Rasp and Roll

Cassettes. Audio cassettes. Analog audio cassettes. Analog audio cassette tapes. Rectangular thingies with two holes and little plastic teeth. A thin, long, flat thing spooled snugly inside a hollow shell. Type I. Type II. Normal Bias. High bias. C60. C90. Dolby. You now have zero guesses of what I'm talking about.

It's been about twenty years since the compact disc was introduced and about half as long since cassettes became relatively obsolete like vinyl. It was a slow death and the purpose of my remarks today is to gather some casual observations of coursing life blood in this medium in the happy wake of an unusually cassette-centric evening of music at Tonic on Wednesday. Cassettes were cheap in their heyday and now free if you're willing to go "shopping" on garbage day. Cassettes were recordable and rerecordable. Players and recorders were cheap and available in all manner of ergonomic permutations. All this is very important, but I'm starting to come to grips with the lesson of Howard Stelzer—"Howie" as is often preferred—about what's really most important about cassettes: the fact they work by motors making some whimsical feat of yesteryear's electrical engineers roll round and round, innocently, unsuspectingly, mechanically, semi-faithfully.

I don't want to belabor the obvious unnecessarily, but perhaps it's not so unnecessary and the medium-subversion I'm reflecting on here has simply become an ordinary fixture on my musical landscape, much like balloons or daxophones, while remaining exotic and baffling to most others. Howie's self-effacing and understated career as a cassette improvisor has gradually infiltrated my listening lifestyle to the point of remarkable prominence, and when I think of the recordings and performances that have had the strongest impact on me over the past two years or so, Howie and his quaint tabletop assemblage figure in an almost implausibly high percentage of them between the BSC, his solo performances, and other delights. It's time for me to outright acknowledge that there's virtually not been a sound coming from his corner that hasn't had me on the edge of my seat with a feeling of joyous discovery.

For the benefit of anyone who lacks enough context for my babbling, let me briefly describe the craft of Howie Stelzer. Howie is a mild-mannered young savant of radical sound residing in the Northeast region of the US, the kind of fellow who started listening to weird music at a much younger age than most. He runs a record label and distributorship and so on. He's quite tangled up in some musical subculture I can't claim anything more than a dilettantish awareness of. Since some point in the 90s he has performed music using a modest setup of a small mixer, a few yardsale-grade portable cassette players, a smattering of cassettes, and probably a few other minor devices. Let me state from the outset that I haven't a clue what's actually on these cassettes, and this is a mystery of content that nags at me, but which I somehow always neglect to inquire about, perhaps because I secretly entertain a romantic notion that their content is irrelevant and his music is derived from some low-tech wizardry that leaves the source material behind in some quantum leap of abstraction. (Note to self: find out what's on the damn tapes.) So he moves the knobs on his mixer and presses buttons on the cassette players and moves them around so their little built-in speakers approach microphones and that sort of thing. And out come these amazing sounds, often like the familiar sound of simultaneous fast-forward and playback, but I can no longer speak of this with a singular noun because he has revealed a vast universe of subtle differentiation in slurs, to say nothing of crackles and rasps. They are the sounds of crudely accelerated playback. More generally, Howie has perceptually exploded the sounds of gently mistreated magnetic tape technology; he is the quintessential deconstructionist of this medium and the counterpart of Marclay, Tétreault, Van Bebber, Otomo, et al in the vinyl medium.

On Wednesday Howie performed at Tonic in duo with Sawako, a mononymic electronicist I'd never heard of before, though as it were I live in blissful ignorance of most happenings involving digital sound production. The joyous occasion of a Stelzer jaunt to my listening proximity was a tour with Bernhard Gal, who concluded the evening with a solo set of skillful laptop music. The evening commenced with a solo set by Aki Onda, who uses cassettes as saliently as Howie, and I'll elaborate on that set below for the sake of setting Howie's work off in dramatic relief. But it's the equally vivid contrast with Sawako that I'll first turn my attention to.

The duo set was a smashing success. I was ecstatic. In fact, it was almost as good as a Stelzer solo set. A bit of the space and tension of Howie's music was reduced by Sawako's episodic interjections of quiet and subtle electronic sound via a handheld digital sampler she earnestly manned in her lap. Her first episode was a gentle, dreamy layer of sheer soft static textural melodic bliss along the lines of the IDM-as-new-age aesthetic of Nobukazu Takemura and associates, and I was very sad to hear it end after only a minute or so. I would've happily listened to that sample nursed and minimally developed for hours, and I've heard enough of Howie's music to know his profound instrumental flexibility would accomodate such a piece splendidly. Oh well. The rest of the set had a similar macrostructural profile as Sawako delivered a sequence of unrelated samples revealing an unfocused vocabulary in the generic/miscellaneous laptop electronica vein and a meager facility for real-time microstructural variation and development at the phrasal level. In contrast, Howie sculpted every gesture with the real-time control of an ace saxophonist.

It was a study in digital/analog contrast. While there was nothing inappropriate or problematically monotonous about Sawako's use of repetition at the subphrasal level, I consistently observed the strict rhythmic regularity typical of digitally-generated music, whereas Howie's rhythms unfolded with a biological wooziness that suits me fabulously as a biological sound-processor. It's those imperfections of motors, gears, microphones, and speakers, not to mention Howie's fingers. I don't mean this as some kind of rigid generalization about rhythm, because magical things can result from quantized repetition, like an escape from the experience of musical time in phrasal packets, offered in some of the brilliant work curated by labels like Mille Plateaux and 12k. But what I often hear in Howie's slurs and mechanical loops is the ecstatic metrical irregularity of the voice, a note stretching ever so slightly, breathing. To hear this in such a timbrally inscrutable vehicle as Howie's greyish sound world and to hear it subjected to the jarring, clipped attacks and decays of his primitive walkman/mixer tools is the germ of an explanation for the profound and revelatory experiences I seem to be consistently deriving from his work.

Fairly early in their first piece the music failed me for a minute or so when Sawako created a dynamic imbalance between the two sound layers. That this was an isolated occurrence in this set is a tribute to her admirable dynamic sensitivity in general, but it was a classic example of the ubiquitous scenario in which electronic sounds cut through the mix and step all over delicate acoustic or electroacoustic sounds. It's something I've experienced dozens of times with great frustration at the electronicist's relative obliviousness to the psychoacoustic context of the performance. I often wonder if it's because they are so used to loud music that when a situation calls for low volumes, they fail to distinguish between soft and very soft, precluding sonic mergers that could otherwise materialize. Or perhaps they are so embroiled in the awkward, sprawling interfaces between their hands and their sound palette that they're not really listening to their partners with any measure of detail.

An example of this kind of dynamic travesty that sticks out as an especially sore memory was the quartet of Jack Wright, Ricardo Arias, Barry Weisblat, and Matthew Ostrowski at the 2004 edition of Brooklyn's Improvised and Otherwise festival. I say "sore" because of the sheer potential of this lineup to create something new and mind-boggling, especially with two of my biggest heroes, Wright and Arias, playing two of my favorite instruments, saxophones and balloons, respectively. Happening on the third day, it was the main reason I actually stuck around for the whole festival instead of going home after the BSC performance on the first day, my overriding reason for even making a trip into the city. In my unfinished (and hence unpublished—sorry, I'm just lazy) review of the festival, I noted "It was a textbook case of acoustic vs electronic improvisation, and the acoustic performers lost. Matthew Ostrowski and Barry Weisblat ran their machines at a medium volume when a lower volume was called for, with a musicality that seemed limited to solo performance, as there was no evidence they understood how their sounds functioned in the acoustic space relative to the ensemble." It was actually a very good set and left me with a net positive impression of the two electronicists, but there's such an abundance of better-than-great music in the world that very good is simply not good enough for my purposes and one conspicuous flaw is enough to ruin an experience. As an antidotal anecdote, I can cite the fabulous and perfectly balanced duo I saw the other year between Seen Meehan and Toshimaru Nakamura. I think every electronic musician should study Nakamura's work in a live setting if they have an opportunity and take him as a role model.

The gulf between acoustic and electronic instrumentation is too familiar to belabor, but the case of Howie and Sawako was vastly more interesting to me. After all, if we were to follow the classic habit of sloppy music journalism, the nearly vacuous label "electronics" could be tagged to both of them. Howie's tabletop sports enough wires and knobs to place him way outside the realm of acoustic music, but here's where that terminological bugaboo of "electroacoustic" rears its head. When I think of this word, the first thing that pops into my mind is Vic Rawlings and his ever-fascinating sprawl across the acoustic-to-electronic continuum, from acoustic-cello-as-acoustic-instrument to acoustic-cello-as-electronic-instrument, from electronics-as-gestural-homomorphism to electronics-as-autonomous-machinery, and from electronics-as-psychoacoustics to electronics-as-electronics. And when I think of the dynamic conflict between electronics and electroacoustics, I think of a deeply frustrating set of music that involved Vic and transpired in September, 2003 during High Zero, which my festival review depicted thusly: "...one of the festival's biggest disappointments for me, especially as it involved two musicians who have consistently impressed me with their improvisational depth and ingenuity. Vic Rawlings' idiosyncratic modified cello and electronics are havens for minimalist electroacoustic delights, and this set was no exception, but while Rawlings made restrained attempts to commune with sonic singularities, Andy Hayleck was simply turning knobs and pressing buttons, letting cheesy and cliched electronic sounds mask Rawlings' nuances. This conflict was exacerbated by the uncomfortable mismatch between Hayleck's medium dynamics and Rawlings' soft dynamics. In my mind, this set dramatized the divide between electronic music and electroacoustic music." (By the way, note that Andy had only recently begun focusing on electronics and previously had a well-etched identity as a brilliant electroacoustician especially known for his gong + wire work.) What I'm referring to in both the Rawlings/Hayleck and Stelzer/Sawako cases is not something as blatant as one person blasting away at gaudy volumes and rendering another person inaudible, but rather a situation where both people play quietly and ostensibly sensitively, but the electronics jump out of the mix at the expense of structural relationships, as if the electronicist is not confident their sounds can function at a lower volume.

It's no coincidence that Vic and Howie run together in my thoughts about analog vs digital and electroacoustic vs electronic. Besides being mates in the BSC, some of Howie's greatest moments are on the two discs of his trio with Vic and turntablist Jason Talbot—2000 recordings released on Editions Zero as an untitled split disc with a like-minded Greek trio and 2002 recordings released by BOXmedia as Open. Even in the rather dense, loud, and noisy sections, the trio created vivid shapes instead of mush, and the music is full of dramatic dynamic juxtapositions. Until the mega-classic Stelzer/Talbot duo disc Songs (2003) and Howie's monumental two-volume Cassette Recordings 98-04 (2004) were released—both no-brainers for my year-end top ten lists— those trio discs were the only real Stelzer fix I recall having on hand. I can't imagine a more prototypical example of an ensemble dealing exclusively in electroacoustic improvisation in contradistinction to electronic or acoustic improvisation. My general repulsion to "power electronics" stands in stark contrast to my pronounced enthusiasm for what I might call the "power electroacoustics" of that trio.

I think this volume issue—again, only a minor quibble with respect to the Howie/Sawako duo and taken mainly as a launchpad to other insights about Howie's music—largely reflects a distinction in internal sound organization, a kind of severe fullness of electronic sounds in which the vertical spaces between component frequencies you find in acoustically-derived sounds are mostly filled in. It's the difference between sounds that subtract from white noise and sounds that add to silence. In terms of dynamics, this means I hear more microscopic peaks and valleys as the dynamic contours of each component frequency do their own thing in the sorts of sounds used by Howie or other musicians I think of as paradigmatically electroacoustic. It's a case of less information being more information because too much information can result in self-cancellation.

These are matters I don't really understand, but it's Howie's curatorial work that has sent me fumbling in what appears to be a profitable direction. The following sentence appears on the inside jacket of his extraordinary 2004 two-disc compilation Intransitive Twenty-Three: "All music composed without the use of digital devices". Playing this era-defining and exquisitely selective multi-artist opus again and again in the past year or so (it was released in June last year) and thinking about that little sentence have greatly transformed my musical worldview. I don't have too many answers, but I'm starting to really like the questions. Even though Howie's own music doesn't appear at all on Twenty-Three, it's put this whole cassette thing into welcome focus for me and my conceptual confusion with his role in the BSC has entirely resolved. I can't begin to recommend Twenty-Three with adequate vigor. Anyway, listen to that comp and then think about that sentence. It's outright profound.

Shifting attention to the supra-phrasal level in the Howie/Sawako duo, the Achilles heel of digital looping factored into the set. There was a stunningly beautiful passage where Howie's faint ambling pulses merged with Sawako's delicate long tones following a familiar reverse-tape-loop envelope, and I noticed that for a while I wasn't distinguishing their sounds at all—which is generally a great thing in my opinion—until my attention was diverted by the rigid looping structure that was a dead-giveaway to the digital provenance of that sound layer. Ah, rigid loops—so much for breathing, fluidity, moment form, and all the other good things in life. My loop detector gently swung into the red on several other occasions as well, structural weak-spots that break the spell I prefer to be under as a listener. I say "gently" because, you know, Sawako's parts were very generally quite appealing and subtle—and it was a uniformly low-volume set—but the music's in the details and those digital loop transitions are a real drag.

As much as I felt Sawako's barbaric digitalia sometimes intruded on Howie's delicate gestures, I have to report an absolutely marvelous and surprising perceptual flip-flop that occurred towards the end of the first piece! Check this out. Sawako generated something like a gentle breeze of indistinct crackles with the surface density of low-to-medium rainfall, sustaining it for several gorgeous minutes, and I was so locked into the tranquil texture that when Howie issued a typical cassette moan midway through I suddenly thought "fuck—what an annoying and disruptive sound"! So in that case Howie was the barbaric one! Talk about perceptual relativity! Incidentally, Sawako's brilliant passage there sadly degenerated after a few minutes when a typical transparent loop structure reared its ugly head.

The brief second piece was quite different and even more focused and subtle than the first. There was an incredible section where Sawako gave Howie's abstract crackles a glorious backdrop of extremely quiet continuous tones on the gentle, easy-listening edge of the sine wave prototype. Of course in this day and age that's kind of like playing hot speed-metal riffs, but hot is hot and it was hot. It was slamming. According to my notes, during this piece Howie created a "crawling, whirling, crackling miracle" about which I'm unable to offer further clarification. Still clear in my memory, though, is the feeling I had for a long stretch that the negative space between their relaxed gestures issued in a slow sequence—sometimes coming in alternation—could've been the ending of the piece each time. To me one of the most beautiful experiences in music is the quietude and resolution of a potential ending that becomes a patient pause instead of an actual ending. It's one of the major drawbacks to improvisation as a compositional methodology that these sorts of passages are so difficult to achieve because of extraneous psychological factors.

I do have one gripe about their set. It was way too short. I know that's a cliched form of praise, but I mean it very literally here as a complaint, not praise. They went to all the trouble of working on their craft for x years and setting up a gig and transporting themselves and their equipment, and the audience went to whatever lengths necessary to attend, only to play one medium-length piece and then act like they were done, only submitting to a second "short piece" (and it actually was short!) as if they were imposing on the audience and testing the boundaries of human decency. I mean, come on, gimme a break guys, play your music! It's what the audience came for. This was an exciting combination that surely has the creative resources to improvise for an hour or so and sustain or even surpass the level of innovative and riveting music they reached in that brief set. Geez, at least 45 minutes would be reasonable. The way I see it, Howie is modest to a fault about his music and doesn't accept the fact that an audience really wants to hear a full presentation of it. That's just my impression; if there's some deep conceptual justification for this practice I look forward to hearing about it. I can't speak for anyone else, but I think he has a lot more to say musically than anyone else I've ever seen him share a bill with, which includes some musicians I rather enjoy. I'm sure everyone can think of examples where a set went on too long, and too much of a great thing ceases to be great. Perhaps this habit (shared by his BSC comrades I might add), is some kind of over-compensation for this common problem as part and parcel of the palpable reaction in actual musical content against the perceived excesses of prior improv traditions. It's a shame, because there's just so much variety in his performance that a mere 20-30 minutes (I'm guessing Wednesday's set was somewhere around 25 minutes at most but I really have no facts to refer to) doesn't even begin to reach any kind of cognitive saturation point. I think Bhob Rainey's standard 20-minute solo set length is just right, but that's because of specific musical concepts of time he deals with that are quite unusual and unlike Howie's music, which deals with longer units at a basic vocabulary level and works well stretched out—he deals more in texture and less in drama. When I listen to Bhob's solo music on record, I tend to take it in small chunks like his concerts, but when I listen to Howie's Cassette Recordings 98-04 or Songs I often go for a full repeat spin. In any case, a little bit goes a long way for all these BSC cats, and that's meant as pure praise, so I can't complain too much.

Reflecting on my experiences seeing Howie live, this is the first time I've seen him do a duo since becoming a serious fan in the BSC-era, which really began for me personally 17 months ago when I finally saw and heard that revolutionary ensemble for the first time—during this period I've seen three BSC gigs, three solo gigs, and five wildly diverse ensemble sets during High Zero 2004. The duo is really a great format to get an earful of someone's vocabulary while also being able to thoroughly and directly compare it to their partner. Interestingly, in the years preceding my current focused interest in his work, I only saw two performances, but both were duos that left extremely strong impressions on me. The first one was so far back in the dim and distant past I'm unable to pinpoint the date beyond something in the 1997-98 neighborhood, at which time I had no clue about the whole Boston scene and was still just into avant-jazz and Euro-improv and pretty innocent of the experimental improv universe in general. Despite finding almost nothing of interest musically during the marathon all-night continuous film + improv event at the legendary and long-defunct Astrocade in Philadelphia organized by Ian Nagoski—whose guru-hood was already doubling or tripling his biological years—I still remember this clean-cut guy going ape-shit leaning over a table and attacking knobs and buttons like a boxer and creating these violent rhythms. The music passed way over my head, but the visual spectacle was unforgettable and seeped well into my subconscious. It was Howie in duo with another great Boston artist, Brendan Murray. This was action music in a much deeper sense than the conceptual nuggets of Nam June Paik and his crowd in the 60s. (I vaguely recall a bizarre trumpet player at a different point that night, and I'm just now registering the thought that it was Greg Kelley several years before I had the faintest inkling of Nmperign, and in a duo with Vic if I'm not mistaken!)

Several years later, late 2000 perhaps, I saw something that I still talk about with wild-eyed enthusiasm to this very day, a Stelzer/Talbot duo at the Red Room. (There were two other great sets that night too, including a wonderful Seth Cluett solo of meditatively rubbing things on two pieces of amplified glass.) This was improvised music in a category far removed from anything I've seen before or since. I've never seen such uncanny timing between two people freely improvising. They played completely insane, violent, explosive music that had rhythmic clarity and complexity, wild dynamic variation, and radical timbres—it was like the old Batman TV show when they'd have a thrilling sequence of onomatopoeia bursting on the screen—but somehow they were always together and would play these short "songs" with jaw-dropping perfect endings as if they were two people riding bikes and getting smashed by a Mack truck only to fly through the air, bounce off hoods and windshields, twist and contort every which way, and then land on their feet unscathed at the same time standing next to each other to take a bow. It was unreal. (Their duo disc Songs doesn't really capture that feeling much at all, but it does capture a different kind of interaction that's almost as great. I think the trios with Vic are closer to what I saw that night, but only in snatches.) The only musician I can imagine achieving something that explosive and rhythmically advanced is Mats Gustafsson, but as far as a duo, I'm not sure who would fit the bill, although his mega-classic trio disc with Zerang and Blonk has some stuff in that direction, albeit at low volumes. Hmm, why not Howie? Yes, a Stelzer/Gustafsson duo—why didn't this happen a long time ago, and if it did, can someone please tell me about it?!

I'm proud to be able to present a vintage, rare photo of this legendary performance here! As a matter of considerable significance in the history of balloon music, note that Jason Talbot is blowing on a balloon scrap somehow fashioned into a reed-like arrangement with the turntable transducer. Like all balloon-sourced sounds, it was incredible and I believe the same technique appears on Songs. Note that they are both standing; the set featured a great deal of bodily movement as they experienced the exciting rhythms in a manner not unlike punk rock musicians. At the end of each piece, they'd straighten their spines a bit, look up and smile together, then lurch into another piece and resume jerking motions while hunched over their machines. The audience went wild, if memory serves me correctly.

Well, I've only scratched the surface of the massive topic of Howard Stelzer, and there's much that I'd rather leave to more knowledgeable commentators. I should also emphasize that outside of his own music, there's precious little overlap in our musical taste. I find his own music a thousand times more interesting than 98% of the music he promotes or enthuses over, assuming I've even heard it, which is rarely the case. (Among that 2% is the warped and mind-warping masterpiece by Nerve Net Noise he released on Intransitive, one of my most prized possessions.) In fact, I strongly suspect that whatever I'm hearing in his music is not at all what he hears or intends to be heard, and that my loquacious celebration of his music is a disservice and misrepresentation. What I'd like to do now is examine a broader context for his medium of cassette deconstructionism by way of contrast with the other two significant cassette-based musicians I've recently experienced live, Aki Onda and Gust Burns.

Despite a tabletop cluttered with cheap cassettes and portable players—which can be seen above—Onda's methodology and music bear only a faint passing resemblance to Howie's. He began the set by simply playing a field recording of birds or the like for a few minutes; nice stuff I suppose, but a reflection of the cassette medium only to the extent of transparent functionality. I may have been the only person in the audience who lives on 20 acres of diverse and flourishing flora and fauna and wakes up most mornings to densely layered birdsong from a great many species. I hope the field recordings were more interesting to the city folks who inhabit windowless shoeboxes or the like. After the field recording warmup he jumped into what turned out to be his standard operating mode: lots of loops and electronic processing. Onda immediately revelead his love for echo effects and a sense of restraint and nuance comparable to a 70s funk-pop album. We're talking echo echo ECHO eCHO Echo, echo echo echo, Eeeeeeecho, eeeecho, eechochocho, eeeecho, echo echo echo, echo, eecho, eeecho, eeeecho, eeeeecho, eeeeeecho, echo echo echo... Basically, the content of his music was generated primarily by his processing equipment and only mildly augmented by cassette-isms as one of many sound resources. You'll note yet more snazzy and elegant devices with knobs and buttons below. Whatever he was doing with all those machines was technically very clever and polished. He was able to pretty much just stand around most of the time with lots of thick and repetitive sound coming out of his powerful amps.

Like Howie, however, he did play a walkman in a direct physical way as reconstructed instrument in many sections, though it was closer to rock tambourine than the Frith/Rowe/Gustafsson/Kelley instrumentalism Howie deals in. He had one sound and he used it as a kind of periodic riff to accent his canned looping textures, and when he got into a groove with it he achieved something like swaying dance pop without any beats or melodies. In fact, I found it entirely pleasant and that bit reminded me of the stunning and truly experimental pop masterpiece he made a few years ago with Haco and Ikue Mori that was released just a few months ago on Tzadik under the group name Synapse, on which I find it difficult to identify his specific contributions, a kind of mystery that I think attests to the wonderful chemistry between the three eccentric veterans. Come to think of it, I saw that trio do their sole concert presentation of that material at Tonic at the time of the recording sessions, which was really fabulous, but I really have no memory of Onda's techniques then. I hear his performances are quite diverse, and he's certainly an accomplished technician who has the chops to work in several directions.

There was one fairly brief piece in the middle of his set that really enraptured me, an insane, loud, dense collage of something resembling birdsong that was abruptly and prematurely cut off after sustaining a Dumitrescu-like level of intensity for something in the 3-5 minute range. I really don't know what those sounds were or how they were being presented, but to me they blurred the distinction between a swarm of blackbirds (thousands of which I occasionally hear right in front of my house in their loud, frightening, asynchronous chorus) and some kind of symphony of cassette squeals with a vocal or birdsongish quality. It was like a Yasunao Tone deluge without glitches. Just unbelievable, mind-blowing stuff, and a total shock and contrast to the other parts of the set. I would love to hear that extended over a CD-length piece (a la Tone's Solo for Wounded CD, a mesmerizing and tear-jerkingly beautiful continuous assault of densely-layered rippling microrhythms).

I will have to really strain here to eke out some further positive remarks and not commit some kind of social faux pas like mentioning the distinct and persistent boredom I experienced for most of the set. Let's see, he seems to have some kind of clever color coding for his cassettes, which are very charming to look at. Onda is, after all, a noted visual artist. I wonder if that's Keiko doing the tapping or two separate things? Hmm, if he takes requests and appears on another bill with Howie in the future, I think I'll go for a mix of the tapping and the African stuff. With some extra echo.

Compared to Howie, Onda's work in the set I witnessed was not an exploration of timbre and phrasing constrained by the intrinsic qualities of the cassette medium to any significant extent. The medium functioned more as a quirky sampling method than a source of content. The case of Gust Burns is somewhere in between the two in terms of a continuum between playback transparency and medium-as-message deconstruction. In terms of extra-cassette-based methodology, the polar divide between Onda's gadget-intensive maximalism and Howie's stripped-down minimalism is even more dramatic for Gust, who deals with the medium in about the simplest way possible, just a few cassette players and some cassettes, no mixer, no effects units, no microphone relays. Heck, he even foregoes a table and just does his business on the floor in the style of Michael Johnsen or Chris Cooper, at least when I saw him.

On April 15, 2005 at The Rotunda in Philadelphia, I had the pleasure of attending one of Jack Wright's Nonet mini-festivals and discovering Gust's astonishing craft. Alongside concerts by Joe Maneri, PAK, and Trockeneis, that night was the glowing highlight of my live music experiences in 2005 so far, several large chunks of infinitely subtle music about as good as anything I've heard in the lowercase vein (even though two of the six sets were mediocre), which reflected the talents of Gust in equal measure to those of Jack Wright (saxes), Andrew Lafkas (doublebass), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Catherine Pancake (dry ice, percussion), and Chris Forsyth (electric guitar). It was this sextet that spun a magically delicate weave of inobtrusive but timbrally intoxicating sounds, and it was a spell-binding, miraculous trio with Jack and Chris that served as my very first reception of Gust's sound gifts. I deeply regret not documenting the many riches of that evening at the time, especially since the winds of fate blew recording equipment out of the grasp of the participants, and alas the moment has long passed, but I have both vivid memories and copious notes with which to depict the timely and germane matter of Gust's cassette improvisation.

I was rather taken aback to see this fellow crouched over some cassette decks in the trio set—I'd never imagined there was anyone else in the world doing anything like Howie, though now I suspect a few more cassette artists are lurking out there and I hope to see their names in the Commentellen below. Not hearing anything like Howie's sound palette coming from his corner, the incredibly quiet and sparse music left me at a loss to perceptually isolate his contributions at first, and I had the great pleasure of experiencing a musical illusion of sorts when I began hearing some ephemeral and thrilling soft squeaky sounds that I took to be an epiphenomenal layer of saxophone sound coming from Jack, who I'd grown well accustomed to hearing rather surprising sounds from, especially in the wake of his monumental close-miked 2004 solo recordings. Well, imagine my delight to suddenly realize it was Gust's tapes and not Jack! So Gust and my ears were off to a very auspicious start. At other points Gust dealt in a vocabulary that was strikingly similar to Michel Doneda and Alessandro Bosetti. I feel like crying that this piece wasn't recorded, because it would send shockwaves around the lowercase-improv community. All three were introducing totally fresh sounds with a unity of structural intent and perfect dynamic and spatial balance that didn't falter for a second, and Chris offered the most ingenious and subtle lowercase guitar improvising I've ever witnessed, with some very fresh techniques (if you can believe that!) that were as revelatory as Gust's thin traces of sound. It was as if the sounds of all three players were moving around the room together through the air and gracefully, slowly merging over in one corner or another, only to split into geometrically elegant skew lines as they gently bounced off a wall with the timing of a paradiddle. Well, I suppose the beautiful and spacious physical environment of The Rotunda and the irreplicable psychoacoustic particularities of my listening experience would be lost to a recording and the shockwaves really belong to us whose ears were in those moments.

What revealed itself in this set was Gust's basic technique of using a cassette player as a sampler, but with a sense of simplicity, directness, and subtlety in stark contrast to Aki Onda's ambitious and baroque looping headlines. Gust dealt with volume at the level of modulating actual sound content; in other words, his sounds were sometimes so soft they could only be heard as a poetic shadow of indistinct whispering. He also used the built-in old-fashioned thumbwheel volume control of the cassette players to control his phrasal timing. Further, he dealt with simultaneously controlling multiple players and the resulting direct sound combinations. These techniques are trivial compared to Howie's virtuosity, but what Gust was offering was an equally advanced musical sensibility in brilliant service of the musical whole. Simplicity of technique, but virtuosity of ear and intention. As with most of Jack's Nonet events, there was a shared understanding that the lowercase aesthetic would be favored, as Jack conceives of these as a type of workshop for research and development among a group of like-minded improvisors. As such, I imagine Gust would reveal a very different musical personality in other contexts. He is, in fact, originally and still a pianist in equal measure to a tape-smith.

Much like Howie, however, though to a lesser extent, Gust also dealt with gentle subversions of the players' ordinary functions, manually manipulating the speed of playback and the conditions of the head/tape interface inside the machine. He also made significant use of tuning forks, seeking the tape head for their transduction.

Much to my shock, when I exchanged my first words with him between sets and Howie's name burst from my lips, I learned that Gust had never even heard the slightest rumour of such a fellow as the granddaddy of cassette improv we have turned our attention to today. Querying repeatedly in disbelief I had to accept that this was a truly independent stream of musical development slowly meshing with the Baltimore/Boston improv corridor that's been thriving for the past decade. Gust mentioned that his close associate Bryan Eubanks splits his efforts between saxophones and some kind of cassette thing, but sadly I haven't yet crossed paths with this well-regarded member of Jack's circle and Nonet alumnus. Gust appears to come from an especially obscure and marginalized circle of US improvisors in the non-Californian Western half of the country, brought to my fair region of the Mid-Atlantic by virtue of Jack and Andrew's enterprising spirit of community and current locus of focus in the Philly/NYC area, but it would appear that the burgeoning Boston improv scene has suffered a lack of exposure in those flourishing hinterlands of self-sufficient musical experimentalism. Actually, I've yet to garner much in the way of facts as to these geographically underpriviledged pockets of fascinating improvisors Jack has brought into the fold through his unrelenting travels over the years, so I may be distorting the case a bit and we can look forward to future expositions of the American improv underground from the participants themselves and curious listeners like myself. There is a minor subcultural revolution unfolding beneath our noses I suspect.

I hesitate to dish out wild-eyed praise for someone based on only one encounter with their work, but over the course of the evening I heard Gust in three distinct ensemble configurations and he didn't make a single fruitless gesture. The sextet set mentioned above was a defining moment in the current era of free improvisation and a very personal milestone for me as I observed six people from very different backgrounds and affiliations, all of whom besides Gust I've been nourishing an intimate engagement with as a listener, quite intensely so for many years in the cases of Jack, Nate, and Catherine, create a truly new form of music with complete aesthetic unity. There's a wealth of complex historical factors that led up to this point, but first and foremost it's the galvanizing efforts of Jack Wright that deserve credit for the current situation of profound improvisational fertility, especially in the lowercase direction. The sextet piece was much like the BSC at their most restrained, and of course it's Bhob Rainey, Greg Kelley, James Coleman, and others from that iconic ensemble of the current era that planted many seeds in the American underground before the lowercase aesthetic became an ordinary option for the average improvisor. In fact, the BSC's mighty man on the big fiddle, Mike Bullock, was a participant in this very same evening, and along with his intimate colleagues Dave Gross and Tucker Dulin, he participated in an unfocused nonet set that had its moments, including a lovely episode of contextually surprising lyrical extroversion from Dave. It was a momentous gathering of talent, and in my focus on Gust I'm certainly doing an injustice to the event in its rich totality.

I'm absolutely thrilled that the cassette concept has two distinctive practitioners in the same overarching musical community, just like the vital multiple voices on saxophone, trumpet, percussion, doublebass, etc that give this community—which is truly a global community—it's guarantee of endless permutational profit. Let's hope for a few more inspired cassette deconstructionists in the near future. While we're at it, we could use a lot more balloonists and daxophonists! These are all much cheaper than laptops and samplers if it helps the cause! In fact, I've got some wacky cassettes from my youth I'd be happy to pass along to anyone pressed for source material!

~Michael Anton Parker

Check out Howie's great Listed feature on Dusted!