January 31, 2004
Rebecca (Two Variations)
Rebecca
Rebecca [Two Variations]
Charhizma 022
It is, perhaps, not a complete exaggeration to suggest that over the past several years something like a new musical movement has become increasingly evident in certain parts of the world. The centres of this movement include Berlin, Boston, London, Tokyo and Vienna, and amongst its leading lights can be found such figures as Annette Krebs, Sachiko M, Radu Malfatti, Bhob Rainey, Taku Sugimoto and Mark Wastell. Capturing the shared characteristics of this movement is a somewhat hazardous enterprise, as there would appear to be differences in philosophy and method both within and between its various national manifestations; nonetheless I would suggest that, above and beyond the differences that separate them, the members of this new current share to some degree an orientation towards microtonality, radically extended playing techniques, pianissimo dynamics, small gestures, silence, and unconventional sounds and timbres that blur the distinctions between music and noise and utilise for musical ends the sounds of industrial and electronic procedures. One can, doubtless, point to the work of the likes of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, Helmut Lachenmann, and various electronic pioneers as having explored aspects of this territory before, yet there is something more afoot here than a mere reiteration of existing ideas and practices. One important difference is that the new music largely takes place outside of the bourgeois and academic institutions to which the exponents of twentieth century experimental music were too often confined by their lingering classicism and middle-class mores. Another difference is the degree to which the new music embraces improvisation, an embrace that connects them with the more radical currents of free improvisation, such as the work of AMM. This reliance on improvisation is by no means unequivocal or total, but even in its most tempered form it appears to go far beyond anything the composers I have mentioned were generally prepared to contemplate. In any event, even if it is only by dint of standing on their illustrious forebears’ shoulders, the new music has in some respects at least extended and deepened the breaks with conventional Western musical ideology hitherto achieved.
Rebecca is the work of two members of the loose community of advanced musicians in Berlin, Kai Fagaschinski (clarinet) and Michael Renkel (acoustic guitar, zither and preparations). Fagaschinski has played with many of the leading lights of the Berlin scene, but his recorded work is restricted to a mini-CD, Kommando Raumschiff Zitrone, with Christof Kurzmann (on Charhizma), and contributions to the compilations, Labor CD (on Charhizma) and Berlin Reeds (on Absinth). Renkel is also a regular performer in Berlin, but he is perhaps better known internationally, not least for his superb work with drummer Burkhard Beins in the duo Activity Centre. Two Variations is Fagaschinski and Renkel’s first proper release together, although a privately produced double CD-R of recordings was circulated to a very limited extent around a year ago. The new CD consists of two tracks, one 37'20" in length and the other 31'47", both of which were recorded in Fagaschinski’s Berlin home in December 2002.
Rebecca’s working methods and history are described in a short text that appears in German on the disc’s sleeve notes and is translated into English on Charhizma’s website. The text starts by saying, “Rebecca exists since October 2001. Work began with improvisations. Over the cause of time the same piece was repeatedly ‘improvised’ again, reducing the concept of improvisation to absurdity. Through repeated playing a musical piece, a composition come into being”. This is somewhat confusing, but my best guess is that the duo began with relatively free improvisations; then from the results of those improvisations, certain elements of structure and performance progressively came to be selected or preferred, eventually coalescing into a set of elements that constitute each “piece” or “composition”. But just what comprises each piece? The duo itself must have some idea, otherwise its decision to identify a number of performances as iterations of the same piece is entirely arbitrary. Unfortunately, it is not letting on. What we can gather is that, unlike classical music, “the piece is not notated”. This suggests that it is carried in the performers’ heads. However, unlike many oral cultures, little attention is given to the accurate retention, transmission and performance of a piece: “Rebecca remembers, and forgets”. Beyond this, “it is not so much a matter of interpreting a preconceived idea but rather of continuously working on and within the piece. The musical work becomes practice, action”. Curiously, although the group seemed quite keen at the outset to repudiate any suggestion of improvisation, I find it difficult to describe a practice that goes beyond interpretation to make substantive changes to the extant musical material as anything other than improvisation, especially when it is done spontaneously in the course of performance.
It is a pity that Rebecca has chosen not to make clearer what musical material existed beforehand as the piece and what was spontaneously altered or introduced while the performance progressed. More is involved here than mere curiosity or pedantry. When seeking to understand and appreciate a musical performance, it is surely important to know whether at any given time one is witnessing an attempt to (a) spontaneously construct or modify a structure or response, or (b) manifest a pre-existing script, for the aesthetic criteria one brings to each can be quite different. That said, I would speculate that Rebecca’s “variations” involve a not inconsiderable degree of improvisation. A set of preferred sequences, techniques and responses may exist, but I suspect that these are far from comprehensive and often forgotten, modified or set aside as each variation progresses and the demands of the moment shift in ways not predicted in advance. The considerable differences between the two variations on the disc seem consistent with such an analysis.
Although I have my reservations about Rebecca’s writing, I am more than happy with its music. Each of the two long variations strikes me as consisting of a sequence of more-or-less discrete sub-sections. Within these sub-sections, there is little attempt to produce rapid variation or crude call-and-response interaction. Often, one player begins alone, repeating a chosen motif. The other player then unfolds his contribution, almost invariably well-judged and productive of a compelling synergy. There may follow changes in volume, intensity or timbre (for example to match an emerging texture in the other’s playing), and occasionally more dramatic shifts (for example between instruments), but there is also a strong element of, if not stasis, then at least exploration within a small compass. A sudden change often brings the existing line of playing to an end. Silence may then ensue, to be followed in turn by a new and perhaps quite different strategy in a new sub-section. In this way, Rebecca produces what for me is a fascinating mixture of momentary invariance and overall fluidity and change. The fascination is deepened by other aspects of the music. Rebecca’s often very quiet sound is spacious, mysteriously evocative and even lyrical, while the reiterated silences that are an integral part of the duo’s sound help to capture and focus the listener’s attention. Also, Fagaschinski’s abstract language of microtonal waverings and subtly shifting breathy exhalations holds out to the sympathetic ear a ghostly but captivating soulfulness. Intermittently, his playing may approach an onomatopoeic rendering of patterns of human speech with established affective associations; more often, the connections he makes or opens to the committed listener are more elliptical. Renkel’s playing is perhaps less radical, especially when compared with the work of Keith Rowe, Annette Krebs and similar players, yet its astringent lyricism is an essential component in the mellifluous synthesis that is Rebecca’s music.
Of course, these are my personal and subjective understandings of Rebecca’s playing. One of the pleasures of music, such as Rebecca’s, that opens a universe of musical possibility beyond the scaffolding of conventional musical theories and established interpretive rules and heuristics, is the scope it affords the listener. He or she is not only permitted but required to develop new ideas about musical meaning and to freely interrogate the music for significance, resonance and the unfamiliar voices of new and open poetics. You may not find what I have, at least not every time you listen.
Fortunately for the listener, the task of engaging with Rebecca’s quietly challenging music is greatly facilitated by the beautifully clear recording. All too often, very quiet music is presented in an obscuring fog of background hiss. Not so here.
Some listeners may also have their pleasure enhanced by what I can only describe as the slight smell of curry emanating from the sleeve notes. Whether this is a deliberate part of a multi-sensory experience, a commercial tie-in with a local Asian restaurant, or a happy accident, I just cannot say.
~Wayne Spencer
some sort of ethics
What's the dope on sharing music? I'll start.
I'm Al. (Hi, Al.) I share music. (Boo.) Actually, I've only recently begun using one of the more popular file sharing programs, which started as an interest in seeing just what the hell it's all about. (It's about selfishness and piracy, dummy.) So far it's been enjoyable in moderation. I'm getting to hear some stuff I'd otherwise never have heard, and as such I've been prompted to go out and buy some records from musicians whose orbit I'd not known about prior. And no, I'm not disclosing which program I use or what handle I use just so the evil RIAA can add me to their list of the fallen. (Pussy.)
It's a touchy subject anyway. You can actually feel a greater strain of ethic at work when the subject is broached, like some hazy "wrong" floating around the ether, much like that mirror thing that snapped up Zod and his cronies at the beginning of the first Superman movie. I don't want to end up like them (even though that nuclear bomb released them, giving them unearthly supermanlike powers at the beginning of the second one), so I try to go about it in moderation, hoping my conscience won't notice. But something tells me that the practice is more widely accepted than I really understand. Does it depend on what you are sharing/downloading? Is there a statute of limitations on out-of-print material? I know how the corporate machine feels about it, but I'd like to better understand how the smaller businesses feel. I've heard from some that it's not minded, as it is a way for musicians to get heard. But then you'd think that musicians and label owners would like some essence of control in how the music is heard. I'll stop there before this becomes circular logic.
January 30, 2004
Black Metal
Black metal bands get goofed on a lot, even within the larger metal community, for the extremity of their look, but in the hands of a talented photographer, these guys are impressive. It's easy to be in a death metal band; any beer-drinking schlub with long hair can step right into one of those band photos. But black metal requires commitment. Check out these photos by Peter Beste (click on "Norwegian Black Metal" for a slideshow).
There are, of course, numerous issues raised by black metal iconography, especially given its explicit endorsement of paganism and a return to Norse warrior-culture values, and links to right-wing Nazi politics. (This stuff varies from band to band, by the way...black metal is not automatically Nazi metal.) But we can discuss those afterward. For now, just check out the pictures...they're just the thing for a wintry Friday afternoon.
January 29, 2004
Larry Schneider - It Might As Well Be Spring
Tenor plus rhythm ranks along with the piano trio as among the most venerable of jazz schematics. These sorts of quartets are so pervasive and precedent-burdened these days that some folks think they should be put out to pasture altogether. Seasoned horn men like Larry Schneider exist on the scene to punch holes in such fallacious styles of thinking. Schneider caught his break with Billy Cobham in 1975. Subsequent trials by fire with Horace Silver and Bill Evans further solidified his style out of post-Coltrane and bop influences like many of his peers. Inking a deal with Steeplechase in 1976, first as sideman, later as leader, that still holds currency today, he’s gone on to record fifteen albums for the Danish label. This latest offers up a potpourri of tunes with composers ranging from Béla Bartók to the band’s own pianist Andy Laverne.
Oddly enough, Schneider’s sound and phrasing on tenor recall the finicky pitch preferences of Von Freeman, especially on ballads. Quite frequently he’ll whittle away at a motif as it spools out of his sax, etching wavering inflections in its texture and lagging languidly behind the beat. On the more up tempo pieces like the terse reading of “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” realized in duo configuration with Adam Nussbaum’s propulsive, but responsive sticks, his tone necessarily hardens and tightens up as he adheres closer to the melody. Mike Richmond holds the fourth slot on bass, his bulbous, modestly amplified lines insulating the band’s breaches with viscous harmonic glue. “Draul,” the Bartók piece, seems at first like unusual jazz victuals, but Schneider leads his men through a nourishing repast on the folk-flavored theme. Nussbaum makes an impressive showing in his role as rhythmic colorist with mallets and brushes. Schneider imbues a swirling cry into his expositions that this time divine the weathered emotionalism of Kidd Jordan sans the saturnalian side.
Chosen standards on the date supply a resourceful mix of old and new. The title track and “Beautiful Love” suggest Schneider’s ability to succinctly apply his modern sensibilities to aged pop fare. For the latter, he and Richmond go it alone and his opening unaccompanied statement dovetails beautifully into a close conversation. On Tad Dameron’s “If You Could See Me Now” and Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way,” each folded into the program’s middle, Schneider’s horn seems even better suited. He draws the first ballad with careful attention to lush detail. Tenor purrs slowly through the melody for a protracted sequence of choruses that leave behind a bittersweet aftertaste. The second piece possesses surliness at the start that runs contrary the sorghum sentiments of its title. Schneider’s sound soon softens, but there’s still and urgency to his phrasing further driven by Richmond and Nussbaum’s prodding support. A pair of Laverne’s tunes complete the program along with Thad Jones’ “Kids Are Pretty People.” All three tracks are comparable in caliber to what’s come before.
From first bar to last, Schneider and his colleagues argue a compelling case. The crux- it’s still possible to make vital new music with standard issue tenor-led quartets. In other words, if it ain’t broke, there’s no need to replace it.
January 26, 2004
Oliver Nelson - Nocturne (Prestige / Moodsville)
A good friend of mine once likened Oliver Nelson's playing to a "silent scream". Literally, the comparison may make more sense if one were talking about the work of contemporary saxophonists such as Urs Leimgruber, whose work seems increasingly concerned revealing the musical qualities of what typically passes by “unheard” when he chooses to interact with his instrument. A concern with the fundamental issues of utterance, if you will… But what my friend was trying to get at was the sense that, underneath Nelson’s formidable technique — along with the still under-valued Bill Barron, was one of the first saxophonists to achieve a true (i.e., personal) understanding of John Coltrane’s "sheets of sound"; he also logged some time as a pupil of Elliott Carter — and almost implacably "legitimate" tone, there is a roiling emotional complexity that never quite found full expression.
Few albums showcase Nelson's abilities as a "jazzman", and not just a crack arranger, as well as this one. Because you can hear that raggedness beneath the sheer, smooth glissandi, the dissonance beneath the gorgeous lyricism (derived chiefly from Ellington and strictly non-jazz based saxophone literature), and the discontent beneath the ostensible “moods” assumed, like camouflage, by the entire ensemble (Lem Winchester, vibes, and one of Nelson's most compatible collaborators; Richard Wyands, piano; George Duvivier, bass; Roy Haynes, drums) from piece to piece on Nocturne. The title track is an etude devoid of any improvised content that manages to be both scintillating and haunting, and the two blues performances ("Bob’s Blues"; "Early Morning") strain against perfect relaxation. But it is the readings of "Man With A Horn", "Azur’Te", and especially "Time After Time" that are characteristically extreme in the way only Oliver Nelson can be. His solos on both pieces glide down the AABA runways of each song like handsome, fastidious models, each accoutrement a necessary element in the balancing of line (stationary as well as mobile), color and texture that is also an agonized attempt to transform the human figure into a demonstration of Euclidean "beauty". But what happens when one's own skin begins to feel like a costume? People are not statues, and poses, like all surfaces, are inevitably broken: a hand trembles; a blink, like a tiny writhing, mars the face; the course taken by a drop of sweat drives hairs out of place. Far from being a tease, this is what counts for nakedness in Nelson's music.
January 25, 2004
so Tony Levin is selling his car
Visited the Mind Your Own Music site today, and there, gracing the front page, is a picture of this sweeeeeet candy apple red '63 Aston Martin. Turns out that Brit jazz drummer Tony Levin is selling his baby of 37 years to help finance a new jazz club he intends to open. Clicking through to further details, you find the quote, "This is a rare opportunity to purchase a famous DB4 which has been lovingly cared for by a celebrity." I love that. Levin deserves every pound he's asking for, for such unabashed advertising. I want to see this club in operation by year's end and wonder what type of music he plans to book. Certainly it won't be another Ronnie Scott's! Maybe Warburton wants to go dutch with me and we can timeshare. He can drive it whenever he's in the States.
January 23, 2004
Bully Pulpit
Hoping I’m not stealing anyone’s thunder, but readers should be alerted to Phil’s new column PDF FILE debuting under the FEATURES section to the right. It’s a good read in what’s likely to become a repository of good reads. On a side note, I’m currently taking entries for the "Guess Phil’s Middle Name Contest.” Grand Prize is a "Bagatellen Flying Saucers versus Gamera" picture hand-drawn by Adrian Clercx, Age 9.
Loving Big Brother
"He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."—George Orwell
Living (as most of us here do) in an alternate sonic universe, where musicians totally unknown to 99 percent of the world are worshipped like gods, makes for a kind of dissonance that can be cool, and fun, but is most often jarring, and can be injurious to one’s self-esteem. One of the few positive aspects of Internet message boards is that every once in awhile, you can post a message and get a response from somebody who’s got more Keiji Haino albums than you do, thus making you officially no longer the geekiest person you know. It’s a nice feeling, for the few moments that it lasts. But I still can’t forget all the years before I got online, when I was creeping through my high school halls blasting Borbetomagus’s Live In Allentown, or Miles Davis’s On The Corner, in my Walkman and trying in vain to figure out what earthly pleasure anyone could possibly get from U2’s The Joshua Tree.
Here’s the bad thing about going online, though: there are lots of other critics there. Many of them have blogs. And a hell of a lot of them (or maybe it’s just the ones posting at I Love Music) seem to love mainstream pop.
When I started writing about music for money, I deluded myself that the feeling of geekiness, of permanent outsiderdom, would go away. That my tastes were in some way being validated by the fact that I could get an editor to print an interview with, say, Blixa Bargeld, and maybe even pay me. And for awhile, that delusion held, especially when (as happened a few times) I got letters from kids in scuzzy tanktowns saying "I bought [insert zine title here] and your stuff is great! I bought that Flipper album you talked about, and I love it!" That kind of feedback went a long way toward making my attitude toward music criticism what it is, which is this:
Critics get records for free. (Occasionally I will write about a record I’ve gone out and paid cash for, like a review of a new Noah Howard 2-CD set I’ve got coming in the March 04 Wire, but 95 percent of the time, the previous statement holds true.) Thus, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the person reading the review does not get that record for free, and, depending on how obscure it is, they may have to go to some trouble to find a copy. So it’s important, to me, to explain, in plain language, whether or not that record is worth the money and effort it will take to get it.
(Yes, go ahead and gasp in horror: I am one of those "consumer guide" critics. I don’t write about the social context in which an album was created, or how/whether it "speaks truth to power," I don’t write about who the bass player is sleeping with, or who in the band’s hometown scene loves or hates them. I try my best to describe what the music sounds like, occasionally employing references I anticipate the majority of my theoretical readers understanding, and I issue a recommendation. Buy it, don’t buy it. One more thing: I try to write about records that need the help. I don’t think there’s any virtue inherent in obscurity. I don’t think selling more than 500 copies of a CD is a sin. And I don’t think that any particular genre of music is doomed to obscurity because of how it sounds. I know a disc like Too Beautiful To Burn won’t do Shania Twain numbers, but listening to it, I feel like it ought to appeal to a wider variety of people than it’s likely to reach, just because of where it’ll get reviewed and where it won’t. For these reasons, I tend to pitch reviews of records I don’t think anybody else will be pitching. I don’t need to be the 500th person to talk about how great Radiohead is. I’d rather be one of six people who talk about how great Pelican is. And wow, are they. But that’s a topic for another time.)
But I’m not anti pop. Really, I’m not. I bought the last Kylie Minogue album, and the Missy Elliott album before the most recent one. Still, it seems to me that critics who write about pop are wasting their time, and their readers’. And, more problematically (because it poisons discourse), it seems to me that critics who write about pop often do so with a venomous defensiveness that helps nothing and no one.
First of all, pop records don’t need critics’ help. Justin Timberlake, to take a recent example, has a multi-million-dollar promotional budget at his disposal. He makes videos that get played dozens of times a day on MTV. His songs are on the radio almost constantly. He has appeared on the cover of People and US Weekly and Rolling Stone and Details, and I’m sure The Weekly Standard and The New Republic would put him on their covers, if they could figure out a way to justify it. So for music critics to expend print-space (or bandwidth) talking about him is, ultimately, a waste. They are not going to convince anyone otherwise not inclined to purchase a Justin Timberlake CD that, in fact, a Justin Timberlake CD is exactly what they need. Ain’t gonna happen, at least not in sufficient numbers to justify covering him versus covering Pelican. Anybody who wants to can form a judgement of their own about Timberlake simply by turning on the radio. Thus the record is literally critic-proof; there is no role for the critic as informer, as consumer guide, there.
Second of all, I sometimes feel, reading articles like this one, that critics who spend a lot of their time gushing over pop know, on some level, that what they’re doing is ultimately useless, and that’s why they get so defensive about it. Like The New Yorker needs to get on board the Justin Timberlake bandwagon. Pop is not a fit subject for criticism because not only is it critic-proof, but it seems to be designed to lash out against criticism, to resist contextualization, to murder thought. So how does a writer justify attempting to say anything beyond "I like this record. It makes me jump around"? He (and it’s mostly a male thing) does it by bashing those who don’t see the value in Justin Timberlake, or Missy Elliott, as anti-fun, or "worse," as elitists ("rockist," as Frere-Jones points out, is the epithet of choice), holding on to some foggy memory of the days when white guitar rock ruled the world. Accusations of racism and classism, tossed about because not everybody's wowed by this month's hot sample, or the latest flashy video. It's just one more variation on the oldest (and most dishonest) game in America.
But the pop edifice remains impassive, impenetrable. The pop industry is as indifferent to its sycophants as it is to its would-be assassins. The only time the industry registers concern is when sales drop, and there’s no demonstrable correlation between reviews and sales. (This isn’t a purely music-biz phenomenon, either; The Cat In The Hat, to pick but one example, did land-office business despite uniformly, unrelentingly savage write-ups.) On the other hand, a well-placed review of a struggling death-metal band can mean the difference between 5000 and 10,000 CDs sold, and that’s no small difference.
Pop doesn’t care whether critics like it or not. Its power is in its omnipresence, in its irresistibility (irresistible like a tank through the front door, not like a chocolate truffle on the tongue). Pop is about control. When Timbaland (a producer who works with both Justin Timberlake and Missy Elliott, as well as many other folks in the post-soul hip-hop pop continuum) incorporates Indian music, or initially-jarring video-game samples, into his work, it’s not about subverting the pop orthodoxy. It’s about reinforcing that orthodoxy, by showing that nothing can escape pop’s omnivorousness. Everything is fodder for the mulching process in which music becomes pop music.
This doesn’t mean that non-pop music, that which has yet to be consumed and turned into an R&B backing track, is about insurgency. But the pop industry must crush that which it has not itself produced or found a need for. Therefore, reviews of non-pop records, of records deemed commercially unpalatable or too weird for the mass market, can (must, perhaps) be viewed as altruistic gestures. To review a pop record, positively or negatively, is to kneel before the throne. To review an obscure record, thereby granting it the glimmer of limelight the industry would deny it, is nobler, and ultimately, I’d say, the proper job of a critic.
Why does this bother me? I don't know. I get to write what I want, about who I want, so why should it concern me what other critics write about? Why do I feel like I'm back sitting at the uncool kids' table because I don't like 50 Cent or crunk or whatever else is getting written up in the Village Voice this week? I guess the same impulse that drives me to proselytize about obscure death metal records under the presumption that someone will read my words and respond makes me think I can change the minds of my fellow writers, too.
But of course that's just a delusion. Hubris. From an elitist, old before his time, who hates fun.
January 20, 2004
Gerry & Elephant
What the hell happened to Gus Van Sant? As far as I’m concerned he’s been caught in a creative tailspin since 95’s To Die For (itself a flawed enterprise), nevermind the hare-brained waste of celluloid that was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.
Last year’s Gerry plays out as a paean to tedium virtually unmatched thus far in the cinema of the new millennium. Sure the cinematography’s gorgeous. But when the desolate sepia-tinged landscapes of the Utah desert serve as more palpable characters than the two twenty-something cardboard cut-outs played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck the red flag necessarily gets raised (taking into account that such banality is Van Sant’s intention). With a script that probably filled no more than two college-ruled pages the film goes down like one of those Canadian Aero™ chocolate bars- a vaguely tantalizing taste shot through with lots of vacant air.
This year’s Elephant is an even more egregious exercise in self-indulgent sophistry. ‘Experimental’ in its use of improvised dialogue and a cast comprised largely of the teenaged population it seeks to portray; the damn thing comes off as alternately overwrought and undercooked. Painfully protracted long shots combine with nebulous & stilted dialogue. A ham-fisted gay subtext vies with caricatured species of students including a trio of bulimic fashion-obsessed girls straight out of Fox’s OC. One of the few engaging aspects arises through a tweaking of time and perspective. Scenes are repeated from various characters’ vantages. But even this stratagem is squandered on a ‘plot’ that’s as pointless as it is plodding.
Van Sant’s earlier work- Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho (in spite of Keanu Reeves bumbling performance) especially- stands as some of my favorite cinema of the 90s. So my indignation seems justified. I want to know where his head is at & if there’s a cure in sight. Did the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho permanently shunt the flow of his creative juices?
Globe Unity: Then and Now
Globe Unity: Then and Now
It has been almost 37 years since Alexander Von Schlippenbach’s first effort to merge big band orchestration with free improvisation. That endeavor hasn’t seen much of commercial circulation since its original 1966 release on the German Saba label, and it is a wonder why. For a group so influential to the improvising small ensemble and large group of the past thirty years, why are more Globe Unity Orchestra recordings not widely available? Yes, there is a true, traceable lineage with respect to Schlippenbach’s early works, and yes, a large number of today’s free improvisors owe the group an incalculable debt with respect to techniques, interactivity, and compositional methods. But the beauty of such music is that its intent is, in large part, to never be repeated, at least in performance. There exists a sizable catalog of Globe Unity recordings, many of which have only been heard by the chosen few (or those with a nice enough disposable income). Be that as it may, enough copies of Globe Unity (Saba, 1966) were pressed originally and in sparing reissue efforts that a decent copy is bound to show up from time to time in the offbeat vinyl store or on electronic auction websites.
Globe Unity was a launching pad for Schlippenbach’s musical ideas, and the music within could be said to reflect his inability to sit still. Consisting of two long-form orchestrations, the record shows two opposing sides to the composer: “Globe Unity” is the side of choice and stands as a key predecessor to today’s “free” improvisation, while “Sun” suggests an early interest in the influences of mid-century “world” music in the Europeans’ task of making a unique, modern voice for itself outside of coexisting American forms.
Together, the album is far from cohesive but the numbers on their own make for an interesting, if not head-first entry into European improv’s semi-recent history. Personnel ranges from genre giants (Peter Brötzmann, Günter Hampel, Manfred Schoof, Peter Kowald, Willem Breuker) to the utterly obscure (Willi Lietzmann, Kris Wanders, Jaki Liebezeit, Mani Neumeier).
The distinctive characteristic of “Globe Unity” is its definable (by today’s standards) structure, a series of improvised solos and off-pairings that come and go by Schlippenbach’s direction within the framework of a large, written score. The solos are exciting enough, full of youthful energy, and the musicians’ interest in making individual statements is not only conducive to the disposition of the piece, but manifest. “Sun”, on the other hand, is a delicate piece of music driven by percussive instrumentation, and marked by a “chorus” that features piano, bass and tuba. Though not an essential piece of music, one wonders how many of yesterday’s Transatlantic groups (Ganelin, Breuker’s, et al.) were inspired by “Sun”. Certainly it has its place in associated lineages.
Considered together, Globe Unity and Globe Unity 2002 (Intakt, 2003) are joined in their own polarities. They have in common their leader, and the now-recognizable voices of a handful of the players. Otherwise, one could be said to be the end of the other. In 37 years the methods have changed, so have the inspirations, and let’s not forget the global environment in which the musicians operate.
Globe Unity 2002 is the controlled free-for-all we have come to expect from such veteran European improvisors as Brötzmann, Johannes Bauer, Paul Rutherford and Evan Parker. Apparently, Schlippenbach laid down no motifs, no scores, and no rules in the moments prior to the concert. Lending further to the concept of external-stimuli-as-guidance is an event shared among musicians and audience: the recent passing of a local music enthusiast and proponent. The music simply opens with the pianist in calm arrhythmic reflection, and the rest characteristically follow. Along the way there are collective breaks, stop-time entries from soloists, subset exchanges among the personnel, and the occasional liftoff to higher planes. The music is as exciting as it is nerve-wracking: at times the horns seem hell-bent on disagreeable pitches through which to howl and holler, others seem exercises in just-how-atonal-can-we-get?. But these episodes are hallmarks of the tradition, and no similar occasion would be complete without them. It should be added that Schlippenbach and the unlikely returnee, a reflective Manfred Schoof, maintain a sense of poise and control throughout all 74 minutes, and, somehow, steer the others from the occasional search-and-destroy operation. To pull from another Schlippenbach title, the 2002 music is, simply, living.
If one thing has remained a constant for the Globe Unity Orchestra in four decades, it is the undeniable presence of political undertones in the music, a trait decidedly apart from concurrent collectives. Michael Mantler’s group, the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, the Breuker Kollektief, the Instant Composers Pool; these all owe in part to Schlippenbach’s vision. And though a large part of that vision has been shared and built upon, none of those have been able to convey their own socio-political environments as pervasively. With Globe Unity, those influences are unmistakable. The riotous atmosphere of the 2002 recording translates well the global instability in which it was operating, while the 1966 session tells of non-conformity and an effort to find permanence – even within the music’s own disorder – in a rapidly evolving musical environment. Globe Unity’s success in expression could be measured by the chances it takes, and music rarely gets as close to tangibility.
My Own Public Pablum
What the hell happened to Gus Van Sant? As far as I’m concerned he’s been caught in a creative tailspin since 95’s To Die For (itself a flawed enterprise), nevermind the hare-brained waste of celluloid that was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.
Last year’s Gerry plays out as a paean to tedium virtually unmatched thus far in the cinema of the new millennium. Sure the cinematography’s gorgeous. But when the desolate sepia-tinged landscapes of the Utah desert serve as more palpable characters than the two twenty-something cardboard cut-outs played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck the red flag necessarily gets raised (taking into account that such banality is Van Sant’s intention). With a script that probably filled no more than two college-ruled pages the film goes down like one of those Canadian Aero™ chocolate bars- a vaguely tantalizing taste shot through with lots of vacant air.
This year’s Elephant is an even more egregious exercise in self-indulgent sophistry. ‘Experimental’ in its use of improvised dialogue and a cast comprised largely of the teenaged population it seeks to portray; the damn thing comes off as alternately overwrought and undercooked. Painfully protracted long shots combine with nebulous & stilted dialogue. A ham-fisted gay subtext vies with caricatured species of students including a trio of bulimic fashion-obsessed girls straight out of Fox’s OC. One of the few engaging aspects arises through a tweaking of time and perspective. Scenes are repeated from various characters’ vantages. But even this stratagem is squandered on a ‘plot’ that’s as pointless as it is plodding.
Van Sant’s earlier work- Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho (in spite of Keanu Reeves bumbling performance) especially- stands as some of my favorite cinema of the 90s. So my indignation seems justified. I want to know where his head is at & if there’s a cure in sight. Did the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho permanently shunt the flow of his creative juices?
William Gagliardi Quintet - Nhlahla
Late bloomers are still a bit of a rare breed in jazz. The majority of players cut their teeth early, honing chops in school and or on the bandstand. Most don’t make the decision to devote a their lives to the dubious pursuit of improvised music at middle age. Bill Gagliardi is among the happy exceptions. He recorded Music is the Meditation, his debut, for CIMP at 54. Though to be true and fair, Gagliardi’s been at the game for far longer than his terse discography might suggest.
Gagliardi’s sophomore disc comes from the first of two CIMP sessions that spawned enough music for two whole albums (the other being Ernie Krivda’s project). Evidently, the summer of 2003 was an intensely fertile time for creative improvised music at The Spirit Room. On hand are some of his familiar compatriots. Hofstra leaves his tuba at home and turns attention solely to double bass. Grassi is the ideal sort of drummer for this sort of date. He joins muscle with dexterity in a stentorian style of sticking well suited to Gagliardi’s boisterous tenor.
Nhlahla borrows from a Zulu word for good fortune. As the title track it counters any assumptions toward bombast with a dreamy preface of thumb piano and diaphanous guitar. Hofstra and Grassi enter and lock down an organic groove that primes Gagliardi and Carlson for a energizing twining of horn lines. The tune reminds me of something from the Billy Harper songbook with its pliant rhythmic underpinning, African leanings and open-ended interplay. Wessel torques his strings, producing a tonal warble that wrestles with Gagliardi’s rowdy vocal chants. Hofstra’s bass interlude comes on a bit abrupt, but his measured lines contrast well with the earlier huffing and puffing.
“Henderson” is only identified by surname, but Gagliardi’s bold phrasing and the hardbop reminiscent head suggests shades of Joe. Carlson’s punchy salvos recalls a bit of Dorham too. Wessel plays it sparse at first, leaving Hofstra to lay down a turgid walking line in synch with Grassi’s choppy beats. Minutes later he’s trading plinking licks with the leader’s horn and soloing to fine effect. Gagliardi gives Thelonious the proper due with “The Loneliest Monk” and revisits the Chitlin circuit of yore with the surprisingly laconic “Walking the Bar.” Both are brief, but highly entertaining pieces; the former another feature for Wessel’s surly fretwork, the latter built on Hofstra’s elastic pizzicato. “Hearthstone Conference” returns the band to the long form with mixed results.
The end in sight, an old-fashioned blow out seems in order. Gagliardi obliges with “The Oracle of Pat Riot.” Divining Ayler, Trane, Wright and the rest he funnels a modest geyser of breath through his tenor. Wessel, Hofstra and Grassi respond in kind and weave a supportive web around him. In light of his recent recording activity, there’s the strong temptation to argue that Gagliardi is making up for lost time. Reality references the opposite side of the coin. It’s we listeners who are finally catching up with him.
Peg Leg Sam - Medicine Show Man (Trix)
With a sobriquet straight out of the pages of a pirate novel Peg Leg Sam promises much in the way of flamboyant musical knavery. His sole entry for the Trix label makes good on the pledge. Sam’s songbook transcends the blues’ porous boundaries and overlaps with old-timey country and folk repertoires. All were learned on his peregrinations through the States and even overseas to Cuba, Jamaica and the Bahamas. Friendship with songster Pink Anderson led a lengthy career in the medicine shows. As such, the disc’s title isn’t some flippant marketing ploy. Substantial technique informs his extempore harmonica style and he accomplishes some amazing feats, but it’s all in deference to the various moods that strike him. “Peg’s Fox Chase” suggests the pinnacle of his powers. A favorite staple of harp players, Sam puts a charming spin on the tune in a virtuosic display of coarse breathing and blowing punctuated by jocular shouts, whoops and hollers that evokes the harried fox’s efforts to outwit the hounds. On “Greasy Greens” an ode to his favorite cuisine of lard-soaked collards, he crafts one clever rhyming verse after another. Guitarists Henry Johnson and Baby Tate each guest on a handful of cuts, laying down string bean licks and harmonizing vocals under Sam’s gesticulative lead. Handclaps and scuffling foot shuffles act as other instrumental agents for the colloquial house party on hand. Sam didn’t record much beyond what’s preserved here, but at an hour-plus a picture of his peculiar homespun artistry develops in vivid relief.
January 19, 2004
Lacy/Waldron
I’ve long treasured half of this recording, the half which I acquired when it was released as a Hat twofer called ‘Round Midnight (collecting two of the original four Hat Hut LPs, the other two of which were disc-a-fied as The Peak). Together, these four records document a week’s residency at Paris’ Dreher by the long-standing duo of ex-pats soprano specialist Steve Lacy and the melancholic piano master Mal Waldron. This is a fitting monument to one of the most inventive, enjoyable, and long-standing partnerships in improvised music, beginning with Lacy’s 1958 Monk program Reflections, continuing through their move to Europe, and lasting from their return to active partnership in the 1970s through their final tours (including one in the U.S., where they played magnificently) in the early 21st century (ending, sadly, with Waldron’s death in 2003).
Throughout their shared history, the two developed an extraordinary musical simpatico, a language of interwoven lines as dense as a double helix and equally mysterious. Yet these releases constitute their first official documentation as a duo. Over the course of these four discs (and here’s hoping that the Hat reissue program continues by the way, as it seems to with the recent reissue of the Giuffre/Bley/Swallow concerts), the decades-old friends cycle through familiar material – mostly Lacy originals, with the occasional Waldron tune, and a handful of Monks – but do so with an ever-present spirit of invention. No tired by-the-numbers playing, this is spontaneous music at its best. Even on pulse-based pieces like “Bone” (one of my personal Lacy faves), Waldron can – with that effortless architectural wizardry he possessed – divert the whole performance with an unexpected lyric fantasy pushing through his characteristic dark clouds.
There are also unexpected rarities, such as the delightfully abstract “I Feel a Draft.” The 17-minute reading of “The Peak” itself is something of a laboratory for these two singular approaches, ranging from concentrated lyricism to sudden jagged dissonances (which conjure up the imagery of the title) to down-low rhythmic movement. Lacy’s subtle alteration of his tone in mid-line, even mid-note, is captured beautifully here, as is Waldron’s now heavy, now fragile chordal architecture. It’s fascinating to hear how their moods change over the course of a set (and over the course of this brief club residency): at times they bounce from tune to tune, delighting in their rapport and improvising with playful freshness (say on Waldron’s “Hooray for Herbie”), while elsewhere they fall deep into melancholy and linger . . . And across these four discs, when Waldron is left to play alone, he often finds himself in a rhythmic space where he sounds as if he might break into “Snake Out” at any moment (he does so only twice).
It’s a real joy for me to revisit the music I’ve long known in context with the other half of these recordings. Though there is quite a lot of music here – just shy of 262 minutes in total – and it’s best absorbed one disc at a time, this is a sparkling example of two modern masters perfectly matched in their idiosyncrasy. Newcomers might scoff at the playlist and its apparent repetition; after all, there are multiple versions here of “’Round Midnight,” “No Baby,” “Well You Needn’t,” “Herbe de L’Oublie,” “Snake Out,” “Let’s Call This,” and “Epistrophy.” But that would be like saying about that beautiful Paul Klee hanging in your living room, “it always looks the same.” This music changes and grows with you, with each listening.
Oren Ambarchi/Gunter Muller/Philip Samartzis - Strange Love
Oren Ambarchi/Gunter Muller/Philip Samartzis
Strange Love
For4Ears 1448
Drones. The term undoubtedly gets applied too loosely in this music. I tend to think of most relatively continuous, in-some-sense smooth, having as one of its components some kind of buzz or growl kinds of music as drone. Or having drone aspects. Maybe. My knowledge of the music of all three of the participants on this very fine recording led me to expect something dronish in nature. Their work generally involves stretches of sound where at least certain elements remain fairly constant, sticking around for extended periods while others are added or removed. So in a way, at least as I use the term, this is drone music.
It begins with a low thrum, pulsating in irregular contractions, quickly joined by a wavering, very high pitch. Just these two things, their cycles unaligned, create a fascinating line, something akin to what Alvin Lucier achieves, where two fairly pure tones interact to generate ghost pulses. Several minutes in, a middle tone appears, slightly fuzzy, granulating the affair a bit, texturizing the music delightfully. This additive and subtractive strategy is something I find immensely appealing but the key, as always, is in the choices. There are perhaps an infinity of possible good decisions to be made but, a la Cantor, a far greater infinity of bad ones! As in much of this sort of improv, a music so seemingly wide open, it’s those choices that make or break a recording. Muller enjoys injecting looped rhythms and he does so here now and then (I’m assuming it’s Gunter), a temporary spine along which to drape a threatening growl, a shawl of static, a nest of buzz. The music doesn’t grow so much as it spreads, taking on particles of beauty or detritus as it sees fit, abandoning others. This is the first of two pieces, “cooler”, recorded live at the What Is Music? festival in 2002. It gradually becomes grainier, the sonic elements utilized getting rougher, more particulate (including some voice samples from, again I’m assuming, Samartzis). There’s a build-up in volume intensity in the last several minutes, and an interesting concurrent rise in “drama” (or at least anxiety) before everything’s subsumed in a stack of whistling harmonics.
Part of me, listening to music like this, wonders what could have gone “wrong”. Does the basic pathway or situation chosen more or less guarantee an aesthetically satisfying result? I don’t think so by any means and, as mentioned above, have to believe it comes down to choices made on the spot. Not that it doesn’t ultimately devolve to a matter of taste with regard to the appropriateness, wisdom, discernment of those choices, but for me, the balance between “rightness” and “surprise” is struck quite well. Rightness in the retroactive sense of, “Yes, that sounded very natural and unforced”, surprise in that, as natural as it sounds to me now, it’s something I never would’ve thought of before hearing it.
The second track is “warmer”, compiled in the studio in late 2003. Warmer, I suppose it is, beginning in similar territory to “cooler”, but with the crucial addition of Ambarchi’s softly strummed guitar. Tapes of children’s voices sounding as though recorded on the street, ambient city noises and wind flutters emerge over a subtle, low-range rhythm. The voices, recalling Ferrari, are strangely welcome here and missed when passed by. It’s an element rarely found in a music that is nominally all-inclusive of sounds and yet another pleasant surprise here. Ringing tones predominate the closing minutes of the track, again mixed with the room-molded conversation of a group of people, a wonderful juxtaposition.
Are these drone pieces? There’s a continuity, an underlying though varying hum that causes me to think of it as such. But whatever, “Strange Love” is a lovely, tactilely lush and disarmingly imaginative album. Especially recommended for those who have heard Muller but not yet gotten around to the two fine gentlemen from Australia, each of whom has released plenty of excellent work on his own.
January 18, 2004
Urs Leimgruber/Gunter Muller/ARTE Quartet - e_a.sonata.02
Urs Leimgruber/Gunter Muller/ARTE Quartet
e_a.sonata.02
For4Ears
1447
Urs Leimgruber had been previously working with the ARTE quartet (four saxophonists) for a couple of years before getting the idea to include Gunter Muller in the mix. Muller, as is his habit, took recordings of the musicians, processed and replayed them for Leimgruber, showing how his sounds would work in tandem with theirs. Typically, Muller renders the original sources virtually unidentifiable. Leimgruber then roughed out a compositional timeline for this sextet, sketching areas where certain playing combinations would occur, where Muller would improvise, where he’d do live sampling of the saxophonists’ improvisations, etc. Written parts for the reed players are scattered throughout. The result, a single 52-minute piece here presented in a live recording, is a sprawling, sometimes engrossing but ultimately frustrating work, one in which the sheer depth and imagination expressed in Muller’s contributions far outweighs that of his compadres.
It’s an interesting problem and part of it may simply be that I’m so attuned and partial to Muller’s musical conception that I’m irresistibly drawn toward his sounds at the expense of everyone else’s. At times, the most successful portions of the disc, the reeds lie low and almost evanesce, taking on the role that Keith Rowe often assumes these days, that of a canvas for fellow musicians to leave marks on, something that’s almost nothing yet, at the same time, crucially important. The saxophonists (who range from soprano to baritone, including an “electric saxophone”) do their best to sound un-saxophone-y although when the baritonist has a small feature about 30 minutes in, he (I’m guessing the first name “Beat”—shared by two of the musicians—is male) resorts to some tried and true, that is to say stale, avant-gardisms. The others also delve into such areas on occasion, generally in chirping territory. That old oil and water aspect once again rears its head: the difficulty of the saxophone merging with the electronics. Leimgruber has been attempting to breach this divide more and more often lately and, to the extent he sublimates his jazz-derived tendencies, he’s sometimes reasonably successful. But over the course of a 50-minute plus work, he (and the others) seem unable to sustain the requisite selflessness, to not regularly coalesce into the overall sound at the expense of so-called personal expression.
Muller provides some really marvelous work on his own and fans of his music may find the disc worth their while for that reason alone. The diverse nature of the sounds he evokes, the quiet, insinuating rhythms that evaporate almost before you’re aware of their presence and his endlessly colorful palette are truly wonders to behold. Also, as mentioned above, there are moments when everything meshes and you forget you’re listening to six musicians as opposed to simply listening to music (the end of the piece flickers out in a lovely manner, for instance). But as a whole, I’m not sure “e_a.sonata.02” is as convincing, as of a piece, as I wanted it to be.
January 17, 2004
soni on balance
|
Various Artists AMPLIFY 2002: balance Erstwhile Records |
|
October 2002: Jon Abbey, of Erstwhile Records holds a festival in Tokyo of new improvised music. Its lineup includes many of the Japanese and European standouts of a niche community, some of whose roots lie alternately in free-jazz and modern composition, two poles of the avant-garde whose difference rests on a structural issue. Modern composition makes structure external, its methods are intelligible – at least in theory they are – and visible, where in free-jazz the structural mechanics are all internal and accessed as such through the intuition (that “brewing luminous,” in the Cecil Taylor sense). This new improv (third generation free improv?) takes the material concerns of new music avant-garde, and applies to those materials a method derived in part from the legacy of jazz. The festival proper is three days long, with satellite shows (which included the only non-Japanese or European improvisor on the set, Australian Oren Ambarchi) running before and after through the surrounding days. Out of the festival emerges this boxset.
AMPLIFY 2002: balance is comprised of seven audio cds, and one DVD, a visual document of the festival by Jonas Leddington. Six of those audio cds are live recordings, made on location, in front of the audience attending the festival. And there’s “tint”, a studio recording from Toshimaru Nakamura and Günter Müller, carefully constructed, as all of the recordings are on Erstwhile.
If we would take a leap, and classify the variety of music that is documented in the AMPLIFY 2002: balance box, as “expressionistic”, we immediately run into a problem. Abstract Expressionism, in particular was, in part, about the subtle interaction of eye, hand and brush. All mimesis was drained from the act of painting, and gesture was abstracted therefrom. It was, in many ways, a recording of a particular subjectivity, a recording of interior vision. Expressionism is about singularity, about one brain, one heart, and one object. But, in improvised music, solo performances are the exception, rather than the rule. Interaction with another being, whether it be the audience or a room, seems to be a necessity. But with expressionist painting, especially of the abstract variety, the idea of a collaborative piece between two artists seems preposterous. What would a collaborative painting between both Phillip Guston and Mark Rothko look like? Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollack? The mind rebels against the prospect. We then need a way to describe how a pluralistic expressionism would work.
In
this boxset, we find the following means being employed: acoustic and
electric guitars, turntables, analogue and digital synthesizers, laptops,
a no-input mixing board, an “empty” sampler, an ipod, a minidisc
player/recorder, percussives, voice and the occasional intervention of a
clarinet. But, this is not
the totality of what we are talking about when we say “material.”
Those that know me must be tired by now of this Cardew quote by
now, but I’ll repeat it again:
“...it
is impossible to record with any fidelity a kind of music that is actually
derived from the room in which it is taking place - its size, shape,
acoustical properties, even the view from the window...” - Towards an Ethic of Improvisation This
is one of the primary pleasures of Jonas Leddington’s DVD visual
document, “balance beams”, that is included in the boxset.
It offers its viewer “the view from the window”.
“‘How
do you prepare for a performance of highly abstract music?’
I think you begin by preparing yourself.
It’s not in the manipulation of the instrument…it’s in the
perception of how you see the performance, or how you view performance.
I’m really honest when I say....when [at] a performance I put my
guitar on the table, I get it all working, I go off [and] do something and
it’s eight o’clock and it’s time to play, and I kind of look at the
guitar in absolute horror at that point, and I really don’t have a
single idea. I’ll go
further and say, when my hand descends to play the very first notes of a
performance, I still don’t have any ideas.
As the hands or the fingers are just beginning to touch the
strings, ideas begin to come, and you just take it from whatever begins to
happen at that stage....I think what a performance is, is basically
focusing on what is happening in front of you.
In order to focus, and to have something worthwhile within you to
be reflected, that comes from constantly observing what’s happening
around you and scrutinizing your work…looking very, very quickly....” - Keith Rowe, from “balance beams” Viewed from the perspective of the listener though, this form of interaction is invisible. We see only the external manifestations of this form of interaction, this relationship as extending into materiality. In that we hear something like music, we’re hearing a precipitation of all of those material events described. Electronic improvised music, “balanced improv”, as Abbey once referred to it, grows climactically. Weather and pressure become a metaphor we can use to describe this external blossoming of the image, in that there is no set form prior to each concert to adhere to. The musical results are predicated exclusively on the interactions of material conditions. Each set is a grouping of conditions, which, through the mediation of the artists, plays out within the venues. What prevents this from being cold and sterile is the depth of character of each of these musicians. Their discipline must be enormous, to be able to keep their heads in the midst of this complex “unfoldment”. It feels like something alchemical.
Among
the many joys of the DVD are the short glimpses of after parties and
pre-concert preparations. To be honest, it humanizes the musicians.
When you see Taku Sugimoto with a big grin on his face, twirling
his hat on his finger, the yawning valleys between notes in the Sugimoto
Guitar quartet seem less about austerity, and more about humility, as per
Günter Müller’s comments. As
it is tied to the circumstances of weather, the variety of improvised
music documented on this box defines itself by the atmosphere it creates.
We seem to experience abstract music as we experience climate, in that we
are reacting internally to external changes in pressure. Abstract music
does not have the cognitive currency that music that employs melody does.
One imagines that there is basic pattern-recognition taking place, but
nothing on the order of perceptual gymnastics that occur when listening to
complex melodies and harmonies.  Atmosphere,
as precipitation, is not just its outward, visible facts. There are hidden
relationships, which are not only mechanical; they are felt as much as
they are seen. It is not just the rain that we enjoy, it is the
accompanying wind, the smell it brings from the soil, the way clouds dim
the sun, the humidity, etc. In a similar way, the dancers in the Degas
painting are not just an occasion for paint. It is their relationships; on
one level those relationships of the dancers as their physical selves,
graceful and lithe, and on the other level, the hidden, invisible
relationships - friendships, rivalries, affinities, disinclinations among
themselves that structure their outward organization as framed and denoted
by Degas. The music described within the AMPLIFY boxset offers similar
relationships that are as often as hidden, and as complex as those in that
painting, and in climate. The boxset offers us a picture (with well
defined edges and frames, it is an image of the festival, not the
image of it, one imagines that the participants and immediate spectators
have memories that are quiet different than what is documented here) of a
system of subtly interacting elements: room, temperament, temperature,
etc. It is has a peculiar variety of organization that may be visible to
those in the future. At the present, though, any sort of descriptive
physics remains unwritten. It
is difficult to describe where exactly the pleasure of this music arises
from, but it seems to be akin to the feeling of the sun against skin. |
| ~Nirav Soni |
This
box, then, becomes a course in the combinatronics of the musical climactic
instability.Balance
|
Various Artists AMPLIFY 2002: balance Erstwhile Records |
|
October 2002: Jon Abbey, of Erstwhile Records holds a festival in Tokyo of new improvised music. Its lineup includes many of the Japanese and European standouts of a niche community, some of whose roots lie alternately in free-jazz and modern composition, two poles of the avant-garde whose difference rests on a structural issue. Modern composition makes structure external, its methods are intelligible – at least in theory they are – and visible, where in free-jazz the structural mechanics are all internal and accessed as such through the intuition (that “brewing luminous,” in the Cecil Taylor sense). This new improv (third generation free improv?) takes the material concerns of new music avant-garde, and applies to those materials a method derived in part from the legacy of jazz. The festival proper is three days long, with satellite shows (which included the only non-Japanese or European improvisor on the set, Australian Oren Ambarchi) running before and after through the surrounding days. Out of the festival emerges this boxset.
AMPLIFY 2002: balance is comprised of seven audio cds, and one DVD, a visual document of the festival by Jonas Leddington. Six of those audio cds are live recordings, made on location, in front of the audience attending the festival. And there’s “tint”, a studio recording from Toshimaru Nakamura and Günter Müller, carefully constructed, as all of the recordings are on Erstwhile.
If we would take a leap, and classify the variety of music that is documented in the AMPLIFY 2002: balance box, as “expressionistic”, we immediately run into a problem. Abstract Expressionism, in particular was, in part, about the subtle interaction of eye, hand and brush. All mimesis was drained from the act of painting, and gesture was abstracted therefrom. It was, in many ways, a recording of a particular subjectivity, a recording of interior vision. Expressionism is about singularity, about one brain, one heart, and one object. But, in improvised music, solo performances are the exception, rather than the rule. Interaction with another being, whether it be the audience or a room, seems to be a necessity. But with expressionist painting, especially of the abstract variety, the idea of a collaborative piece between two artists seems preposterous. What would a collaborative painting between both Phillip Guston and Mark Rothko look like? Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollack? The mind rebels against the prospect. We then need a way to describe how a pluralistic expressionism would work.
In
this boxset, we find the following means being employed: acoustic and
electric guitars, turntables, analogue and digital synthesizers, laptops,
a no-input mixing board, an “empty” sampler, an ipod, a minidisc
player/recorder, percussives, voice and the occasional intervention of a
clarinet. But, this is not
the totality of what we are talking about when we say “material.”
Those that know me must be tired by now of this Cardew quote by
now, but I’ll repeat it again:
“...it
is impossible to record with any fidelity a kind of music that is actually
derived from the room in which it is taking place - its size, shape,
acoustical properties, even the view from the window...” - Towards an Ethic of Improvisation This
is one of the primary pleasures of Jonas Leddington’s DVD visual
document, “balance beams”, that is included in the boxset.
It offers its viewer “the view from the window”.
“‘How
do you prepare for a performance of highly abstract music?’
I think you begin by preparing yourself.
It’s not in the manipulation of the instrument…it’s in the
perception of how you see the performance, or how you view performance.
I’m really honest when I say....when [at] a performance I put my
guitar on the table, I get it all working, I go off [and] do something and
it’s eight o’clock and it’s time to play, and I kind of look at the
guitar in absolute horror at that point, and I really don’t have a
single idea. I’ll go
further and say, when my hand descends to play the very first notes of a
performance, I still don’t have any ideas.
As the hands or the fingers are just beginning to touch the
strings, ideas begin to come, and you just take it from whatever begins to
happen at that stage....I think what a performance is, is basically
focusing on what is happening in front of you.
In order to focus, and to have something worthwhile within you to
be reflected, that comes from constantly observing what’s happening
around you and scrutinizing your work…looking very, very quickly....” - Keith Rowe, from “balance beams” Viewed from the perspective of the listener though, this form of interaction is invisible. We see only the external manifestations of this form of interaction, this relationship as extending into materiality. In that we hear something like music, we’re hearing a precipitation of all of those material events described. Electronic improvised music, “balanced improv”, as Abbey once referred to it, grows climactically. Weather and pressure become a metaphor we can use to describe this external blossoming of the image, in that there is no set form prior to each concert to adhere to. The musical results are predicated exclusively on the interactions of material conditions. Each set is a grouping of conditions, which, through the mediation of the artists, plays out within the venues. What prevents this from being cold and sterile is the depth of character of each of these musicians. Their discipline must be enormous, to be able to keep their heads in the midst of this complex “unfoldment”. It feels like something alchemical.
Among
the many joys of the DVD are the short glimpses of after parties and
pre-concert preparations. To be honest, it humanizes the musicians.
When you see Taku Sugimoto with a big grin on his face, twirling
his hat on his finger, the yawning valleys between notes in the Sugimoto
Guitar quartet seem less about austerity, and more about humility, as per
Günter Müller’s comments. As
it is tied to the circumstances of weather, the variety of improvised
music documented on this box defines itself by the atmosphere it creates.
We seem to experience abstract music as we experience climate, in that we
are reacting internally to external changes in pressure. Abstract music
does not have the cognitive currency that music that employs melody does.
One imagines that there is basic pattern-recognition taking place, but
nothing on the order of perceptual gymnastics that occur when listening to
complex melodies and harmonies. Atmosphere,
as precipitation, is not just its outward, visible facts. There are hidden
relationships, which are not only mechanical; they are felt as much as
they are seen. It is not just the rain that we enjoy, it is the
accompanying wind, the smell it brings from the soil, the way clouds dim
the sun, the humidity, etc. In a similar way, the dancers in the Degas
painting are not just an occasion for paint. It is their relationships; on
one level those relationships of the dancers as their physical selves,
graceful and lithe, and on the other level, the hidden, invisible
relationships - friendships, rivalries, affinities, disinclinations among
themselves that structure their outward organization as framed and denoted
by Degas. The music described within the AMPLIFY boxset offers similar
relationships that are as often as hidden, and as complex as those in that
painting, and in climate. The boxset offers us a picture (with well
defined edges and frames, it is an image of the festival, not the
image of it, one imagines that the participants and immediate spectators
have memories that are quiet different than what is documented here) of a
system of subtly interacting elements: room, temperament, temperature,
etc. It is has a peculiar variety of organization that may be visible to
those in the future. At the present, though, any sort of descriptive
physics remains unwritten. It
is difficult to describe where exactly the pleasure of this music arises
from, but it seems to be akin to the feeling of the sun against skin. |
| ~Nirav Soni |
~ Nirav Soni
January 16, 2004
new "feature" feature
Over there. On the right. Really interesting piece by supaman, Nirav Soni, our newest recruit. Very happy to have his talent and insight aboard.
The "feature" thing is, I think, a nice answer to the bastard op/ed category above. Thinking of changing that link up top to "etc" because, well, our editorials are mostly published right here in the blog anyway. Gotta think of a catch-all category for the longer pieces of writing that show up here from time to time.
So yes, the feature spot in the right column is a permanent part of this ever-evolving site. We hope to publish a new one every 2-3 weeks or so from a wide range of topics.
Nikos Veliotis - Radial
Three pieces for solo cello pillowed between four silences. Previously unknown to me, this disc from Nikos Veliotis came as a very pleasant surprise. The accompanying fact sheet says the works were performed without overdub or editing (and, presumably, without any post-production enhancement); if so, the layers of detail Veliotis manages to extract from his instrument are rather extraordinary and generally quite beautiful. All of the pieces are essentially drones and each remains in its own territory for the duration but within that, there’s a wealth of tiny variation and even some almost naturalistic evocation of mood and place. He tends to weave at least three strands simultaneously. On the second track (my favorite), for instance, there’s a slightly rattling high pitch that’s rather reminiscent of air being blown through a flute or other metal tube, a medium range hum and a subaqueous moan that one might expect to hear issuing from a melancholy, ruminating whale. A certain kinship to some aspects of Gavin Bryar’s “The Sinking of the Titanic” is felt. Veliotis works this narrow but rich field for 20 minutes and never once did my interest flag. It was as though there was always something else to be perceived, always a slightly different angle of hearing that would reveal more. The final piece seesaws back and forth in sighing fashion between two clouds of adjacent chords, sounding weary and resigned, yet comfortable. Veliotis apparently conceives of the alternating sound and silence tracks in a structural sense and perhaps it works somewhat although, in the end, I could do without the silences (measuring, I suppose for a reason, 0:47, 3:00, 4:48 and 0:54 in that order). Quibbles aside, “Radial” is highly enjoyable and a surprising direction for someone who’s worked with the likes of Malfatti, Durrant, Davies, Beins and Wastell. Good stuff.
January 15, 2004
Talking Walls
Time spent last night with Shirley Scott’s Queen of the Organ on Impulse (not to be confused with the Prestige comp that shares the same title) worked like a tonic on my cold-tarnished senses. The simple, but evocative album cover got me thinking too. It pictures Scott in close-up seated at her B-3 console in front of a stage curtain glided with gold sequins. Shimmering textures in the backdrop bathe her mocha complexion in a glowing amber tint (confession time: I’ve got a huge crush on Shirley). The photo, and by extension other extra-musical aspects of the session, become cumulative complements to the experience.
It’s a club date recorded at some now forgotten joint called The Front Room. Scott co-leads a quartet with husband Stanley Turrentine. Bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Otis “Candy” Finch complete the band. Standards and blues-oriented originals serve as the larder & include a surprisingly involving take on Lennon & McCartney’s “Can’t By Me Love.” Crowd noises are audible throughout & it’s clear that the audience was having a damn good time digging the tunes. The vibe translates potently through the speakers. In coming to terms with the soul-sapping minus-zero temps outside I couldn’t help wishing I was there at the club witnessing the warming, rejuvenating music first hand. The same sort of thing can happen with studio sessions, but I find it more common with concert recordings.
So many hole-in-the-wall venues like The Front Room have come and gone, preserved now only in memory and on records. Ali’s Alley, Slug’s Saloon, Shelly’s Manne Hole (a colorful name given more recent connotations) and countless others have gone belly up. A select few like The Velvet Lounge and The Bitter End soldier on. These places and their clienteles are often palpable elements in the location-recordings that survive. The garrulously intrusive audiences at the Plugged Nickel on hand for Miles triumphant stand in 65’. Gerry Mulligan’s venomous berating of a loud patron at Storyville documented on his Pacific Jazz record of the same name. Curtis Mayfield’s prescient banter with the crowd over the length of his Live album for Curtom. Recordings are convenient snapshots of time. They can also be snapshots of place.
The dynamic cuts other ways too. To use the previously mentioned Velvet as an example, the place just exudes atmosphere: the gaudy floral print wallpaper, peeling and pockmarked, crosshatched with turquoise, saffron and salmon hues; the blue blown-glass table candles with ill-fitting plastic mesh sheathes; a linoleum tile floor, soiled from the scuffing of countless shoes; the particleboard stage that’s been crammed to capacity too many times to count. And the signature feature- the black velvet painting of a topless Nubian princess hung against the far wall. Everytime I hear any of Fred’s live recordings these sights & others materialize vividly in my mind’s eye.
Arising from these ruminations are some not so rhetorical questions. What are the albums that succeed in this sort of transportative travel? Where the audience, the venue, the entire temporal bubble itself becomes an inseparable aspect of the record. Relatedly, what are the other venues of today that carry comparable levels of ambience-inducing clout?
Scott Rosenberg - Creative Orchestra Music Chicago 2001
As both the composer and Peter Margasak (who wrote the notes for this release) seem to admit, Scott Rosenberg’s Creative Orchestra Music Chicago 2001 represents a big step forward from his 1997 IE: "The previous large ensemble recording is considerably looser and rougher than the one you hold in your hands, and Rosenberg says that for the Chicago album he was more deliberate about assembling the orchestra…" For my own part, after hearing a good deal of Rosenberg’s recorded work with Anthony Braxton, I was disappointed in IE, but I’m pleasantly surprised by Creative Orchestra Music. With the exception of the earliest composition on the disc, Wash, all the pieces display not only a fine aesthetic sensibility—something Rosenberg was probably born with—but also a facility for writing for large ensembles, which was certainly not in evidence on his earlier disc.
There are five pieces, ranging from nine to over 18 minutes in duration. The first, Tehr (2000), reminds me of the early Cage and Feldman orchestral works I’ve heard. Rosenberg employs a nice variety of rhythmic devices, but, as in many earlier aleatorical works, they’re not often used simultaneously—making the piece less complicated and academic-sounding than, say, a Carter or Babbitt work. There’s more emphasis on the viola/cello/bass contingent here than in Rosenberg's other pieces, and, while it’s not the NY Phil., the six fiddlers do a very nice job holding their own against the remaining 20 performers. In Wash (1995), a piece originally written for string quartet, the almost exclusively anti-contrapuntal display of individual chords produces a more Feldman-Ligeti "moving cloud" result, which, though effective for a listen or two, may be a bit too simple to encourage many repeated spins. The following piece, ala Brax, involves a combination of two graphically scored pieces, written four years apart. There’s considerably more counterpoint here, and Rosenberg backs off his general preference for pointillistic, single-note (or, more characteristically, single-chord) entries and lets some of the performers loose now and again—sometimes even over composed multiple ensemble activities. The guitarists, Nathanial Braddock and John Shiurba, distinguish themselves here, as does Kyle Bruckman on oboe and whichever of the three percussionists was responsible for the vibes work. Forgetting Song (1997) is a re-write of a piece originally made for a 12-piece string and percussion group. In this version, trombonist Jeb Bishop and vocalist Carol Genetti are given some improvisatory space and both do themselves proud. I would have preferred the piano part to have, at some point, deviated from its legato eighth note obbligato (which the rest of the rhythm section eventually does), but, not having the score, I don’t know if this was pianist Jim Baker's choice or if the piece was written that way. In any case, it remains an effective piece, dreamy and captivating. Toys (1996) is the most Braxtonian work of all, as well as the longest. It breaks the ensemble into five groups, each given several through-composed pieces to choose from at any time. There’s often a lot going on here, but there’s no muddiness, no mess. It’s a wonderfully constructed "conduction" piece with some cuckoo parts for both winds and strings that, against all odds, fit together perfectly. Both Ives and Brant would approve, I think.
Walter Horn
Colgrass/Schuller - Deja vu
Michael Colgrass & Gunther Schuller
Works for Wind Ensemble
Mode mode 125
Gunther Schuller and Michael Colgrass are a couple of distinguished elder statesmen on the American music scene who seem to have met with nothing but acceptance and success since their teens. They’ve both been involved with jazz performance as well as attempts to integrate jazz into "classical concert" music. In addition, they’ve both won Pulitzers for their compositions and each has seen several of his works break into the high school and university wind ensemble repertoire. All this approbation has been in spite of their rebellious/iconoclastic streaks. (Schuller recently wrote a big book in which he argued, in effect, that nobody has really had any idea how to conduct basic orchestral repertoire for a hundred years. Colgrass is active in the Growtowski physical training and Neuro-Linguistic Programming [NLP] movements.) It seems like, no matter how much they’ve (at least apparently) tried to outrage, these two musicians have always met with ready acceptance. On the other hand, in spite of the plaudits, I don’t think either man has ever been considered among the first rank of contemporary American composers by the cognoscenti. Certainly, the Colgrass works on this recording will give some idea why.
Déjà vu, a transcription of his 1977 Pulitzer winner for percussion quartet and wind orchestra (the original utilized symphony orchestra), displays the composer's skills at percussion writing and his interest in jazz, but little else. It contains a handful of widely used mid-twentieth century techniques, all admirably employed, but is neither particularly innovative nor intrinsically interesting. It is, I think, one among many of the "nothing special" pieces that have been adorned with Pulitzers over the past fifty years. On the plus side, the performance by the New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble under the direction of Charles Peltz is very good. Also included here is Colgrass’s somewhat stronger Dream Dancer of 2001. Much of this 20-minute concerto for alto saxophone (Kenneth Radnofsky) and wind ensemble has a rolling, La Mer feel, and is more romantic than the other Colgrass pieces with which I’m familiar. It’s not a great work, but I can see why some might admire the exotic, sometimes Middle Eastern harmonies and flourishes. (One can even catch a couple of quotations from Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, if I'm not mistaken.) I don’t particularly care for Radnofsky’s flutey, senza vibrato sound, but he’s clearly a virtuoso gets all the notes right and stays perfectly in tune. Again, the NEC group sounds terrific.
The big work here, both in conception and length, is Schuller’s Symphony No. 3, "In Praise of Winds." This piece calls for a wind ensemble of at least 104 players, all of whom are, at times, required to blow their brains out. It’s not a particularly modern piece for Schuller—in spite of the fact that he apparently utilizes some alea in the last movement. The opening of the piece, for example, is more likely to bring Sibelius or Nielson to mind than it is to conjure Ferneyhough or Ligeti. Like the Colgrass works, it’s expertly put together: the wind writing is both idiomatic and demanding, but it’s a good deal more dramatic than either Déjà vu or Dream Dancer. Schuller obviously (once again) had something weighing on him that he felt the desperate need to get off his chest. The Andante, dedicated to Alec Wilder, contains some lovely harmonic painting and seems indicative of a certain amount of compositional restraint, but the Koechlin-like finale is a bit of mess even before Schuller gets to the "big band" ending, which like the "jazz sections" of Déjà vu, is pretty awful. The NEC ensemble again acquits itself wonderfully and the sound is very good.
Walter Horn
Howard Stelzer/Jason Talbot - Four Sides
Howard Stelzer/Jason Talbot
Four Sides
C.I.P.
012
It’s refreshing, in a way, that after all these years of listening to music which qualifies as noise in the minds of most people, that I can still innocently put on a recording and have an initial reaction of, “What is this cacophony?” This double-7” album by Boston-based musicians Howard Stelzer and Jason Talbot consists of seven short tracks (totaling 20 or so minutes) from performances in their hometown and the Netherlands, all of them brutal, all happily obliterating any notion of a boundary between music and noise. I had seen Stelzer as a member of the BSC a couple of years ago and thought that, in many respects, his contributions were the most intriguing that day, though his sounds were leavened by virtue of being one musician out of eight or nine. I’d also heard this duo’s earlier 2003 release, “Songs”, which had left me pretty much unmoved. Listening again to that disc, I think the central aspect that caused my indifferent reaction was actually the relatively restrained air, the fairly cohesive overall sense I received, causing the tracks to sound somewhat indistinguishable from this or that noise improv performance or recording. Given that the casual listener would certainly find anything produced by these guys to be ear-splitting, abrasive and aggravating enough to immediately propel the disc into the nearest wall, this may seem odd but in the nether reaches of improv just as well as in any other genre, ruts develop, pathways become well-trodden.
Some of the difference may lie in the sound quality of the vinyl recording which possesses a greater immediacy and makes a strong, visceral impression, much like a punch in the gut. Admittedly, my preference tends toward music that subtly emerges from (and takes cognizance of) its surroundings and this sort of thing lends itself to all sorts of non-musical associations (like some wack job who all of a sudden starts yelling into your ear) but at least as a break, as a jolt from the usual, it has a bracing aspect to it that conjures up a fondness that might not normally be forthcoming. The sounds (Steltzer manipulates a cassette recorder, Talbot a turntable, by the way) are generally abrupt, often disassociated with anything in their temporal vicinity, harsh and jagged. They’re like pieces of sonic shrapnel, differing from each other only in terms of particular shape but torn from the same grenade. Maybe think of Jason Lescalleet without his continuity. Liking or not liking it seems a little beside the point; I can’t imagine I’ll be playing the discs very often but I do like the fact that it’s out there, planting a stake a bit further out in the territory of the possible than may be considered prudent. Whether their pathway ultimately proves viable or not, it’s simply good to hear it explored and “Four Sides” is certainly worth hearing and thinking about.
January 14, 2004
back into masada
Last weekend was a good one in that I rediscovered my appreciation for this group. Hadn't listened to them in a while because some switch in the head got tripped that says "if you have one Masada disc, you have them all." That might be unfair, but I still think it's true to some extent. Minor-key Jewish melodies tend to blend together after a while, and it could be argued that Masada's shtick is built from cadence and interplay, rather than an ability to craft a whole slew of independently catchy tunes. Better, a good sum of their tunes are catchy but perhaps for the same generic reasons. However one might define their craft, these are powerful players with an attention-getting feel that is pretty consistent for jazz-based music of the past ten or so years.
So what is it about Dave Douglas? His own led releases sound fairly soft by comparison and you'd be hard pressed to find him stretching out as aggressively as he does with Zorn at his side. By comparison, Zorn has what appears to be a small bag from which he pulls his own tricks, but when set against Cohen's unrelenting progressions or Joey Baron's daredevil trapping, those licks just don't get as stale as they might otherwise.
And what of the comparisons of this group to Ornette Coleman's old pianoless quartet? Personally, I don't hear it and never have. Coleman and Cherry just didn't use melody in that way and the scales those guys would use seem far more foreign. It might be easier to compare Masada to Mulligan's old quartets. The way Douglas/Farmer/Baker plays against Zorn/Mulligan... you'd swear one was actually "comping" behind the solos of the other, even without the melodic influence of the rhythm section.
At any rate, I heard LIVE AT TONIC (2001) for the first time last weekend and it's been a joy to get reacquainted with Masada's energy and the ensuing fireworks displayed by all hands. Really fun stuff. I suppose I should add that it's been rare that I've connected with Zorn otherwise. Anyway.
January 13, 2004
Xavier Charles - La Neige Attend La Neige
Xavier Charles
La Neige Attend La Neige
A Bruit Secret (abs 10)
One of the questions music dares to ask of its performers relates to how far they are willing to go to achieve unique, dynamic results that appeal to the ears and minds of listeners. Xavier Charles' "La Neige Attend La Neige" is not so much a step forward for its related areas of music -- even though these twenty minutes were produced by a most interesting system -- as it is another small advance for the concept of "method before outcome" in music. To our beneift, the results are hardly pedantic.
Charles uses a low frequency tone transmitted through a loudspeaker, thus creating the music's credited source "vibrating surfaces". A natural rhythm is created by the physical attributes of the sound waves themselves and the resulting, mathematical vibration of the cones of the speakers. Facing the speakers upward, then, offers a unique prospect: a platform on which to place objects of various sizes, shapes, and, most importantly, resonant characterisitics. The sounds end up alarmingly real, however silly the concept may seem. Imperfections in the surfaces of the applied objects offer a mode of improvisation almost completely separate from the "performer", aside from the conscious selection of the devices and the chosen frequency or tone for the loudspeaker. The whole of this 3" disc is comprised of a single track, however separated by three instances of prolonged near-silence (roughly a couple of minutes each), one residing at the beginning. These silences, beware, make the inevitable emergence of sound more system-shocking than perhaps normal, but not without immediately gaining our attention (rather than causing us to involuntarily reach for the volume knob). While loud and simultaneously forceful, the music is hardly offensive, insomuch as the listener has a vested interest in the examination of the sounds. Over time, "La Neige" shows itself to be presumably what Charles was after: engaging music brought about by a distinctive, even rebellious, method.
~Alan Jones
Christian Wolff - Complete Works for Violin and Piano
Christian Wolff
Complete Works for Violin and Piano
Mode (Mode 126)
Christian Wolff devotees take note. Prior to 1999, the composer had written a single piece for violin and piano, one which came from the still smoldering embers of a fierce string of post-structuralist activity. Four years ago, he scored again for the same instrumentation, this time with violinist Marc Sabat and pianist Stephen Clarke in mind, and the new composition could be argued to show nearly forty years of age. The disc opens with a 36-minute performance of "Pebbles" (1999), which finds Wolff embracing the traditions of vertical and melodic structure in music (he seems to have all but turned his back on the purely experimental), even with a score that, on paper, sounds like a modern take on decades-old methods in game theory. "Pebbles" has two dozen individual pieces of thematic material, all of which share points of transition in their code-like juxtaposition with each other. The result is an unlikely sense of rhythm. For two instruments, the music feels surprisingly thick: at times the piece has all the impressions of a concerto for whichever instrument is at the fore. In his own liners, Wolff admits an affinity for these two voices in duo, while acknowledging a shortage of writing for them over the years. He further points out the successes yielded by Cage and Feldman in writing for the same instumentation, however dissimilar their processes. In fact, there are melodic tidbits during the piece you'd swear were pulled from a Feldman score, while as a whole it remains uniquely Wolff's in the way he pits the violin and piano against one another. Though greatly different on most accounts than "Duo for Violinist and Pianist" (1961), the music is not saved by any sense of "newness". With the exception of a countermelodic progression toward the end of the piece -- the segment sounds part fugue, part Baroque call-and-response, and interlaced with some lovely pizzicato work from Sabat -- "Pebbles" is weighed down in other key moments of activity by a feeling that the music has been done to death already.
"Pebbles" was written specifically for, though not limited to, the instrumentalist heard here, while "Duo for Violinist and Pianist" was composed less with the performer in mind than it was for the process of interpretation. Both pieces are largely interpretative: no two renditions are likely to sound alike, as evident with a shorter, 5-minute version of the '61 piece also offered here. While "Pebbles" has its moments of appeal over an uneven, sometimes confusing course, "Duo" is simply the more engaging of the two. Everything seems taken into account, from timbre to natural decay, and it is a true platform for the instruments to explore the very limits of their mechanical dissimilarities. Not surprisingly and however transient in nature, Wolff's instructions leave room for the judgment of the perfomers, and the piano and violin stand together as unprepared stringed instruments, rather than apart for traits like size and timbral range. The two pieces make for an interesting session of point-counterpoint and are certain to be enjoyed by Wolff's fans.
~Alan Jones
Texturizer - Texturizer
Texturizer
Antifrost Afro 2018
Hailing from Greece with a sound that wants to dominate all of Europe, this fittingly named duo consists of Coti K. on electronics and cellist Nikos Veliotis. Chalk another one up to the wherewithal of Mediterranean improvisors and for their dot's increasing diameter on the map of experimental music. Veliotis and K. bring it together during a time when so many edge-seeking musicians kick the dirt up only to reveal a sort of cloaked unoriginality. Their self-titled release was performed in an Athens church, though the sonorities of the space achieve a sort of neutrality, unlike those attributed to Britain's St. Michaels and All Angels. Comprised of four separate tracks that are similar in both "texture" and attitude, the music is easy on the ears, further served well by focus on the listener's part. The music begins with K.'s layered electronics that remain near-static for the duration of the disc, Veliotis joining soon enough, bowing an attractive chord evidently pulled from the air and sustained long enough to be best categorized as a drone. This first track is the only obvious instance where both musicians are immediately identifiable from one another. As the electronics continue in their own camouflaged loops, Veliotis shifts to slight variations on the cello, seemingly bent on blending in with K.'s coarse atmospherics. Interestingly, the human elements -- those occasions where both K. and Veliotis detectably improvise over the intended clamor -- seem deliberately underplayed, but never as afterthought. The results yield huge stretches of sound with enough delicate nuance to make the disc viscerally powerful and worthy of meditation.
~Alan Jones
if there's an end in sight, let me know
Me: inundated with far too much information and external stimuli. Add to that the travel schedule of an Enron tax attorney. In the grand list of priorities, music may need to step down a notch. There's music on the shelf bought in 2003 that hasn't even made it to my ears yet. Not that I'll be functioning here in a lesser capacity, just that some restructuring needs to take place with respect to my schedule.
Having had the opportunity to listen to music, undistracted, in the comfort of hotel rooms and airplanes, I have stumbled across some truly wonderful new (to my ears) sounds, including, but not limited to:
Alberto Pinton's DOG OUT (damn)
Tom Verlaine's self-titled debut
Berlin Reeds, on Absinth Records
Yoshihide & Co.'s LOOSE COMMUNITY
the new Dean Roberts (finally)
Stereolab's ABC MUSIC
Soon, I hope, I'll get around to writing about some of them. But not without making time for the new CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM season. And damn, if the Shield's second season didn't just come out on DVD. Add: the time-consuming temptations that come with getting a new guitar. That's it, my new, as-yet-started driftwood hobby is on indefinite hold.
And here I type this on the cusp of a new semester. Fuckles.
January 12, 2004
The Hafler Trio - A house waiting for its master
The Hafler Trio
A house waiting for its master
Rossbin Rslp01
It came as something of a surprise from Rossbin, an excellent small, Italian label heretofore issuing a string of adventurous CDs: a 10” EP by The Hafler Trio, it’s milky, opalescent vinyl encased in an elegant black and silver sleeve festooned with elaborately scripted titles. The music is also rather different than anything Rossbin had previously released. The Hafler Trio (never more than a duo in reality and, I’m given to understand, likely just Andrew McKenzie by the time of this recording) creates three pieces consisting largely of drones, generally keeping within a rich, tonally centered area with a lavish helping of throbbing undertones. It’s impossible not to think of Eno while listening and, in truth, the music isn’t all that far away from some of the areas he was exploring in the mid to late 70s, but that doesn’t take away from the basic sensual pleasure felt. There’s just enough harshness spicing the mix to remove any new-agey qualms. The first track, “Everything that stops you becomes your idol”, is ten minutes of entwined pulsations, effortlessly wafting one downstream. The two shorter pieces (about six minutes each) provide more of a jolt, each containing something of an electric buzz, a slightly stinging tinge that moves the drone into something you might encounter standing alongside a generator. A flapping rhythm, sounding like a canvas gate forced open and closed by the sonic pressure, grows in presence before abruptly stopping and hurling the piece into a cavern of howling winds. An impressive track. It’s interesting to see Rossbin branch out into something like this, momentarily sidestepping the world of pure improv. For fans of the complex drone, it’s certainly a recording to check out.
The Fall - Bend Sinister (Beggar's Banquet)
Most fans would rate the earlier Perverted By Langauge, The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall and This Nation’s Saving Grace as the high points of this particular incarnation of The Fall’s discography, but this 1986 release was the first Fall album I ever bought, so it holds a special, even singular, meaning for me. For me, no other band captured the enraging bleakness, the deterioration and the stagnation, and the feeling of impending if rather nebulous doom that defined the era. Even if, when I bought the cassette version back in the day, it was being sold here in the States under the title Domesday Pay-Off. The glances at pop music that define Fall music in the mid-1980’s are especially scathing and sidelong on Bend Sinister: ramshackle grooves and either stone-faced or intentionally cloddish dance rhythms, especially on the unholy Trinity of “R.O.D.” (in which a creature of “gas and flesh” roams the streets in monstrous mediocrity), “U.S. 80’s-90’s”, and “Riddler!”; half-spoken, half-sung, wholly mangled – words are mispronounced and elongated, and the vocalists revel in “perversions” of standard syntax – yet unmistakably spleen-venting lyrics, including a great one from the two-part “Shoulder Pads” targeting fadsters who “couldn’t tell Lou Reed from Doug Yule”; turgid, highly-textured Hank Marvin-isms (yep, there’s a Rickenbacker in the bass-heavy mix somewhere); and a subtext of musique concrete sounds, courtesy of Craig Scanlon’s tapes and electronics. Fall mastermind Mark E. Smith no doubt has taken the piss out of them elsewhere, but there are tracks here that really do approach the kind of monochrome goth splendor of which Bauhaus was in such damned dogged pursuit (“Gross Chapel – British Grenadiers”).
Maybe that’s why Smith has tended to discount the music on Bend Sinister as possessing “too much perfection” and for being “too sluggish” as a result, but, as with all Fall music, there is a refreshing disregard for precision here. Its a dense, D.I.Y. collage of sound produced not by any careful placement of element but by random collisions and maneuvers of sabotage within the ensemble. It is seldom pretty, though “Living Too Late” is almost poignant, and it is sometimes so weird it becomes arch – the street vendor interjections in “Dktr. Faustus” – but there are many days, like today, when I’d choose the penetrating glare of The Fall over the hazy focus of the innumerable indie rock bands that have taken inspiration from them.
January 8, 2004
title/track
Be it live conversation, e-mail exchange, or reading from a BBS, I've noticed this nagging phenomenon of people singing praises for the entirety of a release, rather than individual tracks or songs. "Blah Blah Blah is amazing." Rather than, "'Blah 1b' has some really nice playing." This sort of dialogue tends to make me wonder if real attention (insert criteria here) is less often than not given to a record as a whole, with merits attributed to individual numbers.
It seems that part of the whole search for greatness in music is the inevitable stumble upon the next Kind of Blue, London Calling, or Marquee Moon. Each of those records, to their fans, play as cohesive albums with good transition from one nugget to the next.
I guess it comes down to that I'd like to hear more from folks about what particular tunes from the records they're praising make them tick. That in itself would give me greater perspective when comparing my own tastes with others'.
January 7, 2004
Why I Still Read Harold Rosenberg
Mostly because he is not a “thinker” in the manner of Derrida, or Foucault, or Zizek, or Baudrillard, or Deleuze. There are times when I just get so weary of theory, and long for the comfort of frank opinions and honest accounts of personal experience rendered in unrepentantly prose-y prose. It would be unfortunate if Rosenberg were remembered mainly for the fact that he and Clement Greenberg crossed sabres at every opportunity regarding the true significance of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Not to slight Rosenberg’s role as an extremely important interpreter of DeKooning, Pollock, Motherwell, Kline, Rothko, but I value his work for additional reasons.
- Because he cared very much about the act of creation, not just for those specially active individuals we call “artists”, but for all of us created beings.
- Because Rosenberg believed the critical enterprise possessed its own social efficacy, as the quote from his introduction to Discovering The Present, a compendium of various magazine pieces, lectures, and sundry, published in 1973, indicates:
In art, “conservative” and “radical” ought to be abandoned and attention concentrated on déja vu. The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight. In America an almost total absence of genuine education in modernist creations and attitudes of the past hundred years is responsible for wave after wave of déja vu novelties. The déjavunik exploits his audience’s lack of education b appealing to its desire to be advanced and its expectation of being repelled by new work. (xi).
- Because he was one of the few critics, and perhaps the only one, to understand what Philip Guston was trying to do in the new, “crude” paintings he exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970.
Nor do Guston’s new political reveries eliminate his ancient debate with painting, its reasons for being, its probabilities for survival; the artist himself humorously confesses his inability to escape this obsession by presenting a canvas of a Klansman painting a self-portrait… It might be argued that finding art problematical is itself a form of political thinking, in that it considers the kind of society in which art can continue to be practiced and valued. In the last analysis, Guston’s exhibition is more political by way of art and does more for art than politics. The recently influential formalist conception of High Art, pledged on principle to refuse to take note of the destruction of the planet, seems thoroughly played out, and with it the dialectics of an increasingly self-purifying abstraction. On the other hand, the anti-form earth and raw-materials projects that were presented as the antithesis to color fields and minimal sculptures have reduced themselves to an endless lecture on counter-aesthetics. [A person in me really enjoys the counter-intuitive idea that something can be reduced to endlessness.] (”Liberation From Detachment”, The New Yorker, November 7, 1970, p. 140).
- Because, in the late 1960’s, at a time when culture in America – and, in fact, the world over – appears from our historical vantage to have been anything but boring, Rosenberg wrote a little essay entitled “Virtuosos Of Boredom” (pages 119 to 124 in Discovering The Present), which, in its exposure of the forms of self-aggrandizing collusion that can unite artists and critics, feels to me like it juts a stern forefinger at the writerly conscience to which I answer.
To the critic, the bareness of a work is an opportunity to display his powers of exegesis and to top other critics who might have given up the work as hopeless… The ideal situation from the point of view of the new critics [is he speaking here of someone like Roland Barthes? I have to wonder…] would be for works of art to vanish completely and for nothing to be left but the critical interpretation. Today, no degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating. Even when boredom is the artist’s explicitly stated objective, his intention will be frustrated by decorative inlays from the critical workshop. “It is… disconcerting,” protests Bersani, “to read so many admiring, undaunted analyses of a significance for which [Samuel] Beckett… expresses only boredom and disgust.”… Nothing is boring to the specialist practicing his vocation. Under close scrutiny, an inch of skin or a page of the telephone book will yield wonders of accidental combination, alphabetic pattern, symbolic suggestion. Nor does boredom exist for the partisan or the promoter.
One is bored when the mind is forced back upon itself, the condition of children who have “nothing to do”, or when it is trapped in a situation which it is powerless to affect. Art inspired by the aesthetics of boredom is evidence of how widely prevalent is the disruption between the “I” and things in contemporary mass society. Boring art is the mirror of the repetitiveness, unexpressiveness, abstractness, and obsession with detail of daily life. The “message” of this art – and since it is devoid of pleasure, it is in all instances an art with a message – lies in urging its own rejection as a first step in the development of a free individual sensibility. (pp. 123 – 124)
For me, these are nearly caustic yet inspiring words. (I choose to hear them spoken in such a tone.) And I feel that the issues Rosenberg is addressing are relevant to this day – particularly with respect to music that intends towards a kind of “purity”. This is not to say that I am opposed to such music on moral grounds or find all of it worthless or even unlistenable. Nevertheless, the repercussions of such music are not as “empty” as its component sounds can be perceived to be. Certainly, artists must allow that boredom, real boredom, not instilled or coerced boredom – not the only kind of boredom that Rosenberg discusses anyway – is a valid response to their work, and that perhaps the void is not in those other people who don’t “get” what they are doing, but somewhere in the "done" artifact itself.
"De gustibus, non est disputandum." In one respect, yes, there are no real productive disagreements in matters of taste. But what Rosenberg’s work reminds me is that, unfashionable as the idea may seem, we all of us approach the art which means the most to us in some attitude of truth-seeking. However, I do believe it is difficult, in living with cultural expressions in the way “critics” are asked to, to acknowledge that art fulfills such a need. There’s a vulnerability in it, and maybe even a latent self-rebuke. “You’re more comfortable intellectually manipulating things – books, paintings, records, films, buildings – than you are confronting other people.” So that, more and more, as I live in and through the many positive and negative relationships that my involvement with my own work both proposes and sustains, my faith that there is a system of ethics at the heart of my aesthetics is restored.
January 6, 2004
Wolfgang Mitterer: Radio Fractal (Beat Music)
Ever so slowly over the last couple years, the Hat labels have been dipping their toes into the electroacoustic waters. Sometimes this has taken place under the auspices of their new music subsidiary, Hat Now, but there have also been some fine improvisational releases on Hatology (most notably the excellent Trapist recording Highway My Friend). When I scanned the personnel on this release, I got pretty excited: it features Max Nagl on baritone sax, John Schröder on electric guitar, Herbert Reisinger on drums, dieb 13 on turntables, and Patrick Pulsinger, Erdem Tunakan, and Mitterer on electronics.
Commissioned by the Southwest German Radio for the famous festival at which it was recorded, this release consists of two sprawling hours (actually a 65:58 disc one and a 48:30 disc two) of improvisation by the collected musicians. And for the most part, I must say it’s a crashing bore. It possesses little to none of what I like best about electroacoustic improvisation (and what, based on the participants, I was hoping for and expecting): subtlety, restraint, and a knowing elision of idiomatic reference. To me, and to a lot of people really excited by the use of electronics in improvisation, the music succeeds in direct proportion to the absence of hackneyed sampling (decontextualized human voices, airplane noises, or remote-sounding genre music, to take three of the most obvious examples, all unfortunately done to death here) therein. What’s more, this stuff is generally impressive when it resists or quashes altogether the individuated “soloing” that characterizes other modes of free improvisation (which is, of course, perfectly successful in other contexts).
Instead, these guys mostly tread idiomatic water in a pretty tiresome way, generating a never-ending stream of click-track grooves (which Reisinger hammers home with none of the compelling percussive sorcery of, say, Martin Brandlmayr), the occasional saxophonic noodle, and regular excursions of early-McLaughlin freakery from Schröder (a really good player who just doesn’t sound at home here, and who consequently reduces much of this to jam-band mess). With some superficial similarities to Dave Douglas’ Sanctuary project, the continual reliance on beat box rhythms and noodling instrumentalism here just occludes the possibilities that might otherwise be generated by dieb 13 and the other electronicians (who generally resort to Casio beats, pitch-bending, and the occasional feedback storm).
Harry Lachner’s liner notes faff on a good long while about the theoretical and compositional roots of Mitterer’s production. Predictably, as with a lot of music that involves samplers, there are abundant references to parallel motives/strategies, layering, fragments, and so forth. But you know what? It still sounds like sloppy jam-band music weighed down by (rather than liberated by) healthy doses of ambient texture.
Two Nuclear Blasts
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Denmark’s Mnemic can’t exactly be reduced to mnemonic players (i.e. they don’t exactly aid in the recovery of memory). Mimetic might be closer to the mark, as they recall the recent explorations by fellow Scandinavians Meshuggah quite a bit. (The band actually claims their name is an acronym for “Mainly Neurotic Energy Modifying Instant Creation.”) Not so much indebted to the presto-chango mathcore style as to the bludgeoning hammer of mechanical precision, these boys showcase the brutal chops along with a vaguely Nu Metal flair for hooks, choruses, and the occasional keyboard flourish. But don’t mistake it for bordering-on-pop: the low strung 7-string guitars, super-elephantine bass, and hyper-drive drumming prevent things from moving too far in that direction. For every anthemic chorus, there is a turn-on-a-dime mosh section or an in-your-face thrash in 5/4 or 7/8; for every ringing, chorus-drenched guitar arpeggio, there is a thrumming, pitch-bent jag that sends the lyricism sprawling sideways. Just as versatile is vocalist Michael (no surnames are given on the album, though they can be located elsewhere – I prefer the disc’s listing instrumental credits to “7-string Messenger,” “6-string Violator,” and so forth). He can bark out the choruses but can also mewl conspiratorially, shriek maniacally, and, in passages of layered multi-vocals, recall Layne Staley’s sicko constructions for Alice in Chains.
There were times when I was just about ready to think of this music as slightly too slick for my taste. But unfailingly, Mnemic would pull out some riff, some vocal insanity, some fill (there are no solos, which are presumably for wusses) that would kick me in the head. Note the factory sounds which conclude “Tattoos,” for example. And pretty much the whole of the title track can answer anyone who suspects Mnemic of occasional prettiness (it’s also one of the few places where the band ventures outside its usual harmonic range). Only the slow, somewhat self-consciously atmospheric “Zero Gravity” doesn’t convince on at least some level. So while the shift between Meshuggah-esque polyrhythms (5 against 4 most often) and soaring refrains can wear a bit thin, in small doses it’s pretty invigorating. Mnemic’s music is a quirky mix that’s sure to repel champions of metal orthodoxy but which I find pretty winning.
Coming from a different position on the metal spectrum is Dew-Scented. How marvelously delicate a name (apparently Poe-derived) for such a bludgeoning band! The fifth full-length release from these veterans of the German thrash scene, led by intense vocalist Leif Jensen, I’m tempted to write simply that this is the best Slayer record since South of Heaven. But that would be missing out on this band’s more playful, looser nature with the same basic elements of brutality. And while these personal twists and addenda to the basic form won’t blunt the force of comparison (hey, even the guitar solos sound a bit like Kerry King’s, while “Down My Neck” at times practically apes “Seasons in the Abyss”), that’s probably not the kind of thing likely to deter fans of this vintage. And for what it’s worth, they’re also influenced by bands like Kreator, At the Gates, and Morbid Angel (with something of the latter’s careening-out-of-control splatter-style mixed into the industrial hammering). It’s a caustic dose of old-school thrash, gaining velocity and momentum right from the album’s opening barked, “Go!” (a command which seems to go hand in hand with the cover image of two ram’s heads butting one another). When you enter this band’s world, you find that the skies are always red, there is always a continual drama of pain and retribution, and the steadfast individual can survive whatever trials loom ahead. This kind of bleak and violent world has its odd comforts for aficionados of this music. And it’s done with undeniable precision, from the vocal howl, the chugging of guitars and bass, and pile-driving drumming (which doesn’t have quite the savage freneticism of Dave Lombardo, but can boast double-kick work which recalls Mickey D from the old King Diamond groups). While the form and the style might not be too memorable, what you take away from “Impact” is the sheer, well, impact. File this one under “Harder Faster Louder Meaner.”
January 5, 2004
Elliott Sharp - The Velocity Of Hue
Guitarist Elliott Sharp is known primarily to listeners as a quintessentially Downtown NYC eclectic: a Metal-plated yet agile note-shredder who has spray-painted his own unique fractal graffiti across the walls of free improvisation, minimalism, funk, punk rock, and blues.
For all the variety in his music, however, Sharp is not necessarily the sort of artist you'd expect to find in the campfire settings suggested by the music on his latest release, and first for the Emanem label, The Velocity Of Hue. On these mostly brisk, succinct improvisations, Sharps spin tales on his "modified Godin Duel Multiac" (an acoustic guitar with solid-state analog and digital electronics integrated into the body of the instrument, largely for the purposes of amplification) recounting travels across foreign lands. Limned by flickerings of heat and gloom, our narrator also plays the many characters encountered on these journeys, becoming, as the story demands, a Chinese pipa, an Arabic oud, a National Steel guitar, a hammered dulcimer, a Mexican tiple, an African kora, a Hindustani vina, an ancient psaltery. More restless than the artists to whom he can be most profitably compared in this context -- John Fahey, Hans Reichel, Loren MazzaCane Connors, and the beatifically flaky Incredible String Band -- Sharp's point-of-view is also slicker and, consequently, strikes less friction from taking it's passage through so many traditions, so many technologies -- from the basic (language, if one pays close attention to the neologistic titles of these pieces; woodworking) to the relatively advanced (the gauge of steel strings; the plastic of a guitar plectrum; integrated circuitry) -- and so many droning, hocketing, melismatic, epic sounds.
The personal and the universal, the estranging and the inviting, are present in abundance if not quite in proportion on The Velocity Of Hue. But this is the danger of eclecticism, I suppose: it establishes just another, ostensibly richer equivalence. The most beautiful and memorable improvisations here are those which really do feel like they break through the tumult of the guitarist's imagination, not to some new synthesis, but to some nigh-primordial principle: "Anamesia"; "Euwrecka"; "Polytope"; "Recognition". Although there is a clear antecedent for much of this music in Sharp's String Quartet works, now happily available on a single Tzadik disc, it will be most interesting to reassess this recording once, as I hope eventually occurs, it is no longer a one-off or an isolated experiment.
Charles Gayle - Solo in Japan (PSF)
What’s happened to Charles Gayle? The arguable crown-holder in a trioka of free jazz tenors that rose to prominence in the early 90s, he’s slipped a few rungs since in the hierarchy. Perelman’s turned to painting. Ware fell into a rut he’s yet to fully extricate himself from. Gayle healed from a nasty hernia, shelved his “Streets the Clown” shtick and turned his attentions largely to piano (as far as I know he still holds a regular weekly dinner gig at the 5C Café in NYC). But as yet he hasn’t chosen to reclaim the crown. This solo set comes from a summer 97’ concert and captures Gayle at the peak of his prowess and single-mindedness on saxophone. Two traditional hymns and three originals, all working from simple thematic skeletons, supply the sacraments for his pious improvisatory inquiry. The last, “Woe and Joy,” is vehicle for piano, but it’s the others, particularly the 15-minute “Walking Nearer” that proclaim the breadth of Gayle’s powers. During the opening orison “Come Ye” Ayler’s ghost feels palpably present in the perfect juxtaposition of jubilance and sadness siphoning through heaven-raised tenor. The fidelity is stark and unequivocal, microphone placed inches from the bell of his horn and adding to the massive cleansing sound. Word is that Gayle has a new trio record coming out on Clean Feed. Here’s hoping it’s sufficient catalyst to catapult him back into the limelight.
January 2, 2004
The Chicago Way
Just dropped loot on the Crime Story: Season One dvd box set on my lunch break. Didn’t even know the damn thing was available so it was a nice surprise seeing it sitting there on the shelf. Enough time’s passed that the plot lines and details have mostly fogged over, but this was easily one of my favorite televison shows of the 80s.
Michael Mann, fresh from surfing the crest of success on Miami Vice, helmed the series. He used earlier police dramas like The Naked City and The Sweeney as his blueprint and added gutsy elements of fringe culture and hard-boiled noir to create a lasting antecedent to now popular cutting edge cop shows like The Shield. The cast was top notch, headed up by Dennis Farina as tempramental & obbessive Lt. Mike Torello, chief of the Windy City’s Major Crimes Unit, and Anthony Dennison as sociopathic mob guy Ray Luca, his nemesis. Guest stars included Michael Madsen, Lorraine Bracco, Ving Rhames and Pam Grier. The set includes the entire Chicago run, 20 regular episodes plus pilot, in a no frills box with no extras.
Season Two saw the series shift in locale to Las Vegas with accompanying weirdness involving South American dictators, Russian fighter pilots and nuclear bomb test sites (probably in response to flagging ratings). From the little I remember, quality slipped significantly as well. I’ve also just read a few reviews that bemoan some changes made to the soundtrack & only passable picture transfers to dvd format. These grumbles aside, I’m definitely looking forward to digging in and being re-exposed to this influential chunk of small-screen history.