Tagged: Poland

009

Szalonek’s Medusa


Some men there are love not a gaping pig…and those who dislike the high-pitched tones of the flute and piccolo probably won’t get too far with the austere work of avant-garde composer Witold Szalonek. There’s three pieces on Medusa (BOLT RECORDS BR 1010), their titles all themed on episodes in the life of that Greek mythical being what with the snakes in the hair and the gaze that turns men to stone, and all. To render the music the flautists Natalie Becker, Johanna Daske and Olaf Futyma (known collectively as the Trio Soli Sono) create a delirious chorus of peeps, overblown screams and dream-like drones, generating an almost syrupy sound together, imbuing the harsh and strange music with warmth, depth and the complexities of humanity you’d never have thought the Medusa would embody in any way. This may just be a side effect of the music, but to me it feels like the most compassionate portrait of a mythical “monster” released on record this side of Akira Ifukube’s music for Godzilla. You may start out hating the Medusa, but spin this CD and 30 minutes later you’ll be asking for her phone number and seeing if she’s busy next Saturday.

Szalonek was a pioneer of an obscure branch of 20th-century musical study called “sonorism”, which is to do with integrating “pure sound” into a formal, organised structure. He wrote and published on the subject, and may have been its primary (or only) exponent. Not unrelated to this aim, I suppose, would be his preoccupation with “combined sounds” and their effects, particularly in relation to wind instruments; he catalogued the combinations he found in meticulous manner, and explored the techniques of musical instruments in general. I know post-1960 improvisers have all been working on extending their techniques like billy-ho, but how many composers have taken the trouble to make any use of that? Very few I expect, and many will tend to settle for conventional dynamics (and conventional notation) to express their ideas, trusting on the skills of the players in the orchestra. Monika Pasiecznik details these aspects in her sleeve notes to this release, the text printed in English and Polish, and she gives short shrift to the more “famous” Polish composers Górecki and Penderecki, who she seems to be implying were about “oversimplification” and a sentimental return to past romantic forms, as licensed by the prevailing anything-goes tenets of post-modernism. That’s fighting talk, especially to listeners like myself who have built private shrines to Penderecki in their listening parlour, but the point is well-meant; the implied question being, why isn’t Szalonek’s work better known?

Pasiecznik’s notes also confirm a story-telling dimension to these three Medusa episodes, and there is certainly a lot of compacted musical “information” carved into every intense and precise stave of woodwind-shriekery here. So for me, a picture is beginning to emerge of Szalonek as a unique composer dedicated to total originality in modernism, but also one who wasn’t about to neglect the hard graft of compositional effort, yet also wanted to find a way to ensure he didn’t alienate listeners. If you’ve read this far two weeks ago and are now spinning this disc which you purchased using internet methods, you may be scratching your head as to why this subtle, understated and near-static music isn’t passing on the hoped-for life-changing moments which you perceive I might be promising. Ahh, give it time, gentle listener, and you’ll be as entranced as I know you are by the later piano and violin suites of Morton Feldman. Szalonek almost seems to inhabit a similar, vaguely parallel soundworld to good old cheeseburger-loving Morty. It’s got the same qualities of hermeticism, of repeated (vaguely) patterns, and of the sort of exquisite compression reminiscent of a detailed tapestry. This is another terrific item on the Bôlt label, of which we noted three items on the Populista series here. This one seems to be part of an informal series called Polish Oldschool.

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Automatic / Detours

Beuys Keep Swinging

A very fine avant electro-pop oddity from Poland’s Audio Tong label. Go-Go Beuys Band (AUDIO TONG ATCD17.2011) rescues 1985 studio recordings put together by the composers Krzysztof Knittel and Marek Choloniewski, working with their guitars, synths and beatboxes at the Electroacoustic Music Studio in Krakow. That’s odd enough already for me – 1980s pop music being produced at an experimental studio by modernist composers. They were joined by the saxophonist Marek Nedzinski and the singer Olga Szwajgier, plus Janusz Dziubak (a 1980s free improviser who made the LP Tytul Plyty in 1984) contributing the texts for a couple of tracks. By this collaborative effort, they arrived at their own twisted brand of synth-pop music with weird vocals, solid drum machine rhythms and stark melodies picked out on Roland and Yamaha synths, coming close to the same sort of sweetly-rendered dementia as Ptôse, The Residents, or Cabaret Voltaire (although other writers also make comparisons with Throbbing Gristle, Faust and Kraftwerk).

This CD consists of two separate suites, Automatic Pilot and Go-Go Beuys Band, both of them excellent and bizarrely entertaining warped pop music, although Automatic Pilot scores slightly higher for me with its adherence to brevity, its crisp three-minute pop tunes and winning off-kilter melodies. Then again the second set has more prog-like variety in its instrumentals, there are more and lengthier saxophone solos, and the vocals are slightly more declamatory and sonorous, as if reciting an Eastern European morality tale or political diatribe rather than spewing the usual pop-song fare. The singing voices throughout are one of the oddest elements; where the keyboards are relatively familiar, the unusual vocal intonations of Knittel, Choloniewski and their friends take us directly into Eastern European art-rock territory. Don’t be misled by the apparently conventional song titles like ‘China Wedding’, ‘Heavy-Love’ or ‘Rock-Body’; this is 1980s pop music rethought as a surreal pastiche of elements, including both high-art modernism and moments of supreme kitsch. How many other bands would have the sheer audacity to conflate the work of severe conceptualist Joseph Beuys with disposable pop music in their name?

The operation seems to have a semi-temporary studio affair for the most part, although we are informed the two main protagonists did perform some concerts in Poland, Austria and Germany in 1986; and they may or may not have been responsible for other lost, unknown, untraceable and non-existent band projects called Island Of Love and Non-Existed Monastery Group in 1987. On this matter, the elliptical sleeve notes remain obscure, and maybe even the enclosed photographs are part of a conspiracy of misinformation. Nonetheless, the music here is excellent – melodic, oddball, parodic, slightly dark, and beautifully realised. Just imagine what would have happened if this team had been chosen to produce a single for Tears For Fears, Wham or Madonna. The results might not have been world-wide smash hit records, but they would have been distinctive and intellectually satisfying, pop history would have taken a different turn, and we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today. Available in an outsize card cover about the size of a seven-inch single, or can be downloaded in a digital manner for 7 Euros.

Divertimentos

Speaking of avant-garde composers producing pop music, when I heard the 2007 CD issue of Out Of The Blue by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, I waxed lyrical about what might have happened if this lovely US composer had gotten the chance to produce Joni Mitchell or Steely Dan in the 1970s. When you hear the immaculate songs on that CD, you’ll understand what I was blathering about. Now here comes Detours (UNSEEN WORLDS UW07) from the same label, released January this year. No songs this time, it’s all solo piano music by this Mills College maestro, and apparently the first time he’s released an album of new piano works since 2003. However, it is likewise immaculate music which you should all welcome into your homes. There’s the 12-minute suite ’13 Detours’, short compositions that feel like an update on Mussorgsky’s ‘Promenade’ as Tyranny ups the ante and leads us into philosophical diversions of thought, using a form of mental gymnastics learned from the San Francisco composer and film-maker Phil Perkins. It’s music for taking a walk outside your own mind. This turns out to be an underpinning theme for the album, proposing strategies for forms of mental liberation. Even the front cover depicts a “helping hand”.

On the long piece ‘George Fox Searches’, Tyranny uses the sleeve notes to tell the remarkable history of the 17th-century Quaker George Fox, who fled religious intolerance in England to settle in America where his enlightened visions about tolerance, peace and compassion found a more receptive audience. A self-declared agnostic, Tyranny has nonetheless attended Quaker meetings in his time and drawn inspiration from the silence of their prayer meetings, and the spontaneous utterances which might occasionally reveal deep truths; these experiences he effectively recreates in real time on this gorgeous 20-minute piano work, and with characteristic understated genius he also manages to layer in subtle references to the life of Fox, creating music that matches well with Fox’s psychological condition as he undertook his spiritual journey with uncertain steps. Warmth, sympathy, honesty; all good things I associate with this musician.

‘She Wore Red Shoes’ was composed in 2004 as a dance piece for Stefa Zawerucha. In that symbolic work, she enacts a dilemma about life choices no less crucial than those faced by George Fox; the dilemma is represented by a large mandala drawn on the dance floor, sliced into portions that represent past and present influences on her existence. Tyranny’s sprightly music here, a sort of syncopated foxtrot, suggests the protagonist faces her dilemma with calm unwavering dignity, and at the end she “abandons her former life” without regret.

The five-minute ‘Intuition’ piece, though the shortest on the album, is much harder to sum up. In six minutes the uncertain and ambiguous piano and tape music seems to drift freely across an abstract realm of thought where almost anything is possible. This seems appropriate for a work where the composer is trying to digest and sum up various conflicting “cosmological views” of existence, in the end shrugging his shoulders and admitting “I haven’t got a clue”. But he goes on to state he intends to “re-imagine the nature and role of music”, an ambitious undertaking which is performed in a quiet and modest fashion, and like the ’13 Detours’ piece it passes on something useful about the process of thinking intuitively. A very satisfying and approachable record of modern music, rich with ideas and humanity and refreshingly free from any form of arrogance, pretentiousness or impenetrable mysticism. Also available as a limited edition LP.

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Staunchly into the past she stomps


At end of January we received the new CDR from Hearts Of Palm, the beyond-underground team of noise-improvisers based in Cincinnati. ballglovemask (NO NUMBER) exists in a run of just 50 copies and was recorded by the foursome of Chamberlin, Hancock, Renschier and Wilson at a studio in 2009. Outdoing even their own past efforts in terms of opacity and obscurity, these 30 minutes behind the veil represent some of the most remarkable examples of nebulous, lichen-encrusted miasma to have been unleashed to us in the name of home-made kosmische-inspired avant-improv. Impossible to describe much that’s tangible about this insane, layered, cryptical and mystic groaning noise with its eerie non-sounds and its unpredictable percussive bursts; just allow it to envelop you like the shroud of a Saint from above. Hearts Of Palm have now been active for 14 years and as far as I know still remain “unsigned”, not that it would make very much difference if they were otherwise. I think best just to leave them be and let them proceed with their self-appointed tasks and scoop up whatever holy effluvia you can locate with your beady, ring-like fingers. “The group…hopes to record and release several projects this year”, they write in their press. If that boast be true, then keep a watchful orb trained on that myspace page and maintain the PayPal account at a steady level, is my advice.

Another curious item is My Favorite Tics (Z6 RECORDS Z6333666) by The Static Tics, sent to me from the Worm Shop in the Netherlands (an emporium that has been quite supportive of The Sound Projector Music Magazine). The madcap experimenters to credit here are Henk Bakker and Lukas Simonis, both making sport wildly and amusingly with their electronic set-ups, guitar, clarinet, samples, and the treated recordings of voices by visiting guests and friends who may have yapped knowingly or otherwise into concealed microphones. These 19 tracks are mostly gorgeous little fragmented explosions of sweet aural lollipops, most of them pop-song record in length, and all of them cheerfully subvert all our expectations about electro-acoustic music, sampling, and electronic music. The Tic-mongers have been active in their time (at least ten years) producing odd radio plays and audio magazine articles, and I think this CD compiles some of their very first forays into these areas, but is also “surrounded by material from later periods”. It’s massively enjoyable, delirious and puzzling chaos which I heartily recommend, especially to listeners who enjoy the great Vernon & Burns.

From Madrid, we got a copy of Early Summer (CON-V CNVCD 002) by the contemporary French-American composer Wade Matthews, on which he plays back a number of local field recordings made in that part of the world, processing and relaying them through his twin-laptop set-up over loudspeakers; I think what we hear is the document of a live performance of him doing this, hence the subtitle “improvised sound collages”. Among his concerns is an interesting in creating collisions, such as inserting small local sounds inside non-matching aural environments. He intends this as an aesthetic version of what everyone nowadays experiences when they play music through their earphones on a bus, unwittingly or otherwise combining string quartet music with the sounds of a bus motor and chatty passengers. He also wants to “play beyond or against memory”, by which he means he wants to explore and discover new combinations and play them back, whether or not they’re guaranteed to work. It’s all part of working against what you’re familiar with, which is good advice for any artist; but also shows Matthews’ commitment to spontaneity, excitement, genuine experimentation, risk-taking. All the above ambitions do show up in the work, but a brief skim has convinced me you need to be playing close attention to catch the multiple timbral inflections in this subtle and precise work. Very good.

Intense durational electronic minimalism on Aurora (PPLCD001) by Kamil Kowalczyk, the first release on his own label Prototyp Produktions. This young Polish-born composer carried out his first sound experiments in the mid-1990s, quite innocently experimenting with tape and cheap keyboards and creating his own brand of noise and drone music, unaware of anyone else’s work at home or abroad. After a few years releasing computer-based music on a netlabel, this is his first piece of tangible product. While Aurora may not be massively inventive music within the context of a genre that already has a fair abundance of exemplars, I have a lot of time for the simplicity and directness of Kowalczyk’s music, its very clean and “pure” delivery, the simple but effective use of high tones and low tones, the unhurried way it sets about advancing its basic structural forms, and the way it sort of envelops the whole body in sub-zero temperatures. It’s like a vast blanket of wool that chills your inner fibre instead of warming you up. If Kowalczyk’s intention on these two long cuts is, as cover art suggest, to send us slowly into the centre of a spiral-formed nebula in blackest deep space, he comes close to delivering on that particular KPI. Keep this alongside your Eleh CDs and albums, and check back in a few months to see which one is winning.

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Penderecki and a bunch of other contemporary Polish music (TSP radio show 27/01/06)

  1. Zenial, ‘hippi’
    From Hi-pi, POLAND SIMPLE LOGIC RECORDS SIMLOG 008 CDR (2003)
  2. Robotobibok, ’100000 lat gwarancji’
    From Nawyki przyrody, POLAND OBUH V25 / VYTORNIA V01 LP (2005)
  3. Stop, ‘cd’ (fade)
    From Paindeck, POLAND SIMPLE LOGIC RECORDS SIMLOG 005 CDR
  4. Magic Carpathians Project, ‘Amp.Ass’
    From Euscorpius Carpathicus, POLAND OBUH V22 LP (2003)
  5. Czeslaw Niemen, ‘The Milky Way’
    From Katharsis, POLAND MUZA SX 1262 LP (197?)
  6. Stop, ‘ef’
    From Paindeck, op cit.
  7. Robotobibok, ‘Skipping C’
    From Nawyki przyrody, op cit.
  8. Czeslaw Niemen, ‘From a Letter to M.’
    From Katharsis, op cit.
  9. Krzysztof Penderecki, side A of The Manuscript found in Saragossa (1963)
    POLAND OBUH V24 LP (2005)
  10. Ultra Milkmaids / Telepherique / Inox Kapell, ‘sehn.2′
    From nan tikum remixes, POLAND IGNIS PROJEKT D1 012 CD (2002)
  11. Jerzy Milian, ‘Salam-Talam’
    From Free Conversation with Myself, POLAND OBUH V27 LP (2005)
  12. Spear, ‘N:O:T:H:I:N:K’
    From Sapphire Flower, POLAND IGNIS PROJEKT D1 010 CD (2001)
  13. Laterna, ‘Abandoned Lighthouse Song’
    From Laterna, POLAND OBUH V26 LP (2005)
  14. ea, extract from r
    POLAND IGNIS PROJEKT D1 011 CD (2001)
  15. Magic Carpathians Project, ‘Fat Moon’
    From Euscorpius Carpathicus, op cit.
  16. Stop, ‘epo’ (fade)
    From epo, POLAND SIMPLE LOGIC RECORDS SIMLOG 012 CDR
  17. Chefkirk, ‘(38-40cm)’
    From (38-40cm), POLAND SIMPLE LOGIC RECORDS SIMLOG 007 CDR
  18. Krzysztof Penderecki, extract from Jutrznia, POLAND MUZA SX 889-890 2 x LP (ND)

Simultaneous playback of 10 with 11, 12 with 13, 14 with 15, 16 with 17.

The Sound Projector radio show,
originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM

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