain. Six examples of this perplexing music can be heard on A Color Photo Of The Horse (D.S. AL CODA #4), all recorded in Brooklyn in a single day in 2010 under the production guidance of Alex Waterman. Trophies music is always a bit daunting and overwhelming to listen to. For starters, the music is half-familiar, half-unfamiliar; at times it almost resembles a form of dissonant experimental jazz-minimalism performed without any sort of underpinning rhythm or pattern, and at other times proceeds with the urgency of a tricky Trey Gunn riff from a latter incarnation of King Crimson. Mostly, it is dissonant and unpredictable, wriggling about the turf like a structural-materialist centipede. Then there’s the equally tricky lyrical content, a jumbled explosion of prose verbosity which may sometimes repeat certain phrases, and which occupies some halfway mark between Samuel Beckett and Lenny Bruce. As soon as I think I stand on the verge of grasping the meaning of these breathless texts, they almost instantly collapse back into a sea of absurdity and gibberish. The situation is not helped by Bosetti’s studied ambiguity as he performs his half-musical recits, at times almost parodying the emotional dramas of a soul singer or operatic diva, but mostly rattling through his forests of words with the speed and efficiency of a human typewriter. True meanings are masked in this post-modern diatribe. Make no mistake, this is a truly fine art piece of business – conceptual art trammelled up with music in ways that make Laurie Anderson sound like pop music. In some ways this could be the closest we’ll get to hearing a Raymond Pettibon drawing in sound. This release is one of numerous oddities, including some DVDs, we received from this inscrutable art label in January 2012. All of them are packed in sleeves which cannot be unfolded.

By which I mean anything from George Martin with The Beatles to Teo Macero with Miles Davis. ↩
The instrument has its origins in an invention of Michel Waisvisz, who made an LP of it for FMP records in 1978. The device was also used briefly by Derek Bailey on Domestic and Public Pieces. ↩

December 9, 2012

Two Vinyl Voltaggios

Colour Field

Texas musician Rick Reed is here with a sumptuous double LP called The Way Things Go (ELEVATOR BATH eeaoa035). I am ashamed to say we have had this in the vinyl waiting list since May 2011, if the release date is anything to go by. Reed is a composer who layers his tones using tone generators, synths, and radio waves, and believes in long-form duration to achieve his aims. There are only six tracks across this 83-minute double package, which gives you some idea of his sense of scale. Each work is an enormous abstract expressionist painting, with dramatic timbral shifts taking place across unexpected and subtle turns. Reed is not one of those near-silent mysterious droners, either; he gives you a lot to listen to, a lot to digest, and as well as thinking big, he also believes in making it loud. For full appreciation of these solid and very very continuous electronic drones, turn up amplifier loud and prepare to float in a colourful and intense atmosphere that has no end in sight. At least three titles give us a clue to the Rick Reed aesthetic: ‘Mesmerism’ is the effect he intends to have on your psyche, lulling you into a trance with his throbbing tones; ‘In a hazy field of gray and green’ is the precise visual analogue we need to understand the contours of this near-shapeless music, and through naming colours he suggests its rich tonal effects (unlike some droners, Reed does not neglect the root note); and ‘Celestial Mudpie’ indicates the more spiritual claims to his music, promising a heavenly experience to the listener, while at the same time admitting it’s not so grandiose, and he might not be much more than a kid in a sandbox making mudpies. I should stress that “muddiness” is not one of his characteristics though, and this heavy sound has been so well realised, recorded and pressed that when spun it passes on the complete desired punch, groove for groove, in highly vivid manner. Reed did the cover paintings too. The label is still puzzled why Rick Reed is not better known as a composer, and it’s true he does have enough droney capacity here to outlast any of his English counterparts – e.g. Colin Potter, Nurse With Wound, Mirror – who continue to receive many plaudits.

Expecting To Fly

A truly uncategorisable item is Come Ho Imparato A Volare (CORVO RECORDS CORE 002) by the Italian artiste Ezramo. This is evocative, lyrical art, created by a very gifted miniaturist. In just six short tracks we hear a bewildering variety of musical and sound-art techniques, all in the service of Ezramo’s peculiar minimal-poetry lyrics; she sings, plays piano, zither, harp and bells, and also collages field recordings. She also produced the drawings and texts for the whole sleeve. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that this gifted woman is primarily a gallery artist, who assisted at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and that this LP has its origins in an exhibition of the same name which was shown in 2009. In the two years following her Stuttgart success, she developed this music which I suppose (not having seen the exhibition) might be an aural rendition or re-casting of the same themes. She is interested in insects and larvae, as is Irene Moon but in a quite different way, and she intends to explore the idea of “transformation”. All the album’s titles refer to this concept, either obliquely or directly, and if you think the image of being wrapped in a cocoon is going to depict a comforting interpretation of human existence, quite the opposite. It’s fairly clear that the entire experience of “How I Learned To Fly” is sad, painful, uncertain, and even racked with torment. Despite moments of respite implied by the romantic piano fugues, the core of the work is quite insistent on these raw emotions, many of which are clearly very hard to express. I welcome this degree of honesty and truth in art, which is very rare. The printed text inside just sings to us about the painful primacy of existence, and our responsibility as human beings: “Wake up!! It’s not a dream…this is your resurrection, your gothic metallic electronical freakin pathetical southern bloody blooming resurrection”. It’s also evident that the gifted Ezramo, whose real name is Alessandra Eramo, knows exactly what effect / meaning / substance she is aiming for with each note she creates; not a single wasted moment across the entire LP, which is compact and accurate as a jet of ice cold water between the eyes. I also welcome this sort of discipline and economy in art. As to what it sounds like, besides the piano music episodes, there are two or three abstract tracks of intense hissing sounds which deliver all the tension and fear implied above; there are overdubbed vocals chanting absurdist la-la tunes in a stark manner; and an opening track that is an expressive metallic rattling episode, highly reminiscent of Ashley Paul’s music. The LP ends with a collage of sound effects and field recordings that seems to depict a dramatic and near-nightmarish Cinderella story – footsteps running, voices muttering, something going badly wrong at a concert with choral music and brass music. 300 hand-numbered copies of the “trade” edition, and 50 art edition copies which were inlaid with original drawings by the artist. Released in March 2012, this is one of the most beautiful records (aurally and visually) I have received this year.

November 14, 2012

Refracted Light

True Mirror Microfiche / Double AA Side (D.S. Al Coda #2) is the vinyl viand of the evening. Pressed in red vinyl it be. It’s on a label called D.S. Al Coda. We may have several CDs received from this label as well. As yet, I don’t fully trust the vibe of what they are doing somehow. There is a bit too much text, context and meta-text for everything. This release is credited to Dexter Sinister though it is far from clear what this means. Alex Waterman and Dan Fox seem to be credited as principal instigators. The A side I liked. There’s music composed by Alex Waterman. Waterman is a significant composer associated with the Plus Minus Ensemble in Europe and the Either/Or Ensemble in New York; and he’s worked with Robert Ashley. Perhaps it’s a document of a performance which includes some music and some on-stage antics that involve footsteps, dimming lights, maybe a screen show of some sort, and a brief lecture. The music is beautiful at times, in its halting way. A trumpet played by Peter Evans, a violin by Hrabba Attladottir, and some turntable effects by Marina Rosenfeld. Gentle phonograph rumblings more likely. The music may have been scored or directed in some way to be as simple as possible. Basic patterns of notes just keep repeating. It’s quite soothing but also extremely enigmatic. It may be minimal but there are rough edges, overlapping vectors, patterns that don’t quite match up when you think they should. Nearly exact opposite of the usual control-freak perfection minimalist music. Another thing I like is that the ending of the piece is clearly stated, announced, and happens as a very concrete moment. And this may be reflected in the sleeve notes too. Again it’s a layer of meta-text we can probably do without, but I like concrete moments when I can get them. It feels like a document of a thing happening that is in some way beyond one’s reach, a statement of self-evident simplicity that is impossible for the mind to grasp.

The B side is by turns annoying and intriguing. Dan Fox may be the perpetrator. He describes his work as “sound intervention”. Spoken with a very Home Counties accent is a self-important and rather pretentious diatribe, an art history lesson that takes in the Armory Show, Marcel Duchamp, and aspects of popular music too. It somehow draws a line from Duchamp to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Byrne / Eno) and back again, with many cultural stations on the Bakerloo line of the mind. It’s punctuated with radio dial interference effects and snippets from music too. It’s probably very serious in intent. The bits I liked was where the whole wordy business appeared to be folding in on itself in some way. Paragraphs repeated or restated in a different context, or read in a new voice. Quotes within quotes in some way. Playback of an earlier tape which contains the whole phrase or paragraph which was only excerpted previously. The experience is even more confusing if you try to read the printed text as well. It doesn’t quite match. Neither a proper transcript nor a palimpsest. It reminds me in method of The Post Nearly Man by Mark E. Smith, a very odd spoken word record whose cultural importance still doesn’t seem to have been properly appreciated by that many people. You may take issue with the specious art history conclusions drawn by this piece (I know I did), but the form it takes is interesting and innovative, like a lecture or essay illustrated with small sound bites, which tend to pull the train of thought down some odd sidings.

Another offputting part for me is the inner sleeve. It contains enormous wodges of printed text. I cannot be bothered to read them. These texts seem to conceal as much as they reveal. They refer to trivialities as if they were incredibly significant, and make insider references to things / events / places in the career of the creator(s) which we could not be expected to know (or care) about, yet he/she/it treats them as though they were common knowledge, widely appreciated and understood. Or is the whole thing a constructed fiction to add yet another layer of obfuscation? I experience the same exasperation when I read about the finer points of some absurd Fluxus performance or event, which didn’t mean much outside of a circle of five friends in New York. Sorry for incoherence, I could have been more careful in the writing but I feel like only a semi-distracted associative ramble through my half-baked brain will do when attempting to sum up this unusual work.

September 10, 2010

All-American Weirdness

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The Sound Projector Radio Show 10th September 2010

Roger Nusic And The Vague Sunshine Orchestra, ‘Can I Come in and See You’
From Hello Lovers…, USA RAINFOREST RECORDS RR 010 CD (1993)
Revd Fred Lane and Ron ‘Pate’s Debonairs, ‘Fun In The Fundus’
From From The One That Cut You, SHIMMY DISC EUROPE SDE 8911 LP (1989)
The Shaggs, ‘That Little Sports Car’
From The Shaggs, USA ROUNDER CD 11547 (1988)
Roky Erickson And The Aliens, ‘Creature With The Atom Brain’ (1980)
From I Think Of Demons, UK EDSEL RECORDS ED 222 LP (1987)
Davis Redford Triad, ‘Solar Aquarius (Slight Return)’
From The Mystical Path of the Number Eighty-Six, USA HOLY MOUNTAIN 8655-CD (1997)
Smegma, ‘Fish Story’
From The Smell Remains The Same, USA ANARCHYMOON RECORDINGS ANOK 18 LP (2007)
Ed Askew, ‘Ask The Unicorn’ (1968)
From Ask The Unicorn, GERMANY ZYX MUSIC ESP 1092-2 CD
Barnes & Barnes, ‘Cemetary Girls’
From Voobaha, USA RHINO RECORDS RNLP 013 LP 91980)
Golden Sunrise with Sky Saxon & Ya Ho Wa 13, ‘Voyage’ (1977)
From Fire, Water, Air is Djinn, Arelich,Pythias, Octavius, Sunflower, HIGHER KEY 006 CD
Revd Fred Lane and Ron ‘Pate’s Debonairs, ‘Mystic Tune’
From From The One That Cut You, op cit.
Alexander “Skip” Spence, ‘Books Of Moses’
From Oar, USA SONY MUSIC SPECIAL PRODUCTS A 9831 CD (1991)
Irene Moon, ‘Untitled’
From Excerpts From Field Station A, USA NO LABEL 10″ LP (1997)
Fredrik’s Cosmic Spaced Out Blues Band and Orchestra, ‘Get it out of your system’ (1976)
From Beyond The Black Crack, UK PARADIGM DISCS PD 06 CD (1998)
Sun Ra, ‘I Am Strange’
From USA NORTON RECORDS 45-153 7″ SINGLE (2009)
Dion McGregor, ‘A City So Nice’
From Dion McGregor Dreams Again, USA TZADIK TZ 7404 CD (1999)
Copernicus, ‘They Own Everything’
From Deeper, USA NEVERMORE INC. NEVERMORE 208 LP (1987)
The Tinklers, ‘I’m Proud to be a Citizen of the Roman Empire’
From Casserole, SHIMMY DISC EUROPE SDE 9132 CD (1989)
Daniel Johnston, ‘Despair Came Knocking’
From Hi How Are You, USA HOMESTEAD RECORDS HMS 117-1 LP (1988)
Pearls Before Swine, ‘Rocket Man’ (1970)
From The Use of Ashes, USA WATER 112 CD (2003)
Wild Man Fischer, ‘Merry-Go-Round’
From An Evening With Wild Man Fischer, USA BIZARRE 6332 2 x LP (1968)
Ya Ho Wha 13, ‘Yod He Nau He’ (1974)
From Penetration: An Aquarian Symphony, HIGHER KEY 001CD

June 1, 2010

Noctilucent Idioms

From Denmark, Stormhat sends a copy of From The Moat (APPOLLOLAAN RECORDINGS APAR030), a curious solo CDR which has been made from building up layers of field recordings with “primitive instruments”, and producing some very singular sound events through subtle, organic collisions. Sun, sand, sea and windspray are not exactly prominent on these hallucinatory episodes, but they seem to underpin and inform all the strange clonkings, clankings, wooden thuddings and deft tape manipulations that are taking place. I’m always impressed when a creator can master this many layers of unmatched materials, and not end up with a paintbox full of muddy brown goo (or the digital equivalent thereof), a success that our man Peter Bach Nicolaisen achieves here in his quiet and idiosyncratic way. ‘Taking Off On Fragile Wings’ is especially impressive for producing the sort of imaginative and fanciful materials which many stern academics of the tape-recorder method would normally deny themselves. A micro edition of 50 copies, with photography and artwork by Michael Shaw; I wonder if he hand-decorated all the covers? Apparently it’s already sold out!

Canadian project VioSac were last noted here in August 2009 with a rather apocalyptic and bleak pronouncement somewhat in the “dark ambient” mode, but Dawning Luminosity (VATS3) feels quite different. It’s calmer, slower, and extremely minimal, made using a lot of analogue equipment at source (including a Moog Voyager and a Roland Korg), and it aims to express “sadness and resolution”. I haven’t yet got to the resolution part, but it’s certainly quite a poignant listen thus far. I am personally encouraged to see a 16th-century religious painting on the front cover (St John on the isle of Patmos painted by Bramantino), hinting that Graham Stewart may also wish to convey something of the quietness and solitude of the ascetic life, and his printed motto “understand, and you are liberated” comes within a hair of “the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). These filtered and looped electronic droney-waves are not unpleasant, and there’s a steady rising and falling slow rhythm shaping the work.

Camera Police (D’AUTRES CORDES RECORDS DAC302) is another great one from Franck Vigroux, the French one-man jazz-rock electronic genius. As you can tell from the title and the cover art which features a single riot policeman with helmet and baton inflated in Photoshop so he looks like a grotesque leaping blimp, this concept CD is highlighting the dangers of the surveillance technology which is one of the blights of the modern age, and Vigroux makes no bones about his very real fears that we’ll all end up under the iron rule of a Police state if things go much further. Track titles take up the theme, alluding to identity cards, truncheons and databases of personal records on ‘Fichier’. One of his more exciting and abrasive records results, with plenty of harsh electronic noises and mutant beats thickening up the textures of these paranoid atmospheres, ultra-fast instrumentals and chattering side-swipes. Musically, Vigroux is proudly carrying on the traditions of Pinhas, Lard Free and Metal Boys, and it’s also great to hear the Situationist spirit of rebellion and political critique expressed with such passion and panache. Garde à vue, gare à toi!

On Music In The Air (DEEP LISTENING DL 43 2010), we have a studio collaboration between famed American Minimalist Pauline Oliveros, with her accordion and her conch, and also performing on something called an “expanded instrument system”. Hard by is Chris Brown, a scholarly fellow who has followed many ethnic influences in his piano work but also busied himself with building modified electronic instruments, a path which has led him to the real-time signal processing he performs here with the aid of computers. While ‘Troposphere’ seems a little over-crowded with discordant and busy sounds competing for air-space, the opening cut ‘Noctilucent Clouds’ is bafflingly beautiful, somehow deflecting all of one’s expectations as we try to listen our way into its nebulous centre. The genius of the performers here seems to be that they have created a gaseous fog out of multiple small gestures and tiny mosaic-like sounds. Very compelling.

Idioms and Idiots (W.M.O/R 35) is the latest item sent to me by Mattin, an event which you should all by know is the equivalent of receiving a bottle of nitro in the mail. I’m not sure yet but it might be another ingenious anti-music statement that manages to be totally innovative and poisonously destructive at the same time. Hereon, Roy Brassier, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Seijiro Murayama and Mattin are doing something which human minds cannot comprehend. It seems to have been recorded live at a festival in Niort in 2008, perhaps working to diagrams (or perhaps not) by Guionnet, and it’s bolstered by a textual mini-essay inside the package which I think explains something of how it came to be. I can’t face digesting that mass of words at the moment, but there seems to be a set of very convincing ideas about keeping normal expectations and conditioned behaviours at bay, in the same radical way that MEV used to do when they were inventing their unique form of improvised noise (ideas and discussions…always a good approach). At least, that’s my understanding of the heading for paragraph 2 “Don’t start improvising for God’s sake”, which in my opinion is very good advice indeed. This is without doubt one of the most perplexing and confusing records I have heard this year, which can only be a good thing; packed with strange sawing noises, inept guitar strums, inexplicable passages of nothing happening, and odd irruptions of screaming metallic shrieks. I hope to revisit in due course and try and figure out what this all means.

April 15, 2010

Something New for You

KIVA (POGUS 21054-2) is a double CD set of fairly uncompromising modernistic music…only those of a strong heart and intestinal fortitude should check in to experience these four lengthy pieces of atonal disjointedness. The avant-garde combo KIVA was set up in 1975 in California led by the American trombonist John Silber and Jean-Charles François, a percussionist from France. Their mission: to widen up the artistic field of play in classical music so as to allow the performer more creative licence and freedom in their interpretation, yet without treading over the same ground followed by those of the jazz-based improvising persuasion. Two recordings from 1991 on the first disc (the group lives and dies by its recorded statements) are all acoustic (piano, percussion, brass, strings) and sound to these non-musicological ears like a dark and demented form of avant-chamber music that would cause even Pierre Boulez to start frothing through his hairband as he frantically tried to regain control from behind the conductor’s podium. However, some listeners might find more accessible inroads on the second disc; it kicks off with a 1985 piece where the acoustic instruments are cut with some growling live electronics (Keith Humble roars out nicely with his DX7 set to Prowling Tiger mode), and at certain points the combo’s disjunctive and stuttering approach to sonic generation starts to turn into a profound musical language. To some extent, it’s the way they leave these stark and yawping gaps in their playing that makes it so exciting. The disc concludes with a 1990s tape collage made by John Silber, using KIWA performances as his raw material, and these ‘Poems on the Absurd’ are where it really starts to get unnatural, futuristic and deeply spooky. At this point the intrepid listener will want to revisit disc one and start to decode these difficult, dense and challenging musical statements in more detail. Real food for the brain, this one.

Another extreme-experimental belter of the week comes from the GD Stereo label run in New York by the fabulous and celebrated Geoff Dugan. Con Gen Duets / Gen Con Duets (GD022) displays a collection of works made by old friends and sparring partners Gen Ken Montgomery and Conrad Schnitzler, who have been producing crazed hand-made tape experiments and other aural delights since the 1980s, based on a mutual admiration system and determination to push each other’s working methods in strange, new directions. On this, we’ve got seven examples of challenging, radical music-making made simply by combining the basic one-finger spontaneous piano compositions of Schnitzler (a man who doesn’t “really” play the piano at all and in fact has made numerous records trying to deconstruct and undermine this most academic of orchestral instruments with almost as much clinical passion as the insane Walter Marchetti) with the every-day and uneventful field recordings of Gen Ken, who delights in the poetry of small objects and overlooked bric-a-brac. I realise this is a record that will try the patience of many, but those of you with a taste for absurd drama of the Beckett and Ionesco variety will find yourselves whistling all the merry tunes from these duets in no time. The release is housed in a letterpress envelope filled with letterpress artworks, made by our good friend with the hardest working elbows in the print room, Ben Owen of windsmeasurerecordings. A fine limited edition art object of 300 copies it be. Also I see from the press release that the GD Stereo catalogue is going to be made available through the Pogus website from now on. Nice to see these big guys of the NYC avant-garde co-operating with each other to mutual benefit.

Speaking of Gen Ken, he recently sent us a cassette tape from Poland made with Mark Moreland and Paul Hamilton. On Elm Elm Elm (XVP67), Gen and Mark make quiet and eerie sounds using everyday objects like musical instruments, and vice versa; Paul Hamilton apparently only appears by accident as a guest voice, and is also responsible for animal sounds. Recorded last summer, it has the feel of a spontaneous semi-musical event taking place in the open air under warm skies. I think you would be impressed by the range and variety of sounds and effects going on in this apparently unobtrusive and gentle work; it’s packed with life and rich events, all leaking in through the wide-angle lens of the microphone. 50 copies only, packaged with inserts (including one laminated object, natch).

December 30, 2009

We're Becoming Blind

Blinded by the Light
Among all the prevailing efforts to reissue just about anything that moved from the international post-punk home-made cassette and DIY era, it’s a pleasure to find this astonishing curio from Mika Taanila who, in 1980-1981, did his bit for the Finnish underground, recording cassettes under the guise of Musiikkivyöry (literally, ‘music avalanche’). A disaffected and introverted young man, Mika was just 15 when he recorded these raw and primitive pieces of electronic concrete negativity, working alone in his bedroom and turning his back on his parents and the confirmation-school camp where he was born. He issued the results in tiny quantities on the label Valtavat Ihmesilmälasit Records, an enterprise co-managed by the very notable Anton Nikkilä, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that like many others in the Finnish scene, he drew inspiration from such bands as This Heat, Cabaret Voltaire and The Normal. Compiled here with all tape hiss intact, and a full-colour insert with detailed photographs of the original tapes, Tilemm Sokeiksi (EKTRO RECORDS EKTRO-059) is a great package which also exists as a newly-minted limited edition cassette, and is testament to Jussi Lehtisalo’s attention to detail in such matters. Mika’s music was of course featured on the excellent compilation Pilottilasit, which I also recommend. Another piece in the huge jigsaw of this hitherto-neglected area of music, this record is full of sinister pulsing, unpleasant growling, vari-speeded voices, relentless tape loops, scrapey metallic bursts, and all the unhealthy obsessiveness we should expect from an intelligent, alienated adolescent genius. (Mika Taanila has since gone on to become an international film-maker of some note.) Great release, highly recommended in every possible way.

Three of France’s finest contemporary improvising players slug it out in assorted jazz festival arenas on Dos D’Ânes (RONDA RND12), a curious title referring to the remarkable load-bearing qualities of the humble donkey who often performs well in the improv circuit, carrying amplifiers and instruments. Jérôme Noetinger, eRikm and Michel Doneda produce many pleasing examples of improvised sax music rubbing up against live electronics and CD-skipping work in a highly salty manner. To my mind, eRikm hasn’t made a single sub-standard record in recent years and his many team-ups are reaping dividends, lug-pleasure wise. Noetinger (label boss of Metamkine) is likewise steaming like an industrial street sweeper with his ‘dispositif electroacoustique’ work, parping out illogical swawks like some exotic jungle parrot. Meanwhile Doneda’s sax is sweetening up the mix in ways we haven’t heard since the glory days of Lol Coxhill. Three long and tangly pieces of chattering, serpentine noise recorded in 2007, with the great Jean-Marc Foussat (among others) sitting behind the recording desk.

The Prisma Records label has been created to document music performed at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Norway and showcases Norwegian sound-artists and musicians on its two new releases. On Music For Tinguely (PRISMA 706), Ingar Zach plays unobtrusive percussive effects alongside a motorised drone, and Andreas Meland uses his computer to reprocess environmental sounds recorded at a Jean Tinguely exhibition. On Nova (PRISMA 705), we have a short 25-minute 1972 piece of electronic composition from the contemporary composer Kåre Kolberg, originally used as part of a multi-media piece in collaboration with visual artist Anders Kjaer. Archival photos from this event adorn the sleeve. A nice brace of examples of art-gallery music, with cover designs by Lasse Marhaug.

Dmytro Federenko from the Ukraine kindly sent us a copy of Sturqen‘s Piranha (KIVITNU 8), a sterling example of avant-techno blackitude rendered with evil pulsing beats and sullen, surly bassundo throbs. An elaborate die-cut card sleeve unfolds to provide many jagged edges, which could be the teeth of those piranha fish all set to tear our soft, supple flesh to ribbons. The label is home to other examples of underground Ukraine electronica, including the very good Kotra, some of whose stark and challenging releases have arrived here in past times.

From Swansea, a quite nice pastoral record which combines the electronic ambient drone music of Ian Holloway with the countryside field recordings of Banks Bailey. Holloway (who has done film soundtracks) began A Brief Sojourn (QUIET WORLD 12) working with his own field recordings, but decided that those of Bailey were far superior; the results take us on a continuous journey across land, water and air and produce many pleasing effects along the way. Cover images of a feather and dragonfly wings suggest the fragile and delicate themes these creators are attempting to evoke.