Tagged: composed

May 11, 2013

I Am A Statistic

UK marginalista Hari Hardman‘s cleverness consists of stating his themes in short bursts of electronic drone-noises that stimulate the mind for only a few minutes at a time, in contrast with many excess-merchants who overegg their puddings and outstay their welcomes. The Tyrant King Supports The Sacrificial Vessel (HARI HARDMAN PRODUKTS HH0024) is more approachable than his earlier harsher burst-a-plosions, and indeed you may enjoy losing your way in the curvulated paths he maps so eccentrically. Highly generous on the absurd visuals too, booklet and insert produced with high-contrast photocopier and typewriter technology. (25/07/2012)

Puzzling thing sent from Sparks, Nevada in the US, maybe from Isa Tanaka. The name of the act and CD are rendered in runes I cannot reproduce, and the tracks have odd names such as ‘Rakine Hugoniot Relations’, which perplex. The front cover states “Ambients”, but this may be misleading information. On the CD are the most enigmatic stretches of low-key white-noise hoover-drones I have heard for a while. Some are possibly environmental in origin (a clinical shopping centre mode), some have vaguely musical elements. May seem unappealing, but I enjoy its inscrutable continuousness. (24/07/2012)

UK composer Martin Ayres has produced his Harmogram Suite (BURNING SHED BSHED0111) as a 5:1 surround sound DVD and as a regular audio CD. Not one to stint on hard labour and meticulous assembly, his work contains 140 layers of overdubs, with all parts played by Ayres himself; he’s also paid close attention to recording methods, set-ups, and different playing techniques, the better to simulate the richness of a full orchestra on this one-man show. Languorous strings drone slowly, and the work is suffused with melancholy astringency. (03/08/2012)

Mika Vainio will be an electronic musician I personally associate with a time in the 1990s when electronica was punchy, abstract, and brutal. His FE304 – Magnetite (TOUCH TO:86) thankfully contains some trace elements of these desirable features. With six track titles that incorporate the word “magnet”, he may be trying to tell us something profound about the world, even more than these stark, ultra-dynamic throbbers of pulsant noise reveal on first spin. Angry firebursts, puzzling silences, eerie distilled silver tones, deathly precision. An air of stern grimness abounds for album’s length, which is fine, but Vainio also relaxes into pedestrian mechanical drone once too often for my liking. ‘Elvis’s TV Room’ is a great title though, and it’s a good piece of mausoleum music too. (19/07/2012)

An uncanny oddity of terrifying beauty is Polin (MATHKA NO NUMBER) by Ireneusz Socha. Produced just with sampler and electronics, plus the voice of Jaroslaw Lipszyc and the bayan of Jaroslaw Bester, it tells you more than you want to know about Polish and Jewish history, and does so in just 20 minutes. An intricate “hörspiel” miniature, it took Socha several years to complete, which is unsurprising as, at the core, it’s a detailed assemblage of samples borrowed from a sound archive. Religious and political themes underpin the work, blended with speech recordings and cabaret or klezmer music, but ultimately it’s a transcendent art statement that takes the listener on a profound and fascinating journey. Bolstered with a concise essay “An Uneasy Rest” written by the composer. Very recommended! (13/07/2012)

Fêlure (ORGANIZED MUSIC FROM THESSALONIKI T18) is an item from two maestros of the school of non-musical object-based minimalism, Pascal Battus and Alfredo Costa Monteiro. Battus has done great things with his strange droney sounds based on “rotating surfaces”, which I assume are decommissioned potter’s wheels and broken cake-stands. Monteiro has taken his reductionist philosophy one stage further by playing “amplified paper” on this album, an action which presumably involves rubbing or stroking the grain in interesting ways. Atmospheric creaks, haunting hoots and sibilant rumblings abound. (03/07/2012)

Worsel Strauss decided one day to surrender his will to the way of the machine, and produced the music on Unattention Economy (VICMOD RECORDS VMDL16) using self-generating electronic devices including a Buchla synth, along with a deliberate refusal on his part to interfere with the pure course of automatism. The liner notes robustly defend this approach, ruminating on the psychology of fear and ideas about loss of control. Lest we think the resultant album is a sprawling mess of doodling synth noise, in reality the process has been carefully refined through listening and editing. Strauss found that the set-ups were incredibly labour-intensive, and even more work was involved in finding strong moments of structured or partially-structured music buried among the hours of chaos he recorded. His strenuous efforts are reflected in the 12 shortish tracks we now hear, some of which are quite good. I’m all in favour of editing, but doesn’t that strategy somehow undermine his “loss of control” philosophy? (04/07/2012)

April 21, 2013

Nada Será Como Antes

Symphony No 3: Siddharta Gautma O El Poder De La Nada (ROARTORIO ORAR 24) is a decidedly unusual and beautiful album which showcases the unique music of Nelson Gastaldi. Hearing it “blind” is enough of an experience. Something very puzzling about the recording quality. Maybe something to do with cassette tapes. Light distortion, distanced. The music is very layered, and the layers don’t quite match up. Like hearing one melodious fugue piled on top of another as if by random methods, or seeing superimposed photographs across different time zones. Swirling drones which we later learn are mostly processed sounds produced by keyboards, yet come across as clean and organic as though they were played by acoustic instruments. String sections from another dimension. Odd percussive interpolations that follow no obvious logic, yet appear as naturally into the vista as jackdaw or toucan cracking a macadamia nut while we’re listening out in the jungly wilds. Above all the persistent sense that we might be dreaming this music, making it up out of our imagination rather than hearing anything real. How many composers or musicians have aspired to creating that particular impression in their listener’s mind? Thousands, probably. Yet these three suites in this unusual symphony come close to it, patterning whatever underlying score or composition method there may be on the random logic of the unconscious mind.

We’ve got a sleeve note written by Roberto Conlazo, one of the original “unholy three” who created the Reynols madness in the 1990s. Anla Courtis was another of that trio, and he’s involved in the story too. Conlazo used to run a music school in Buenos Aires, and Nelson Gastaldi showed up there one day, leaving after a brief exchange about keyboards. Later Gastaldi met both Conlazo and Courtis by chance, and after a long talk about shared musical interests they had no hesitation in claiming this man as one of Reynols’ spiritual ancestors. Later still, they managed to interview him and have the results published in San Francisco’s Bananafish magazine, once the printed haven for far-out musical oddities of all stripe. If you like reading far-flung tales about strange visions and the power of ritual, it is certainly worth seeking out a copy of this text. Luckily it’s available on the label website. It persuades me that Gastaldi can probably be aligned with the magical-realist tradition of South American writers, like Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

One of the nuggets to spill from his mouth indicated that Gastaldi had a horror of all that was mainstream and successful in art, particularly music festivals, art galleries, and media coverage. He tended to see the dominant culture as a trap, a factory which just created “more of the same” and “parasite music”. This may account for why his own music has been kept out of the public eye for so long; perhaps he was a deliberately self-exiled Outsider. Like Charles Ives who worked in insurance for most of his life and kept unpublished scores in his desk drawer, Gastaldi worked for an electric company in Buenos Aires for most of his life. Only since his death in 2009 is the information and the music beginning to emanate out into the sphere of attention. Would he be happy about this? I’m always struck by the reaction of Henry Darger, whose secret cache of writings and artworks was discovered in his flat towards the end of his life, a revelation he was powerless to prevent. His reaction on hearing the news was one of unmitigated horror; the worst had happened.

We’d probably want to move back one or two notches from that end of the purist Outsider Art scale when accounting for Gastaldi’s music. After all, Roberto Conzalo was invited to the composer’s house and was extremely pleased to witness the bare-bones setup used by the artist to realise his music. Very basic tape recorders, cheap keyboards, some actual acoustic instruments including violin and trumpet, and lots of toys and percussion devices. It doesn’t take an expert to realise that the genius of this strange music is all in the imaginative power of the creator in this case, the resourcefulness that could make art out of almost anything; I am reminded of Joseph Cornell and his well-ordered boxes of cuttings, objects and commonplace found items that were reorganised into three-dimensional statements of profound beauty. This is one reason I always get so bored and fed up with electroacoustic music made by prize-winning composers in Canada who have expensive studios, keyboards, filters, computers and lavish effects at their disposal, yet what ends up on the grooves of their releases is boring, lifeless, academic tripe, for all its rich surface.

My own predilections in this area lead me to favour work like Gastaldi’s, which vibrates and floats with its own understated raw, uncooked energy. The work has been digitally restored from the composer’s home tapes, which makes me wonder if the wobbly tremor effects are part of the intended work or part of the restoration process. Either way they work beautifully. Lastly we have the title which may or may not be referring to Siddhartha, the 1922 novel by Herman Hesse. I was advised to read this book when I was 16 but I found it dull and unengaging, and since then have always remained unpersuaded by tales of spiritual illumination and self-discovery. I’m more attracted to the second half of the title, El Poder De La Nada which translates as “The Power of Nothing”. While Gastaldi’s music here may have some trace elements which put one in mind of the swirling mandalas of Popol Vuh or Between, there is also a very eccentric trajectory that causes the music to meander as inexorably as a huge river, cutting its way through inhospitable turf. From February 2012 – sorry to have been so dilatory in noting this release, but I find it is still in print. Recommended.

April 14, 2013

Entertainment and Partial Entropy

On Numbers (CREATIVE SOURCES RECORDINGS CS 201 CD) we have the team-up of the guitarist Han-Earl Park with Richard Barrett playing live electronics. After some 20 minutes of slotting this one into the old playback vestibule, I bethought me “Yikes…amplified Derek Bailey meets Thomas Lehn!” Park is one of those scary polymath guys who seems to have a tremendous facility for music, both improvising and composing it, and he has played in many groups and at many festivals, appearing around the globe in seemingly ubiquitous fashion. Scariest of all is his intense and speedy guitar technique, which on parts of this album presents a rush of tangled information that would require a bank of dedicated computers to solve it. Thankfully Mr Han-Earl is never too “glib” in his phrasing and throws in multiple fishhooks and other barbs to snag our ears, otherwise we might be tempted to switch off in the face of his effortless glides and spiky dense riffs. It’s also good to find him in this duo set-up where the detail of his playing can be more clearly heard than in Mathilde 253. The Englishman Barrett is also a composer, like Park sometimes situated in an academic and teaching context, and is no stranger to using electronics in the live situation having formed the FURT duo with Paul Obermayer as long ago as 1986. Some day I really must get around to hearing FURT, or some of Barrett’s compositions, because I have the sense I would find a denseness and complexity that I could really sink my teeth into. Barrett’s method in wielding his “boxes” here is certainly pretty enervated. Regardless of whatever intricate and dazzling shapes are thrown at him like crystal spears by his sparring partner, he responds in kind with impossibly twisted gurgles, shrieks and salivated electronic utterances. Throughout album, a lively and sizzling session of fierce interplay is staged between these two boxing kangaroos, with sqwawks and yelps a-plenty as another blow is landed on the respective muzzle or snout. The striking thing is that neither player appears to be breaking into a sweat at any time, and I have the abiding mental image of two unfazed chess players sitting in a deep-freeze unit, weaving complex theorems while remaining almost immobile in large leather armchairs. The music has that degree of rigid control, of brittle precision, even when the structure appears at its maddest and the musical data is flying wildly beyond the point of interpretation. The value of this music as a form of invented language is emphasised by the odd titles, ‘tolur’, ‘tricav’, ‘ankpla’, ‘uettet’…as if counting upwards in Venusian. From 19 June 2012.

We got a small bundle of items from the Lisca Records label in Lucca on 25 June 2012, which I intend to digest one at a time. First from the envelope is Uncodified with the Document (LISCA 011) album, which is mostly the work of Corrado Altieri, although the venerable Simon Balestrazzi popped into the studio to add electronic parts to a couple of tracks, and also did the mastering using his magickal digital toasting device. Unlike Balestrazzi who seeks to beguile with occult drones, Corrado Altieri is a no-nonsense bare knuckle fighter, and can be quite adept at piling it on with remorseless intensity when creating nasty slabs of throbbing noise-poundage. ‘Severance’ is one particularly compelling assault of post-industrial grindery which is akin to trip through the ancient tunnels of Lucca at high speed during a dark night, while also being pummelled about the face with a leather sap. ‘Aesthetic Imperfection’ is slightly less brutal, but still exhibits the same qualities of airless, layered, noise; the ultra-dense sound occupies every available space in the spectrum and never dares to relax its tinnitus-inducing whirrs and buzzes. And for those who still enjoy inculcating a sense of dread and unease in their lives through music, the opening cut ‘Discobar Panic Disorder’ is your go-to point for the requisite ingestion of paranoia. Just ten seconds in and an instant migraine headache will be thine. I think it achieves this through its upsetting mixed organ chords, but there is also an overhanging cloud of gloomery on this cut produced by more insidious and inscrutable methods. Maybe all it takes is to go into the studio when you’re in a bad mood, and your ill temper will simply pass directly into the recording process. Of the other cuts, five of them are extremely short, making cryptical and punchy statements in a matter of seconds; perhaps they were rescued from offcuts or outtakes of longer sessions. One of them may be simply an amplifier warming up, another a mere doodle from a synth machine. I wish other noise-makers could be as concise and selective in their releases. Document is perhaps not a staggeringly innovative release in this genre, but there is much strong content to enjoy in this stern frowner of sullen, rhythmic, pulsations.

Excellent recordings of animal wildlife and the forest environs on Sempervirent (GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 111), made by the field recordist Rodolphe Alexis. He did it in various nature reserves and protected areas of the Costa Rica forests in Central America. His setup was such that he simply wanted to document whatever passed before his mics, but it so happens a large amount of wildlife was captured onto disk as well, and so a list of species has been provided in the package, along with rich colour photographs of same in the booklet. Monkeys, parrots, frogs and bats abound; all of this information was probably added after the recordings were made, but it adds a satisfying sense of completion to the work. Alexis remains justifiably proud of his decision to leave the recordings raw and unprocessed, and what we hear is as close to nature as technology can bring us. If I had to locate this within the broad spectrum of field recordings, I’d venture to place it at the “scientific investigation” end rather than in the zone of “art music”, but it remains a vivid and fascinating listen. From 18 June 2012.

Slow minimalist composition from Monty Adkins on Four Shibusa (AUDIOBULB RECORDS AB040), which was released in April 2012. Each lengthy title uses the plaintive long tones of the twin clarinets played by Heather Roche and Jonathan Sage, and combines this sound with wispy electronic drone music, holding everything for a long time. Along with duration, delicacy and subtlety are the main watchwords, but Adkins is carefully creating some very poignant contrasts in his music – it’s just that they happen very slowly and tend to creep up on the listener. The term “shibusa” is Japanese and is concerned with finding beauty in everyday objects, recognising perfection in simplicity. As part of his aesthetic development along this contemplative road, Adkins worked for one year with the visual artist Pip Dickens, whose paintings of small and beautiful objects can be seen on the panels of this digipak. I like parts of this record and perhaps my preference is for the unadorned clarinets, which have a stark loneliness I find appealing. The electronic half of the act is a shade too “tasteful” for me, but I admit the combination of sounds works well.

April 14, 2013

Walking Woods

Composer Daniel Stearns freely owns up to the peculiar mental state of “dissociation”, which manifests itself as unusual occasions or experiences in his life from time to time, strange visitations which have descended upon his psyche since as long as he can remember. He takes heart in the fact that other mystics, scholars, writers and musicians in history appear to have been subjected to similar episodes, among them William James, Emerson, Charles Ives, Sigurd Olson and the Outsider artist Adolf Wolfli. Now on Golden Town (SPECTROPOL SpecT 03), he attempts to find musical expression for the semi-visionary outlook he receives in his detached states, and fourteen tracks of decidedly strange and distinctive music are the result. From the first track onwards, the music evokes mental detachment and an uncanny sense of world-going-wrongness before your very ears. Stearns was encouraged in his project not only by Bruce Hamilton but by the composer Steve Moshier, whom he met through online social media. The CD appears to be linked quite strongly to Stearns’ visual effluvia, a tack which leads us to consider his interest in lo-fi photography (typically using cellphones) to create singular images that appear to be suffused with more meaning and hidden depths than their original subject matter ever contained. Reading the compelling sleeve notes on this release does start to engender a not-unpleasant mind-sapping sensation, as though the layers of reality are starting to flake away and small chinks appear in the fabric that separates us all from the Great Beyond. The music / sound art on the CD is likewise quite unsettling, a queasy mix of semi-identifiable field recordings with wobbly electronic music and some intensive post-production techniques. At its best Golden Town does indeed come close to ushering the listener into the private world of Daniel Stearns, which he describes metaphorically as “an insular place at the far end of a dark wood” which he arrived at after “walking down a mountain I never knew I’d climbed”, with its extreme disorienting methods and highly dreamlike, somnambulistic tone. The label praises the “trance states” and “hypnotic pattern layers” of this unusual record. From 13 June 2012.

The lovely Dan Peck is the New York radical artist who has found the missing connection between jazz music and doom metal. He expresses this discovery using the tuba, playing in a trio called The Gate who we first heard on the 2009 LP Acid Soil with its great zombie skeleton cover. Now here they are again on Destruction of Darkness (CARRIER RECORDS CARRIER 015), Peck with his brass beast, the bassist Tom Blancarte and drummer Brian Osborne. Three lengthy tracks of depressing, intense and slow-moving sludge are created, almost unbelievably, through acoustic methods. I say “unbelievably” because in form and surface, this music is uncannily close to heavy sludge rock made with guitars and amplifiers. Stephen O’Malley had better look to his laurels! This micro-genre has been dubbed “doom jazz” by the experts, a fitting nomenclature, and The Gate do it far more convincingly than The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, even though the latter have the musical style embedded in their name. ¹ If you like deeply resonant bass and sub-bass tones that can slough the skin off a Burmese python at fifteen paces, with enough presence to flatten a mountain range into Play-Doh, then this is the record for you. Peck’s method, which incidentally is composed rather than improvised and partly indebted to the work of Hungarian composer György Kurtág, is horrifyingly effective when set to a relentless march beat as on ‘Aeons Of Decay’, but also doubly fatal on ‘Frozen Gods’ where for the first half of its 23-minute stretch, the tuba just sits there and growls menacingly in jet-black rumbling tones, its bad-tempered sighs sometimes joined by the equally disgruntled upright bass sawing out snarls and grunts from the lower depths. It’s not just the glorious sound of this record that’s so compelling, but the way it contains all the nuances of improvisatory rapport and compositional structure that makes it so satisfying a listen. I suppose ‘Buried Blasphemy’ is the liveliest cut here and is the one to spin to your extreme metal-freak friends with their strange haircuts and pieces of metal embedded in their noses and lips. ² If they arrive at the party clutching their boring records by Cult Of Luna, Neurosis and Mastodon in their heavily-ringed fists, then give ‘em a dose of this monster and watch ‘em drop dead. From 23 April 2012 and highly recommended.

When not working solo as TL0741, Pat Gillis is one half of Northern Machine with the bass player Bill Warford. The duo poured most of their energy into studio-based records for a while, until they found they could wreak their droning noise on stage and made a leap into releasing live recordings, staring with 2004′s Staalhertz. In Front Of The Crowd (HC3 MUSIC HC3NMCD9) is also live music, a compilation of ten examples of their craft made in the period 2005-2009, realised using keyboards, percussion, tape loops and various electronic effects; all the individual voices of these instruments, most especially the “singing metals” of Warford, do tend to lose some of their definition in the overall droney murk, sometimes resulting in rather nightmarish effects as the frequencies swirl together like nine types of liquid glue. I get the impression the pair are very good at working their way intuitively through the twin swamps of aggressive noise and effects-drenched drone, but the intention in the live work was to introduce some repeatable elements and a tad more structure to the enterprise. Unfortunately these good intentions appear to have succumbed to the compelling effects of loud amplification, and while the record has its moments of good solid assaultive chunkery and mysterious sojourns in a dreamy dark-ambient state, the music becomes quite samey and dull towards the end of the album. Despite the often compelling surfaces, I just don’t hear enough risk-taking or moments of real danger in the playing. One title at least, ‘Circuit Parasite’, seems indicative of their approach; one often has the impression of electronic equipment simply feeding off itself. From 13 June 2012.

Sadly they are an example of a band who cannot possibly live up to their own name. ↩
I of course have many such acquaintances in my coterie, to a man all named Zach and covered with so many tattoos that their arms resemble walking museums of scrimshaw work. ↩

April 7, 2013

The Towering Inferno

From Eli Keszler we have the wonderful Catching Net (PAN 32), shaping up to be an exceptionally powerful set…I received the release as two unmarked CDRs in a plain white sleeve so shoved one into nearby slot in hopes of result…this is how I began by playing the second disc first and received the almighty shock of hearing ‘Catching Net’, where Keszler combines one of his installations with chamber music, viz. a string quartet and piano. We have encountered his installation work previously for example on the impressive Oxtirn LP which was reissued by ESP-Disk in 2010. For some reason I misapprehended these installations as being a little more complex than they actually are, when it seems the main component is piano wires, strung about the performance space in such wise as to cause strong and extremely resonant vibrations. Paul Panhuysen would be proud. It seems the composer was aiming for a certain timeless quality in opting to use piano strings, “sounds that won’t get dated in any way”. I also learn that while he’s had training in music, his visual art / sculptural skills are all hard-won on his own terms…in other words he’s an auto-didact in that area…which may account for his bold gestures and risk-taking. This ‘Catching Net’ piece alone ought to justify instant purchase of the release by Xenakis fans…using all-acoustic methods, a monument in sound is erected, its creaks and groans reaching up to the stars with solid staircases of iron…his compositional method does involve some form of notation, but a stopwatch is used to determine the tempo, rather than conventional marks on a stave…this may be because machinery and motors are used to scrape, judder and hammer the strings…imagine a large-scale version of Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano, only stripped bare and removed from its wooden coffin, and the hammering action taking place in a form of grisly, deathly slow-motion performed by inhuman robot arms.

The triumph of ‘Catching Net’ has been to combine the mechanisms of the installation with the violins, viola, cello and piano, melding classical chamber music with abstract metallic sound art to produce astonishing, astringent effects that your body cannot ignore, in a face-to-face exemplar of raw and physical art-music. To hear the installation by itself, we click on to next track ‘Cold Pin’ which offers further monstrous scrapperings of doomulated grind for 13 minutes. It is here specifically that the motorised components come into play on a version of the installation that was attached to a large curved wall in a huge dome in Boston called the Cyclorama ¹. Once again the axis of art-music-architecture is too clear to ignore and the Xenakis comparison is not far from the mark. Also on disc two we have ‘Collecting Basin’ which was executed by stringing up a large water tower and using two empty basins ² as “amplifiers” or echo units. Astute avant-music fans may recall to mind Eric Lanzillotta’s Water Tower record ³, but also the echo experiments of Yoshi Wada when he used an empty swimming pool to act as a natural echo amphitheatre for his resonant chanting voice ⁴. It’s probably fair to see Keszler in the tradition of the old school of American conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s, who really thought big…transforming entire landscapes, taking over buildings, creating huge blocky steel sculptures in enormous New York lofts, pushing them out into public spaces…⁵ this ‘Collecting Basin’ induces dizzying vertigo as we listen to its terrifying grunts and sighs, like some gigantic breathing ogre in its cave, the very sound invoking the awesome scale of the acoustic space.

Disc One gathers three performances called ‘Cold Pin’ 1-3, and are records of Eli’s “band” performing heavily percussive and metallic noise. The three performances were recorded in significantly different acoustic spaces, which is most noticeable on the third very echoey track. In the band are Ashley Paul on alto sax and bass harp, Geoff Mullen on guitar, Greg Kelley on trumpet and Reuben Son on bassoon, with Keszler rattling his tireless arms across an array that includes drums, percussion instruments, crotales, and another guitar. Two of these cuts have already been released by the PAN label. ‘Cold Pin 1′ is intense and heavy – the improvising elements barely allowed to get a word in edgewise among the throbbing steel blasts and near-continuous resonating effects. On ‘Cold Pin 2′ the other players are more audible and the performance succeeds as a very radical form of group improvisation, where every second is packed with dense, detailed musical information. This music seems to be unfolding and generating itself, rather than played by people in real time; the collaborators are like radio receivers for these streams of information from unknown dimensions. On ‘Cold Pin 3′, it’s a little unclear whether the same five-piece is featured; the notes refer to a “mixed sextet and piano quintet”, and on early spins I’m not yet able to perceive any pianos playing here at all. But no matter, as this 25-minute piece is another essential piece of keening, melancholic, churning music, where some very unhappy brass or reed instruments make their plaint in slow and languid tones across a bedrock of spiky and restless percussive skitterments. Highly recommend this Catching Net double CD…its wild dynamics, resonating frequencies and primeval forces will alarm and amaze you…Keszler is emerging as a significant talent and one with a completely unique and personal approach to acoustic sound-generation, combining it with composition, improvisation, noise and live ensemble playing in very exciting ways.

See this image to give you some idea of the scale involved. ↩
Very coincidentally, the water tower was in Shreveport, thought by many to be the original home of The Residents. ↩
Anomalous Records, SOUND 1, 2000; although Lanzillotta was probably aiming more for a naturalistic “found” installation vibe ↩
Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile, India Navigation IN 3025, 1982 ↩
Such as…erm…Tony Smith, Christo, Serra, Carl Andre… ↩

April 6, 2013

Hippogriffs

We heard from Sula Bassana in February when he contributed to the monstrous Electric Moon LP The Doomsday Machine…we first gained the impression that Dark Days (SULATRON RECORDS ST1204-2) might, in title at least, be following from that depressive slab in a similar vein of blackened, thundering, ultra-heavy psychedelic space-rock…on the contrary it turns out to be a generally uplifting and sometimes mystical album of mighty guitar riffs, supremely steady drumbeats, and cosmic flurries of synth-winds howling around every corner. Apart from percussion assist on a couple of tracks by Pablo Carneval and vocals by David Henrikkson, this is totally a solo album by Bassana (i.e. Dave Schmidt), also assisted to some degree by Komet Lulu who did the sleeve paintings of orange, brown and green mosspit-shapes crawling from the belly of the universe, said images being used in turn by the musician to influence and shape his playing as he scoped these impasto swabs of lurid smearage. Another strong album from this retroid genius, a man so besotted with Krautrock he is capable of dipping the genre in gold, while condensing all his favourite Pink Floyd moments into intense hits of overamped smokiness…this outing contains the memorable 20-minute ‘Surrealistic Journey’ which sends the listener on a “far-out trip” in line with the aspirations of any given album by Gong or Hawkwind, while for those who prefer something punchier we have the very strong opening cuts ‘Underground’ and ‘Departure’…only place where the mood sags a little is on ‘Bright Nights’, a meandering odyssey into brain cells best left unturned, resulting in shapeless noodly guitar lines and, ultimately, dollops of rather pointless noise…and I’m not so keen on the frenetic beat-loops of ‘Arriving Nowhere’ which sometimes seems to be turning its ageing grey hippy head in the direction of Techno music and misunderstanding what it sees. From 20 June 2012, also available as a double LP.

Got a large bundle of curios from the Spectropol Records label in Bellingham (Washington State)…first picked out from the envelope was Elle Avait Raison Hathor (SPECT 11) by Vincent Berger Rond. He is an electro-acoustic composer based in Quebec, and presumably appears on the back cover in his winter garb standing besides an ice sculpture of a female head and shoulders. The winter wear is our first clue that this is difficult and inhospitable music for seasoned hardy outdoors-types only, on which more shortly. Meanwhile any attempt to stare fixedly at the image of the woman in order to decipher her features will simply result in even less definition, as it gradually recedes from your intelligence evasively. The whole album, you see, is a conceptual composition addressing “notions of womanhood” and doing so by filtering its music through an understanding of mythological treatments…Japanese, Greek, Inuit and Egyptian texts are found within the booklet, dropping hints that are somewhat less than lucid, yet strangely illuminating. Circe is the well-known enchantress from The Odyssey, but in a few lines you learn more about her meaning and symbolic resonance than you could have wished for. We’ve got a female vocalist Laura Kilty on the first track, where she intones her own settings for the poetry of Rond, but after that the remainder of the album is instrumental. It features strings and piano as you might expect from classical chamber music, but also synthesisers in a couple of places, electric organ, and the multi-dubbed electric guitars of Fred Szymanski. But none of this knowledge prepares you for the sheer weirdness of the distorted soundscape – the whole record just sounds completely bizarre. Vincent Berger Rond’s technique involves a lot of cutting up, editing, reshaping, modification and recomposing, such that Szymanski’s improvised guitar lines, for example, are completely recast into incredible, impossible shapes. The notes also refer to the composer’s “spasmacousmatic” method, which is a highly evocative term suggestive of a deeply radical and idiosyncratic approach to this contemporary form of composition. Not easy to listen to, but he plays fair; the work has clearly been assembled with great care and commitment to the form, and each piece, though at first bewildering, clearly adheres to an internal logic. The womanhood theme is not really explained in detail, which is a relief to any readers who are doubtful about long-winded explanations of an artist’s intentions, but Rond provides terse informational notes about this and would probably be very pleased if we did some research into the area for ourselves. From 13 June 2012.

We noted eRikm‘s Austral in November 2012 – at any rate, the audio dimension of it, which was released by Room40 as part of the Transfall album. Now here it is again as a DVD (DAC2031) from D’Autres Cordes Records, reminding us that the composition is a mixed-media work, combining electronic music with video. The visual side to the work was also created by the composer, and shows him weaving electronically-generated abstract shapes across the screen in shades of gray, green, and red, which multiply and germinate in jerky animated fashion. These images used photographs of cities as their starting point, taken from his journeys to South America. The music is played by the Laborintus Ensemble and remains a sharp snappy piece of atonal chamber music, sounding even better in this DVD presentation. But the visuals are rather banal, very process-heavy, not much more adventurous than a first year art student exercise. From 15 June 2012.

Fractures (DEBACLE DBL076) is a perfectly pleasant record of electronica / beats music by Rainbow Lorikeet. I like the “dubby” construction of the music that emphasises the heavy beats and the spaces in between, reminding me in places of Techno Animal – which I’ll admit is one of the few points of reference I have for this musical genre. Lorikeet’s electric sounds are not very distinctive or inventive though, and I find my attention wavering very quickly after only a few moments of this over-familiar crunch-and-squelch morass.

Anita‘s Hippocamping (WILDRFID RECORDS WLDRFD006) is more successful as an example of inventive and personalised electronica. We’re not given much reliable information on her technique, but I have the impression she’s something of a mosaicist, piecing together musical fugues out of very small fragments of sounds, tones, and whatever shapes she can find lying around the floor of the workshop to pick up and add to the collage. Resultant album is a highly textured listen – you can feel your ears being dragged over a thousand different rugs, textiles, vinyl floors, coconut matting, and assorted soft (and hard) furnishings. While she doesn’t abandon form completely, Anita has very little interest in composing a tune, and would prefer to leave you spinning in an unfamiliar micro-landscape for three or four minutes at a time, while she makes a cup of coffee (small black espresso, natch) and admires the results of her labours with a wicked smirk. What’s also impressive is the very firm and muscular core to these steel-belted monstrinos; Anita is never content to settle for a comforting decaffeinated drone when she can tie you up with eighteen yards of fencing wire. Track 11 is titled ‘L’Ultimo Yogurt’, which is precisely the sort of dessert I’d expect to be served if I was invited to a dinner party by this mysterious woman. This exists as a limited LP with a screenprinted cover and insert provided by visual artist Sofy Maladie.

March 24, 2013

Consider Yourself Dissolved

Pity me…I’ve been ill with a nasty strain of flu twice this month, and it’s putting a crimp in many of my plans. If you were expecting a radio show this week, sorry to disappoint you, but it’s this rotten illness what did for me last Friday, when I should have been on the air but was instead stretched out like a numb cadaver on my rack of pain and coughery. Now for some CD releases.

Jan Klug and Kasper van Hoek recorded Music Played On A Monday (HEILSKABAAL RECORDS HK021) at the Mohr Institute. Just fourteen minutes of music from these worthy Netherlandish fellows on this mini CD. The event or occasion was “Max Meetup”, a kind of musical swap meet where I suppose musicians, laptoppers and tech buffs all compared notes about their use of the Max / MSP software. One of these days I really must find out what this transformative software actually does to sound, and try to understand why so many musicians are attracted to it. On this recording Klug plays woodwinds, Theremin, and the famous Crackle Box invented by Michel Waisvisz, while the prolific Van Hoek has his home-made stringed instruments. It’s fair to say the experience of a Monday which they present is much the same as that of many people – lethargic, uncertain, and laced with a certain dread. Some interesting sound effects pour out of the churning aural melange, but the music is rather unstructured and refuses to amount to much more than just interesting combinations of tones and textures. This is another Monday morning effect, well known to anyone who works in an office, where your thoughts just cannot connect and you flit miserably from one incomplete task to another. From 11 June 2012.

Boy Fruit‘s Demonology (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL079) promises plenty with a Satanic title and cover images of eyeless lost souls, but the music turns out to be routine mashups of beats, hiphop, techno and funk, occasionally messed up with spoken-word fragments from FM radio announcers; nowhere near as crazy as it would like to think it is, its looping daftness grows wearisome quite quickly. Not enough effort was spent by Jay Harmon of Cincinnati to transcend his sources, and what he creates is virtually indistinguishable from what he cuts up. From same label, Firstdog‘s Corecore (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL077) is slightly more successful, with its illogical streams of video-game music going completely nuts. Jack Rodriguez, making his full-length debut, takes “wonkiness” as his guiding aesthetic and attempts to tame his inherent melodic waywardness by setting it to minimal dubby beats. When he released this, he had a much better name (First Dog To Visit The Center Of The Earth) but has now curtailed it to Firstdog for some reason. These both from 6 June 2012.

A great piece of electronic analogue noise from Jason Soliday, here billed as J. Soliday on his first proper CD release, Nonagon Knives (CIP CIPCD027). CIP label boss Blake Edwards would put his own head on a guillotine to make sure that Chicago music gets the recognition it deserves, and in print form he’s waxing lyrical about this album until he froths at the mouth. No wonder, though, since Nonagon Knives is a real slicer. Soliday has a lot of the violence and force in his work that makes noise music attractive to so many sickos and masochists (indeed a lot of the audience often begin and end with the violence), but he also has a strong understanding of how to manipulate the stereo field in his favour. At times he pulls off tiny miracles of mixing and panning, situating his barbs, bombs, and boulders at marked points in the imaginary listening space with remarkable assurance. We also find much to admire in his very varied textures, which run the gamut from barbed wire necklets to scalding jets of acid in the mush, not forgetting the layers of painful igneous rocks which sear our running feet. To cap it all off, there’s Soliday’s impeccable timing and dynamics, executed through a powerful mix of lightning reflexes, ultra-sharp editing skills, and sheer instinct; he makes these shocking events collide and germinate with terrifying precision. This music was all generated with modular synth systems, instruments which (I would guess) are much harder to control than their digital counterparts, so this may be another index of Soliday’s great skill. I think the label is correct to compare him with modern electro-acoustic composers; in purpose and method, he has more affinities with the extreme end of the INA-GRM label than he does with Merzbow. Stern, rigid music with a core of pure titanium; an exciting and invigorating listen which I recommend. Only the sleeve image is kinda drab, though I suppose it strikes a suitable keynote of darkness and ambiguity with its digital abstractions. From 25 June 2012.

Equally thrilling is A Congregation Of Vapours (FARPOINT RECORDINGS FARPOINT 038), from the Dublin sound artist Fergus Kelly. This talented fellow gets his effects from combining feedback, home-made electronics, digital processing, field recordings and lumps of metal, plus he makes judicious use of the no-input mixing board as promulgated by Toshimaru Nakamura. The first thing we note about Kelly is that he’s some way from being a pure minimalist, and the best parts of this album just roar out at you with the barely-controlled rage of ancient giants playing quoits or whatever it was they did in ancient times in mythological Éire. We also note that Kelly will never leave a black space on the canvas when he can cover every surface in sight with a luscious abstract drone of some description. The third point in his favour is the very naturalistic / organic vibe to his music, which is intended to be as bracing as rain or seawater in the face, and it refreshes the mind as surely as a good icy March wind against yer cheeks. It’s not just the layered field recordings of the wind and the rain, at times the music itself is as forceful as the very weather that inspires it. Paul Hegarty contributes notes to this release, and while at first I thought we might have another potential noise artist poised for release on Hegarty’s DotDotDot Music label, in fact the abiding keynote here is one of restraint. True, the album gets off to a feisty start with the exhilarating ‘Freefall’, but thereafter it tends to settle down into slower and more meditative music, revealing Kelly’s attention to detail, the way he can discover an inner pulsebeat in the most seemingly inert and unlikely places, and bring it to life. Some of the titles allude to tools we can use to navigate our way around space, both interior and exterior spaces – maps, patterns, sonar, horizon points and so forth, while titles like ‘Pressure Drop’ and ‘Heat Signature’ also feel significant somehow in this regard; a well-attuned human being might be able to use their sense of ‘pressure drop’ to determine how many people are packed inside an auditorium. Perhaps we’re all blind men stumbling about the world, with need of music to steer us like ancient navigators used the stars to steer their vessels. Perhaps also Kelly has an interest in revealing invisible things, like an aural infra-red camera. Kelly is a successful collaborator and composer with numerous activities to his name, including radio broadcasts, public performances, festivals curated by him, and a teamup with the UK improvisers Mark Wastell and Max Eastley. The man even runs his own CDR label. Considering that this method of working is quite commonplace now (I mean especially the mixing of field recordings with everything) it is all the more testament to Kelly’s skills that he produces music of such distinction. One might be tempted at some point to compare him to another Irish electro-acoustic grandee, that is the famous Roger Doyle, but Doyle had a bit more interest in narrative I think. From 11 June 2012.

January 13, 2013

Ligeti Morphed: a sometimes spellbinding performance of acoustic and electronic music combined

Ensemble Offspring with Oren Ambarchi and Martin Ng, Ligeti Morphed, Sydney Festival / About An Hour (CarriageWorks, Eveleigh, 13 January 2013)

Acoustic and electronic music come together in this concert using works by composer Gyorgy Ligeti (1923 – 2006) as inspiration and foundation. The venue is a former railway yard recently converted into a centre to develop and present works of contemporary music. Four members of the experimental classical music group Ensemble Offspring performed on violins and percussion on a cramped stage with Oren Ambarchi on guitar and Martin Ng on turntables. Surrounded by black curtains on three sides, the musicians were almost dwarfed by a shadowy atmosphere that was a little on the sinister side. Distant rumbles of trains outside – there are busy railway lines behind the venue – added a spooky effect. The hall was not air-conditioned and, with every seat taken, the air was palpably hot and sweaty and people were frantically fanning themselves with copies of the program.

The Ensemble Offspring musicians primed themselves and us with their rendition of Ambarchi and Ng’s “Simulacra 7 “, a pleasant droning piece. The original piece was playing in their headphones and the women responded to the music with their answers on violin, cymbal and one other percussion instrument (jeez, I already forget what that was). This was followed by a relatively conservative performance of Ligeti’s Piano Etude #2 ‘Cordes Vides’ 4′.

The best was yet to come and we got a taste of it with the two percussionists, Bree van Reyk and Claire Edwardes, hitting and drawing on the skins with their version of Ambarchi and Ng’s “Woods 15′ “, a surprisingly deep droning piece that could have been mistaken for two rumbling cargo jet aircraft coasting through the sky. Van Reyk and Edwardes later swapped whacking drums with pom-pommed sticks for whacking marimbas with pom-pommed sticks on Ligeti’s “Continuum (2-marimba version) 6′ ” and this, even more so than the drum duet, was an exercise in intense concentration, split-second anticipation and timing, and intuitive knowledge of one’s own and her partner’s sections of the music as the musicians set up on-going repetitive loops of minimalist thrumming of the bars that change continuously. The actual music itself was not so remarkable as the echoing bell-like metallic resonance that reverberated overhead and carried through the air.

Ambarchi and Ng joined the musicians on the last two pieces of the program, of which the rendition of Ligeti’s “After Atmospheres 16′ “, based on the piece that was used in the Stanley Kubrick flick “2001: A Space Odyssey”, was the major highlight of the entire set: powerful thunder and gentle rain-showers were simulated during the course of the music, the women blew peals of shrieks on toy woodwinds, Ng coaxed some surprisingly deep and heavy drones from his turntables and Ambarchi flipped vibrato flecks and other gentle effects from his guitar. Of all the performers, Ambarchi seemed the quietest but he was working hard on his sampler and guitar and I was sitting closer to Ng than to him so the relative distances between them and me would have made a difference to what I was hearing.

Unlike some recent live performances I’ve seen where chunks of minutes got chopped off from the set time – I’m still annoyed at the time I went to see Noam Chomsky talk at the Sydney Opera House and the time allocated to him was whittled down from 90 minutes to less than an hour – the musicians stretched 60 minutes to 90 minutes so they literally gave 50% more than they were obliged to. Unfortunately this meant that when they finished, the entire row of people sitting with me stampeded over me during the applause to catch the next item on the Sydney Festival program so, erm, Oren and Martin, if you’re reading this and you guys noticed that I was a bit slow to get up and clap, that was probably because I had been run over without even the privilege of being startled to see my whole life flash by in oncoming headlights.

One aim of the set was to produce sounds that, combined together in real time, evolve into new sound textures and moods of their own accord. In this, the musicians weren’t always consistently successful and it was actually easy to tell who was making what sound in later performances; but when they hit the mark together and held it, then the result was spellbinding.

January 5, 2013

Barbs of the Unexpected

Fiat Lux

Very impressed with the beautiful melancholy of Leyfðu Ljósinu (TOUCH TO:90) from Hildur Guðnadóttir, a continuous 35-minute piece recorded live in one take, preceded by a four-minute ‘Prelude’. Using her own voice, cello, and electronic effects she transforms herself into an entire orchestra and choir, filling the available space with sumptuous melancholy music. I have found some of her other past records a bit ponderous, but this piece has a lightness of touch that is very refreshing. Although the music does build up into a cloud of competing sonorities, it never turns into a bland ambient porridge, and the sound remains clear and concise. This Icelandic composer and cellist is so confident of her craft that this music, at times, hardly appears to have been created by human hands at all, but emerges from a strange unknown crevasse like a mystical revelation. The title translates as ‘Allow The Light’, and it would not be far from the mark to read this as an allusion to the book of Genesis, and the words God spoke to bring the universe into creation. The music was recorded at the University of York and the notes assure us that there was absolutely no post-processing of the recordings. From April 2012.

Breathe life into the dead dinosaurs

We enjoyed Kyle Bruckmann‘s Cracked Refraction in 2012, a release on the jazz-ish label Porter Records which seemed an appropriate home for music that crackled with such rocking vigour and vital swing. On Procedural Grounds (NEW WORLD RECORDS 80725-2) is released on the modern classical-ish New World Records label, and shows another dimension to this impressive American all-rounder, improviser, composer, and musical omnivore. I suppose the main event is the 29-minute title track, but I enjoy the two pieces which showcase Kyle’s oboe work. On ‘Cell Structure’ he’s joined by the clarinet of Matt Ingalls with live electronic manipulation. Hearing this piece of scored crazy-paving garden design is like being led around a scale model of a maze with added spring-loaded traps awaiting us at every turn; try to follow the logic-defying musical woodwind phrases, only to meet with a sudden explosion of abstract digital noise, or be lulled by mysterious passages where only a strange rumbling serves as an intellectual anchor for the brain. Then there’s ‘Orgone Accelerator’, a solo spot for Bruckmann with his oboe and French horn, once again treated with electronics. This one isn’t so much of an intricate Chinese puzzle as the former, but it does stop and start in highly baffling ways, while remaining true to its avowed aim of pulsating ominously like a loathsome, inflated pumpkin with a sinister orange glow.

What accounts for this tendency to keep the music permanently surprising, at times almost shocking, to listen to? Bruckmann openly declares his “bent and affinity for discomfort zones”, and Tom Djll’s notes likewise refer to “a barb of The Unexpected” as one of the hallmarks of this fascinating music. Bruckmann also intends to bring improvisation into his compositions in a big way, stresses the social interaction between the players, and creating situations where “the act of listening” is the primary policy. He composes with “the mindset of an improviser”. Even the written score is regarded as a bit of a nuisance, just a formalised way of communicating with his talented collaborators. This approach is shown most strongly and successfully on the title track, which features some fine playing from the woodwind and string section, the great Gino Robair on live electronics, and the entire Rova Saxophone Quartet, four gifted players with their own impressive history of “directed improvisations” which makes them an ideal candidate for performing in this context. This rich work parses into multiple sections, blending generous chunks of quirky modernistic jazz propelled by an irresistible beat with the more free-form, burbly and parpy-type passages of improv gobble-dee-goo. The mixture of half-swallowed clarinet ejaculations with the honeyed syrup of electronic jelly is one ingredient in this tabled feast, likewise the brilliant clashing of the meditative string section playing slow, scored measures directly alongside skittery passages of unrestrained reed-vibrating skronk. At all times, what impresses me here is the relaxed control and assurance with which Bruckmann assembles these competing forces, and convinces us it’s all as natural as can be. Unforced, non-contrived complexity. Unlike John Zorn, he doesn’t aim to jolt us with far-out juxtapositions, and the logic of his method is laid out for all to hear in very precise, repeatable arrangements, cemented together with 18 bags of pure swing feeling. His intelligence and skill enables him, and the players, to sustain this endeavour for nearly half an hour with ease.

The same strain appears in more muted and subtle form on the minimal chamber dissonances and imperceptible events of ‘Tarpit’, which features a small ensemble with woodwinds, strings, percussion. electronics, and a prepared piano. Again, the listener’s logical thought is brilliantly defeated by the ingenuity of this piece, which is both utterly simple and intricately complex at once; it feels like at least two or three separate pieces of music overlaid, working together and against each other, like criss-crossing solid phantoms that can walk through walls as well as the bodies of their spectral compadres. Mr Djll reads this work as a cautionary tale about the slow death of culture through fossilisation, i.e. those who refuse to evolve are stuck like dinosaurs or mammoths in the tarpit of history. He thus finds an affinity with Captain Beefheart’s ‘Petrified Forest’. Any sleevenote that references the Captain is a good sign as far as I’m concerned, so you know you’re making a solid purchase with this item. Arrived 17 April 2012.

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. ↩