Two releases involving members of AMM, the UK improvising group, both with the participation of Kjell Bjørgeengen. This Norwegian fellow is a video maker, although he does also produce sounds in the course of doing that, and has an association with Keith Rowe and John Tilbury going back some years. There’s the Sissel record from 2018 on Sofa Music, noted and enjoyed by Paul Khimasia Morgan, which suggested they’d met up and started working in 2015, although today’s record A Thought For Two was apparently recorded even earlier, in 2010. More recently there was the Kjell Bjørgeengen box set with Chris Cogburn, called Fear Of The Object, which failed to excite this listener very much, despite the involvement of some serious players drawn from the contemporary international improvisation pool.
In his work, Bjørgeengen explores the potential to transform audio signals into video signals. On A Thought For Two (TRUE BLANKING 003), we’re hearing a concert recorded 5th December 2010 in New York City, where he’s doing it with Keith Rowe’s guitar and electronics in a situation which is evidently a subtle, but quite complex, interactive system of feedback and interplay. Bjørgeengen starts with his audio oscillators and supplies “video reference synch signals” which can transform that sound into video. He wants to stress this is not the same thing as an oscilloscope – an instrument that can present a graphic rendition of any voltage signal; Bjørgeengen’s work, although not visible on this release, is evidently a lot more subtle, and he claims to produce a “direct” correspondence between sound and image. At the 2010 concert, this video was replayed on an old cathode-ray monitor, at which point Keith Rowe starts to engage with it. The actual detail of this engagement is a bit hazy to me – indicated here by the phrase “picking up the debris of the magnetic field” – but it sounds like Rowe was able to participate in a very productive feedback loop of some sort, with both guitar and live electronics being brought into play. There’s also something called a “flood coil”, supplied by a third party Dave Jones, which likewise is able to receive and amplify this “magnetic field debris” in some way, intriguingly using a telephone receiver to do it.
While I was somewhat resistant to this release at first, on today’s spin I’m finding 41 mins just fly by. We’re now a million miles away from 1960s AMM, and it’s also quite some distance from Rowe’s solo records, or even his low-key long-form excursions and collaborations in the “EAI” field so generously documented on the Erstwhile Recordings label. It might not have anything much to do with playing the guitar or even with free improvisation, yet neither can it be dismissed as empty process art. I’ve no clear idea as yet what, if anything, makes this a compelling listen; it might have something to do with the intense concentration of the artists, as if making a detailed and patient exploration of some new and unknown form of life, studying it with powerful optical instruments. With Keith Rowe drawings on the cover suggesting waves of magnetic energy or the paths of electronic signals, we’re got a nicely integrated art statement. (15/05/24)
For Flicker, Scratch, and Ivory (TRUE BLANKING 002) we move ahead to 2018, a date which coincides with the release of the Sissel item – indeed the Cafe Oto event documented here was staged to promote that release. Rowe is now joined by John Tilbury on piano and Bjørgeengen is credited with video and electronics. Most of the press note for this one is taken up with Rowe’s fine art observations and insights, particularly on a specific painting by Nicolas Poussin from the 17th century, which he uses as the starting point for some profound and touching ruminations about death and friendship, and perhaps touching on something about the indifference of the universe; he contemplates “the muteness of trees” in this landscape painting, as if nature was watching our grief in silence.
Well, this is part of the creative approach of these players in this project; Kjell Bjørgeengen suggested this painting as “a possible focal point” for the 2018 Stavanger performance, indicating that their work on stage is assisted by having a shared image, or idea, in mind. What interests me here is how receptive Keith Rowe is to suggestions like this, a near-intangible notion which would probably mean nothing to a lot of musicians. It’s also encouraging how his perception of visual art, and its value, is not restricted, but rather enriched by situating it in a wider culture, the written criticisms of other art experts, and allowing it to resonate with a deeper understanding of experience and life. Flicker, Scratch, and Ivory has the added dimension of Tilbury’s sympathetic piano notes joining the very abstracted, attenuated electronic graininess, and while I enjoy the intent concentration of A Thought For Two and the way it explores a single pathway right through to the end, this 2018 performance takes off in several different dimensions and discovers new haunts and obscure corners in the wraith-like zone it inhabits. I can’t account for it; fragile, mysterious, beauty, steeped in loneliness and sorrow. (15/05/24)