Tagged: piano

October 27, 2013

Drift Away

Marihiko Hara
Flora
DRONE SWEET DRONE RECORDS DSD011 CD / NIGHT CRUISING NCD-02_2013 CD (2013)

Marihiko Hara’s Flora is a collection of calming and ambient sounds that evoke images of his native Japan. Inspired by nature, this is music to relax to and be carried away by.

Far from being bold or provocative, Flora sits very much at the other end of the musical spectrum; providing a reflective and transporting experience that forces you to stop for a while and step away from the stresses and frustrations of everyday life.

Recorded in Kyoto and Takashima City, Hara’s elegant piano and electronic compositions are combined with field recordings to produce a seamless selection of tracks that aim to transport listeners through forests, lakes and oceans, and even all the way up to the moon.

More than anything else, Flora highlights Hara’s talents as a composer and musician; with tracks like ‘Camera’ and ‘Curtain’, in particular, demonstrating his abilities as a classical-style pianist. Occasional electronic touches add a bit of an edge, but the overall feeling remains that of serenity and placidity; like a rippling lake or gentle summer breeze.

The ambient sounds, including twittering birds and buzzing insects, simply provide a subtle background to the Kyoto-based artist’s compositions. In fact, the whole CD almost feels like a soundtrack to nature. Only on one track, ‘Ocean’, does the drone take over from the piano; providing a slight shift in mood and ambience.

On some level, Flora might have benefited from the inclusion of more ambient field recordings (especially on the water-themed tracks), but as Hara himself states, the sounds he has chosen are ones that are close to his heart; and this certainly comes across.

For sheer beauty, ‘Ocean’ and ‘Eclipse’ are probably the standout tracks, but there’s no weak link here, as they all glide effortlessly into one another; each distinct, but no one track overpowering or diminishing the next.

Overall, Flora is an unchallenging, gentle and tranquil experience that allows the listener the chance to experience nature, reinterpreted and enhanced. It is a piece of work very much rooted in Japanese culture and conjures up images of the country’s landscape away from the hustle and bustle of city life.

As such, the best way to appreciate Flora is to lie down, close your eyes and let yourself drift off into Marihiko Hara’s world. Once there, you might find you want to hang around for a while.

October 2, 2013

Creamed Coconut

So, with CD player newly repaired and listening once more free from the shadow of equipment failure let us see if this newly de-stressed set-up has had a benevolent effect on my reviews:

Let’s consider Alessandro Bosetti and Chris Abrahams matt varnished digifile opus We Who Had Left (MIKROTON RECORDINGS CD 19).

Instrumentally it’s all about piano and electronics, approached with an appealing sensuousness which touches on such worlds as jazz and sound poetry. Chris plays piano in The Necks, I gather. I haven’t actually heard The Necks, but the internet told me that and I thought I’d save you opening any extra tabs by passing on the information.

The first track, ‘We also dress today’, doesn’t give too much away, a spare but approachable construct consisting of the piano riffing on one note, loose-connection bass pulse coyly flirting with being a kick-drum and a sprinkling of pattering, looped polyrhythm. The second track, ‘We arrange our home’, is more representative of what the duo have to offer: light, silvery runs up and down the keyboard backed with electronics, in this case an electronic wandering bassline shadows the piano while breathy samples which sound to me like down-tuned whistles are mixed into a gauzy background wash, giving a hovering flute-like exotica tinge. In this Exotic Forest you half expect some Martin Denny birdcalls to start up as you pass the next tree. It’s a coolly strange environment, like Ballard’s crystal jungle relocated to Tahiti and populated with silent Gauguin beauties.

‘We cannot Imagine’ introduces vocals, softly spoken and Italian-accented, slowly repeated and unpicked phrases unravel over the course of ten minutes whilst they are tentatively wafted into song by gentle puffs of piano and the quiet electric whistle-flutes, floating softly around the listening space. Quite a lovely effect, very delicately performed. Bellisimo.

Sound-wise this isn’t quite the Doobie Brothers, but there is a certain smoothness, more evident in some tracks than others, a quietly polished finish you might actually expect of an ambient album. However, when Chris Abrahams strikes or rather caresses a chord or note, ably counterpointed by Alessandro Bossetti, it is mighty enjoyable whatever burnishing methods may or may not have been applied.

‘When they are overhead’ starts a little like Charlemagne Palestine writ medium accompanying a clog-dance and Google party thrown by Santa’s elves. It certainly has the potential to achieve elevation and hits a nicely rolling green-ness towards the end. If you’ve ever seen the BBC Krautrock documentary where Iggy Pop drills a coconut (a fine cultural moment) while describing the music of Neu! you will recall he uses the phrase ‘psychedelic pastoralism’ while sunset silhouetted pylons recede field by field as seen through a car window. My pleasantly wandering mind was reminded as this track progressed of a similar sensation to that evoked by this scene.

Our journey finishes with a cover of a Bill Evans tune, Waltz for Debby. Debby is ceremoniously draped in a belligerent sinusoidal lap-top as our romantic Italian croons and serenades the album away over a seductive tinkle of the old ivories. That’s amoré!

Kakawaka
Ein Fröhliches Lied Auf Den Lippen Den Wandersmann Kann Nichts Erschüttern
NO LABEL MC CASSETTE

What have we here? A short but sweet cassette (the mini hi-fi system which includes the aforementioned CD player also has a tape player, conveniently), two 10 minute-ish sides. Seit ein: blind munching of psychotropic worms, bursts of computer overload, pitch shift metallic glissandi, the frog chorus and Michael Caine’s heel hitting the concrete in a deserted East Berlin basement, unt so on. Crude methods yield deceptively crude results. Vignettes change like clicking the button on one of those red slide-viewers with the slides on a carboard disc that you used to get. In the background those worms are munching in the dark, converting rainforest decay into putrid phosphorescence. A lesson we can all surely look to apply in our daily lives.

The insect life returns in the second of our sides wherein a flea-bitten, moth-ridden, valve-driven, ragged organ vamp is nibbled on the toes by beetles. Uneasy reposes occur, always while the mandibular chatter soothes away those aches of the day. A muffled noise like a plucked double bass loops away somewhere under the floor like Poe’s tell-tale heart thumping in a bath of mellow vibes. The beetles (John, Paul, Ringo and Jaws) organise a hunt, paint their concave carapaces carmine and set out in slow motion across a shifting carpet, their horns echoing lugubriously. Enchanting and finger-snapping, needless to say.

All in all, very relaxing and swinging and suitable for your next cocktail evening or canasta party if James Last Non Stop Dancing fails to deliver the goods.

September 15, 2013

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)

August 1, 2013

The Haunted Drawing Room

The name of pianist John Tilbury should be familiar to anyone who has ever dipped a toe or two into the waters of the British avant garde. An impressive c.v. unravels before us….a member of AMM for thirty-three years, the ne plus ultraman of Morton Feldman interpretations, a one-time member of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and the M.I.M.E.O. collective with Keith Rowe, and others.

Poland’s principal minimalist composer in orchestral/chamber/tape/solo fields, Tomasz Sikorski (1933-88) was a friend and associate of John’s during his tenure at Warsaw Conservatory and John’s latest CD For Tomasz Sikorski (BOLT RECORDS BR 1014 / BOCIAN RECORDS BC JT) consists of three interpretations of his works and adds on an improvisatory tribute to this criminally undervalued figure, who, sadly, only merits a small bundle of entries on internet sites.

A series of well measured repetitive figures form the backbone of the opening “Autograph” and the slightly similar (and deceptively titled) “Rondo”. Haunted drawing room flourishes clash with the occasional heavier right hand punctuation, whilst the latter piece tends to occupy the higher end of the keyboard. Its jittery movements promise and deliver a less linear audio experience, made even more so at times, by dramatic usage of the pregnant pause option. “Zertstreutes Hinausschauen” reveals itself to be the most forceful and brooding of the trio, where knitted brows and basilisk glares are de rigeur in, no doubt, a listening or playing capacity. “Improvisation for Tomasz Sikorski” comes under heavy Cageian manners with the aid of a slew of unspecified foreign bodies placed in the piano’s underbelly. This added vocabulary squeezes out (in no particular order), some ersatz far eastern harmonics, a recurring spectral bass gongtone and the tiny mechanical clack of victorian automata. Funnily enough, John’s solo debut LP on Decca from 1975 was a certain Mr Cage’s Prepared Piano. So…deference from a master to a grandmaster’s methods lasts a long, long time.

A joint release between Bocian Records and Bolt Records. Crisply recorded at Warsaw Museum of Sculpture, where every last micro-second of decaying note is captured for posterity.

From solo piano to one man and his six-string…

After 2011′s Neil Young v Rhys Chatham jam-heavy Paranoid Cat CD (Family Vineyard), Chris Forsyth, ex of freeform splatterjazz combo Peeesseye returns to the fray with Kenzo Deluxe (NORTHERN SPY 025). A solo electric guitar showcase (sans overdubs) that trains its telescope towards the realms of kozmik Americana, where the Fahey Spiral and Basho Centauri can still be glimpsed.

It’s a collection of conflicting moods, where the track sequencing does tend to run towards the occasional zig-zagging ride. “The First 10 Minutes Of Cocksucker Blues” is a heavy lidded abstract blooze in long form, where a chugging undertow is topped off with a strange form of lyrical picking that sounds, for all the world, as if it were recorded underwater. If Harvey Mandel (Canned Heat/solo) ever ventured into repetitive musics – then it just might resemble this. The gently meandering “Downs & Ups” is, to these ears, the most successful track, in which images of Felt’s great lost guitar wizard Maurice Deebank emerge, caught boning up on Takoma sheet music. However, themes of mellow fruitfulness evaporate as if they were but strange dreams. “Boston St. Lullaby No. 2″ appears to hark back to Chris’s more noisome past endeavours. This fug-laden reverb ‘n’ drone exercise inches towards Ben Chasny territory and possibly even Bardo Pond solo ventures and, in no way, can be viewed as a complimentary ticket to the Land of Nod. Acting as a brief and delicately played buffer, “East Kensington Run Down” gives way to “Boston St. Lullaby no 1″, a charming slice of back porch introspection that luxuriates on a bed of the finest woven reverb. Like I said, sequencing that moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.

A release from Northern Spy Records (39 Hawthorne St., Brooklyn, NY11225, U.S.A.) that has also been issued in vinyl form, now long gone no doubt…

July 28, 2013

Corollaries: beautiful and shifting soundscapes of continuous piano / violin music

Lubomyr Melnik, Corollaries, Erased Tapes Records Ltd, ertp048cd (2013)

Pianist Lubomyr Melnik plays continuous minimalist piano music in a way that makes his style comparable to minimalist black metal tremolo guitar riffing as well as to the more Usual Suspects in minimalist music like Charlemagne Palestine and Steve Reich. As the Aquarius Records website notes, Melnik’s technique involves depressing the piano pedals which allows the notes to blend into one another and create layers of shifting overtones which in turn build up lush and ringing soundscapes that constantly shift, never remaining static enough to just “be”. The music is always in the process of becoming. “Corollaries” is the result of a meeting between Melnik and violinist Peter Broderick at a music festival in Cologne: the two collaborate on four of the five tracks on the album. As might be expected, Melnik lays down a basic melody structure which flows wherever it will, taking Melnik with it – the pianist enjoying the ride that his fingers lead him on – while Broderick improvises over and in response to Melnik’s groundwork.

“Pockets of Light” is a beautiful and delicate work with a wistful air of longing thanks to Broderick’s very soft and almost meditative vocal. Violin is incredibly sparse and seems to come near the end so the track is almost a solo piece. “The Six Day Moment” is dominated by a deep motif played by Melnik’s left-hand that pulsates and surges back and forth like a living creature in danger of being beached by a heavy swell upon a beach while a light tinkly melody dances over it in the manner of annoying little seagulls hovering close by. The track is melodramatic in parts and comes quite close to weepiness and kitsch Romanticism but the rules that Melnik must have set for himself in playing continuous piano prevent the music from descending too far into sentimentalism.

Subsequent tracks are more restrained in the virtuoso piano playing but possess their own charms: Broderick’s violin commands attention on “A Warmer Place” by its steady drawn-out bow work in spite of Melnik’s hyperactive playing; and “Le Miroir d’Amour”, the most conventional sounding of the lot in its structure and a bit of a disappointment compared to the other unorthodox tracks, throws the spotlight onto the violin’s maudlin tune and Broderick’s own accomplished playing while Melnik’s piano follows close by. However it’s “Nightrail from the Sun”, featuring guest musician Martyn Heine playing soft droning guitar feedback, that steals the show from the rest of the album: it’s a bit slow to get off the ground but once airborne, the track zings off at manic speed, powered by the interplay between near-demented piano shimmer and six-string drone moanings.

The music is strongly atmospheric and its emotions range from melancholy and longing to sorrow to an urgency bordering on anxiety and obsession. Some of the piano work can be maddeningly relentless in its repetition and just listening to it on tracks like “Nightrail …” gives my own fingers, untutored in the Way of the Ebonies and Ivories, a feeling of repetitive strain injury. Some of the emotion on the two later tracks can be overwrought and I wonder if it might sound a bit forced and manipulative for some listeners. There are times when the music does appear carried away by its own momentum and the space in and around the flow of the music seems neglected as a significant element in its own right.

On the whole, “Corollaries” is a lovely recording to listen to when you find yourself alone on a grey miserable day and you need something that shares your feeling of mild disquiet and want of company.

Contact: Erased Tapes Records Ltd, Lubomyr Melnik

July 13, 2013

Snakes and Eagles

At Land’s Edge (FEEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR088) is the team of Roger and Ben Miller, performing as M2. These musicians ought to be familiar to you from Mission Of Burma and perhaps a bit earlier as Sproton Layer, who recorded a wayward prog rock album in 1970 which was never released until 1991. And for my money, Mission Of Burma ought to have been regarded as national treasures in America, yet strangely never seemed to quite catch fire the same way as their contemporaries such as Big Black, Husker Du, Butthole Surfers, or Black Flag. I suppose their experimental touches – like throwing pre-recorded tape segments into the middle of live performances – branded them as a shade too intellectual. Ben Miller meanwhile was a member of the second version of Destroy All Monsters, and also recently performed with Glenn Branca. After citing all of these impeccable avant-rock credentials, it’s a pleasure to report that this debut album of theirs is a real success, a splendid set of improvised music made with just modified electric guitar and prepared piano. In fact some visual clues as to these preparations are scattered liberally on the covers, not least Ben’s metal comb stroking the strings of his “axe”, but also the expected array of crocodile clips, clothes pegs, screws, tapes, straws and plastic wall plugs – in fine, the contents of Keith Rowe’s shopping bag on any given Saturday. The record sounds gorgeous, with the disguised instruments pushing their way effortlessly past the barrier of unfamiliarity and into a realm of breath-taking beauty, and at times the combined noise is like a 21st-century refit of Harry Partch, his multiphonic percussion instruments trailing their way into the hobo jungle accompanied by the alternative-universe twin of Larry Carlton, a reverse-image session man who went to join Derek Bailey’s Incus label in London instead of playing on Steely Dan’s records. Both Millers work beautifully as a team too, each responding to a shake of the spinal column and curve of the pelvis as if interlocked like Siamese Twins. While sometimes restrained and murmuring repetitive curses in obscure tongues, the duo can also create extremely surprising and almost shocking noise-bursts, and perform them with much more subtlety than we have any right to expect. All of these 2008 recordings were performed live without overdubbing, and it’s a real pleasure to hear so much sheer craft inscribed in these grooves.

Every time I pick up this LP by The Dogmatics, I think I’m about to hear a lugbriuous record of ceremonial Black Metal. The title, the logo, and of course Zev Langer’s cover painting (nocturnal skeletal beasts hold up a decapitated head under the moon) are the factors that influenced my mistake. In fact, The Sacrifice For The Music Became Our Lifestyle (MONOTYPE RECORDS MONOLP011) is a record of smoky, brittle jazz-like improvisations, performed by Chris Abrahams at the piano and Kai Fagaschinski on the clarinet. Fagaschinski’s name is familiar through some releases on the Erstwhile label, but clearly I haven’t heard enough of this Berlin-based woodwind guy who has an interest in wringing highly distinctive sounds out of his body, via his lungs and throat into the stick of his instrument. On many of the tracks here he barks and hoots like a friendly owl, or evokes our sympathy as a small wounded animal with its pained clucks. The Australian pianist Abrahams is a ring-wise champ, was a member of The Necks in the 1990s, and has been making records of his own piano music long before that. I think his piano may also be prepared on some of the cuts here, given the unfamiliar tone and the dampened effect that sometimes muffles his errant half-chords and truncated runs. A subdued set of tunes on this album, successfully weaving its own strange little atmosphere, from whose central black swamp musical notes hop like frogs or leap like whirring crickets. After a time, it seems as though the supernatural cover art is entirely appropriate for the album.

The album Energy (Of) (COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS CFYR011) was recorded live in September 2011 at a concert in the Wesleyan University, and made by the team of Bryan Eubanks and Jason Kahn. On this lengthy growl-fest of feedback, crackle, theremin whoops and fizzy yawps, they are both described as simply playing “electronics”, but perhaps it’s just as well we don’t get the full equipment checklist. I can hear at least two stand-out effects which rise to the fore in this particular marengo. One of them is the sound of the crowd at Wesleyan, surreptitiously recorded as they chatter in lively manner, and fed back into the musical performance in real time. Unless of course it’s a pre-record tape, but I hope it’s the former – I do like the strategy of feeding off the energy of your audience and using it to improve your music in some way. The second effect is simply a stuck CD hammering away insistently, which only appears on one occasion but has a quite galvanising effect on the entire show. One might almost call it the central node, the junction box through which all the energy must flow. This isn’t to decry the remainder of the set, which is a master-class in dynamic improvisation; how these two manage to escape the traps of mindless droning and shapeless noise ought to be an object lesson to us all. The players are locked in an exciting struggle with powerful forces, which if not controlled will shatter every bone in the body like a giant electric tornado. Document of a first-class performance, yet it also contains a high quotient of the genre of grumbly digital noise that this label has cornered the market in.

June 23, 2013

Gentle piano curves

Piano Interrupted is the project of London-based pianist composer Tom Hodge and French electronic producer Franz Kirmann.

The starting point for the music of Piano Interrupted is based around the digital manipulation of Hodge’s piano by Kirman. The results on this album are also augmented by cello and percussion supplied by Greg Hall and Eric Young, who are now an integral part of the live performance unit.

The music on the album Two By Four (DAYS OF BEING WILD WILDLP001) follows a fairly narrow path with gentle curves and inclines, but rarely steps into the rough ground either side. This in itself gives the album a coherence and identity. The music contained herein wouldn’t cause offence when played at a dinner party or go amiss as a backdrop to a Sunday drive.

The ensemble pieces have a light, gentle undulating feel, in part achieved by Young’s understated percussion and Hall’s multilayered cello. The two tracks that are solely created by Hodge and Kirman have a tighter electronic studio feel to them.

Latin and eastern influences emerge periodically and are given a few unexpected but pleasing twists and turns in the process.

The duo state that in the live arena the ensemble stretch out and improvise. The tracks on this album however appear to be composed and highly constructed and reveal little evidence of this.

The musicianship on the album is faultless and has been impeccably recorded and mastered. There is little here to startle or challenge the listener but that is not intended as a negative criticism of what is a beautifully executed and pleasing album.

June 16, 2013

Rare Birds

Magda Mayas is a young percussionist from Berlin but her favorite instrument is the piano. And this is sheer luck for us, the listeners, since she has developed a very solid technique on tingling, scraping, bowing and scratching the strings inside the piano, speaking to us in a very personal and comprehensive sonic language. Her CV is already full of important collaborations, e.g. with Peter Evans, Phill Niblock and Thomas Lehn, to report only a few of my personal favorites. This is the second product of the collaboration between Magda and her alter-ego in the wind instruments, Christine Abdelnour (Sehnaoui), a young, largely self-taught, sax player from Lebanon. Her high-pitched sonic expressions are influenced by the concepts of noise and distortion, following, in a very personal style, a long line of avant-garde sax players in the field.

For many people, art is the rendering and processing of nature by its human factor. In this way, numerous music compositions and playing techniques are determined by the language of birds, the most profound being Catalogue d’Oiseaux by Olivier Messiaen. Here, the birds’ presence is implied by the cover image, the title and probably by the recorded material which otherwise is a free improvisation. Bird sounds are often considered soothing and relaxing but a birds’ convention taking place on a large tree could easily end up in a hellish high-pitched havoc. Myriad (UNSOUNDS 30U) is balancing on both sides of this coin following mostly a tender and clear path even in the rough parts of the improvisation, aligned with the female temperament behind the work. I have to admit at this point that I feel a special gratitude for the female perspective on modern music, that tends to deliver an increasing number of important works.

The two improvisations in this album captured by Unsounds label, home of some very notable musicians, are influenced by spectral contemporary music, building a high-frequency reverberating corpus and spreading very unequally in duration. The longest track, “Hybrid”, begins with what seems like the birds’ smooth awakening and develops into a complicated communication among different types of bird singing (or high-pitched sax patterns) accompanied by weird wood knocking and string plucking. The mood of this piece is constantly in motion, leading to a pleasant uncertain evolution of the music. The sax sound in the second track “Cyanide”, reminds of ambient pre-recorded soundscapes while the “piano” contributes with arpeggios and pitch-bending expressions achieved by the direct manipulation of the strings inside the instrument.

What we have here is a highly conscious, crafted sound of a duo that amounts to an impressive wholeness of a single entity. This is a very rare scenario when we discuss avant-garde improvised music played live (during the Meteo Festival in France). The instrument techniques employed are both original and complicated. The sonic expression is dense and consequently the listening experience requires a devotion that is nevertheless rewarding. My only complaint could be that the 33 minutes of the album seem too few and the work leaves a sense of being unfinished.

After their first album Teeming, Myriad certainly reinforces the appetite for more recordings of this unusual duo that consists of a standing pianist and a sitting sax player.

March 29, 2013

Cendre: beautiful music trapped in land of Melancholia

Fennesz + Sakamoto, Cendre, Touch, CD TONE-32 (2007)

Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on much by various artists who I used to listen to but then drifted away from. It’s been quite some time since I heard anything by Christian Fennesz. So I thought I should check out this collaborative instrumental work from 2007 with Japanese composer / musician Ryuichi Sakamoto with whose music I was also once familiar way back in the early 1980s when he was a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra.

“Cendre” is a series of ambient soundscape pieces done mainly on piano, guitar and laptop (used to process guitar and piano sounds and melodies). All track titles are short one-word names that suggest states of incomplete stasis or the remains of something that once existed but is no more. Much of the music is desultory piano melody meandering, often sad and meditative in mood as it favours certain keys, with guitar and laptop electronics active in the backdrop. The atmospheres can be quite dark but they are never menacing or threatening. No other instrumentation is used and there are vast spaces revealed in the music by the plaintive keyboard tunes. There is the sense that listeners have to fill in the empty spaces with their own imaginations and memories that those darkened spaces might evoke.

Although the album is divided into 11 tracks, the music is better heard as a continuous soundtrack of changing melodies and sounds that passes through a melancholy blues style, something approaching lounge lizard muzak and occasionally falling into abstract experimental territory. The best tracks are those where the piano and guitar electronics are blended so well that everything sounds like one instrument with an amazing array of tones and effects that all sound like pure piano and Fenneszian guitar effects (“Kuni”, for instance).

The music is certainly very beautiful and its sculpting can be gorgeous and heavenly but at the same time it stays within a very restricted zone of Melancholia: in this world, joy, lightness and happy defiance, in the face of a world that insists on solemn observance of the transience of life, are qualities alien to its denizens. I know we all have to die one day and for many that’s a terrible prospect to be shunned; for others such knowledge kills off all motivation to live fully in the moment; and for still others the awareness suggests we must observe detachment and resist a hunger to satisfy all our appetites but at the risk of denying our emotions, feelings and animal passion; but “Cendre” takes its remit of regarding the world and change with a detached eye rather too seriously to the extent of draining any life out of the music. The result is an album that increasingly becomes stupefying and soporific as it hammers its message over and over with each subsequent track.

Hmm … I probably wasn’t missing all that much after all after floating away from Fennesz and Sakamoto all those years ago.

Contact: Touch Music, Christian Fennesz, Ryuichi Sakamoto

January 27, 2013

Universal is Born

The lovely EM Records label in Japan has been busy with more of its characteristically wonderful reissues of scarce, choice and exotic items. All the below were received here 02 May 2012. I happened to visit Honest Jon’s Records in West London yesterday and found they were still stocking a few copies of the label’s older releases, some of which are out of print. I’m personally very excited to receive and hear I Saw The Outer Limits (EM1098CD) by Matsuo Ohno. The work of this exceptional Japanese electronic music composer is not exactly easy to come by. There were three CDs issued on King Records in 2005, but these volumes of The World of Electro-Acoustic Sound and Music are in the process of becoming collector’s items. If known at all, Ohno is probably best known to a Western audience through his soundtracks to the TV anime series Astro Boy, but that’s become something of an astral albatross for him. In fact he has a complex history behind him, working in documentary and nature films since the late 1950s, developing a very personal philosophy, and some details of his fascinating life have been recorded in the very simpatico sleeve notes to this release, written by the label owner Koki Emura. There are other and more obscure anime works, for example the work of Hiroshi Maname, which had an influence on this creator, and he also made his own innovative documentary films in the 1960s, including some highly personal film projects about the treatment of disabled and mentally ill children in Japan. He produced and directed a 1972 documentary following the Taj Mahal Travellers on tour.

In 1977 he scored the soundtrack for The War In Space for Toho, the large Japanese studio that produced the Godzilla movies, and he was commissioned by director Shinji Hinoki to produce an album of purely electronic music. I Saw The Outer Limits is the result, Ohno’s first release of non-soundtrack music, and an art statement in its own right. To emphasise the unique nature of Ohno’s music, Emura gently opines how much electronic music of the 1970s (and a lot of it was quite commercial and even sold well) was not only rather bland and boring to listen to, but also tended to simply recreate the sound of conventional instruments; many times we heard quite ordinary melodies being played on a keyboard, except that the keyboard happened to be a synthesizer. It’s worth bearing this in mind as you delve into the extremely subtle tonal shadings of Ohno’s work, which are the result of pure process – the sounds here can only be created by electronic means, and the only method to arrange them involved tape editing. While this is not wildly different from the techniques used by many classical electro-acoustic composers, the results here are blessedly free from theories of structure and compositional techniques. The music just floats…it makes a lot of electronic music seem clumsy and stilted with its delicacy and weightless grace. One senses that Ohno worked in a very intuitive way, and Emura for one is convinced that Ohno has “broken free from musical genre…also from the very framework of the standard composition process”. The other thing that listeners will notice is how strange and almost impersonal the work is, a quality which is another product of Ohno’s unique personality, his reluctance to preach or express direct messages in his music. Outer space music has rarely sounded so outer-spacey, in short – cold, distant, alien, and forlorn. The release comes with a bonus mini-CD of Animal Noise Music called Choju Gigaku, and the composer himself explains how this oddity came about for the World Expo in Japan in 1970. He himself is charmingly baffled as to why anyone would want to reissue this obscure item which was intended for a very limited audience and sold virtually zero copies at the time. For the rest of us music fanatics, prepare to be delighted for 12 minutes of electronic animals singing their beautiful little tunes. I think the label has also pressed this as a nifty seven-inch vinyl item. Essential purchase!

Portrait of a Prodigy (EM RECORDS EM1099CD / MEDITATIONS MEDI 02CD) collects a number of recordings by the enigmatic Indian flautist T.R. Mahalingham, remastered from 78 rpm discs of the 1940s and 1950s. Indian music is not quite in my line, but it seems this fellow did much to reinvigorate the Carnatic tradition with his attempts to put more voicing and emotion into his playing. In doing this he caused some controversy among the purists, and made matters worse by his slightly disreputable lifestyle; an occasional gambler who was not very reliable or punctual, often arriving late for concerts or storming off the stage in the middle of a performance. These however could be taken as indicators of his perfectionism in music, and signs of a temperamental genius. I’m not at all versed in the traditions here, so have nothing to compare it to, but my ears tell me his playing is clearly detailed, taut, and very meticulous. He may not exactly be the John Coltrane of the Carnatic flute, but his music is beautiful to listen to.

Another record guaranteed to expose my musical chauvinism and ignorance of world music is Diew Sor Isan: The North East Thai Violin of Thonghuad Faited (EM1101CD). This album compiles a number of mid to late 1970s recordings of this exceptional player of the Sor Isan. The Sor Isan is a fairly grating instrument and its keening sound may be an acquired taste to Western ears at first spin, but some will also love its rawness and direct qualities. It’s a very distinctive voicing you don’t hear too often. Thonghuad Faited is notable as one of the few players who managed to bring the instrument to the fore, and achieved notoriety as a soloist – again, going against the grain of tradition. The music is completely beyond my ken, and I’d be lost without the contextual notes provided by Chris Menist and Maft Sai (who also compiled the release) – they achieve an interesting blend of musicology and regional history in their concise essay, and bring the story to life. All of these tunes have something to recommend them, whether it be a syrupy ethnic drone, an intriguing vocal part, or even a lightweight easy-listening “rock” backdrop with drums and guitars. The other thing I like is that while the Thai violin is the “lead” instrument, it’s clearly nothing like the sort of musical excess we would associate with jazz, improv, or rock solos, and rather than relentlessly propelling forwards, the music keeps circling in on itself in a compelling manner.

On Istikhbars & Improvisations (EM1096CD) we hear the piano music of Mustapaha Skandrani. This is another example of a relatively obscure musician whom Koki Emura clearly regards as a hidden gem and one most worthy of wider exposure. This Algerian musician recorded this music of his piano improvisations in 1965 under the auspices of a French patron, and once again it is something I have never heard the like of. Skandrani was trained in the traditions of Arabic or Andalucian music, but in the late 1930s he came under the influence of a musician named Hadj M’rizek, who was on a mission to modernise and update the traditional forms of hawzi and shaabi music. It seems that the piano, that most European of instruments (the development of the well-tempered clavier, and indeed the entire Western scale, is a fascinating tale in itself, full of competing factions), was considered totally unsuitable for the rendition of the half-tones and microtonal structure found in Andalucian music. On these 18 short and exquisite piano improvisations, Skandrani provides plenty of evidence to the contrary. Admittedly the grand piano in question was tuned especially to accommodate him, but even so it’s hard not to be flabbergasted by the precision and assurance with which he executes complex runs of notes and tricky Middle-Eastern intervals. The dryness of the recording only adds to the husky, spicy flavour of the music. The album upset quite a few musical purists on its release, so perhaps Skandrani is a visionary “outlaw” who appeals to this label for the same reasons as Mahalingham above. Even so, Mustapaha Skandrani was highly respected and successful in his field, and did many great things for Algerian music in his lifetime. It’s surprising that this was his one and only recording.