Tagged: percussion

Classic Rock

PHILIP CORNER 1

Philip Corner
Rocks Can Fall At Any Time
GREECE MORE MARS TEAM MM010 LP (2013)

Corner, amongst many other things, is noted for the performance in the 1960s of his Flux event in Germany that ended in the dismantling and dismembering of a piano. Something that caused a minor scandal at the time, supposedly due to the sacrosanct significance of the piano as cultural symbol, but which in fact was not specified in the instructions for the piece. This twist evidenced a spirit of physicality and utility – apparently the artists would have had to pay someone to remove the piano otherwise. A similar physicality and a thriftiness of sound, expression and presentation is something that Corner retains to this day, selecting and minimally burnishing to reveal delicate expansive impulses latent in simple materials and open structures.

Over the years he has shown a particular affinity for gamelan and metal percussion, a major strand of his work being his Gamelan Son of Lion associated pieces, which explore in a Western context the musical languages and approaches of Indonesian gamelan musics, and his ongoing explorations of resonant metals, which are flavoured very much by those Indonesian influences.

The influence of a heady hash of eastern derived thought systems is also evident throughout his work, be it the ‘Om Duet’ here or a randomly picked title out of many such in the back catalogue such as ‘Uhhm (After a Deep and Tibetan Image)’. Considering this, I have no doubt that the readymade koan of the album title, featured on the road sign photographed in the booklet accompanying this LP, appealed to both Corner’s Fluxus roots and his Eastern mystical leanings. This mix of ingredients hints of a certain time and space, a little American, a little far-out Far-East 1. A smattering of musicians this mix has manifested to some degree in would include John Cage, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Henry Flynt…no doubt you can also provide your own examples. This mix bubbled up with the Beats as well, and can also be discerned in the counter-culture of Ed Sanders, The Fugs, ESP-Disk, etc. A time and space, like I said. But as is the way with time and space, not limited to one of either.

In Corner’s case from Fluxus he derives a directness of approach, from Indonesia a sense of movement and rhythm, alongside a Japanese Zen-like mindfulness and simplicity. The music here is danced and performed. Rather than the long form, the eternal drone, Corner is interested in discrete, physically derived sounds in the here and now that in their transitory and ephemeral nature – like Blake’s winged joy or the compressed meaning conveyed with a few select symbols (cymbals, in this case) in Japanese poetry – become possible drops of satori.

Sound quality is various degrees of verité – in the case of the earliest recording, a pretty gnarly tape. Wrapped-up and encapsulated succinctly this collection is not (rather like this review, then) – consider it more of an open-ended proposition, comprising historical document, off the cuff performance, sketches, marginalia, off-cuts from an on-going exploration. The four pieces presented represent four disparate points in time and space on our peripatetic composer/performer’s journey, all threaded together loosely through a unity of focus and open approach.

Resonating in physical space, the spinning of the record edge round like a cymbal, we first hear on the A-side ‘Gong (Ceng Ceng)/Ear’, recorded in 1989, in Bali. The piece combines Corner’s solo cymbal work with an exploratory, ritualised, performative edge hinted at as well by photographs and notes

For ‘Two in Thailand’ (performed New York, 1997) the score is reproduced in the notebook. It is a poem in space for cyclical movement, instruments, and sound. Rubbing of cymbals, procession by one performer around another, slow hits on the nipple of a gong. ‘Time is a Man Space is a Woman’ as Blake tells us, which may come to mind as we see in the evocative back cover photograph and hear this personified on record, Corner defining the pulse, circled by the travelling cymbals of Phoebe Neville, his partner in the performance. Many fine filaments of poetic connection can be hung on these choice but earthy elements. The booklet provides more hints for imagination.

Both these percussion and dance pieces have something of a beautiful shimmer of Indonesia about them, a subliminal bloodstream of rhythms of the Gamelan and graceful, stately movements of court dances.

On the B-side we flip back in time to New York, 1972, towards the tape and Fluxus era documented on various excellent Alga Marghen releases. ‘Om: Duet for Jug and Bottle’ (also featuring James Fulkerson) is a primitive, primal piece, a stoned age Jug band mantra. Breath as the beginning. The first letter of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter in a monograph on pre-Columbian pottery vessels aspirating and aspiring with burgeoning self-awareness. The cooing of pigeons hidden beyond cool plaster walls, linoleum on the floor of a midnight apartment, for some reason I think of an allegorical figure out of Ginsberg melding with the nocturnal all-vibes, simply the roundness of a bottle and jar in a kitchen at some still hour, emptiness containing the idea of the animating breath.

The final piece, ‘Satie’s Chords of the Rose + Croix … As a Revelation’ presents another aspect of Corner. The side that also has incorporated Baroque keyboard influences from Lully and Couperin. A room recording, cut from the frayed corner of bellows cloth, glow off-stage, creaks of a wooden body and room front and centre with the occasional passing car in the distance or sighed breath, or exhaling instrument. The piece, recorded in 1999 in Vermont, gently teases various Satie related implications viz. entr’acte (a pun almost on the musical interval of the two chords that Corner chooses to explore), rickety furniture music, unadorned as in the ancient Greek gymnos. A wealth of allusion in the lightest, simplest sounds from a room with a squeaky piano stool.

Throughout there is an air of unforced concentration, attuned listening. The rotating of the cymbals against each other or the pumping of the harmonium bellows like quietly observed personal rituals, the dull thump on the gong the tap of a Zen masters stick on his zazen-seated student. Of course, Corner wears this as lightly as baggy pair of unbleached cotton trousers; impression, allusion, wisp of suggestion that can enter and pass like clouds in frame of view. Music of material, of pleasure in, contemplation of. Not overly-determined moments.

Package-wise, whilst the cover isn’t the best ever – the geometric shapes seem a little clumsy when compared to Corner’s fluid calligraphy which has been showcased on other recordings – the documentary material included is excellent. The booklet contains writings, descriptions and notes on each piece, graphic score, notation, sketches etc – all intriguing and thought-provoking – and helps to shed light on what we hear on the record.

Taken as a whole, the collection of material is somewhat fragmentary, by nature, although the concept of the definitive piece would not, I imagine, be an over-riding concern of Corner’s. We only have fragments of Heraclitus, after all 2. What we hear through each recording is interplay of intuitive movements and simple ideas executed with a magnanimity and lightness of touch which pay attention to the extra-musical harmonies and happy accidents of time, place and material. A scrapbook of thoughts and actions, attuned to dance, movement, sonority and rhythm, modest, quietly assured and engaging, which can indicate plenitude found in the partial and hint at intimations of the infinite OM in the momentary and ephemeral.

Not pinned down too much by the stylus these four documents, although quiet and sometimes unassuming, retain a sense possibility. The possibility of lightbulbs flashing on, of illumination stemming from connection with the basic and physical considered mindfully – of rocks falling at any time.

PHILIP CORNER 2

  1. Father Yod once told us ‘East will meet West and that will be that’. Composers like Corner have been working on a similarly syncretic mission since the sixities. ↩
  2. Speaking of flow, some of my favourite pieces by Corner are those involving his kitchen sink. ↩
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Getting Through Accidentals

An astonishing outpouring of energy from Invisible Things on their Home Is The Sun (PORTER RECORDS PRCD-4069) album. The label Porter Records is often home to some far-out free jazz enterprises, but this bizarre monster has most of its clammy paws planted in the art-rock camp…the duo of American players Mark Shippy and Jim Sykes realise most of this dazzling escapade with a guitar and drums set-up, although Shippy also adds rich keyboard layers and sings, and guest player Jeff Ziegler is on hand to supply further keyboard goodiness like so much cookie dough. Drummer Jim Sykes apparently bases his work on a deep awareness of percussion methods from Sri Lanka, applied to modern instruments…given that Sri Lankan percussion traditions are said to be about 2500 years old, and at one time the culture had over 30 different types of drum, this is quite an achievement. On Home Is The Sun, there are 17 short tracks which are in fact index points for a enormous whole thing, a continual and overwhelming flying carpet of remarkable music. I think both players come from a Chicago background, with respective histories in bands Parts and Labor, Grooms, Marnie Stern, U.S. Maple, Miracle Condition, and Shorty, and have been honing this approach to their craft since they met in 2009. Impressive, and not just admirably clever; it rattles and roars with unhinged, psychedelic mayhem. Personally I far prefer this open-ended and juicy lubed-up style of playing to the tight-ass precise renditions of Om, for example. The electrifying cover art truly lives up to the music within. From 9th October 2012.

Seth Cooke realised Pneuma (LF RECORDS LF028) using just his crotales (percussion instrument, a specific type of cymbal array) on one track and a pneumatic drill on the other, hence the title. Certainly a process piece, requiring long duration; two tracks at nearly half an hour apiece; gradual shifts in timbre across continual tones. But not an infuriating piece of semi-preciousness, Cooke’s work retains a steely core of hard-edged realism and never drifts off into the clouds of ivory-tower aesthete-land, where velvet-caped fops may shower you with lilacs. If you just read about the crotales piece, it may put you in mind of soppy singing-bowl type music, but when you actually hear it it’s as sturdy as a sheet of tin; it just hangs in the air like an unyielding, brutal, fact. The drill piece is also surprising; far from the industrial noise-brutality some listeners or fans of SPK might expect, it’s an ingenious well-structured composition whose every waking moment is a vehicle for contemplation. “Drills are the aspiration of the male saga”, is all he’s prepared to tell us, by means of an obscure quote; no doubt he’s alluding to the phallic qualities of the pneumatic drill, a factor that leads most road workers to take up the job in order to cure their problems of impotence and flaccidity. There’s nothing like feeling a powerful metal shaft surging between your thighs to cure those erectile tissue problems. If Cooke can tame the savagery of this particular mechanical penis-like device, methinks he could set out a plausible plan for altering the entire mind-set of the modern world, by a combination of chemical processes and other, more occult, strategies. Given Cooke’s wide range of useful skills – he is a sound artist, percussionist who plays unusual objects, and a practising psycho-therapist – anything seems possible. From 27 December 2012.

Third release in from the Norwegian Va Fongool label, and this time we’re moving away from the high-energy high-decibel clattery rough-house parties that Eirik Tofte gravitates towards for his Oslo-based label. PGA are the duo of Jan Martin Gismervik and Fredrik Luhr Diterichson, who perform all of Corrections (VAFCD003) using just an acoustic bass and drum set, though the duo are joined by the brass players Nørstebø and Larsen for a couple tracks. Very far from jazz, music, or even improvised music – this intense, minimal stuff just creaks like broken boughs of an old oak, while sloughing its way out of the speakers like three-day old porridge. I just love the severe and sullen aspect of their sound, which makes virtually no concessions, refusing to be held hostage and turning many debtors away from its door. The pair themselves are far from being cranky old geezers though, and come to us from lively backgrounds in group playing – Moskus, Skadedyr, Sagstuen, Karokh, and the Wolfram Trio, where they both played – see here for a review of that album, also on this label. Apparently the rhythm section couldn’t make themselves heard about the blurty racket from tenor saxman Halvor Meling, so their only course of action was to have him assassinated. The Norwegian Mafia were hired to do the job, and they sealed Meling’s feet in a bucket of cement and then threw him in the Hobølelva. With “Old Hooty” out of the picture, Gismervik and Diterichson could proceed unimpeded with their new minimal plan. Sure enough, pared down to a duo of scrapey wooden and metallic noise-production using highly innovative methods, this pair have a chance to shine – or at least to glimmer like the limpid light of a pond in a heavy fog under the obscured winter sun. Arrived 23 October 2012.

We last heard from Hitoshi Kojo with his Omnimoment CD from 2012, although this unclassifiable Japanese musician is also one half of Jüppala Kääpiö, a name which betrays his likely preoccupation with modern Finnish music and its eccentric psychedelic clutter. High Tide Mirror (OMNIMOMENTO OM06 / SHINING DAY SHINE 12) contains six pieces of very accomplished layered studio working, where whatever instruments were originally used are cunningly blended and morphed into kaleidoscopes of shimmering, bustling sound. Not a surface is left unfilled in these incredibly “busy” scapes, presenting elaborate views of a colourful fantasy world. I am always deeply impressed by the surface beauty of this music at first listen, but then find my attention wandering and I begin to wonder if they really need to be nine or twelve minutes long, since little of any value is added by the duration. Instead of of 6 long tracks, it might be interesting if Kojo were to present 24 short tracks, where the intense and dazzling strangeness of his inventions could astound the listener for a precious moment, then swiftly fade away like a vanishing dream. The cover is fantastic, made of screenprinted card with a cut-out hole and a triangular flap, with sumptuous images of foliage and sealife.

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Blunt Instruments

One day all obscure punk music will be collected, anthologised and reissued, fed to the hungry ears of those who continue to relish this great music and somehow missed out on its first incarnation, or have declared themselves born-again hardcore fans, or simply like obscure music. In the case of 1980s US punk band Mission For Christ, their obscurity is fairly understandable – it seems they only released one single, only existed for about two years, and they came from a part of the USA (Washington DC) which apparently was not – erm – highly regarded in terms of its general contribution to the American punk and hardcore movements. I have the impression they didn’t tour as widely as Black Flag, but then again, who did? We now have The Complete Sessions (EKTRO-079) CD from the Finnish label Ektro Records, which is a corker of a release and presents the band as a well-honed machine producing highly original, eccentric and noisy song-based material with influences from funk music, dub, and the more extreme reaches of art-rock. Plus there’s a healthy dose of protest and current affairs awareness, as indicated in songs like ‘Nancy Reagan’, ‘Smash The Rich’, and ‘The Lebanon Song’. Both sides of the seven-inch ‘Pennies From Hell’ (No Trend Records #4, 1984) are included on the comp, and we also get the entire contents of their 1983 demo cassette which led up to its release, plus an additional six unreleased cuts from 1984. As to the band’s complicated history and extremely fluid membership, it’s told in concise and well-researched detail in the enclosed insert by the very knowledgeable writer Jordan N. Mamone, currently based in NYC and himself a musician (he was the main man in Alger Hiss in the 1990s). Bass player John Gibson was the mainstay of MFC, but I have a lot of time for the hollow and desolate moans emanating from the mouth of Dave Berman, who sings the first nine songs here. Berman’s tone indicates he’s fully on board with the band’s ethos…Mission For Christ had an association with No Trend, whose 1984 debut album Too Many Humans… is now a £100 collector’s item, and were a band noted for their extreme antagonism towards most of society’s mores and the cliches of punk culture in particular (not unlike the way that Zappa poured sarcastic venom on the despised hippy culture). Both bands clearly shared the same outlook on humanity, and were not afraid to dispense their sceptical and acerbic views on the unthinking conformity of the masses. Matter of fact the No Trend guitarist Frank Price joined Mission For Christ in 1985, but apparently there are no tapes surviving of this incarnation. No matter, as this 36-minute CD is a vital and exciting document of the times, a useful piece in a vast jigsaw puzzle, and a thrilling listen to boot. (03/12/2012)

Now for a fairly repulsive smear of power electronics noise…Fecalove appears to be completely obsessed with shit, piss, semen and perverted sex, and wallows in his unwholesome predilections on the album Void, Chaos & Cum (CRUCIAL BLAZE 005). This is released in the Crucial Blaze zine-and-disc series that presents a generous package with an album along with a little full-colour booklet and folder inserts; the visuals for these are also created by Fecalove and prove to us that there is no taboo he won’t violate with his deadly brush and ugly flat colours printed in a limited range (mostly flesh and brown). I would have photographed more of these for you, but it could be they violate obscenity laws in 18 countries as well as all the rules of good taste! So far, pretty yuk-worthy; not even a close reading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo will get you through this monster with your mind unscathed. The Italian creator Nicola Vinciguerra is Fecalove and has been inflicting unspeakable records on the world since about 2004; he also runs the label Turgid Animal, and commits further artistic abominations under the name TISBOR. If you can separate the record from the trappings however, I gotta admit he’s a cracking good noise artist, capable of generating some highly dynamic and imaginatively twisted racket. While this album is mostly a remorseless and grim wall of harshness, the general monotony is tempered by his ultra-violent screaming vocals, his rhythmical power-blasts, his occasional use of samples, and the way he is apparently able to tame his feedback to make it administer forty lashes on the back of the listener. Most of the time though, Fecalove is happily pissing and shitting on the floor of the toilet with no restraint, happy to affront the world with his infantile proclivities. He’s so committed to maintaining this identity that he even tweets as “Bowel Documents”. (11/12/2012)

PRSZR is a team-up between Pure and Hati, and their Equilirium (HINTERZIMMER RECORDS HINT 15) was recorded in a German studio in 2009. Peter Votava (Pure) is an Austrian former DJ who has been baffling us for years with his inscrutable albums of extreme electronica and dark ambient-styled music, while Hati are the Polish duo of percussionists Rafal Iwalski and Rafal Kolacki, who have a penchant for moody and introspective work, and may have borrowed an idea or two about magick rituals from Z’EV, with whom they have collaborated. On Equilirium, I suppose the shared common ground between the creators is a desire to build a very occluded and low-key atmosphere, and the mysterious pulsations and uncertain tones of this album will effectively induce a brooding state in the listener, as if listening by candlelight in a small concrete cell. The third track upsets this trend somewhat, with its rather alarming metallic sounds, its abrasive buzz, and its general sense of hectic urgency; this cut in particular is like a very avant-garde rethink of techno dance music (Pure’s 1990s background is pretty much in this area, I gather), stripped-down and restated as a rather spastic form of mind-numbing repetitious throbbery and clatter. The commitment to near-stasis in the music and the determination to refuse dynamic development is awe-inspiring. The ambitious final track is over 17 minutes long, and comes closest to realising a full integration of the percussion and electronic sounds, to the point where the frequencies of each instrument blend into an indistinguishable array of constantly-pulsing information. As indicated by the title, your sense of balance (equilibrium) is soon replaced by a palpable “delirium”. I would like to say it’s all very mesmerising, but it’s also not unlike being tortured in a sensory deprivation tank. When you come out of the trance, the world will look as upside-down as the bleak landscape photograph on the front cover. From December 2012.

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Ectoplasm and Adrenaline

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Ken Hyder / Z’EV / Andy Knight
Ghost Time
HINTERZIMMER HINT 16 CD (2012)

As initial reactions go, the question “what is this scary music?” is certainly auspicious, offering assurance that I’m playing something interesting. The group goes by the name of ‘Ghost Time’, and is an ethereal, instrumental trio of overlapping interests, all peripheral to jazz. Most (in)famous of the three performers is Z’EV, known for his molten, multi-kulti-meets-industrial approach to percussion. In these four post-mortem ‘jazz’ pieces he is joined by composer and fellow percussionist, Scotland’s Ken Hyder, whose predilection for prog/jazz fusion puts him on first-name terms with the likes of Tim Hodgkinson, Phil Minton, Keith Tippett and Elton Dean. Finally – and most enigmatically – Andy Knight is, according to the group’s website, simply ‘an English trumpet player’. The group’s moniker offers ample indication of what to expect: ghostly, post-mortem ‘soundscapes’ steamrolled by sub-bass and streaked with spaghettified phantom yowls. The formula may not be rare, but the product permits little more than a passing acquaintance: depersonalising all participants and foregrounding none into the bargain.

The tracks are largely cymbal-led, shimmering with glassy, growling backdrops coloured by a faint pull of pocket trumpet. Though potentially generic to casual listeners, the riches of this dark ambience will be revealed to the patient. The press claim that there is ‘a feeling of something you felt before… A hint of music you might have caught on the wind, off the water, in your sleep, or in someone’s eyes’ is not inaccurate, though by the same token, specific influences such as Canntaireachd (‘a vocalisation of bagpipe playing’), Tuvan Khoomei singing and Tibetan ritual percussion playing will be evident only to ‘those who know’. Not until ‘Faint’ are we treated to any significant tonal variation, where a more menacing air of rolling snares and guttural sub-bass enshrouds the careful listener, while in ‘Glimpse’, a sharper strain of muted trumpeting pierces the atmosphere like it does the ‘Silencio’ scene in Mulholland Drive.

Generally, there’s little to differentiate one track from another, as all possess the same ingredients and ideas, leaving us with a subtle, longform exercise in theme and variation. Not that there’s anything wrong with this of course. The music can be easily enjoyed, especially if one assumes a horizontal position and surrenders to the near-darkness it articulates.

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Terrie Ex / Paal Nilssen-Love
Hurgu!
PNL RECORDS PNL012 CD (2011)

On the other side of the jazz divide we find – in this exclamatory effort, ‘Hurgu!’ – Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and guitarist Terrie Ex (of Dutch troublemakers, The Ex) in singularly confrontational and uncompromising mind-states, both in jazz-flag burning mode. Little need be said about proceedings other than the fact that they are a) loud and b) fast. However, lest the reader experience apprehension at the appearance of yet another jazz-rock wank-fest, I hasten to add that it is c) completely captivating from start to finish.

The recording rocks and rolls with an itch that begs for relief: like two lion cubs tumbling playfully in the savannah, Ex and Nilssen-Love tussle with dental intent. In ‘Harar’, Ex’s guitar is edged and muscular, withstanding every pummelling beat of Nilssen-Love’s relentless percussive rejoinders. The mood becomes more jagged in ‘St. George’ – Ex chipping off chunks of flaming scree, which Nilssen-Love volleys with thundering skin rolls and searing cymbal smashes, the two colliding like masochists in a moshpit. Initially of a more sinister species is ‘Bedele’, which begins with a bassy rumble and a rant of agitated strings, but soon enough becomes another high-pace terminator chase through a collapsing metal works. Not until ‘Meta’ does the blistering meter relent, slowing to an agonizing howl of abrasive growl and angular twang: atonement expressed with the most depraved definition of ‘grace’. This comedown comes across like one of DNA’s primal scream therapy sessions hijacked by an enervating lecture on entropy. Utter perfection.

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Krangsome Skree

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Jacob Felix Heule / Bryce Beverlin II
Intersects
USA EH? 61 CD (2012)

When it comes down to being associated with striking/odd band monnikers and, indeed their own names don’t come far behind, Jacob Felix Heule and Bryce Beverlin II seem to have things truly sewn up tight. Alongside membership of Barn Owl and occult jazz splurt combo Ettrick, percussionista Jacob is also with the splendidly named (in a Dr. Seuss meets Edward Lear way…)… Wormses. While Bryce (electronics/assorted what-nots) of Leviathan and Brown Rainbow is also a card-carrying member of Squid Fist (!!). Roll that one around your tongue…Squid Fist! There’s something there that lodges some very wrong-headed images in the old grey matter. Trying to wipe out images of Lovecraftian gods posing for glossy centrefolds can be quite a challenge.

Erm…anyway Bryce and Jacob have teamed up for a veritably explosive and multidirectional CD outing entitled Intersects. A creation that’s bulging with skreesome klang and certain elements of krangsome skree. Interesting sonic textures and tingling/slithering metallics bleed out of these two live improvs: (“Madame Arts, Minneapolis 21/6/11″ and “Art of This, Minneapolis 3/8/10″) from the get go. It’s a procession of noise events that ebb and flow in an organic way that’s best known to its own internal logic and I can’t really picture what these cantankerous and downright unruly gadgets might look like. I dare say that a goodly percentage of their combined arsenal might be of a homebuilt, W. Heath Robinsonesque nature…a bit Hugh Davies here and perhaps a little bit of early seventies Tony Oxley there. As for the latter, I’m reminded of an old grainy photo of Tony from an ancient/now yellowing Melody Maker, proudly holding his amplified egg slicer (!!). Perhaps there’s an item or two on “Intersects” that’s been liberated from the kitchen drawer and “modified”? Well, short of seeing a live action by this duo, we’ll never really know, as the scant sleeve credits appear to be a polar opposite to the maximal gush that this unit churn out.

If you seek further sign-posting and finger pointing, intrepid voyageur…what about a crash collision between Russian industrial coves ZGA and percussion wildman Jamie Muir from seventies Crimso…or…think of a state of being where a combination of a hand-cranked hurdy gurdy and a waste disposal system is looked upon as a commonplace audio tool.

Eh? Records c/o Public Eyesore Records, 475 43rd St., Richmond, California 94805, U.S.A.

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A Vinyl Varambolage

Another fine Jean-Noël Cognard project – ever since this veteran French drummer got in touch with TSP, he’s been exceptionally generous in supplying us with his vinyl releases, which happen to be on the Bloc Thyristors label and are usually sumptuous objects pressed in coloured vinyl with screenprinted covers, witness their other releases by Tankj, Empan, Tribraque, Ressuage and others. La Vierge De Nuremberg is a six-piece combo featuring the great Jac Berrocal on trumpet, flute and various “jouets sonores”, Cognard on the drums, plus a jazz-rock-type combo on guitars, bass, sax and “clavier vintage”, by which I suppose the French understand old analogue keyboards. They play a solid and energetic set on Le Retour De (BLOC THYRISTORS 0100), reminding us of a forgotten time when albums really were “albums”, by which I mean a collection of related and well-produced tracks edited into a coherent whole, and not simply two 20-minute sprawls of improvised noise plastered onto vinyl. The band here exhibit diverse interests in jazz, free-form improvisation, progressive rock, psychedelic rock songs, and a fair dose of inventive insanity when the occasion calls for it. Fans who are in the know will appreciate the first track on side two, ‘Rock N Roll Station’, where Berrocal stages a remake-revisit of one of his most famous pieces (the original was recorded in 1976 with Vince Taylor on vocals, but I find Berrocal has revisited it at least twice before in 1996 and 2007), and it’s still an eccentric gem, although its avant-mischief is largely untypical of the rest of this album which is more in the area occupied by great French prog music of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Gong or Lard Free, with perhaps the odd touch of Rock In Opposition groups. Recorded in 2011 in the Pierre Schaeffer studio. Mika Pusse did the highly kinky cover artwork with lashings of spanking, lingerie and tit clamps. From July 2012.

The Swifter is a collaboration between the Italian percussionist Andrea Belfi and BJNilsen, plus the pianist Simon James Phillips. Just four enigmatic instrumentals on this eponymous long-player (THE WORMHOLE WHO#02), where the pattern is that each piece starts with uncertain, near-chaos, coagulating gradually out of forlorn percussive scrapes and bangs, as if a house were being put together by renegade builders invading your garden at midnight; and then develops slowly into a glorious melodic crescendo as Phillips executes his assured minimalist arpeggios to soaring effect. What begins as slightly broken music transforms itself into a very stable and pleasing harmonic arrangement. The odd effect of hearing so many drum-rolls and piano introductions that don’t develop anywhere is that the listener is kept in a state of constant anticipation, as though watching a music hall stage where the orchestra are creating the world’s longest build-up for a star singer who never appears. An enigmatic release – the titles refer to capstan bars, wave guidance and neap tides for no apparent reason, and the record purports to be about “space”, but I enjoyed the very crisp and clear sound of the recording, a no-nonsense and unfiltered document of the performances. From 18 October 2012, apparently the second vinyl release from this subsidiary of the cassette-only Tapeworm label.

Guerilla Toss are an American five-piece here with their Jeffrey Johnson (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR 095) LP, just six tracks which make for a shortish LP or a longish mini-album. The band form a basic oddball rock setup with guitars, bass and drums, but much sizzling heat is added by their two secret weapons – the synth of Ian Kovacjr and the vocals of Kassie Carlson. Kassie’s vocals are shrill, high-pitched and harsh and most civilians will reach for their steel helmets after just five minutes in her company, but when she’s in the shrieky mode she reaches new heights of deliberate-obnoxiousness not heard since Japan’s Space Streakings. Mark you, she is also capable of muttering strangely into the mike like she’s just been woken out of a coma in the psycho ward, and is recounting the dreams she just had. Kovacjr’s insane electronics add tasty flavouring too, although I for one would have liked to hear more from his moth-like fingers skittering across the keys and dials. The rest of the band are great though, straining quite hard (perhaps too hard) to play crazy dynamics, with wild stop-starts and frantic explosions of errant rock noise provided as needed. They fit together as a unit like sixteen pairs of odd socks – you never get the same match twice. Their strenuous efforts ensure the music is always extremely surprising (to say the least), even at the expense of structure or song form. Clearly all of these young Bostonians have been digesting their post-punk record collection well. I dig the spontaneous energy of the whole album while it’s spinning, even if it doesn’t leave much of an impression after the fizz has died down. Since we received this item, they’ve got a CD out on Tzadik, so maybe that one’s slightly better “produced”. Jeffrey Johnson gave the album its name and also did the bonkers cover art. (23 November 2012).

Thurston Moore is one of the “executive directors” of Feeding Tube Records and it so happens he’s featured on the album Caught On Tape (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR092 / MANHAND MH131), two sides of recordings taken from a European tour he did in 2012 with the drummer John Moloney covering his back. It’s a tremendous record. As is well known, 2012 was the year that Sonic Youth went on “hiatus”, and not even the press release makes any reference to this seminal band (although there’s a long checklist of Thurston’s other projects). Here, liberated from the song form and the need to hit marks, play on cue, imitate Glenn Branca compositions or do anything other than just play the guitar as he sees fit, Thurston is suddenly unleashed, born again. A meticulous musicologist could probably listen to side one alone and unpick musical quotes referring to anyone from John Fahey to Albert Ayler by way of Tom Verlaine, but everyone else is just enjoying the glorious melodic and psychedelic noise of unfettered amplified axe. Moloney’s drumming finally makes sense to me in this context too. I was usually disappointed by the sluggish Sunburned Hand of the Man records, but here Moloney’s loud and primitive bashes completely fit the bill, and the pair of them genuinely sound like they’re enjoying themselves. How often do we get that sensation these days? Recorded on cassette (like audience recordings) with a rough edge that aids the rawness of the music, the finished product has I suspect been edited in places – one or two splices are detectable on side one at least – but the cumulative effect is a non-stop exhilarating juggernaut of avant-rock madness. Fine art by Raymond Pettibon and Emma Kohlmann completes the package. Since the original “tour pressing” of 113 copies sold out instantly, this edition is a must-have! (23 November 2012)

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The White Cube

Christoph Limbach / Pierce Warnecke
2 (3) Incomplete Triptychs
GERMANY EMITTER MICRO LIMITED 001 CASSETTE (2012)

Nice little thing in a perspex box is a cassette tape which arrived from Berlin in April 2012. It’s the very first release on Emitter Micro, a tiny DIY label from Berlin. Pierce Warnecke and Christoph Limbach prepared three separate recordings but decided to release only two of them; the decision was to do with the limitations of the C30 cassette, and rather than compromise on a matter of such mathematical precision, they elected to keep the third piece in reserve as the unseen and unheard part of this “incomplete triptych”. The decision to pack the item in this see-through box only deepens the riddle of inaccessible and inscrutable music in some way. I had half expected the package to be welded tight or sealed with superglue, but as it happens I was able to pop the lid quite easily and soon had the all-white cassette spinning happily in my machine. After I took it out I noticed that the title has been inscribed on the shell in “blind” (using laser etching), another near-invisible component to the work. The duo haven’t missed a trick in assembling this conceptual home-grown art object, no aspect left unpondered. It’s also very good to listen to, when you’re prepared for a good facial scrub of late-night scrapery and unexpected electronic blastage. Realised using just a prepared drum kit and live electronics, this is music that starts out strangely minimal and uncertain, only to turn violent and abrasive at the turn of a screw, then subside into sullenness just as suddenly. It’s as though the two players were studiously trying to avoid treading directly on any known modern music genre, and set out to walk the self-imposed tightrope with the aim to avoid the major pitfalls presented by free improvisation, “reduced” improv, and table noise – to name but three. I do like the unexpected moments that erupt out of this set-up, and some of their high-volume sounds are just spot-on as headache-cleaning solvents or industrial cleansing agents. They also sent me a CDR, their second release, not yet heard at time of writing but I’m glad to have it because both of these existed in tiny editions – 30 copies only – and it’s probably no surprise for you to learn they are pretty much sold out at the parent website. However, they also organised a music festival in May this year, with some substantial players on the roster – which gives one hope for the future, if they can leap from making very limited pressings to setting up a three-day art music festival in a capital city in just one year. Many thanks to Pierce for sending these.

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Phantom Tornados

bociantk

Bocian Records is a small-edition label which has released albums involving such luminaries of the avant-garde world as Kevin Drumm, Lasse Marhaug, C Spencer Yeh among others, but the name Tomasz Krakowiak is a new one on me. The sleevenotes by Daniel Muzyczuk refer to Krakowiak’s Moulins (BOCIAN RECORDS BC TK) as a “tornado” and he’s not wrong there. He also asks the question “How do you build a mill out of a drum kit?” This kind of thing really winds my gyroscope. In a good way. To my ears, Krakowiak could be using precision welding, the distant engines of submarines, industrial suction pumps and local weather as part of the transformation of his drum kit. His approach puts me in mind of the rigorous and almost academic re-invention of common objects as sounding vessels by people like Lee Patterson, Hong Chulki or Jason Kahn, but here Krakowiak builds a more emotional cacophony out of the debris at hand than those brainiacs. Here and there, recognisable fundamentals of rhythm are employed only to be erased swiftly by fluent scraping techniques. And unlike the well-trodden path many, many gumboot-shod noisicians have traversed leading from the literal über-clang of Einsturzende Neubauten’s 1980’s experiments with detourned metals, Krakowiaks’s percussion collages are augmented by strange, painterly washes of non-percussive elements. Like meadows. And ice crystals. Or bitumen. The nine track titles refer to places visited, which is counter to the supposed immobility of the mill as mentioned, but could just as easily indicate the path of a tornado. Krakowiak manages to do just as much damage. Recommended.

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A puzzling artefact here by Nattavaara Rocks. Housed in a black dvd sized card sleeve with barely a legible letterpress tracklisting on the front, the instrumental music contained within is a modernist Spaghetti Western-style mogadon-cowboy slow-core drone with high-in-the-mix tremolo guitars fizzing away like they only just heard about Ry Cooder. It also takes in elements of the Tortoise/Mogwai axis of the post-post-rock movement that even now still sees a teenager with a guitar and a Do Make Say Think album on every rural streetcorner. Although having said that, Ghosts Move Through (NO NUMBER) doesn’t outstay its welcome. In fact, there’s something strangely enjoyable about it; for me, it is simultaneously reminiscent of both John Zorn’s The Big Gundown and Tortoise’s most noodly passages on Standards. There is precious little information in the booklet, just a series of muted colour photographs of trees on an overcast day. Presumably we are to take this as typical of the scenery of whichever part of Sweden the band hail from, and thus gain an insight into their disturbed collective psyche. The booklet itself, as an object, appears to be hand-made. Pleasant to look at but overall the package is a little austere in content and slightly unskilled in its realisation. According to their Bandcamp page, there is a previous release by the name File Under Debris from 2009, and the briefer-than-brief press release (if that is indeed what this little slip of paper that just fell out actually is) asserts that Ghosts Move Through is, in fact, their third album. However, to the best of my online search abilities, I can find no hard evidence of another title. No matter, Ghosts Move Through works its way into my cerebellum with slow inevitability; much the way the radiation dust inexorably approaches Melbourne in Nevil Shute’s post-apocalypse novel On The Beach, and like the doomed inhabitants of the fictional version of that city, I wait for its deadly effects not with a sense of horror, but with anxious resolve. Like the best purveyors of this style of music, there’s more than a little sense of impending apocalypse about this music. Something about it makes me imagine some new, awful kind of tragedy’s inevitable approach.

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Mirrors Beneath


Phantom Horse produce quite jolly and pleasant music out of their keyboards, guitars and percussive objects, creating a rather dense and busy surface across nine tracks on their self-titled LP (DEKORDER 062). The label’s perception is that the duo of Ulf Schütte and Niklas Domaschk fill in a space between Kosmische German electronic music and the more considered minimalist compositions of the American school; for the latter, Philip Glass springs to mind when we listen, given the duo’s frequent inclination towards continually repeated arpeggiated piano riffs. With their multiple percussion layers, they also succeed in suggesting a vaguely ethnic strain of African thumb-piano music, or a form of poppified lite-Gamelan. A speeded-up Philip Corner music for fans of drum-machine electro music of the late 1970s onwards. The LP sounds sumptuous and rich for a home recording, and I like the seamless tapestries of the music where no space is left unstitched nor any thread left hanging. Yet in spite of all the percussion elements efficiently weaving the hoped-for “polyrhythmic” effects, the players themselves are rather stiff – they cannot syncopate, swing or accentuate worth a darn. As a result the music carries itself with a brisk but awkward walking motion, when one feels it ought to be skipping, dancing and running all at once. (13/07/2012)

Mike Connelly has made another sinister noise-exploration album as Failing Lights. We very much enjoyed his 2010 release for Intransitive Recordings, but he’s been releasing material under this name for American Tapes and Gods Of Tundra since 2005 onwards. On Dawn Undefeated (DEKORDER 063), this Wolf Eyes / Hair Police exemplar of beastly American Noise continues the trend for understatement and restraint that characterises his project. This is not shocking noise music, but it remains potent and chilling. I suppose the challenge for Connelly has been to rein in any tendencies towards the familiar amplified savagery, yet still deliver ice-cold sensations of terror to the audience. He succeeds with these very stark and simple experiments, pushing together isolated guitar and synth sounds to create bizarre, unsettling combinations of electric juice. Each work is as brittle and mute as a modernist sculpture, all spiny bronze and unpolished stone. I’d imagine that few of these pieces are prepared or composed in any conventional sense, and rather emerge from intense studio sessions which were subsequently edited and sequenced. As a result the movements of each instrument are dark and weird, unpredictable as a crawling bat on the mossy ground by night. Connelly almost seems to leave pieces deliberately half-finished, the better to leave us with a mystified and troubled sensation in the pit of the stomach. ‘Our Wild Flight’ is the strongest track, it closes the album and offers a grisly drag-me-to-Hell effect rendered in the most emotionless and pitiless manner possible. The album was cut at 45 RPM, but I found it is equally horrifying played at both 45 and 33. (13/07/2012)

Keith Fullerton Whitman released Generators in early 2012. That album contained documents of his 2010 endeavours concerned with live performance of electronic music. It was reckoned by many to be something of a benchmark achievement, in its mixture of analogue / digital hardware and making music with a semi-composed / semi-improvised mindset, given that extra edge of excitement from doing it in the live arena. Occlusions (EDITIONS MEGO 026) could be said to continue that galactic endeavour, and Whitman indicates in his notes that he regards it a “companion piece”. It’s much harder to listen to than its brother, however. The performance is almost alarmingly half-human, half-robot…machine-generated random bursts are let loose by the performer, who admits he has gone out of his way to refuse recognisable patterns of any kind. That includes rhythm, meter, melody, and “a cleanly outlined organisational sense” – many of the things that bring conventional pleasure in music are thus stricken from the agenda and removed from the table. It’s probably more sensible to approach both the sides here (live recordings made in Europe in February 2012) as documents of Keith’s work in progress, snapshots of developing ideas, workings and reworkings of the Occlusion theme as he bravely takes his ideas into the unforgiving world armed with only some black boxes under his wings and a very game pluckiness in his heart as he girds his loins and stirs his stumps. There’s a somewhat raw aspect, doing it naked or without a net; even the “mood swings” of the performer are noted, and can be heard to some extent manifesting in the music (side B is more aggressive, when he was in a blind rage for some reason). All of this honesty is confirmed by the deliberate decision to make audience recordings, using cheap technology and with the recorder situated so as to capture the same events as he himself was hearing. He even encoded the sound files at quite a low resolution. Yet here, pressed in vinyl and mastered at 45RPM, the sounds are penetratingly sharp. Oddest of all is the artist’s claim that he considers this heavily abstracted and disjointed work “a ‘kind’ of Dance Music”. (06/06/2012)

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The Towering Inferno

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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.

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