Almost as intriguing as these recordings of minimalist organ music made by Mamman Sani Abdulaye is their subsequent history and how despite making Abdulaye a household name in his native Niger they very nearly were lost forever. On acquiring an old Italian organ from a Rwandan UNESCO delegate in 1974, Abdulaye became obsessed with creating and performing music on the instrument, and in short order in the late 1970s he had composed several songs, based on the native music of his country and reinterpreting and reproducing ancient songs for a modern audience, for his first and only solo album which he recorded in 1978. In 1981 he took his organ and the album to the National Radio of Niger studios which overdubbed his album in two takes. Released on cassette, the album “La Musique Electronique du Niger” was a commercial failure but the National Radio of Niger adopted the songs as its theme music for the next 30 years, thus assuring Abdulaye his place in the history of contemporary / early electronic music in Niger. Many years after the cassette release, copies of the cassette were rediscovered in a cassette archive and the music was digitised on a portable recorder. “La Musique Electronique du Niger” was reissued on vinyl in 2013.

The songs on the album are a mix of original compositions and reinterpretations of some of the traditional music of groups such as the Tuareg and the Woddaabe living in Niger. The organ’s sounds can be quite unearthly, a bit on the shrill droning side and slightly nauseous: the instrument seems at once pop-kitschy in the way it does trills and a little bit melancholy in some of the melodies on opening track “Lamru”. There is an insistent quality in the organ notes and I can almost imagine the music being broadcast all over the planet by earnest aliens in an unseen UFO hovering close by, trying to warn us Earthlings of imminent danger from a passing asteroid. The melodies are very distinctive and when plucked have a slight acidic edge. An early highlight of the album is the unforgettable “Salamatu”, a love song Abdulaye wrote for an unfulfilled personal romantic relationship: the tremulous notes drip with yearning and feeling against a constant blocky beat. Later songs like “Kobon Lerai” and “Lidda” also have very idiosyncratic melodies, full of emotion, which create distinctly hypnotic moods and atmospheres.

Despite the very minimal style of the music – it is basically just Abdulaye playing away on his organ – it is very dreamy and mesmerising, and its emotional range can be quite astonishing: longing, slight melancholy and reflection are present. Each succeeding track is so different from the previous song that listeners can easily fool themselves thinking they’re listening to a new first track of a new album. The last song “Tunan” has such a different sound and style from the rest of the album – a bit sickly and treacly in tone, and the melody strangely reminiscent of Southeast Asian pop songs of the same time period (late 1970s) – that listeners can suffer a real shock when they hear the album ending.

This recording really is unique as an early example of electronic music in Niger in its style and range, and in its history.

Christian Rønn is an accomplished all-rounder from Denmark – composer, performer, and player of the organ. He also does film music, and likes his work to operate in as many genres as possible, including sound art, free improvisation, and formal composition. Plus he’s played in a hefty list of band/performance projects, including Prox, Panser, Ganga, Blind Man’s Band, and Troln. These interesting collabs seem to travel the gamut from electronic noise to psychedelic jamming, by way of downtempo beats and cinematic scores. So far Rønn strikes us as one of those powerhouse omni-directional types, who at one stage I was fond of calling “polymaths” and mostly seemed to emanate from America. Now the Danes are getting equal time – and it’s long overdue.

I am equally impressed that Rønn holds a Masters in playing the church organ, which he earned from The Royal Danish Academy Of Music. I’m not sure what degree of formal training is required, but the church organ is a mighty beast, and requires not just a knowledge of music but also an understanding of the pedals, diapasons and manuals just to emit some sort of roar from the pipes, let alone gain any sort of formal recognition for thy skills. But he’s also retained a personal attack on the old 88, and I’m confident in saying we can garner some of his unique performative movements on this Broken Air LP. It’s mostly lengthy solo performances on the church organ at Soborg Kirke, to which he has added overdubbed layers of feedback, effects, synths, samples, contact mics, and objects. Or perhaps some of these things featured while he was performing in some way.

The A side ‘Diffusion 2’ is just short of 20 minutes and represents the main tour de force. It’s pretty much in two parts, where his intense soloing (he packs in more notes than you would have thought possible, and has a wild stabbing technique with his steely fingers) eventually gets pushed aside by an ever-growing droney noise growl. At length his musical achievements are struggling to be heard against this thunderstorm, a storm of his own making. This effect exactly matches what he describes as “[the] area where sound breaks up and transforms into something else. The stretched out feedback just before it feeds or the battle of two frequencies fighting to dominate the aural space.” At its simplest, you could say that the organ pipes must carry out this battle against amplifier hum and feedback, but there’s much more to it. The detail, the textures, the dynamics…it’s a swirling dense melee of music and noise, executed with craft and skill, and with a strong sense of intent behind it. That intent is almost metaphysical…in describing his mystical quest, Rønn says “I like to stretch out and examine “inbetween-moments” and unrecognizable states of being…I aim to put light in the cracks, open up a new space, give an experience of transcendence.”

On the B side, two shorter pieces ‘Static’ and ‘Broken Air’ offer some slightly calmer escapades and some Messiaen-esque flourishes in the playing. Less of the abstract noise; we’re given more of a chance to appreciate Rønn’s unusual organ skills. The term “Broken Air” is also quite poignant, accurately describing the phenomenon of physical movement in the air, which is one way of understanding the acoustical science of music. For instance, Frank Zappa first noticed it when he saw candle flames flickering in response to the choir’s singing in a cathedral. This record shows the ways in which Rønn interrupts that movement. From 4 December 2017.

Stefan Fraunberger is doing it in Transylvania, in churches that are about 300 years old. One of the things that interests him is the profound changes history and migration has wrought in this area, whose German population have mostly moved on since the collapse of the Berlin wall, and where the small villages are now inhabited by Sinti and Romani gypsies. The churches he visits were built during one of the many Ottoman wars, and are more like fortresses. Fraunberger sees the buildings, and the organs themselves, as the last surviving remnant of a forgotten purpose, a “pre-modern, forgotten future” as the press notes have it. He proposes to reinhabit and colonise this admittedly rather vague zone with his own modern, radical ideas, through the possibilities of sound…the record is a document of his spontaneously created “organic sculptures”. While “organic” is an overused word in our field, it’s entirely appropriate to the all-acoustic nature of this sound art, music which is somehow aspiring to reach the “abstracted spirit of electronic music”. Not just because it involves wood and other natural materials and the passage of air wheezing its way through the pipes in irregular bursts, but something of the rottenness and decay of the organ itself has passed onto the grooves. You can almost see the dust, smell the mould.

Visit Franunberger’s website for further examples of his forward-looking and rather abstruse ideas about art and language, and its place in society…through his extensive travels, he seems to be trying to discover things about the meaning of contemporary culture through signs of change and decay, and finding clues in the most unlikely places. The photo of heavily-rusted satellite dishes is strangely evocative in that context, for reasons I can’t explain. From 3 May 2016.

I recall we were very taken with Guionnet’s Pentes when it came out in 2002 and sent him a few brief questions. He had a very interesting view of what the organ meant to him as an instrument: “for me (in my poor head) organ is an archaic and sophisticated mix between piano (keyboard), mixing table (‘registres’- stops) and saxophone (pipes) which are the three instrumental accesses to sound I prefer…I did practice this instrument but less than on the saxophone or on the piano, and never in an academic way.” Keyboard, mixing desk, pipes…that was elaborate enough, but compare with how this apprehension of the organ has now evolved by the year 2016:

“1) we control a machine 2) the organ is halfway between vehicle and artificial intelligence : it is a public transport : a ship, a barque, a boat, a building within a building 3) passing the machinery to the filter of listening, gesture and architecture.” And that’s just the start of a long list of ideas. He’s still preoccupied with the mixing desk metaphor, only now its become something even more sophisticated; he calls it a “helpful member”, perhaps perceiving it as an extra helping hand or limb. He likens it to a “carburettor, distributor, central nervous system”, clearly sensing the possibility of a way to control, move and articulate something of considerable power. I like to think that on each of my favourite recorded organ solos, such as Sun Ra’s ‘Hiroshima’ or Keith Emerson and ‘Karn Evil 9’, the player is transformed for a moment into the megalomaniac Captain Nemo playing the organ on board the Nautilus. Here, Guionnet goes one better; the organ is the vessel itself, and he’s trying to steer it.

Listen to Plugged Inclinations with the above notions [1. “The vast unfathomable sea / Is but a notion unto me”. – Lewis Carroll] in mind. At one level, you’ll notice it’s like listening to a machine, a steam-driven monster hissing and clanking along on its forward path with the inexorable march of a steam-roller or other industrial machine, flattening all. Somewhere he’s managing to lay bare the mechanics of the situation, exposing circuit boards, revealing pistons pumping and cogs turning. Jean-Luc Guionnet is not remotely interested in a smooth or seamless listening experience, and the rough edges are working well in his favour here. The other thing I like about it is the genuine sense of exploration; he’s not sure how these slightly-malfunctioning devices will perform, but he’s interested enough to keep pushing and keep discovering.

At a time when much of the excitement and unpredictability of experimental music seems to be dissipating in favour of quantifiable results, it’s a pleasure to get your mitts on a compelling piece of music like this. “The blast is endless,” reports Jean-Luc, attempting to account for the powerful force that fills his sails, “and the electric current is endless too. Neither the blast nor the current need me.” From 11 April 2016.

On the face of it, CMKK’s Gau (MONO065) is a pretty sickening proposition – four artists producing a single 47-minute meander through some surreal sludgy ambient drones while one of them recites their strange poetry using plenty of pastoral images like black water, swans, fields, and mist. There’s Celer with laptop and samples, Machinefabriek with laptop and tapes, the guitars of Romke Kleefstra and the poetry of Jan Kleefstra. However, listen to the end of this slow dampened odyssey across joyless and sunless flatlands and you’ll feel the rewards as your brain is softened into malleable mush, fit to be sold as Sten Hanson’s Canned Porridge. Not unlike hearing Polwechsel after they’ve swallowed a dose of Mogadon, with added zombified electronics and a stoic TV announcer trying to remain calm while he watches the whole world being flooded. From October 2013.

Here’s some French heroes of indefinable music and sound art: Eric Cordier and Jean Luc Guionnet, discreetly rubbing their organs together in a deserted temple in Metz. By “organs” I mean the hurdy-gurdy of Eric, which has been amplified and processed while he squeezes it, and the amplified organ of Jean-Luc – an instrument which he’s previously played to great effect in various church and cathedral settings. De Proche En Proche (MONO061) comprises live recordings from 2004, mostly rather uneventful and slow droning. Things liven up from the third piece onwards as vaguely menacing machine-like qualities are exhibited – it sounds like a milking machine going wrong and the cows are moaning in complaint. Or perhaps reaching a cow-like orgasm of some sort as they feel the errant mechanical clamps around their udders. From October 2013.

Unearthly slab of live electro-acoustic music here from Charles-Eric Charrier, who is manipulating two musicians – their instruments, at any rate – on C6 GIG (february 2012) (MONO059). Martin Bauer is playing the viole de gambe and Nicolas Richard plays percussion and accordion. From this we derive 45 minutes of continual, mysterious sounds, at times approaching the shape of a nightmarish cloud of purple filth descending on the belly of the fitful listener. I’d have liked a tad more commitment to sustaining this crapulous mood, but I can understand why Charrier feels the need to layer this inexplicable composition with long silences, pauses, and other existential longeurs. Still, when the strings pluck bass throbs from the lower registers and the percussion rattles its cage like a snoring gorilla, you’ll find me there with my concrete pillow. From October 2013.

Bartek Kalinka concocts some fairly bonkers music on Champion of the World Has No Monopoly on the Legions (BOLT RECORDS BRK003), through overdubbing meandering acoustic guitar strums, wonky synth tones, and arbitrary percussuon bashes. These ten tracks feel all of a piece and sonically they occupy the same zone of solitary, intimate conversations – except I feel like the conversation is taking place with a balmy loon who doesn’t even speak my language. By time of eighth track, called ‘King Is Approaching’, my mind is reduced to small lumps of gravel and any sense of proportion has been sapped by the tropical, heat-cooking weirdness that boils the brain slowly. By the end, I give in and am prepared to admit that the King is indeed approaching, and that creator Bartek Kalinka is in fact Napoleon.

The Sound Projector Radio Show
Friday 21st December 2012

1. ‘La Nativité du Seigneur’
2. ‘Oraison’
3. ‘Improvisations’

1 played by Louis Thiry
2 is a 1937 composition for the Ondes Martenot
3 played by Olivier Messiaen at the organ of Paris Church of the Sainte-Trinité

Dag Rosenqvist is one of the Swedish melancholic types who has provided some memorable moments of wistful sorrow in ambient music form as Jasper TX. Here he is teamed up with Aaron Martin from Topeka, and the duo call themselves From The Mouth Of The Sun on their debut album Woven Tide (EXPERIMEDIA EXPCD021). It’s a mixture of mournful chords and swelling string sections, aligned with somewhat more “atmospheric” sounds to produce pleasing blends. Most of it resembles rather sentimental soundtrack music from a Norwegian arthouse movie I just made up, about a young woman who falls in love with frogs in the snow, but I liked ‘Color Loss’ where the balance between the melodic and the abstract feels just about right.

Errors Of The Human Body (EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 140) really is a soundtrack album, for a German feature film made by Eron Sheean, but this CD and double LP was composed by the Australian Anthony Pateras. He’s got a small chamber ensemble with him (strings, woodwinds and brass) and a percussion group, although a good deal of the music is based around the piano, organ and electronics work of Pateras. I’ve heard one or two of the insane and energetic electronic records he’s made for this label when teamed up with Robin Fox, but this is nothing like those disjunctive roman candles. Sober and restrained, EOTHB is a studied exploration of different tones and textures, with minimalist arrangements that emphasise mood and atmosphere. It’s like generic soundtrack music for an intellectual thriller, only given a vaguely “experimental” slant. Technically flawless on the surface, and the playing and production have an attractive polished sheen. I found some of the pieces a bit shapeless and unfinished, but perhaps the aim is to leave the listener hanging in a state of perplexed expectancy. Each track almost ends with a virtual question mark.

We received a bundle of items on 16 February 2012, including some vinyl, from the publishing wing of the American independent organisation 23five, but for today here’s an excellent CD by Helmut Schäfer called Thought Provoking III (23FIVE 017). This is the first I heard from Schäfer, and it seems this Austrian chap has a reputation for uncompromising and near-brutal electronic music performances, but this release is uncharacteristically quiet. Eerie, understated, but positively rigid with tension and bristling with excitement, this composition is an unusual performance/installation/composition realised partly in performance in a church, and partly at Helmut’s own home. On this 2006 recording (and incidentally only the third time the work has ever been performed), he’s joined by the violinist Elisabeth Gmeiner and the percussionist Will Guthrie. The first thing to note is we shouldn’t really think of it as a musical performance. It’s mostly process sounds created by organ pipes, said pipes being in the personal possession of Helmut Schäfer and laid on the floor of his house while he was “recuperating” them. When he puts hair dryers at the mouths of the pipes and switches them on, they blow air along the pipes and interesting resonant sounds emerge. He adds live electronic processing to this set-up, and the contributions of Gmeiner and Guthrie are likewise captured within that processing field, such that their strings and percussive blows are also drenched in the resonant atmosphere. According to Guthrie, nobody really had to do very much playing at all – the pipes were doing all the work. It is utterly compelling music, with plenty of incident and action (none of your reduced improv here thanks) and shot through with a core of inner blackness that means Thought Provoking III exudes a heavy vibe of brimstone and brooding. Acoustic industrial music, almost. Other recent experimental types come to my mind who have dabbled with the organ pipes or the church organ, and usually come off the worst, but Schäfer is clearly the sort of fearless larger-then-life personality who wrestles crocodiles just for fun, and he masters the pipes in like manner. I mention the crocodile because this particular set-up reminds me of the music of Yoshi Wada, and while Wada is strong on your basic resonant acoustics and gigantic pipes, his uplifting and joyous music is nowhere near as dark as this particular blackened groaner. Next time I’m having a nightmare about vultures gnawing my liver, I’ll know what music to use as a suitable backdrop. Purchase now to bathe your sinful soul in 24 minutes of breathy doom, and as an added bonus you get ‘Averaging Down 20XX’, a piece by that well-known sonic ogre of noise Zbigniew Karkowski which he made using Thought Provoking III as a sound source. A double dose of very unique and powerful art music.

The principal element in the execution here has involved careful measuring of the internal space of the building (This is the only instance of a CD release I’ve seen where two artists credit themselves with “measurements”), noting the position of columns, the distances between walls, and experimenting with the punctuations of the silences between each attack of the organ. It’s as though the entire building were a container of sentences, of musical language, or a space that enriches such language. I think it’s great that they expended so much mental effort in finding out what the original architects of these buildings had pretty much planned all along, and which any regular communicant of the Catholic church could probably have told them in two sentences, but no matter. This is still a strong work of intriguing sound art, full of careful preparations and very intensive sound generation experiments.

The organ drones are accompanied by sine wave generators, and by white noise generators, and the very formalised experiments in minimalism have a certain rigid absurdity that outmanoeuvres La Monte Young, even. Where ‘Air Volume’ contains five minutes of dramatic rushing sounds like wild winds set loose in the transept, the 14-minute ‘For Standing Waves’ is a fantastic harmonic droner with a suitably solemn tone. Monumentally beautiful music. Its sister piece, ‘For Standing Waves Disturbances’, seems to incorporate more rescued ambiences from the space itself, and feels less closed-off than the previous piece. Here, you almost feel as if the stones themselves are breathing – a gigantic pair of ancient lungs. Another long and faintly alarming sustained organ tone carries on for half the track’s length, never resolving, and becoming almost unendurable. Then there’s ‘Close, bells, architectural remains’, which feels more like a documentary recording (with its random interventions which feel almost chaotic in the context of this much pure sound), nonetheless incorporating some delicious sub-bass throbbing tones that, when played at appropriate volumes, should help to activate your inner Holy Ghost from the feet up or the head downwards. Recorded in 2010, this was part of a festival called MicroClima. Mélanie Bourgoin did the restrained design for the package. Arrived here 31 January 2012. Very good!

Acting on the suggestion of Matthew Bourne, New York jazz trumpeter Brian Groder got in touch (with a friendly hand-written note) to send us the album from his team-up with Burton Greene, the estimable veteran of free jazz piano. Groder & Greene (LATHAM RECORDS LATHAM 5409-2) was recorded in 2007, issued last year and is an exceptionally fine example of modern free jazz. The first thing I noticed was the vivid recording quality, allowing the contributions of the five players to shine like diamonds in crystal clear water. Invited in by that warm sound, you start to decode and untangle the ingenious compositions within, which have all the depth and complexity we could hope for from such clearly intelligent and well-informed players; at their best, the quintet manage to pull things in five or six different directions at once, giving the amazed listener a feast of elaborate free-thinking ideas to feed on. What’s most exciting, for example on ‘Separate Being’, is how the piano holds down a completely opposing argument which contradicts yet somehow complements the discussion being held between Groder and his partner Rob Brown on the alto. As I savour these ‘Cryptic Means’, I’m tempted to reinvestigate Greene’s work on the 1969 BYG LPs. He may have had more fire and bombast 40 years ago, but I like his more considered approach much better; there’s deep wisdom and experience engrained in these mystical, odd-fitting abstractolid chord shapes of his. Plus there’s even one track graced with a witty Mingus-inspired title, which wins extra points with this paid-up fan of Th’ Mingster. Fabulous work, totally recommended to fans of 1960s Dolph and early Ornette. Also from Groder, his Torque (LATHAM 5106-2) album from 2006, again boasting a superb sound quality and featuring the flute work of Sam Rivers.

Last year I was very pleased to discover the music of Locrian, a Chicago duo who seemed to be doing something exciting with their excessive amplified guitar and electronic sludge-drone, overlaid with Black Metal elements and wallowing in supernatural paranoiac slime. For Territories (AT WAR WITH FALSE NOISE ATWAR073 / BASSES FREQUENCES BF23/ BLOODLUST! B!147 / SMALL DOSES DOSE85), the duo of Foisy and Hannum have supplemented their power with players recruited from Nachtmystium, Yakuza, Velnias and Bloodyminded – all gloom and hate merchants to a man. The addition of vocals, synth, drums, sax and an extra guitar has certainly made the Locrian overall sound a lot thicker and, in places, more textured and detailed. I feel however that some of the relentless and obsessional qualities that they exhibited so convincingly as a two-man act have been slightly compromised by the need to co-operate with these other bloodthirsty musicians. ‘Procession of Ancestral Brutalism’ is one example of the new band dynamic, but in spite of its killer title it’s not much more than identikit Black Metal. However it would be churlish to deny that overall, this is an album of horrifying power, particularly on the slow and broody cuts like ‘Ring Road’ which over ten agonising minutes of painful squalor and heavy monotony soon convinces you of the presence of imminent disaster. Vinyl copy of this item known to exist, unless sold out by now.

Inclusion Principle is the team-up of Martin Archer and Hervé Perez, and on The Leaf Factory Fallback (DISCUS 38CD) we’ve another dazzling example of their rich and elaborate studio constructions made from saxophones, field recordings, software instruments and keyboards. Unlike so many who over-process their work in the relative calm of the digital world as they gaze serenely at the laptop screen and bleed all the passion out of their music with a million and one unnecessary tweaks, Archer and Perez never once lose sight of the live recordings that are the heart of this work. There’s gallons of aural pleasure to hear what they do with filters, edits and near-impossible twists of sonic taffy-pulling, but at the core of each astonishing track you’ll hear the puff of human lungs making saxophones howl and bellow like motorised dinosaurs. Another tremendous piece confirming Archer’s under-recognised skill for creating truly inventive and powerful electro-acoustic music. It baffles me why Chris Cutler hasn’t phoned him up for a duo date. This album was paid for by advance subscription (something Cutler used to do on his Recommended Records label to sell mail-order only vinyl goodies), and the names of Archer’s supporters are printed on the back cover.

Cleveland’s finest electronics trio Emeralds have their new album released on Editions Mego later this month, in both CD and double LP formats. Does It Look Like I’m Here? (EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 101 and 101V) compiles new work with some A sides and B sides from very limited seven-inch vinyl releases on their own labels, Wagon and Gneiss Things, and many of the highly enjoyable pieces here last for three or four minutes, offering a refreshing shower of lush and dazzling mantra-music. These three synth-meisters are proud of their clean and sharp synth lines, eschewing distortion or the kind of evil embittered black grunts favoured by Nate Young, and rich and wondrous melodic impressions result from their simple repetitive approach. Unafraid of the Cluster / Eno / T Dream labels which writers fling at them like sticky toffees, Emeralds freely wallow in the soundworlds of prog-rock and Krautrock and bolster their work with quasi-futuristic titles like ‘Double Helix’ and ‘Science Center’. A very convincing follow-up to their great album for No Fun Productions, which we noted here.