Bagatellen

"Muscle Mary Mats"

There’s quite a treat to greet readers over at the All Hallow’s Eve edition of Paris Transatlantic, namely a guest essay by John Gill, author of Queer Noises. He’s a writer I’ve long wanted to glean more from, but was unaware of where to look for a byline. Turns out he writes regularly for The Wire and Jazzwise, two U.K. publications that have never been in my regular reading rotation.

Anyway, the above-mentioned essay is a clever & entertaining, if slightly wobbly polemic on the resurgence of “Macho Jazz,” a chauvinistic, testosterone-pumped mindset with strong roots in the Bebop movement (though why Gill doesn’t calibrate his way-back machine even further to such maestros of machismo as Jelly Roll Morton, I’m not sure). About eight years have passed since I cracked QN at my grad school library, but I recall several chapters where he cut through all the obfuscating revisionism and traced rich veins of gay influence in the music, outing a few unexpected players in the process (his assertions about Wilbur Ware as one of the few openly gay jazz musicians in NYC during the 50s are ones I found particularly intriguing and I’ve long wanted to query him about his sources/findings in further detail).

One of prime fall guys in the new piece is none other than the Mad Swede himself, Mats Gustafsson. Though Gill also takes zinging shots at members of the improv band Polar Bear and Gary Burton, who was one of the focal points of QN, but is now mildly denounced for toeing the hetero-party line (love the phrases “blue-rinse brigade” and “strawberry-pink shorts suits”). His slams on Mats strike me as short-sighted & guilty of the “reactionary” tag he so summarily levels at his target. For one thing, the parallel drawn between The Thing’s shared black stage garb and skinhead attire seems a stretch. Skinheads aren’t the only folks enamored of Doc Martins and Gustafsson’s deep passion for Black free jazz, along with the obvious musical kinship/friendship he shares with frequent Thing bedfellow Joe McPhee would seem to torpedo such accusations outright. His stomping, snorting, lips-smacking, tongue-flicking stage ticks are certainly openly aggressive and even intimidating, but they strike me as more absurdist and self-deprecating than indicative of anything truly bellicose or sexually-conflicted. Wynton Marsalis, who Gill also draws a bead on & whose conservative viewpoints when it comes to gender and sexuality aren’t exactly enlightened, seems to me better quarry for this sort of tar-and-feathering. Then again, perennial whipping-boy Wynton’s probably still scraping the tar residue off his spats from his last lambaste by the cultural critics.

And how exactly is continued influx of chest-thumping, brow-beating, listener-hostile jazz damaging or demeaning the music’s more dulcet and tempered strains. Last time I checked Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue was still the number one selling jazz title of all-time. Keith Jarrett, among those whom Gill champions as a purveyor of cerebral and tender is still a cash magnet at ECM and regularly sells out recital halls abroad (not something the so-ascribed Alpha Male Mats is likely to do on a regular basis, if at all.) and is poised to release his nth Standards Trio recording. Norah Jones (not really jazz, I know, but lumped with the genre and seen as a representative of its merits thanks to her Blue Note association) is some of the most mellow and melodic pop music available. Bottom line is I’m not sure that old macho bugaboo still holds clout when it comes to dominating public perceptions of the jazz. Anyone with an even a passing interest in the music can poke holes in a macho-rooted ideology’s sieve-shaped claim to supremacy in jazz.

Gill does just that with several lists of players who better align with the gentler, more beatific side of the spectrum. Soon after he accuses segments of the jazz press as being “fashionistas with no sense of history beyond a well-stocked record collection and a near total lack of understanding of the history of jazz”, complicit in the masculinizing of the music. In my experience, other segments of the media are guilty of just the opposite, attaching terms like “cool,” “relaxed,” “laidback” and “cerebral” to jazz as a whole. Marketing tropes like “Jazz for Lovers” and “Jazz for a Rainy Day” also contribute to the overarching ruse of jazz as dinner music, background music, and mood music. These ploys are also a key reason behind the continued confusion regarding Kenny G as a jazz artist- a claim that to his credit, Mr. Gorelick hasn’t made. The point is that attempt to paint the music with a broad brush is going to miss the multitude of cracks and textures that make it so rich and storied.

Gill’s comments regarding gender politics in jazz, especially the point about shapely poster-girls like Diana Krall, work better by my reckoning. Inequalities couched on those grounds are long-standing and continue to be daunting problem. But they’re also no secret and no revelation: musicians as diverse as Susie Ibarra and Irene Schweizer have made long strides in combating the biases, mostly by tossing them aside or barreling straight through them. Gill’s call-for-inclusiveness conclusion rings resoundingly too. This is the crux, to support and advance the music in its numerous forms, not pit one faction against another. Attaching labels based in gender or temperament only compartmentalizes the music and exacerbates a power-struggle mentality. I’m willing to bet a majority of musicians don’t see it in those divisive terms. To put it another way, there’s plenty of room for both Paul Desmond and Karou Abe, to name two extremes, and all the shades and colors between, at the table.

Jacques Berrocal - Paralleles (D'Avantage)

Is your bicycle broken? Don't let the joke run along, getting mighty sprightly ahead of you, strong stroke those spokes and become a muse sick wish with this man. The terrain is the map, scraping jiggly-wiggly pedal-metal, this is designed of the wide end of the track with lots of latitude for your longitudinal attitude readjustment frock cemented into the zone relegated for and scored in the free-form stratosphere invisible ink paste gumbo stilt throw. Charts? What charts? Improvisational is where it starts and barring one elegiacally perfected tune room at the 'Rock'n Roll Station,' reaching seekers freaking for a fixated melody embellished plea are left in the lurch sans the search.

Squelching Neanderthal parrot. Charlie parks one lip asleep skip town. Blubbering chiggle-chaggled and you feel the teeth dangle impressionistic sputtering farts, soft squawks, rippling retorts amidst staccato sharps poking the jolly jester in the arse. Feel the breathing become part of the music, flittering mouse patter leads the trail to comforting and familiar, yet obtuse squall and response alliteration saucier and fluffier until pup-puh-puh-pum-pumpum-pumpeh makes smile.

Machinery. Strained kite string lollygag horn trill. Randomly interspersed impromptu comments seeming story in French. Before you know it, your shift at the fantasy avant-garde factory is over and you can go home to the next song.

Making a horse neigh. Staying the course lain. Jacques Berrocal has the power to ensconce with his deft use of independently structured spontaneous creation. These are ideas that may have been toyed around with before, but were not dropped to trollop unsuspecting ear cheers releasing fears that continual beat impressions are necessary for the mind to make connection directions with what seem like obtuse chortles colliding in space, bouncing, and the swerving wending the same path immediately.

The doormat reads 'everything is possible' - you are at the original 'second pirate session of a strange wax:' "Rock'n Roll Station" - Nurse With Wound covered this tune to great effect, naming an entire marvelous album afterwards in nepotistic frenzy alluding to the steady dour retelling in repetition of Vincent Canby accompanied by steady 3-notes-bass thrung-thum-blugneah wheel spinning crank clickety-clack interference bells, whine on rubber, words slightly morphing elongated syllable perplex. 'Jacques bicycle is music to my ears, do you remember?' Final wheel screech click-tap matched for tring-a-ling fades to coughing, and frog, lighter, poured water, laughter, muted bike vamp, utensil plated tangle stop.

'Bric-a-brac' is over 25 minutes and takes the entirety of side two into submission. This is opus direction, outré style. Dining with pleasure, listening to all the sounds around wooing for flickered dispersion. Mounted violin parapet intermittently stroking a straddle, evolving rubato in anomalous supportive crumble. All in chip fin and disquieting escapes the face making master powerful, juiced avant-pounce by the ounce, poured in a splash at a time. Incorporating footfalls, plate wobble, pot lid organic percussion, string struck
precision childlike mercurial atonal pluck, megaphone grunts, metal sheet wobbler, requisite pterodactyl shrills from elephantine monster spills of sonic departure ticket-stamped voucher felling the glacier hearts for the 'out-there' that is easy to feel 'in-here.' Sterile is not to be, cacophony reigns supreme and ropes the corralled scene warm blanket sheen away to cortex inner drum posed leaning to. Not to think of no, periodic shifts to rudimentary follow me simple attention. Getting surprised and being able, on follow stride short sublime, to
then reel from getting trapped in the belly walrus shell again, a piano comping akimbo percussive scatter jagged swagger introduces itself and a winding horn innuendo distend blow. Coiled runs afterwards and the return of the sun melody 3-note upright-chunked stomp from the only verifiably structured tune, now accomplice typewriter in tow, rhythm sectionally lunch lurch unclothed jubilant quasi-musical stenography replete - a new narrator recalls fragmentary discussion of another whole whale of a history tale all together, a French accent giblet freshly mustachioed story: 'interested simultaneously by moving.. and by noises... like music... [...] you know what, I am just waiting for Vince... I mean, Rock'n Roll Station... I'm just waiting for him... always in love, but is not.. here.. anyway, go home, go on.. [...] during a surrealistic demonstration by the Camelots of the king... what a strange thing he is making me doing... what a strange story.. you know I don't know what I am doing there.. you know, really... what a strange story, what a strange thing;' fade the flock out, big hawk lands throned. Swoon baboon new golden dongle spoon soon, put your cap tarts on, staring ague eyes open meden agan agar-agar. Everything is possible and this album just made it probable. 'We can do what we want to do.' Hear here.

~ Cesar Montesano

Tilbury pt. 2 rev. b

A fine howdy and top of the morning from Paradise!

Reading through the Tilbury/Andel review and discussion, a certain opinion registered with my own: that there's plenty of room within this site to give the tangents their own home. Tilbury's politics have been brought up enough around here, which leaves me wondering why his politics don't have their own .php. And a perfectly fine review now has attached to it yet another exchange that has become personal! I like the dynamic review/article format, in that the dialogue that follows the writeup becomes part of the record, but perhaps no more 'valid' than a page from Wikipedia. That's the way it goes here, as it has forever.

I task the other writers here to recognize the storms when they collect, and to create a new sub-discussion on the topic, right here on the main page. If they die a quick death, then so be it. Pixels are cheap around here, so use the space we have, attempt to free the reviews and articles of clutter, and organize the exchanges. (Just don't overdo it, Parker.)

I'll begin:

Michael faults Tilbury as a slinger of "pseudo-intellectualism". Fair enough, though I didn't read anywhere how or why certain parts of his stance are flawed. If I may prime, Tilbury says:

1) "My contention is that by submitting oneself to the formal procedure of entering the US, by presenting oneself and one's passport to American custom officials for acceptance and approval (and now to be finger-printed: 21.1.04), one is conferring a status of legitimacy, of normality, on a situation which is abnormal."

Any Americans here feel as strongly with respect to their residency?

2) In his '22 Questions', Tilbury considers the anonymity of the thousands of deaths that occur daily as a result of poverty, which is of course a byproduct of the fattening of rich corporate pockets. I'm to assume that there is a crime of hypocrisy here: (1) thousands died anonymously as a result of government and (2) the ~3,000 who died in the WTC (who, naturally, were noble players in the pocket fattening process) were identified and their names were publicized, treated as all heros should be.

Michael, go nuts.

Rob Brown Quartet - Radiant Pools

Rogueart 2

Over the past several years Rob Brown has found valuable stewardship via several French labels; the benefits of expatriation reaped without relocation. Radiant Pools, released on the newly-christened Rogueart imprint, reveals his latest alliance and the results come easily to recommend to fans. Positive or negative depending on perspective, the basic package isn’t all that removed from his past efforts as a leader. Here, he convenes a small combo of East Coast colleagues with a second horn, this time trombonist Steve Swell, completing the frontline. Small-combo free jazz is definitely Brown’s forté and he brings the same skill and verve to the studio on this outing. The program combines punchy freebop-flavored tunes fitted with agreeably tractile heads with more chamber-style pieces like the title track and Brown’s closing “Swarm Village.” This latter piece sheathes pre-composed sounding prologue and post-script segments around a middle section marked by an exuberantly swirling melee of horns and fractious rhythm.

Most of the disc’s tracks hover in the seven to nine minute range and their lengths leave substantial solo space for everyone to expound. Swell and Brown make for a particularly intuitive pair in the foreground sharing a rapport gained from plentiful hours on the bandstand in outfits like the Little Huey Orchestra. Morris plays double bass rather than guitar and his abilities on the upright now appear nearly on par with many of his East Coast peers, particularly when it comes to pizzicato proficiency. Gray fits in implacably as the fourth member, his malleable and muscular rhythms well-suited to the variable propulsive needs of the band. Standout features to my ears include the meaty groove of Morris’ “King Cobra,” which slithers along on a composer-rendered bass vamp and brooding statements from the horns, and the rising-then-receding menace of “Boxed Set,” a Don Cherry-kindred tune that features prime Brown channeling a piquant amalgam of Lyons and McLean. Two content-related collective improvisations under the common title “Semantics” chalk up as less memorable ventures. On both pieces the players engage calculated tonal explorations that end up erring into the nebulous without enough gas to adequately fuel the jets, though “Semantics 2,” the better of the pair, does allow for the welcome appearance of Brown’s anodyne flute.

The path expected of an artist commonly diverges from the path they choose for themselves. Nor should the two necessarily align. Rob Brown’s music is a germane case of this sort of aesthetic tug-of-war for me. I keep anticipating his choice of a direction drastically different from those he’s opted for in the past. He continues to work within the same general lexicon and with the same basic cadre of players, at least on record. It’s a framework within which he obviously feels comfortable and creatively engaged. His chops remain fearsome, his improvisatory command still salubrious. And to be fair, while the intrinsic bag may be the same, the contents remain productive and appealing. But the nagging desire to hear him test his talents in wildly divergent settings endures. Brown’s been gigging recently cellist Daniel Levin and drummer Satoshi Takeishi and the trio is slated to record a new album soon. Fingers crossed that the project is a harbinger of Brown’s decision to break significantly new ground.

~ Derek Taylor

Three from For4Ears

Tetuzi Akiyama/Jason Kahn
Till We Meet Again
For4Ears
1654

Philip Samartzis/Gunter Muller/Voice Crack
Wireless_Within
For4Ears
1655

Fredy Studer/Ami Yoshida
Duos 21-27
For4Ears
1656

I admit that my first reaction to the Akiyama/Kahn disc, of which only the first four of the nine tracks are duo performances, was to scream, “These duos are so good! Why not a whole album of them?!” But if, at the end of the day, I still prefer them to the solo tracks (three by Akiyama, two by Kahn), subsequent listens found a great deal to admire in most of those as well. It’s just that the combination of Kahn’s steady-state pulses, resonating and warping out into the ether, with Akiyama’s fiercely convoluted, always blues-based playing are so juicily fine, so utterly ear-satisfying (track three is a small morsel of perfection) that the changeover to the weakest of the solo cuts (Akiyama, track five), is kind of jarring. But Kahn’s first piece scours the sound-space with a harsh, scraping squeal that might loosen your fillings (um, this is a good thing) while his other solo effectively toys with low feedback throbs. Akiyama’s next number explores a Partchian realm, splintered and forlorn, and on the final track he expands on this, giving one of the greatest faux-Kithara performances you’re ever likely to hear, complemented at its conclusion by an airplane engine. An excellent recording.

Muller and Voice Crack had worked together before but throwing Philip Samartzis into the mix was a fine idea, just the sort of piquant flavor to really roil and spice up this music. For this recording from July of 2002, Samartzis, among other things, provides a web of environmental sounds, some of them insectile, others from the playground, in which the other three musicians can cavort, cracking electronics to their hearts’ content. The first two of the three tracks percolate along quite well, Muller’s deep drones and Samartzis’ tapes bracketing the late, lamented Moslang/Guhl duo as efficiently and imaginatively as you might expect. Indeed perhaps a bit too efficient as these pieces, while totally enjoyable, maybe tend a bit toward the predictable, i.e., more or less what I’d have expected to hear from this grouping. Very good, at times really good (toward the end of “tombac_toothless” or the opening seven or eight minutes of “bacchus_marsh” for example, where the sounds just blister to the surface), but not quite as consistently arresting as I think might have been possible. Such niggling concerns are rendered moot by the final piece, “bleep_black”, 16 minutes of sandpaper sizzle, found voices, threatening whines and dark pulses that evaporate, gasping, into a single sine. A wonderful performance.

Studer and Yoshida is the oddest pairing here and, try as I might, I can’t quite get the two to gel convincingly in my head. When Studer makes the attempt to play in a less efi manner, as on Duos 22 and 24 where he sticks to largely one attack for the ten or so minutes of each piece’s duration, Yoshida’s kissing, sucking or croaking sounds seem to simply lie alongside, sometimes interacting at cross-rhythms but never, to these ears, in such a way to command attention or appreciation. It’s actually interesting to compare his work on these pieces with the somewhat similar playing by Kahn on the earlier disc. Where Kahn manages, by dint of touch or other means, to abstract the sounds he’s generating to a non-instrument-specific level, Studer’s rhythmic cymbal attack never sounds like anything but…cymbals. I can see, I suppose, the argument for this approach (if that’s what’s intended), i.e., an “honest” exposition of the cymbal as disc of pounded metal, but to these ears, it comes off as somehow banal, not at all hallucinatory. When he plays in a more typical free jazz style, as on the final cut, you can rather easily imagine that you’re listening to a David Moss/Shelley Hirsch track from 1987 or so. Aside from her singing with Cosmos, I don’t think I’ve otherwise heard work from Yoshida that’s consistently knocked me out and I’m beginning to wonder if she needs the sort of “control” provided by Sachiko M to truly blossom. Whatever the case, this session left no good lasting impression.

(Apologies to Bags readers who prefer ungrouped reviews)

Buildings are nice when it's raining...

Otherwise, allow me to recommend the pleasures of trees, stars, and gentle breezes as accompaniment to public aesthetic rituals. On Wednesday I enjoyed an unusual event that shouldn't be unusual. In the idyllic environs of a sprawling public arboretum at the northern edge of Philadelphia I savored an uncontrived assortment of perceptual stimuli in the dispersed company of several hundred people. I expected it to be a cozy, small event, and it was, but the turnout was outright remarkable, cars backed up for hundreds of feet at the entrance and filled with young children, miscellaneous hipsters, elderly folks, etc. We aimlessly strolled around a dimly lit garden enjoying the subdued multi-sensory environment, from the human interventions of light projections, sound installations (including some slightly edgy textural electronic music oozing from one set of speakers), and musical performances, to the arboretum's own offerings in the way of flora, air, and land.

When I arrived a few minutes into the proceedings, I first encountered two guitarists seated with their backs turned to passerbys, strumming out a gentle and beautiful haze of softly amplified and distorted notes I had to soak up for a few minutes before exploring the garden a bit further. It was the duo of Meg Baird and Helena Espvall-Santoleri, members of Philly's extraordinary dreamy folk ensemble Espers (whose newest album I think I'll wax at length about one day soon on a nearby Bags page). I can't think of a finer way to enjoy such understated music than that context, with the normal performer-audience dynamic elegantly bypassed.

The soft volumes of the duo held a special appeal for me, and the opportunity to relish faint acoustics was beautifully expanded when P.G. Six, yet another key figure in the city's thriving underground folk scene, performed solo music on a kind of miniature harp (forgive me if there's a name for this I don't know). His slow, sparse, unassuming plucks disappearing into the comfortable evening air satisfied me rather more than any of the self-consciously creative and underwhelming harpists I've seen over the years like Rhodri Davies, Shelley Burgon, etc. It's a testament to the sublimely low volume of the music that a friend leaned over to whisper of how lovely the leaves sounded just then. The musical highlight of the evening for me came when one of the strings was somehow set into an extended passage of quasi-perpetual-motion of rapid, faint percussive attacks. I can't think of a more convenient way to describe it, but I'm sure we've all heard prepared guitarists do this sort of thing using some implement or another; it's somewhat ordinary. Besides the inherent appeal of this sort of sound event to my ears, the key was the faint volume, an invitation to listen more closely than usual and hear it mingle with the gentle sounds of twigs snapping under footsteps and the like. P.G. Six went on to delight my ears with a small hurdy-gurdy, ending his performance by wandering amidst the crowd minstrel-style.

Directing my gaze to the hand-drawn animations (said to be based on plant species found at the arboretum) by Kate Abercrombie being projected nearby and catching snippets of Antony Balch's Ghost at No. 9 (Paris) (1963-1972) (featuring William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin) screened at some point in the sequence of visual happenings, I noticed myself being thoroughly drawn into the psychedelic haze spreading from two guitarists and a percussionist performing a good twenty feet away. It was lovely! I learned later that the musicians were members of a local band called Bardo Pond that I've actually heard before. It's quite good heavy and hazy guitar rock with a 70s sound and I heard a CD a few months ago I dug so much I played it all the way through. I also remember seeing them open up for the Sun City Girls last year and liking it a good bit except for the excessive volume. In fact, I rather accidentally wound up at a rock gig in which Bardo Pond was playing (Acid Mothers Temple—I couldn't stand my curiosity after hearing hype from reputable people but they were comically horrible!) the next night after this outdoors event, but I only caught a few minutes of their set because it was too loud and so I left. So it's reassuring to know that these musicians really have some substance and can weave a beautiful web of sound at more sensible volumes like they did on Wednesday. I'd love to see more amplifier-worshipping rock bands perform in a setting like this. The gong so beautifully affixed to the Japanese maple tree in the lead photo was bowed at length during this gorgeous performance.

I'm not sure who did what that evening, so for the sake of offering due credit, here is the list of people cited in the promotional materials for the event, presumably responsible for the various performances/installations:

Kate Abercrombie, Meg Baird, Will Brown, Kelly Cobb, Helena Espvall-Santoleri, Aaron Igler, Tristin Lowe, Jeremiah Misfeldt, P.G. Six, Paul Swenbeck, Clint Takeda, Vapour Theories

Also, comparing notes with the press release, I think I missed a few things that were happening, probably because I was chit-chatting incessantly as is my unbreakable habit. The event was the work of an admirable organization called LURE (Lighting for Urban Rooftop Environments), so it's to them and this list of people I direct my congratulations on a splendid evening I hope to be approximated on future occasions in any of the suitable loci of plants and people.

~Michael Anton Parker

Steve Lacy & Evan Parker - Chirps (FMP)

Steve Lacy may have monopolized the magazine polls over the years, but few would contest Evan Parker’s mutual place amongst soprano nobility. Each man wears his virtuosity prominently like brightly-hued plumage on this 1985 concert meeting, making the pate-slapping moments of stupefaction at their joined ingenuity manifold. What’s even more gratifying and downright entrancing is how each man bends to the others’ ticks and preferences: Parker embracing Lacy’s meticulous melodicism, and Lacy tailoring to Parker’s prevailing tonal latitude. The accords are so amicable that if not for the stereo channel separation, their identities could easily overlap and blur during certain segments. Listeners who off-handedly lodge pejoratives like “aloof’ or “overly-academic” at either player would be wise to spend some time assimilating the warm and inquisitive colloquies of this set. “Full Scale” spools out with a narrative improvisatory logic intact across a full third of an hour, countless expository notes and tones issuing forth from the respective raised fish horns. In the waning minutes it’s Lacy, not Parker, who coarsens his tone with growling trills and stutters prior to a final tandem display of spiraling airborne acrobatics. Everything is accomplished with surprisingly slight reliance on the sort of extended techniques so often used to gauge an arch improviser’s mettle. Parker’s storied circular breathing doesn’t even enter until the final minutes and then only for a brief spate. With “Relations” the pair once again commences chatting in limpid, tonally-forthright language. While the disc omits the solo recitals that preceded the duo portion it does contain three bonus “Nocturnal Chirps” taped after the audience’s exit from the recital hall. Miniatures by comparison to the main pieces, they still offer plenty of gorgeous reciprocity and with a fidelity that feels even more inclusive of the performance space. Another side perk comes with the photos of saxophonists together in the accompanying booklet. Lacy shows himself among the few who can match the stern countenance of Parker when so inclined. And the flying saucer street lamp cover makes me smile too.

Dave Rempis & Tim Daisy - Back to the Circle

ODL 1008

Rempis and Daisy probably need no preface to Bags readers. As two-fifths of the Vandermark 5 and two-thirds of Triage they’ve cut quite a visible swathe across the contemporary free jazz scene. One of the unforseen pleasures of the 2004 ACME Festival in Athens, Georgia was the chance to hear the two of them as an impromptu duo. Their laconic twenty-odd minute encounter served as the crux of a seminar tag team-taught by John Corbett and Kevin Whitehead on the celebrated discipline of music criticism. The syllabus was simple. Rempis on alto and Daisy on a drum kit compact enough to fit comfortably in a corner of the lecture hall would improvise for short set and then we, the students, would comment critically on the music. As Corbett and Whitehead probably expected, the exercise fell a bit flat with most of the undergrads reticent to raise their hands in response to what transpired. But I found the music freewheeling and thrilling, well worth the strained and stunted Q&A format that followed. Rempis and Daisy invested an inveigling amount of variety and creativity into their episodic exchange and I recall leaving the classroom wishing I had a CDR of the set in hand for future reference.

That wish goes partially fulfilled with this new limited edition Okkadisk offering, though the more predictable results here don’t live up to my memory of the Athens event. Taped two months earlier in a Chicago performance space, the disc presents seven tracks that gallop by in just over forty minutes. Four from Rempis, two from Daisy, and “Huff” a terse improvisation shared by both surnames. Rempis uncaps both tenor and alto, demonstrating an abiding mastery over both reeds. Daisy shifts between structured rhythms and more porous pulse-resistant play, sometimes slipping a shade during the latter situations. Even with a fair share of freer leanings the program is fast-paced and fairly clear cut. No ear-upending surprises or sudden trapdoors, but the pair sustains solid focus and stamina from start to finish.

Two traits readily apparent about Rempis are his dexterity and clarity. His superior chops over Vandermark are a matter of public record on the part of the latter reedist. The same self-deprecating skill at schooling comes to bear in this setting, though it’s now Daisy who occupies the pupil chair. Rempis works off a soaring anthemic riff on the opener “Welcome” as Daisy shapes a vaguely Latin cross-rhythm beneath him. The title track and “Fast Cars,” both emotive free-boppish numbers that feel borrowed from the V5 songbook, exhibit some of the most fortuitous interplay. On the former track the two zoom along on sagacious, swinging rhythm, Rempis stoking excitement via a velocious interval-hurdling alto solo. Daisy’s “Alexandria” bookends bouts of legato tenor blowing, with a spacious, textured foray from the composer on brushes and mallets. Rempis’ Brötzmann-flavored finale swiftly shifts from ferocious roar to a dissipating whisper and rasp. Other pieces exhibit similar rapport and earnestness. But none cement indelibly in the memory, the barcode imagery of the cover reflected in the music. Regardless, it’s an enjoyable encounter between two friends who obviously glean a great deal of pleasure from playing together. With a pressing limited to 800, interested parties shouldn’t dally in their securing copies.

~ Derek Taylor

John Tilbury - Barcelona/Laura Andel - In::Tension:.

John Tilbury
Barcelona
Rossbin
RS021

Laura Andel
In::tension:.
Rossbin
RS022

Two rather different releases, in style and quality, from that most inscrutable of Italian labels (in the sense that I rarely have any idea what sort of music Alessandro is likely to put out next). A word, first, about the new packaging. Essentially, the discs come (or, at least, are mailed—not sure how they’d appear on a store rack) in a flattened package the dimensions of a DVD case. It appears as though you’re intended to expand this box so that it’s about a half-inch wide, though each time I’ve opened one, the stickum on the interior spine has failed to hold. Just as well since I can’t imagine why I’d want to take up that much shelf width for a CD. Additionally, the slit on the inside of the cover flap isn’t the easiest thing from which to extricate the disc. Visually, both covers are fairly handsome, a step or two up from recent Rossbin designs, though no credit is given to an artist/designer.

John Tilbury has been playing and recording more and more outside the confines of AMM in recent years, but this is his first ever solo, improvised disc, a rather surprising fact. Since for so much of his lengthy career he’s been heard either as an interpreter or as an element of the near-indivisible AMM, it’s been fascinating to listen to him bloom in more “exposed” surroundings. The “Doris” session with Keith Rowe marked out extraordinary levels of aesthetic attainment, though several subsequent efforts, to these ears, found him a bit tentative and unwilling to assert his strong personality. AMM’s “Norwich” and this recording (done in December, 2003), however, are by and large breathtaking examples of his art. Never having had the opportunity to hear Tilbury in such a setting, I’m unsure how typical in structure it is, but “Barcelona” is an exquisite performance. It’s a bit louder, more impassioned than one might expect, beginning with pounded, strident chords and revisiting that urgency throughout. The piano is partially prepared and Tilbury often makes simultaneous use of pure notes and altered ones, to unerringly gorgeous effect. As with much of AMM’s best work (as well as post-AMM projects like the quartet on ErstLive 005), there’s something of the sense of a goal, a territory that’s sought for from the onset; its specifics are likely unknown but it’s recognizable when you get there. Here, during the piece’s 36 minutes, you encounter several familiar Tilbury tropes, general patterns and attacks you may recognize. It almost sounds as though he needs to say hello to certain old friends before passing on into less certain areas: the delicately rising arpeggio, the two-note conversation, the drumstick drawn over the stringboard. Even here, though, the accents vary, the patterns subtly change. I suppose I should admit that there’s still no other pianist in the world I’d rather listen to; Tilbury’s touch and ineffable sense of poetic time and sound placement are second to none in my book. But I believe that listeners who give this disc a cursory once-over and think they’re hearing “standard” Tilbury are missing a lot. Even the most cynical observer can hardly help being overcome by the closing minutes, where Tilbury achieves an interplay of serenity and poetic incision that’s as warm as it is melancholy. Beginning with some low notes that perhaps ever so slightly allude to the song forms of late Cardew, the last moments arrive on a plane of beauty rarely glimpsed. Mature, wistful, maybe even a little bitterly romantic, it’s a world no one else can evoke and a very, very deep and beautiful one.

Laura Andel is an Argentinean composer currently based in New York and she’s assembled an eleven-strong ensemble, called the “Electric Percussive Orchestra” to perform her oddly, not to say preciously, titled suite. Notables in the group include cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum and pianist/accordionist Carl Maguire (a musician who should be more widely known) along with a host of guitars, keyboards and percussion. My initial (and, actually, lasting) impression was of the general sensibility of the Bang On A Can school, particularly Michael Gordon, about halfway between his earlier, more interestingly aggressive Branca-esque pieces and his later, more boringly academic work. There are jagged, harsh rhythms that lack inherent interest, a degree of monochromaticism in the arrangements that seek to force the electronics, with their vague and watery allusions to rock or funk, into conservatory strictures, the inevitable but hazy nods to the tango and, most gratingly, a declamatory voice (Kyoko Kitamura) who recapitulates much I’ve come to dislike about post-serial vocal stylings over the last several decades. Another reference point that struck me: Remember those Vienna Art Orchestra records on Hat from the early 80s? I understand they’re quite popular in some circles, but their conflation of styles, with rare exceptions, never quite cut the mustard with me; I was never really convinced of their conception as a whole despite some fine individual work. Here, Andel orchestrates some individual moments that rise above the dreary morass such as a fine conversation between Bynum and pianist Ursula Schlicht over a dark, bellowing underbelly and some percussion episodes seemingly inspired by Tibetan forms, but they’re almost always abutted with written lines that are dry as a bone, wavering between forms, unwilling to wholeheartedly commit themselves one way or the other. The fifth part, for instance, dips a toe into the sort of quasi-primitive, roiling rhythms Elliott Sharp explored long a go with Carbon (Sharp is credited for mixing and mastering this disc, incidentally) but then frustratingly retreats into more innocuous territory. The final section includes some vocal lines that bear an unfortunate resemblance to the theme from Star Trek.

Do yourselves a favor: Do not miss the Tilbury.

Getting in on the Ground Floors

Technically, these two profiles should probably be posted in the interview section. But closet Luddite that I am I still haven’t figured out all of the bells & whistles of that section of the Bags apparatus. Maybe Namor (once more on shore) or Emory can take what’s here & transplant it to the proper digs. Meanwhile, please enjoy Jesse Goin’s e-mail exchanges with two label honchos who are just getting their respective empires rolling. In the interest of equity, the same questionnaire was forwarded to each respondent. It’s my sincere hope that Jesse will be contributing more around here in the near future; he’s got commodious ears and plenty of flair with the pheasant-feathered quill. Interested parties should also be sure to check out his fathoms-deep confab with Dennis Gonzalez over at OFN- Part One ripe for the reading & Part Two soon to drop from the vine. Without further delay, Mr. Goin…

Introducing two upstart labels I think merit your attention, Formed Records and (1.8)sec. Records.

Will Benton heads Formed Records in San Francisco, whose inaugural release is scheduled for November, a duo of Mattin and Dion Workman entitled S3. Truly a label in its nascent stage of development, (a little) more information can be found at the Formed home page.

Chris Bryan heads (1.8)sec. Records in Winnipeg. The label was launched a year ago this month with a vinyl compilation conceived of and curated by Chris. Since then, (1.8)sec. has released two cds, the Tomas Korber/dieb13/Jason Kahn trio, Zirkadia, and A Book Of Standard Equinoxes, a duo of Kim Cascone and Domenico Sciajno. These last two were reviewed here at Bags by Brian Olewnick in September. More information is available at the soon to be operational (1.8)sec. home page.

Formed Label Profile

10/10/05

[JG]: When was Formed launched?

[WB:] "Launched"? I had been kicking the idea of starting a record label around for years, but officially, the summer of 2005. That's when I actually started putting money into the project.

What big idea/concept launched you into starting up a label?

Basically, I think that there is a lot of really exciting music happening these days, and that there are not enough people listening.

How do you choose the artists for your label? What is your input/influence on the
collaborations/projects for Formed?

This really varies from release to release. Some things have come to me as finished works; other things are still being shaped into their final form (no pun intended). I would have no problems with asking that material that I just didn't think was good be cut from an otherwise good recording, but I wouldn't ever ask people to re-do anything, or offer suggestions on how I wanted something to sound. I'm pretty hands-off.

How active a participant are you in commissioning/curating a release?

If there are particular projects that an artist is involved in, I'm happy to specify my interest in it, but in general, my approach is to find an artist who matches the focus of the label and ask them what they're working on. If it's relevant, I pursue it, if not, I don't.

How would you characterize your relationship to the artists on Formed?

Genial? I'm only interested in releasing music by people who impress me. I want to give them a source for getting their music more out into the world. I know what I have the time and energy to do with the label, so I am pretty up front with the artists on the label about what they can expect from Formed.

How is business conducted with the artists on your label [e.g., a handshake agreement, contracts…]?

Case-by-case. Everything gets done via email these days, so it's waaaay easier to just go back into your archive and see exactly what everyone said. I'm happy to work on a handshake, I'm happy to workout a contract... We're talking about a relatively small pond here, and one in which people tend to stick around for quite a while... so I'm not personally worried about getting taken to the cleaners.

What is your design concept for packaging & your web site?

I would like for the label's graphics to be really, really quiet. the website was designed by Chris Dilts along my guidelines that it be unobtrusive. My working agreement with the musicians on the label is that they get to use whatever artwork they want, subject to my approval. I run everything by Mr. Dilts to make sure that it works with the pressing plant's template, and I would feel comfortable asking artists to revise artwork that was not at all in line with the basic visual direction of the label... And all the releases are going
to be packaged in the same cardboard sleeve, so they look awesome all bunched together on a shelf.
Okay, and to be totally honest, I briefly deliberated the merits of ripping off the Crass Records look, but decided that the joke would get old after a while.

What about your label identity is contradistinct from others in the marketplace?

Formed is going to focus more specifically on material that falls between improvisation and composition, between electronic and acoustic instrumentation... I think that the way that things have been going on in the music circles I'm interested in have countenanced the possibility of a more nuanced take on what improvised music is / can be. I don't want to go on at too great a length here, as I basically like good music, and dislike bad music, but I think that the above describes the most central point on the many-circled Venn diagram that describes what the label will be up to.

What is your distribution network looking like currently?

Ummm trade secret? heh.. I'm working some things out right now, and since nobody's signed anything yet, I should probably wait to say anything specific.

Will Formed be an outlet for your own work? [are you a musician?]

Oh heavens no.

What enterprise would you undertake if you received a handsome endowment for the label?

If, say, a gigantor arts grant landed in my lap, I would do a couple of things:

1. I'd intensify the release schedule. The rate at which you can put out records is defined in no small part by the amount of risk to which you can expose yourself. If I was risking someone else's money, I'd be more comfortable tying more of it up.

2. I'd schedule a festival. I'd facilitate mini-tours for the attending artists.

3. Maybe some sort of regular publication covering the areas of cultural work on which Formed focuses?

4. Finally, and this is based on the assumption of a comfortably large grant, I'd open/operate a more permanent space for events relevant to Formed's agenda. I think that something like 3030 in Chicago would be ideal.

How, if at all, has your perspective on the experimental music scene, & its audience, been informed by label ownership?

I've realized that you have to pick what it is that you care about and stick with it, that there is a lot of good stuff out there, but that whatever you like is what you should work with, and if people like it, great! This sounds corny, and before starting Formed, I would have smirked at a sentiment like that, but seriously, when you decide to step in as something more than a spectator, you find a surprising clarity.

~Fin~

1.8sec Label Profile

10/19/05

[JG]: When was [1.8] sec. launched?

[CB]: The label was launched in Oct. 2004; we’re just over 1 year old.

What big idea/concept launched you into starting up a label?

I've worked in record stores for years and years, and subsequently have become a big record geek. I had started to think about how vinyl as a medium had these unique physical properties that could be used for specific sound art projects. I felt that if I came up with a good idea based on this, that I wouldn't have trouble getting my favorite artists to participate.

How do you choose the artists for your label?

For projects I initiate, I approach the people I would like to work with. For the 2 CDs on the label, the artists approached me.

What is your input/influence on the collaborations/projects for [1.8] sec.?

The (1.8)sec. Comp (12” vinyl) was conceived and curated by me, so the conceptual influence would have been 100%. The artists had to construct a 1.8 second loop that they would send me, I would then send that loop to a random artist, and they had to use it for a lock at the end of there track. As far as the actual outcome of what the tracks sounded like, it was completely up to them. I picked a fairly musically diverse bunch of artists within the genre and gave them freedom to do whatever they wanted.

How active a participant are you in commissioning/curating a release?

For the compilation, I included myself on the release. I record under the name 3x3is9.

How would you characterize your relationship to the artists on [1.8] sec.?

Everyone is very friendly. I've met maybe 1/3 of the people who are on the label... maybe a bit less. Some of them I keep in regular contact with through email. I see Arden (duul_drv) a lot; he is a friend here in Winnipeg. I'd say for the most part everyone involved with this kind of music is so busy (myself included), that once a project is over we only keep in loose contact, an email every couple of months.

How is business conducted with the artists on your label [e.g., a handshake agreement, contracts…]?

Handshake agreement. Everything is quite loose. I'm really relaxed about how they want to deal with the rights etc. If a CD sold out, and they wanted to re-release it on their own label or something... sounds OK to me. The artists I work with are for the most part of a similar mindset regarding releases, copy write and ownership of music etc.

What is your design concept for packaging & your web site?

Many.

The website has changed a few times. First it was sort of blobby and minimal, now it's a lot sparer looking. I like the contrast of mediums, so I try to use very old things in a modern minimalist design.

As far as the releases are concerned, it is per release. The art for the 2 CDs were done by the artists themselves. I felt this was appropriate because the music was already completed when I agreed to put it out, so them having complete control over the art made sense.

The LP compilation is another thing altogether. I wanted the cover art to stand out. Initially I was planning on doing something more like the current design for the website, but decided that wouldn't exactly fit the release. I thought about all the crazy album covers that I would see come through the record shop I work at, so I thought I'd use something a bit atypical to the music style. The main theme of the LP was that it was a concept that I really liked, all artists I really enjoy, so why not use one of my favorite paintings for the cover. The artist also happens to be my lovely girlfriend. I've had the exact mixed reaction I thought I'd get; some people have told me or written that they think it is the best cover they have seen in years; other people think it is inappropriate for the genre... I'm happy I went with it.

The next release I'll be doing is a 3inch CD-r by David Szczesny that I'll be doing all the layout for. I'll be doing a few variations on the package, sort of a "COLLECT ALL 4!!!!"

Other future plans are a 12" with hand made lino block printed covers etc...

What about your label identity is contradistinct from others in the marketplace?

Hmmmm..... A lot of labels start out releasing sort of a "Crew" or area specific artist, I just sort of jumped right into the middle of things. My main intent with the label will be to put out music I enjoy; I’ll let the label's theme morph around as my interests change.

What is your distribution network looking like currently?

I mainly use Scratch distribution. They do a bunch of sub distribution for me, and have an online shop. Otherwise I go directly to some shops and smaller distros that contact me. You can get the CDs through Ear rational now to. Lately I've been enjoying trading releases with other small labels. I think it is great that so many labels feel the same way I do about this. I'll send them 5 of each item, and then pick a bunch of items from them.... fun, fun, fun.

Will [1.8[ sec. be an outlet for your own work?

Someday. I put one of my tracks on the compilation. I can see myself releasing some future collaborative work I might do. I'm already hearing more great music than I could ever release, so I think I'd like to reserve my solo stuff for other people to release.

What enterprise would you undertake if you received a handsome endowment for the label?

I definitely would like to do more vinyl. I would love to do a series of punk rock style split 7" records, and I'd love to do a DVD of some sort.

How, if at all, has your perspective on the experimental music scene, & its audience, been informed by label ownership?

I'm exposed to a lot more music than I was before. This is both a good and bad thing. I'm a lot more critical, but also hear things that I would never expected to love and do. I guess I'm aware of pockets of experimental music and musicians that I would otherwise not know about. Artists and labels approach me that are amazing and prolific, that had otherwise gone unnoticed to me.

~Fin~

Triptych Myth - The Beautiful

AUM Fidelity 35

The demise of the piano trio as a viable jazz configuration has been prefigured and prognosticated upon for quite some time. I’ve fallen into the trap of using the theory as a means of boostering new bands that fall outside established parameters. Cooper-Moore, Tom Abbs and Chad Taylor, collectively known as Triptych Myth, prove unequivocally the straw man status of such an argument.

Aptly-named to the point of perfection, The Beautiful presents a concise program of ten tracks and registers invitingly into the range of old vinyl playing times. Cooper-Moore covers the 88’s with a stylistically far reaching sweep, from chamber concert patrician to barrelhouse raconteur and back, the James Booker of the ‘free jazz’ set. His gunny-sack of invented instruments stays in the foot locker and accords his full attention to the piano. Abbs anchors and advances on a bass, achieving obelisk-sized proportions in terms of tone and density, but far from an immovable object. The palpable weight has little bearing on his dexterity and sterling ability to shape vibrant contrapuntal lines. Taylor rules his kit with a sovereign authority, wielding sticks and brushes with even facility and representing an engine room that runs on atomic rather than coal-fire energy.

Together the three players sketch an eventful itinerary. “All Up In It” reflects the resolve of its title as the trio engages in a fast-paced relay that veers from tightly structured to semi-free. Here an elsewhere Cooper-Moore’s attack carries curious echoes of Andrew Hill, circa the later Blue Note sessions, dark clusters dropping like freshly-plucked Morel mushrooms. “Trident” opens opaque and dour, but soon shifts to contrast of Cooper-Moore’s fitful indigo chords and the chattery, untethered responses of his colleagues. With “Spiraling Out” the trio dives intrepidly into a whirlpool exchange of stabbing block chords, stinging ripcord bass, and frothing cymbal-forwarded drums. “A Time Too” travels a similar tack of mutual unrest indexed by interludes of confluence, while “Poppa’s Gin in the Chicken Feed” introduces a congenial dollop of Guaraldi-style parlor swing and M-Base funk.

The most impressive and endearing of the pieces end up being the ballads. “For Frida K.” saunters out as a somber and haunting waltz. Cooper-Moore’s sparse filigree notes shape a theme that is at once delicate and assertive. Abbs and Taylor sculpt a surrounding accompaniment, rich and responsive and the piece takes on an aura spiritual akin to the Ellington-Mingus-Roach opus “Fleurette Africaine. The heartfelt rondo “Pooch,” penned as an ode to Wilbur Morris, and the solo “Robinia Pseudoacacia” are nearly just as breathtaking. Sewn from gilded melodic thread, the former tune, one virtually guaranteed to hook itself indefinitely in the listener’s frontal lobe, carries the grand pathos of a Keith Jarrett piece, but sans the invasive mumbling and unchecked ego. Abbs and Taylor engineer ideal support and unveil a bustling battery cymbals, toms, snare and strings that reflect and accentuate the core beauty of Cooper-Moore’s central line. Ascribing the ultimate compliment in his liners, William Parker describes the latter piece as “perhaps the most perfect piece of music I have heard in my life.”

Like its tenor-bass-drums cousin, the piano trio is in no danger of lapsing into extinction. In the rights hands, of which we are fortunate there are many, it can serve as vehicle for uncovering and exploring inexhaustible territory. This is the first in a projected trilogy of AUM Fidelity releases by Triptych Myth. Strong odds suggest that the forthcoming other two entries will provide listening experiences that are equally bountiful.

~ Derek Taylor

Alessandro Bosetti/Michel Doneda - Breath on the Floor

Absinth 7

Aggh! It’s those sopranos again! Why won’t they leave us improv fans alone, what with their swirling and chittering, their piercing shrieks and harsh snarls? What is it with these reeds that they insist on gobbling up the lion’s share of discs that allow that dread instrument, the saxophone, some breathing space?

…..

OK, I’m better now. I do admit to a little bit of misgiving when I see a release like this. Despite occasionally being happily surprised by the odd soprano disc (Stephane Rives still looms large in recent times), I can’t help but think, “Ah, probably more of the same old same old.” Unfair, to be sure, but it’s there. With “Breath on the Floor”, well, I found that to be somewhat the case though, overall, I have to say it’s a strong, tough album, quite likely to more than satisfy admirers of the two musicians, especially those who have wanted to hear a slightly burlier Bosetti or a just-barely-reined in Doneda. Though the disc begins in breaths and clicks, these sounds are much more in one’s face than normally deployed, acid-tinged and insistent, even going so far as to include a dogged pulse for much of the piece’s duration. The second cut, “Verbs rather than Nouns” (some noteworthy titles offered herein), ups the agitation ante a notch, the burbles becoming growl-like, the breaths more irritable. It’s probably a good move that five of the seven tracks are between three and six minutes (the remaining two only 9 and 11-ish), as both players arguably benefit from concision and the concentration of ferocity. Some very impressive and very low multiphonics going on here as well as it segues into “Lord Boomerang”, which eventually incandesces into a fiery spray of gaseous spittle.

Phew! Where was I? “Deux encoche” returns, to an extent, to whistling air rushes, but with a different enough accent, different areas of emphasis, that there’s no sense of treading worn pathways. In fact, it might be the improv which sits on its own the most successfully, a vague songlike structure tingeing the proceedings. “Not only cigarettes but cheese” (told ya) is the one running nine plus minutes and suffers somewhat from the exertion, meandering overmuch through saliva-drenched byways, though again those intriguing low hums occur toward the end. A plaintive whistle, almost a dirge, rides atop “Migrations”, an intense lament buffeted by wind—scrappy little number. And how could one resist a cut called, “Giuseppe Ielasi”? Again with those behemoth subtones! Again with the gusty spume! It may be more of the same and, admittedly, around this point a little of my interest began to waver but it’s been a rollicking, wet ride. Fans of both should enjoy the disc greatly. If, ultimately, I want to hear more of the obsessive intelligence I found in Rives, there’s certainly a place for the more purely sensual, angst-ridden pleasures to be found here.

Yowie - Cryptooology

Skin Graft GR#74

This music for microtonal electric guitars and drumkit sounds like the hot, herkyjerky instrumental parts of classic Beefheart played about two or three times as fast. When I listen to Yowie (which has been an average of a dozen or so times per week since discovering it some six months ago), it feels like the secret equations of music are rolling by on a high-speed ticker-tape, making virgin encounters with mortal eyes. A likely candidate to crack my all-time top 30 albums list.

~Michael Anton Parker

Various – Mississippi Delta Blues: “Blow My Blues Away” Vol. 2 (Arhoolie)

With the Blues, more than most idioms, the onus lies not on the song, but on the performer to stamp it with his own peculiarities and personality. It’s the chief reason why a tune like “Catfish Blues” can reveal a fresh catch even on its nth reading, providing the bluesman doing the fishing is using his own pole and bait. This collection of folklorist George Mitchell’s field recordings from ’67 and ‘68 makes that case in bold letters with the caps lock emphatically in place. Deviating from the first volume, which features a dozen names, this second sampler shaves the cast down to three, five if you count Robert Nighthawk and James “Peck” Curtis (dubbed The Blues Rhythm Boys) backing Houston Stackhouse on the final four cuts. Joe Callicott gets eleven, including two vintage 1930 sides from his youth, and R.L. Burnside receives ten. The music is definitely of the Delta and its adjacent Hill Country zip codes, but takes an array of surprising detours. Callicott sounds like Mississippi John Hurt might if the latter man had the wind in sails sucked away by chronic insolvency and world weariness. A warbly yodel invests his “Lonesome Katy Blues” floating above an anchoring acoustic strum. On “Laughing to Keep From Crying” the steady buzz of a bass string keeps rhythm as he voices vignettes that advance an almost Buddhist mindset: life is suffering so you might as well have a long hard chuckle in the face of inevitable and unending adversity. Burnside’s program pays heavy respect to Muddy Waters on tunes like “Goin’ Down South” and “I Rolled and I Tumbled,” but there’s far more menace and angst imbued to his versions. Early minimalist takes on tunes like “Skinny Woman,” where a knuckle-on-wood rhythm laces his raspy vocals to create the aural illusion of the title entity tap-dancing in clogs on spindly tree branch legs, and “Long Haired Doney” presage the misogynistic persona cultivated during his later career. Amplified and heavily soused, the Stackhouse cuts are bit incongruous with what’s come before, but Curtis’ quixotic beats and daffy cowbell accents readily fulfill the requisite originality quotient.

Roel Meelkop - 5 (Ambiences)

Intransitive 24

Even in this relatively tiny slice of the sound-art/music world, there must be dozens, if not hundreds of artists whom I’ve read about here or there, thought, “Hmm, it seems like I should hear this person” and, all too often, never get around to it. Though I do own but a single disc, Richard’s current dissection of 31 Jeph Jerman recordings over on IHM is causing a severe itch of this sort in yours truly, for instance. Roel Meelkop was another name out there for me, someone I’ve never made the move on, not due to any reluctance at all but more to do with time, money, etc. So, thanks very much to Howie and Intransitive for passing this one on: a rich, mysterious, deeply fascinating album.

In his liner notes (five paragraphs, incidentally, each beginning with the phrase, “Ink on paper”—five more ambiences), Meelkop speaks of the difficulties in constructing sound-art, particularly in how one gets at the sounds’ essences or hidden (I might say, poetic) meanings. Whether or not this is a more subjective undertaking than is normally the case anyway is an open question but Meelkop seems to think, and I tend to agree, that a certain percentage of…shallow formulations will show themselves over time even if they retain a (what may turn out to be) superficial attractiveness at present. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of relistening to something that knocked our socks off even ten years ago with a pained expression as if to say, “Yikes, how did I hear so much substantiality back then?” So, even though I’ve no idea how “5 (Ambiences)” will hold up a decade from now, it sounds damn fine, solid and true today.

The melding of sonic elements with evocative structure is likely, for me, what causes these pieces to, generally, work so well. On the strongest tracks (ambiences 2 & 5, for my money), the listener is never quite able to concentrate on one at the expense of the other. As attractive or otherwise intriguing as a given sound is, you’re always conscious of its relation to the sounds that came before or follow, where it sits in the work, what it evokes by these relationships. Determining exactly why a given segment “makes sense” becomes as slippery as analyzing the success of a haiku. There’s a kind of drama, to be sure, but one filled with unexpected (but retrospectively logical) meanderings, false endings, surprising recurrences, etc. I’ve no real idea as to what his sources are though, aside from some clear—and lovely—use of field recordings (children’s patter, fireworks?), I get the feeling many are utilized in more hidden circumstances. In fact, though essentially electronic, there’s usually a strong sense of air in the pieces, even if that atmosphere has a slight tinge of ozone. There are stumbles on occasion--the inclusion of some academic-sounding sonorities at the close of the first track grates a bit and the fourth cut somehow fails to cohere for this listener—but by and large, Meelkop creates an individual, honest and very real sound-world here and, really, what more can one ask for?

www.intransitiverecordings.com

TwoThousandAnd Troika

Doctor Quirkey's Goodtime Emporium Band
A 6
TwoThousandAnd 2+10

Broken Hands / Lucky Rabbit
LUCKY HANDS
TwoThousandAnd 2+11

Anthony Guerra / Nisihide Takehiro
SCOPA POSSIBILITIES
TwoThousandAnd 2+12

London, as Martin Davidson will proudly confirm, boasts more free improvisers per square mile than any other city on the planet, but even despite the noble encouragement of that most Londoncentric of new music publications, The Wire, many still have to struggle to play for more than five people, five quid and a packet of chips at the end of the gig. So the scene has gone into survival mode: small venues (the basement of Mark Wastell's Sound323 is certainly cosy, as is the studio at Resonance FM where Lucky Hands was recorded), small groups (with the exception of the awful hydra-headed monster that is the LIO) and small labels, including Wastell's Confront and TwoThousandAnd, this latter co-founded by guitarists Michael Rodgers and Australian (then resident in Britain) Anthony Guerra, who also perform together as a duo, Broken Hands. Lucky Rabbit is also a duo, consisting of Ross Lambert, also on electric guitar, and Seymour Wright on alto sax. Lucky Hands is a joint venture between the two outfits (one imagines the next one will have to be Broken Rabbit), featuring two tracks by each as well as one Guerra / Wright duo, one Lambert and Rodgers duo and one quartet. The influence of Off Site-style Japanese lowercase is still discernible – Lucky Rabbit's debut on the label recorded back in 2002 also featured, you'll recall, Utah Kawasaki, Ami Yoshida and Tetsuro Yasunaga – as is the post-Fahey post-Connors take-your-time fingerpicking, but there's also a whimsical and typically British feel to it all, a sense of humour that harks back to second generation LMC improvisers like Steve Beresford and Terry Day and an off-the-wall experimental purity you can also find in Morphogenesis. The recording is so intimate it sounds as if they're all in your front room – you almost feel you're intruding on something simply by listening to it. Shades of Roger Smith playing his Spanish guitar in his kitchen in the wee small hours.

Guerra's outing with Nisihide Takehiro, Scopa Possibilities, was recorded in London in 2003 before the former returned down under and the latter relocated to Japan. Guerra's on guitar and electronics here, but Nisihide is billed as playing "various" (and as most of the links you can dig up on him by Googling are in Russian, good luck trying to find out exactly what that "various" means). His last two releases on the label, Iberian Tour with Guerra, Rodgers and Joel Stern and plastic (released under the name of Popo and clocking in at just nine minutes) are both sold out, so I'm none the wiser. Not surprisingly Scopa Possibilities is a pretty inscrutable 34 minutes of soft noise, with low gloomy drones, vicious clicks and occasional blasts of noise interspersed with threatening silence. It's very much the Mattin aesthetic – Mattin of course being an honorary member of the TwoThousandAnd crew, his Gora being the label's most powerful release to date – somewhere between Malfatti and Merzbow (nearer Malfatti, thankfully). Try setting fire to your house while playing a Sachiko M solo album simultaneously with early Xenakis electronic music – it might just sound something like this.

The most extreme of these three releases though is A6, by the splendidly-named Dr Quirkey's Goodtime Emporium Band, another two-man outfit (hey, three's a crowd..) consisting of Chris O'Connor on drums and Daniel Beban on guitar. It's a continuous 43-minute span of music that, in a strange way, achieves the impossible, managing to be unremittingly static – Beban's basic chord remains the same throughout – and consistently fast-moving, as O'Connor darts around his kit, flailing hi-hat, toms and snare with his brushes like Han Bennink on acid but at a volume level you'd associate with John Stevens' work with the mid-1970s SME. The music is totally distinctive – play it once and I guarantee you'll be able to recognise any part of it again instantly – and yet totally forgettable, containing absolutely nothing whatsoever that could stand out as a structural defining event. At one and the same time then it's a rather neat example of Stockhausen's moment form and also a comment – maybe an ironic one, at that – on improvised music's typical busy-ness. In its own quiet yet flustered way it's an extraordinary and unique document, and, as TwoThousandAnd's elegant hand-made packages tend to sell out fast, I wouldn't let this one pass you by without giving it a listen. The question is, how many listens? How many times do you need to listen to this music? How many times would you want to? For you to figure out.

~ Dan Warburton

Arek Gulbenkoglu - Points Alone

Impermanent 006

A lovely, even dazzling solo recording by Melbourne-based guitarist Gulbenkoglu, “Points Alone” offers five extremely varied tracks that take the guitar’s natural resonance as a starting point and proceeds outward from there.

The first point made is possibly the most abstract and a gorgeous, open soundscape it is. Sandy swishes, guitar-body clicks, severe string plucks—all laid out in a quasi-episodic manner, with much silence between, as though turning pages in an obscure photo album. A deep hum, a crackle, silence, crisp chitters that close the piece—there’s a remarkable variation in texture, volume, timbre and spatial placement, each sound a surprise as it emerges from the darkness beyond the last. One of Point Two’s main elements seems to be Gulbenkoglu blowing across, into, against different parts of his instrument and closely miking the results. Again, there are stretches of silence but I think I can just pick up some breathing back there. As I’m concentrating on that, there’s an abrupt and jolting double-tap followed by sustained (circular?) clattery chafing. As in the first track, the sequences are placed in sonic space with great care, the silences as present as the noise. The rustling that ends the piece (that is, before almost a minute of silence) is hauntingly beautiful.

The third point begins and remains in an entirely other realm, that of the high-pitched, sine-like tone, though there’s a grain to it that betrays its origin in a guitar instead of an oscillator. It runs a couple of minutes, pauses (faint, very faint scrabblings in the background) then resumes, carrying a waver that provides the tone greater urgency and, after another couple of minutes, concludes the work. Structurally somewhat similar to Sachiko M’s recent solo work, there’s something attractively blocky about the two-step plus silence formation, an ungainliness that nicely counterweighs the relative purity of the sounds.

The next track is quite brief, consisting of strongly struck, bell-like notes with overtones, played singly as if in a procession, the most overtly guitar-ish sounds to be found on this disc. It leads into the final, lengthiest point to be made and, for me, the highlight of this generally fine release. Essentially a drone, Gulbenkoglu weaves a thread that wonderfully combines the sweet with the sour, a fairly tonal taffy that nonetheless is laced through with harsh lines, slightly abuzz, as though certain pitches are causing sympathetic vibrations from nearby metals. As I’ve often found to be the case with much recent work out of Australia, the spatial sense is entirely immersive, the strands as distinct as they are recognizably of a whole, a delicious paradox. The amount of detail is vast and, while it really just sits there and pullulates, the listener has the strong sense of movement and change. And, clocking in at about 11 minutes, it’s of absolutely perfect length; one of my favorite tracks of the year.

Excellent disc—need to hear more from this fellow.

http://impermanent.info/recordings/

Bags Unwrinkled

Take this as a formal welcome to the new bilingual edition of Bagatellen, now expanding to accomodate readers of Choatespeak. I heard some Choatespeak in an analog ear version some ten years ago at the WNUR jazz show (Seth said "did anybody ever notice that Andrew sounds like George Bush sometimes when he's getting into it on the air"—not an exact quote, but pretty close) and there's been a dent in my brain ever since, a space quickly filled in with some gorgeous weeds that tangle all over each other. So imagine my pleasure to be getting a waft of prime digital Choatespeak after all these linguistically impoverished years. Before pointing your browsers over to Andrew's Nickelsdorf nail-pounding, be sure to load your joy surge protecter plug-ins first.

By way of useful information blogging, you now know that Choatespeak is veritably squirted all over the analog plane of sound wavery on a radio program called Unwrinkled Ear easily heard online on Thursdays 9:00-10:30pm EST, or archivally (go here and search under "unwrinkled"). I've just slipped into the unwrinkling myself in recent days, happy to find several recent shows in the archive specifically tailored as a downright swank soundtrack and sing-a-long to the names and notes of this Nickelsdorfian snorkel convention this July.

To give a flavor of the outcome of Andrew's manipulation of playback and broadcasting devices in the city that gave us Arthur Lee, Bobby Bradford, Eric Dolphy, and Frank Zappa, I've pasted here a randomly selected playlist (or sketch thereof as it may be) from the archives.

voice crack
kenny rankin
sun city girls
jimmy roselli
sidhran jadhav
pat boone
walter ruttman
london improvisers orchestra (conducted by pat thomas)
bootsy collins
control machete
english accents
francois bayle
sammy davis jr.
duke ellington
achim kaufman
charles dodge
cobra killer
lytton/ wishart/ dunmall
grydeland/ tanaka
rowe/ tilbury
queen
people like us

That concludes my ceremonial formalities of intra-Bags back-patting I'm generally averse to but couldn't resist upon recognizing the wheel of wh-question duties had spun to a rest at my name this time.

~Michael Anton Parker

Tremè Brass Band - "Gimme My Money Back" (Arhoolie)

Parts of New Orleans are still underwater. Large portions of the populace remain displaced; their residences devoid of basic civil amenities like electricity, running water and working sewage. Hollow apologies for FEMA’s colossal fuck-up in the face of the disaster have come and gone. But saints be praised, Fats Domino was found safe and sound. If that last point reverberates with a bit of cynicism, so be it. Fats’ plight coupled with celebrity status made for good news copy. But his story was just one of hundreds of thousands of others, most of which will never receive a drop of reporter’s ink. Listening to this choice album by Tremè Brass Band over the weekend my thoughts went out to the members of the group, wondering about their whereabouts, their safety in relation to Katrina’s city-razing swathe, above all just wishing them the best. The nearly eighty-minute program here serves up a traditional Nawlins gumbo of joy and solemnity, powdered jazz stirred into a fizzy ameliorating concoction of liquid blues. Tremè celebrates Canal Street history with collective ears equally enamored of the more modern argots of postbop, funk and hip hop too.

The opening title jam ambles out on an infectious fatback meets Congo Square rhythm. Kirk Joseph’s moist tuba burbles a cool-stepping bass vamp as the saxes of Eliot “Stackman” Callier and Fredric Kemp riff and solo boisterously across the syncopations. The trumpets of James Andrews and the higher profile Kermit Ruffins (the pup of the band at “30”) join trombonist Corey Henry as a hot-blowing brass battery. Benny Jones, Sr. and Lionel Batiste, Sr. supply the serviceable snapping beats on snare and bass drums respectively, the latter man also furnishing raspy lyrics on the vociferous vocal numbers. Most of the men have direct ties to other city brass band royalty like the Rebirth and Dirty Dozen outfits. They cover the typical bases, delving into lengthy expositions of “Hindustan,” “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and “The Old Rugged Cross” along with couple original blues. Four of the tunes even find a pair of fearless Japanese tourists joining the rambunctious professionals on borrowed banjo and piano. Some cuts are overly circuitous with a fair amount of ramshackle riffing replacing tightly rehearsed charts, but if anything the roughshod informality only adds to the listening experience. News agency opportunists from CNN to MSNBC have taken recently to expounding endlessly on the indomitable Spirit of New Orleans. It’s right here for the hearing as far as I’m concerned.

Konfrontationen 2005 / Nickelsdorf Jazzgalerie

Friday afternoon July 22: Sten Sandell is first musician to arrive that afternoon. Orders a beer and wiener schnitzel in the restaurant. By midnite he has his head in his hands and doesn't move for an entire set of music. White suit, cream t-shirt on, still life with happy exhausted ears.

First actual set of music is in the Kunsthaus, a new gallery down the street that is covered with photographs from the last 25 years of people around the festival (Lindsay Cooper waving her pinky at her bassoon; Wilbert de Joode taking an afternoon nap on a bench.) John Butcher and Christoff Kurzmann eventually work it out and start it up and I watch from behind so I can look at the laptop screen. Music was dense with open space and suddenly unfurling texturewarps. Kurzmann had something connected externally to his laptop that let him physically control some shit and he kind of beat it and went at it physically like it was a videogame joystick except his actions had direct musical and not fantasy effects. John was sputtered and round as usual.

1st set actually at the festival space was Trapist. Brandlmayer was astonishing to watch drum. Played 85% of the set with brushes. Then the last 10 minutes with white felt-covered mallets. Really has an awkward precision complex that makes great music. I'd call it robotic if it wasn't so damn humanoid and manipulative in weird patterns. Let's just say sharp, and filled with strange decisions about which beats to accent. Siewert was a good guitarist who embraced the moment well when the rhythm section decided to pound out some glory beats -- Siewert stood up, put the guitar strap around his shoulder and did the best Floyd-esque psychedelic slow guitar solo you'll ever be likely to get from a psychosober(?>/) Austrian();-=) artnerd. Really good shit. Siewert had to feel like a god to be able to play on top of the heavy shit the rhythm section was laying down.

Next set was Georg Graewe and Mary Oliver. Oliver's violin was superhappy and short-term-memory driven. She wanted action at all times. Her playing was so hyperexistingly on the surface that she was impossible not to pay attention to and I enjoyed her, as light music mostly, and sometimes as something pretty fun. It took me 40 minutes to be able to hear Graewe; he just sounded muddy. But because Oliver was so stiffly on the tip of all available aural consciousness, once I heard Graewe (mentally) I could really dig how they were goading each other on. She had some annoying habits, like vocalizing what the violin was doing (which was unnecessary, her violin thoroughly said it) but overall I found it quite an enjoyable set, especially for one which I had came to with no expectations.

And then we are treated to Joe Williamson back on stage, this time with Olaf Rupp playing an acoustic guitar to his left, audience's right, and playing it like he was hugging an upright wooden bee sting. He literally holds the guitar on one leg, with the neck perpendicular to the ground and out away from his body (of course he eventually falls all over it, but he starts out like he's pushing it away because it stinks but he still thinks he can get in its pants so he doesn't want to treat it so bad). And then there's Tony Buck to Joe's, audience's left. This set was one long hoedown, and though it seemed like the first set to really ignite the audience, I was only partly charmed. Buck's playing was fast and hot, but to my ears there was little to no dynamic. That doesn't mean it wasn't fun watching these guys sweat raccoons out of their foreheads trying to keep up with constant acceleration and density, but I was more in the mood for interaction and pausing and context and maybe-then-some-rapid-sound-hurling, not constant warfare stepping all over itself. Then again, it was "weird weapons" and they really did play like that, as if they each had weapons, and in the context of weapons they were weird, but they were still going to fire relentlessly at each other. Highly energized, audience screaming for an encore afterwards. Didn't totally get it, but still had a pretty good time watching the raucous ruckus.

Final set of Friday night was a nuthouse octet of 7 Italians + Tristan Honsinger playing a musical / theatrical set-piece that Tristan wrote in 12 parts. Paper was distributed beforehand with descriptions of each of the 12 songs; this paper was in English, the entire performance was in Italian, the Austrians didn't give it a standing ovation, but Dmitri and I did. Where to begin really describing this thing? Ever heard Tristan's old band This That and the Other? Similar feel. This ensemble, called Small Talk, had one male vocalist and sometime thereminist, a drummer, 2 bassists (one of whom was kind of the main actor, with costumes and movements etc.), a female vocalist and accordionist, Tristan on cello + "ostrich" and "Gertrude", and one clarinetist and one saxophonist. The sung parts ranged from discussions about love in the context of getting a bank loan; "an untranslatable story about an ostrich who takes a shit in a policeman's boot"; suicide for love and after love and in spite of love; the possibility of a suicide bomber on this bus!!!!!! (signified by a paper airplane landing on stage from the audience); war wounds; a discontent military cane-dependent goggle-and-jumpsuit-wearing and stage-hobbling and wandering Samuel Beckett impersonation; nurse vs. wounded soldier erotic scenarios; the donning of fezzes and fake mustaches; excerpts from Wittgenstein's Treatise on Logic (still in Italian mind you, but read VERY convincingly to nurse from male vocalist as she repeatedly pronounces a soldier dead as he lies on a cot in the middle of the stage; she puts her hands down his jumpsuit and he tries to signal to her that he's still alive…thanks Wittgy, it wouldn't be logic without you; thanks Tristan, we'd never have swing if we didn't have a treatise to make music out of); all to a backdrop of slamming Mediterranean jazz. This shit was hilarious, very realistic in terms of portraying the absurdity and truth of love, very realistic in terms of portraying the absurdity and beauty of art. I can't imagine a more physically fun, or more intellectually and emotionally stimulating set. Also great to have Hans Falb (the presence/ reason / everything behind this festival) laughing his ass off and nodding his head sitting right next to us.

Time to move to Saturday, but before that let's go over what we've eaten at the Jazzgalerie so far: 1 wiener schnitzel with salat; 2 salt sandwiches (ham and/or cheese on bigsaltchunk covered bread -- these are available all night during the festival and are pretty goddamn wonderful, brought out on huge platters to the back wooden bar every hour or so) and lots of beer. Next morning I had meatball soup for breakfast, and then veggie spring rolls an hour later before heading off to the Kleylehof, a collection of old huge barns 6km away where some artists have built working and showing and living spaces, and a couple others where it would appear that they still farm the land around there. These concerts were to start around 2:30 PM, but they wait till after 3:00 so people have time to have afternoon wine spritzers, beer and coffee with parsley and herb bread slices garnished variously with cheese spreads/slabs, salamis, eggs, lengthwise gherkin slices, green olives etc. The concerts took place in a concrete floored, empty rectangular cavern with movable wood risers against the small wall and scattered loose benches around the middle.

Tilbury played solo in the dark, with the only light coming through the curtained door, and enough people moving and walking and twittering that the grey light that made its way inside hit the wall directly behind his back (he faced the right) kept moving. Constant fluctuations of grey in different degrees behind him. Music was overwhelming and pure despite tons of peripheral sounds (babies, shoes on ground shifting, cameras rewinding [thanks DW!], walking, rolling of cigarettes [thanks guy in front of me!]) and it was fucking marvelous how actually none of those sounds detracted from the music. It wasn't like Tilbury interacted with them or incorporated them into the playing -- they were just a constant presence that fit into everything he was doing. Lovely. Lovely. He wore a semi-shiny grey suit and black t-shirt. I had sat in a hammock in the sun beforehand.

Afterward I walked down to one of the (I'm assuming) farm buildings and found a big pile of old harvested corn and two deer chilling out in the field. And a huge barn that was completely open on both sides so you could see right through to the sunny yellow field beyond, framed by the black of the building itself. Went back to take a photo the next day and one side of that door had been shut. Dwight went back to take a photo of some wheat on Monday after the fest and the field had been cut. It felt like nothing was changing, but it was, it was.

Second set on Saturday afternoon at the Kleylehof was Tony Buck (drums), Manfred Hofer (acoustic and electric bass) and Hannes Loschel on piano. This was actually the first set to bring me to unexpected sonic nirvana. Felt higher listening to this set than I had in the previous 20 months of listening to music. Tony Buck just whooped me. Hofer's simple (and I mean very simple) electric bass taps (held like Rowe's guitar, but actually on his lap) worked into some heavy heavy rhythmic fucking. Loschel's playing was weird as fuck, like he was doing everything he could to avoid banging out the hard chords and strong articulations that the rhythm was edging him towards, and though others found it irritating or disappointing, I was just startled at how it all sounded together. And especially when Loschel did chip in to enrich the rhythmic counterpoint and play, it just sounded fucking angelic and transporting: the pianist had kept back for so long that (still playing mind you, but just not allowing the intensity of the oblong rhythmic march below him to sway his awkward ways) that when he gave in it just made the whole room go purpley red and floaty for me like I had to be careful or I was going to lift off. I did not exist physically at those moments. Buck played inside and outside some of the coolest fucking rhythms -- really snapping a couple of beats in a cycle and then playing the next cycle the same way but leaving out what you then discovered to be the crucial beat so that it walloped you on the head with its silence. Manipulative smacker. With a mini-broom. And sometimes a stick. And Hofer. Playing one bass string slowly and deadeningly monotonally with only slight little fingerslips or twitches (purposeful or not, they made big purposes out of the music) that were steady and reliable and somehow quite full of instigation for the movement of the music and the musicians. Almost arcanely monotonous at times and somehow arrayed with tons of tangential flavor. That set really got me.

We walked out and it was dark everywhere at 5 o'clock and it was raining and we started moving immediately to the car and it started raining heavier and we were freaking out about what was still outside the tent back at the camp, and I was wondering where my tennis shoes were outside the tent and ohmygod the best five sets in a row of the festival were coming up and you can't let it rain now god! Damngod. (Especially since the other two times I had been to this festival it was rain-drenched, almost completely. And according to festival-goers, those were "the only" times it had ever rained at the 25 year long festival. Please Damngod don't make me the curse!)

But we got back to the tent, took care of everything, put on our rain jackets, got to the Jazzgalerie and sat down for dinner. I had the pepper steak with carrots and green beans (yes! w/ bacon!) and potatoes covered all in a rich thick mushroom and wine sauce -- big old gigantic steak, which I knew I would need to get me through the evening (even eventually having three more salt sandwiches… hey!) A fine fucking meal. (I saw Mats eating the same steak plate the next night and knew that he was on the right track with the right attitude). It was the most expensive dish on the menu and the fullest plate; but sometimes you know you're gonna need a lot of steak.

Oh yah, and the rain ended and the sun came back out and everything felt refreshed before we were even done eating and there was no more rain all weekend. Whoopchaw!

Next up, the heart of it: Saturday evening, July 23, 2005, Nickelsdorf, Austria -- the Jazzgalerie.

So it begins w/ Sten Sandell (piano + voice) Johann Berthling (doublebass) Paal Nilsson-Love (drums): the Sten Sandell trio. Though I thought Sten might bring his electronics out considering their surprise appearance on the trio's last record, it was an all-acoustic showdown of piano slapping and drum tinkling and bass crunging. An absolutely ferocious set for the 7 o'clock hour. Sten tapped and popped the side and all over the inside of the piano as is his wont, burst forth with several vocal tones -- often held, pure pitches that disappear like they're falling down a well, which he follows up with a mean bang on the piano keys. As Dmitri says, he needs a longer keyboard, maybe 212 keys or something. He spends so much time on the very ends of the piano and a little in the middle, but almost none in between those areas. Just the ends of the spectrum, and outside the ends of the spectrum, slapping and fingerpopping the literal sides and insides of the instrument. Boisterous dense madness under control like group sex amongst psychologists. Paal would hear Sten get stuck on a pianotone and Paul would mimic it with a drumstick and a piece of metal folded just so. Sten egged him on, luring him deeper and deeper into the resonance between the sounds and then once it got to be one throbbing organism of like tones, he would reel back, hiss between his teeth and go tap-a-tap-a-tap happy all over the glossy lacquer of the piano's skin. Paal had to bite his nails to check the pulse of his bones. Percussy reactions from everywhere. I couldn't see Berthling but he sounded thickly in the midst of it all with that bass, damn good and took a couple of rugged solos.

Corkestra was next up for the evening transition and they brought 8 folks on stage to hammer out some tunes. Fuhler was funky as fuck, I don't know how he gets such a light bouncy touch out of his organ and yet still remains deeply groovy while showing almost no signs of funk-feeling in his body. Both percussionists had great moments during this set. While it was very nice and pleasant, it rarely rose to greatness for me. Whereas Sten's trio plateaud there and just rested and went horseback riding and swimming and canoeing on excellence, Corkestra seemed to be regularly on the verge of it, but never or rarely able to make that final group push needed to reach an ecstatically twisted transcendence. Even though it was a very nice set and Toby Delius had a wonderful sax solo, it was probably the only set I could say that "disappointed" me. This probably also has to do with the very high expectations I had for this one, and also the fact that their inclusion on the roster was the signal for me that I had to go because Hans was paying attention to exactly the things I was paying attention to this year (as if he ever isn't.) They did do some nice re-workings of songs from this year's disc and had some stellar moments of rich compositional flowering, but I kept waiting for the set to start blazing a trail into my willing epidermis and ears, but instead it just kept going and then was over.

Good thing the next set started out with the most sophisticated improvising I have ever witnessed. John Butcher, Paul Lovens and Steve Beresford are longtime masters, each with a highly developed style, and who had never played together in this combination. I literally had my brain fall out of my mouth listening to the first 10 minutes of this set, the music was just so goddamn well-articulated and interacted upon/with/through. Communication and improvisation on an almost impossibly clear and abstract level. My favorite set of the festival pure music-wise. I just could not believe what I was hearing. Even though there had been other sets that were completely improvised during the festival, this was the first by a non-working band, i.e. by musicians who rarely if ever play together, and the glorious result of how volatile and hypersensitive they were to each other, having to listen to everything because they can't expect anything and don't know each other's habits. I left utterly awed by the acquisition of even higher levels of respect for each of those three musicians. I felt like it was a real showcase of what dedication makes possible. Equal to the best improvising and best music-making I have ever witnessed.

The Thing opened up with a White Stripes song (so Mats announced afterwards "that was the old jazz standard by The White Stripes, here's another jazz classic by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs" -- apparently these are popular rock songs). One thing is for sure, I would bet my left leg on the fact that whoever wrote those songs doesn't play them with 1/3 the intensity that this bari sax, doublebass and drums trio throws at the audience. Case in point: they all had on black t-shirts that said "RUBY'S BBQ" which had a drawing of a cow's skull on a desert prairie on the back. (Needless to say, I was very surprised to find out at 5 AM that night that both the bass player and drummer are vegetarians, and Mats had insisted that they get the shirts.) So they took the rock songs and screamed into them, just pounding the pulp and nerve out of (into?) those tunes. The only way to listen to a band that comes at you with such aesthetically justified force is to squeeze your face into all sorts of shapes that make you open your mouth like your screaming or wince your nose like you're a filthy snob at Kmart and embrace these positions. Now shake your head back and forth, and froth from the lungs. Gigantic small-combo jazz. Sleazy. Mighty mighty screaming sweat. You can feel it in your shoulders afterwards, all that jazz sleaze.

Oh boy, oh boy, party band. A decent amount of old timers left before the next set even started. Hell, it didn't start till 2:30 AM. The best visual clue was that the band was called Trio Exklusiv, they were listed as having four guys in the band, and when they set up on stage they had five -- one drummer, one conga player with a huge 70s mustache, a guy on guitar and saxes, another guy on vocals and trumpet, and another guy on guitar. Maybe one of them played bass too. It was funky groovy and totally easy listening after the day of music. Horns were tight, rock and roll was happening. I was jamming along in my seat, doing some chair dancing when I got up to get some bottled beers for us all (the tall ones). By the time I had four sips of this beverage from my seat I couldn't stand it anymore and went over to the left of the stage, took off my long-sleeve shirt, put my beer down, and started cutting up the carpet (which in this case were 1 square foot stones that were anything but flat.) It was the place where we had danced our asses off to Tipper Gore 4 years before and I started getting nasty. Mr. Krasnov was hot on my trail to the dance floor. By the time this song was over there were 40 more people dancing all over the audience than before I got up to get down. Trio Exklusiv played for an hour and a half, till 4 AM, finished off the 20 minute encore with the "I Dream of Jeannie" theme and had the entire rest of the audience sweating free jazz out of their teets. Young invisible microbial babies were lapping it up.

Several salt sandwiches were consumed as well as one liter of beer per set (though I took one set off so I could continue into the night unchecked) and several mineral waters. I can't remember what was playing in the bar for the late night crowd except for one thing -- you know that Saul Williams' track "Monkey Theme" off the Infesticons album? Somebody played the tune featuring the original drum and bass thing that was lifted to form the backbone of the Williams track and I sure as hell would like to know who it's by, but I had other things to jam about then -- but the rest of the stereo cuts were also juicy groovers. Damn good.

Sunday had a nice wakeup (I've forgotten to mention the absolutely freezing cold outdoor showers in the morning at the campsite, and all the various yodels and whelps people make as they dance through or hold themselves courageously underneath the water. As painful as these showers are -- I literally never caught my breath while taking one -- they really do help for the wakeup process) with a schnitzel for breakfast. Still a little ragged from the night before but we made it over to the Kleylehof for the afternoon shows. 1st set was Walter Malli on soprano sax and Oskar Aichinger on piano. Fine musicians I know but nothing diabolic or angelic in store I knew so I went up onto the felt stage at one end of the hall and laid down horizontally on my back for this set. I was worried that others would find my actions askew, but when I got up to clap there were 17 people horizontal on that stage, so I think it was a good idea. Oskar is incredibly short, drank a big glass of white wine while he played, and Malli had some nice notebending. Pleasant background for needed physical relaxation recovery.

The Paul Lovens / Martin Brandlmayer duo was up next and after wandering around and taking some pictures I went to the bathroom. I walked in and who should be washing his hands but Mr. Lovens himself. He said "I would dry my hands on one of the trees but there's too many to choose from" (there were no paper towels in the bathroom, but trees indeed in all directions around us in the fields' forests) .I used the bathroom, walked back, and at that moment they announced for people to come in so I went in and got a bench right at the front on Lovens' side. First off -- it's hard for me to write about my favorite musician in the world. Secondly, this was a drum battle goddammit by two full-fisted percussion monsters at 4 in the afternoon. Brandlmayer began a little tentatively, even noticeably mis-hitting some drums. Lovens gave him lots of room to add stuff and it made me think that Lovens must get a little weary of having to try to make people comfortable. The set was very good, but I think Lovens is a lot happier when he is surrounded by musicians that test and poke him rather than by musicians that creep around, trying to fit in with him. The two of them did eventually get into some very riplip beatslinging and also subtle thin wriggles, but the best stuff for me was when Lovens would pop slap dash hiccup boom then swizzle swizzle swizzle little squiggles out over the drum heads. I even spent an hour that afternoon during dinner trying to draw the squiggles, then I spent even more minutes the next couple of days drawing them. Swizzles that is. Sonically this set had a lot of great shit going for it, and even though it could have been more fiery, it was completely fucking enchanting and contained some outré stellar jerk dance jamming.

Went back to the Jazzgalerie and had some frogosch for dinner. Capercrazy frogosch. I always forget that the first band on Sunday starts right at 6 PM or 6:30 as opposed to all the other opening sets that start half an hour later than stated start time. So missed the very beginning of this band led by Marco Eneidi (alto sax) which had two bassists, a drummer and a guy on computer, maybe a DJ, I don't know. I was tired and essentially had my eyes shut and head down for this set. Didn't sleep, but just let the froth slip through. Unfortunately, it was mostly already-popped bubbles. Wilbert de Joode and the other bassist had some nice bass battles and rich chasings after each other, but as Dwight said "it sounded like every sound Eneidi made was the same." Who knows how he did it, but it was boring. He also insisted on an encore when the audience couldn't care less, and told all the musicians "really really fast OK. Really." and then he proceeded to play just like he had the whole time. I'm glad it was unengaging because I needed some rest from hyper-absorbing attention.

I moved over to a different seat for John Tilbury / Philip Wachsmann / Paul Lytton / Ken Vandermark set because I wanted to see Lytton's setup, which was a big bunch of metal pieces (like an adult erector set) with all sorts of shit hanging on it made out of different materials. He only had a couple of tiny drumheads and played primarily electronics, albeit percussively. Vandermark started on clarinet which was the right instrument choice, but he started out like he often does when free improvisation between musicians unaccustomed to each other is about to take place: he wants to do something but doesn't want to be obtrusive so he plays a long single note at different intensities. And then he repeats the note. This is very tiring. He did this at the beginning and it was embarrassing (probably because I'm used to it, but had forgotten about it, and then once it started I instantly remembered how common it used to be for the guy and was surprised he was still doing it.) Anyway, I quickly enough had my attention divested from Ken and listened to Lytton and Tilbury, and there was marvelous shit to be found in there. Lots of surreptitious milking and farm mechanics. Phil violined in with rodentary background omnipresence. Hay was pet, wind was light shifting attention on music. Eventually Ken even started finding a way to work with the musicians that didn't depend on the kind of direct interaction that says, "I hear what YOU are doing so I'M doing THIS!" and then "I HEAR YOU TOO! so THIS!" He actually did blend in very well and make some good stuff, especially later on in the set, during the second piece the ensemble played, where they all got into a pretty special eerily small place for about 20 minutes, kind of like 4 mosquitos trying to peel an orange -- smelling it, smelling it, sme-lling it, can they suck it? can they taste it? There were also some really raunchy moments from Tilbury that were basically elicited by Ken from a screechy clarinet blast that he kept rippling. Eventually Tilbury rolled his sleeves up and went pounding, Cecil-Taylor-heavy pounding on the keyboard and just bashed it around. I couldn't tell if he was having fun or just coping with the animous repetitions of squeak bursts from Vandy. Phil chimed in with violin pealing too and it was more shriek-fearing than anything else. Very peculiar music for these four. Much better when they settled into some abstract emotionally curative improv rather than the fake-jazz slammingThe encore was basically due to the huge applause at the end of these twenty minutes where they all played with each other with some scary funky grace and ability to let each other be their own freak without explicitly commenting on the freakiness to themselves or each other. A well-warranted encore, it took the interaction down even another notch and maintained barely perceptible mellowtones for a couple of minutes, and then everyone came to a soft pause, there was a silent beat and then the church down the road softly rang its bells, and everyone in the audience laughed and clapped and whooped since it was so fitting and calm an ending.

POW ensemble was a real highlight for me, and I had a Red Bull beforehand that I thought was doing nothing, but I think it worked considering that from the moment they took the stage around 9 PM or so I was flying until 9 AM. This band was one vocalist, one DJ (also on background vocals and amped rubber band), one computer guy, one tap dancer, and Luc Houtkamp on sax and computer. Supposedly there was somebody behind the soundboard doing sound design too. It did sound damn good so credit is hereby launched his way too. 1st tune was a solo vocal piece that found Han Buhrs with a microphone held up to various parts of his neck, throat and head and articulating some warbly burps, in English, of a Paul Blackburn poem about malfunctions and purple-colored semantic dilapidation blues. This transitioned to a saxophone tap dancing duet that was smoking blazing bad ass you-do-this and I'll-do-that like we're having a blues riff battle.

Total happiness -- evident and contagious -- on the tap dancer's part for this and everything she did throughout the set. It seemed like she was really happy to be involved with such a fucked up performance ensemble and to be appreciated for what she brought into it, and also loving what other people brought into it too. In fact all of the ensemble members seemed to have an astonishing amount of respect and interest and experience of real pleasure with what the other people brought to it (this was corroborated for me by talking to several of them individually afterward, where they said the music was developed really slowly over a long period of time and learning how to work with each other). So they worked supremely well together playing "songs riddles, poems and dances" -- a shitload of blues tunes and soul-flavored things that were just supremely fucked. You've got a tap dancer in the center of the stage, some clicking electronics, a DJ singing background chorus-girl type bass vocals to a blues dirge and a skronking sax or sample from some beaten railroad tie. Other highlights included a poem by Robert Filliou set to music, which talked about a homage in dance to that mammal "m" [yes the letter, er, mammal] and all sorts of animals and domesticated animals, and then would go through a list like "What testicles! What ovaries! What violence! What uterus! Begat the experienced bull (what chromosomes! What a brain! What a clitoris!) and the nocturnal fly" etc. etc. I suppose one's enjoyment of this poem depends on your enjoyment of linguistic patterns about animals and sexual evolution: "What copulation! What lips! What promiscuity! What penis!" which I loved. Apparently Dmitri and Dwight didn't dig this set too much, which I was totally blown away and transported by. Listening to it I just assumed that everyone was freaking out in enjoyment of this amazing insanity that was still so amazingly controlled and clear. This was the blues, for sure, and I got all painted up in it.

By the time that set was over, I was ready for my first drink of the evening. A scotch, and a beer. So I was ready for two drinks. I went to the bar got Dmitri a salt sandwich and a vodka and two Cragganmore scotches plus two beers for Dwight and I. All of my drinks were done by the time ZU + Mats Gustafsson came on, so I was onto my next beer and bought Dmitri another vodka and a beer. Dwight went to sit down, but there was no way I was going to be able to sit still since 1) the POW ensemble really lit me up and 2) I knew I was going to want to dance and shake to this set. And what was this set? ZU. An Italian trio. One/3rd: an electric bassist who moves like a humanoid tribute to all 1990s MTV speed-metal video vigilantes. Puts the I in DIY and the U in PUNK. Two/3rd: A drummer who covers his thin arms in tats and idolizes the convergence of mathematical nuthouse prog rock changes and stickslamming punk power. Three/3rd: A baritone saxophonist who keeps all the jagged rhythmic lines in check by popping out tight melodic patterns. And then you add Mats Gustafsson who just basically screams along to everything going on around him, trying to interact with every rhythm and every sound that every person does. A frightening feast. I wouldn't exactly say Dmitri and I were dancing to this, but we were back in a spot where we could see everything and still stand up and wiggle and shake and rock back and forth and basically contort our bodies into sponges for sucking in the music. We probably looked nasty. It was a fucking blast. ZU calls what they do soul music. And it is. It just sounds like hypercomposed punk jazz in 3 minute tunestretches. Perfect kind of band to show off Vandermark's best side: saxrock, so he joined the band for their last couple tunes and encores, so we had 3 baritone saxophones, an electric bassist and a drummer playing freakmetal. Freespeed freakmetal artpunk deathdirge squronk.

So that was all the music. Then I started drinking strongly and chatting with musicians and we went to the downstairs bar after an hour or two and a kid was DJing what sounded like the greatest funky hits from Black Saint records then a couple folks got on the dance floor and that was all I needed. It was time to cut that rug! Took off my shoes and socks and danced around Luc Houtkamp and an old Viennese woman I've seen at every festival, and then a bunch of folks that I hadn't seen the entire weekend. After a bit of this and chatting around I saw some of the kids who work the festival going upstairs so I just followed them and introduced myself and got high on a couple of hash joints out in the outside upstairs barn bar in the back. They got me drunk and I entertained them with American English (straight from the source!) so that they thought I was speaking popular slang, but I was really speaking choatespeak and convincing them that that was the new school of speech. A highlight: gabbing with an old wobbly short drunk afro'd dude who couldn't speak any English (and obviously my no-German-go) to entertain the kids. We actually liked each other and could understand the gist of everything perfectly, even though we knew we were sort of performing for people that actually knew (sort of) both our languages. After a couple hours of this they convinced me to go back downstairs and get my shoes (I wanted to dance again too) so I made my way down and accidentally stepped on some glass on the way, didn't really notice, or care to deal with it until I could get to my shoes and sit down and check it out, so I go downstairs and Mats Gusty is on the small stage down there pulling out his bari sax, and Tristan Honsinger is warming up his cello strings and an Italian woman is sitting on the stage, tapping her hard-bottomed shoe on the wooden stage and flaring up the accordion. I proceed to an available seat within 4 feet and notice that it's after 6 AM, there are only 30 people in the place, only 20 of them are conscious of what is going on, and my left foot has a huge blood splatter between the big and next biggest toe, where I had just pulled out a couple of pieces of glass. I wiggled everything back and forth, decided the foot damage was minimal and settled in for an hour long free jazz folk dirge. The woman sang old Italian folk melodies and Mats and Tristan layered fat swathes of microtonal drones on bari sax and cello. Dramatic as hell. When she took breaks off the accordion / vocal bellow (always still tapping her foot) we got the foot tap continuing (still mellowly tapping that thing) and Mats and Tristan broke out of the long tones and scraped up against each other all volatile pent up and drunk up. They got a little vicious and testy, and she was just sitting in front of them, tapping her foot (she was kind of sprawled sideways, so her foot was at an equal height to her torso along the stage, which was really only two steps high off the dance floor.) So there was tense frenetic improv dialogue crushing and mashing with the backbeat of the foot for a good twenty minutes and then she started the accordion up again and Mats and Tristan took that to be a cue to amp it up even more, but to play within the bloated microtones of the accordion chords, so they got louder and more devoted to the rhythm, then to bring it all to a big burst she started singing and barethroat gargantuan bellowing the folk song. That tune might have been a mourning melody for lost love or dead passion. That's really the only thing I can think she could have been singing about so passionate boisterous solemn and melancholically: the loss of passion. The trio crescendo-ed in tearful power. Needless to say, this set left everyone mowed. There was one guy that was giddy drunk and jumping in his chair afterward (one of the waiters in the restaurant), but it looked like the rest of us had just been ploughed out and emotionally eviscerated and we were smiling really brightly about it on the inside, which was just hintingly visible through our blasted exteriors.

I got my shoes back on, went back upstairs and back to where the kids were, told them about my foot, told them we needed some music back there, got some kid to go pull his car up, walked back to the tent, grabbed a Lyrics Born remix CD and a Trio Exklusiv album I picked up, walked back, smoking and drinking big bottled beers and started DJing with the car stereo in front of the barn bar and dancing. Eventually Toby's mom came up just to say hi and chat, and she recognized me from years before and he told her about my foot and she insisted that he go and help me take care of it and look at it. So then we went and got supplies out of the kitchen and went and sat on the front steps of the Jazzgalerie and I cleaned it with paper towels water and antiseptic and we realized the cuts were small, the blood had just splattered. So we cut some bandages, slipped my socks on etc. and rapped there for a while. Went back downstairs at some point where Tristan was still wearing his bright red fez and going up to each of the individual people still drinking (even awake?) downstairs and playing his cello personally for them. I got him to do a little dance and hop and sing for me, but I think I was too engaged an audience, like he wanted more of a challenge to woo people. [A reminder: Tristan has been playing this music and deeply embedded in this scene for 30 years. These were not the actions of a hyperactive neophyte. This was a goddamn legend winking and strutting with his instrument at 8 AM.] Eventually me and Toby walked around and rounded up my discs, unsuccessfully tried to find the notebook I had been using to write about the festival (and the airplane over, and in Hungary and Vienna beforehand, and all the linguistic fun and games that normally make up my writing oh well) and I started wandering home, where I got the hiccups while walking, big cracking hiccups and got to the tent, laid down boomhiccuping in the tent, realized that wasn't going to work, stuck my head out of the tent, threw up the ridiculous cola and tequila and vodka and mineral water cocktail {yes that was one cocktail, I don't know what I was thinking when I made it} then fell softly to sleep. Slept wonderfully until 3 in the afternoon when Dmitri and Dwight woke me up and told me to get get up because we were going to Slovenia. Great. I didn't feel too bad. Got myself together enough and we packed it all up, went back to the Jazzgalerie (one last check for my notebook) walked around, found a big case of mineral water, grabbed a huge one, found Hans sitting on the bench smoking with his shirt off and a tall girl in a black dress next to him staring at the stage where all the music had just happened. We said goodbye, he called me to him and I gave him a big hug and we left the Jazzgalerie, and the doors were bolted behind us. We drove to the other restaurant in town, a pizza joint, where Dwight ordered big beers for us all "because Andrew needs it, Dmitri wants it, and I have to have it." I had a spinach pizza, Dmitri had ham pizza and Dwight got a chicken schnitzel. Then we started driving to Slovenia.

The amazing thing about Nickelsdorf is that you can see people believing in what they do to an extent that you have never seen before. And when that happens to coincide with one of the only things I believe in, you see why the place would keep drawing me back. Very hard to resist such a place that is full of the music that is not only close to my heart, but that has had such a great amount of influence over the shape of my heart.

~ Andrew Choate

~ Photographs by Dmitri Krasnov and James Tudor

Grimley's Gang

It's not often I see something as distinguished and delightful as Tom Grimley's automated music machines. On September 26th, Tom wound up on a snazzy program of electroacoustic experimentalism at the cozy home in Fishtown (a peripheral and charming neighborhood of Philadelphia) where selfless new music supporter Brooke Sietinsons and others host both experimental and folky strains of underground music from time to time, fostering a balanced and inviting musical climate extending well beyond the deservedly celebrated resident ensemble Espers. Since 1996, Tom has been creating an entourage of small devices that play themselves, simply sitting in the back to enjoy the resulting music much as if he were just another audience member. Basically he has found circuit boards with interesting sound behavior and implemented motor-driven mechanical interfaces with the electrical loci of variation in the circuitry, like variable resistors. These ad hoc gadgets are packaged in attractive small boxes with speakers and Tom needs only plug them into a power supply for them to start their unpredictable mechanically-mediated sound excursions. With a handful of these gizmos operating at the same time as independent musical agents, the emergent textures of slowly pulsing and bleeping analog electronic sounds is complex and intoxicating.

As can be seen from the picture above (that's Tom in the black shirt sitting in the rear and enjoying the performance), the devices also offer spatial separation that gave an unreplicable psycho-acoustic experience for us lucky folks sitting a few meters away from the array in the ideal intimate space. One of the memorable moments from the performance came when a machine positioned in a corner a good bit away from the others in the center of the room suddenly came to life midway through. It was like being in the middle of lively sound installation and quite unlike an ordinary music performance. The boxes were like little alien creatures having an indecipherable and relaxed conversation while us humanoids watched over with pleased puzzlement. While essentially autonomous, the behavior of the analog circuitry was modulated by the power supply and since all the machines shared a common power supply, there was an element of subtle interaction as voltage ebbed and flowed in each device and altered the overall voltage state of the network. So, at several levels, this was a fine example of the emergence of complex and unpredictable phenomena from the interaction of simple processes. Best of all, it sounded great. Tom's background is mainly in academic composition, but it appears he's gone the way of the soldering iron instead of paper and ink while developing truly refined taste in his selection of analog electronic sound sources.

Bravo to Tom for an elegant concept beautifully realized. I can't remember where he lives, but it's somewhere far away from Philadelphia and I was plum pleased to see his music in action during this rare trip he coordinated with his colleague Joseph Hammer's East Coast jaunt. After seeing Joseph do some excellent performances during the High Zero festival in Baltimore in the preceding days, I was thrilled to hear his unique twist on analog tape performance as solo music, though it was in fact a duo with his partner and visual artist Sayo Mitsuishi, whose straightforward projection of real-time drawing is captured in the photo below. Sayo drew in a linear fashion along a transparent sheet that unrolled as she moved along, a process analogous to Joseph's musical path along the surface of a strip of magnetic tape rolling through his antiquated tape machine. In their respective media, both also conveyed a feeling of textural continuity without repetition. It was a beautiful and novel experience.

Joseph uses a laptop to play sound files, routing the output to the input of his tape machine (I have no idea what sort of name or taxonomic niche this device has), which records the sound on magnetic tape that immediately proceeds to roll past a playback head. At it's simplest, then, the tape machine is a delayed analog playback machine for the digital sound source. In practice, all manner of subtle mechanical complexities impinge upon this process. For example, Joseph manipulates the degree of exposure the tape has to an erasure head, varying the layering of old and new information on the magnetic tape. He also manipulates the surface region used for the recording. Because he's accessing the very guts of the machine, various moving parts are also fair game for his playback permutations. There's a whole series of real-time mechanical interventions he uses to transform and layer the source material. While the aesthetic is in all other ways unrelated to Howard Stelzer's use of analog tape machines in real-time performance, they share a similar palette of slurred sounds I find endlessly engaging in their electroacoustic subtleties.

It was none other than the cassette maestro himself joining Joseph for this concert to launch a mini-tour together. Howie and Joseph had never heard each other perform before, so it was a bit of an analog tape summit meeting as they heard each other do solo performances and looked forward to sharing a few more evenings in the ensuing days. Howie's solo set was frankly astonishing, perhaps the best I've heard, though there's just so much to be said about his music that I remain too intimidated to make a real attempt. For now, the cursory hints of his music in a previous Bagatellen entry will have to continue sufficing until I tackle the topic in earnest someday and get down to the real musical substance and not just the methodological surface. I'll also use that page as a better contextualization for any further remarks about Joseph and Howie, because my primary intention here is to simply make note of Tom Grimley's work and briefly acknowledge the distinctive evening it was part of.

There were five short sets in total, and all of them had a strongly analog electronic slant. Stelzer's touring mate from Boston, Jay Sullivan, did a fine set on turntable, mostly processing and layering the turntable as an ordinary playback device. While pleasant and technically polished, the high-medium-density and static continuity of most of the set wasn't the brand of tea I prefer to drink. I did really enjoy some of the sparser crackling passages, though, and I found it remarkable how similar his sounds could be to Howie's despite the totally different equipment being used. Perhaps it's the magnetic pickup at the heart of that delicious sound world. Kudos to electromagnetism.

Michael Barker, a Philadelphia improvisor I've seen do a bunch of consistently solid stuff over the years ranging from acoustic doublebass in a free jazz vein to live circuit-bending electronic improv, did a fine set on theremin and some processing devices that seemed responsible for most of the content, as I couldn't make out any sounds with a theremin flavor. It was a single line of gentle harsh noise minimally modulated and played at a sensible and pleasant volume. I appreciated the relatively narrow band of frequencies employed, giving the effect of chiselling instead of bulldozing. Seeing this dapper lad standing in the middle of a living room in front of a theremin sharing his sonic wares with a dozen or two convivial, attentive listeners gave me the striking impression that I was in the midst of a postmodern revitalization of what I take to be the parlor performances of a century ago in which socialites would gather to behold some recital or technological novelty or another, offering perfunctory applause with a self-satisfied air of cultural patronage. A quaint scene we were that night.

~Michael Anton Parker

Misha Feigin / Craig Hultgren / LaDonna Smith — They Are We Are

After encountering LaDonna Smith for the first time last week and witnessing a fabulous performance, I was happy to recall this fine recording and pull it out for some overdue proper attention. Smith is one of the pillars of improvised music culture in the US, especially known for her duo with Davey Williams, a musical partnership running for around 30 years and still going strong as I heard from the violinist herself last weekend. Smith's writing and editorial presence in the pages of The Improvisor has been registered in my mind ever since I devoured a few issues of that remarkable magazine as a nascent free improv fan, and I'm pleased to report that the publication is still alive online these days, with a compilation of intriguing essays well worth digging through. While Smith's reputation as an underground legend must surely owe a lot to her irresistible spirit of creativity and immersion in live performance I was finally able to enjoy first-hand, she's a formidable improv violinist and violist taken solely as a recorded entity in this trio program with Misha Feigin and Craig Hultgren recorded and released in 2000.

Misha Feigin is a key example of an artistic career paralleling the transformation of Russian culture from Communist restrictions to Capitalist freedom, and alongside so many other artists documented on Leo Records, he's a pioneer of improvised music in Russia. More than an improvisor on classical guitar and balalaika, Feigin has formed his reputation as a troubadour of sorts, bridging gaps between Russian-language and English-language audiences with his synthesis of folk tunes, improv, singing, and storytelling. While primarily capturing his skills as a pure improvisor, this disc portrays the scope and aesthetic diffusion of an artist resolving the conflicts between a foregrounded singer/storyteller role with accompaniment and an equal collective free improv format. All told, his voice weighs in as the feature on three pieces totalling about 16 minutes out of a 64-minute program. Additionally, on "Curley" his voice elevates the music considerably as a subtle element of collective interplay for one passage. On "The Singing" and "Dimensions Lost (A Giant Twang Out of the Sky)", Feigin more or less recites English poetry from his own pen, and while it's easy to cite the virtues of his wordcraft and the tremendously effective improv that Hultgren and Smith wrap around it, I honestly have found his mildly jarring accent and effusive melodrama to be a bit too much to take on repeated spins through the disc, skipping ahead to the tracks without vocals.

On the other hand, the title track and sole example of Feigin as a flat-out singer is absolutely stunning and not only bears plenty of repeated listening, but is reason enough by itself for anyone to acquire this album. Feigin's voice has both the confidence and power of a stalwart torch-bearer of some folk tradition and the uninhibited expressive urgency of scattish free improvisor, freely alternating between linguistic and non-linguistic vocal contours as he attacks the moment in genuine free interplay with Hultgren's cello and Smith's violin. It's all too rare to hear vocal improvisation suggesting some imaginary folk music and the accreted treasures of wailed melodies, holding itself accountable to no idiom in particular but accepting the underlying old-fashioned musicality shared by traditional idioms. The Russian feeling of his voice is so strong, however, that it could also just be considered a kind of Russian free folk music. I only wish that the album had a few more tracks with Feigin's unbridled vocal improv, especially since the string improv in a few pieces can veer towards tedium for all its consistent balance and craftmanship.

It's hard not to be floored by this disc after the free song music of the title track, mainly because it appears second and the disc's opener is nearly 15 minutes of flawless and profound free improv fully mining the timbral riches of the three acoustic instruments. "Summer Wind, No Sleep" is also the only piece where the trio dips into the tense and edgy abstraction associated with prototypical non-idiomatic free improv like MIC and the golden years of the Russell/Durrant pairing. Hultgren and Smith squeeze out some gripping sustained soft squeals with their bows and Feigin plucks his way into some uncharacteristically non-linear paroxysms. Delicate harmonics are given as much attention as sawing and riffing, and the mood hovers in elegaic territory contrasting with the more sprightly leanings of other pieces.

Even in this epic wonder, the trio displays its distance and independence from the free improv avant-garde. This is a kind of timeless free improv bearing no self-conscious aesthetic agenda or aversion to familiar musical habits. The tremendous compatibility among the players reflects shared old-fashioned musical values; melody, repetition, riffing, phrasal alignment, and extended motivic development are the primary stuctural concerns. With the adventurous spirit to be expected in a free improv setting balanced against a conservative Euro-centric folk/classical underpinning, the music strikes me as a free improv counterpart to the old-world strains in mid-20th century academic music, especially the full-blooded anti-hermeticism of Alfred Schnittke's string quartets. The strident, angular rhythms and narrative unfolding of Feigin's strumming patterns seem rooted in the same East European traditional folk aesthetic that Bartok and so many other pioneers of notationalism adopted to varying degrees of abstraction. Hultgren's playing in particular has the unswerving sense of purpose and control of someone playing a part in a string quartet they've committed to memory as a personal reference point. His virtuosity and confident willingness to repeat lucid motifs instead of constantly searching for new material is evidence of his success in reconciling an academic music background with free improv instead of abandoning this background and groping for a new vocabulary as so many academically-trained players tend to do in free improv situations.

Rarely using extended techniques, but freely accepting harsher sounds as part of their instrument's full timbral spectrum, Hultgren and Smith revel in the warmth and depth of bowed strings, and that's at least half the explanation for the copious rewards I've found in this album; I really just have an endless appetite for the nuances of cello, viola, and violin in pretty much any aesthetic context, but especially in a context like this where the nuances are brought well into the foreground. Of course, delicious timbres alone don't tell the whole story; it's the split-second sensitivity and creativity of master improvisors like these three that complete the timeless package.

~Michael Anton Parker

While visiting the Leo Records page for this album, I discovered that it's currently being offered as a download for a mere $4. However, if this doesn't get you the text in the CD's booklet, it's worth paying a normal price for the CD because Feigin's tale of youthful rock 'n' roll adventures in Russia is a damn good read!