The players are Marina Cyrino, Tony Elieh, JD Zazie, and Matthias Francisco Koole, operating in Berlin since 2020, where this live concert was recorded in 2022. Strong gender balance, and a rare mix of nationalities in this group – Cyrino is Brazilian, Koole is Belgian, and I think Elieh comes from Beirut originally, where he was at the forefront of post-rock music in the group Scrambled Eggs. Already Hic Up have evolved a very democratic way of playing, and no single instrument ever dominates or overpowers the others. Yet I myself keep wishing for a bit more energy and stronger dynamic in the playing; too much of a boneless soup, not enough roughage. The sounds they make are very good though, and I understand it’s intended to be impressionistic and “gestural” music. (10/06/2024)

A brief glimpse at the track titles may indicate what was on the minds of these two restless creators while they were performing, with references to communication and lack of same (one missing channel), uncertain futures, melancholy, and “blurred positives”. If they are pessimistic about the prospects for the human race on planet Earth, they hint at a number of strategies for how to redeem the situation, ranging from ‘Cycling Flow’ to ‘Transition & Grip’, the latter sounding like a very pro-active approach which should serve everyone engaged in high-profile IT projects or consortial business schemes. Indeed “pro-active” might be the watchword for these two engaged improvisers when the energy-drinks start to kick in and the wild percussive beats scurry about the room like so many enriched crabs with antlers skating on friction motors.

I seem to recall that earlier record was also minded to make plain the love that both musicians have for dancefloor and trip-hop expeditions, a boast on which they continue to make good, now adding bizarre and perplexing vocal elements fished from the ponds of soundfiles one of them has stored on their roaming digital device, a virtual folder so replete with data that even Microsoft refuse to accommodate it on their cloud servers. These vocals, some of them so preposterous as to appear almost humorous and Goon-show like in their varispeeded absurdity, do a lot to root this otherwise abstract music in some form of reality, albeit a rather grotesque one. Meanwhile the intense, hyper-busy surfaces of most of the music here can be exhausting to listen to in one sitting; amazing that they had enough energy to produce it all in just two days of working.

Ignaz Schick and Oliver Steidle have been playing together since 2013, and it’s fair to assume they know each other’s nooks and bridles to the extent that they can almost communicate by telepathy, or through using virtual paper darts, a new technology they’re working on to replace BlueTooth. From February 2024.

Well, let’s look at the facts…Triple Music is kind of a “lockdown album”, because the group were thwarted in their plans to go to Japan in 2020, where they hoped to collaborate with Akiko Nakayama. This astonishing Japanese creator has developed his own unique approach to painting – he does it live before an audience, using digital projection and a system that creates ever-changing colours and shapes, that respond to external stimuli in a way that Cezanne and Monet never dreamed of. Nakayama built a “colour-organ system” called Fluid2wave for this practice, which he calls “Alive Painting”. From this I get some sense of why our Scandinavian threesome were keen to work with him. Instead of doing it live, Nakayama sent them a “video triptych” – presumably a multi-screen projection experience of some kind – and the players used this as the basis for a musical performance. I expect we can see details from this visual feast on the panels of this digipak – blue abstract swirls representing a 21st-century digital update on a psychedelic “liquid light” show so prominent in the 1960s in both popular music and avant-garde performance milieux. As far as I can make out, Muddersten used it as a score, working very spontaneously in real time.

So far so good. Muddersten are credited with their usual instruments (Volden – guitar, Olsson – piano, Taxt – tuba), but there’s also a lot of electronics on the album – more specifically, loops, prepared tapes and sound events, and turntabling. These are called “sonic readymades” in the press notes, and we’re given to understand they could be read as corresponding to the objects and shapes in Nakayama’s alive-paintings. Even more specifically, Henrik Olsson (the turntabler in the group) used the notorious Fyloop LP from 2013, a completely bonkers release that contains 360 locked grooves, provided by Fylkingen artistes. Adventurous indeed to introduce such an unpredictable, risky device into live performance. In the finished results, Muddersten exhibit remarkable restraint and subtlety, creating very gentle undulating shifts in tones and textures; the “minimalist” tag doesn’t quite cover it, as there is a lot going on here, just rather slowly and methodically. “Have no plan and stick to that, no matter what”, is one guiding principle articulated in words by Olsson; “greater flexibility in the musical practice” is what they strove for.

This is in response to what Henrik Olsson perceives as a wider ever-growing international crisis, and not just related to the Covid epidemic (see above), but threats to the climate and the biosphere, “an overwhelming amount of obstacles”, as he stoically puts it. How can improvisation respond to this? Olsson is clear: “we will all need to be flexible improvisors and find a way to cope with…our own abusive behaviour,” he warns us, advocating humility, acceptance, and an adaptational approach to the rigours of life. Gotta admire the clarity of Olsson’s statements, but I’m not feeling much clarity in the grooves of Triple Music, where the main takeaway is “life is uncertain”, and the response to this uncertainty appears to be taking baby-steps and making incremental, provisional moves towards the unknown (or away from it, perhaps). In short, Muddersten don’t really exhort us into direct action, rather invite further reflections, pauses, and guesses. To learn more, bend an ear to Triple Music. From 2nd Feb 2024.

Australian player Aviva Endean made a nice record called Moths & Stars for Room 40 in 2023, which was an exciting blend of her clarinet improvisations with vivid recordings of moths doing their fluttering thing with the wings and the antlers. Here she is doing a live version of same – now titled ‘What Calls in The Quiet’ – and she’s supplying electronics, voice, field recordings, and plastic pipes alongside her faithful clarinet. Of course it’s oversimplifying to call it a “live version”. Rather the intention has been to revisit some of her own ideas from Moths & Stars and recast them in a new setting. In all her works, Aviva Endean has exhibited a strong connection with the environment, and she hopes to “foster a deep engagement” such that, through music and sound, the audience can build a better connection with the natural world. We could all benefit from this kind of relationship with our surroundings, for all sorts of reasons – spiritual, ecological, societal. Aviva Endean is one who does this in a very simpatico way, genuinely exploring sounds, without any preconceived ideas of what she might find. Nor does she hector the audience with proscribed, political ideologies about territories. This sumptuous 31:07 set seems to be slightly more “abstract” than the 2023 Moth item, but what it lacks in wing-beating moments it more than compensates with its compelling, immersive, drones of warmth, and suggestions of infinite vistas.

Recorded by John Chantler using 3D printers and health monitor apps, and presented with informative liner notes by Magnus Nygren. From 2nd January 2024.

As it happens both Pelayo and Eli might feel more at home in a museum or art gallery, as they both come from a fine art background, and have form in other non-musical and visual art modes of expression, as well as their experience in experimental rock groups and collaborative musical endeavours. Pelayo Arrizabalaga – whose free-jazz career started in the 1970s – has even played with Victor Nubla, an extremely important and visionary musician and mover-and-shaker in that part of Europe. If anything can be said to characterise these nine experiments made with a record player, live electronics, electric guitar and “sound engines”, it’s a sense of playfulness mixed with a spirit of discovery. Having set up a foundation of abstract, textured electronic drigglements, or proposed an endless loop with a stuck tonearm on an old piece of vinyl, our two mavens from Madrid proceed to layer on their clarinet riffs or crazy free-improvised guitar licks. They pull back and forth between trying to create a memorable and atmospheric sound world and inhabiting it with jazz-inspired workouts.

That’s a good blueprint to follow – I just wish our two friends could be a bit more adventurous in the execution of it. A lot of the music seems tentative, afraid of going too far, or uncertain about where to go next. There’s some exciting and innovative moments where they spark something genuinely new and vibrant into the ether, but they can’t seem to sustain it for very long. If they simply took a few more risks, they might inspire a few more followers. (31/10/2023)

Five tracks of continuous swirling mud-like morass creep over us and inhabit us like so much sentient jelly…not since the golden age of science-fiction movies made in the 1950s, spliced with similar “possession” tropes taken from recent exorcism movies, have we felt such palpable dread, dread mixed with strange beauty. Well, we’re told they used field recordings, turntables, and a clarinet to produce these unearthly mumbles and chair-shifters, but I simply don’t believe them. I’m prepared to give more credence to the claim about “singular systems of playing and hearing music”, although that reference to “systems” worries me. What pre-programmed approach, what mode of organisation could possibly work in a situation like this? It’s more likely that sinister goings-on took place in that attic of theirs, a ritual that involved beaming shortwave messages to Alpha Centauri while simultaneously wrenching an unborn squid from the mouth of a passing rook.

Even Bricoleurs themselves are not quite sure what they hath wrought, what bizarre energy they’ve accidentally loosed into the globe. To disguise their true intent, the package arrives with a printed dialogue between Dionysus and Heracles, probably a fragment from a Greek drama beamed to them by psychic means, and the five track titles will reconstruct a nonsensical quasi-philosophical utterance if read in the correct order. Plus there’s a liner note written by Garfield, the bland cartoon cat. Other inserts, too abstruse to describe, go still further with laying false trails and misleading clues. One of these even poses the conundrum “Are Instruments Contagious?”, indicating that these contemporary musicians – outreaching even the most outrageous forms of free improvisation – regard music, or playing it, as some form of disease, a metaphor that works very well at this poignant moment in history.

Josh Ronsen has zapped in on previous occasions with his groups Zanzibar Snails and brekekekexkoaxkoax and often produced outstanding odd and memorable records with lovely packaging and inserts, and while False Friends Of a Translator continues these traditions, it also has a black scheming heart which endears me to it, and a threatening cover image which I take to be a battleship on fire in the imaginary global wars which trouble our creators in their fictional universe. Snap up for immediate seasoning and roast in the oven as needed. From 20 October 2023.

Official band website

Burning Motherfuckers – An Ki (HÆRVERK INDUSTRIER HÆ032) – what a cover, eh? Close-up photograph of this Oslo rockin’ duo ensures we miss no detail of their handsome fizzogs, with every eyebrow hair and detail of facial stubble lovingly lit and lensed in perfect focus as they make plain their sheer love of life through raucous laughter and intimate smooching. This “in your face” mode might be what Øystein Monsen and Thomas Eggum are striving to convey – strenuously – with their take on modern rock and roll, made with just drums, bass guitar, and vocal yawps. What comes across is a frantic and slightly alarmed tone, both in the voice and the frenetic playing, as though both players were intent on driving into a brick wall at 200 MPH, grinning through clenched teeth and with a bottle of Jack Daniels in easy reach of their trembling fingers. Not every cut has this manic intensity, but when they attempt a ballad ‘Unless It’s Trees’ it’s enough to make a hundred SST label-collectors duck for cover. Remainder of album, especially the long title track and ‘Lost It’, strive very hard for MC5-styled excess and ecstatic transport, but the pair can’t seem to negotiate their way of their own self-made straitjacket of limited noise, and eventually the thuds and the hammers simply create a numbing sensation in the lower extremities. Rather than allowing us to soar with the eagles, An Ki simply encases our legs in a tub of cement. For all their flailing, BMF can’t seem to reach a moment of release, much like a dry straining erection belonging to a man determined to bring his bored partner to orgasm, however long it takes. I have some of the same reservations as I do with Norwegian free jazz and its enforced “outness”; too much extrovert personality, not enough art. (06/09/2023)

Given that title, we need hardly detail the methods by which our long-haired raving maniacs achieved their results, but the ear can’t help be pulled in by loops, repeats, and spare use of an echo chamber to magnify these clonking sounds. Their home-made machines lope across the wooden floor with the charm of a wind-up toy made out of wood and powered by 18 coils, old friction motors, and a bucket of broken carburettors. With track titles like ‘Downhill Planet’ and ‘Laser Tape’, our listening pleasure is also enhanced by suggestions of futuroid astral journeys. Imagine if James Jacson from the Arkestra fell into a time warp and was lured by the twin new-wave sirens of Kleenex and Lilliput to his doom on the rocks.

Oddly enough though, the abiding impression of these strangely-patterned rhythms is their simplicity, as if our creators were trying one experiment at a time and did not wish to over-explain the results, nor add anything in the way of deep-friend sentiment nor golden feathers. Thore Warland has played drums for Kjetil in a more “rock-mode” context, but we first had an inkling of his insanity from the Firmaet Forvoksen record, still causing outbreaks of madness in the northerly climes since its release in 2022. While I do adore the avant-rock textures of Noxagt and Ultralyd, it’s a delight to get the tendrils stuck into these more marginal, outlying, avant-styled statements associated with Kjetil Brandsdal (who also runs this label, by the way).

Well, the cover is textured and embossed and has gold foil stamped into it in a self-conscious homage to the Philips “Prospective 21e Siècle” records of avant-garde music emanating from France since 1967 – Bayle and Henry showcasing their own work but also that of Xenakis, Parmegiani, and others, and reaching out internationally to include Japan also, and giving too much work to the Les Percussions de Strasbourg – which brings us back to the percussion work of Warland here. Although Drid Machine would also love to have the cover – and their music – mistaken for a Library Music release too, which might indicate that the lines between these wildly divergent genres might be thinner than the world supposes.

At all events, here’s one to keep the mice at bay and use in the kitchen when you’re plucking the scales from your blue turkey. (1st August 2023)

From what I can gather so far, he’s not your conventional dancefloor DJ with his records of beat-driven techno, nor a maximal chaos-artist on the lines of Christian Marclay or fellow Japanese player Otomo Yoshihide. Maki instead has been driven by his interest in avant-garde music, found sounds, and continuous drones, and using turntables is just one part of his overall quest, which has evidently led him to occupy a very narrow strip of turf. What he’s arrived at on today’s offering is about as simple, minimal and materialist as this sort of art can be; it’s based on just two things, (a) the hum produced by a turntable when it’s turned on, and (b) the noises made by the cartridge when you rub it with bits of metal. To demonstrate the humming sound, we have 27:12 minutes of ‘Extrovert’, which is simply a passage of heavily-amplified white noise. Like the Reizen release, it’s very process-driven, and perhaps not very surprising or exciting, but I do kind of admire the purity of the idea, the sheer materiality of it. That said, you gotta wonder if it makes any difference whether this electrical hum was produced by a turntable or a fridge or a toaster or any other electrical machine. I suppose, having decided that the turntable shall be his chosen instrument, this is one way of truly investigating the inner core of the device you regard as your method of expression.

After all that blanked out ocean-roar drone, the second track ‘Introvert’ has more substance and grit. Hiroaki Maki rubbed nickel strings on the cartridge of his turntable, producing these obnoxious and absurd drawn-out noises, which sound like the world’s largest rubber band being stretched and stretched to breaking point, except that it never snaps. It might have the same effect on your nervous system. If you’re a hi-fi buff, you will wince at the thought of the damage this action must be doing to the most sensitive part of the turntable (let’s hope it wasn’t a Koetsu!). Hiroaki Maki calls this an “improvised performance”, I suppose in distinction to the white-noise track which is simply the document of a process, and in some ways we’re getting back to the rudiments of old-school table noise of the 1990s, where the gestural actions of the performer produce wild eruptions of insufferable noise at high volume. But Maki is doing it on a small and intimate scale, nothing like the guitar-hero antics of Otomo, and seems to want to remind us constantly that we’re not hearing anything other than the constituent parts of a turntable. Again, very materialist – and also somewhat claustrophobic. I mean that his gestures are extremely limited – after all, there’s a limit to how many ways you can keep rubbing a cartridge with metal strings – and rub as he may, he can’t transform his movements into those of a graceful abstract painter, let alone a musician. It’s doubtful whether he’ll ever succeed in making this basic action into something more transcendent.

Very extreme…I have a blank promotional CDR, but the finished product has a restrained circular motif design printed in grey and is packaged in an oversized card wallet with embossed printing. From 23rd July 2021.

On Altered Alchemy (ZAREK 18/19), we hear Schick playing with Achim Kaufmann, a German free jazz pianist of no small accomplishment. For two CDs, we enjoy lengthy and exploratory workouts where Kaufmann’s grand piano is joined by the turntables, samples, and live electronic noises from Schick’s set-up. If Ilog2 can be understood as the entertaining “crowd-pleaser” record (even while it’s tremendously experimental), Altered Alchemy can I think be more easily located in certain high art traditions, particularly European ones; it’s not too far apart from the experiments of Stockhausen where he joined his electronic music with the discordant piano stabs of Aloys Kontarsky, such as on Kontakte and Refrain. The two musicians here met in 2015, about which time Schick asked Kaufmann to join his Circuit Training group; their duo performances have sometimes been supplemented by Andrea Parkins, and they conducted a tour in 2020. These particular recordings however come from a Berlin Ausland set in Feb 2016, and represents the first time they played together; which is notable, considering how assured the music sounds already. They’re specifically aiming for a subtle electro-acoustic blend, where the two instruments meld into something new; a morphing beast that emanates classical / jazz inflected piano runs in between seething at the jaws with electric fizz, samples, grit, glitch and loops. With very few edits in the final piece, the listener can observe the genesis of this music almost in real time, as the musicians develop and hone their craft across these eight tracks of stately, fascinating music.

Both the above from 26th February 2021.