American player Keir Neuringer is the sax player behind Dromedaries, and though I never heard him before he also played in Irreversible Entanglements, a group who are so free they don’t just play free jazz – they’re “liberation-oriented”. I liked the use of electronics (played by the drummer Julius Masri) on ‘A Brass Planet’, which shows how the trio don’t have to go full-on energy jazz every minute of the day and have a nice line in “open” structures, highly suitable for this mode of cosmic voyage music. There’s also a splendid where-are-we-now vibe emerging from the chaotic strands of ‘Avant Jawn’ – Keir Neuringer is also a synth player and while he’s no match for Sun Ra on Oblique Parallax, his music somehow intrigues me more when he lays down his overpowering sax.

Alexoteric, also of Philadelphia (where this was recorded), is a very advanced practitioner of “Afrotopian tension” (selon Glyphhaus) and manifests his visions in comic books, collage zines, and art-punk bands, pushing beyond the expected tropes of “cyberpunk”. I found his breathless expositions exhausting at first, but I gotta admit the rush of imagery is exhilarating, and he gets more reflective towards the end of the record, and does much to convey the crags and crevices of a twisted unknowable universe, riven with doubts and anguish. He doesn’t despair of the potential of the human race to rebuild society, but neither should we expect a joyous celebration of humanity, such as June Tyson might have delivered. Vinyl LP release for this unusual item. (19/12/2024)

The tension on the recording of Lone Wolf Runner is palpable. You can imagine what it must have been like to see the original performance piece, which took place at SMK (the National Gallery of Denmark) in Aug-Nov 2023. Jessie Kleemann was born in Greenland, and though she’s been living in Denmark for the last 20 years, she’s never lost sight of her artistic and societal mission, which could be summarised as addressing “the abuse of nature by modern humanity, the loss of indigenous culture, and the struggle for a descendant of the Greenlandic Inuit to find a new identity in a modern, globalised present.” It’s embedded in her poetry, her videos, and her performance art pieces; ‘Orsoq’, from 2023, saw her covering her body in red ochre paint and wrapping herself in a plastic bag. The word ‘orsoq’ may translate as seal blubber, but as a substance it has symbolic meanings for the creator, and she uses it as part her ongoing “postcolonial critique”; blubber can be both something repulsive and also used as a trading commodity, and she also likes the idea of expressing corporeal decay in her performances. (Right there we have quite a few consonances with Stuart Brisley and Joseph Beuys.) Even the poetry on this LP is, I think, written and spoken in an Inuit language; one of them refers to ‘Seals singing their jaws off’, in a harrowing image – one of many moments on the set where the fragility of animal and human life, and indeed all of nature, is brought into sharp relief. Her audible contributions include poetry, vocal sounds, field recordings – and perhaps some seconds where the physical demands of the performance result in shortness of breath – and though minimal and brief, the presence of this formidable creator hangs over the entire LP.

The Copenhagen composer Gemmer has recently moved into piano-based improvisations, still reserving the right to inject his music with abstracted art-techno beats, and documentary recordings torn from any suitable source, including foley sound effects. One senses he’s right at home in this sort of milieu, having already collaborated with actors, story-tellers and poets assisting with their interpretations of various biblical and epic themes. A luxurious vinyl LP presentation in a gatefold cover for this release, supported by the SMK; I don’t see a credit for the cover art, but it reminds you that blood is never far away on this strange mix of ritual, baptism, animal magic, bones, snow, and ice. From 15 October 2024.

Album has a dedicated website

Today’s item Broken Allures (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR339CD) follows their trusted pathway – all performances, voices and instruments subjected to twisted studio treatments and processes that induce maximal madness and distort all rebakes and rope ladders into nightmarish dimensions, in as much time as it takes a French chef to whip up a pink macaron inside a smoked trout. Fenech on guitars, bass, drums, sequencers…Epplay filling in on synths, samples, and diabolical tape recordings, sound effects and field recording captures…label is correct to hint at some form of “musique concrète” approach in the final mix, but even this clue doesn’t convey the unhinged genius found in these splicing touchettes, where spontaneity and crazed imaginative skills are privileged above the mode of academic pondering and deliberation of the IRCAM school. As such, Berrocal remains true to what I regard as his post-punk hero influences that have helped mould his jazz improvisations since the 1980s – and just check out that recent Catalogue record if you’re inclined to doubt this – and he still embodies the vocal loopery and zaned-out terrorthons that Stapleton evidently admired (and could never imitate successfully, try as he may).

Speaking of “that period” from English underground music, Cosey Fanni Tutti (of all people) is also here, adding chilling lyrics sung in equally unsettling voice on two tracks, and electric guitar on a third – ‘Viva La Hacienda’, as it happens, one of the stand-outs on the whole set and we’d like to think a nod in direction of Manchester and Joy Division. Speaking of Public Image Limited – which we weren’t exactly – Jah Wobble also surfaces from 20 fathoms to add his bass blorrks to the title track, and indeed it might be that element that so cheerfully drives this strong piece down its death-disco inflected dubby pathway back to the rocky beach. With Berrocal’s echoplexed trumpet writhing on top like three deep-sea fish about to be fried in the pan, we’ve got a harshoid-horror studio mash that Martin Rushent would only have dreamed about, and even the ghost of Teo Macero raises one toenail from his perch in paradise. To lock the case up tight, the opening track was inspired by ‘Warszawa’ by Bowie and Eno, and on ‘Coiffeur Pour Vince (Tu Sais La Mort)’ we have, wouldn’t it be fair to say, a deliberate throwback to Berrocal’s immortal ‘Rock’n’Roll Station’ from 1976, that surreal re-imagining of early American rock and roll – which this time around throws in an additional verbal salute to Johnny Burnette.

As with previous outings by the trio, the music seems (to me) to be taking place in near-darkness, and the poetic surrealist sound-poetry of this great man Berrocal both confuses and illuminates the mind like a green candle. Recommended! (10/10/2024)

Pernice composed this work for a stage play, a contemporary version spoken in French, of the Sophocles tragedy staged by Emma Gustafsson and Laurent Hatat; what we have today isn’t a “soundtrack” to the play exactly, but rather an assemblage of all the music he composed for the production – hence the subtitle “Complete Sessions”. Six actors from Antigone are also credited on the CD, although we don’t hear much from their declaiming voices on the disc apart from a brief exposition on ‘Stasimon 1’; they are also represented by the rather washed-out ghostly images printed on the digipak. The 20 tracks indicate how closely Pernice adhered to the story and structure of the play; they read like episode titles. Interestingly, I see the original tragedy (with which I am not familiar) touches on themes of citizenship and obedience, and how society’s constraints conflict with the individual’s sense of “self”, along with the expected subtexts about families, conflicts, and familial duties (some say that all Greek tragedy is really about the family).

The response of Laurent Pernice to all this textual richness has been to create rather solemn, minimal, and poised music; some of it quite classical in its harmonic approach; all of it conveying deep melancholy and a sense of futility. There’s isn’t a great deal of departure from the central sadness underpinning everything, although the Nyman-like structure of ‘La Lutte’ goes some way to enliven the mood. A bit of me was half-expecting simple “atmospheric” tones to act as a backdrop for the actors, but no – each piece, no matter how short (some are delicate miniatures lasting for just over one minute), has been thought-through in detail, never drifting away into the land of wisps and ghosts, nor filling space with unnecessary padding. We’re intrigued by Pernice ever since we learned of his association with Palo Alto, a French combo seemingly determined to keep the Zeuhl flame burning and extend their complex music into sci-fi and philosophical areas; we enjoyed their album Difference and Repetition: A Musical Evocation of Gilles Deleuze from 2021.

With this record and the Martin Küchen / Angles Kalypso jazz opera, and to some extent the recent jazz LP Medea by Star Splitter, perhaps we’re seeing an emerging rediscovery of the enduring power of Greek tragedy. (22/04/2024)

Elio Martusciello
Esercizi Per Esistere
DISSIPATIO diss019 CD
Here the guitarist offers twelve tracks directly inspired by the poems of Nazim Comunale, even including a booklet of these texts with which we can measure his success, said poems also illustrated by the drawings and collages of Peter Bartlett. Martusciello is going to inordinate lengths to disguise his guitar on these cuts; computers may have been used. It could be that the actual phrases he’s playing are quite simple, but are technically inflated to suggest a certain grandeur by the use of echo, reverb, looping, and delay. For me it has the unfortunate effect of just deferring the payoff; any catharsis or emotional release is simply being pushed away or swept under the carpet of sentiment. While not quite as boneless as Antonio Tonietti’s filleted symphonies above, Elio Martusciello runs a close second in the general competition to remove muscle tone and sinew from the musical corpus. If some sort of sympathetic response is being elicited, it’s very hard to engage with it. Even so, this fellow made a tribute record to the music of Giacinto Scelsi in 2010, so he can’t be all bad. (12/02/2024)

I think the source for most of the work here is a book called The Earth Will Come To Laugh And To Feast, published a few years ago in New York, to showcase Tinti’s texts with photo-images by Ballen; four such Ballen images reappear here on the panels of the digipak, black-and-white art photos showing a certain preoccupation with human limbs, especially feet and toes, gazing at them relentlessly. If there’s an underlying theme to this curious release, it might come from Tinti’s conceptual vision, reaching deep into ancient history, and his speculative notions about the nature of early man, in regard to rituals, rites, and ceremonies. The more blood sacrifice and animal bones involved the better; Tinti strives to re-imagine himself back into the space of what he calls a “primordial cave”, hoping to evince sensations of terror and the unknown; in all our years of so-called civilisation, he might suggest, mankind has done little more than re-enact these cultish practices, with signs daubed on the walls and “simulacra” of human bodies

The connection with Roger Ballen’s stark, uncompromising images seems fairly clear; Massimo Pupillo, lui, can’t do much more than provide unsettling dark-ambient sounds and corrupted Kosmische keyboards to advance these themes, but he does have a stab at creating a soundtrack for Ill Wind, apparently a 1972 movie created by the New York-born Roger Ballen. In all, the set can be reckoned as a successful meeting of minds and confluence of ideas; while I found the overall tone a little solemn and self-important at first, thankfully it never tips over into outright hysteria. Those involved adopt a stoic attitude to the ancient horrors they have glimpsed, each interpreting them by their own lights and expressing them in their own manner. (02/01/2024)

The string section is provided by Mari Sawada (violin) and Sophie Notte (cello); they do it with the precision of the grim reaper, if that supernatural entity were equipped with a razor-thin scythe that could shave the skin off an earwig. Haven’t heard either of them before in any context, although Notte is a member of the German Youth Orchestra and Sawada plays in Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop. Actually now I rescind earlier opinion above as the album gets much better when Burelli does multiple part harmony, and here somehow it’s easier to perceive how steady her voice is, hitting the notes with unwavering accuracy. Maybe this is why the string players were selected too. If they had crossbows, not a single bolt would miss. They ought to come hunting for bad critics, like me. A lot of weight in their work. They emulate statues, cast in classical poses, lit by the moon.

Andrea Burelli released this one herself and has absorbed influences from classical music and non-Western sources, including Turkish, Indian, and eastern European folk. As to that you can kind-of make out the Voix-Bulgares thing on certain tracks…double-tracked Burelli vox in high-range mode creating astringent tastes in your brain. Oh, and maybe touches of modern electronica feed in here too, ultra-minimal synths and beats, but used as sparingly as anything else on this economical set. Moody black-and-white art photos on the sleeve may have led me into error as perceiving this album as twee or sentimental, whereas now I perceive a steely core of inner strength in these brief, tautly-wound tunes. (24/10/2023)

Finding more expressive playing on Now Is Forever (ZAREK 21/22), a sprawling two-disc set which Ignaz Schick made with Douglas R. Ewart, a distinguished American player who joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) when he moved to the US from Kingston Jamaica in 1963. Thereafter he appeared on record with a number of luminaries of free jazz in the 1970s and beyond – including Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, and Leo Smith. The European Schick regards his personal purchase of the 1979 album Jila-Save! Mon.-The Imaginary Suite as one of many epiphanies, and following an online correspondence the duo managed to work together and record these sessions in Minneapolis in 2017.

The German player doesn’t disguise his child-like enthusiasm at working with one of his heroes, but also proposes that we perceive the results as a blend of European EAI free-improv with the earlier Afro-American traditions of free jazz. Schick stays pretty much on the electronic side of the stage with his turntables, sampler, looper/pitch shifter, live-sampling, and the exotic-sounding Indonesian oscillator box, while Ewart blows various saxophones and bamboo flutes, as well as reciting lugubrious poems, which may contain some kind of “warning” to the modern world in among its sinister mutterings, odd metaphors, and barely-subdued anger. This has led Schick to dub this release “A narration and cultural/socio-ecological critique of our time that has … not lost any of its relevance and urgency.” There’s a lot honesty and emotion in Ewart’s playing, and his words, but somehow not a great deal of force behind it, as though his energy were being dissipated in these rather lengthy, languorous workouts. (OCT 2023)

I see Jenny Pickett and Julien Ottavi are here, label managers and both fine noisers and experimental sound-art politico agitational types, sometimes exploring new technology and subverting the internet, but here on these Nantes sessions recorded in 2022, they’re blasting out some fine boulders on bass and guitar, joined by Benjamin Bourdel, Jean Grimault, Francesco Petteta, Philippe Simon, Anthony Taillard and Gabriel Vogel in an unholy old-fashioned assault in the Hemingway bullfighter style. Two drummers…for one thing it’s great to savour a dose of thumping and battering in the remorseless Hawkwind mode, instead of all these droning-guitar types who want to emulate Sunn O))).

Rhys Trimble is the secret weapon on this album, though. I find he’s an avant-garde Welsh poet (and educator, and visual artist, and all-round good guy outsider) who grew up in Pontypool after being born in Zambia, has a first degree in biochemistry and been published in academic journals of poetry writing, and has concentrated on writing and reciting his poems, be they in Welsh or English tongue (he himself is fluent in both languages). Those intrigued (including me) to learn more might want to seek out his work with Lolfa Binc, an improvising punk noise band. Plus he has an automated word-scrambling program on his website (every writer their own Burroughs) and his Wikipedia photo depicts a bearded, unkempt wild-man with a wooden stave. Trimble isn’t detectable on every second of this record, and both Ottavi and Bourdel are also adding their very distinct vocal contributions (sometimes aided by loops and echo), but when our Welsh genius opes his lips and roars, he comes within an ace of reincarnating the spirit of a pagan druid, and you’d need extendable dog tongs such as those used in St Beuno’s Church Clynnog Fawr to evict this barking maniac from the pulpit.

Fans of the very extreme end of the Mark E. Smith / Fall catalogue will want to check this out instantly. In fine, an irresistible mix of unhinged sounds and dementia in fine tornado form. Co-presented by AP0-33 and Le Filtre À Sons. From 19 June 2023.

ORD’s first album is part improvisation, part singer-songwriter, part composition for voice, part repurposing of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems and part chamber jazz odyssey. I’m not used to finding such a unique proposition on my desk, but I wholeheartedly welcome the uncommon, mostly, so here goes. ORD is a quintet of Karin Johanssen on piano, prepared piano, composition and arrangements, Jenny Willén; vocals / voice, trombonist Niclas Rydh, Gunnel Samuelsson on bass clarinet and tenor saxophone, and Hasse Westling on double bass. “Hemligheter på vägen” is a collection of eerie songs and soundworlds. The title translates as “Secrets Of The Road”. Hmm. The girl looking out at us from the cover is the ten-year-old Karin Johanssen. I’m not sure what the significance of this is. Nice anorak though. The illustrator and artist Jenny Svenberg Bunnel provides the following insight in the accompanying press release: “…we carry all our different ages and memories with us, they walk next to us each day, but there are gaps between moments of recognition…”

Let’s proceed. The material has intriguing spoken word sections, and if pushed I would rather use the word “drifting” rather than “ambient” to describe the pleasant ensemble extemporisations mixed in between some (to me) rather unchallenging chamber jazz. The first piece, “April och tystnad” has its text taken from Memories Look At Me by Tomas Tranströmer. This is true also of another five of the pieces. The sleevenotes thank to Monica Tranströmer. Vocalist Jenny Willén contributes the text to “Som att du sovit lange”. There is a vague air of Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way in mood on “Vintern former” at least that is what the muted trumpet suggests to me. There is some nice free playing on “Tradet och skyn” although I have to say I’m a little suspicious of “composers” who direct group improvisation for a section of material and then take all the credit, but I’m not sure that’s entirely the case here. The words on “Just A Second From Now” are written by Karin Johanssen and sung in English. Jazz balladry, if you like that sort of thing – but wait! The piece devolves into pretty piano notes and then the musicians are free, free, free… Stop, the vocals are back: “just a second from now a thousand years anyhow…” okay. Sorry, I’m mentally filing this under “dinner party music” now.

So, a fairly lightweight item, by no means without some good qualities but I’m pretty lukewarm about this item, on the other hand, you may like it. Your mileage may vary, as they say. Karin Johansson can also be heard in her duo with Lisen Rylander Löve; in Quagmire with Nina de Heney and Henrik Wartel; in the duo with Finn Loxbo; Jonny Wartel 4; and in many other collaborations.