Pianist Tonino Miano sent a copy of Ulysses (IMPRESSUS RECORDS NO NUMBER), a record of improvised music he made with viola player Frantz Loriot; the two of them met in cyberspace and from there proceeded to develop their own brand of musical communication. Both of these conservatoire players come from an extensive academic background, and it shows in every note of these 14 recorded works, which resemble examples of 20th-century avant composition more than they do any average jazz-influenced improvisation record. Even the titles, such as ‘Suitor’s Dance’ or ‘Dawn’s Rose Red Fingers’ seem more inspired by Henry Cowell than by Keith Tippett. Miano and Loriot’s sound has a certain authority, but it’s also quite severe; one senses a rather strained, suppressed yearning for self-expression in their fast runs and atonal blocks of sound, as if they’re working hard to break out of the shackles of classical form, yet don’t have enough swing in their bones to do it. A noble effort, nonetheless, and the package looks very stylish despite having been produced on a tight budget.
The UK’s John Butcher is a seasoned improviser with a quite different approach, his excellent work often informed chiefly by instinct rather than technique. During 2006, he was invited (along with other musicians) by Barry Esson of arika.org to perform in various unusual locales in Scotland and the Orkneys; his contributions to the Resonant Spaces tour, as it came to be known, are now released on a CD of this title (CONFRONT 17). The intention was for musicians to respond creatively and sympathetically to the acoustics of these environments, which include a cave, an oil tanker, an ice house, a mausoleum and even outdoors among the standing stones of Stenness on the Orkney mainland. Butcher’s tenor and soprano saxes are also sometimes aided with amplification and feedback; to say he produces sounds that are “eerie” would be the understatement of the month. This release is packed with slow, mournful, dirge pieces for the most part, fully deserving of the suggestive motifs in the titles (magic, cults, wind, frost, waterfall), and Butcher achieves some form of time-travel through his playing, as though he appears to have gotten back to the primordial roots of human existence and is struggling to invent a language. An uncanny release!
Mark Wastell’s Confront label continues its Collectors Series releases in their distinctive clamshell packages and tiny labels adhering to the shoulder. On Terrain (CCS8), Graham Halliwell and Lee Patterson represent a meeting of the two camps of reduced improv and near-imperceptible sound art respectively. Saxophone feedback meets field recordings on four very slow and lengthy drone-epics of quietness and restraint; the “terrain” that interests these two surveyors may not have many unusual geographic features, but they are determined to explore every inch of it in meticulous detail.
Argentinean avant-sax player Lucio Capece has joined forces with Finnish electronicist Mika Vainio to produce Trahnie (EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO 098), to quite devastating effect; the sleeve art suggests they’re capable of melting brick walls into a pile of brown goo, and I can well believe it. Every one of these 11 sizzlers is markedly different to the last, showing intensive concentration and commitment to experimentation, even if there is the chance of misfire; not one of them falls back into polite twiddling or empty self-indulgent droning, and the CD is full of extreme contrasts and attention-grabbing unusual, denatured sounds. Vainio (ex-Panasonic) rarely disappoints, and Capece sounds determined to make a clean break with his jazz and improv background at all costs; nary a clichéd note escapes his mouthpiece. Recorded in Berlin over two years, this is another invigorating release from the new-improved Mego organisation.
The Texan label Quiet Design Records has compiled Spectra: Guitar in the 21st Century (alas007), an international survey of avant-garde guitar works, representing players from Japan, London, USA, Turkey, and other parts of the six-string world. Tetuzi Akiyama has a distinctive live set called ‘Three Small Pieces’, played in his remarkably calm and precise style; while Jandek, an underground hero whose music still remains an acquired taste for this listener, delivers a dark bluesy moan called ‘The World Stops’ extracted from one of his many self-released LPs, on which both voice and guitar are in a terminal state of doom. The remaining contributors mostly seem to me to be in thrall to the style and sound of Keith Rowe (who is also here, performing live in Austin in 2004, and clearly suffering under one his steely and grim moods); but their long and droney workouts, however pleasing they sound, lack the invention and rugged individuality of Rowe. That said, Mike Vernusky‘s segment is suffused with an ominous dread which I enjoy; and Cory Allen‘s ‘Fermion’ has many complex layers and loops to profitably occupy the ear. As a compilation, Spectra feels diffuse and uneven, suggesting a lack of focus on the part of the compilers. Even the cover photograph, perhaps a close-up of a prepared guitar, is a visual statement lacking in clarity.
The genre-hopping music of Mikhail Karikis is not at all in my line, but Sub Rosa think highly enough of this renaissance man of beat-music and visual arts to have released Morphica (SR288) as a 3-CD set packed inside an elaborate folding pinwheel card package, with a foldout poster of sleeve notes inside a plastic bag. This is just the trade edition; I think there will also be a limited luxury box set packed with art prints to be stocked at the Tate Gallery and the ICA. Mikhail’s musical abundance is spread over three discs subtitled ‘Electronics’, ‘Voices’ and ‘Strings’, and he works with a small army of musicians and DJs in a post-modern exercise more pan-cultural than the worst excesses of Peter Gabriel or Sting; everything from early music choirs to avant-jazz vocalists and German minimal electronics (and much much more) can be found on this collection of mixed-up World Musics, virtually all of it set to a relentless disco beat and packed with vocal samples. I couldn’t get past disc one, but don’t let that stop you investigating this complex and ambitious work.
Robert Millis has released 120 (ETUDE 018) on the Etude Records label in Canada, in a handsome digipack decorated with four intriguing colour photographs (my preference has been for the back cover, as shown in pic above). Here, the Climax Golden Twin from Seattle combines field recordings from his exotic Eastern travels with subtle and delicate music of the most pristine and unobtrusive beauty. Jim Haynes writes that he apparently cannot come to grips with the “logic of the album” which he admits “may seem absurd from afar”; yet I value that absurdity, and to me the highly artistic combinations of Millis have all the surreal logic of a beautiful dream. The opening minute of the final track, ‘charcoal twins’, is particularly delirious, but the second track contains a superb mix of night-time insect chirps and gentle celestial droning which will simply send you to Heaven, ascending to the light on a pink cloud.