Tagged: stringed instruments

November 26, 2013

Only a Northern Song

Barbara Romen / Kai Fagaschinski / Gunter Schneider
Here Comes The Sun
RUSSIA MIKROTON RECORDINGS MIKROTONCD23 CD (2012)

We all love The Beatles don’t we? (This is a rhetorical question.) And what better ironic, tongue-in-cheek way to commemorate those lovable Liverpudlian longhairs than to record an album of difficult avant-garde music and then name it after one of their most successful tunes. Ho ho, you guys! As a wholly irrelevant aside, I seem to recall that the Beatles’ tune “Here Comes The Sun” was the theme for the BBC’s flagship holiday programme presented by Cliff Michelmore back in the 1970s. And that George Harrison; he’s the man. He was always my favourite.

Anyway. Great to hear hammered dulcimer played by an accomplished technician in an improvised setting that doesn’t simply rely on the irresistible potential of simply scraping all those strings in “new and interesting” ways. Barbara Romen’s name is unfamiliar to me, but on the strength of her involvement in this release I’m going to search out more of her music.

This is a strong collection of six recordings, all very self-contained and unique in their own ways, but still standing together as a unified whole. The first track, “Who’s There?” offers a coherent appraisal of each of the player’s interests over a twelve and a half minute duration that seems to fly by. If I’d heard this piece at a concert rather than on a cd I think I’d feel slightly short-changed perhaps. The languorous way the players pluck at, agitate, trill and breathe on their instruments seems to collapse time, (at least during the first ten minutes – things get slightly more demanding toward the end), with overlapping long tones driving things gently along.

Next out of the six is another longish piece at fourteen minutes; “Feelings Without End”. Here, the dulcimer sounds more like a piano at the very beginning. During one listen, I admit I was beginning to get a little bored until a hail storm hit the house without warning at around 8 minutes and turned it all into something quite magical.

“Dazed And Diffused” – another bloated and hirsute rock n’ roll institution reference; this time Led Zeppelin, you jokers! – is shorter at just under six minutes, and crawls along on its face with a sense of panicked yet resigned dread. “The Last Words” incorporates gorgeously warm long tones. It is followed by the intriguingly titled “At The End Of The Tunnel There Is Always A Lie” which does nothing but perpetuate the feelings of unease instigated by “Dazed And Diffused”. The second half of the disc feels as though (though probably isn’t – I have no real evidence to back this up) the last three tracks are all part of one long improvisation, with ID positions inserted at appropriate points. This adds to the overall cohesive and structured nature of these pieces and enhances the enjoyment of same immensely.

Mikroton should be commended for their impeccable programming of quality titles and Here Comes The Sun is the latest in a line of top-drawer recordings released by this Russian label. Their impressive back catalogue features other great projects involving big names like Jason Kahn, Lee Patterson, John Butcher, Rhodri Davies, Mark Wastell, Tetuzi Akiyama, John Tilbury, Werner Dafeldecker, Keith Rowe and many more. Well worth spending some time investigating this label, I’d say. Let me know how you get on. Edition of 300.

Mikroton

August 21, 2013

Fifteen Strings

Gilbert Isbin & Scott Walton
Recall
USA PFMENTUM CD073 (2012)

The Lute. Not exactly the most popular of acoustic instruments in this day and age. With its roots in moorish culture (its father being the Oud), this twenty-four stringed creature really had its purple patch from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. So…trying to list lutenists of note isn’t a particularly easy task. I guess for many, classical virtuoso Julian Bream would come in at number one. But let’s not forget, it was the second instrument of choice for Jan Akkerman of Dutch progsters Focus. They’re also employed by doublet ‘n’ hose revivalists from seventies Britain: Amazing Blondel (LPs on Bell and Island records) and…didn’t Milord Sting suffer a commercial petit mort a few Christmases ago by unleashing a solo lute album on the unsuspecting public? It seemed then it was only Important Records’ soloist Jozef Van Wissem who could be seen to be taking the lute into century twenty-one. Not so fast. Another entry to the canon comes in the shape of Recall by Gilbert Isbin & Scott Walton. A collection of partly scored and partly improvised pieces that are constructed with the unusual pairing of Isbin’s lute with the thrummed/arco bass propulsion of Scott Walton. This well-mannered clash of left-field jazz, contempo chamber techniques and extensive experience in recording/gigging (collaborations including George Lewis, Wadada Leo Smith, Jaap Blonk, Hugh Hopper a.o.), knit together as a winning example of boundary-blurring creativity. There’s nothing too spikey, too hectoring or overbearing on show; after all, the longest cut comes in at a more than manageable 3.21. “Knomish” for example, is an exercise in medieval mystery themes; a chase amongst the cloisters that concludes in some pretty busy finger-cramping fretwork. “Solace” and the lyrically sublime “Panting” point towards the same kind of inventive fizz and sparkle that was found in Feliu & Joan Albert’s standalone prog album from ’77 (albeit filtered through an ECM-styled ambience). This is all you could hope for in a two-man set-up such as this – totally receptive playing – with ears w-i-d-e open.

pfMENTUM Records, P.O. Box 928073, san Diego, CA 92192, U.S.A.

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.

December 2, 2012

Rapture of the Deep

Australian musicians Thembi Soddell and Anthea Caddy effectively give us a good dose of music from the bughouse on their Host (ROOM 40 RM448) CD. Through clashing atonal cello music with ghastly stabs from a keyboard sampler, they bounce acoustical mayhem off the walls of our padded cell, inviting the blindfolded ear to guess at the shapes that are force-fed through our respective feeding tubes. To increase the sense of apprehension, the musical attack lacks any sense of continuity, and the information is spewed outwards randomly, in horrid fragmentary bursts that don’t fit together. Any patient forced to endure this cruel and unusual treatment will be a candidate for the rubber room in short order. Three long tracks of this mental torture are available on a CD whose almost-blank packaging contains basic geometric shapes to further confuse the mind of the mentally ill as they are unwillingly engaged in vicious parodies of a psycho-geometric test. The second track not only has the best title – ‘A Shut In Place’, highly vivid description of a mental ward – but is also the most ominous music on the set, easily rivalling most sick industrial drones from the 1980s that used to rattle on about depravity and decay like kids playing in a trash-heap. Thankfully this bleak vision lasts only 8 minutes but it feels like an eternity to the prisoner, condemned to writhe in their straitjackets and beat head against bars in futile manner. One of the most effective “bedlam” music records I’ve heard, and I’ve heard ‘em all. From 11 April 2012.

Now for a good ocean-going record. This powerful maritime theme has been used by every musician from Benjamin Britten to Charles Hayward of This Heat, and more recently Isis. To be accurate Leaving Ocean For Land (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL075) is not exclusively set on the brine and is more of a transitory piece, depicting a nameless odyssey of doomed sea-dogs returning to the mainland with their scratchy beards and a poisoned cargo stowed in the hold. The suite is realised in seven parts by two important American doom-noise mystery merchants, Vertonen and At Jennie Richie. The former is Blake Edwards and has drilled inroads into the minds of many with his disturbing electric gougers, often released on his own Crippled Intellect Productions label. The latter act we have never been able to identify for certain, so reclusive is their identity, although their name is taken from the works of Outsider artist Henry Darger. On this joint work, the melded tones of queasy, nauseating electronic sludge are sewn together like eighteen rats in a seaman’s canvas bag. The slow glorp exudes a motion exactly like the swell of the waves on a sluggish Sargasso sea. Lurking in the mix are creepy disguised voices, murmuring unintelligible groans, rescued radio broadcasts from wracks and disasters. The seven parts segue into a compellingly nightmarish trip lasting 46 minutes, passing on the effect of being drawn slowly into an enormous maelstrom, or cataract. The evocative cover photographs depict a grim forgotten hulk ground ashore and encrusted with barnacles. The voyage did not prosper, methinks. From 17 April 2012.

For those who like a suggestive narrative undercurrent to their abstract music, you could do no better than bending an ear to In The Library of Dreams (POGUS PRODUCTIONS POGUS 21064-2) by Frances White. The album showcases six pieces of very delicate music by this award-winning American composer who has also been featured on soundtracks to Gus Van Sant films. The works have been realised by guest musicians, such as the string players David Cerutti and Liuh-Wen Ting, the flautist Ralph Samuelson, and the chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird. Small and mysterious sounds are one of her specialities, as shown on the two electronic pieces ‘Walk Through Resonant Landscape’ 5.1 and 5.2; they are simulated virtual worlds, replete with replicants of birdsong and insects, synthesised in a way that matches Pauline Oliveros and her Alien Bog. ‘The Ocean Inside’, scored for a small ensemble and using conventional acoustic instruments, is more romantic and melodic; but the same degree of attention is paid to tiny details, expressed in percussion and delicate woodwind-piano passages. The title track is the most evocative, both in its Surrealist title and loving execution, and Cerutti’s full-bodied work on the viola da gamba here is an apt soundtrack for wandering around the attic of the mind, a melancholy reminisce about clutching at near-lost memories. No post-modernist she, White is not afraid to imbue her work with meaning. From 17 April 2012.

Argentinian saxophonist Lucio Capece continues his explorations into long-form music on Zero Plus Zero (POTLATCH P112), on which four of the tracks are quite extensive (between 15-20 minutes) investigations into sound-generation. He does it by making unusual electro-acoustic interpolations between him and his instrument, for example the ring modulator, equalizers, cassettes, and applied objects; and ingenious use is made of cardboard tubes as well. That said, woodwinds only actually feature on two tracks here, the remainder being executed with the sruti box or by purely electronic means, such as sine waves or equalizers being fed through cardboard tubes. It’s a rather process-heavy album and sometimes I wonder whether the long durations are justified, but ‘Inside the Outside I’ is a truly heavy magnetized hum that could hypnotise a bucket of sand into thinking it was the Sahara desert, while its sister track ‘Inside the Outside II’ is an implacable throbbing beast, whose electronic pulsations move in and out of phase to suggest a vast reservoir of power. It is well that Capece has all this power at his disposal, but I’d also like to hear him do something a little more constructive with it than simply present this very static music. From 2nd April 2012.

We last heard from the London micro-label Foredoom Productions in May 2011 with four fine cassettes of abstract noise. This odd mini-CD is called -1 (FOREDOOM FD008) and is credited to VA AA LR, in fact the trio of Vasco Alves, Adam Asnan, and Louie Rice. The main event is eleven minutes of extremely puzzling digital noise, often very minimal and fugitive with lots of dropouts and empty segments, prompting the sort of “where-is-it” exasperation I normally experience when chasing the flies out of my bedroom. Gradually it turns into a highly abstracted digital glitch which has been rendered down into a strange pile of rubble. There’s a bonus track which delivers three more minutes in the same rubbly vein. Given how little actual content or variation there is on here, I’m inclined to wonder why it took three people to produce it. I would tend to characterise it as a slightly more refined version of the kind of intense digital mayhem we find on the label Copy For Your Records, only more approachable. The original release has sold out now, but most of it has been published on Soundcloud, along with more of their studio work. Received 10 April 2012.

September 1, 2012

Vox Humana

Imaginative and inspired use of the human voice to make modernist compositions by Leo Kupper on his Digital Voices (POGUS PRODUCTIONS P21060-2). Kupper is from the Belgian school of electro-acoustic composition and founded an important studio there, besides having worked with Henri Pousseur. The voices of Barbara Zanichelli, Anna Maria Kieffer and Nicholas Isherwood are all to the fore in these works, even when electronic music is involved; and while some studio technique is involved to enhance the voices (overdubbing, maybe a little reverb), much of the creative artistry is in their powerful singing, speech, and other vocal gymnastics they perform. Zanichelli turns in a sort of super-mutated birdsong catalogue on ‘Aviformes’, in ways which would make Olivier Messiaen glow with quiet pride. Kieffer sings and murmurs with overdubs of herself on the four parts of ‘Kamana’, along with a rich electro-acoustic backdrop woven by Kupper from a carefully-selected range of sources. ‘Kamana’ seems to be neither speech nor singing – Kieffer’s “vocal expressions” are remarkably fluid and agile. The suites ‘Paroles Sur Lèvres’ and ‘Paroles Sur Langue’ are presented as a connected “diptych”, and in these the electronic music is foregrounded; the human voice elements provide a sort of subliminal church choir effect in among the dramatic electronic and percussion music, creating a near-surreal impression. The intoning basso-profundo cantor on Track 18 is particularly stirring, reminiscent of a Russian Orthodox high priest. No less spiritually moving is ‘Lumière Sans Ombre’, which uses recordings of Slavic liturgical chant and the bass vocals of Isherwood with its burnt sienna-styled electronic music. The vocal-heavy CD is divided in two by the track in the middle, where the composer plays the santur and arrives at a species of warped Persian soundtrack music. The release arrives with a chunky full-colour booklet of notes, images and photos, and Kupper is given ample room to describe his compositional technique and methodology, and while this may give the impression that Digital Voices is a rather process-based work, Kupper’s intentions are in fact to keep the music as “abstract” as possible, and thereby arrive at an international language of spirituality. He is very articulate and passionate about the expressive and emotive possibilities of the human voice, and for those who seek more of it, a related record Ways Of The Voice can be found on this same label.

Dag Rosenqvist is one of the Swedish melancholic types who has provided some memorable moments of wistful sorrow in ambient music form as Jasper TX. Here he is teamed up with Aaron Martin from Topeka, and the duo call themselves From The Mouth Of The Sun on their debut album Woven Tide (EXPERIMEDIA EXPCD021). It’s a mixture of mournful chords and swelling string sections, aligned with somewhat more “atmospheric” sounds to produce pleasing blends. Most of it resembles rather sentimental soundtrack music from a Norwegian arthouse movie I just made up, about a young woman who falls in love with frogs in the snow, but I liked ‘Color Loss’ where the balance between the melodic and the abstract feels just about right.

Errors Of The Human Body (EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 140) really is a soundtrack album, for a German feature film made by Eron Sheean, but this CD and double LP was composed by the Australian Anthony Pateras. He’s got a small chamber ensemble with him (strings, woodwinds and brass) and a percussion group, although a good deal of the music is based around the piano, organ and electronics work of Pateras. I’ve heard one or two of the insane and energetic electronic records he’s made for this label when teamed up with Robin Fox, but this is nothing like those disjunctive roman candles. Sober and restrained, EOTHB is a studied exploration of different tones and textures, with minimalist arrangements that emphasise mood and atmosphere. It’s like generic soundtrack music for an intellectual thriller, only given a vaguely “experimental” slant. Technically flawless on the surface, and the playing and production have an attractive polished sheen. I found some of the pieces a bit shapeless and unfinished, but perhaps the aim is to leave the listener hanging in a state of perplexed expectancy. Each track almost ends with a virtual question mark.

We received a bundle of items on 16 February 2012, including some vinyl, from the publishing wing of the American independent organisation 23five, but for today here’s an excellent CD by Helmut Schäfer called Thought Provoking III (23FIVE 017). This is the first I heard from Schäfer, and it seems this Austrian chap has a reputation for uncompromising and near-brutal electronic music performances, but this release is uncharacteristically quiet. Eerie, understated, but positively rigid with tension and bristling with excitement, this composition is an unusual performance/installation/composition realised partly in performance in a church, and partly at Helmut’s own home. On this 2006 recording (and incidentally only the third time the work has ever been performed), he’s joined by the violinist Elisabeth Gmeiner and the percussionist Will Guthrie. The first thing to note is we shouldn’t really think of it as a musical performance. It’s mostly process sounds created by organ pipes, said pipes being in the personal possession of Helmut Schäfer and laid on the floor of his house while he was “recuperating” them. When he puts hair dryers at the mouths of the pipes and switches them on, they blow air along the pipes and interesting resonant sounds emerge. He adds live electronic processing to this set-up, and the contributions of Gmeiner and Guthrie are likewise captured within that processing field, such that their strings and percussive blows are also drenched in the resonant atmosphere. According to Guthrie, nobody really had to do very much playing at all – the pipes were doing all the work. It is utterly compelling music, with plenty of incident and action (none of your reduced improv here thanks) and shot through with a core of inner blackness that means Thought Provoking III exudes a heavy vibe of brimstone and brooding. Acoustic industrial music, almost. Other recent experimental types come to my mind who have dabbled with the organ pipes or the church organ, and usually come off the worst, but Schäfer is clearly the sort of fearless larger-then-life personality who wrestles crocodiles just for fun, and he masters the pipes in like manner. I mention the crocodile because this particular set-up reminds me of the music of Yoshi Wada, and while Wada is strong on your basic resonant acoustics and gigantic pipes, his uplifting and joyous music is nowhere near as dark as this particular blackened groaner. Next time I’m having a nightmare about vultures gnawing my liver, I’ll know what music to use as a suitable backdrop. Purchase now to bathe your sinful soul in 24 minutes of breathy doom, and as an added bonus you get ‘Averaging Down 20XX’, a piece by that well-known sonic ogre of noise Zbigniew Karkowski which he made using Thought Provoking III as a sound source. A double dose of very unique and powerful art music.

August 25, 2012

A Rate of Knots

So what has good old Oren Ambarchi been up to the last coupla years? We don’t seem to have reviewed any of his records since TSP 18. The more we heard from this seriously talented Australian musician, the more facets appeared…a guitar-player of highly avant-melodic dimensions, he evolved and crafted an incredible personal style and distinctive sound on his instrument which to this day no-one else understands how to achieve. He also continued to amass an enormous collection of extreme Black Metal records during the years when that genre was hot, just because he loved the stuff; and also found time to pursue pop music in his band Sun, tour with Sunn O))), and appear in various doom metal projects such as Gravetemple and the Burial Chamber Trio. Not to mention appearing alongside improvising guitar veteran Keith Rowe as a member of 4G. Talk about your hardest-working man in showbiz…

Now we have his new record Audience Of One (TOUCH TO:83) which we received 17 February 2012. It’s a pretty unclassifiable album. I suppose the first thing to say is that it’s very beautiful music, and that it’s also rather lonely and sad in its fragile beauty. Through slowness, stillness, economy of means and other refining tactics, Oren has composed and directed four pieces of exceptionally poignant contemporary music. Did I forget to mention it’s also a collaborative work? Oren plays guitars, percussion, and keyboards, while important guest players provide strings, horns, piano, and percussion. On one of the most limpid cuts, ‘Passage’, there’s the splendid Eyvind Kang adding viola and piano to the mournful elegiac music. Kang is making good with his “spectral” compositions for Ideologic Organ just now. There’s also the delicate voice of Jessika Kenney on ‘Passage’, barely appearing, and moving through the track like an imperceptible breeze, barely leaving a stain on the tape. crys cole is doing something equally nuanced with her brushes and contact mics, while Oren builds his transparent layers of sound with guitars, Hammond organ and wineglasses (the glass harmonica I assume). After some six minutes of still waters running deep, ‘Passage’ segues into ‘Fractured Mirror’, the eight-minute epic that closes the album and represents another side of the pop and rock music loving Oren…for starters, it’s based on a tune by the Kiss lead guitarist, Ace Frehley ¹. Oren plays virtually everything, apart from some acoustic guitar assist from Natasha Rose, and it’s a tightly-structured instrumental of minimal Krautrock, the guitar sound of Daniel Fichelscher set to an early 1980s drum machine click track, with a murmuring mellotron drone at the bottom. Of all the music here this is the one track that wants to try and rejoice, even in the face of great sadness; it’s a glorious bittersweet melange of emotion.

The album begins however, not on a triumphant note at all, but with the slow sadness of ‘Salt’, a lugubrious song with pained vocals supplied by Paul Duncan from Warm Ghosts, plus a small string section (violin by Elizabeth Welsh, James Rushford on viola and piano) creating a romantic swell that’ll make your heart burst with empathy. Against this, Oren adds his treated guitar to sound like the unobtrusive ambient piano of Brian Eno, and also etches in his tiny details of discordant notes that add just the right degree of ambiguity to this hymn of uncertainty. This is probably what Scott Walker die-hard fans imagine they are hearing on disastrous records like The Drift, but when it comes to creating disturbing easy-listening styled modern pop ballads, Oren shows us how it’s done, almost effortlessly.

The main event of the album though has to be ‘Knots’, and at 33 minutes this track could have made a credible vinyl release on its own terms. The lineup here includes Eyvind Kang again, plus the cellist Janei Leppin, Josiah Boothby on French Horn, the percussionist Joe Talia and the singer Stephen Fandrich, all accompanying Oren with his electric guitars, autoharp, and percussion. The recordings have been made at different times across the world – Australia, Seattle, London, Luz and Milan – and assembled in the studio with the help of Randall Dunn. What results is a tightly integrated and intense piece of micro-tonal groaning, as nebulous as a swarming galaxy. As with all of this album, “understatement” is certainly the keynote of the day, but there is exquisite detail and discipline woven into every strand of this “knotted” composition, and it’s not simply another self-indulgent drone-morass of the sort that blights contemporary music like Dutch elm disease. Without wishing to dive straight into the deep end of the “superlatives” swimming pool at Swiss Cottage, I’d have little problem aligning this ambitious and sustained piece of work alongside recent compositions by Reinhold Friedl or Yannis Kyriakides; though to give credit where it’s due, it seems that most of the arrangement work for this exceptional piece was executed by Eyvind Kang rather than Oren. The press notes highlight the subtle but very propulsive percussion work of Talia, indicating that ‘Knots’ also works as an update on the electric jazz of Miles Davis, the confidence and swagger of Miles’ music restated with all the qualifiers of 21st-century doubt and uncertainty. And besides all the spectral composition undercurrents, there’s a hint of doom metal in the menacing bass growls…a very accomplished record and one that will probably come to be regarded as a significant benchmark in Oren’s oeuvre.

Edited 09/11/2013 to correct gender of crys cole (his > her)

In my book, Oren scores 500 points for even name-checking Kiss, but he goes one better and records a cover version of a song by one of the band’s naffest members! ↩

June 9, 2012

Strangers still

I first came across American violist and violinist Jessica Pavone thanks to her membership of Anthony Braxton’s Septet and 12+1tet. Pavone clearly shares something of Braxton’s questing attitude in the way her music shifts between composition, improvisation and performance. Quite the busy bee, she has a number of different projects on the go including duos and groups with fellow Braxton acolytes Mary Halvorson and Taylor Ho Bynum, a soul group (The Pavones) and a no wave/skronk outfit, Normal Love. The début, self-titled album of her group Army of Strangers (Porter Records PRCD 4052 CD, 2011) is something special though, an album that generates a considerable thrill with its lively rock aesthetic.

There’s a real physicality and presence to these ten shortish instrumental workouts, keeping the listener alert and engaged throughout. It’s also very much a collaborative effort. As composer of the tunes, Pavone is nominally the bandleader, and her viola and violin tumble beautifully through the centres of these songs. But guitarist Pete Fitzpatrick and drummer Harris Eisenstadt are also key to the group’s sound. Fitzpatrick’s clean, ringing guitar lines transform into angsty Neil Young-style riffage, while Pavone saws away with wonderful expressiveness, matching the guitarist note for note. Eisenstadt, meanwhile, anchors the music with his rugged percussion, and there’s sensitive bass work by Jonti Siman as well.

It’s this combination of viola (or violin) and electric guitar in the service of some fairly intense rock music that makes the album so unusual and interesting, in my view. The viola and the violin are hardly standard rock instruments, after all. There was John Cale on the first two Velvet Underground albums, of course; but Cale was basically a drone merchant, offsetting his durational tones against Lou Reed’s twisted dream pop visions. Then there was David Cross in the mid-70s line-up of King Crimson; but Cross’ contributions to Larks’ Tongues in Aspic and Starless and Bible Black have always struck me as particularly weedy when stacked up against Robert Fripp’s miraculous lead guitar. Probably the closest comparison would be with the fine Australian group The Dirty Three, whose Warren Ellis mines a rich seam of melancholy with his angry and swirling violin sounds.

What I find excellent about Army of Strangers compared to the above is the way Pavone’s highly confident playing falls into free and easy conversation with Fitzpatrick’s steely riffing and Eisenstadt’s fluent percussion. The tunes themselves vary between friendly, mid-paced saunters (“A Piece Has Been Released”), raw post-punk skirmishes (“Really?”) and miniature progressive rock epics (“Apparently, I’m Still Bleeding”). In all of them, though, there’s a sense of intuitive interaction between the musicians coupled with a warmth and an openness that seem to invite you to join their army of strangers. Listen in.

March 11, 2012

Machines of Moisture

Hold the front page

I keep trying to find a way in to decode the abstract and slightly illogical electronic music of Jim O’Rourke on his double LP Old News #5 (EDITIONS MEGO OLD NEWS 5). It’s four separate pieces, one side each, drawn from O’Rourke’s personal archive of his recordings, made in Chicago and Tokyo, but taken together the album amounts to a labyrinth, multiplied to the power of four. It’s very puzzling stuff; each piece proceeds quite slowly with monotonous drones, yet within that slow-moving framework there can be a rush of detail. As soon as I think the piece is going to resolve into something resembling a tune, it dives down a side-turning where digital white noise and glitch are the order of the day. To me it’s a rather disjointed listen, not to say that the music is fragmented or composed of multiple edits, just that I can’t connect the dots or follow the lines of thought of this inscrutable American laptop music pioneer. Even the sleeve image is hard to read; it looks like it’s going to be a crowd of people in the street, but their arms and legs are incomplete, they have no faces, the lines don’t quite join up, and there are odd geometric shapes piercing the picture plane, further disrupting the visual flow. This is the first of many such packages where O’Rourke will retrieve and issue such works from his voluminous hard drive, so maybe when the series is completed it will make more sense to me.

Time after Time

Likewise, I honestly wish I was deriving more pleasure from Temporal Marauder‘s Temporal Marauder Makes You Feel (SP 006), an album on the Mego sub-label Spectrum Spools. Unlike Old News, there’s less of a problem finding a way into the sound; the surface is appealing, rich layers of electronic music often propelled by enjoyable pulsebeats, plus sequencer patterns, filters, effects and dribbling beepy noises. Sampled voices occasionally murmur unintelligible statements, and short simple keyboard melodies are buried everywhere in the morass of detail. Once the initial charm of the sound wears off, I find myself wishing each piece would develop into something and move forward, but all eight tracks inevitably just keep on chugging away in neutral. This is largely the work of Jean Logarin with the percussionist Hans Schule, recorded by Max Tanguy. There is a back story to the record which would have us believe it was recorded in the 1970s and is now being presented in its re-edited form as a lost treasure of “kosmische” styled music, but I’m not having any of that. I can’t really place any credence in this wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Moonshine

With an album called The Whiskey Mountain Sessions (FIREPOOL RECORDS FR002) and a band name Hillmen, I was half-expecting this Californian band to deliver a post-modern update on 1920s country or jugband music. Instead the four players Hillman, Ellett, Murray and Rivers produce four lengthy jam sessions of improvisation using guitars, keyboards, bass and drums, resulting in competent fusion jazz, produced with very little studio intervention or overdubbing, in order to preserve the spontaneity of their work. The results come out like a slightly rougher version of an Al Di Meola LP. Nothing very innovative going on here I’m afraid, and I distrust sleeve notes that use superlatives like “magical…profoundly creative…transcendent dimensions…transformational power” so liberally. This is released on the showcase label of the avant-rock band Djam Karet.

Vermiform Appendix

Vega is the the team of Henry Vega and the singer Anat Spiegel. On Wormsongs (ARTEKSOUNDS ART001), Mr Vega spins very delicate digital backdrops of glitchy ambient music to support the fragile and breathy intonations of the songstress, and a mysterious web of artifice appears in the dusty attic corners of your mind. Marco Molling and Georg Hobmeier provide the textual starting points for a couple of tracks, and the percussionist Bart de Vrees appears on ‘Light Code’. At first the ambient tones seemed a shade too familiar and ordinary to me, but after a more determined listen I’m gradually succumbing to the minimalistic charms of these lightly throbbing drones and brushy percussive effects. I’m arriving at the conclusion that Henry Vega is a very abstemious miniaturist, one who distils his musical output with as much care as a chemist of the 17th century. Likewise, Spiegel may be the most mannered vocalist you’ve heard this side of Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen, but she is wound as taut as a watch spring and seems to be forcing each musical droplet out of her pipes as though there were a narrow-necked spigot attached to her throat. If you’re expecting a sort of post-modern operatic soprano, she’s actually much less stiff than that; she’s very adept at holding on to a monotone and working the note into the ground, as she twists her tongue around some very spiky syllables and difficult sibilants with ease. This is the case whether working to a text, or scatting with her unusual wordless moans. Brittle, fragmented, perplexing.

Hotel Splendide

A curious undertaking by Nettle has resulted in the album El Resplandor: The Shining In Dubai (SUB ROSA SR324). The subtext is that DJ Rupture had a momentary brainstorm where he transplanted the events of the Kubrick film The Shining into Dubai; if we play along with this fantasy, then the images of a luxury hotel in the Arab Emirates on the CD front cover soon give way to desolation and poverty with the shabby and deserted interiors we see in Lamya Gargash’s photographs when we open the gatefold. This before-and-after scenario may be read as an index of the deterioration of the caretaker’s mind in the original story, and it also works as a comment on the current global financial disaster; after all the opening line of Geoff Manaugh’s short story, provided to bolster the idea, is “They came to Dubai on the promise of easy money”. Musically, the work offers a melting-pot of styles, including improvisation, electronica, classical chamber music, and folk music of Africa. This reflects the mixed stylistic backgrounds of the six talented players who help DJ Rupture to realise the work, among them the guitarist Andy Moor and the cellist Jennifer Jones. It’s fine instrumental music with plenty of atmosphere and undercurrents of menace suggested by many minor keys and quirky melodies, which befits this quasi-soundtrack to an imaginary film; spirits and ghosts are floating around every stairway, strongly suggested by the dispassionately gorgeous chanting of vocalist Lindsay Cuff. The track ‘Simoom (Wasp Wind)’ stands out as a painful noise piece, where the spiky electric guitar of Moor is given license to whip up a storm, and the track works into a frenzy of spiralling mayhem with percussion, vocals, loops, and electronic processing. The string players are all excellent, producing crisp lines with assurance, bending notes and creating unusual effects on their violins and cellos, and providing a perfect counterpoint to Rupture’s electronic melodies, as on ‘Espina’ for example. This just in: I learn that Geoff Manaugh writes about architecture. So El Resplandor works as soundtrack music, but also has a spatial dimension, acting as a sort of conceptual work describing a promenade around a vast deserted building.

February 5, 2012

Cannibale / Agitato

Tutto Va Bene (NIENTE RECORDS VOLUME 9) is the third item we’ve received from the Italian avant-electronic duo st.ride, and it’s another strong set of tunes constructed using drum machine, voice, and the “mopho” which is probably their personal shorthand for the synths and other electronic devices which inhabit their homes in the same way that an unwanted debt-collector hovers around the doorstep of his defaulting creditor. I’m not here to make direct comparisons with previous releases, but this new one feels more stripped-down and uncluttered, probably due to the decision to leave the guitars at home on this particular trip to the Genova studio; without that amplified burr, and thanks to sequencers, monophonic keyboards and primitive settings, the music hits home like a surgical-precision bash in the nose-bone. Maurizio Gusmerini spits, barks and snarls his simplistic lyrics like slogans and chants, a nifty update on the way most UK punk rockers used to sing in 1977; along with Edo Grandi’s drum machine, it’s these rhythmic vocal eructations that are providing most of the structure for each song. This approach creates a bare-bones framework, leaving the synth elements free to squelch out their unnatural fizzes and burbles in extremely simple ways, filling in the spaces and gaps with one-note one-sound monotonal gulps. On occasion, the synths are allowed to go completely crazy, as on ‘Turbamento’ where they unleash eleven types of merry free noise heck from their split-circuit-tongues, making this particular ditty a perfect expression of pent-up anger and frustration in 4 and a half minutes, where the vocalist is simmering with rage and words are inadequate to capture the extent of his emotion. You can hear the stern frown of disapproval written on his face. On ‘Mi Piaci’ he may sound a bit more resigned to the cruel fates of the world, but it’s because he’s been turned into a robot, acquiescing to the incessant demands of the consumer-driven society with a helpless vocodered sigh. In fine, this album is a winning combination of semi-musical contrived chaos, direct and elemental electronic sounds, enervating coffee-fuelled beats, a seriously disaffected singer handing you unpalatable facts (in Italian), and no bullshit anywhere in sight. You may come for the Kraftwerk / Depeche Mode comparisons, but you’ll stay for the distinctive st.ride modernistic take on alienated urban electropop. From the overall pessimistic tone, we have to assume that the title which translates as ‘All’s Well’, is deeply ironic; and the fact it’s restated on the cover in multiple languages only emphasises how bad the situation is world-wide. Embrace this pessimism freely, that’s my advice; in a world full of corrupt media and slimy politicians, at this crucial time we need to get our information from clear-thinking truthsayers, as found on this record.

Profoundly radical and inventive approach to playing contemporary classical violin music from Aisha Orazbayeva on her superb Outside (NONCLASSICAL RECORDINGS NONCLSS013) CD. Technically proficient to a near superhuman degree, she can clearly play complex and challenging modern music with a breathtaking ease, but that’s just for starters – it’s a given. It’s the intense attack of her sound that will demand your attention – she plays like a freakin’ demon on the six Caprices of Salvatore Sciarrino, the startling “calling card” that opens this record and occupies you for seventeen minutes (I personally was riveted to the spot with my jaw hanging open). Her whole body is alive, contorted and possessed as she unleashes these uncanny sounds from her instrument’s guts, not skimping on the astringent scrapey effects and high-register complexities that create shrieking harmonics enough to scrape the fillings from out of your back molars. So far, so electrifying. But all that isn’t enough for her, since she adds a further sonic element by recording these pieces in numerous external locations ¹ – bus stop, car park, railway arch, warehouse – eschewing the comfort and predictability of the recording studio acoustics in favour of “wild” echoes and timbral shadings, with results that are later sewn together at the editing suite for maximal ear-slam. You can imagine the devastating effects of these combined strategies, but you don’t have to imagine anything, since Orazbayeva has made this all happen herself. I personally have often grumbled to myself about the generally rather conservative approach to the recording of mainstream classical music; I won’t say that Orazbayeva agrees with me 100%, but she has certainly forged her own personal solution to the situation. Sciarrino, himself something of a musical outsider who considers that he owes no allegiance to any particular school of modernism, seems a most apt composer for her to interpret. The remainder of the CD is also full of interest and surprise; there’s the Ravel Sonata recorded at the Royal Academy recital hall with a piano accompaniment, putting us on slightly more familiar sonic turf (and it’s a beautiful rendering). At the end of the disc are two very odd items – a two-minute Russian lullaby ‘Pchela I Babchka’ by Salvador / Tsepin, and a piece she composed with Helmut Lachenmann called ‘Toccatina / Russian song’, which ought to satisfy your cravings for hearing a truly “deconstructed” approach to plucking muted violin strings in the production of quiet and mysterious music. Before that, we have fourteen gorgeous minutes of ’5 Bagatelles from OUR violin and computer concerto’, which she wrote in 2010 with Peter Zinovieff. Astonishing far-out musical tones are created and generated with great assurance in a seamless mixture of acoustic playing and cyber-music. Quite different in tone to the “demonic possession” style of the Caprices, here Orazbayeva displays her skill for steady, continuous sound and glorious atonalities, combining it with Zinovieff’s dark cybernetic utterances and producing a music so strange that you can taste it like slowly-unfurling fungi in your brain. This suite has both intense intimate beauty but also unfamiliar and alarming darknesses, as on the closing segments ‘Peg’ and ‘Stre’, whose inventive noisy textures you could use to resurface half of the UK’s motorways. The package may look restrained and decorous, but don’t be fooled – it’s an album of pure classical dynamite from this astonishing Kazakh genius. Recommended, but be sure to approach with lead-lined tongs and protective goggles!

A similar strategy was used by the violin-cello improvising duo of Kuwayama-Kijima, who since the early 2000s often performed and recorded their music in abandoned urban spaces. ↩

December 3, 2011

Troubling histories

Twenty of Another Kind

A lengthy triple-CD box set of microtonal minimalism is Twenty Ten (12K1066) by the New York composer Kenneth Kirschner, offering over three hours of music across four very long compositions. The music gradually becomes fainter, quieter and more washed-out as you progress across the set; while we may start out with 23 minutes of detailed and enjoyable Gamelan-like tinkling-note music, by the middle of disc two we are set adrift in a mysterious sea of silence which is occasionally punctuated by long tones from strings and horns, and not sure where the horizon may be nor when we shall return to dry land. We’re back on relatively safer ground with the third disc, which across 50 minutes provides a delicate mix of filtered piano notes, scraped and plucked strings surrounded by ambivalent computerised ambient washes, in a thoroughly abstract and non-narrative composition where every element is judiciously positioned with the loving care of a minimal art-gallery sculptor who only works with white bedsheets, muted fluorescent lamps, and thin copper rods. Piano, strings, horns, and celeste are among the instrumentation, and Kirschner carefully assembles and edits his elements inside the computer to create his precisely-timed effects. The music moves very slowly, it does rely on long duration, and sometimes makes use of pre-ordained rules as part of the composition; but his love of detail, sumptuous (in their own miniaturist way) sounds, and ear for microtonal events marks out Kirschner as a composer who is quite some way from the traditions of “old-School” New York minimalism. A firm believer in Creative Commons, he makes all his music freely available as mp3 downloads from his website.

Transversals of the Day

Also in the area of avant-garde composition, we have the double-CD set Faint (CREATIVE SOURCES RECORDINGS CS 088) sent to us in June 2011 from the School of Music and Sonic Arts of Queen’s University in Belfast. Here a trio of academically trained conservatoire musicians play free improvisation, Pedro Rebelo on the piano, Franziska Schroeder on the saxophones, and Steve Davis on the drums. In between the restless, skittery, and atonal improvised music, the young Portuguese composer Rebelo creates his electro-acoustic treatments derived from the performances, and the set is intended to create interesting contrasts between these two musical modes. I found the entire exercise rather dull and lifeless, and, with its track titles such as ‘Toward less probable states of concentration’, ‘Causalities and Transversals’ and ‘A crowd must be fully individuated’, even a little pretentious. Rebelo’s electro-acoustic variations on the music are clever and I like the way he compacts highlights into short textural bursts, but even so he can’t seem to inject enough energy to transcend the fundamental stiffness of the original recordings.

Open Air Festival

An unusual entry in the catalogue of UK folk singer Sharron Kraus is In The Rheidol Valley (MORC RECORDS MORC #57), for which she collaborated with Michael Tanner of Plinth, United Bible Studies, Tex La Homa, and Pantaleimon; in fact Tanner played on her album The Fox’s Wedding. The album is as much a musical release as it as a document of their rural ramblings, when they simply went for a walk in this undisturbed part of the Aberystwyth countryside with their instruments (including perhaps an autoharp, drum and some small bells), sat down and improvised these slow and lonely instrumental pieces. The recordings are extremely modest and quiet, so gentle that you feel a light summer breeze might cause them to evaporate instantly; and the open-air feel translates onto disc wonderfully. Perhaps the most evocative instance of their work is the 53-second piece of ethereal beauty simply called ‘Valley Bells’, which is like a breathless comment on the beauty of the landscape expressed simply by a single tiny percussion instrument. I also like the beautiful ‘Valley 5′, which feels like an English version of a Popol Vuh tune. All too soon, everything fades away and slips through the fingers like Elvish gold, a dream in the mist of the Welsh landscape. Exists as a limited press vinyl LP and was released 17th May 2011.

Dachau Blues…and Greys

Another field recording based work, but with quite a different intent from the above, is the double-disc set Gurs/ Drancy/ Gare de Bobigny/ Auschwitz/ Birkenau/ Chelmo-Kulmhof/ Majdaneck/ Sobibor/ Treblinka (GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 085 / BRUIT CLAIR RECORDS BC06) created by Stéphane Garin and Sylvestre Gobart. The two discs are compilations of recent field recordings made at these sites of Nazi concentration camps and extermination centres across parts of Europe (France, Poland and the Ukraine); the package comes with several monotone photographs, and the artists intend to “draw up a sound and photo picture” of these zones. I must stress that their work has serious artistic intent, and is nothing to do with certain “industrial” musicians who, in the past, have flirted with Nazi and death-camp imagery simply for its shock value. No, the idea behind this release is to explore memories of the past, collecting recordings from these camps which are now monuments and memorials, making edits and assembling short incomplete and inconclusive episodes, and finding out what might be revealed. Since many of these sites are now museums and used as educational places for school field trips, quite often we hear troops of visiting school children; at other times we hear machinery, cars, trains and other vehicles; also the voices of guides of curators, gently discussing matters. Mostly though we hear a strange and indescribable grey murmur, a distant rumbling, which (given the context) cannot help but be strangely moving. The inserted portfolio of grey photographs are equally evocative in like manner. The artists say they wish to “call up what cannot be seen any longer” and “show that there is nothing left to see”; the recordings are named, quite simply and starkly, with factual locations and dates, and there is no attempt to build a narrative from these disjointed segments of information. This approach starts to raise many troubling questions about the nature of our collective memory, and casts doubt about the meaning of history, our ability to remember things at all. Oddly enough I write these lines after seeing the retrospective Gerhard Richter show at the Tate Modern, and some of his powerful paintings (also working with shades of grey, very coincidentally) touch on quite similar themes, attempting to excavate buried memories; I’m thinking especially of his 1965 portraits of Uncle Rudi and Herr Heyde. In all, this is a very interesting release which I recommend.