Tagged: poetry

July 28, 2012

Snowed In

Frame Me Again

Paul Khimasia Morgan is owner of the UK’s Slightly Off Kilter label, and also occasionally makes music and sound-art himself. Empty Frame (ENGRAVED GLASS EG.PCD008) is one where he aurally professes his alignment with Mark Wastell, Rhodri Davies, Burkhard Beins, and others of the “reduced” playing school by making three tracks of extremely quiet and mysterious process-based music, floating in a midway point between improvisation and that unclassifiable activity that involves the manipulation of small objects, and tiny microphones to capture the sounds from those manipulations. On the first track there may be some motorised components involved, but the second cut ‘The prospect of dim sum’ is more of a serene, slightly processed, electronic drone whose origins are untraceable by the ear. The label is largely a showcase for the work of its owner, Jez Riley French, who declares his love for “infinite detail” and sounds that are “often overlooked and hidden”, but he has also released work by Richard Kamerman, Anne Guthrie, John Grzinich, and many others. From 17 January 2012.

One Speak for Both

Speaking of Mr Kamerman, here’s another release on his Copy For Your Records label. Un Lieu Pour Être Deux (CFYR) is credited to Antoine Beuger, who appears to be a Dutch flautist and composer associated with the Wandelweiser Group, an international team of hard-core ascetics who profess a very extreme doctrine of silent music. We’re passingly familiar with the work of one member, the trombonist Radu Malfatti who in turn has had some influence on Mattin, so that gives us some reference point; Malfatti’s testing music is sometimes the equivalent of a death sentence, executed with incredible slowness. The composition (if such it be) by Beuger is realised here by the guitarist Barry Chabala and Ben Owen (of Winds Measure Recordings), who plays synthesizers and contributes field recordings. The 47-minute work seems to have been executed in a single day in New York, and the field recordings are all urban in nature; the distant sound of traffic forms the basis for much of the piece. I think there may be some sort of “imaginary map” or psycho-geographic connotations to decode as well, but the minimal information and cover in this instance is giving nothing away. As a musical performance, it’s quite some way from any familiar sort of improvised music, and the players are both slow, deliberate, and almost cautious in their utterances, drip-feeding small chunks of synth tones and guitar notes that are studiedly inscrutable. I think we have to process this as a conceptual composition, where even the field recordings don’t mean what they appear to mean, and most aesthetic pleasures are being strictly denied to us, or at best being rationed out very carefully. To put it another way, this seems to be a rare use of field recordings as a compositional element, rather than something to be heard in its own right, which is an encouraging development. Strangely compelling to listen to, this perplexing work holds us in a state of considerable tension and concentration for its duration. 150 copies only and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, an apt choice as he represents the Italian wing of this school of emptied-out music. From 16 January 2012.

An Aerie Skit

Two more of the items from the & Records label of Montreal which arrived here 20 January 2012. The record Ave W (&10) is credited to Tiari Kese, who apparently plays all the instruments – keyboards, French horn, electronics and samples, but it’s more likely to be all the work of Michel F Côté, who’s a Canadian electro-acoustic composer. A biography of alleged Bulgarian Tiari Kese can be found online, but with its Stockhausen, Beatles and Debord connections it’s all too good to be true and is probably just another internet hoax. The record does have one glorious track title, ‘Dreams of Spartacus’s Spacecraft’, but I mostly found it a rather turgid listen, directionless and shapeless digital layers of drone that amount to less and less the more they’re piled up. The instrument-playing has been processed and denormalised to an extreme degree, sucking the humanity out of everything until we’re left with echoed and orphaned horn tones floating aimlessly on a sea of samples, light distortion and glitch.

The City Wears a Furry Hat

Even less enjoyable is Solitary Pleasures (&RECORDS &15) by Fortner Anderson. It comprises several short 90-second vocal recits by the poet Anderson while accompanied by electro-acoustic noise played by a non-jazz trio of Alexandre St-Onge, Sam Shalabi, and Michel F. Côté again, this time playing the drums. The release accompanies a book of poems published at the same time. We’ve encountered Fortner Anderson before in TSP15 where we noted the baffling Six Silk Purses, recordings of his spoken word exploits provided to sound artists to add their musical interpretations; in fact the same musicians were on that release too. Fortner’s short couplets are expressed here in diary form, each segment beginning with a calendar date announced in solemn tones, before proceeding with his free-form observations such as “I had forgotten the calculus of transcendence…”, alternating with mini-stories about life in the city and the characters he meets. It all feels oddly old-fashioned, like one of the forgotten Beats. Fortner attempts some jazzy syncopation in his delivery, even as the music drags itself along like a three-legged dog on a hot afternoon. Kenneth Patchen it ain’t.

July 15, 2012

Rodd Keith – doomed to song-poem Hell

We were sent this Rodd Keith vinyl LP (limited press, gatefold jacket) around November 2011. My Pipe Yellow Dream (ROARATORIO ROAR23) is the second time this label have compiled an anthology dedicated to this singular fellow. I expect you all know the story about these song-poem recordings. It’s been well documented and Irwin Chusid wrote an informative chapter about it in his book Songs In The Key Of Z. It was a kind of vanity press arrangement where you could send your song lyrics to a music company who (in return for a fee) would turn it into a pop song, record it and release copies. Like other vanity press arrangements, it was pretty much a scheme for making money out of optimistic but not very talented Joe Sixpacks from Middle America.

The cult of collecting and appreciating these records long after the fact still seems to persist. I recall JR Williams, the yoks-worthy underground cartoonist, was a fairly rabid fan and for some reason this cemented for me the idea that the whole enterprise was a kind of post-modern, sarcastic dig at “proper” music, as if collectors had reached the point where they were so jaded that only these odd and highly obscure vanity records could satisfy their lust for novelty. I recall buying a copy of The American Song-Poem Anthology: Do You Know The Difference Between Big Wood And Brush CD and never getting past the first few cuts, then selling it on quickly. The lyrics were just dreadful, unmitigated doggerel, and incredibly banal; the very average music didn’t do much to rescue them either. Of course that CD was a late arrival on a scene that had already been thriving from many years among tape traders and other cognoscenti, away from public scrutiny. When a scene gets to the point that it can be so readily anthologised, your radar should start to detect worrying signs.

Very few of my reservations have been put to rest by this LP, despite the immaculate presentation (very good cover drawing by Josh Journey-Heinz) and expert selection of choice cuts (by compiler James Lindbloom) from the Rodd Keith production line. Everything we hear is a needle-drop, from rare singles dated 1966-1974, since the master tapes are probably buried under a bridge along with the accounting books for these song-poem companies. The lyrics beggar belief once again – banal, corny, flat, samey. These would-be songwriters had obvious trouble with even the elementary basics of the form (e.g. scansion, rhymes); no insights or observations; they could not create characters, or tell a story. Many of the words are just recycled from other pop song clichés, and what’s most embarrassing of all is when these squares try and use supposedly “hip” slang. We’re not hearing much that isn’t a regurgitation of very ordinary popular culture taken direct from movies, TV, or advertising. Or greetings cards. I sense that all of this mediocrity had an effect on Rodd Keith, who simply sounds wretchedly bored for 90% of this record. His singing is flat and unengaged, and the backing band of session musicians are like a fifth-rate bubblegum band, for the most part recycling very ordinary pop riffs, with one eye on the studio clock and the other on their paycheck. Taken in one sitting, the LP passes on a strange feeling, like an alternate history of pop that’s been dredged up from the dusty back rooms of a thousand charity shops.

A couple of tracks do stand out. ‘America The Not So Beautiful’ is a recit set to a schmaltzy orchestral backdrop, but it’s a bizarre screed written by one Johnny McCray in which he unburdens his patriotic soul about the corruption of his homeland. What’s odd is the singular details he chooses to make his case. It’s like a Readers Digest article, written by a potential serial killer. Speaking of which, there’s a nasty vengeful streak underpinning ‘Search Out Your Soul, American’, originally written by Vaughn Galloway, and it flings many a poisoned barb at his fellow Americans. Though rendered as mid-1970s funk-lite, you could almost hear this one recast as a violent 1990s rap lyric. Rodd Keith’s voice, especially on the former, is pretty strange; he seems to be dribbling the words out between clenched teeth, uncertain what emotional register would be appropriate for this creepy diatribe. Both of these oddities come close to delivering on the promised song-poem thrills, but you could scarcely call them “outsider” art, as some claim.

Why are we even interested in this? Well, if there’s a pantheon of anonymous hacks in music, then Rodd Keith is the Burt Bacharach of this particular genre. I respect the work done here (and by others) rescue Rodd Keith from obscurity and the genuine efforts made to recognise something of worth in his output. The notes here praise his ability to compose and arrange very quickly, make a record in a single take; since it would have wasted money to do it otherwise, he was driven to that method by the economics of the situation. But the compilers see this as a virtue, and dub Keith a “master improviser”. Then there’s the variety of song-forms which are represented – on this LP alone there’s bubblegum, soul, funk, gospel and ballads. And the sleeve notes from jobbing musician Dick Castle reveal a touching picture of his friend Rodd Keith, and praises his unflagging energy, enthusiasm, and positive stance. Yet Keith himself regarded his career as a doom from which he was unable to escape, and after drink and drugs decided to take his own life.

July 1, 2012

Kosmic Blues

Orpheus in the Underworld

Christof Kurzmann attempts grand things on El Infierno Musical (MIKROTON RECORDINGS CD 20). He composed all the music, plays electronics, saxophone and guitar, and sings all the lyrics where they appear; these words were written by the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, and translated into English with the help of Cecilia Rojo. The aural experience is rich – an unpredictable melange of jazz, free jazz, improvisation, chamber music, blues, pop music and rock music, sometimes given a vaguely medieval / Renaissance flavour by the viola da gamba playing of Eva Reiter, who also plays the contrabass recorder on a couple of tracks. Plus the whole package is contextualised with images sampled from the “Hell” panel of Bosch’s famous Garden of Earthly Delights triptych.

Many musicians may have commented on, been struck by or even dreamed of making a concept album about this “musical Hell” proposed by Bosch, where sinners are punished in amongst a ghastly cacophony of archaic musical instruments, some of which are changed by the diabolical agency into engines of torture. I should point out that Kurzmann is not explicitly intending to do any of the above either, and only the title of this suite has any consonance with the Bosch painting, of which we see a Photoshopped variant provided by the visual artists Jimmy Draht and Stefan Haupt. The main aim of the work is to pay tribute to the poetess Pizarnik, a collection of whose writings also appeared under the title El Infierno Musical and indeed prompted Kurzmann, who purchased said volume almost by accident from a street seller while drinking coffee in Buenos Aires, to found the quintet of this name in 2008.

Musically this album is strong and convincing, even if not as chaotic as anything with a Bosch cover ought to be, and while the individual players – e.g. saxman Ken Vandermark, drummer Martin Brandlmayr – perform with authority, I sometimes find the package a shade too mannered and contrived for my tastes. Kurzmann is the sort of musical catholic who has no problem in mixing different vernaculars, styles and genres in his musical statements, often doing so in the same breath, if he decides that’s what is called for. The main stumbling block for me is Kuzmann’s rather effete voice, which recites rather than sings the lyrical content, and always sounds breathless or on the verge of tears as he negotiates another corny-sounding flattened fifth. So far this prevents me from reaching the core meaning of the work, which is probably encoded more into the poetry than in the music. Still, one needs to persevere with work of this complexity and depth. Don’t let my meagre prejudices prevent you from hearing this extremely unusual and distinctive piece of work. This arrived 31 January from a label based in Moscow.

Leave not a Wrack Behind

Cracked Refraction (PORTER RECORDS PRCD 4061) played by Kyle Bruckmann’s Wrack, is a pleasant surprise and tremendous piece of composed-jazz-classical music, with its multiple feet planted in many fertile territories. I thought I must have some solo Bruckmann albums somewhere in the TSP archive, but it seems I only know the work of this oboist and French horn player from his contributions to other ensembles – such as those of Olivia Block, Scott Fields, and Jason Ajemian. Here are seven fascinating instrumental pieces recorded in 2010 and performed with a small group which performs the considerable feat of sounding as rich as a whole orchestra; they are Jason Stein on the bass clarinet, Jen Clare Paulson on viola, drummer Timothy Daisy and bassist Anton Hatwich. Maybe it’s Myles Boisen’s skills in the production department that help make this such a crisp and bright recording, but the players are on fire. Just two tracks in and I’m already delighted with the mixed chords of ‘Exacerbator’, whose bittersweet harmonies remind me of a slightly darker Gil Evans, or some of the more mysterious moments of Ornette’s Skies Of America. Then there’s ‘Notwithstanding’, where Bruckmann’s oboe trips its way as gracefully as a long-legged stork as it negotiates the tricky time signatures. The tiny miracle of this one is how the entire pace of the piece is quickly pulled off-course by the slower tempo of the viola, which subsequently pulls the bass and drums under her unfolding wings and they demonstrate new feats of restraint as they pluck their skeletal notes under a starlit nocturnal sky.

Those joyous opening cuts are almost something you could sing along or dance to. By the time we get to ‘Ratchetforms’ however, I’m beginning to see what liner notes writer Bill Meyer is going on about with his articulations of the phrase ‘Cracked Refractions’. “Improvisers are vandals who crack music apart, and make something new out of the parts,” he asserts, after naming a list of credible precedents in that area. ‘Ratchetforms’ may be bitty, but it’s not disjointed; you can almost hear the gears of Bruckmann’s mind creating a sort of gigantic wooden clock on the soundstage. Plenty more aural joys and delights to come; the plangent woodwind and viola sounds on ‘Fair To Middling’ are enough to make a blackbird weep into its own nest, and the high-energy forthrightness of ‘The Dishevelator’ gives an indication of a direction Frank Zappa could have taken around the time of Burnt Weeny Sandwich, with its wonderfully complex interweaving melody lines played against a steady rock-like beat with plenty of space for Stein to blow his grumbly-tootly notes in a manner that brings much pleasure to the heart of this confirmed Dolphy fan.

While I could easily point to a number of “third stream” (if that’s still the right word) ensembles whose members all love to be clever and complex and let you know it at all times, one of the many pleasures of this album for me is how Bruckmann and his team make playing this music seem effortless, fun, and 100% natural, never neglecting the swing in favour of flashing their musical chops. In short as Kyle’s thank-you note so aptly puts it, “you guys rock”. Arrived in the TSP mailbox on 30 January 2012.

September 12, 2011

Random Errata

Warm Digits are a whole-hearted “retro” duo from Newcastle, producing a lively and hugely entertaining form of melodic Krautrocky-beat combo music on Keep Warm…With The Warm Digits (DISTRACTION RECORDS DIST22CD), and as their name suggests they reintroduce heat, passion and friendliness to the area of digital music, which may be in danger of growing too cold, clinical and sterile. Steve Jefferis plays guitar and synths, Andrew Hodson drums, and both are involved in the production of visual and video materials which I assume accompany their live sets. A couple of the jokey titles, such as ‘Trans-Pennine Express’ and ‘Here Come The Warm Digits’ admit to everything up front, pre-empting everything the critics are going to throw at them in terms of Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Eno references, but a “wacky” band they ain’t, and they do a much more convincing and danceable version of the electro-beat thing than the dreadful Add N To X, if anyone is unfortunate enough to remember them. A fab release.

For a more subdued take on electronica, there’s the new release You Can’t Get There From Here (MONOTYPE REC MONO038) from Scanner and David Rothenberg, where the laptop music of Robin Rimbaud meets the clarinet playing of Rothenberg; the album is a species of spindly lounge-jazz riffs, accompanied by filtered and pulsating loops in a vaguely art-gallery ambient setting. The combinations of sounds are pleasing, but I feel the performances don’t really develop, and each piece stands in one place like a sort of hologram artwork, sparkling briefly and saying little. I want to persevere with this one however, as David Rothenberg seems a very genuine and inventive polymath sort of chap, a nature-studying academic who integrates his ideas about birdsong with his clarinet playing.

From Holland, a tremendous team-up of two maverick eccentrics Adam Bohman and If, Bwana. Long have I admired their many manifestations and issuances, but I didn’t appreciate they were old friends since the 1980s. This session from the summer of 2010 sees them producing many a churning morass of grinding, scraping and vaguely spring-loaded tootling grumblement and moanage, presumably generated from multiple desktops and tables loaded with an array of non-musical devices; the very title, Adhesives And Grout (BROMBRON 18), shows they’re able to poke fun at their DIY and garden-shed approach to improvisation for this release. They also perform a few tracks of concrete poetry, in some cases apparently just plucking found words and phrases out of the local shopping paper and transforming their utter banality into sheer magic, by overlapping the dialogue and through the combination of their distinctive speaking voices: Bohman as plummy as a Christmas duff packed with raisins, Al Margolis withering everything in sight with his acidic sardonic whine. Lads, Bob Cobbing is smiling down at you from his corner of Heaven where he’s just opened an infinite version of Better Books. And just look at those track titles – ‘Rhubarbian Ruminations’ is the most perfect two-word description of the whole album, redolent of a secret allotment or orchard where the very fruits and vegetables are conducive to metaphysical contemplation. And who wouldn’t want to be a member of their ‘Pudding Club’? Let’s hope this is the start of a new musical genre…Groutrock!

Labyrinthe (BRUIT CLAIR BC05) appears to be the debut release from Emmanuelle Gibello, a Sorbonne graduate from Paris who has done some live performances with electronics and multi-media settings. Her approach to the field recording genre is highly imaginative and these four cuts (two of them quite lengthy and indeed very labyrinthine) will reward many further spins. Subtle and underplayed, her sources are I suspect not intended to be decoded or identified, so much as used as triggers for personal resonances and internal fictions; she admits to being inspired by literature and science fiction. It’s about time someone started putting field recordings to some compositional use, instead of inviting us to simply contemplate the immersive joys of nature for a change. Extremely “sensible”, in the French meaning of that word, these compositions have many hidden corner and still waters running deep…if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors. Check back in a few years and we may be looking at a worthy successor to Lionel Marchetti. And if you buy one of these 300 numbered copies, you’ll have her autograph in your collection. Roll them bones!

September 8, 2011

Hunched and Needy

From June this year, we find the Brighton-based label Slightly Off Kilter releasing these poetry records. All four of these poetry releases are distinctive and truly experimental items, evidence of vital and exciting talents at work; and I should have written this post sooner as two of them are already sold out by now. The mighty Adam Lygo, creator of numerous releases of surreal and apocalyptic guitar noise, unleashes the bats from his spoken-word muse on The Girl With The Leopard in Her Mouth. Open this lavish hand-made package to get to two full-length CDRs of eerie mumblings and murmurings whispered into an echo chamber to the accompaniment of wispy and wraith-like drone music, the lyrical content littered with images of dreams, mirrors, light, and broken pictures of stark alienation and loneliness. The actual verbal content is largely obscured by these processes, yet the emotion and meaning shine through unmistakeably. These compelling and relentless streams of information summon up the requisite dream-state in short order. Recommended listening to all wide-eyed insomniacs and fans of Bill Nelson records who want to take their personal dream-quest to a higher level! Notice…all texts are supplied on little folded inserts and there are numerous artwork panels to further induce hallucinatory states. Line by line, pulse by pulse, Lygo is becoming the embodiment of the French poets in the film Orphée.

On Engruntled (SOK038), Daniel Spicer recites six separate poems over a single 34 minute track, often overdubbing himself, and adds some low-key non-determinate noises as backdrops to his voice. Many techniques: punning with synonyms and Joycean jumblings, passages in Latin, basic and earthy “pastoral” imagery, many lapses into Anglo-Saxon cursing, with each unlikely tale enhanced with numerous grotesque and startling images. Spicer is also capable of a non-verbal moaning noise, not unlike the improviser Phil Minton, and adds even more unsettling layers to his bizarre tirades thereby. Plenty of eccentric and black humour to savour too. I’d have liked the CD to be slightly louder and better recorded, but there’s real potential here for Spicer to one day make a spoken-word set as distinctive and unforgettable as The Post-Nearly Man. At his best, he seems to come close to creating private incantations of rough magick. Numerous local talents involved in various capacities on this release, including label boss Paul Morgan, the drone-guitarist Hobo Sonn, and Jason Ward, who adds xylophone and flute. A true oddity!

I sense Paul Morgan has a talent for seeking out and nurturing truly visionary personalities who have been overlooked and remain invisible to most of society. Such a description might fit Martin Preston, who performs numerous poems on Vapour (SOK039) in the space of 24 intense minutes, many of the pieces recorded live at small venues in front of an audience. Certainly the most “artless” of the records on the table today, this is a radical, electrifying document of a unique outsider voice. The centrepiece is ‘Live at the Lift’, nine minutes of ranting on which this uncompromising figure unburdens his soul through seven short vignettes, each one a clear-eyed vision of street life delivered with an unblinking stare; between these tales, and the good-natured but abrasive way he jostles and insults the audience, it becomes clear that Preston is a man who has seen too much of the cruel injustices that beset us all. And he’s suffered his own personal setbacks, dyslexia and Huntingdon’s disease among them. On these live cuts, Preston will wrench you out of your comfort zone in seconds with his strident and insistent voice; some listeners might prefer the more ambiguous cuts ‘Nostalgia’ and ’9 Hours to Julia’ which at least temper some of the anger with musical backdrops, but the latter is a punky-reggae episode of strident chaos that John Cooper Clarke ought to applaud, and the former (with doomy music by Morgan) is simply a waking nightmare. Small press editions of this man’s poems, and a novel, exist; but you’ll want to initiate yourself with this release, 24 minutes of some of the most painful honesty and rawness committed to disk.

Poetry and jet-black gothic darkness combine on Blood Blister (SOK036), a project where the poems of Anthony Murphy are enhanced with the music of Euphonious Murmur Blend on a short three-inch disc, and by Adam Lygo on the longer full-length CD. Murphy’s poetry is quite different to all of the above; not especially confrontational, but his voice sounds resigned to the wearisome futilities of everyday existence, whose tedia the author details with minute attention to detail bordering on the maniacal. There is a matter-of-fact clarity to his words, and his delivery, that makes a nice contrast to the Lygo disc for example, where the strategy has been to obscure as much content as possible. It should take about just ten minutes of experiencing the dour and rain-sodden delivery of Murphy before you’ll be sucked bodily into his age-worn and care-lined world, and soon every tree will appear gnarled, all books worm-eaten, every apple in the bowl rotting away. As to the musical content, Lygo’s contributions are abstract but listenable electronic noise charged up with plenty of echo chamber. Euphonious Murmur Blend by contrast produces long tracts of nerve-shredding electronic synth and guitar noise, not especially high in volume but certainly designed to induce tension and hate. This tactic brings out the bitter and vengeful side of Murphy, whose poems for this disc are bilious stories of frustration and denial, just dripping with sarcasm, barbed sentiment, and an undercurrent of sheer menace. His every word carries a frown.