It’s all about the body of the instrument and, he wishes to stress, his own human body, a warm carbon-based entity playing this wooden monster in the room. Volume, space, plucking, breathing, wood…To this end he attached microphones to anything that moves – his hands, his chest (to capture his heartbeat) and his voice – not counting the pair of mics in the recording space to capture the music. Few musicians, I would guess, have gone this far with contact mics and gaffer tape, attaching ungainly machines and cables to their own body as if about to be sent out to capture testimony from an unsuspecting mob boss while wearing a “wire” (as seen ad nauseam on Hollywood thriller movies). Perhaps we need to look outside the world of improvised music for a precedent, and turn to performance artists like the maniacal stellarc, although he dreamed of turning himself into a cyborg and didn’t flinch from attaching hoists and cables to achieve his aim.

Apparently this is the second bass-solo record From Svendsen (the first was probably Forms & Poses from 2016) and we’ve mostly tended to hear this highly individual Norwegian player in small-group context, often on his own Nakama label, but quite often the music we hear challenges what we think we know about the many genres of “free improvisation”. That’s pretty much the case here, too; there are moments, like on ‘Joyful Body’ where it becomes more about physical presence and something verging on contortion, as though the player were a very agile acrobat or India-Rubber Man at the circus. With all these taped-on microphones and limbs tied into pretzels, you might be expecting something rather more “extreme” from the music here, when in fact it’s quite approachable and refined, even. Although the experiment is very unorthodox, it does indeed succeed in bringing the listener “closer” to the experience of performance and the “truth” of a physical wooden instrument.

At a time when computer moguls are advising us we can dispense with all that untidy human messiness in favour of virtual this and AI that, a record like this is only to be welcomed. Enclosed booklet includes testimonials and praise from fellow bass-players around the world. (02/04/2024)

Well, if you’ve been slaughtered or butchered by Pain Jerk records in the past, you might be surprised to learn that now he calls himself Painjerk Wracked And Ruined, and what’s more he’s since evolved into a composer of modern chamber music. Today’s record Dots Kinematics For Electronics & Chamber Orchestra Version II (CONRAD SOUND CNRD335) gives a co-credit to The Touchables, and it’s the maverick Octobass player Guro Skumsnes Moe who seems to have assembled this group of Norwegian musicians to perform this single 32:36 minute piece, scored for percussion, strings, and some computer + synth input from the composer himself. And while we’re mentioning the Norwegian connection, the six-panel wallet has artwork and design from Lasse Marhaug, himself a confirmed “noise addict” who not only flew around the world performing his own brand of intense and juicy noise, but also founded a label to further indulge his passion for it – releasing, for instance, the Incapacitants Box Is Stupid from 2009 which compiled 10 CDs of intense harshitude rescued from obscure and collectible cassettes.

Well, today’s record is of course very far from harsh noise, but it’s not exactly a comforting or reassuring event either. While it may start out with inscrutable bells and puzzling percussive blombos, odd phrases and pregnant pauses hanging there with terrible solemnity, the brew starts to liven up when the string section respond to a gesture from the conductor’s baton, and start to dish out astringent stabs as sharp as any dagger, then proceed to drip lemon juice into your wounds. There’s also some engaging moments creeping outwards from the woodwinds and brass – the bassoon of Hanne Rekdal and the contrabass clarinet of Gjertrud Pedersen doing much to curdle the milk inside your udders. Only towards the end does the listener experience a certain frisson of chaos, but it’s a very controlled chaos, taking place inside a cold room and performed by acrobats executing clown-like tumbles with the awkward precision of an academic researcher. For some reason, the “Dots” and “Kinematics” of the title had led me to expect something with a little more movement and passion, but instead I feel I’m left with a puzzling lump of organic matter in my fridge, unsure as to whether I should cook it in the oven or take it for a walk on a long leash. The composition itself however is quite clever and complex. From 23 February 2024.

Friedl and Topelitz are doing it with just piano and electric bass, although swathes of amplifier hum and other evil fizz do seem to swirl in with the rising tides, and the entire suite extends over two hours in a non-stop performance of deathly slowness, informed by a fatalistic torpidity that’s guaranteed to put the listener on ice as they freeze our bone marrow, using sophisticated hospital equipment, by inches. The “composition” word is getting bandied about a lot in connection with this record, and undoubtedly both these gifted Europeans have earned that accolade in their many endeavours, but La Fin Des Terres is almost entirely predicated on the performance – specifically the simple interaction between these two instruments, but after a bout of listening you’ll start to think the piano is the size of a house and the bass is a coffin for a woolly mammoth. It does seem to have some effect of stretching out dimensions, but the one they are most interested in is that of “time” – “the music is clearly built on a double thought of the architecture of time,” we are told, “the creation, disappearance and mutation of textures…”, which seems to be a way of expressing something about the sheer formlessness of these wretched burrs, these cold piano stabs, these non-musical shapes, these menacing lower-register tones, and above all the sense of slowly marching into the abyss, to the tempo of Reinhold Friedl’s left hand. In like manner, the six monochrome images on the digipak depict a land without boundaries, a sprawl of contours and surfaces, too vast to be understood or encompassed.

Well, all of this would be just grand if there was a bit more tension and vif to the music, or if the duo just cut loose and exploded into horrifying, bone-crushing noise, but they take the exact opposite path – restraint, cool, aloofness, are just some of the watchwords binding them in as they undertake their gloomy task of repainting the continents in various shades of grey, and rather than build to an orgasmic climax across the cosmic sky, they prefer to wind it in even tighter and spiral downwards to a nameless grave. Still, this kind of stilted free-improv is an interesting move for Friedl, slightly uncharacteristic of this meticulous control-freak fellow who needs to spend months preparing elaborate impossible scores before he can execute them using lasers and sewing-machines and protractors. French / Polish Kasper T Toeplitz is now, I see, considered to be an important electroacoustic new music interpreter (e.g. Radigue, Niblock), but he started out as a brutal noise guy in the late 1990s, when he worked with Karkowski, Z’EV, Vomir, and Ottavi dishing out nine types of punishment from his whacking stick.

I take heart that it was recorded at Art Zoyd studios, although the actual band Art Zoyd would have really made a meal of this “theme” if they’d tackled it in the 1980s, and would have delivered it in a fraction of the time. From 15th September 2023.

‘On Hirohito’s Famous Win’ is melodic and enjoyable lite-classical, and while ‘For Scodanibbio’ may include raunchy plucks and stabs, they’re certainly not deployed in the service of abrasive or dissonant music. I take note of the player’s great sensitivity and discrimination when it comes to acoustical nuances; he recorded his solo turn at the Ghent Opera while it was empty, so that “every note, attack and vibration comes through, including the creaking of the wooden floor.” Even his strings (‘Tempera’ strings made by Gerold Genssler) come from a lineage of traditional gut strings, another hallmark of his hand-woven authenticity and commitment to his craft, and he’s slung his tuning especially to enable freely resonating strings.

Vermeulen does get vaguely avant on ‘On Integration’, but even as he tries to follow the trend towards rigourous minimalism, he still can’t help forming tunes and he can’t help filling spaces. Neither Bruno Duplant, Hannes Lingens, or d’incise are likely to select Nils Vermeulen for any of their projects in the near future, but on the other hand, he did appear on those Tonus records by Dirk Serries in 2018. Superficially a very user-friendly album of music results, but also deficient in tension, heat, or engagement. (28/04/2023)

American experimenter Charles LaReau is also called Das Torpedoes and Voost Viszt, plus he’s part of an improvising group called Naturaliste. He’s currently a resident of China where he runs his own cassette label Bluescreen, but today’s item Stasis (EH? AURAL REPOSITORY EH? 121) was released on the Eh? Aural Repository. This one scored an instant hit with me, for reasons I don’t understand. Really great set of odd and strangely compelling sounds – an inscrutable mix of recordings, music, found sounds, process noise, electronic racket, and any other intangible flots our man can pick out of the ocean depths, using his gigantic submersible tongs. When this kind of work succeeds, it’s not really about the source materials that are being used, and maybe not even about the methods (recording, editing, processing), so much as the forces that drive an artist such as Charles LaReau in the first place. The “inner artistic demon” as I sometimes like to call it, rehashing a phrase I once read in a review of Ornette Coleman’s records, can sometimes be a benign force; I suggest LaReau is compelled to explore and find out new facts about the airwaves and the atmosphere around us, reporting back to HQ with all the exacting dedication of a man on a mission for the USAF who’s just returned to earth after a flight in the XRT. What I especially like is that he seems genuinely amazed by it all – and that’s a healthy attitude right there, far preferable to that of a so-called experimenter bringing in the exact same predictable results with each new episode. As such, there’s a real delicacy to his touch which is very evident on these dream-like recordings, and he behaves as one so respectful to the spider’s web and its tracery that he dare not disturb it, even as he makes his observations. A tiny gem right here.

Quite nice record of double-bass improvisations by Evan Lipson on Echo Chamber (PUBLIC EYESORE PE152), marking his solo debut release. He did it inside a Corbetta magazine in Tennessee, a disused storage bunker where munitions and explosives were kept by the military since the time of WWII. Naturally enough, Lipson makes the most of the resonant environment, allowing the stone walls (and hopefully some cast-iron doors) to throw back reverbed ghosts of his plucking, stabbing, and sawing actions; there’s even an evocative photo of him at work, where it’s so dark that only his hand is illuminated, and a portion of his bass’s neck (plus there’s a glimpse of the star of David shirt he’s wearing). If it was indeed performed in near-total darkness, those circumstances may well account for the way he starts freaking out at certain points during this 43-minute performance, writhing like a stir-crazy prisoner of war clapped into solitary by the enemy. In what I regard as a rather typically American fashion, printed here are tables of historical facts and figures about the location, the activities of various military agencies, and statistics about the production of TNT, none of which information actually does very much to enhance our listening experience. But it resembles research, so adds a veneer of gravitas to the record. It’s also doubtful if you need to hear an entire album of this music, whose message could easily have been delivered in a fraction of the playing time. Even so, there’s an earthiness and urgency to Lipson’s playing which is useful, and anyone who has a connection to Revd Fred Lane, however tenuous, can’t be all bad in my book.

The acoustic bass continues to features on the self-titled item (PUBLIC EYESORE PE151) by Guro Skumsnes Moe & Philippe Petit, which features two long pieces by this great Norwegian bass player – who we have heard previously with her duo The Touchables (with Ole-Henrik Moe) and the noise-rock band MoE, where she also shrieks out punkified vocals. On this record, she does play electric bass but also wields the mighty octabass, a 12-foot monster that you have to play with pedals and levers. While it’s possible to say this record also suffers from the “over-long” syndrome mentioned above, it’s made much more tolerable by the powerful vortex effects generated by Moe’s bass. These vibrations pretty much pull us in like a gigantic whirlpool of molten steel, and the journey is made even more intriguing by her occasional vocal interjections, simultaneously eccentric and rather alien. Where Evan Lipson above is struggling in the dark against his bonds and shackles, Guro Skumsnes Moe is happily rewriting the story of “A descent into the maelstrom” by Edgar Allen Poe, and what’s more she’s coming out a winner. Philippe Petit’s additions (EMS Synthi A, turntables, voices) are decorative and all, but I’m gonna have to award the championship belt to the Norwegian, for the sheer effort and imaginative force of her playing. The first track showcases the acoustic versatility, but you unreconstructed rock fans may wanna click onto the third track for long-form electric fuzz bass emanations, purrs and growls.

These are both accomplished and respected players in their fields of endeavour, and it might be that a lot of the success on this recording (from a 2019 live performance in Munich) comes from the duo knowing each for a few years, and playing together – when prompted to discuss how much of the music was pre-planned, our man Dafeldecker responds in cagey fashion that they simply share similar musical interests and have similar histories, which might be all that’s needed. My sense is that minimal improvisation is evolving all the time these days, with one rarefied strand following another in a gigantic vivarium of mutating life forms, and it’s knowledgeable musicians like these who are breathing life-sustaining vapours into the atmosphere. I say “breathing” because I can’t seem to escape the in-out mechanism of familiar punch-bags, the old lungs that is, when listening to this stately music, and that’s not just due to the woodwind work of Argentinean genius Capece, although his work here on bass clarinet and slide saxophone is as refined as an entire facility full of natural gas. It’s the subtle interplay of two enormous land masses navigating carefully across a frozen sea, where 90% of their true power is kept submerged and only called on when necessary.

Another part of it is to do with that ever-elusive quality which I sometimes call “room tone” – musicians with a fine ear understand it perfectly and often swap anecdotes, I assume, about certain venues to avoid, but here it’s become a positive presence thanks to Capece’s subtle amplification of the space, aided perhaps by feedback from his mini speakers. At least one source sees fit to credit him with “room acoustics”, and this record, if listened to attentively, may indeed succeed in suggesting a virtual space around the listener as surely as a blueprint drawn with a mercury pen in zero gravity conditions. Play Part I of this unedited set to hear more of the “breathing” metaphor being recast in unusual ways, or Part II if you want to liven up your day with some sparky, harsh bass plucks and ominous wooden creaks from the Dafeldecker half of the act, who stirs much like a Titan emerging from his cave to deliver a message to the world. Plus there’s a cover photo of a near-empty landscape with a deep blue sky, supplied by Capece and his immobile lens device.

All of Simon Reynell’s releases on this label are of a high standard and fit well within his admirable aesthetic and label identity, plus he knows a lot about the music he curates, and about the musicians he works with. From 21 February 2022.

Intense record of solo double bass by Swedish player Johan Berthling. His Björnhorn (THANATOSIS PRODUKTION THT12) is his debut as solo recording and it’s impressive to hear the way he throws himself into the task, and is not afraid to touch on as many extremes as he possibly can – frenetic sawing actions, deep bass throbs, monotonous long-form grinding and groaning. It’s also quite some way from the high-energy firework jazz we have heard from Fire! Orchestra and Arashi, both Norwegian jazz-improv groups who don’t spare the horses when it comes to serving up platters of high-octane raw meat. Berthling solo is more thoughtful and contemplative, as if intent on exploring the acoustic space of the studio with his resonant thwacks, but also threading his way around his own interior spaces. Six segments titled ‘Björnhorn’ are presented here, with a break in the middle where he plays a Charlie Haden composition in his own lugubrious manner. Limited CD of 100 copies, though there’s also an LP version.

Berlin-based sound artist Jana Irmert here with What Happens At Night (FABRIQUE RECORDS FAB097). For this record, she took the unusual step of working primarily (though not exclusively) with recordings generated from smashed lava rocks…she rubbed them together to generate sounds, but also became fascinated with looking at the layers of strata within these volcanic fragments. There seems to have been some process whereby she aligned the visual information with the sonic forms, which led her to speculate and ruminate on the passing of time, as measured in “millennia of existence and non-existence”. After gazing at her screen, mankind’s presence on the planet suddenly seemed very insignificant to her, a consideration which evidently awaits any serious student of geology. Although rubbing rocks may sound unpromising, and her method may lead you to anticipate a record of empty process noise, What Happens At Night is in fact a very charming and poetic work. We could attribute these qualities to the album title, to the combination of field recordings and minimal synth melodies with her lava work, to track titles such as ‘Dust is the Rust of Time’, and the image on the cover which seems to show her (or another woman) walking through a time portal into the distant past; that image alone should resonate with Kate Bush fans. Last heard from Irmert with The Soft Bit, also made with rocks (and metal objects); her work has seemed a bit insubstantial to us on previous outings, but this is a good one. (04/04/2022)

Tomaž Grom also happens to run this label in Ljubljana, but Zavod Sploh is in fact an entire association for music production and performing arts in this part of the world; as to his own musical development, Grom has cultivated his extended techniques and sometimes plays the bass with added electronics (not here; this one is all acoustic). Zlatko Kaucic is a veteran of jazz and improvisation in his homeland, working for over forty years at time of writing, and is a member of a number of small groups and orchestras. Like Eddie Prevost, also a drummer of course, Kaucic has run his own school for young musicians, an enterprise which has evidently met with great success. They’ve been playing together as a duo for nearly 25 years now, but I think this might be the first record they’ve released. I think the triumph of this pair is that they’ve managed to create something that’s highly innovative and surprising, even to those listeners and friends of long-standing (including Luka T. Zagoricnik, who wrote the insightful essay) who think they know everything about their music.

That alone would be reckoned an achievement, but to a listener like me the music is completely fresh and new; a number of things I like about it…concision, not too many long takes; economy in the playing, meaning a lot of information is transmitted without going into long-winded detail. A certain urgency in the playing, without being drawn into an overly frantic style of playing; both sound assured and fully confident of what they’re doing. A brittle and spartan sound (which is one net result of working with these instruments), yet they find exciting ways to bring new voices to bass and percussion, without resorting to tiresome gimmicks like “preparations”, electronic effects, or bowing everything that stands still long enough to feel the hairs of the bow. Strong, concentrated stuff; recommended. From 20th January 2020.