Sharks are in the water & circling...

I didn't particularly enjoyed the amplifiy box. When I read the reviews about it I started feeling
like maybe I dont understand anything anymore about this musical approach, because reviews seemed a bit different from what I heard.

My general feeling about "amplifiy" or "EAI" or "ErstMusic" somehow could be that there is too much "form" for not enough "content". I mean I am not impress anymore just because someone plays with certain equipment or with such special concept. I expect from "art" related activities to provide me with something different, something that can be exchanged between people, something "alive", something with guts, with a bit of sense even maybe.

recently some of this "classical type electro or acoustic improv" dont fill me up with this. no surprise, no crazyness, not so much fun...

Then maybe, the reason for not many negative reviews about amplify is because maybe certain people are ok if you really dont give them anything so disturbing, so "new", so different. In a sense there is something that makes the actual improv music scene looks "weird" from outside (this people playing sine waves, or playing guitar with objects) but from inside this is nothing so exceptionnal anymore, so again there is a need for more "sense" more "content".

dont know if this is so clear. sorry.

havent heard the IMJ box.

alexandre

Alexandre, I think I understand what you're saying, and I can relate, but only partially. The Amplify set really impressed me for many reasons, and I have been enthusiastic about it since first hearing it. These days, now that the initial overwhelming buzz has subsided, I find that I return to it, but not for the sake of getting to know all of the music as a single, related set as I did in the beginning. Now there are two, maybe three discs that I listen to regularly for the same reasons that I listen to Hands of Caravaggio or La Voyelle Liquide from time to time. The rest is nice, but hasn't held up near as well as the really good stuff in that set the way I'd imagined it would. That's not to say I don't still appreciate the set for what it is as a "document" (I know that word's been passed around concerning the box gratuitously, but I really do think it applies).

Anyway, this site is plenty Erst-centric as it is, and I'd rather stay away from rehashing any old discussions about that box. But it's plenty interesting to see how tastes change over time and how old feelings about a certain work are influenced by time and the newness in other stuff.

I've been back and forth on acquiring the IMJ box, but haven't heard anything I'd consider definitive about it as a whole. Some concensus posted here would be welcome.

Well, the IMJ box was much more a grab bag of many musicians who happened to occupy a certain section of the new music scene in Japan whereas the Amplify set was a through-conceived grouping (and subsequent mini-groupings) put together by Jon and organized according to his own vision. So, whatever else, it has a conceptual cohesiveness that the IMJ box lacks (though, personally, I think there's lots of excellent work therein and even the less successful tracks are often pretty interesting).

I do agree with Alexandre that, sometimes, formalist aspects can overwhelm those of "content" (if I'm understanding his use of the term correctly) which is one of the reasons I value things like 'Doris' so highly, performances where, imho, the two qualities are inextricably mixed.

I also, generally speaking, like the idea that some listeners are finding the state of the art in eai to be a little bit staid. That attitude can only help spur things on.

"Now there are two, maybe three discs that I listen to regularly"

-> which ones, al?

form is content.

I think the difference in response to IMJ and Amplify is definitely because they're so different in terms of their aims and scope. Jon's set is a document (and yes, the word is very apt in this case, I think) of a single weekend of shows by a group of musicians most of whom have worked with Erstwhile in the past. So it's something like a label overview as well as a document of the festival, which makes it very consistent and cohesive. It reflects a particular aesthetic, and as Brian pointed out, a tremendous amount of conceptual planning and thinking.

I don't mean to imply that IMJ lacked concept, but it was certainly much more scattered and broader in its aims and ideas; it doesn't quite make claims to be the definitive sampler of Japanese improv, and many critics have complained that it leaves out a lot (which is true), but it is fairly broad in its scope and the range of different types of music it accepts, from Erst-style EAI to free jazz to music developed from traditional Japanese styles. Personally, I love that box, I think its variety is one of its strongest points, just as coherency is the strongest point of the Amplify set.

And responding to Alexandre, I don't really see the distinction between form and content here. In abstract, lyric-less music like this, aren't form and content synonymous? Tomas succinctly suggested that "form is content," and I think he's right, especially as applies to things like EAI, free jazz, harsh noise, etc. And, though it seems like we've had this conversation many, many times, I don't think EAI lacks surprise, craziness, or fun at all - I hear lots of those in this music, particularly in live settings like this box set. Read Taku Sugimoto's essay in the Amplify booklet, or listen to Keith Rowe inserting baseball broadcasts into "Treatise," and tell me this music doesn't have a sense of humor. ;)

I get from Alexandre's comments that he is not slamming anyone/thing in particular, just that he's disenchanted by much of the music he's heard lately in that realm. Why not? As one example, there is more than one way that Sachiko's last couple of releases can be appreciated, but the path of least resistance follows that of form. In terms of content, there is precious little to be had and I'd be surprised if even she disagreed.

Academics are a fascinating subset of music interest, but in the eye/ear of the beholder, if there are little-to-no dynamics to be held... A few guys here (myself included, to the extent that music is "thought provoking" as process) get charged by this stuff and I for one am often rendered speechless when some of the crazier techniques and collaborative approaches yield shit that is undeniably "musical". At least that's a large part of the appeal for me in the music we're discussing. Mostly though, I'm just a sucker for music that challenges standards.

Tomas, to answer your question: the Nakamura sets of the first disc, "Tint" nearly in its entirety, and the phenomenal Lehn/Schmickler set from disc 4.

OK, fair enough, but in the sense that you guys seem to be using the term, what "content" could there possibly be in any abstract, lyric-less music? To me, the content of Sachiko M's music is the fact that she's challenging standards of beauty and music, making music that is completely against the grain, and yet has a kind of alien beauty all its own. That's my subjective impression, of course, which is part of the point: in any music of this sort, "content" is completely in the mind and reactions of the listener, not really the music itself. So maybe the form is all that matters, and you can like it or not, read deeper meanings into it or not, depending on your own reactions.

hi

yes, this discussion is helping me to put it more clear.

what I miss is the feeling of "art expression".

lets make a comparison with a painter maybe.

take Jean-Michel Basquiat (young american black artist from graphiti/cartoon culture):

- the form of his works : use of intense colors, graphiti/child like drawing, big pannels, collage, dirty/free apsects

- the content : his conditions of black american, love for jazz, drugs... his frustrations as a human in capitalist society...

then I feel, the form is not enough. it is just a concept, a way. what makes it all great, its what is inside of the guy, the motivation for his "art expression", what he's got to "say", with or without speech.

then, somehow, I feel that this is totally missing, for me, at the moment, in the field of this "whatever" acoustico-free-electro-EAI-while-improv-music.

I am not trying to really put anything down here, or being critical for the sake, but this is honestly something I am questionning.

In the idea to make parallele between music and art (painting for example), I really feel that for all the major artists, we must realise that both "form" and "content" are very, very important.

Then to little go on with the Amplify example, for me it is more about just trying to make something a bit ok, a bit nice looking. it is really not feeding my "sensitivity". and in this trouble world, i feel artist have more to do than just make something nice and vanish... there must be something else... I must say eventually that I think "rock" is quite poor as well since Cobain and Nirvana, etc. etc. etc.

have a good day

Alexandre, I'm enjoying reading your comments on this topic. I think that if this new music is going to retain any of the vitality it's had in recent years, it is going to need to answer some tough questions like the ones you raise.

Ed, understood completely. With Alexandre's ideas in mind, perhaps part of the problem (with respect to content) is that there has been very little in terms of documentation, aside from reviews and published interpretations of what the music's about from outsiders (like ourselves) to the practice itself.

My example using Sachiko's music of late was meant to show that a common preconception among music lovers is that dynamics have to be there. In other words... variations in pitch, tempo, layers, etc. often need to be there in order to sustain human interest, if not only for the sake of having something to latch onto. Those elements are utterly absent from 1:2, et al., and to be honest, the praise-laden reviews I've read of those records have had little to do with the "music" itself, right or wrong.

I just had a look at the track list of the IMJ box on the IMJ site.

well somehow I feel there is maybe more creativity involved in the IMJ box (variety of approaches, genres, instrumentation) than in the Amplify Box. I must say that I havent got the IMJ one, maybe all the tracks are not so good...

yeah its about this as well, I didnt mention this word in my previous comment : "creativity".

I think it's a mistake to assume the same critical paradigms apply between the visual arts and the musical ones, and this is so particularly when the cited artist is Basquiat rather than perhaps Kandinsky or Rauschenberg. This is abstract music. The dichotomy between "form" and "content" does not hold and is only a kind of convention in primarily representational art. The problem here is that EAI doesn't represent anything other than itself.

the issues of "creativity" or "beauty" as primary aesthetic criteria are by now rather naive. Better just to say that a piece of music doesn't hit you, your aural preferences don't go there or some such thing. I'm not into all of the box. the sets by Sachiko/Nakamura and Stangl/Kurzmann/Sugimoto don't do anything for me. the rest however is pretty fabulous. I'm aware though that Ed and others like the S/N set, so I think it's probably a matter of taste. What I'm finding out now is that there's a particular area of EAI that I jell with best and it generally covers the Otomo/Nakamura/Muller/Voice Crack axis. I like a certain level of busy-ness.

The IMJ set is really great. I don't listen to it that often, but I do enjoy it. It covers the basic aesthetic of the label, which is fairly broad, and nothing more.

I'm pretty sure the Amplify box will for me hold up pretty well. I carry the whole thing around on my iPod and tap into it now and again. One thing I don't need, though, is yet another "review" of the set. maybe one of these days when I get some time, I'll write an "anti-review" of the box and make it as idiosyncratic as I am. One of my regrets with it, though, is that the Stangl/Kurzmann set wasn't on it. That's a great one, even if it sounds pretty much like Schnee, probably my favorite CD in the whole catalogue.

alexandre, i'm not sure if we mean the same thing with the words "form" and "content"... when i use the word "form" (and i'm not sure if i use it correctly), i mean the way you chose to put the audiomaterial together, independently of what you chose as your material (sine waves, the kick of a bassdrum or whatever).

"but the path of least resistance follows that of form." -> al, i disagree, but maybe we don't mean the same thing with "form"... i mean: when you get to a point where you just dig everything that sounds (quite literally - to me the are no "bad" sounds, just the things that we associate with them, maybe, and i try to ged rid of that) you have to start caring about questions of form to still make something that makes sense. i mean, if not you can as well just quit making music go to a building site and dig the sounds there (and they're quite enjoyable, aren't they). wouldn't that be the "path of least resistance"?

alexandre, "artistic expression" often is about showing how you feel and trying to get other people to feel this way, too. i much prefer music that leaves more room for individual interpretation rather than providing a certain "message". to provide precise "messages" is often to patronize the audience, i think. maybe you are searching for something "behind" the sound (the "message"?) but as stupid as it may seem, i just think that's not the job of the musician, but rather your own. listening is a crative act as well.

sorry if i'm too un-systematic at argumenting - i'm not good at this.

...and of course i agree with both ed and bill. i think you guys are much better in making coherent statements than myself ;)

I really wanted to stay out of this, and being in the middle of a crazy week here has helped. but what I'd like to hear is some specifics rather than generalities: Alexandre, which musicians, in whatever genre, do you find "alive" and "creative" these days? which projects of theirs? what is the most successful new record/s you've heard in the last year or two?

i must go to sleep now,
so many remarks/questions came.
it makes me interested in continuing this discussion
i must say though, that i find it hard to write in the forums. because at some point, i feel i would like to start writing really long thing, to start explaining my points, to be clear and precise, explain maybe my position, and then i dont know if i want to start doing all this on the internet.
i like the idea of discussing very much though, i wish we could all sit down in some place and have a talk!
I must go to bed.

Well, "artistic expression" is something that many have disavowed at this point. Especially as a priority or goal (to deny it completely as a factor is naive and disingenuous, even Cage was "expressing himself" if only by trying so hard not to).

The issue of content is, as someone said above, pretty moot, as well: the kind of "content" you talk about re: Basquiat is pretty extra-musical; Does Tilbury have this kind of "content" for you? If so, it's likely based on his words, not his pianisms (the "content" of which, for me, is an abiding residence in the Feldman catalog).

Now, for that kind of "content," one can always turn to titles (again, "extramusical," but directly associated with the music, at least). A title like I am frustrated with capitalist society's inability to satisfy my non-quantifiable needs, or even to acknowledge them might feed your need? Or too direct? : )

As for the original topic of the thread, perhaps the lack of criticism of "this" music (which I've noticed as well) relates to a simple notion: those that don't much like it feel that they don't relate to it, and don't often bother to approach it; those that often like it tend to stick to reviewing "safe" material that they already suspect they'll like (no real shockers on the box in question).

There is a "safety" that people are noticing in this onkyo-ha/erstwhile music, a safety of extramusical expression (innocuous titling, abstract associated images, "theoretical"ish discourse), which doesn't appeal to everyone. As much as I have "solipsism" concerns, I can only say: approach the sounds as the content; there's no other choice available.

don't run afoul of the law,

Joel

I suspect the main reason for a generally positive response (setting aside the matter of the actual music) is that only critics with a strong prior commitment to this area of music, & who feel that they're going to like the contents of the box, are likely to want to spend the enormous amount of time & energy reviewing such a formidable document. Speaking for myself I can say that while I've purchased or arranged to review several Ersts in the past, I decided to give the box a pass for now.

hi

joel reaction was very interesting
but also there was this question from jon about the cds that had good effect on me last 2 years
also so many things I am thinking about.

my point in general is not only based from the amplify box or erstwhile records. i live in paris and often go to instants chavirés and other music venues as well. it has been about two years that me and a bunch of friends, rather all around 30 years more or less old musicians and aficionados (or just friends coming once to a gig), often are disapointed with "improv" concerts and for those who follows more seriously, also with the cds being released. i dont know what is happening with us. somehow we really like the improvisation music idea, also compositions derived stuff, rock, jazz, techno, folk, blues, elvis presley... and probably when we slowly entered world of free rock, free jazz, free improv, noise, harsh noise, we were happy with it. it maybe had promises of something a bit "different". and slowly and slowly the "improv" side of it turned into something we feel had become very old in a very short amount of time. i still really like listening to CAN (german band from 1960s, i mention this for no confusion), their music is still carrying something for me, though its old, done and redone maybe, not so revolutionnary even maybe, but it works. somehow i am surprised to dislike "improv" cds i liked 4 years ago. maybe i simply cant explain this. maybe it sounds even stupid! excusez-moi! on the other hand, there are some records from this period i found briliant, but maybe some of this musicians seemed to have recently turned into something else i dont understand and like, this "safe" one to take back joel's word.

from there i can come back to stuff we were discussing before, is this lack of time resistance a sign of a lack of "content"? lack of "motivation", lack of "necessity"? is art in general a necessity for the art makers?

to finish this one; I will say that in french we use "le fond", like the background, the root, et "la forme", the "content", the style, the technic used.

well. hope this can make some of you react.

>>>>Better just to say that a piece of music doesn't hit you, your aural preferences don't go there or some such thing. I'm not into all of the box. the sets by Sachiko/Nakamura and Stangl/Kurzmann/Sugimoto don't do anything for me. the rest however is pretty fabulous. I'm aware though that Ed and others like the S/N set, so I think it's probably a matter of taste.

I think this is a very important point to make. The Sachiko/Nakamura set is my favorite in the box, whereas the "busy-ness" of Muller & Voice Crack often, but not always, turns me off a bit (cf. poire_z et al). Ultimately, as much as we fall into objective language in these discussions, this stuff comes down to subjective taste. I think I've argued a similar point on here a few times, but I really do believe that there's relatively little objectivity to be found in a piece of music. Alexandre (and many others, I'm sure) finds no creativity in improv, and I (and lots of others too) happen to hear the same piece of music and think it's wonderfully creative and exciting. It's taste, what can you do?

i am not saying i found no creativity in improv in general at all. i am talking maybe about recent years, maybe last 3 years production. there are stuff from improv i really like of course, old and new, even simply, i really am into it, that's why i am questionning so much why a part of it which has been recently given lots of space, the japanese scene, erstwhile and their followers in europe (berlin, london, paris) has somehow started really making me board. i think it is thomas who said that the sugimoto's writing is maybe a good proof of a sense of humor in improv, but somehow i understand the statement sugimoto is making. its quite close somehow of what i think. i bought the amplify box in a way to check by myself that i would find it quite disapointing.

now i am thinking suddenly about what otomo said i think in the article about offsite in the wire, he said something like we are in a turning point, and the new generation of musicians is feeling there is something else to be done, i think he even said he encourages their actions.

somehow maybe i built to much expectations on this improv thing. i wish every concert has such a tension, such an urgence, such an involvment. something intense and well presented. form and content.

i dont know

i spelt "board" instead of "bored"
lapsus
feeling board

>somehow maybe i built to much expectations on this improv thing.

I think this is an important point. The idea of free improv quickly becomes tiresome in practice. ("Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!" to quote some very wise ants from The Simpsons.) Rules are necessary; structure is necessary; form is necessary. You can't achieve transcendence without structure. To pick a thuddingly obvious example, I haven't heard Derek Bailey's Ballads album, but I'd be more willing to give it a listen than any of the other dozen or more records he's put out since then.

>

I couldn't agree less, actually. Duos for Doris was totally freely improvised and is as transcendent as any music I know, in any genre. the vast majority of any style of music is boring or subpar or whatever you want to say. Writing the above statements as if they're facts strikes me as completely absurd.

>

an odd example, since you haven't actually heard it, but to me it just sounded like watered-down Derek, with heads on each end.

Alexandre, I love Can too (until Future Days, anyway, I believe Tago Mago is the best rock record ever made), but can't you come up with some specific examples from the last 30 years of artists/musicians/records that you feel are "alive" and "creative"? what music do you love, specifically? you've given almost no clue as to that, and without that, this discussion seems a bit pointless to me, at least in terms of my being able to offer any input. as Ed says above, I do think a lot of music comes down to taste, at least in terms of what areas you personally connect with.

repost, with fixed quotes (why don't double arrows work on this site?):

"Rules are necessary; structure is necessary; form is necessary. You can't achieve transcendence without structure."

I couldn't agree less, actually. Duos for Doris was totally freely improvised and is as transcendent as any music I know, in any genre. the vast majority of any style of music is boring or subpar or whatever you want to say. Writing the above statements as if they're facts strikes me as completely absurd.

"To pick a thuddingly obvious example, I haven't heard Derek Bailey's Ballads album, but I'd be more willing to give it a listen than any of the other dozen or more records he's put out since then."

an odd example, since you haven't actually heard it, but to me it just sounded like watered-down Derek, with heads on each end.

Alexandre, I love Can too (until Future Days, anyway, I believe Tago Mago is the best rock record ever made), but can't you come up with some specific examples from the last 30 years of artists/musicians/records that you feel are "alive" and "creative"? what music do you love, specifically? you've given almost no clue as to that, and without that, this discussion seems a bit pointless to me, at least in terms of my being able to offer any input. as Ed says above, I do think a lot of music comes down to taste, at least in terms of what areas you personally connect with.

I guess I’m kind of in Phil’s camp when it comes to the value of some sort of underlying structure/method in music. Bailey’s BALLADS is a good un awright, but I think most, if not all, of his stuff (at least what I've heard) has an underlying structure/logic to it. Extemporaneous maybe, but extant just the same.

Just to make the obvious point: why can't structure be improvised? The underlying structure doesn't have to be anything as obvious as the songs on "Ballads" (which is an ok album, I think), but I think most good improv has some form to it, some sense that the musicians are working together to create something greater than just the sum of their little guitar squiggles and electronic doodles. I've rarely listened to an improv album on Erstwhile or IMJ and felt like it was just formless meandering.

Well said, Ed.

"I've rarely listened to an improv album on Erstwhile or IMJ and felt like it was just formless meandering. "

I've always felt this kind of improv to be more of a narrative than a refrain. I think it's the narrative side that people don't get. And why is "structure" a criterion here? I don't see "structure" in this kind of music, but that doesn't mean it's unstructured either.

ok - i think i lost track. i'm getting all mixed-up with "structure", "form", "content", "logic" etc. as far as i can follow this discussion i agree with ed's last post. most improv i like sounds quite structured to me, obviously not in the sense of a pre-conceived structure... isn't a simple crescendo already (part of) a structure?

Tomas is on the head: there is always structure. Even if the only obvious markers of it are start and finish. Every past effort by the human brain to avoid structure has been an abject failure.

For those who have listened to (metrically/harmonically) "free" music (composed or improvised) for any lenth of time, the statement that there are infinite organizational principles (explicit or no) should be a cliche by now.

The notes about "personal taste" are also givens.

Alexandre: if you're feeling jaded by a specific "scene" in music, give it a rest. Listen to other stuff for a while. Your ears might be asking you for some variety. I mean, shit, I love eating raw fish but if I eat it every meal I'll be pretty sick of it. Or better yet, you could start making your own music...

As for players being alive vs. stagnant, only time will tell. I've been a little concerned about some players I like, lately (won't name names), but the jury's still out and might not come back till we're dead.

And this:
"The idea of free improv quickly becomes tiresome in practice. ("Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!" to quote some very wise ants from The Simpsons.) Rules are necessary; structure is necessary; form is necessary. You can't achieve transcendence without structure."
I shudder. The practice of playing freely is to make a discipline of freedom. Rules are not necessary at all to make structured, organized, "transcendent" music (whatever that means) - the issues of personal intent, creativity of listening and playing, and sympathy for playing partners play a much higher role in the success of an improvisation experience, in my view. Although I've made music that felt like crap, only to be deeply proud of the results on playback, so there.(?)

Jenny

just in case it wasn't clear, I wouldn't release anything on Erstwhile that I didn't hear the structure in, that's maybe the most important criterion I use. this is actually my problem with a lot of the recent Mego releases (Rob Mazurek's is an ideal example): nice sounds, but I don't hear the structure a lot of the time.

Just a few comments about this interesting discussion.
Improv, as an official genre, exists since the middle of the 60s. It's old now. And less and less surprising for a lot of ears. These last years, there was a new genre with electronic material. It seemed new and important. But, quickly, for many people (Hi Alexandre), it resulted in boring gigs and discs. Maybe because there are too many musicians who believed that it's easy to make music with laptops, samples....
So, always the same problem : talented people can make interesting music. In any genre. Old improv is not dead. Last week I attended a duo by Michel Doneda and dancer Yukiko Nakamura (it was not the first time I saw them together). And it was completely amazing. I've attended hundreds and hundreds of gigs (in any genre), maybe I should say thousands... And I know Michel Doneda since the middle of the 70s... But on that last gig I was completely stupefied. I had never heard that before. Of course the stucture was there, and it was definitely improvised.
Structure is not always easy to understand in some pieces. For instance in Phosphor

"there is always structure"

Perhaps someone here could define this term as it applies to electroacoustic music. I could understand the word "logic" used in reference to this music but not structure. But this is probably a matter of interpretation.

is this an odd idea "baka guy"?
to think i want to feel bit of jimy hendrix, kurt cobain, yoshihide otomo and nick drake in improvised music?
bug sound shaker stuff

If Alexandre is the same Alexandre I think he is, he does make his own music. (hello if so)

Below is the definition of structure from the American Heritage Dictionary. I don't see any reference to things having to be preconceived.

In fact: "The interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity." and "something constructed" both suggest to me, far as music's concerned, that a sense of development, of something being built, of a relationship between the constituent parts of a piece of music is sufficient for it to have structure. And that this could equally apply to something very static or very busy. However it also suggests a sense of wholeness, of entities, and I think it's quite easy to think of performances that do or don't have that.

If a structure isn't preconceived, it's the perception of the performance that gives it structure - an interpretation of events (and decisions in the case of musicians analysing their own performance). I don't see how this is any less likely to give a sense of form/architecture to a piece than something painstaikingly constructed to remove all sense of form.

structure

SYLLABICATION: struc·ture
PRONUNCIATION: strkchr

NOUN: 1. Something made up of a number of parts that are held or put together in a particular way: hierarchical social structure.

2. The way in which parts are arranged or put together to form a whole; makeup: triangular in structure.
3. The interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity: political structure; plot structure.
4. Something constructed, such as a building.

5. Biology a. The arrangement or formation of the tissues, organs, or other parts of an organism. b. An organ or other part of an organism.
TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: struc·tured, struc·tur·ing, struc·tures
To give form or arrangement to: structure a curriculum; structure one's day.
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, the process of building, from Latin strctra, from strctus, past participle of struere, to construct. See ster-2 in Appendix I.

Just was reading on and off all comments and thoughts .... Hum .... what shall i say
as someone who does play sometime these games in music ..... that seems lost and far from just reality of PLAYING .... someone may want to think of the Derek Bailey use of the term PLAYING in Improvised music as well as anywhere ..... which amount of PLAYING do you throw or get is the most appropriate point here to me .... and we re not talking about HOW MANY notes or moves per second but i guess about denisty .... in this respect
my earlier comment on the Vienna Tokyo Berlin scene was aslo to mention quite a small amount of Playing .....

EVEN SILENCE can be FULL !

cheers
n

See all i wanted to say is :
In order to be playing you need to have SOMETHING to play ( with ?)

the same way than to have money problems i assume you need to have money otherwise you re just sticking to PROBLEMS

If you d watch all these things differently now
how much of these releases or whatever musics became simply a REPERTOIRE music ?

how can you risk anything when everyone agrees to death on what s OK and what s not ?

Again improv has never been a GENRE or STYLE ... when for SKUG magazine i attack a pile of records to be reviewed i almost could file all these recordings per style genre ...
so you d get "Quiet minimalism" next to "Ragga Dub" or "produced" next to "unproduced" ( i ll skip "Selfproduced" )
and after a short while the only consistant difference will appear as EXCEPTION Vs GENRE ..... SOMEONE against Something

best
n

And the last comment for now ....

I OFTEN thought quite some people should give back 50 % at least of their fee to Keith Rowe .... that would be fair no ?

n

"Below is the definition of structure from the American Heritage Dictionary. I don't see any reference to things having to be preconceived.

In fact: "The interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity." and "something constructed" both suggest to me, far as music's concerned, that a sense of development, of something being built, of a relationship between the constituent parts of a piece of music is sufficient for it to have structure."

Thanks, but I didn't mean to imply that the use of the term "structure" would necessarily entail preconception. I'm not sure how well architectural metaphors apply to improvisation, either. That there is something "constructed" in this music is rather a truism. that it opposes a neat refrain, that the narrative shifts, reverses, turns in on itself, avoids long repetition, etc. suggest to me a condition of "poststructure" rather than "structure." but that's just my sense. I could well be wrong or reading structure in a way different from what others are doing.

"I OFTEN thought quite some people should give back 50 % at least of their fee to Keith Rowe .... that would be fair no?"

The anxiety of influence would mean that no one would ever get paid--their debts to precursors always already being far too vast to overcome. Best way to repay Rowe? Critique him. Or invent something completely new.

Chinese copyright does not exist it says you were influenced and you will have to influence

the balance in between is your own moral duty

i was just more seriously thinking here of Jean-Luc Godard going to Cannes 20 years with a special visit card that says
JLG Film Director
account N° XXXXXX

and he gave it to people who said " you re such a big influence to me " ..."then give me back a little something "

i guess improv is closer to psychotherapy
( not psychology but anylytisis )
therefore you enter here to be SPOKEN by the discourse ... and THERE his the structure
but the structure does very little to the fact here

best
n

#

And that is also why i find very dubious the "silent" scene ... cause you re not taken into silence or quietness or whatever you may want to call it BUT literally FORCED to shut up

of course that does only involve me but
this fact makes me feel like the silence is just a curtain to ANOTHER deeper and more unspoken desire ... a rather bad one actually

sounds like a call for a STRONG ORDER from ABOVE to me ....

see religious music does not work like that
an d i witnessed many religious concerts of Pendercki recently in Poland .... that was like Take off ( i m not catholic .... enventually i enjoy vatican that s something else .... du plus de jouir so to say )

Why SILENCE these days ?

best
n

noël - i don't really know what to do with your last post... i don't see why choosing not to play anything (aka silence) should be a "call for a strong order from above" when in fact a lot of improvisers behave like a voice from above is telling them to do just the opposite... who is the one that "forces you to shut up" more: bernhard günter or merzbow...? besides: silence does not equal silence, it all depends on the musical context, on the listening (and playing) environment etc... i don't understand your aversion to it - not to say something is often more powerful than saying something, don't you think?

hey

this talk has gone so many directions

hummmm, i read interesting things from noel
somehow feeling it was coming back to my idea
of "content" ealier on,
i agree with the idea that you must have "something to say" like noel said before
and yes somewhere accumulation of "playing demonstrations", "style demonstrations" somehow ends up for me in a lack of "something to say "

and tomas, i am not sure i share your opinion when you say "not to say something is often more powerful than saying something".
hummmm, i hope that's not true always

alexandre

Maybe the main thing is not in SAYING or NOT SAYING but accepting to let things to be SAYED ... (?) they are as many ways to "say" as people and playings ....

i deeply don t think that STATMENTS makes a speech in music ( and especially prior or theoretical staments )

that goes likes Improv should remain JUST WHAT IT IS ....

and my main concern here is to let enough space open for that ... but that includes it can all go awfully wrong ( as well as beautiful )
WHO KNOWS

for myself improv means to go and try out

if i know what it s going to be like i d rather do a 10000 things else

best
n

The thing is, silence does not "force" anyone to shut up. A "silent" performance is in a sense a cooperation with the audience: if the audience doesn't feel drawn in enough by the performance, they won't shut up at all. Just listen to the second disc of the recent Raku Sugifatti disc on IMJ; the sounds of the musicians at the Vienna performance are completely obscured by the sounds of the crowd, while the audience in Tokyo sits completely still and silent, listening. The appeal of the very quiet music of the onkyo scene, for me, is its delicacy, the sense that it can draw you in with the expectation of its next moment of activity.

Noel, I sort of understand what you're saying in your last post there, and it sounds similar to Taku Sugimoto's own reservations about onkyo. But I don't believe the scene is inherently limited to its current quiet palette, nor have they quite exhausted the possibilities of what they've been doing these past few years. There have long been so many improvisers out there who explore the absolute loudest, busiest reaches of sound, so why have so many people so quickly accused these musicians of sticking to quiet sounds only? It seems like valid territory to explore, and despite some lack of variety in the records they've produced, when you consider the short time frame, people like Toshi Nakamura, Sugimoto, and Sachiko M have actually come a long way in the past few years.

Dear Ed

i ll answer now like in a usual mail
( excuse me and i promiss more details soon)

- The thing is, silence does not "force" anyone to shut up.

i did not say silence does i said the actual scene does in some ways ( you don t have to still YES )

ve scene A "silent" performance is in a sense a cooperation with the audience:

Heard Werner Daffeldecker saying audience does not change at all what he ll be playing ( or unplaying )

if the audience doesn't feel drawn in enough by the performance, they won't shut up at all.

heard many jazz albums recorded live in US where the crowd is really Loud .... Jim Hall Ron Carter duet on Concord or Jim Hall Red Mirchell or Paul Desmond in Toronto etc ...

Just listen to the second disc of the recent Raku Sugifatti disc on IMJ; the sounds of the musicians at the Vienna performance are completely obscured by the sounds of the crowd, while the audience in Tokyo sits completely still and silent,

i ve been around few times the audience was so tiny that ........

listening. The appeal of the very quiet music of the onkyo scene, for me, is its delicacy, the sense that it can draw you in with the expectation of its next moment of activity.

i do respect that i was just asking previoulsy
for people into it to tell me more just cause i personally got annoyed by it

Noel, I sort of understand what you're saying in your last post there, and it sounds similar to Taku Sugimoto's own reservations about onkyo.

But last time i played with Taku in Tokyo with Grubbs he stopped playing everytime something louder came up.... and don t get me wrong i m not against all that i just don t get the idea

It seems like valid territory to explore,

it does if it is But i don t feel it really is

and despite some lack of variety in the records they've produced, when you consider the short time frame,

40 years since AMM started these experiments is not precisely short
also listening to AMM III on Japo Keith really goes for weird trials

people like Toshi Nakamura, Sugimoto, and Sachiko M have actually come a long way in the past few years.

i m not putting down all these people at all
that i deeply respect ... what in short words i d say is it s time to risk more
whether it s silently or loudly

my own experience here has been always extremely boring because of some sort of unspoken rules without any goal unless you agree on keeping quiet

but i ll go further soon
best
n

Dear Ed

could you for example hear me if i d tell you this ?

looking for material inside Minimalism recently i just got back to ( that is my own history also ) Freddie Green

in many ways Green is close to Bailey
at least it took more than 50 years to Derek to purchase an Epiphone Emperor Guitar
( the one you hear on Ballads / Tzadik )

and i m not talking about the sytle either here
but the "amount" of actual playing

best
n

But the main thing is
that i value a lot this site and your work because mostly Musicians never talk ( or can´t ) about what they do ......

as i wrote to Dan before
if many musicians complains about critics being wrong musicians you never hear of critics complaining about musicians being bad critics

best
n

Noel: I've also felt that some players have turned the "quiet" music into a rule. I've actually rubbed up against players who "insist" on it.

Now, I can understand that from the perspective of "minimal music first, freedom second," but that's not a perspective I wish to share. I actually tend to play quietly, but most of my experience has been doing it while other musicians have been playing loudly (Super Unity/Dupity as best example). The choice it leaves me is either play louldy too or not be heard. I don't mind not being heard and I don't mind playing loudly sometimes if I think I can add something to the proceedings (ie. "something to say"). It is nice to play with quiet players because it gives me more room to do some of the things I like to do best, and I'm sometimes able to find more "places" to "put" my music, but as a player, the last thing I want is to be told what to do. If I wanted that I'd join a rock band & get paid, to boot.

For Alexandre: You might be interested to know that there is a whole "non-scene" of American players who have very strong socio-political/psychological motivations for their music, who don't give a rat's ass about their "bios" (read: list of famous people they've played with, ignoring the "nobodies" who've actually influenced them), and who are perfectly content to play anywhere, self-produce their own shows and series', and who actively seek risk. Some of them play electro-acoustically, some play electronically, some play acoustically. Some play quietly, some loudly. They generally self-identify as "free musicians" or "improvisors," rather than "electro-acoustic improvisors," probably because the freedom and improvisation are more central to their impetus than the tools are. These people are someitmes hard to find, and their recordings aren't exactly widely available, but they're there.

I'll not attempt a list, but suffice it to say that there is a whole coterie of these types lurking in Portland Oregon, and when they travel, they find plenty of others.

Jory

Dear James

i totally get your point actually the problem is not on the quiet / Loud sides but on the
Risks no risks .... Improv no Improv

if i join musicians to improvise and get stuck in an audio installation with people around barely unable to do anything else than ON /OFF i start to think ...hum ... are they a church ?

what his behind this desire ?
i have to say when it happen to me to be in different musical contexts with some of them
it got really poor and cheap ....

i have never had these problems with elder UK improv people for example ...it s not to be ready to play anything it just to be able to PLAY
and develop a discourse or position or anything that requires few skills at least his own ...

for example what i sort of mentioned on the Ballroom Trapist album is that when its esthetics goes like impro contempo electro
it s like tight but as soon as something tries to cross over it gets ambarassing to hear Pat Metheny or Frisell or fusion like things coming out ... and i just wanted to say it s maybe more obvious here but it s certainly not a surprise to me
i hear the same problem in other works ....

i d say if you want to be very EXCLUSIVE ESTHETICALLY you d better be able to keep up ....

the silent so far and at this point became the most rigid and stuborn thing i ve heard in a while ..... but again that s only me

i have hard time to hear something suposdely above all levels when i also hear people disable to do anything else ....

BEST
n

You know that s the Lol Coxhill joke about the 70´s when so many people were into these exerimental improvs ... where Lol says -
- Oh Yeah ! sometime you d start as a trio and you end up 30 on stage .... MOSTLY DJEMBEs though ....

obviously about a million things to say, but I'll keep it to a few.

first of all, I continue to plead that participants in this discussion list who the hell they're talking about specifically, and what records, concerts, whatever of theirs. Malfatti and Sugimoto represent one extreme end of today's improvising scene, and even they can't be entirely lumped together (particularly after the new Mattin/Malfatti disc). if someone just says "Otomo", I have no idea whether they mean sampladelic Ground Zero-era Otomo, his Jazz Quintet, his recent more abstract work, or some combination, which is why specifics are helpful. everyone has strengths and weaknesses as a musician, and different facets of different musicians might appeal to you more. for instance, Toshi Nakamura is one of my favorite few musicians in the world right now, a brilliantly sympathetic collaborator. but I'm not much of a fan of his solo work, although I do like each one more than the last.

and terms like "eai" and "erstwhile" encompass everyone from Schmickler, Pita and Fennesz to Sugimoto and Malfatti, so I'm not sure exactly what's under discussion, it's a pretty wide spectrum. I'm not saying there aren't trends, but I am saying there are plenty of exceptions to any trend that can be pointed out.

Noel:

"my own experience here has been always extremely boring because of some sort of unspoken rules without any goal unless you agree on keeping quiet "

if you're talking about anyone here except Taku or Radu, I'd be surprised (and very curious as to who it was). I'd agree that it's often boring, but it's occasionally transcendent also. anyway, I have nothing but huge respect for both of those guys, I may not agree with all of their aesthetic decisions, but they're both beautiful and influential musicians, and I'm very curious to see how they emerge from this phase of their careers.

since we have a large Paris contingent weighing in, did anyone check out the Jérôme Noetinger/ErikM show at Les Instants Chavires last year? curious for reports on that...

"Structure", "form", "design", "logic", "narrative"... with respect to the process of making, whcih I fell is really what is up for grabs in this discussion, aren't all these terms really variations on -- euphemisms for? -- negotiation? I agree wholeheartedly with Foster: "Every past effort by the human brain to avoid structure has been an abject failure." Structure is impossible to avoid as long as one retains some coonection to consciousness. I think this is why apparent formlessness / amorphousness as well as form indulging in replications of itself that are very nearly out of control both provoke equal amounts of revulsion. Both are visions of the monstrous, and both are only attainable by certain kinds of genius -- or mob effort. The word I want is hypertrophy. And there is certainly little hypertrophy in contemporary improvised music of the type discussed here... or it at least hidden, nearly microscopic.

The negotiations I'm talking about then are the kind of negotiations made by all of us everyday: with ourselves, with each other, with the objects we need to manipulate in order to even last to the end of the day. Its just that sometimes our "structures" go wrong, don't work as expected, get commandeered to other purposes, fail, collapse. This idea brings us back to the matter of taste, however, becuase structure is also something that can only be completed by some comprehension on the part of the listener / viewer / whomever. Its a matter of what structures one is likely or even conditioned (by a whole host of factors) to apprehend. Narrative is an interesting example, becuase it has the power to mold us precisely for an "appreciation" of itself. There's something viral or parasitic about narrative, as Burroughs noted about language. Fiction that deviates from strict narrative -- as the earliest English novels actually managed to do (it is worth remembering) -- thus are critiqued for being poor stories, or for being mere prose that does not attain "story"-hood. As if narrative were the only "structure" available to fiction.

Which is all to say that that litany of abstractions at the beginning of this comment has tremendous power to shape our perceptions of a given work, beofre we have even experieinced that work, becuase they are gorunded in and stake some claim to the ideal of "realism". But what has "realism" got to do with contemporary improvised music? I find Bill's reference to narrative in this context certainly not "wrong" in any sense, but fascinating. As I hear it, so much contemporary improvised music is about the resistance of narrative and all the linear processes -- up to and especially including catharsis -- narrative implies. What counts as an "event" in music predicated on long, long passages of silence and / or static sonorities (drones, sine waves, etc.)? I think it is perfectly valid to say that an entire piece as such is an "event" in and of itself, but I also recognize that there are different levels of event as well. Yet events strung together do not necessarily lead to the creation of a narrative. Some relationship has to bind them.

Finally, what is also interesting to note is that so many of the genre terms that have been defined for new music, from "serial music" to "minimalism" to "free improvisation" to "glitch", rely on the idea of individual pieces of music sharing certain formal concerns. This approaches specualtion about intent -- something so much contemporary critical theory cautions us against. But it seems like, and especially with music as forthrightly conceptual as so much contemporary improvised music, we keep bumping up against this problem -- intention -- no matter how hard we try.

BTW -- I'm still making my way through the AMPLIFY02 box; taking it in small bites. I have been most impressed by disc 4 (036), specifically, the Muller / Yoshihide performance.

I'm saving the DVD for last.

hmmmmmm

yes i was at erik m/noetinger last september

they played after zbigniew karko

for me his set that day was great
20 minutes of harsh noise computa deconstructed sample something,
really quite loud,
he played with strong attitude,
nearly kinda moving to his own music,
standing up and down in front of his screen.
bit agressive sometimes
at least something which moved me quite a lot
in the last year jon.

also last time i was a bit disapointed when they played with pita at Instants Chavirés
I liked the pita solo ok,
but then karkowsky was less in good shape than september

then i must say it was a bit funny to listen to erikm/noetinger after the opening from karkowsky.
i couldnt really quite keep myself into it after 10 minutes or so. i think they played a bit long to my taste, loosing the tension very quickly. i find it hard to concentrate on improv if it flows to easily. also i must say i was more fan of erik when he played the decks.

i remember a concert with voice crack, muller and erik m at Instants, they were not called Poire-z. one of the speaker went on fire... this concert was totally amazing to me somehow, back in 98 or 99, something like this!

interesting post, Joe. I meant to say before that it's not really "structure" that I look for in records I'm working on, it's an internal logic, which may or may not be unique to that particular record.

"As I hear it, so much contemporary improvised music is about the resistance of narrative and all the linear processes -- up to and especially including catharsis -- narrative implies."

I think there's plenty of narrative and linear flow in a lot of these records that you're seemingly talking about (although again, without specifics, maybe we're talking about different things.) for instance, dach holds together as a constant, linear performance for me, just barely.

"What counts as an "event" in music predicated on long, long passages of silence and / or static sonorities (drones, sine waves, etc.)?"

change? I also think that "music predicated on long, long passages of silence" is unusual even in this field, and is pretty much limited to the work of Malfatti and Sugimoto, with others from the Tokyo scene beginning to explore that direction recently (Toshi/Sachiko duo set on the box, upcoming double CD on Erst of those two w/Otomo). and as for truly "static sonorities", I tend to find them dull, the ones I like are ever-changing and fluctuating.

Dear Jon

i understand you d like precise names shows and so on but i may want to still speak of someone rather than just an album and that has many reasons we could talk abnout later

when or if i say Otomo for example i have to indeed think of at least 10 different projects and contexts but i still want to think of ONE artist person etc ... the same i d do with other people cause for example ( sorry) when you d talk about the Vienese scene they are people i ve heard in quite various situations through years ... what shall i tell you i played for example with Hautzinger a rather impovised show but i also invited him in Vienna to play standards with Ernst Reisjeger and on the top both Franz and myself have played with Wolfgang Puschnig ... the same with Burkhard Stangl that i ve first heard with Koglman years ago playing jazz chords or Siewert that i ve heard basically every year ( that was way back ) into another style ... so it s still complex

concerning BOREDOM that i mentioned i wanted to specifically talk about playing in such contexts ... see it s NO space for improv where whatever could happen
i can name you a show we did David Grubbs, Otomo Sachiko, Taku and myself in Tokyo
where everything was CORRECT when David and i went there way ... as soon as we went wherever or just improvised ... the feedback from Sachiko and Taku was less less existing
i just felt it was OK to drone not OK to go improv risking it all goes wrong AND i make a point here that IMPROV with refusing Risks and ugly long moments is sort of refusing to play the game .... you need to have something to loose i guess

On the same evenening i played a duet with Otomo where the question of what to play or not to play would not even be in the minds
the improv to me has the particularity that it s what you re playing that tells you what it is
( again Improv is NO STYLE but a Gesture and facts and presence )

as For the RADU / TAKU duet well yes it s no question of respect( i do ) but why don t they just not play at all then ?

i personally find that it comes to a point where
it s not improvised anymore not composed either and hardly played ..... i also thought these kind of extremes have been done already decades ago ....

But YES Jon you re right
i ll have to be more precise soon

For example the too last albums i ve heard ( Trapist # 2 and Kapital ) did not make me feel at all like Brandlmayr is able to go somewhere else ... is that plausible if i d say it reminds me of some Joey Baron solo work with a tiny tiny sound ? ( do you remeber that James Brown solo drums Joey use to do a while ago ?)

i also find that these scenes are maybe not getting enough exchanges with other contexts and players like you d have in London or Chicago .... don t know
all i may feel i know is THINGS TAKES LONG LONG time

best
n

Following Joe s answer on

"Structure", "form", "design", "logic", "narrative"...

when i have to hear again things like "NO EGO" i m sorry to say .... WHAT ?
not again that dodgy positivist psychology ....

and they are really loads of comments and things like that around ... especially when you re in austria with all that history behind where still people considers themeselves as Victims of Nazism massively .....

that sounds WEIRD to me and totally unapropriate ....

did you got a copy of the PHONOTAKTIK Catalog by SKUG ?`

that was full of these new agy high tech things
but unfortunately as i said many times LAPTOPS don t make music on their own ....

etc
n

"change?"

Interesting, Jon. Someone would say that all stories boil down to this. Or, as a teacher of mine once said, "There is only one story, and that is that someone is is less stupid at the end of the story than he or she was at the beginning."

You're right, of course, in that "static" itself is a kind of value judgement disguised as a mere perception. But, if we were to measure some of these sine waves "objectively" and generate some sort of output, we could argue that, for certain evaluative purposes, they are relatively static.

"i must say i was more fan of erik when he played the decks."

me too! I saw him do an amazing solo on two of them in Wels in 1999, it blew me away. Jérôme and I got him to return to them at least a little for the What a Wonderful World record. have you heard that, Alexandre?

I like some Karkowski (the 3 inch on Mego is superb), but I have a feeling your taste and mine don't overlap too much. I'm more interested in subtlety, in music that takes multiple listens to make itself understood and continues to reveal itself slowly through dozens of listens, no matter how experienced a listener you are. I heard new things on the Rowe/Fennesz last night, and I've probably played that fifty times already.

when you say "i want to feel bit of Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Yoshihide Otomo and Nick Drake in improvised music?", you're not going to get that from the music I release. those guys (with the exception of Otomo, obviously) are strong individual personalities, and the work I release is about collaboration, subsuming the individual in favor of the whole.

It s like all these actual recordings needs for me to be TRANSLATED and then you may see rather different ideas coming up than what the artwork designes says it is ....

i remember ( Jon i promiss i ll give precise examples now ) a grob album Bossetti Krebbs .... if you look at the artwork ( seriously who can sustain such a naive ugly painting ?)
then if you hear the musicand if instead of using the politically correct sounds in that era so that it sounds like what you d expect
i meán basically if you get rid of all the Agreed
things at the end the level of playing and inrterractions left is to me really quite low ...

and in some of these things they are many Fluxus like or previous conceptual things that to some extend are just the same thing Diana Krall does when she covers Nat King Cole nowadays .... revival ....

if often say in reviews GIVE ME BACK THE ORIGINAL .... then

all i can hope is that all this useful for many of them to build something

probably too that it has an audience cause it s highly recognizable and expectable ... (?)
you don t get much surprises i find

But time we ll tell
to me when Keith Rowe and AMM started
that was a total different thing but that was 40 years ago too

best
n

Noel:

yes, as you obviously know first-hand, if Taku or Radu is involved (for Radu over the last five years or so, for Taku the last 2 years maybe), they play one way, that's what they do, that's what they've chosen to do. if you don't enjoy it, either as a fellow musician or a listener, then don't explore it any further.

"as For the RADU / TAKU duet well yes it s no question of respect( i do ) but why don t they just not play at all then ? "

um, because they enjoy playing in that style, even if very few other people seem to?

as for Brandlmayr, I don't think he wants to explore too abstractly yet. I think he's funkier than Baron ever was already, and he's still very young.

i relistened to "what a wonderful..." few days ago, to kinda check it out, hummm, it doesnt really so much trigger me. after a while i tend to hear the same thing always going on more or less. just my opinion...

also i think i would like to relistened that zbigniew solo, i could find it different for a few listen at list. the density of his sounds probably hides so many different hardly audible things at first.

also i undesrtand noêl point's about people. before the musician there is a personnality. that's what i mean by mixing of hendrix, otomo, cobain...

also i like the voice crack/otomo. but maybe for me its near the limit of my interest actually.

Dear Jon

quoting you

are strong individual personalities, and the work I release is about collaboration, subsuming the individual in favor of the whole.

Up to very selfish attitudes as far it s good for their business in the case of musicians ?

In Vienna you may know Kurzmann holds hands on the scene ... hard to see something outisde of that .... that is another aspect we don t get to hear about much ....

i am sometime slightly shocked by that
side ....

best
n

Just wanted to say that i see MANY MANY paradoxes here for example ....

like NO EGO but ME FIRST
that often happens

best
n

Noel, I'm just talking about the music itself, not anything outside of that. not sure how tightly Kurzmann can "hold hands" on the Vienna scene, since he's primarily lived in Berlin for quite some time now, but I do know generally what you're talking about.

anyway, if you don't like what he's doing or what Taku or Radu are doing, then do something different yourself (I know that you already do, of course, I'm speaking here more in general terms). I wasn't hearing enough records that I loved anymore, so I decided to produce them myself, and the same thing with concerts.

pardon me

but this is really fast motion going this Bagatellen thing. waouahhhh!!!

noêl i didnt understand the sense of what you meant in this : "Up to very selfish attitudes as far it s good for their business in the case of musicians ?
In Vienna you may know Kurzmann holds hands on the scene ... hard to see something outisde of that .... that is another aspect we don t get to hear about much ...."

its so hard to follow all this writings, also still i am not english native speaker and so many records you talk about i dont even know them. but its good to exchange i guess

See Jon
i may also be reacting cause basically it s a scene with more or less the same people you hear ... ( cause it s like i invite and then you invite me back ) and i m wondering why for example we could not get some other things just based on music played

for example i did recently an ITW for Skug with ROD POOLE .... he released years ago two amazing solo microtonal acoustic guitar that really amazes me

It was a bit strange to find out that was his second itw in 15 years

But you re right i mean i m not forcing myself when i don t like it it s for sure my own problem i just happen as i said before through Sylvian to listened again ( i wanted to make sure what i disliked was really there or i may have heard it cause i mixed up things after all )
to many of these records i had here ... and
well it s very tiny to me ....

not the genre or so but the playing is still too tiny to me ... not much meat there yet to my ears cause of too heavy locked things

best
n

Dear Alexandre

i was mentioning here some STAMENTS as opposed to ATTITUDES ....

it s just my view when someon states THIS OR THAT and then when i get to see what he or she does i see obvioulsy something else

like one says RED ONLY and then you get YELLOW ....

i guess this answers only obscures things

best
n

"Noel, I'm just talking about the music itself, not anything outside of that. not sure how tightly Kurzmann can "hold hands" on the Vienna scene, since he's primarily lived in Berlin for quite some time now, but I do know generally what you're talking about. "

Dear Jon
i totally agree with you
what i say here is not just personal cause to me it reflects also musical attitudes ... i mean i hear these paradox or things

i had clashes for example when i got an EFZEG flyer with a political statment that they were against any past or future government
but the show was at KONZERTHAUS a really very official venue ....

and to some extend it s the same in music here to me .... it s a huge difference between
wearing a CHE tee shirt and joing indians in Chiapas ... that s all i want to say

But of course you re right and i guess most if us here are ALSO DOING something
and don t get me wrong i m glad as many different people are around to do as many different things as far as they still agree to talk about it

i m not even directyl concerned by all that cause i really do things in all sorts of era
and will always do ... that s indeed the best answer we all can give no ?

Best
n

man!!!

euh, i want to react a bit on this
"i may also be reacting cause basically it s a scene with more or less the same people you hear ... ( cause it s like i invite and then you invite me back ) and i m wondering why for example we could not get some other things just based on music played"

sometimes i feel things happen to much because there is a certain "system" than rather to really try and create some unexpected music ... as myself being, i dont know, amateur musician lets say, playing concerts here in paris, i discover the whole scene of improv in paris, and met people, tatati tatata... and realised its a all thing with codes. and now i am discussing here with all of you, its really strange somehow. i feel we are all sharing same desire. i dont know, sorry i get lost...

Noel, I like Rod Poole too, especially the Death Adder which I think is beautiful. but based on what I've heard, I wouldn't ask him to be on Erstwhile. he seems much more of a solo artist.

as for why more people don't know him, there are plenty of overlooked people who are amazing musicians, as you well know. Jim O'Rourke helped a lot to "rediscover" some of these musicians over the last decade, John Fahey, Tony Conrad, Luc Ferrari, Arnold Dreyblatt, Ray Russell, but there are dozens and dozens of others deserving similar recognition who have yet to be given their proper due. for instance, Masayuki Takayanagi, still not nearly well known as he should be.

But Jon

as you know i wish to listen to more of your albums still

i just beleive it s important to talk
to dislike is not to deny
it also can change too

let me tell you a funny story that goes in your direction. As you may know Grubbs and I are close friends and we come from radically different backgrounds. For long time i knew David is really into Loren Connors and i never really understood Connors music ... to me it was also rather dodgy ...

Until one day Grubbs sended me this Arboviate duo album he produced
and that was it THERE i could hear what he meant totally

so it s plenty plenty of things for us to produce
exactely as you ... let s RELEASE what we don t find somewhere else !

best
n

I promiss to come down loading this chat room ... i just found 2 days ago but
i ll be more disert soon

yes, I agree with that, but I also think it's important to remember that some areas of music/musicians just aren't for everyone, even everyone with experimental tastes, which doesn't make them any less valid.

I think i know what you re talking about here

" but I also think it's important to remember that some areas of music/musicians just aren't for everyone, even everyone with experimental tastes, which doesn't make them any less valid. "

But i wouldn t oppose personal tastes with capacities and density etc ... i think you can t
just skip some questions or realities by saying i Like or Dislike that s just a private statment .... see sometimes they are bad qualitiy recordings that i like a lot because of their dramatic qualitites or because they reflect something else played too .... i wont say it s a good recording but it still may be a great album ... in these esthetics you can t just accept things on that basis i find ... i mean like with a composition when you can read a score
you can also SEE things that is objective too

you don t have to like yourself Quincy Jones to recognise him a great talent at least as an arranger etc ....

the same way yo can t say : THAT IS MY CONCEPT you can t discuss my album at all cause you don t understand my music ...when the concept gets totally lost or spoiled just cause the players hardly cant transcend it for technical reaons or etc ....

i remember a show like that with Gene Coleman supposed to be freely improvised
but strangely enough Gene had a cliche coming under his fingers every 30 seconds the sane ....
that wasn t obviously a choice of his but a real TIC ....

should we ignore it or say it s just cause i don t like him for example ? no that is not a very good answer .....

best
n

the next important thing would be HISTORY too it s not the same thing to play Coltrane note for note in 2004 than to be Archie Shepp still ..... you don t face the same thing at all

that is what i wanted to say with Keith Rowe
and i also always remember that Keith is leaving in France since really long years now but it s only since few years that you can hear him around
before nobody really talked or even knew him around ... when i first wrote him a letter donkey years ago i have never ever had seen his name in a program around

yes, when I met Keith for the first time in 1999, he had barely recorded outside of AMM. I've done my best since then to rectify that situation. :)

noël, i get the impression that a lot of the stuff you dislike about the more "quiet" scene has to do with politics, rather than with the music itself (i.e. your comments about kurzmann)... it's funny to hear you talk this way when (in a strictly musical sense) your disc "rien" does have quite some similarities for me with some of the stuff the "onkyo" crew or the people around efzeg are (ore were) doing... i really love "rien" and i think it's still a much underrated record, but it's hard to believe that it was done by the same man who is posting these comments here... and talking about some "unspoken" rules in the "silent" scene: i can just say that you're gonna be pretty surprised when (if) you hear the disc i've done with erik, otomo and toshi (gonna come out in a couple of days btw): toshi was extremely flexible. erik brought in some busier stuff and toshi was completely up to it. sorry, i seriously think you're underestimating some musicians and their ability to go far beyond cliches here...

jon: i understand you prefered erik with the decks, but i'm convinced his "new" way of playing with the inputs provided by the other musicians opens up a whole new world of possibilities. for me the strongest thing about erik are not his sounds, but rather his feeling for musical form, he's a master in "instant composing"... the way he's working now gives him more control to "lead" a performance, which i find very interesting and more "future oriented" than working only with turntables.

Jon said, "I'm more interested in subtlety, in music that takes multiple listens to make itself understood and continues to reveal itself slowly through dozens of listens, no matter how experienced a listener you are."

Me too. I'm very sympathetic with this "deep structure" biz. One of the things I love about Elliott Carter, e.g., is that each of his mature pieces presents a "difficult nut." As I listened to "What Next?" today, I wondered for a moment whether Brian ever finds any crosswords "beautiful" in the sense that they have some particularly cool deep structure that (may or may not) become apparent to the savvy puzzler.

I may find a "simple" piece extremely beautiful or sad or kicking. But I generally know, even while enjoying it greatly, that it won't have the shelf life of a more complicated work. This may be why I've never really 12-bar blues--even though, when young, I used to make a few bucks playing and singing Skip James and Bukka White stuff. It may be that I'm not completely satisfied if I have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen next.

Silence is useful in that regard, since it's sort of a palette-cleanser. To a certain extent, it "undoes" the most recent notes played, making what comes next anybody's guess. There are, of course, other devices available too.

"As I listened to "What Next?" today, I wondered for a moment whether Brian ever finds any crosswords "beautiful" in the sense that they have some particularly cool deep structure that (may or may not) become apparent to the savvy puzzler."

Just what we need, a crossword tangent. But the answer is yes, certainly. Not sure about the parallels to music, but it's interesting that the structure is there already but only emerges as the solver discovers it (if, in fact, she does, depending on her own expertise at solving). But it is very cool to see patterns percolate up and, perhaps, it's not too dissimilar to something experienced by improvisers as structure suddenly coalesces around them.

But Jon

YES ! I know and praise that concerning Keith !
i just wanted to say i do remember times where all that didn t exist at all ... in Paris you had the 80´s period with Dunois and label Nato plus few things but until a club like Instants Chavirés started to go that way ( and i was there since the begining of that story ) in the 90´s it was NOTHING ...

i m glad it reaches another level and brought another scene and so on ... it s just sometime
it goes a bit quickly all in one direction then all in another no ? When i wrote in the late 80s to Keith in France i can tell you the crew around AMM was so tiny ... in Fact you d never ever see him playing at all and that lasted for a long long time before they found out ... i remember also Fred Frith being responsible for mentioning many many times Keith was so important and a pionneer here and there ...

As for your work i think that is indeed a great answer and FACTS that is no question. See i m really glad Davidson is so dedicated with EMANEM for example altough i m not running after the whole catalogue IT S a NEED to HAVE him. no ?

All i am saying is Give all that a little time ....
wait and see in 5 years, 10, 30 etc ....

best
n

Dear Tomas

"i get the impression that a lot of the stuff you dislike about the more "quiet" scene has to do with politics, rather than with the music itself "

Well who brought Politics into that ? i don t need to talk about politics i d rather do something or don t but i don t need to advertise that at all. Now when people bring this issue then YES i m gonna have a look at what does it concretely mean ... and there in terms of the Vienna scene i have to say i am pretty sceptical .... probably also that i ve seen to many Private interrests wrapped in a political discourse .... i mean just a sticker NO is nice but that is not really Politics. Since many people around this scene have said to join the SPO ( Socialist party ) as the only chance to fight Haider .... I DON T HEAR them VERY MUCH after SPO made the coallition with HAIDER themselves... do you ?
And to many extend the Cultural policies are JUST the same to me here and there ... if it brings advantages to their business they d sign anything i find ....

"
it's funny to hear you talk this way when (in a strictly musical sense) your disc "rien" does have quite some similarities for me with some of the stuff the "onkyo" crew or the people around efzeg are (ore were) doing.."

Hum i know but that has always been a misunderstanding same with the "joseph" serie of solos .... cause this music comes from a really different story that originally has very little to do with Music but with Cinema ( has it s also one of my activities and not much for soundtracks )

. i really love "rien" and i think it's still a much underrated record,

Thanks but it s not really true cause it s on Winter & Winter and this means a very serious distribution so that ( and that was the original idea too to do such a project on a label who does reach a different audience and who s not specialised in avant garde ) RIEN has had and it actually to my surprise still goes on a real big audience for what it is

" sorry, i seriously think you're underestimating some musicians and their ability to go far beyond cliches here..."

that ll take another explanation i am not underestimating musicians at all my question is the DESIRE for a music that in many ways sounds to me as a REFUSAL of Music
( but i also know writing this shortly is a source of many other misunderstandings )

in other words to me it s a serious GAP between the concepts and the actual
playing results

best
n

Jon said, "I'm more interested in subtlety, in music that takes multiple listens to make itself understood and continues to reveal itself slowly through dozens of listens, no matter how experienced a listener you are."

But that is great no problem
But still you could apply such statments
to ANY MUSIC you personally love

It took me decades to hear certain music
and they don t fall into one genre concept or form they more often reflect a Person
his or her presence etc ...

the listener is alo responsible for what he hears he can Project his hearings to other people less aware or sensible to it too no ?

best
n

to me there s no opposition in Composed / Improvised

the things are revealling under INTERPRETATION

best
n

"Well who brought Politics into that ?"
noël - i think that was a misunderstanding. i was talking about politics meaning "personal politics", the friendships and hostilities in a "scene"... it had nothing to do with the efzeg-flyer you mentioned or anything like that...

i'm happy to hear "rien" is selling well.

"Hum i know but that has always been a misunderstanding same with the "joseph" serie of solos .... cause this music comes from a really different story that originally has very little to do with Music but with Cinema ( has it s also one of my activities and not much for soundtracks)"

-> i disagree. your motivation behind the record, "story" as you say may be a different one, still i think it's wrong to speak of "misunderstanding", since the feelings that music evokes in myself has similarities to that "quiet" music we were talking about. it's like if bernhard günter says in the warburton PT interview that he used to like morton feldman for the "wrong" reasons... i think that's a pretty weird thing to say... he may have liked him for other reasons than the ones the composer was intending, but i'm sure günter had his own reasons to like that music... how can these be "wrong"... is there a "wrong" reason to like something? ... that's why i don't think my (and other) interpretation of "rien" and "joseph" is a misunderstanding... i may have liked it for other reasons than you made it, still: it is what it is, and - don't get me wrong - for me it's just not really that important why you did it or what history way behind it... it's just there to be interpreted by each listener in his/her own way...(and i'm thankful for that)

Dear Tomas

Well 2 things ... i guess Politics starts with
our own policies no ? in that extend the more public ones reflects the more private ones

And "misunderstanding" on these albums ( see it s easy to misunderstand i should deffinetely be more precise here ) was meant not as thinking people heard it wrong cause it had another meaning or context for me ( there i totally agree with you they are as many understanding of a work than people want to reflect and see hear feel it ..that s what i said earlier too ) NO what i meant is i personally got sometimes feedbacks on Rien for example that suggested i would be totally dedicated to a more general scene of music floating in this era .... that is not the case
that is as simple as that .

Or to give you another example cause i m cloe to David Grubbs i sometime met people sure that i was aware of all Drag City albums ... well that is neither the case ... i met people in the scene and worked with some but that was always like an accident and eventually we re friends but nit because i embrace forcerly the whole idea behind

Best
n

The same way that i get asked why i didn´t join the quiet experimental crew in Vienna ....
for the same reasons ... cause i do all sorts of other things during day time than to drone
so that for me that has never been a question
but it seems after Rien it could have been one for some ...

best
n

But if Günter says "wrong" ... i kinda go for that too.... they are so many artists that deeply influenced me in a wrong way ....

it reminds when i was into Ornette Coleman s Primie Time and from my corner it felt like more of a Poetical Naive Art brut way to comp behind ... until i played with some of the Primie Time people who had all kinda of theories very very defined etc ... ( to me still that was far from how they just instinctively played this music )
i respect both ideas ... again that s how it sounds like at the end

When i ve seen keith Rowe solo in Nantes last time ... whether he does or not theorised his playing the way he used basics of prepared guitar ( well he invented that so )
was so Wide ... for the use of one Crocodile clip that we ve all heard a zillion times Keith
had so much variations control dynamics textures .... see i forgot even what it was

that is what i m talking about
i don t want to hear a program or an objetc and just to feel like HUM that is THIS or THAT
i do for example hear programs or effects or technical devices a lot in Laptop music
that just takes me away from the music when a Max program sounds like a Max demo track

best
n

Noel:

"it s just sometime it goes a bit quickly all in one direction then all in another no ? "

no, I don't think so. I'm personally largely interested in one direction (although, again, the variations in personal approach within that are immense), but the majority of the European free improvisation scene is still doing the same thing (generally) they've been doing for decades. I think it's more that individual/s become/s interested in one direction at a time, that doesn't make the other/s vanish.

"my question is the DESIRE for a music that in many ways sounds to me as a REFUSAL of Music "

again, I plead for specifics. I'll assume you're talking about Radu/Taku again, and I'll argue that for them, in different ways and at different points in their careers, this isn't an end point but a phase they're going through, bringing everything back to zero, clearing out any accumulated habits, starting over, and (eventually) seeing what comes next.

it's not a refusal of music, it's their reaction to a world filled with sound/noise, and a free improv community where (they felt) people play way too much, a mindset I can totally relate to, even if I don't always enjoy the end results they come up with. I'm sure you've talked to one or both of them about this in person, but if you're interested, the conversation between the two in the first issue of the Improvised Music from Japan magazine is illuminating.

"i don t want to hear a program or an objetc and just to feel like HUM that is THIS or THAT
i do for example hear programs or effects or technical devices a lot in Laptop music
that just takes me away from the music when a Max program sounds like a Max demo track "

no kidding, Noel! what are you telling us here, that there are loads of boring laptop musicians? that's really not news to anyone, I'd say there are less than 10 laptop musicians in the world I really like.

FWIW, I really disliked Rien, it did absolutely nothing for me (thus living up to the title, I suppose) and I sold it. I did like Live at Les Instants Chavires with Evan P. a lot though.

Dear Jon

but the majority of the European free improvisation scene is still doing the same thing (generally)

Largely Yes i have the same questions on these ones too ... like when Matts Gustaffson plays Evan Parker 67 better than Evan ....
That s also why i went quite away ... didn t stopped a repertoire to exchange with another one even would it be a more something one

again, I plead for specifics. I'll assume you're talking about Radu/Taku again,

No by far nit only cause TAKU / RADU are sort of an extreme too and in some ways it s kinda locked already ... I felt listening to a recent Sachiko M solo ( mini CD on A Bruit Secret ...is it 1:2 ?) that i may have had more "fun" just to read the idea ... and let my ears open something ...but the actual sonic experience of it was not necessary to me there , i guess an explanation with eventually a drawing would be fine and there i would say we would (if it was a composed piece or a map) enter the serious question of Composition ... cause a line with 2 marks somewhere in the middle is not exactely Novelty

and I'll argue that for them,

in different ways and at different points in their careers, this isn't an end point but a phase they're going through, bringing everything back to zero, clearing out any accumulated habits, starting over, and (eventually) seeing what comes next.

I am very happy to see it that way ... i ll wait until it comes again then

it's not a refusal of music, it's their reaction to a world filled with sound/noise,

But should you do as a reaction to a world full of records and dull releases plus other marketing plans in Music STOP to produce as an act for example ... would you do that ? or would you feel NO it needs another side and there you come and make it happen real

and a free improv community where (they felt) people play way too much,

That is also correct but that doesnt still tell much about what they played ... again translation may be useful do you think for example someone like Olaff Rupp plays too much or that the problem may be somewhere else in his case ? To me for example (that is a quite good one i d say ) improvised music is not exactely what he does anyway .... could be the same in another era ....

a mindset I can totally relate to, even if I don't always enjoy the end results they come up with.

But me too i find Improv is stuck in the 70´s stylistically and people play loads of harsh things ( i guess another explanation of what i called REFUSAL will come soon )

I'm sure you've talked to one or both of them about this in person, but if you're interested, the conversation between the two in the first issue of the Improvised Music from Japan magazine is illuminating.

I ll have a look yes thanks

no kidding, Noel! what are you telling us here, that there are loads of boring laptop musicians?
i said Laptop music cause originally the Laptop people i liked didn t talked at all about being musicians ....

that's really not news to anyone, I'd say there are less than 10 laptop musicians in the world I really like.

And even ... but yes 10 OK and for the 10 are probably the same since 10 years ...the one who started

FWIW, I really disliked Rien, it did absolutely nothing for me (thus living up to the title, I suppose) and I sold it. I did like Live at Les Instants Chavires with Evan P. a lot though.

That is no problem at all
the Evan thing i didn t even knew it was a record ...you know Jean-Marc Foussat is often here sitting next with his Large Smile

best
n

I agree with you about that Sachiko release, that's another extreme point. we had a long discussion about that here a few months back, I'll bring it up to the top for you. I think it's possibly my least favorite thing I've ever heard from her, I certainly don't feel the need to hear it a second time.

"But should you do as a reaction to a world full of records and dull releases plus other marketing plans in Music STOP to produce as an act for example ... would you do that ? or would you feel NO it needs another side and there you come and make it happen real"

it doesn't matter what I would do, I'm not a musician. I respect the choices those two have made for themselves, even if I'm not always so interested in what it results in, and I'm glad that not many other musicians are so extreme.

as for Olaf Rupp, I haven't really listened to him enough to say, I think both of his solo discs have passed through here, but neither is still around.

have you heard many Erstwhile releases, Noel? which ones? I only ask because you say "I find Improv is stuck in the 70´s stylistically", and whether you like Erstwhile or not, I think anyone would be hardpressed to describe many of the releases that way.

Dear Jon a few more things

i ended up on Bagatellen cause i listened again to some of these albums ( let s say to give you details the Vienna Tokyo Berlin crew we know on various labels where they released a music that has some link in between ... ) and i did listened again cause had these discussions and that may lead to a Song album with some of them and i felt when i got asked ...hum ... It does not inspire me at all (whatever )

and listening again i really felt that if it wasn t that esthetic of playing very little, droning, never solo, etc it wouldnt be left much of it. But even in that era the drone wasn t enough happening ... i just felt bored ( and not cause drones necesseraly bores me but because these ones are very settled to my hears )

That plus another thing which is that in many cases when it goes slightly out of the drone it often feels to me not much controlled .... seems like the esthetic is just a HUGE CURTAIN to keep it hype and respectable

i ve also seen this music live sometimes and that was even worst ...i thought that was unberable very shortly ... what i said REFUSAL is that coming to a show to see someone hiding behind an instrument ( there also why not just come with nothing ) and stretching the time as long as possible before eventually coming to the point where maybe he d play something ( but no not yet wait another 20 minutes ...) and this other last thing that i dont get WHAT does it mean to play the most possible blank sound ? a sound like dead, with no one behind no intonations no emotion no projection etc ... a concept, or as you said a stage ...? could be i don t know
to me it felt like a desire to REFUSE and a very violent one but nott assumed directly by someone ... but Hidden behind an estethic

that s why i react to that
and also cause i don t see that issue much discussed anyway . I ve heard descriptions of this as modernity, beauty etc but to me it s a form of Death without someone to respond of it ( that s call a murder usually ) Which in Austria with the past Behind (it s still around ) has a weird taste in the mouth .....

Best
n

As for a world Too Full yes probably
i dont find Too Full is the problem i find often
the big meting machine is more a problem
cause it should be space for everything if everything had a proper name i guess

i don t find the Norah Jones album bad at all
i just would react on the marketing and the fact that younger audience dont get much chance to decide for themeselves if they d rather have Norah or a more Original version of the same
but Outkast or Missy Elliott are great still
just the last Britney is a little weak in the middle

well, without anything more specific than the "Vienna Tokyo Berlin crew" to go on, I have no way of answering that. either you haven't heard the right records/concerts (of course, everyone makes crappy records and has subpar concerts), or you just don't like most or all of these musicians, one of the two. maybe you'll be interested to hear that Mr. Rowe considers the Tokyo crew a great inspiration for his recent work, and the most important development in improvised music in decades, or maybe not.

anyway, different tastes for different folks: I'd personally be OK if I never heard another David Grubbs record (although he's an extremely nice person and I consider him at least a casual friend), but I don't go around talking about the state of singer/songwriters based on that.

Dear Jon

i probaly have heard about 10 ( less ?) of your releases and YES it s clear to me you re doing something else

i thought we were talking about the more "usual" thing you find under Improv and Free Jazz .... you know like regular FMP and Leo and followers .... like every country more or less as a scene sometime stil from the 70´s but a lot much younger playing that Free Jazz like it was actually never written but just happened back then ... i just wanted to say you ll find the same releases in this free impro corner than you ll find them on Concord records or Criss Cross and many others ..that is just on the same level as people collecting stamps or toys or whatever ...one does not want to be surprised

i always have to think what s different or free in a free jazz Festival where everything should sound free anyway ?

And that also reminds for example some hypes like with Rock Critics in France when Tortoise came up ... suddenly that was it
but to me it sometime sounded like a Fusion band twice speeded down ( and god knows how many times these critics mad greasy jokes on Fusion ...)

again the Frame might be of importance but you can t stick only to that

best
n

I'm totally with you on all of that, Noel, particularly Tortoise, who I thought were laughably bad the time I saw them at Victoriaville, easily the most amateurish show I ever saw there.

"i thought we were talking about the more "usual" thing you find under Improv and Free Jazz"

well, originally it was an oddly conceived thread about the AMPLIFY box, but it quickly turned into Alexandre, who didn't like the box but evidently doesn't like any improvised music, and you, who I now learn is talking about FMP and Leo. one can understand my confusion. :)

P.S. the Live at Les Instants Chavires disc, with you, Evan, Lawrence Casserley and Joel Ryan, is on Leo.

http://www.shef.ac.uk/misc/rec/ps/efi/labels/leo/lr255.html

nice to hear no one ever bothered to inform you about it... :)

Jon,

well, without anything more specific than the "Vienna Tokyo Berlin crew" to go on, I have no way of answering that.

Well there s a life before and after records noop ?

either you haven't heard the right records/concerts We(of course, everyone makes crappy records and has subpar concerts), or you just don't like most or all of these musicians, one of the two.

I haven t heard the Disco ones that s for sure ....

maybe you'll be interested to hear that Mr. Rowe considers the Tokyo crew a great inspiration for his recent work, and the most important development in improvised music in decades, or maybe not.

I m sure Keith does but with all my respect and affection to him i still don t need
to ask anyone before i go out in the street to decide what rocks and what maybe makes me feel differently

anyway, different tastes for different folks: I'd personally be OK if I never heard another David Grubbs record

I wasn t saying anywhere that people should massively ask for refund after buying some of the quiet ones , did I ?

i guess that more or less ends up around here ...half way through ?

best regards
n

I'm totally with you on all of that, Noel, particularly Tortoise, who I thought were laughably bad the time I saw them at Victoriaville, easily the most amateurish show I ever saw there.

But ( cause indeed if you started on the Amplify box it s a real mess now sorry ) i entered the chat through Trapist -Ballroom
(you ll see that closes the link now ) cause i felt really like with Tortoise but even more of a second hand one ... ( this one has few heroic passage of post rock fusion of the best juice when not in the more restrected playing era --did i say as a start )

music, and you, who I now learn is talking about FMP and Leo. one can understand my confusion. :)

WE ALL DO i m sure !

P.S. the Live at Les Instants Chavires disc, with you, Evan, Lawrence Casserley and Joel Ryan, is on Leo.

http://www.shef.ac.uk/misc/rec/ps/efi/labels/leo/lr255.html

nice to hear no one ever bothered to inform you about it... :)

No that is wrong i got copies later i just wanted to say when i went to the club all i knew was we d play with Evan ( but not even with who else as far as i remember ) and i understood it was a record when i got a copy ( i havent listened to it since .... )

best
n

jon, how do you mean i dont like improvised music?
its not even questions of like or not, its just its there and i intend to check it out, and i participate

man i must be crazy S&M then,
i am very often playing concerts (6 in april, not bad for a amateur guy!)
attending venues for concert, 3 options tomorow nite in paris, sun at Instants (not improv though), surprise concert somewhere with warburton, lehn... and also some lebanon friends playing with some japanese trombone player i dont know.

I also nuy buy records, not only improv... but.

yeah, i relistened to the leo with you noël, casserley, parker and ryan. i think the pieces in duo and trio with noël and the electronics are interresting. i relistened to this record to actually see how it stands after a few years and after myself being under the all tokyo and erstwhile and kinda "hidden people" thing and being a bit bored...

so yeah, i started this thread with saying i found a bit of lack of "guts", "ideas" "involvment" in how much the musicians in some erstwhile related
projects and tokyo play? then noel came in and kinda push that way or am i really out of this?

you didn't come up with any examples of improvised music that you actually liked after repeated queries, so I extrapolated from your other comments, sorry if I misread you, but it's pretty easy to do so when you spout generality after generality.

jon, i think i am making a point in not wanting to quote any one in particular, but more "trends", "styles" because for me it is more the question of a "general spirit" which is in question here?

i can make a list of 25 concerts i saw in france in the last 2 years i found very boring. even i feel so many "young" musicians went inspired by the tokyo thing and it resulted in many of them playing really boring gig where nothing happens. if I tell you the name of this musicians, you wouldnt even know them. what seems bizarre is that now people seems to not be able to really improvised? they just try to fit in the style...

ok, that helps a bit. I will agree that I found it shocking how many young French musicians at the Musique Action festival in 2002 were trying to copy Keith and Sachiko, and mostly pretty awful at it. I think it's a very France-specific thing, though, it's not something I've particularly noticed in NYC or London or Tokyo or Berlin or Vienna. and I have yet to hear anyone using sinewaves anywhere near as beautifully as Sachiko does. the copiers really shouldn't affect your impressions of the originals, although I suppose sometimes necessarily they do. the fact that it's so hard to successfully copy what musicians like Sachiko and Keith do point out just how difficult it is to pull off those styles succesfully.

and I find it hard to believe that we're at the point where musicians who don't play in those styles get ostracized. if there is a club like that (and outside of some small ones in Tokyo who have noise restrictions because of neighbors, I'm not aware of any), there are 5,10,20 others that lean in the other direction. if there were festivals that were booked entirely along these lines, I wouldn't have to worry about going bankrupt putting on these AMPLIFY fests.

for example then

i was totally disapointed by krebs/neuman/tétreault at the densités festival this year. i really like martin's way of playing, i had the chance to follow the martin and otomo tour last year (i was their driver for a few days) and their concerts were every nite very interresting, engaged, funny, creative, played with the desire to make something good.

then i saw this stuff in densités and i thought "what happened with martin?" i dont know, for me the two "girls" had nothing to offer to martin compared to what otomo offers?
they dont seem to me to be really "into the music", making something good for the audience?

also to go on on the densités, sorry i have nothing especially about this festival, but the duo of tilbury and blondy was a total drag to me? last for very long, the person next to me ended up snoring, me i was just so bored i even felt ill at ease when they coudnlt finish for 15 minutes?

what i dont understand is going to improv gigs that after 15 minutes you can feel the audience is bored, and musicians seem to not realise and ont try to change anything.

i am musician myself, as i said i play quite a lot of improv concerts. honestly, when i am on stage, i really feel i can know if audience is bored, their sounds, their moves, the general "feeling in the air". if i feel this i am thinking "come on man do omthing! come on! go for it!".

i dont know if that helps

i am so happy we can discuss this calmly
you know jon, we are quite a few here in paris to talk about this suvjects for about two years or three or so...

I mean ok that is going to be very vague to Jon
but i think i know what Alexandre means
cause i ve worked both sides too in France
with people ( like Louis Sclavis for example ) that are all over the place in France at least and you don t always know why exactely ( i m not putting Louis down but trying to give you an idea of systems ... and gosh they really do exists ) and they are like this big waves ...suddenly you see a lot some scenes ( then not of course ) and when you talk about it with other people it does not seem to represent much of a taste but rather a policy and then like everywhere there s the big friendship internationale and so on ....
and in this regard France is a particular country with little kingdoms and Queens and aristocracy .... and that is sometime little space left for younger people to try out

But see i got attacked for years for being like the home guitar player at Instants chavirés and i havent played there in years ... ( well i did not ask or really wanted to either ) but things are turning and people sometime can feel
why this again and not something else ?

In cities where s no money for this at all
there s no problem ... you don t fight to get your turn at the Knitting Factory for 12 USD for example ...do they ?

best
n

Just a concrete example

when was the last time Otomo or Keith played
a fairly serious Festival ( apart from Vandoeuvre and co ) in Paris ???????

a serious while ago if it ever Happened
but with the Barons of French Jazz i played all of them every year ....

that is a french reality for example

best
n

Let s also say to somehow help Alexandre that because ( it s my idea can be really wrong ) in France this era of music has been very very underground ( in all sense of the term ) i found people that took it to a little more existence have sometime felt like it s a strugle and fight ...live or die ...and that brings some sectarians or church thinking too often

but it s maybe time for a change

another issue wider now is that they are always musicians who d like to be a bit of a Guru ..... too ...and Gurus are not the most open people to discuss with i guess

best
n

noël:

i'm happy you're with me on the "misunderstanding" thing... plus i never felt "rien" was dedicated to a scene or anything... well anyway: unlike jon i think it is a very good one.

"who I now learn is talking about FMP and Leo. one can understand my confusion. :)
WE ALL DO i m sure"

-> not really. i didn't know you were talking about leo et al... that's a different story, then. i have respect for emanem and stuff like that, but if you talk about dead music, you should start there: 9 out of 10 releases out of that corner feel like stillborn children to me. even if you think that newish reductionist thing sucks you have to acknowledge, that at least they are TRYING to do something new. i have seen a couple of barry guy and evan parker gigs over the last couple of years and i can tell you that i found them extremely boring... the way of interplay always felt the same to me, be it the question-answer game or the imitation-game. guy played sound X and i could tell for sure that lytton would then play sound Y etc. sorry, but i really don't think how anything can be more dead than something 100% predictable... besides i'm not even arguing for the reductionist-crew, yes there is a lot of boring stuff from that corner, it's just the general animosity that puzzles me...

for example alexandre: it's how jon said earlier: if you're not interested in that kind of sound, just leave it alone and do something else... where's the problem?

Noel, Keith boycotted playing shows in France for all of 2003. he played the Wire showcase at Les Instants Chavires in October 2002, just before the AMPLIFY in Tokyo. Otomo and Sachiko did quite a few shows at Les Instants Chavires not so long ago.

Alexandre, thank you, now I can answer you more intelligently. I saw the Otomo/Martin duo in NYC last year, and I agree that they were awesome, maybe the best show I've seen in the last year or so.

your problem sounds like it's more with stupid combinations of musicians by festival promoters and poor festival planning than anything else. I have issues with some of Annette's work too, but her solo on Fringes kicks ass, and Andrea's done more than a few very good records. as you well know, the French festival scene is extremely incestuous (this is what Keith was boycotting against, not that he actually told too many people about it). all of the organizers book each other and their friends, thus they all get state support, and it all ends up as a little Mafia (Keith's word).

for anyone reading this not familiar with the French system, one of these guys can tell you the specifics, and I know it's always changing, but I believe you get paid by the government depending on how many nights you work as a musician. so if all of these organizers book each other and their friends, they essentially all end up fully employed by the state as musicians, whether they're good or bad, or anyone comes to see them, whatever. (I apologize in advance if this is wrong, that's my understanding of how it was at least until recently, I'd like to hear an update).

anyway, Krebs and Neumann can both be very good in the right context, but clearly that wasn't it (to your ears). I'm guessing that was the first time those three ever worked together, which always makes things a little tricky, particularly if people don't know much about the other (my guess would be that would be the case here, but obviously I don't know for sure). a Tilbury/Blondy combination sounds even sillier than that awful Tilbury/Tippett/Riley fiasco on Emanem.

going to too many festivals like this is why Keith and I are curating our own festival in Germany in May. we'll see how successful we are soon enough.

Tomas

but if you talk about dead music, you should start there: 9 out of 10 releases out of that corner feel like stillborn children to me.

Ooops sorry then YES i do mean THAT
to me anyway a lot of Jazz and then improvised music just became rathe "instrumental" music with no particular orientations ...and yes the free jazz usual thing is pretty heavy to me too ...but i mean that does belong also to any style

as for the word DEAD i meant DEATH not dead music .....

even if you think that newish reductionist thing sucks you have to acknowledge, that at least they are TRYING to do something new.

shortly # 1 / i dont think it sucks
# 2 / i m not sure it s new ( but more generally i dont think NEW is the keyword here we re looking for do we ? )

i have seen a couple of barry guy and evan parker gigs over the last couple of years and i can tell you that i found them extremely boring...

see again i have never been opposing things
i m just discussing a scene i personally dont quite get in its goals .... i d never ever start with THIS against that or BETTER than or whatever .... ( unless you want to hear me saying TATU is much better than ...) ( TATU is great no ? very Russian )

the way of interplay always felt the same to me, be it the question-answer game or the imitation-game. guy played sound X and i could tell for sure that lytton would then play sound Y etc. sorry, but i really don't think how anything can be more dead than something 100% predictable...

WELL THAT S MY QUESTION too but the reductionist ( should we say so ?) are not even playing the game in many cases ( see it s deffinetely too general i know )

it's just the general animosity that puzzles me...

i mean sorry if you feel like that ... that s not my point ... but sometimes these reduc shows or albums pisses me off for a short while yes

for example alexandre: it's how jon said earlier: if you're not interested in that kind of sound, just leave it alone and do something else... where's the problem?

It s true i guess but why not either discuss things too ?

best
n

yeah

i guess i have been pretty unlucky with someone like andrea neumann
i also was at the no spaghetti something gig in Instants Chavirés, it was really long long long and boring. that nite, the girlfriend of my friend which often goes to teh concerts of improv in paris was there. she's not a fan, she wouldnt listen to improv by herself, but sometimes she comes to have a look. that nite i was so pissed off with the music i went to ask her "do you think this is okay, is this entertaining, do you feel something in this type of "art"? and her answer was just something like "no", nearly as simple as this.

also I was at the rodri davies/neuman/agnel few weeks before that spagetti and it was the same crap to me. endless and really boring.

also 2 weeks ago I was at the taku/radu concert at Instants. well, i dont know. was so strange, again few people were obviously sleeping, i myself kinda pass out head on my table for the last 15 minutes of the concert. i dont know what to think of this? nice music to sleep!

also after a while, you get pissed off being disapointed by what you think normally triggers you! and have to pay for it and realise musicians dont even bother giving you something for yr money!

arrrrrgggggghhhhhhh!!!!

"and I find it hard to believe that we're at the point where musicians who don't play in those styles get ostracized. if there is a club like that (and outside of some small ones in Tokyo who have noise restrictions because of neighbors, I'm not aware of any), there are 5,10,20 others that lean in the other direction. if there were festivals that were booked entirely along these lines, I wouldn't have to worry about going bankrupt putting on these AMPLIFY fests"

100% correct. let me tell you that here in switzerland the scene is probably as incestous and old-school as in france: in zurich there are basically 2 festivals, one more "jazz" oriented, one more "free" oriented. i.e. the taktlos is built around the scene around the label intakt (another dreadful label, i think)...it's like monopolists: their people get to play (and the festival is subsidized by the state !!) other don't or only as a fig leaf... when i critizised patrik landolt of intakt for that (he's one of the most arrogant and displeasing persons i have ever met in this scene) you know what he told me? "well intakt artists get to play, because we have the best improvising musicians of the world on our label..." i mean, what the hell?! this years taktlos programm looks a bit better, so let's see. but still: if we're talking about brandlmayr, sachiko and co. and use the word "trend" let's not forget that a concert of barry guy's boring whatever orchestra is still gonna get a bigger audience than tokyoviennaberlin...

Dear Tomas

here is the word i forgot to use Yes INCEST
there s quiet a serious amount of that around
i know what jon s talking about with Amplify festival and investing money but Jon you also know that in Europe public money is seriously helping people aware of it ... you know for example that OFF site s not paying ( how could they ????? ) for more than maybe fees
and small ones when it s about 10 artists on stage .... and i m not saying this is wrong or bad that s up to everyone to decide ( i stopped totally but that s just how i feel )

Alexandre, what exactly did you expect when you went to that Taku/Radu show? those guys couldn't be any more clear about what they've been up to lately, you really have no right to be surprised or disappointed in that show, sorry.

I don't understand why you keep spending your money on this stuff, to be honest, it seems like a source of a lot of frustration for you.

noël -

thanks for your last post. it seems that we agree on quite some points after all. maybe it's just a communication problem. and of course i can understand that a lot of that reduc stuff is pissing you off... it does that with me, too, more than not!

TATU is great no ? very Russian - yeah and they're not even real lesbians ;)

alexandre -

when you went to that radu/taku show: did you actually really try to listen to what was happening (remember that absolute silence does not exist...) or did you have already the "this is gonna be a boring reduc show again" attitude beforhand...?

seems like jon and i are pointing in the same direction. actually what jon said is what i wanted to get to: if you're going with a "this is gonna suck" attitude to the show, you're better not going at all.

Yes i know about Zurich ..i actually lived there years ago and worked a lot but more in the "pop" fields ... i d met Bossard often but he would n talk to me for some kind of reasons (and until i lend guitars to Chadbourne for recordings ...)
but on the other side Veit at Rec Rec always all sorts of records and all sorts of music and a huge smile then

noël -

"i stopped totally but that s just how i feel"

do you mean you quit playing concerts at all??

noël-

i didn't know you lived in zurich! yes veit is great and yolanda at karbon, too... there are a lot of great people here and a lot of suckers, probably just as anywhere else... ;)

Noop NO stopped playing at all

shortly when i was like 18 i got into the French Jazz scene ( i wasn t really listening to them but they came and i always was happy to play with people rather than listen records ) and so on few yearts later i was part of this aristocracy of culture wel paid and so on to play all over ( PUBLIC MONEY ) and i got sick of that somehow ( also each if these scenes were only into their own thing and everything else was shit so that became schizophrenic for me to play a tour with Stock, Hausen & Walkman then go with Daniel Humair or so and no interraction in between )

so i just STOPPED to be part of this system where your fees are really high but UNREAL for me

i m doing good the day i stopped even i felt much better

n

jon,

in comparison, after two shows of martin and otomo i could also exactly know nearly what would come out! they play the same sounds nearly, same instruments, but still maybe with the same thing, they put so much "human" thing in there, som much "real playing" that i feel i could see them the all tour of two weeks and maybe not be bored?

about the taku/radu. i wasnt so disapointed in fact. i am just asking if it is normal people fall asleep? i was quite interested to go to see how they deal with it? and they do quite ok? i really tried to pay attention on how they react to eachother? how they place their sound? in the end there was just about 30 people there for their gig?

for example, nearly anytime otomo played at Instants, there is about 100 people or so!

last week, i played an improv concert in a punk squat, few kilo away in the south suburb of paris. there was about 30 people too? some punks (real one i can say) came to complain to us that our music is okay (noisy enough for them i guess) but lacked of rythm. this guy who was rolling a spliff and drinking his beer on my table while i was packing my equipment told me we should had some kinda "techno beat" to what we do and people would be happy!!!

hummmm

i think one day all this stuff would really interest one and i feel it seems quite normal!

Tomas

do you Know Michael Von Der Heide ?

he doesn t improvise officially but HE DOES in many ways

best
n

See tomas i think that s more or less the same everywhere what may change this is ( to me that s always clear when it s the case ) the possibiltiy to get social and political situation

when position and public money then it really affects the scenes i think

but the exciting side is never one and only
you may be bored by someone like Pierre Favre but i really had great times ( really suprisingly present and unexpectable ) with him ...no rules i d say

and in what i say is the quiet scene has a little tendecy to play only in between themselves i find that has happen since a little long now and that is something you can hear ( i find )

the other extreme would be the Derek Bailey
idea if FIRST TIME ( i have to say i kinda fall for that )

alexandre -

i get your point, BUT: if the most impotant thing for you is a happy (and large) audience, why don't you play popmusic, then? that has mass appeal and will make a lot of people happy... i just think there is a contradiction here. for me an essential part of an artists integrity consists in doing what he/she believes is "right" not what other people do. as a consequence of that, one should not pay too much attention to how the audience reacts... don't get me wrong: it's now about being disrespectful to the audience or giving a shit about how they feel, it's just about not being opportunistic, but be true to yourself. so if radu and taku believe in what tey're doing: why should they care if the audience falls asleep?

noël -

"do you Know Michael Von Der Heide ?
he doesn t improvise officially but HE DOES in many ways"

i do know some of his songs (may i say "chansons"?) but i don't know him personally.

"the other extreme would be the Derek Bailey
idea if FIRST TIME ( i have to say i kinda fall for that)" - me too! besides i am a big bailey fan.

"and in what i say is the quiet scene has a little tendecy to play only in between themselves"

yes this is true. i heard that in berlin stuff is more mixed than say in vienna... but maybe i'm wrong?

tomas

i am not saying i want big happy audience

but at some point, i found a bit bizarre that some people believe there are really making something so great, so good, and noones dare seeing it. there must be a problem! at least this 30 people coming to this punk squat last week, they were kinda fulfilled when they left the place i guess

i am not sure so many where fulfilled leaving the gig of taku/radu

also i have to say i have this idea that audience should get something! it is a bit too easy to say " well if you dont like it its because you dont understand it", come on!

if there was something so choking in there at least i will undesrtand (like the first people telling Dali he was crazy when he puts this character with some excrements on his painting!)
but here there isnt eally anything shocking and people are not stupid!

i do know some of his songs (may i say "chansons"?)

see that is one point ..i guess a chatroom is also here so that the language comes from the Language and the ideas through the other ideas and so on like when IMPROVISING

best
n

but taku/radu aren't stupid either... in fact they might know that what they're doing doesn't have much appeal to others, so basically what they're doing is RISKY (yes, here we are again) - even if the risk only consists in being considered to be boring... so even if the music is a failure (i can't tell, i never heard that duo live), i think that proves that they're not hiding. they choose to be "naked" in front of a demanding audience. as for the shock value: personally i'm not interested in that at all, but that's a matter of taste, i guess.

but at some point, i found a bit bizarre that some people believe there are really making something so great, so good, and noones dare seeing it.

SEE THAT IS A POINT TOO i don t mean we should throw vegetables to oruselves but in Vienna or in France they are many cases where you should better shut up .... anyway the rule is often that if you start you wont get any answer

lso i have to say i have this idea that audience should get something! it is a bit too easy to say " well if you dont like it its because you dont understand it", come on!

Especially when it s a bit too much of a tiny familly with a good mix of friends, girlfriends and people in the business i d say
yes

everything needs a little balance

and Jon i just wanted to say that Austria is probably one of the countries to back artists in Avnant Gardes to that degree

what started to make me slightly upset here was to see how many records are already PREPAID through various funds and to hear from people like Kurzmann and crew permament complaints on their situation ....
i don t hink UK flies many Musicians around the world ( not talking about Courtney Pine or Andy Sheppard here ) so they could just be happy about it no ?

best
n

but at some point, i found a bit bizarre that some people believe there are really making something so great, so good, and noones dare seeing it.

SEE THAT IS A POINT TOO i don t mean we should throw vegetables to oruselves but in Vienna or in France they are many cases where you should better shut up .... anyway the rule is often that if you start you wont get any answer

lso i have to say i have this idea that audience should get something! it is a bit too easy to say " well if you dont like it its because you dont understand it", come on!

Especially when it s a bit too much of a tiny familly with a good mix of friends, girlfriends and people in the business i d say
yes

everything needs a little balance

and Jon i just wanted to say that Austria is probably one of the countries to back artists in Avnant Gardes to that degree

what started to make me slightly upset here was to see how many records are already PREPAID through various funds and to hear from people like Kurzmann and crew permament complaints on their situation ....
i don t hink UK flies many Musicians around the world ( not talking about Courtney Pine or Andy Sheppard here ) so they could just be happy about it no ?

They re doing very good i think

best
n

Taku and Radu don't especially care what people think of them. I mean, a little, sure, that's human nature, but basically they're making the music they feel they need to make. if people connect with it, then all the better.

I think it's funny how many intense feelings seem to be stirred up by two guys playing quiet music with a lot of empty space in it. maybe Radu was right when he said "silence does seem to have a horrible effect on people".

Dear Jon

the Radu quote is a little cheap i find
but very interesting i find cause that s where i feel the things are .... to get people react more than anything else sometimes

that works yes fair enough

best
n

Noel, believe me, I'm aware of that kind of thing, but is it really such a bad thing to say you're against Haider while accepting money from the state? I personally have no problem with that, although arguments along roughly similar political lines between me and the musicians almost led to one of my projects falling through a couple of years ago.

i dont care if it is about it being full of silence

even i would say that there wasnt such even silence, at least much less than i expected even... they kinda play a lot for this kinda supposed full of silence stuff.

and still, when the day will come that they still do their stuff and no one comes you can still think that "silence does seem to have a horrible effect on people". yeah, why not! but what's the point really!

they should just play for themselves paybe, private concerts for the "only" fans!

somewhere i am proud to say i want to manage to touch people with improvising music. i dont want to make them feel like they are stupid because they dont get it!

also, to come back to what you were talking about jon, about the system in france. there is a mafia probably, and yes there are some people interrested in playing because yeah, the system gives them social security and social rights if they play a certain amounts of "declared" concerts per year!

you are right in the sense that this system leads to some kinda "friends to friends" concert programming! and really i am really against this, and so is the most "capable" improvisers in the paris/french scene!

i somehow feel that the musicians who takes the less risks are the one who enjoy most this kinda "friend to friend" stuff, in france or anywhere else!

ok, Alexandre, you didn't enjoy the show, we get that. do you really feel confident enough to speak for everyone else in that room? and even if everyone there hated it, who cares? if it's bothering you that much, then just get up, leave and don't go see those musicians again. I think maybe you really are masochistic, as you joked about earlier.

"i want to manage to touch people with improvising music. i dont want to make them feel like they are stupid because they dont get it!"

see, this is where (maybe) we get back to the original topic, the AMPLIFY box. somehow other people really loving this box bothers you. as you know, I asked everyone who bought them directly from me to write to me after they'd had a chance to absorb it and let me know what they thought. most people really loved it, there were some small problems with things here and there from others, but you were the only one who really voiced displeasure.

here's the point: no one's saying, thinking or implying that you, or anyone else, is stupid because they don't connect with a certain area of music. this music's not for everyone, that's cool, no kind of music is. maybe you'd be more into something like Wolf Eyes or Hair Police or something like that, I don't know. you need to explore for yourself, and if you can't find it, and it's important enough to you, then you'll create it yourself. or you'll give up on the artform entirely and be interested in something else, like painting or duck fishing or skydiving. there's a lot of things to do in Paris; I'd advise stop going to concerts that you hate. I have as much as possible (the shows I saw here this past week were the first ones I saw in 2004), and I'm happy. I wish there were more shows that I was into it, but I know there aren't, and that's the way it is.

its been about five persons on bag which told me i should just stop going to gigs and i should find other music like! someone even told this to noel as well!

in the end i am really going to get sick of it, yeah! i wouldnt even get exciting to buy records from erstwhile then... or going to gigs in paris...

it seems a very sad situation, i am really not understanding at all what is going on then!

well, somehow there was at least 15 people out of the 30 who were at IC for the Radu/taku that i really know, and none of them seems so satisfied!

maybe we are so fucking weird here in paris, french people, i dont know!

i am kinda left alone with my ideas, not very nice feeling, not very cool.

Noel, believe me, I'm aware of that kind of thing, but is it really such a bad thing to say you're against Haider while accepting money from the state?

Why not say Both then ? some more straight ahead people do that in austria .. or say i don t know Music should not melt with Politics

What i have a little problem is the double discourse like I am Totally against this but i also want that .... that does not fit at all the other side in that music to me / the artistic position against the world we leave in and his ugly issues .... it s the same with our Magazine here like I m above reviews on one side and then CAN I HAVE A COPY of IT ?

I personally have no problem with that, although arguments along roughly similar political lines between me and the musicians almost led to one of my projects falling through a couple of years ago.

What do you mean ?

best
n

I think it s no problem to accept public money but not for Private interrests that is my position
when i produced for rectangle and never ever thought taxes should help us releasing artists that interrest few people or that are controversial .... even if it sounds naive i feel much better being in a situation nowadays where i survive from what i sell and maybe releasing records with winter & winter is a challenge but it s one i really find lively and vivid .... that would also led us to another issue
PRODUCERS .... i think WE NEED PRODUCERS otherwise there s no counter thinking either ...when Martin davidson releases an Emanem album i know he thought of it before more than once

maybe we are so fucking weird here in paris, french people, i dont know!

could be yes as says jacques Oger
WE OLD EUROPEANS

but that s OK again there s space for a wide world as far as you dont mix where you come from ....

somehow if you tell anyone who is a bit wanting to discuss, to share ideas, that they should simply leave, then you will be left only with people who agress your stuff, what's the point?

then everyone is doing their little shit in their corner, for limited amount of people who agrees! is that really ok? then i am getting close to critics i can make about "mass" society. tv produces a lot of shit that everyone is into.

i might be a bit stuborn to compare with other art activities, but still the surrealists manage to get quite a major interest for example, at least covering, i have videos of dali interventions on tv and its fucking great! out of something not so evident!

i am scared improvised music would never be able to get such state! maybe thats what you want, because if it gets exposed the way it is now, many people would think its just crap no!

And Jon

i think still with no Funds systematically behind and prodcers around some of these albums around Vienna they could achieve a far more intense work ....

cause these albums around also smells like no one open the doors or the window much
when the whole chain is already known from funds to studio artwork order mix etc

duck fishing, good idea ;)

alexandre -

to get this discussion to an end (which seems more and more pointless to me). what you're asking us for is just impossible: you say you don't like that erst-whatever music and then we try to show you some of the points why we think it's cool. then you go like: "no, you're wrong, it still doesn't work for me" and we say: "ok, nevermind, maybe this is just not for you, no problem, then." and then you're complaining about being left alone with your ideas. so what do you expect?! this is getting ridiculous. do you expect jon to say: "oh yes alexandre you're right, the music i get out on erst is boring, i'll quit releasing stuff". look, if you like it: fine, if you dislike it: fine (we all got your points by now). so what? man, i'm sorry to be so harsh, but please just stop whining!

merde j'arrive plus à suivre noel!

sorry for that french bit

i was saying

"shit i cant follow anymore!"

also i realise that we are so much working as a chat thing
but unfortunately the bag is a bit slow and sometimes when i post reply, other people post reply and it gets all very confused order!

i feel something as well, that in this world, the state it is in, with all this terrorist stuff, bullshit war, economical problems and all this, i am 29 years old, i dont know if i want to see people locked in their little art stuff and not thinking there is something to say, something to do...

still i think kurt cobain really had no message, but he had something to say which really touched many people!

i dont know why i always come back with kurt...

Alexandre, do what you want, but if you're buying Erstwhile releases to make sure that you're going to not like them, I don't really see the point, and as much as I could use any sales help I can get, I'd have no problem losing you as a customer. you gave it a shot, it wasn't for you, you moved on. maybe you need to stop going to Les Instants Chavires, maybe the venue's the problem.

really I have no idea, and I've got to go get some work done today and stop posting here for a while.

maybe i'm simply deaf when it comes to French improv/eai. i found noetinger or erikm on erstwhile to be one of that label's least inspiring offerings. somewhat garrulous, "too much music". Same way I feel about their other work, or that of Hubbub for that matter. Seems to me that after the weak green charhizma, even the Germans/ Austrians have given up on recording with the "Parisians". So, it seems, has Jon Abbey.
which brings me to what I perceive as this thread's original issue (correct me if I'm wrong):
label politics/policies. are there any American musicians on the Amplify box? are there any scheduled for the festival in Germany? (all I could find is a small mention of T. Barnes as part of a tiny sideshow). what's happening on the home scene? I'm sorry but I can't see Lescalleet or Kelley as being in the same league as Rowe, Sugimoto, G. Mueller, Stangl, Siewert or Brandlmayr. does that mean that the only important eai musician is a non-musician (i.e. mr
Abbey)?

still i think kurt cobain really had no message, but he had something to say which really touched many people!

Alexandre i guess the question you are asked is did he touch you or who does ?

best
n

ok, one more post, then I'm done for now.

Noel:

"I think still with no Funds systematically behind and producers around some of these albums around Vienna they could achieve a far more intense work ....

cause these albums around also smells like no one open the doors or the window much
when the whole chain is already known from funds to studio artwork order mix etc "

have you heard any of the Vienna projects I've released/produced (Schnee, Wrapped Islands, eh, Too Beautiful to Burn in particular)? I'm quite proud of most of them, I think they transcend what you're talking about here (which I agree with)...

well dear Jon

YES i ve heard Schnee and too Beautiful to Burn AND i DO AGREE too

i anyway need a producer behind a label
otherwise it s just a document or a visit card too often

see we re getting somewhere

have a nice day
i promiss it wont be like that all the time
i ll also soon been off for weeks

best
n

Noop the very last thing Jon

did you ever though as a producer to get radically different musicians to play a music that would have the same approach ( i d do that for example or something else that interacts )

best
n

maybe i'm simply deaf when it comes to French improv/eai.

i don t even know if there s that much of it
i mean beg me pardon

n

thanks everyone for your participation

i didnt think all this would go so busy
when i post my remark following al's comment about AMPIFY and IMJ.

me too, i will be so so busy with my 6 concerts in april that i cant come back to bagatellen.

no i am joking

but really didnt we have a good time?

and to finally answer to noel about cobain
he did touch me and i hope the way he touched me i can use it in my music life for the next years or so.

good nite
oyasuminasai

Alexandre

Good night is only in France or Europe

best
n

sorry

am I being too much europe centered of what!

sorry

am I being too much europe centered or what!

as an afterthought (to noel)

i do have a soft spot for the two cds you did with evan parker in '97. also for some recyclers things from '95. and there's a lovely duet of yours with francois courtois on translucide.

i guess i was thinking more of the french laptoppers i've listened to than french sounds in general.

hello

that was a pretty long thread to go through but i would like to comment on this strange combination of interest/excitment and boredom/disappointment Alexandre was writing about.

I also regularly attend concerts in Paris and the concerts that really blew me away these last two or three years are very scarce. Still, i keep going to most of the concerts at Les Instants Chavirés and thereafter often going back home without having lived an unforgettable moment of music.

So what keeps us attending those shows ? Maybe not only the resident drinkers with which to raise an elbow...
I believe i always hope 'something' happens in improvised music concerts. This something can be either only 2 little seconds of musical beauty, or you feeling -and sitting- THE right way to enjoy a very minimalistic show, or litterally take off and never land for the whole concert.

As a listener i always try to avoid making myself a definitive opinion about the performance on the only basis of the feelings the music brought me. f.e. i was at the taku/radu concert and i heard the same reactions as Alexandre. I was one of those who were looking forward to experience this with excitment but remained unscathed, not to say a little bored at the end. Though i do not regret my being there and trying to get touched by their very demanding music (was it me or they that failed i don't know). It sometimes happen that a mitigate memory about a concert evolves into a great one, as you see other gigs or get interested in the musisican's work more deeply or get touched by something very similar later... Remembering music is very paradoxal : sometimes two seconds of beauty are more significant in the long term than a whole beautiful show.

Maybe what is annoying with quiet improv (however you call it) is that most musicians involved in this current don't seem to be able to get out of this shrinking niche (it WAS supposed to be ever-shrinking from the start, wasn't it ?) and thus equally self-quote themselves or timidly try bending their stated discipline, resulting in a weaker music.

I personally love keith rowe's music as a whole, for instance, but i have the feeling that he doesn't keep any opening for that kind of craziness that allows your opinion to be shocked and then evolve like i said sooner. I feel this music tends to produce some kind of 'standard' for the judgement of improvised music. How flawless it is done, how slow it has moved, how quiet it has kept... Some players bring interesting approaches within that trend, but to me this music has failed to broaden and to ramify as much as the initial abilities and ideas of its actors did promise.

I still hope those who are so good at 'not playing' try to 'play' (with nerves, with chance, with correctness...) a little more often and that would not mean ruining all their delicate work at all.

cheers
quentin

Chris, welcome:

"are there any American musicians on the Amplify box? are there any scheduled for the festival in Germany? (all I could find is a small mention of T. Barnes as part of a tiny sideshow). what's happening on the home scene? I'm sorry but I can't see Lescalleet or Kelley as being in the same league as Rowe, Sugimoto, G. Mueller, Stangl, Siewert or Brandlmayr. does that mean that the only important eai musician is a non-musician (i.e. mr
Abbey)?"

that's a nice compliment, but I'm a producer, not a musician. as for where the AMPLIFY participants hail from, don't forget that a lot of it has to do with where the festival is, both because of transportation costs and because I try to tailor each festival to the locale. the 2003 fest in NYC had quite a few Americans participating, Kelley, Rainey, Barnes, I-Sound, and Lescalleet, Sean Meehan, Barry Weisblat, Toshio Kajiwara, a few others, in the outside shows.

the 2004 festival is all continental Europeans with a very few exceptions (Otomo, Sachiko, Toshi, Oren Ambarchi, and John Butcher I think are the only ones out of about 30).

lastly, don't forget about the semi-retired, always enigmatic Kevin Drumm, who can hold his own with anyone when he wants to. all of that doesn't mean there's not some truth to what you say, but I also wouldn't lump together the six musicians you list so readily. taste is always a factor, I've heard from a fair amount of people that Forlorn Green is their favorite Erst of all.

one last note on that topic: the nmperign/Ninh show at Musique Action in 2002 (w/ Yukiko Nakamura dancing) was easily my favorite thing over the week or so I was at the festival, better than all the highly touted all-Euro combos. the only set which was close was the poire_z/Phil Minton (which is about to come out on For 4 Ears, curious to hear that again). that's why I asked them to open the 2003 AMPLIFY fest, because I found their set in Vand'ouevre so powerful.

Noel:

"did you ever though as a producer to get radically different musicians to play a music that would have the same approach ( i d do that for example or something else that interacts )"

I don't know what you mean here, maybe you can explain more, thanks.

Bowing out of this thread (and the internet in general) for a couple of days should have been safe. Damned if I have the time to read through 100 new posts, but I was able to read the last 20 or so.

To generally address some of the comments above, I sit uncomfortably aside those who really need to be moved by live music but have found little of excitement in my last handful of outings. That ratio extends to maybe the last year or two. There's always the default though, you know, music that has given you kicks for an extended period of time, you return to it after a stretch and the formula still works.... That said, the Seattle music scene has its ups and downs. The still young Polestar Music Gallery seems to be experiencing a dry spell, but the hosts tend to surprise you with great short notice gigs.

The friend/who-you-know camps attiruted to the Paris scene extend all over the place. It's rare out here that a gig pops up where the musicians haven't played together on a number of occasions before, be it on stage or on record, and I agree with whoever above said that they wish more risks would be taken in terms of collaboration in this music that so up-frontly purports itself to be "risky". I love Mike Bisio, good friend, better musician, but I want to hear him with new blood, be it the young local cats or improvisers who have paralleled but never crossed his course over the years.

Back to my original premise waaaaay up top, and I know Jon's given his piece already: Is this boxset so praised for the music or is it more simply a function of what it just is/stands for? I was ultra excited about it for the latter reason I think the first couple of months. I appreciated it for its inherent boldness, from the mere production of the thing all the way to the boldness of the many sounds themselves. But after a time there are only a few sets that I really return to, that have "staying power" I guess. And I listen to those for the same reasons I pull Temporary Contemporary, Italia, P/L/G's Atlanta, and That's The Way of The World off the shelves: it's simply good music. Listening to it now as a "document", in linear fashion, etc. taints the discs that I really enjoy.

actually, I don't think I addressed your initial post at all, since everything was sidetracked. I'll pass on addressing the specifics of the box for now, because I think it speaks very nicely for itself, but I will say that I think most box sets along (very) roughly similar lines get generally very good reviews. the last three released that come to mind are the Jimmy Lyons box, the 10 CD Cecil trio one, and the ONCE box. I don't recall any less than glowing reviews of the first two, maybe one or two of the latter.

The Mole and Ayler boxes are not tantamount in any critical capacity, period.

Jon

thanks-that was very informative.

I reread some of the thread. here are three quotes from you:

"Taku and Radu don't especially care what people
think of them."
"if there were festivals that were booked entirely along these lines, I wouldn't have to worry about going bankrupt putting on these AMPLIFY fests."
"it doesn't matter what I would do, I'm not a musician."

aren't you a bit modest here? - e.g. you seem to be adding more of a "pop" element to the label (I'm thinking of Brian Wilson fan Fennesz, Richard Thompson admirer Siewert whose latest release is described by mosz as "somehow poppy", and of Brandlmayr who you said was "still very young" at age 33, the same age, by the way, Czukay did his imho last great record Tago Mago. don't tell Martin). all I'm saying is you're making decisions that seem to have quite an impact on the music. I might just be lucky as long as erstwhile keeps meeting my taste(s). and it's your label after all. but isn't it still music business politics?

"but I also wouldn't lump together the six musicians you list so readily."

I figured this was an opportune way of satisfying the requirement of being specific and of letting you know who my favorite erstwhile artists are and whose music I'd like to hear more of, at the same time.

Michael:

"The Mole and Ayler boxes are not tantamount in any critical capacity, period."

what does that mean in layman's English, please? (something I'm tempted to ask about half the time I read your posts, but this time I really would like to know).

Chris, while all three of those musicians seem to be more and more interested in exploring pop-related veins, they do some of their most abstract work for my label. comparing Ballroom to Too Beautiful To Burn or Venice to Live at the LU (out next week) reveals this pretty quickly. I thought Brandlmayr was a few years younger than 33 for some reason (probably his baby face), but I'll take your word for it.

Dear Chris

as an afterthought (to noel)
i guess i was thinking more of the french laptoppers i've listened to than french sounds in general.

I understand it like that i just wanted to say there s not to my knowledge the equivalent of like in Tokyo in these era ...it s much more vague i guess in France though they are people looking for things probably

in my case i dind t play this music much in France ...it happened sometimes but i mainly went abroad on my own

best
n

And to Follow with Chris s answer
there is in paris another scene or crew
people like the organisation BÜRO with Erik Minkkinen or Isabelle now at Mego
also in Paris are Andrew Sharpley and Andy Bolus

all these people are not from a strict improv side but they do involve some ... BÜRO organised the first shows around that electronic music in Paris when Isabelle was running the most advance record shop WAVE

Noel:

Dear Jon

"did you ever though as a producer to get radically different musicians to play a music that would have the same approach ( i d do that for example or something else that interacts )"

I don't know what you mean here, maybe you can explain more, thanks.

I MEAN we all know that the "market" is too full of semi-productions i mean by that Self produced album with no other idea than showing something and then many albums where the whole chain as i said for Vienna is locked ... very little input ( and very little wished as well ) from Outside

I don t think it s wrong to as a producer try to get artists you like to go in a more particular direction sometimes ( as a musician too but very little musicians these days accept to hear such comments in studio ) at LEAST to me a producer is here to get the best out of the music with and from the musicians

OK in the case of Improv it can be slightly different BUT still they are many things to do else than just release a Live show or a self produced tape that can t be discussed anymore

I remember at the Ulrischsberg festival looking at the news sections ( was it NO MANS LAND s stand ?) and finding almost a WHOLE TOUR released on numerous small labels .... that just reminds me people buying PRINCE bootlegs with the 2 CDs from the show plus the Soundchek CD plus two more After show ones etc ....

Even Improvised Music can care for production i guess that s what you do by talking and selecting things but that is still pretty rare compare to the amount of records coming out

so my question is DONT YOU SOMETIME FEEL LIKE STARTING EVEN THE PROJECTS since the beginning .... deciding of groups
or discussing some possible directions or set ups ....?

and you know that cause you probably too get asked a lot and receive many CDRs ... it s never really satysfying

Jon

don t you think at this point it would quite interesting that some musicians from the quiet crew we re talking about joins the Chat ?

As i understood it Tomas does regularly play in these fields but maybe it gets a little out of balance when we talk instead of them for them against them and you re basically sometime like a PORTE PAROLE for ( i dont mean negative at all and i don t think you at all talk in their name but from what you do and and what you know )

I had once a chat pretty tensed with Martin Siewert on these issues it ended up quite
shortly and harshly when ( a labsus forward that ended up on Siewert s adress ) i answered a French Critic asking me about the political issue in these scenes that : To me most of them are State Artists in Vienna (and again i dont mean this NEGATIVE at all but a fact ... as part of the redaction for SKUG magazine here we do receive all the details from many public Funds so we re talking facts here nit rumours )

But it would not be wrong that more people around joins us i guess

I just told Vienna Critic Andreas Felber ( with whom i actually discussed these issues few times as well as many others ) about Bagatellen and i m sure he will at least come to read

We ll see
best
n

It anyway sounds like we re opening up
i mean to me these scenes or albums are a way to start a discussion
and i m glad no ones here seems to need answers or confirmation but the fact to discuss and exchange

One last thing is
some years ago rectangle had the idea to release some of these artists works ( we were not that aware or it wasn t that organised yet )

we still hold a TAKU / OTOMO guitar duet supposed to be released as a 10" together with another acoustic guitar duet ( Elliott Sharp / Nels Cline )

for many reasons it didn t came out
but relistening to the Japanese duet
i found it much more freshy at the time than how it did evolve for example and that makes me feell like YES it did evolve and not exactely in a more open way Probably because reducing and reducing means you have to be very very strong and inventive to come above such walls ( that s me talking of course )

best
n

Jon

another thing now
is there a country or an era where your label sells more than another ?
Cause the funny thing is to my knowledge and apart from these post rock scenes in the US like the Chicago one ...in the community of musicians that i work with ( like let s say Downton NY ) this music is totally unknown and i guess from what i ve seen they d be quite against that ( i actually have many example in Europe crossing quiet shows with Fellow from the Zorn era where the went out after 5 minutes really not into it )

do you sell any for example in a place like Downtown Music Gallery ?

best
n

noël -

"As i understood it Tomas does regularly play in these fields but maybe it gets a little out of balance when we talk instead of them for them against them and you re basically sometime like a PORTE PAROLE for ( i dont mean negative at all and i don t think you at all talk in their name but from what you do and and what you know )"

-> well, yeah. the funny thing is that i'm not at all uncritical towards this kind of music. it's just that i think (like in any other kind of music) there is a lot of crap but also some very good things. to me, speaking about the quality of the music, it makes no a priori difference whether music is concerned a big deal with silence or with noise. it's true however that i'm very fascinated by minimalism but that doesn't involve it has to be quiet (one of the greatest "minimalist" concerts i have ever witnessed was a keiji haino solo show - a wall of noise, basically). anyway, i'm probably a bad porte parole for this scene because i have very different ideas than a guy like martin siewert (i guess) so i cannot talk for him. i can, to a certain extent, maybe talk for the toshi-sachiko axis because i relate to their music a lot. but again, these are just guesses. plus i'm pretty young (25) and don't know much about the history of some people (i.e. radu malfatti), so i can just talk about my feeling towards this kind of music, not so much about the motivation that lead him to create it.

Noel:

"DONT YOU SOMETIME FEEL LIKE STARTING EVEN THE PROJECTS "

yes, that's what I do most of the time, actually. all four of the Vienna projects I mentioned above were combinations that hadn't played together before (in that combination, of course), and were my ideas (to be precise: Polwechsel/Fennesz was more of a collaborative idea with Dafeldecker when we were in Ulrichsberg, but the other three were fully mine).

some other ones: Rowe/Nakamura, Rowe/Tilbury (never played as a duo before, unbelievably), Otomo/Voice Crack, Neumann/Beins, Noetinger/ErikM, Otomo/Muller, Muller/Ninh, Otomo/Toshi/Sachiko, all of these were projects I started. I don't have any interest in putting together total strangers a la the seventies Company aesthetic, that's much too hit and miss for my tastes. what I'm interested in is new combinations of musicians who know each other's work, who maybe have worked together in other contexts, but who aren't too comfortable in this specific project yet, that combination of familiarity and unfamiliarity keeps just enough tension in the music to achieve great things, to my ears anyway.

the AMPLIFY festival coming up in Germany next month is built around quartets, 14 different ones, each one of those will be a premiere, all of them were put together by Rowe and myself.

so, to answer your question, yes, yes I do. :)

Jon, you were aligning the respective critical receptions to the Cecil/Parker/Oxley Mole box and the Lyons Ayler box as generally positive. I think this comparison is foolhardy in context. Both are utterly disparate in approach as are each compared w/the approach of your box (which I've not heard; I'm talking approach toward production), and as I recall, the Mole didn't really garner uniformly rave reviews (they even had to recall early pressings). I see some light in the fact that a majority of boxes are perceived as 'a good thing' (academically, oop stuff, et. al.) but I don't think this has anything remotely to do with your box winning most folks over. The lines aren't "very [rough]," in my opinion.

Surprisingly you're confronting the initial question of the post, so at least that's refreshing. And I speak perfect English, perhaps you should just more assiduously read what I have to say.

Tomas

back here now

speaking about the quality of the music, it makes no a priori difference whether music is concerned a big deal with silence or with noise.

But if ever it sounded like this i never ever criticized the QUIETNESS but the attitude of a particular scene and the density of the music played there ..... i just mentionned that to me it became very dogmatic in some ways but not trenscending much the Dogma ( same shit as lars Von Triers .... the followers of Dogma seems totally out of the idea ..and the same with Lacanians, Guy Debord etc ... to me plus it always comme 30 years later about ...the legal time in history )

it's true however that i'm very fascinated by minimalism

well as i said i do also go for minimalism in different forms .... like studies of early guitar players from the 20´s or Freddie Green for example ... following Tony Conrad and many others ....

as i said somewhere else it s a little decay between the way business goes these days and how Keith Rowe did not really made a living in music for decades ( did he Jon ?)

best
n

Ain't Much Money

Jon

YES i felt like you re doing that with your label !

the AMPLIFY festival coming up in Germany next month is built around quartets, 14 different ones, each one of those will be a premiere, all of them were put together by Rowe and myself.

14 premieres quartets in the same era ?
Is that possible without bringing more than half at least people we ve never ever heard ?

best
n

I read what you had to say, thanks, but I was looking for a bit more elaboration than your 13 words of pithiness offered.

each box set is obviously different, but all three of those deal with improvised music in a live setting. the Lyons one is over a much longer time period, but those are the closest recent comparisons, I think. my point was (and remains) if you're going to discuss the overall critical reception of the AMPLIFY box, you should examine the reception of other boxes in that general area also. the IMJ box (which is also wildly different from AMPLIFY, in different ways) also received pretty universal raves upon release, my personal issues with it seemed to be in a very small minority from the start.

"the Mole didn't really garner uniformly rave reviews (they even had to recall early pressings)"

that had nothing to do with any reviews, it's because they pressed one of the 10 discs twice.

outside of that, I think you're still cranky about my "Curse of Paul Pierce" comment. :)

"14 premieres quartets in the same era ?
Is that possible without bringing more than half at least people we ve never ever heard ?"

yes, they're overlapping, the Cologne program is six established duos rotating into 3 new quartets each of 3 nights, so that's 9 of the 14 (actually looking at it now, it's 13 premieres, because the Rowe/Otomo/Sachiko/Toshi is repeated in both cities, albeit at much greater length in Berlin).

http://www.erstwhilerecords.com/live/amplify2004.asp

Jon

yes, they're overlapping, the Cologne program is six established duos rotating into 3 new quartets each of 3 nights, so that's 9 of the 14 (actually looking at it now, it's 13 premieres, because the Rowe/Otomo/Sachiko/Toshi is repeated in both cities, albeit at much greater length in Berlin).

That s a program indeed.
See jon if ever i was booked to play on such a festival i guess my very first reaction would be just to mess it all and go all in the wrong setups and even to quit in the middle of one to enter the end of another ....and finish by leaving a little earlier probably ....

That explains probably why you don t see me too much in these or it gives a reason
( apart from i m too weak to do that much droning )

Are the bands selected because of already scheduled album releases ?

That s not too improvisy is it ?

best
n

Jon

http://www.erstwhilerecords.com/live/amplify2004.asp

just came to see the amplify 04 program ...
i don t want to be too sarcastic but i don t see the point to tell me that "the Vienna Berlin Tokyo Crew" is a vague description of the sitaution .... might be different orders and sets but that is Precisely the same as ever lineup
that you permanently see ... it s here barely not a month without a huge show and many around ....

and by the way that s also what i m talking about ... is it Tonic paying for the flights ?
we know it s not ....

That s what i call a Cultural POLICY
and that belongs to Politics as always

Dont you think they might be a serious counter reaction soon to this permament ongoing situation ? People a little fed up ?

they are really many artists i barely never see around or didn t in any years ...
and some i see non stop though i m really not quite sure the investment coreponds to any real desire from the audience ( or at least the audience is far too small for the investment it is )

for sure comments here wont help balance

best
n

Noel, I don't have time to correct all of your misapprehensions, sorry. so I'll just say that yes, there was a festival with some overlapping personnel in Berlin and Vienna recently, but I'm funding most of this festival out of my own pocket and Keith and myself decided who would be in it. this is the festival that we want to see, that's the extent of the "politics" involved. as for Tonic, this festival is in Germany, so I have no idea what you mean.

"they are really many artists i barely never see around or didn t in any years ..."

who? who? who? who are these supremely talented individuals who are being ignored? please share.

Jon you seem a little obsessed by lists and names where i m talking of human and artists
and situations

i m sure that you re presenting all the artists that you like and want to no question
that doesnt change the fact that i feel it s permamently the same people at the moment in that post improv quiet whatever idea of music

who? who? who? who are these supremely talented individuals who are being ignored? please share.

Should we read the message reversed as it is actually the rule ? "Any one else" is the designated answer then ......

Best
n

Noel, you have at least as much power to change things as I do. I've put out records by a very wide range of musicians (within this area, of course) and put on shows by at least 50 or 60 different musicians over the last few years. furthermore, I distribute hundreds of titles in this area from other labels in the US, helping to promote still more musicians in this field. a comment like "Anyone else" is just bullshit and unfair. what are you doing to try to change the system, besides sitting on a discussion board and bitching about it?

yeah, a lot of things suck about the current system in Europe, but at least you have state funding that you can complain about not getting or all going to the same people, which is a lot more than American musicians have access to.

"i feel it s permamently the same people at the moment in that post improv quiet whatever idea of music "

well, yeah, maybe they're the best ones at it. and if they're not, then WHO IS? "anyone else" simply does not cut it, I can't invite "anyone else" to play a show, or ask "anyone else" and "some random homeless guy" to put together a record for me.

and yes, I'm "obsessed" with names, because otherwise you're just talking in vague generalities that break down when applied to a whole international bunch of musicians.

i won't comment explicitly on the last 3 or 4 post since the discussion is getting a little hot here and i think you guys should take a break. i mean, come on: both of you jon and noël share a great passion for music and try to do your best to promote what you believe in. don't accuse each other. the "bad guys" are out there, not in here... anyway, to name a duo that

a) would be a world premier
b) icludes people who do not appear on the erst catalogue so far
c) consists of one very well known and one lesser known musician (good mix)
d) share similar aesthetic, but have a very different background
and most important:
e) could come up with great music

i'd propose "john duncan & thomas ankersmit"

... what do you think?

I'd go to see that show if it was in town (maybe), but don't have too much interest in either of those musicians. I liked Duncan's Streamline disc a lot, but the others I've heard don't do too much for me, he seems to be too often more interested in the concept than the music. Thomas is OK, I saw a nice set he did last year here with Jason Lescalleet, but it's almost impossible for a saxophonist to make music I'm interested in (I'll keep listening, but that's how I feel right now).

I'd be decidedly more interested in working with a young Swiss musician, last name of Korber, than either of the above two... :) but right now I'm just trying to get through the May festival without going bankrupt, not committing to anything in the future that I haven't already.

jon -

"but don't have too much interest in either of those musicians. I liked Duncan's Streamline disc a lot, but the others I've heard don't do too much for me, he seems to be too often more interested in the concept than the music."

did you hear his dics on the 2cd thing with lopez (NAV)...?

"Thomas is OK, I saw a nice set he did last year here with Jason Lescalleet, but it's almost impossible for a saxophonist to make music I'm interested in (I'll keep listening, but that's how I feel right now)."

i think you should keep an eye on him. i had the chance to play with him in berlin a couple of weeks ago and was pretty amazed with what he did and how he reacted to my eletronics etc.

"I'd be decidedly more interested in working with a young Swiss musician, last name of Korber, than either of the above two... :)"

who the fuck is that guy? not another one of those silent suckers! hahaha ;)
no seriously: thanks for that. i feel honored :)

"did you hear his disc on the 2cd thing with lopez (NAV)...?"

no, maybe I'll keep an eye out for that. I think he's more of an installation artist than an improviser (same with lopez), and I heard his show here last year was awful (I think I'm remembering correctly).

"i think you should keep an eye on him. i had the chance to play with him in berlin a couple of weeks ago and was pretty amazed with what he did and how he reacted to my eletronics etc."

I actually tried to add a fourth night of outside shows to the berlin fest, which would have been all working combos of lesser-known berlin musicians, as follows:

shevadnaze = serge baghdassarians/ e-guitar, mixing desk + boris baltschun/ sampler
ankersmit/schick = thomas ankersmit/ sax, synthesizer, computer + ignaz schick/ amplified objects, electronics
(fa)ga(l) = kai fagaschinski/ clarinet + bernhard gál/ computer (field recordings)

but I was told that seven nights of shows in ten days was as much as berlin could handle already, so it didn't happen, which is too bad, because I'd like to see all of those duos.

"who? who? who?"

i'd like to know myself. of all the music that has come my way via grob, for4ears, Wastell's labels, mosz, durian, charhizma, imj, the Berlin labels, etc (or look at klingt.org) i can't say i've heard more than 2 or 3 musicians i'd like to hear more from that haven't shown up in Jon Abbey's fold (now that he has taken Siewert, Brandlmayr, Hautzinger and Doerner on board; and i see Fagaschinski on the German fest program; Renkel maybe?).

so the success of the amplify box comes as no surprise to me. i listened to it a few times. some very nice stuff ,but i didn't buy it because the almost ever-present Nakamura proved to be too much of a stumbling block for me. also i like my music rather mixed&remastered&remodeled. no matter.

i found the lyons set pretty dull. that goes for the liner notes, too. (give me a keith rowe interview any time).

the may festival lists some 14 people i'd give an arm and a leg for if only i could hear them in berlin. i was there last fall for a month. and i found the scene awesome.

"I actually tried to add a fourth night of outside shows to the berlin fest, which would have been all working combos of lesser-known berlin musicians"

i'd go for all of those combos except for (and ironically) the schick/ankersmit duo. i saw that at ausland and though it was a bit dull...

Tomas mentioned John Duncan.

The march issue of Wire magazine got me interested in John Duncan's Stun Shelter.

The same issue has a review of the Akchote/Auzet/Ferrari disc Impro-Micro-Acoustique.

I checked this stuff out. I can see/hear why this music won't appear on erstwhile for a while.
and - pace Jon - i don't think it has anything to do with the quality of the musicians. it's probably too far out for Jon or the American buying public??? (i guess that's where Noel is coming from)

what about Sugimoto? i love his guitar quartet. and fugatsu, of course. but will he ever get another date with erstwhile?

"what about Sugimoto? i love his guitar quartet. and fugatsu, of course. but will he ever get another date with erstwhile?"

unlikely in this current rigidly austere phase of his, but who knows what the future will bring. there is footage of the guitar quartet on the DVD on the box, as you're probably aware.

"there is footage of the guitar quartet on the DVD on the box, as you're probably aware."

ok Jon. i've gotten so close to buying the balance box on several occasions, i'll probably break down eventually.
and then you'll probably tell me:
sorry, all sold out. no reissues ever.

"but it's almost impossible for a saxophonist to make music I'm interested in"

requests & antisongs just happens to be my very first erstwhile. so i'm sad to hear you say this. maybe i'm just sentimental).

but then maybe you'll change your mind. i never thought you'd contemplate "working units" or do reruns like the upcoming Rowe/Nakamura after i read the Panzer interview some time ago.

hey guys

now this has become politics!

which is okay

but it really seems we dont all really see things the same way.

now we've come to europe (old france!) against america or what!
it seems a quite actual thread, bush is for war, europe is not!
sorry what am i talking about!

seriously, i am not sure we are discussing much here by now. seems everyone try to justify, defend what they do, what they have to sell and then when it comes to talk really an art thing, we are ALL fucked up! i feel.

i dont know.

maybe it has always been the same in any 'art' scene.

its funny because again it comes back to politics. in france it is always the right against the left, in america the democrates against the republicans and so on...

it seems we are not able to go over this...

and as much as all politics try to just save their one little reputation, their little power, it seems we are in this category.

again i have to say i feel this is a bit of a sad situation. we are all in the same wagon, in the same shit!

means i intend this would change! hopefully!

the box won't be reprinted ever, that's true, but there are still plenty of copies left here as of now.

from what seems to be your personal perspective as a listener, the box as a whole captures a very interesting inflection point in Taku's career. on the DVD, you get to see the power in the physical presence and stillness of the Guitar Quartet (the show on the Bottrop Boy CD was actually the rehearsal show for this festival), some nice footage of the Sugimoto/Stangl/Kurzmann trio, and an incredibly tense trio set between Rowe/Muller/Sugimoto, in what turned out to be the final performance of this trio (it just doesn't make sense anymore, Gunter can play duos with Taku and Keith and Gunter can play duos, but the trio is done). it wasn't compelling music, but Jonas managed to capture all of the interpersonal tension there, it's easily my favorite set from the festival on the DVD. Taku's also a presence on the seven guitar CD (a personal fave of mine), not just in the actual music, but for the fact that his "Hum" composition (released on the A Bruit Secret CD) was the first piece of the evening and informed the reading of Treatise and the improv piece. also, as extras on the DVD, you can see footage of the Stangl/Sugimoto duo (maybe the last time he plays in this style for quite some time?) and Taku with Lehn and Toshi, in duo and trio. also, Taku's notes are very revealing about where he stood at that point aesthetically, as well as Otomo's comments about Taku.

(sales pitch over) :)

"requests & antisongs just happens to be my very first erstwhile. so i'm sad to hear you say this. maybe i'm just sentimental). "

I'm still a fan of John's, I tried to do a full studio CD of Radian and John, which would have happened if Radian didn't have too many prior commitments. it'll be interesting to see how the pairing goes in Berlin.

"i never thought you'd contemplate "working units" or do reruns like the upcoming Rowe/Nakamura"

Keith and Toshi will likely be the only exception to this "rule" for quite some time, they're a bit of a special case in that Weather Sky was recorded soon after they'd started working together, and they've changed quite a bit in the intervening few years. they're my favorite combo in this music, so amazingly powerful every time I've seen/heard them, and I believe they'll come up with a record decidedly different from Weather Sky, especially after playing all the quartet shows in Germany in May. I'm very curious to hear the results myself!

Tomas:

Too bad to hear the Schick/Ankersmit wasn't so great, Schick is one of the guys I want to hear a lot more of, his solo disc on Zarek is phenomenal, tough, gritty work, sounds closer to power electronics than most improv.

Just got back from seeing Prurient and Kites. In contradistinction to Mr. Flemmer, I think the Americans he mentioned (Lescalleet, Kelley) are doing work that seems to me *far* more interesting than anything that, say the "vienna crew" (including Erstwhiles, sorry Jon). With Kites and Prurient I felt like Goethe watching Napolean ride by, "there goes the zeitgeist." Total genius.

damn, I forgot that show was tonight.

Chris

The same issue has a review of the Akchote/Auzet/Ferrari disc Impro-Micro-Acoustique.

I checked this stuff out. I can see/hear why this music won't appear on erstwhile for a while.
and - pace Jon - i don't think it has anything to do with the quality of the musicians. it's probably too far out for Jon or the American buying public??? (i guess that's where Noel is coming from)

Funnily NO not at all i come from early jazz Swing ....

concerning IMPRO MICRO i havent listened to it again - what was particular here at least is the fact that a 73 composer goes improv ( and Luc does shows wih Otomo, O Rourke, Erik M, Scanner, etc as a DJ sort of )
and the MIX and SOUND i would
THERE you can really hear something that comes from a certain idea of Sound

Noel, you have at least as much power to change things as I do.

But i haven t said i wasn t doing things at all either - i did - i do -i will

a comment like "Anyone else" is just bullshit and unfair.

It was a whole phrase attached to it

what are you doing to try to change the system, besides sitting on a discussion board and bitching about it?

I m just having a break from the mines .... you know diggin... where things are getting because of these games a little too harsh sometime that s it. no other conclusions !
i Could also since years just rather shut up and take the money ...but i m stupidly disable to do that without feeling it s wrong ....

yeah, a lot of things suck about the current system in Europe, but at least you have state funding that you can complain about not getting or all going to the same people, which is a lot more than American musicians have access to.

I see your point but then see mine too : all that brings aristocracy and POWER instead of democracy and ART

well, yeah, maybe they're the best ones at it.

that s where MAYBE makes sense yes
i wasn t orginally discussing that but ....

and yes, I'm "obsessed" with names, because otherwise you're just talking in vague generalities that break down when applied to a whole international bunch of musicians.

I know ....

n

"I think the Americans he mentioned (Lescalleet, Kelley) are doing work that seems to me *far* more interesting than anything that, say the "vienna crew" (including Erstwhiles, sorry Jon)."

in contrast to the japanese or the german speaking musicians who to me seem to be the ones best fitted to do this kind of music (maybe it's cultural), i can't help but finding the above mentioned Americans (judging from what i've heard) somewhat unfocused on their recordings. bland. maybe it's because they simply don't know how to take their time. no wonder the austrians are no longer recording with O'Rourke or Drumm.
i wish the situation was otherwise, since i live here among these nice folks.

"in contrast to the japanese or the german speaking musicians who to me seem to be the ones best fitted to do this kind of music (maybe it's cultural), i can't help but finding the above mentioned Americans (judging from what i've heard) somewhat unfocused on their recordings. bland. maybe it's because they simply don't know how to take their time. no wonder the austrians are no longer recording with O'Rourke or Drumm."

Are you serious? In total honesty, I've seen about 3/4 of the people mentioned in this thread play here in NYC, and I *still* think that Herr Elk Gel matches up with the best of them, and that Lescalleet is easily one of the most outrageously amazing musicians in America, with Aaron Dilloway, Dion Workman, Sean Meehan, Joe Colley, etc. I don't give a fuck about nationality, Toshi Nakamura is absolutely a virtuoso and everything, but my God, Lescalleet is king. I've seen him play 3 times now (w/nmperign, Thomas Ankersmit and with Tim Barnes) and he's absolutely in the canon.

it's apples and oranges, Nirav connects more with the rawer aesthetic of guys like Kelley and Lescalleet, and Chris prefers the polished sound of the Vienna scene. I don't think either batch of musicians would be too good at fitting in with the other's approach/es.

"no wonder the austrians are no longer recording with O'Rourke or Drumm."

well, Fennoberg is still sporadically doing shows, but O'Rourke and Drumm have mostly moved on to (wildly) different areas.

i forgot to mention the londoners among the good guys.

sorry

"I felt like Goethe watching Napolean ride by, "there goes the zeitgeist." Total genius."

i love the reference.

but didn't napoleon meet his fate in the cannons of beethoven's wellington's victory?

chris -

"no wonder the austrians are no longer recording with O'Rourke or Drumm."

i suspect it's the other way round...

Tomas

you don't want to get me started on Jim O'Rourke.

a propos O'Rourke:
since you're hailing from europe, i wonder if you ever ran across Felix Klopotek's (from grob) book entitled "how they do it" from 2002? it's already pretty dated, true. it may be a bit quaint, but i found it to be quite entertaining. among many other things, there's an adoring chapter on O'Rourke.

you're infinitely more familiar with the various music scenes than i am. of course. but i did spend last year in new york and i can't say a lot of good things about the downtown scene the way i experienced it, the concerts, the local musicians, the venues, tonic, the vision thing etc etc.

reading Dan Warburton's take on the Berlin scene in the april issue of his magazine confirmed my own impressions of the place. berlin has a myriad of problems these days. i'm aware of that. there seems to be little public money left for funding the arts. but as far as the music goes: i feel ny has been in a rut for a while, while berlin seems to be the place to go. at least, for now.

p.s.
due to a misspelling of your name on Mr. Stubley's efi website it was only yesterday that i finally learned who you are (thanks to Jon Abbey)

"reading Dan Warburton's take on the Berlin scene in the april issue of his magazine confirmed my own impressions of the place."

that piece was by Wayne Spencer, not Dan, and I'd personally resist making any overarching comments about the health of a city's scene from one oddly planned festival.

chris -

i sure am not "infinitely more familiar with the various music scenes" than you are. but i think there's quite some difference between the viennese scene and the one in berlin... with your earlier post you probably adressed those dafeldecker/kurzmann meet famous people discs and i'm just saying that a) it was o'rourke's decision to drop out of the whole improv thing and b) the same with drumm. last thing i heard is he sold all his equipment and quit making music, though i'm sure jon knows more details about this... i'm sure the viennese crew would be delighted to work with those two again... what's wrong with o'rourke, anyway?

"p.s. due to a misspelling of your name on Mr. Stubley's efi website it was only yesterday that i finally learned who you are (thanks to Jon Abbey)"

i didn't even know my name was there somewhere... i asked him once to include me in his nifty index, but he didn't get back to me, so that was that...

"that piece was by Wayne Spencer, not Dan"

thanks for pointing that out to me. i must have been pretty tired when i read the article last night.

i had first read the futatsu review by dw, then the no furniture piece (great record i think) by ws, and by the time i finished the festival article by ws, all i was probably seeing was doubleyoos. sorry, Mr. Spencer. nice piece though.

"I'd personally resist making any overarching comments about the health of a city's scene from one oddly planned festival."

i'd have to go through all of 2003's concert postings at the dmg website to refresh my memory with specifics. i don't have the time right now. but let me assure you i did hear my fair share.
Ibarra, Shipp, W. Parker, Ehrlich, Friedlander, Zorn come to mind. very nice people, but listening to them i felt the needle had gotten stuck somewhere in the mid 90's.
i can't think of a better image for this mindset than tzadik's Bailey (Ballads). retro or what?
or Otomo's jazz stuff on the same label (and i love the man). museum pieces.

no need for me to add to the vision debate. the bagatellen crew said all there was to say. and better.

i enjoyed the amplify concerts a lot. the foreigners more than the natives though. but don't you have to feel sorry for the visitors for having to play in a place like the tonic? my wife went there with me once. but never again.

the classical/new music scene isn't doing much better. the ny phil is no match for the berlin phil or the vienna sym. if it ever was close it's not anymore.

and i heard more feldman or cage in germany (and better played) than in manhattan.

as i've said before, erstwhile is an american label, maybe the best eai label in the world right now. you, Jon, must know the local/national scene better than anybody. if the scene is as "healthy" as you claim it to be why do american musicians play only such a minor role on your label? Issue their music so that i can listen to them sandwiched between lidingo (sorry, no umlauts) and time travel.

Chris, you misunderstand me. when I wrote "I'd personally resist making any overarching comments about the health of a city's scene from one oddly planned festival", I thought it was pretty clear that I was referring to the Uchiage festival Wayne was writing about, nothing to do with NYC or anything you wrote.

Uchiage

dont get me started on this one ...

cause i m anyway off for a while

BEST TO YOU ALL

n

Jon, i had earlier mentioned that i spent a month in Berlin last year. thus when i referred to "my own impressions" i was thinking first hand impressions of the local scene.

since your comment sounded like you were implying
that all of my knowledge of whatever scene was based on the impressions from "one" festival, i mistakenly thought you could only be talking about the vision fest (which i guess you didn't like much either) and my general remarks concerning new york.

re: organization

the germans might be known as efficient organizers, but i don't envy you your task of setting up a festival in a foreign town, especially this one.

"what's wrong with o'rourke, anyway?"

Tomas

if i were to answer more questions concerning american eai or post-eia musicians, i might make
a few friends in berlin, vienna or koeln, but i probably wouldn't have a whole lot of them left here at home.

for your entry at efi go to the Mueller page. that's where i first found you. it has a link to the label, and (what i love best) cod has some nice soundclips.

"as i've said before, erstwhile is an american label, maybe the best eai label in the world right now. you, Jon, must know the local/national scene better than anybody."

As you may or may not have been leading to, Chris, I'd hardly cite Jon as a source for the who are's/whatnot's on the American scene, being that in however many years of producing now, he's employed painfully few American musicians. In the many discussions I've followed and that Jon has played part of, he leans heavily toward the European and Japanese musicians. In his fairly unwavering documentation of those musicians, I'd guess it's simply a result of that being the shit that gives him kicks. And here I am speaking for Jon, but whatever.

Certainly there are ways for the many micro music communities in the US to branch out, compile their money and get themselves heard, but who knows if that's even a goal for the folks in say, Portland. Erstwhile's done a great deal for itself due in large part to PR, strange as that may seem for music that is so explicitly non-seeking of status, and then maybe because of so much one-offishness. I think "trendy" could be easily applied to Erst, the dichotomy being that at least half of the discography, all descriptors aside, is so fucking good.

chris -

ok, but then let me tell you a funny anecdote about o'rourke (my first and only encounter with him):

last year at tonic. günter, norbert + i had some good sushi, then we go back to tonic. so there sits our man at the bar. imagine this situation: he's a star and i am a nobody, so i felt a bit intimidated. finally norbert introduces us, and you know the first thing jim says to norbert while shaking my hand? "oh norbert, i didn't know your son was coming with you!" (norbert's son has turned 15 this year...) - what a jerk! ;) ... afterwards i order a beer at the bar. jim looks at me: "but..uh..are you old enough to drink alcohol?!"... man, to hear that stuff from a guy who toured europe when he was 18... ha!! ;) ... i think he's kind of a genius, though...

"I'd hardly cite Jon as a source for the who are's/whatnot's on the American scene, being that in however many years of producing now, he's employed painfully few American musicians. In the many discussions I've followed and that Jon has played part of, he leans heavily toward the European and Japanese musicians. In his fairly unwavering documentation of those musicians, I'd guess it's simply a result of that being the shit that gives him kicks."

just because I haven't chosen to work with many US-based musicians doesn't mean I'm not aware of their work, as you can see from my contributions to Joe's Tonalamotl thread. am I aware of everyone? no, of course not, no one is, but I try to stay aware of anyone who might be a good candidate for a future Erst release.

"I think "trendy" could be easily applied to Erst"

I don't like the connotations of that word, and I don't think it's fair. would you have described ESP or Impulse as "trendy" in the late sixties? take a look at the improv landscape in 1999 when I started Erstwhile, hardly a "trendy" area to explore.

anyway, I'm honestly not sure how one can connect the word "trendy" to the sales figures I have. as I've always said, I don't mind a backlash, I just wish I'd sell some CDs before that happens.

jon -

this is a bit of a personal question, and i understand if you'd rather not reply to it (or only via email): can you tell us some sale-numbers? what is the average sale of one of your releases. which one sells best/worst...?

lots of them are around 300-500, Wrapped Islands (thank you, Christian!) is the only one that's broken 1000.

thanks. yes that's more or less the numbers i thought (maybe a bit more). tough biz :(
i was amazed to hear fennesz' "endless summer" has sold over 20'000 ...!! there is the "trend", i guess. but i don't really get the "rules" behind why something sells good/bad, anyway...

Tomas-

that story of yours:
priceless

Al-
your comment just goes to show how little i know of what's going on behind the scenes.

Jon-
thanks for answering Tomas' question. i've always wondered about that.

i don't mean to be too inquisitive. but
are there significant regional differences, say between new york, california or japan?

Jon, my point is that I'm more naturally inclined to speak to someone who deals more closely in those specific areas of music about their respective scenes. If I had a question about one of the Vienna cats, I'd drop you an email.

Whatever connotations you may not like with the word, it's still just an observation, uncut. I can't really answer your question, in that I don't at all equate Erstwhile with any of the 60's labels you mentioned. Secondly, how would I know what effect the mention of the word "ESP" would have in conversation in 1968? I have no first-hand experience with the improv music climate of that time, only the records. In 1999 I had no idea what this music was, so I can't relate there either. However, now is a different matter. The music has sustained some serious energy and growth in five years, so of course the key players (that would be you) are going to hear things you may or may not want to hear now that a diverse enough (small as it may be) audience has had some exposure to this revolution in music.

So, "trendy" doesn't mean shit right now if you're putting in on the scale with the larger improv environment (or that of music in general) as a whole. Put into the context of its own tiny little niche though, and in part with reference to other labels, I hardly ever hear anyone touting or marking the days from preorder to ownership of the latest batch from Antifrost, a serious heavyweight on the merit of the music alone... yeah, I've read enough comments -- here, at IHM, in personal emails from those involved and otherwise in the internet community, and elsewhere -- that make "trendy" plausible enough with reference to Erst.

*i don't mean to be too inquisitive. but
are there significant regional differences, say between new york, california or japan?*

I think there are a great many "regional" differences, without even dealing with "cultural" stuff (that's complicated and frustrating).

In NYC, Boston or Tokyo (don't know about Europe babies), rents are sky-high so people are always working - not playing. This may account for why NYC isn't the center of *any* art world right now, because the artists are busy working 50 hour weeks as legal assistants or whatever to pay their insane rent on their shared studio apartments. Plus, lotsa neighbors...:

The Tokyo players I've met *do not play* unless they're already famous, independently wealthy, or they have a gig. You can't just "play" informally there without renting a space. The exception is electronic players who can just use headphones. The high rent and population density has led to the onkyo-ha stylee at Offsite, for example, which is nice, I guess, but clearly mandated (by reasons uncontrollable).

Now in Portland, for example, rent is cheap and houses with basements are plentiful. They guys who play there barely work, if at all, and spend all their time playing. Which is what most players like to do (well, Rowe says he never plays, but he's been doing it for a long time, I guess. I can't say I understand it: I need to play). Oakland is somewhat similar to Portland, and there's a zesty young L.A. scene that's taking it to the abandoned downtown to get their free on.

I'm glad US has no funding. That, combined with the "no audience" situation, pretty much rules out the most obvious "bad reasons" to play music.

Love,

Jean-Paul Foster

"In NYC, Boston or Tokyo (don't know about Europe babies), rents are sky-high so people are always working - not playing. This may account for why NYC isn't the center of *any* art world right now, because the artists are busy working 50 hour weeks as legal assistants or whatever to pay their insane rent on their shared studio apartments. Plus, lotsa neighbors..."

That bit about NYC is the most hilariously wrong thing I've read in weeks. Ever heard of the Whitney Biennial? The show whose entire point is *precisely* to guage what the current climate is in the art word? I'll point you to this article in the Village Voice, and point out this quote:

"This biennial is the most art-center-centric one in decades: A whopping 80 of its 108 participants live in New York or Los Angeles."

Unless your description of the "artworld" doesn't include painting, sculpture and video/film, it's really difficult to think that NYC isn't the crux of the art axis. I'm not trying to make some claim for the superiority of New York or anything, it's just that if you'd like your work to get noticed, it's hard to do if you're out in the sticks (this has more to do with painting and sculpture, and less with music, which has been "de-aura'd" a long time ago.) If you're ever in the city, take a walk through Chelsea, go to every gallery you see that's open, and then say what you said again with a straight face. I'd be impressed if you could.

erratum: The show whose entire point is *precisely* to guage what the current climate is in the US art world?

(and the word "article" is a link)

My review of the Berlin Uchiage festival in the new issue of Paris Transatlantic has been mentioned above. I suspect that most visitors to Bagatellen know where to find this, but just in case there are a few that do not, the URL is http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/monthly2004/04apr_text.html.

I agree with Jon Abbey that one should be cautious about drawing general conclusions from this one festival, although I personally found that it usefully crystallized by burgeoning reservations about Taku Sugimoto's recent music.

"I agree with Jon Abbey that one should be cautious about drawing general conclusions from this one festival, "

i would agree with you, Mr. Spencer, when you say
"that one should be cautious about drawing general conclusions from this one festival,"
but adding the rhetorical prefix
"I agree with Jon Abbey"
originating from a context of misunderstandings
makes me wonder what conclusions one is supposed to draw from this.

Nirav -
Thanks for the info. I guess I spoke too quickly about the visual arts, and was mostly thinking about my experiences in NYC in recent years. As for being the place to get noticed, that's precisely true, and I suspect it may be the reason for the truth of your comment. That's why artists and musicians continue to move into NYC: to get noticed. Well, also the incredibly stimulating environment - I have no criticism of that.

I have to say, though, that I met so many creative people in NYC who didn't have any time to do their work because of their jobs. People who used to paint every day and now wait till Sunday. People who used to play music every day in a basement or a park. NYC is the place to get noticed, but that's not a very important factor for a growing number of people, which I think is a good thing; the sound of clamoring can drown out the music sometimes.

Jeff

reading Mr Spencer's review of the
Uchiage fest again

i found it to be wildly funny. when i first read it, how could i have missed the send-up?

i did, and for that and snapping at Mr Spencer, apologies on my part are in order.

i propose we all read the review of the Miira ni naru made performance again.

"The piece consists of a narrated diary" we are told, concerning some rather grave matter.

There was only one problem:
"For my part, my lack of German made it impossible for me properly to appreciate the narrative component."

Well, not too much of a problem at all:

there was, after all, "a series of hand signals and a cord attached to Ostermayer's left leg used to signal"

there's a solution:
why couldn't the whole thing be "viewed simply as abstract sound"?

but then we miraculously arrive at this:
"there seemed an incongruity between the... spoken words and the...abstract sounds produced by the ensemble of musical instruments"

he does concede that
"it would seem likely that the focus of the listener's attention would generally be the meaning of the story"

but he thinks he's entitled to critical judgment nevertheless. how does he do it? maybe he just looked at the person sitting next to him. she probably appeared german enough:

"I suspect that even for those in a position to understand the meaning of the narrative there was little integration of the linguistic and music aspects of the performance. I gather that the text is entirely conventional in its syntax..."

now he seems to somehow understand german syntax. maybe he's an an abstract linguist. i'm impressed.

maybe this critic is on to something. i find this critic's mo intriguing.

aren't talking pictures overrated anyway? don't we all sometimes feel like turning the sound off when watching my dinner with andre?

i have friends who "view" political speeches on tv
"abstractly". they turn the volume way down and seem to be quite happy with it. or so they tell me.

but seriously,
i now know i should give my derek bailey cd "Poetry&Playing" (paratactile)another chance.
ignore those words! i might actually like it. too bad he's not reciting the texts in japanese, a language i'm sad to say i don't speak.

well, i was sorry i didn't attend that concert in berlin. not any more, thanks to Mr. Spencer. if he's right and a scaled down reception of background sounds is all you need to evaluate a performance (after all, isn't Berlin reductionism more or less about reductionism?), then maybe reading a review of the concert is all you need.

but what if i can't comprehend what the reviewer is saying (as seems to be my problem with Mr. Spencer) - no problem at all.
a text can be "simply viewed as abstract."
that's a lot more radical than anything people ever thought Derrida was proposing.

did i enjoy looking at the fonts?
i'll think about and try to come up with a review.

Sugimoto's "work in contexts such as this strikes one as having about it something of the quality of a pathological necrophiliac obsession with increasingly skeletal remains." (W. Spencer)

"pathological".

interesting

Chris Flemmer has criticised my review of the performance of 'Miira ni naru' at the Uchiage festival in Berlin. My replies are as follows.

Having discovered that a German-language narration that I could not understand was a component of the piece, I decided that I would listen to the music without regard to the unknown meaning of the words and report my own subjective impressions from this point of view plus some brief and tentative conjectures (derived from my experience with English-language performances) as to how the instrumental and vocal components of the piece might interact if one could understand the latter. I made sure that I stated up-front that I did not speak German so that readers knew exactly what they were getting and could evaluate and discount what I said accordingly. I also spoke to some German-speaking friends who were at the performance to confirm that the text was the conventional prose it seemed to be, and to obtain a short summary of its meaning and their impressions of the piece. Otomo Yoshihide's hand and string signals did not come into it.

There was no suggestion on my part that an evaluation of the performance as abstract sound gave one a meaning of a text or rendered such an understanding redundant. It was simply an examination of the music from one particular point of view - in much the same way as a structural analysis of the form of a poem that has no regard of the meaning of the words is.

It would seem to follow from Chris's comments that you can have no substantive aesthetic appreciation of music in a language you do not share. It also seems to follow that if you are able to understand the meaning of a text embedded in music, then you are obliged to attend to the meaning of that text: any aesthetic point of view that does not do is somehow straightforwardly invalid. I see no good reason to follow a road that entails such prescriptions.

Rapid typing has slightly scrambled my second para above. I meant to say:

There was no suggestion on my part that an evaluation of the performance as abstract sound gave one an understanding of the linguistic meaning of the text or rendered such an understanding redundant. It was simply an examination of the music from one particular point of view - in much the same way as a structural analysis of the form of a poem that has no regard of the meaning of the words is.

a poem

"a poem
that has no regard of the meaning of the words"

"It would seem to follow from Chris's comments that you can have
no
substantive
aesthetic appreciation
of music
in a language
you do not share."

"of
music
in a
language
you do not share."

"in a language you do not share."

"of music"

"skeletal remains"

"of"
"sugimoto"

"no regard of the meaning of the words"

"pathological"
"sugimoto"
"necrophiliac"
"sugimoto"
"no regard
of the meaning"
"of the words"

"sugimoto"
"structural"
"structural" "sugimoto"
"structural"

"structural
analysis"
"sugimoto"
"patho"
"logical"
"anal"
"ys"
"is"

"i would listen to the music without
regard
to the unknown meaning of the words" "a poem that has no
regard
of the meaning of the words"

"sugimoto"
"would listen to the music without regard
to the unknown meaning"

"sugimoto"
"would listen"
"without regard to the unknown meaning"
"in a language you do not share"
"sugimoto"
"would listen"

"work in contexts
such as this
strikes
one
as having about
it something of the
quality
of a pathological necrophiliac obsession with
increasingly skeletal remains."

"increasingly"
"skeletal"

"sugimoto"
"remains"
"increasingly"
"increasingly"

Rapid typing has made me forget my para/
tac/
tic
footnotes.

1 "sugimoto". On Taku Sugimoto, see WS in PT april 2004. Sugimoto is contemptuously described as "contemptuous" and "musically autistic." Cf. Clive Bell, "Understatement of Intent", in The Wire november 2003, where Sugimoto is quoted as saying that he "would rather (be) watching TV all the time, drinking alcohol and smoking-then play music." But "No more Knitting Factory." (pp. 29-30).
"Contemptuous" and "autistic", indeed.

2 "in a language you do not share." Cf. "Miira ni Naru made". See WS ibid. Cf. also:
"J: Was Sie meinen, verstehe ich nicht."
...
J: Ich verstehe immer noch nicht, was Sie meinen."
Martin Heidegger, "Aus einem Gespraech von der Sprache: Zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden." In: Unterwegs zur Sprache, Stuttgart: Neske, 1959, p. 88f.

3 ( )( ). On "silence" with reference to Sugimoto's performance, see WS ibid.:
"the silences themselves seemed...manipulative." Cf. also Heidegger, idem, p. 152: "Wer vermoechte es, einfach vom Schweigen zu schweigen?"

4 "music in a language". On "language", see WS ibid. Cf. also:
"F: Wie heisst das japanische Wort fuer 'Sprache'?
J (nach weiterem Zoegern) Es heisst 'Koto ba'.
...
F: Und was sagt Koto?
J: Diese Frage ist am schwersten zu beantworten."
In: Heidegger, idem, p. 142. Zu "Koto ba" see "Niira ni Naru made", cf. WS ibid. On the relation of "Niira..." and "suicide" as aesthetic themes, especially as narrated, see WS, ibid. On the practice of "structural analysis" of such narratives, see WS above. On the "structural analysis" of "contempt" and on the aesthetics of
"pathology" (esp. "necrophilia") cf. WS in PT, ibid.
Cf. also Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan, Paris: Editions Galilee, 1986. Translations in English are available, but not "substantive", as WS argues convincingly. On the question of translation, see WS's excellent comment: "(L)isten to the music without regard to the meaning of the words." Ibid.

5 "this context". On "context", see WS, ibid.
On the historical background of the use of a certain vocabulary employed in the field of art criticism that crosses the semantic fields of
krank (pathological), Werke von geistig Behinderten, Ausgeburten des Wahnsinns, "autistic" and "necrophiliac" cf.:www.olinda.com/ArtAndIdeas/lectures/ArtWeDontLike/unlikedArt.htm.-
Nevertheless, more research into the relation between a necrofiliac aesthetics of contempt and the musical structure of the pathological and its analytic reduction of pathos (Greek for sympathy, pity) in autism
is clearly indicated:
"Hopefully there will be further instalments of this thought-provoking and promising festival to allow us to find out.—WS"

And with the last sentence from Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
in mind, i'll be off.
BEST TO YOU ALL

I'm pretty sure Wayne never mentioned what Uchiage means, which might have helped him put this festival in more of a proper perspective. "Uchiage" is a Japanese term referring to an after-concert party, which was likely the primary focus of this oddly programmed, largely privately sponsored event.

Chris: congratulations on one of the most bizarre posts I've seen to this site yet. Bravo! From the depth of your sarcasm, one would not be remiss in having thought that Mr. Spencer had made some off-colour remarks about your mother.

Chris: congratulations on one of the most bizarre posts I've seen to this site yet. Bravo! From the depth of your sarcasm, one would not be remiss in having thought that Mr. Spencer had made some off-colour remarks about me.

Dear Nirav

"I felt like Goethe watching Napolean ride by, "there goes the zeitgeist." Total genius.

Posted by: Nirav at March 31, 2004 08:31 PM

Did you by any chance have Hegel (Phaenomenologie des Geistes) and his famous apercu about Napoleon as the "Weltgeist zu Pferde" in mind (im Geiste)?

since you mentioned me i thought i should say hi