New Rituals for Voice, Cello, and Percussion

Much text will unfold about two human beings who put their indelible stamp on these three instruments, but my mock-clinical title above is not meant lightly. When it comes to accounting for my tremendous enjoyment of Tatsuya Nakatani and Audrey Chen's duo music, the equations just won't come close to adding up if I don't outright acknowledge my overriding attraction to the acoustic timbres inhering in a human voice, bowed strings, drums, and metallophones. In an era where non-electrically-dependent sounds are largely passe to the avant-garde, such especially common instruments hardly seem to merit any special attention. Yet these timbres in combination are surely much rarer than most electrically-dependent timbres. The point is so simple that it's difficult to truly register its significance.

I take the view that all music derives from two basic sources: the voice and the strike. I wish there was a more elegant word for it, but "strike" simply refers to the class of arm rotations exemplified by hitting a drum and its resulting class of sounds with rapid onsets and short durations. Of course these sound categories have been blurred for millenia, but when I hear sustained tones from frictional instruments and wind instruments I like to remind myself they are mere variations on the ultimate source of sonority, the human voice, which can never be matched in its flexibility and integration with the human physiological experience. And when we step back from the stylizations of pitch and timbre that have been fruitfully imposed on basic sound categories like singing and striking, we can imagine the basic possibilities for sound-mediated experience that humans have accessed across time and culture.

I like to imagine that some relatively direct communion with sound infused by drama and ritual was a mainstay in earlier human eras. The Nakatani-Chen Duo sometimes exemplifies a prototype of current free improv that seems to bypass the aesthetic preoccupations of intervening years. I'm struggling to understand the connections between a lot of music that has been moving me deeply these days, recent improv like Trockeneis (debut recording in the works), the Doneda/Wright/Nakatani trio (From Between), James Coleman's Zuihitsu, the BSC, etc, older notational music like Iancu Dumitrescu, Ana-Marie Avram, Giacinto Scelsi, and Luigi Nono, and traditional music from places like Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Middle East. I tend to think there's been a movement in some quarters of free improv towards a specific concept of form that's engendered a new category of experience and filled a certain aesthetic gap in the postmodern era of unrestricted sound combination. I'd argue that free improv typically assumes either moment form, narrative form, or drone form. I'd like to add ritual form to the list, but it's hardly been typical in my experience.

Tatsuya Nakatani's signature style is derived from three basic categories of percussion: metallophones like gongs, cymbals, and Tibetan singing bowls, all of which are both bowed and struck, a palette of rubbing, buzzing, and scraping sounds, and lastly and least distinctively, drums. His Green Report solo percussion albums play like studies in reconciliation between Buddhist rituals and the post-Oxley avant-garde. But unlike the metallophone-and-drum-based music practiced in a symbolically-mediated cultural context, contemporary music is usually presented as an end in itself, not the soundtrack to drama in some other experiential medium. Human drama is easy to find though; it's always been a staple stratum in free improv as a performer navigates a typically under-constrained set of possibilities for sound-action from moment to moment. What I perceive in Audrey Chen's improvisation is something like a tangible relationship between sound-action and psycho-drama, a aesthetic in which the private experience of the performer is magnified, not masked in service of an abstract expressive medium. It's this same distinction that accounts for the gap separating post-Butoh dance and the more clinical and schooled branches of abstract dance in my experience.

On Friday in Baltimore I had the pleasure of partaking in a much more prosaic sort of ritual, the celebration of a record release and, more importantly, the formal entry of Audrey Chen into the market of public music documentation. The occasion was arguably overdue, as Audrey has for several years been a prolific and consistent improvisor in the Baltimore scene with a distinctive and refined vocabulary synthesizing voice, cello, and extra-auditory performance concepts. The Nakatani-Chen Duo performed two sets of music and offered Limn for sale, a release on Tatsuya's own label, H&H Production. Tatusya is familiar to most improv listeners through his work on about 40 releases from about 15 labels, including a handful of exceptionally consequential recordings, but Audrey has remained something of a secret treasure of the Baltimore improv scene, though recent forays to Poland, Russia, China, Japan, Australia, NYC, and Texas have uniformly found enthusiastic audiences. As a regular attendee of Baltimore's legendary Red Room, the musical test tube in which Audrey first brewed her art, I must admit I'm guilty of taking her talents for granted over the past few years. A passionate, intense, gripping performance from Audrey Chen in combination with all sorts of other improvisors has become something of a reliable occurrence I've rarely felt compelled to comment on, but if I'm to be completely honest, I can barely think of a few sets that have been anything less than deeply impressive. By now I've built up a backlog of enthusiasm I'm pleased to address on this splendid occasion of Friday's performance and my serious engagement with the unfalteringly brilliant work documented on Limn.

You'll have to pardon any journalistic excess in my remarks here, but I think the foremost priority for anyone who steps forward to offer public commentary on music is to depict the community and activity they know intimately as a participant. Ideally, every city around the world would have its own handful of local enthusiasts willing to share the news of creative culture they experience first-hand, neutralizing the unfortunate tendency for discourse on art to parlay disproportionate canonizing attention to the people and places that happen to represent the ordinary intimate experiences of the small group of commentators who happen to dominate discourse. You won't find me trying to do justice to the great figures of the London, Vienna, or Tokyo scenes; by and large I don't know those people and the task should fall to the locals who do. And I won't put my energies into giving the scoop on the Coltranes, Sun Ras, and Schlippenbachs of the world. It would be a tragedy if documentation and discourse kept scraping the same barrel when every time and place can readily supply its own great art worthy of equal celebration. It's a matter of sheer pleasure and pride when something from my little corner of the world inspires me enough to report it to the international community, so let me fill you on the great work of Tatsuya Nakatani and Audrey Chen, whose restless creative paths are thoroughly tangled up my with my own restless path as a listener.

Tatsuya spent the first 25 years of his life in Japan, Osaka to be specific, where he enjoyed mentorship from Yasuhiro Yoshigaki (the great drumkitter of Altered States, Shibusashirazu Orchestra, Betsuni Nanmo Klezmer, ROVO, and innumerable Yoshihide Otomo projects like Ground Zero and ONJQ). A misfit in Japanese society, the last ten years of his life have been spent in the US and probably the rest will be as well. In his first phase of American residency he found a niche in the nascent lowercase improv scene in Boston, and contributed to some of the key documents of that scene like the first two Nmperign albums on Twisted Village, James Coleman's Zuihitsu on Sedimental, and Michael Bullock's magnificent free jazz anomaly There the Eye Goes Not on Tautology. After a musically inactive period living in Philadelphia for about a year because of his then-wife's job, he started a new life in New York City around 2001 or so, throwing himself into as many new musical situations he could find, consciously trying to establish an identity as a jazz drummer for the first time in his life, assiduously developing his bowed metal vocabulary with a regular schedule of solitary subway busking, playing weekly above-ground free jazz duos with Assif Tsahar at the heavily trafficked Astor plaza subway stop in the NYU neighborhood of Manhattan, gigging regularly with a bossanova guitar trio, and otherwise generally carrying on the tradition of open-ended improvisational encounters he'd fallen into while a Bostonian. After establishing a studio in the Bronx, H&H Production, he enjoyed a productive phase of recording and immersion in a self-created circle of activity mingling music and dance. Never pausing for a second, in between his local activities in the city he squeezed all manner of tours, solo and otherwise (even including a curious stint as the drummer for noise-psych group The Psychic Paramount on a European tour supporting Acid Mothers Temple and other earplug spectacles). After realizing he was throwing money away paying rent in the Bronx while spending so much time on tour, he purchased a home in Easton, PA and moved there a few weeks ago, following the lead of his colleagues Dan DeChellis and Jack Wright who had also been attracted to this charming town at the PA/NJ border because of the reasonable hour-and-a-half drive into the big city and the town's heavily NYC-artist-oriented demographic. With this development, the storied Nakatani/Wright collaboration is sure to deliver some weighty new chapters.

I vividly recall the first time I heard Tatusya. I'd reckon it was about five years ago and he played a high-energy blowout with none other than Jack Wright at a tiny and fabulously funky coffee shop in West Philly where as many as five people would gather to hear the latest sounds in free improv during the shop's short-lived run. After digging his somewhat unfocused but intriguing percussive palette and enjoying a memorably animated and comical conversation, I knew we'd cross paths plenty often, which is precisely what happened. By now I've got a surplus of evidence that he's a die-hard inclusivist, from watching him go apeshit and send his sundry small objects flying across his drumkit dueling Peter Brötzmann to beholding him slowly select one gorgeous, quiet sound at a time in trio with James Coleman and Liz Tonne (possibly the most transcendentally beautiful live music I've experienced), to hearing him get solemn in duo with Kenta Nagai's slivers of guitar feedback while seeing post-Butoh dancer Zach Fuller blow my mind. But for all his multi-directionality, Tatsuya has really settled into a style I consider his comfort zone, and it's well represented by Limn and the two fabulous recent releases on Rossbin and Public Eyesore by Blue Collar, an enigmatic and amorphous trio with trumpeter Nate Wooley and trombonist Steve Swell.

I don't remember the first time I saw Audrey. She suddenly became a regular presence in the Baltimore improv scene about three years ago and had a number of collaborations that would pop up on bills at the Red Room and elsewhere. Until some of her extraordinary recent accomplishments, especially with Trockeneis, my favorite performance was a trio with fellow Baltimore heavyweights Tom Boram on analog synth and Catherine Pancake on drumkit at the Red Room at least two years ago. It was pointillistic, rapid-fire, stop-on-a-dime free improv begging a favorable comparison to the UK's devastating Konk Pack (Lehn/Hodgkinson/Turner) that brought out the best in all three players. The basic scoop on this young and decidedly uninhibited vocalist/cellist was that she'd done the whole conservatory thing, discovered free improv and had a rapid conversion.

One of the little-known secrets to the incredibly fruitful Baltimore experimental improv scene is a long-running monthly institution called The Crapshoot, basically an improv workshop open to anybody who brings an instrument, where players gather to listen and experiment with each other in a focused setting, and improv newbies get a chance to rub elbows with scene architects and veterans like John Berndt, Neil Feather, Catherine Pancake, and Bob Wagner. This simple and sustained tradition has constantly renewed the pool of passionate and idiosyncratic experimentalists that make the scene so endlessly fresh and fascinating, and it was an incubator for Audrey as a recent Peabody grad who'd never been exposed to improv before and suddenly fell in with this motley crowd of non-careerist sound pranksters. One of her early collaborators was Baltimore percussionist Wes Mattheu and she recounts one of the turning points in her tentative foray into this parallel musical universe:

I had a very cathartic experience and started to consider changing over completely to free-improvised music. The first gig that really did that for me was my first Red Room gig with Wes Mattheu. I ran the Baltimore marathon (my first marathon) that morning and was completely ruined. Huge physical and emotional experience. That night I was barely able to get there. And sat on stage from about 7:30 when I got there until I started because I was too sore to get up. Playing that night felt phenomenal to me. Some deep places never before accessed.

Thinking back to some of her early performances is an object lesson in improv musicology. The simple truth is that she intuitively knew the music right out of the gate and could set aside her chops and habits to have spontaneous sound exchanges driven by nothing more than immersion in the moment. Some people just have that spirit and don't need guidance or practice or exposure to the existing body of work in improvised music. That's not to say she hasn't refined her playing, gaining much more precise control over extended techniques and shaking off a few stubborn residues of her formal training, but there's something universal and ahistorical about free improv and I think Audrey is proof.

In all fairness, I do have my biases. Free improv vocal music is a primary musical interest for me; I do tend to favor the higher pitch range of female voices; and I heavily favor the kinds of edgy acoustic timbres she usually generates on cello, lots of scraping, scratching, and rubbing sounds. I'm very easy to please when it comes to these sorts of sounds. This is the point I tried to emphasize from the get-go above: all this bowing, scraping, rubbing, vocalizing, etc is just my cup of tea. I like to call it "harsh acoustic music". I'm more than happy to be pigeonholed and I won't pretend this stuff is for eveyone.

On the other hand, Audrey has the dexterity, intonational savvy, and performance confidence on both her instruments that doesn't automatically accompany a gourmet sound vocabulary. At 28 years of age, she's been playing cello for 20 years and started voice lessons about 15 years ago. Born near Chicago, she moved a lot as a kid and settled in New Hampshire around 8 years old, making the hike over to the New England Conservatory every weekend for their prep program as a teenager and moving to NYC to attend The Manhattan School of Music after high school. After getting kicked out, she did a stint at Columbia University studying art and eventually wound up back on the music track when she moved to Baltimore to study with Phyllis Bryn-Julson at Peabody. It's hard for Peabody students not to be aware of and receptive to the thriving avant-garde music scene in Baltimore, yet they do an awfully good job at it; Audrey's one of the very few successful crossovers. (The Baltimore scene as we know it today didn't actually exist back when Greg Kelley did his woodshedding years at the insular conservatory.)

As many musicians like to emphasize, craft and chops count for a lot in free improvisation, and as other folks like to emphasize, they're often best ignored. Audrey tends to run the gamut from virtuosity to anti-virtuosity, with a definite tendency towards the latter. She's fully in tune with the kind of collective, non-idiomatic improv aesthetic in which instrumental virtuosity is much less significant than compositional virtuosity, choosing good sounds at good times. She rarely does anything flashy or superficially virtuosic. Nevertheless, especially with her voice, there are occasional moments when she fully exploits the resources of her instrumental craft to the point of stunning soloistic peaks. A great example is a passage from "Trilling" on Limn, about twenty seconds of high-pitched corruscations like Evan Parker tying notes into dense ribbons with his soprano sax. Even better, Audrey weaves her cello into the passage to create an ecstatic swirl of sound. This movement runs out of steam in the most beautiful way, the high-energy swirls suddenly giving way to a moment of delicate circular cello whimpers. It's tiny magical moments like this that really excite me listening to free improv, the little ruptures in the fabric of music where (quasi-pure) sound and (quasi-pure) being come into ephemeral contact.

Another example of Audrey flat-out tearing the shit up is the bubbling babbling on "Liplash"—the kind of sounds that would be comedic if they weren't delivered with such rapid-fire, precise, ululating, dizzying virtuosity. The entire 4-minutes of this piece are in classic narrative form, basically a continuous solo with one explosive voice lick after another, Tatsuya simply offering some mid-tempo rolling tom accompaniment. It's hot stuff. But this kind of narrative virtuosity is not Audrey's primary aesthetic mode; she's more inclined to put subtle, faint gestures on center stage, like those delicate cello notes in "Trilling" or the pinched labial fricatives in "Bulk Flow" that beautifully blend into Tatsuya's wire-thin quiet rubbed or bowed tones between 2:37 and 2:51. One of the highlights on Friday was a duo-as-trio section where Audrey's meditative soft circular caresses of cello with bow slowed time; her indistinct whispers nearly froze time, and Tatsuya's isolated soft slivers of bowed Tibetan singing bowls pushed time to its vanishing point. It's when moments like these are nursed that I feel a truly new improv aesthetic is being developed and the musical invitation of James Coleman's Zuihitsu is finally being accepted. The most focused context for Audrey's increasing skill as a lowercase ritualist is Trockeneis, but the Nakatani-Chen Duo accomodates this aesthetic as comfortably as it leaves no obstacles to old-school improv action. As Jason Willett pointed out to me in discussion of the performance, their soft, sparse passages tend to come not from any predetermined aesthetic agenda (a norm in lowercase improv), but rather from the natural ebb and flow of human action, a simple feeling of intense exhalation and a respite from exertion. They play a music of steep and moderately frequent arches. Thankfully when they arrive at valleys they are comfortable enough with the scenery to linger, and they can readily convey an equal depth of gripping tension across the full spectrum of volume and density.

I see a ton of improv gigs and it's pretty obvious when a musician is in their comfort zone and when they're struggling to make sense of an awkward context. Being my first experience of the duo, Friday night confirmed what I predicted when I'd first heard the news of Audrey and Tatsuya's collaboration: ideal compatability, two improvisors working totally in their comfort zone, playing the music they really want to play, the music that just oozes from their bodies as if they've rehearsed every note. It's one of those pairings that cannot possibly go wrong. Sure, I saw them tread water for a minute or two on Friday, but there's not a single misfire on Limn, which is 15 tracks compiled from studio sessions in 2004 and 2005 and live recordings from three different gigs during their April 2005 Southern US tour, uniformly excellent sound quality throughout.

Tatsuya is fond of soft, rapid pitter-patters on his bass drum, keeping the pedalled mallet close to the drum to get a delicate, nervous, irregular pulse. In one passage during Friday's performance Audrey very nearly doubled that phrasing with some bilabial bass trills, their unison forward motion launching them into a speed drama of thrlling momentum and vocal acrobatics. There's a another kind of unison sputtering between Audrey's voice and Tatsuya's drums in [2:30-2:43] from "Owl Monkey".

Unison textures are also a staple for the duo, with some magical moments on Friday when Tatsuya's impossibly rich bowed gong soundfield enveloped Audrey's bowed cello. Inside, she shifted to a memorable passage of microtonal oscillations bowing just the first string and sliding up and down the string like an erhu. The thick, imperturbably sustained sounds Tatsuya gets from this simple technique fill the room with enough static energy to make drone-sters drool. That's one serious slab of bronze he lugs around, and a whole different ballgame than the bowed cymbal sounds that usually make me cringe in their anemic timbres and sloppy timing. I'm sure we've all sat through more embarassing episodes of rosin-failure than we'd care to recount. Tatsuya is one of the rare percussionists who's got a good handle on all manner of bowed metal, including cymbals, logging countless hours in refinement. He released a great 3" CD a few years ago called Bowed Metal Orchestra, a solo percussion epic that delivers on its title and served as something of a research report at the height of his bowed metal subway busking phase. In an especially revealing moment during this particular bowed gong passage on Friday, Tatsuya made a careful adjustment to his hand positions and instantly dropped the pitch much lower without falling off the sound plateau he'd established. His precise control over this technique is nearly as remarkable as the sound itself. After this gorgeous pitch drop, Audrey shifted into a squalling vocal attack and created a sublime high/low pitch contrast, neither layer devolving into distracting modulations.

Tatsuya often deals with a conventional sense of tension and climax, stacking layers of sound until he reaches aggressive levels of energy and density. The combination of the bass drum accelerations and the gong bowings is especially powerful, becoming a minimally modulated sonic torrent that sustains the intensity of a single phrase to rare durations. During one of these moments on Friday, Audrey picked up on precisely this feeling of stretched or held tension and unleashed an aggressive but static vocalization that further swelled the sound mass.

While I can't pinpoint any specific examples of this on Limn, Tatsuya did use one of his most extraordinary techniques on Friday, a way of blowing into a cymbal atop a drum to create astonishing reed-like timbres. The first time I heard it was during his solo performance last June in Manhattan (in an evening that also included solos by Mat and Joe Maneri and an historic trio performance marking Tatsuya's first-ever session with Joe that fulfilled a dream he'd had since his Boston days as one of many improvisors deeply inspired by the elder Maneri). The sound is so full-bodied, sonorous, and complex that it nearly defies belief even when he's generating it right before one's eyes, using nothing more than an ordinary small cymbal and a snare drum. I believe he discovered the technique during his December 2003 tour of Japan with Assif Tsahar and that it did not exist at the time of either From Between recording session, but it featured prominently in the Doneda/Wright/Nakatani tours of France and America earlier this year. I can recall moments in their Easton gig where it truly sounded like three saxophonists at once. As far as I know, he's the only person to ever use this technique, but hopefully it'll catch on soon with other percussionists. It's one of those miracle techniques that deserves to become standard, like Sean Meehan's blissful rubbed dowel tones. I learned on Friday that he's also succeeded in adapting the technique to one of his tiny accent drums, achieving something like a sopranino version of the altoish snare drum tones. This newer development is pictured on the right. On Friday there was a passage where Tatsuya was playing blown cymbal-snare and when Audrey added some oral flutters it truly had the feeling of a thrilling vocal duet!

Perhaps there's something so primally expressive and stylistically unbiased about Audrey's improvisation that it's especially well-matched with a percussionist who can summon the other half of music's genetic code as I construed it above, but one way or another the fact is she's found rewarding relationships with a veritable who's who of percussionists in her milieu, and I wouldn't make the case that Tatsuya has any more musical compatibility than some of the others. Surely the most important percussionist she's worked with, though not specifically in a duo context, is fellow Baltimorean secret treasure Paul Neidhardt. The two of them found their niche in the improv scene around the same time and have played together in various contexts, culminating in the formation of Trockeneis last year as a supergroup quintet of intimate improv partners and scene stalwarts (the others being Catherine Pancake on dry ice, Andy Hayleck on bowed metal, and Dan Breen on bowed metal). If I had to pick a single favorite Baltimore musician, it would have to be Paul. Quite inconspicuously and through a path of independent research and discovery, this modest lad just pushing into his fourth decade has arrived at a devastating synthesis of the techniques and sensibilities of Tatsuya Nakatani, Sean Meehan, and Lê Quan Ninh. In fact, the only other musicians I can cite in my own current improv percussion pantheon are Michael Zerang and Toshi Makihara. With the exception of Sean (the only one who's arguably transcended the tag "percussionist" anyway), Audrey has veritably made the rounds among these six heavyweights.

Aside from her earliest collaborations with Wes Mattheu, a percussionist I simply lack adequate familiarity with to characterize but who's left no hint of significant work in the handful of sets I've seen, her primary artistic collaborations with percussionists have been Paul, Toshi, and Tatsuya in that sequence, each providing a truly balanced and fruitful partnership. The work with Toshi was perhaps the most experimental and intense, foisting her into a serious consideration of the role of body language and movement in her art, as Toshi is often as much as a dancer as a percussionist when he performs, and he collaborates intensively with movement artists. What Audrey shares with Toshi—and also Barre Phillips, Lê Quan Ninh, Howard Stelzer, Michael Johnsen, Twig Harper, Thomas Lehn, Tom Boram, and other rarer than rare birds—is a whole separate layer of structurally significant performance semantics rooted in body language and movement aside from sound production. This is something different than the ordinary, though certainly not mundane, expressions of passion and immersion that accompany a great many musicians' instrumental actions, yet I don't wish to pretend the distinction is hard and fast.

One distinction that is rather more forthcoming is the simple concept of an abstract, underlying theatricality to most any musical performance in which a rich mapping can be registered between a performer's motor activities and sound vocabulary, allowing the audience experiencer to vicariously engage the drama of instrumentalism. This distinction has only become interesting in recent times with the sudden proliferation of instrumental paradigms (e.g. laptops) for which such mappings fail to obtain in the observer's perception. From a very general and empirical anthropological perspective, these sorts of extra-auditory subtexts displace engagement with sound logic in the informational content of audience experience to a much greater extent than is generally acknowledged, largely accounting for the continued popularity of live music in its transformed realizations that entail musical vacuity. Without pursuing this concept much further, let me simply articulate the hypothesis that it's a specific foregrounding and extrapolation of this humdrum performer-as-actor theatricality that accounts for certain of the above rare cases like Audrey and possibly could also be a source of general insight on ritual form. (Related thoughts on this topic appear in the recent Bagatellen discussion of dance in the From Between thread.)

With the critical role of visual components, Audrey's duo project with Toshi was simply not a good candidate to represent her to a wider audience through conventional audio documentation. With that rich and valuable project running its natural course, this new project with Tatsuya has a more straightforward musical character that has lent itself splendidly to an album experience and I think the two of them are in a similar stage of musical development—a subtle matter I'm not prepared to elaborate on—that makes the duo just the right thing for both of them at this moment in time. As far as Audrey's work with Paul, well, Trockeneis is frankly the most exciting development in any area of music in the past year in my opinon and will soon become a prominent topic in the improv world as they gear for an album release and international touring sooner or later (a tricky matter because Paul has been largely out of commission with a serious repetitive stress injury).

As far as other percussionists, last Fall during High Zero I witnessed first-hand the extraordinary fruits that came from Audrey and Ninh crossing paths. While a mere one-off collaboration, there is an unmistakable multi-modal rapport that will surely be further explored when opportunities arise. In my view, Ninh's artistry is leaps and bounds beyond any other percussionist and I could see Audrey was completely energized by the new challenges and possibilities he presented. I don't have any first-hand knowledge to share about Audrey's one-off collaborations with Michael Zerang, who's maintained an occasional interface with the Baltimore improv scene for many years, but as I understand it there was a solid mutual attraction to the sense of timbral adventure and split-second interactivity they both exemplify. As yet more evidence that Audrey has a knack for percussive collaboration, Audrey reported that her encounter with the ubiquitous Tony Buck in an Australian festival was marked by a strong musical rapport.

Limn is a showcase for diverse strategies from both Audrey and Tatsuya. The only longish cut at nine minutes, "Eating a Volcano", in itself is a pretty comprehensive document of Audrey's vocal work, highlights including the breathtakingly pure, otherworldly thread of sonority in [4:50-5:46], the small burst of Namtchylakian terror a few moment later, and the kinetic white-noisy breath-sound abstractions so familiar in recent improvised music at the end of the piece.

As a cellist, "Thumb and Heel" is an especially focused piece for her. For my tastes the greatest cello music ever recorded is Frances-Marie Uitti's 1978 interpretation of Giacinto Scelsi's Trilogia (originally issued in 1982 by Fore and reissued in 1992 by Etcetera—the classic session also featuring Ko-Tha, another stunner of a wholly different character), so I tend to use that as a reference point whenever I hear someone scour the essence of mid-range conventional cello tones like Audrey does in [1:00-3:01], which is not especially common. It doesn't have that trapped intensity and menacing slowness of the Uitti work, not to mention the perfect tone, and Audrey does lapse into some rhythmic cliches between 1:47 and 2:02, but it's a fabulous passage bookended on both sides by about a minute of equally rewarding cello in contrastive styles. Tatsuya's hovering layer of soft, resonant strikes on drums and singing bowls at the beginning of this piece captures him at his distinctive best. Another cello highlight comes in "Finch", where Audrey's high-pitched bow whistling over Tatsuya's characteristic bowed metal and bass drum tapping is almost daxophonic in its quivering spectral splendor worthy of Horatiu Radulescu's String Quartet no. 4.

"Kestral Beating" is a perfect two-minute miniature. For 22 seconds we're treated to dozens of Robair-worthy variations on rubbing and scraping—some of them could be either Tatsuya or Audrey for all I know—following which Audrey plays a vibrant, woozy melody with conventional cello tone. It would've been dreadful if she repeated it but instead is a warm, contrastive highlight in a rapid flow of ideas, her cello immediately nosediving into fractured scrabbling that winnows itself into static pulsing of rapid bowing oozing with frictional grease, Tatsuya preserving its velocity with a Lyttonesque flurry of strikes on small objects. Kinetic, linear-momentum-based improv with complex timbres. It's fast, exciting, and rich with sonic detail; it makes me very happy. "Sprawl" is another barnstormer with the sorts of wild and crazy freakouts that are stock-in-trade for the older generation of improvisors on female voice (Hirsch, Newton, Nichols, Schürch, etc), a good thing I certainly can't get enough of!

With all this talk of action-packed narrative, frantic scrabbling, and other familiar improv tendencies, where's that elusive ritual form? I'll offer "From the Ends" as a great example of its more obvious, straightforward realization, with a lush, microtonal cello melody mingling with booming and ringing punctuation from drums and Tibetan singing bowls. The ending is premature here, though (and it's the only slightly awkward moment of editing on the disc I might add); the music really needed to be sustained well past three minutes to fulfill its transportative mood of contemplative serenity.

As nice as that is, though, it's "Dragon's Den" that truly documents the ritualistic profundity I'm trying to chase down in these remarks. As my favorite piece on the disc, I want to extend a special thanks to none other than regular Bagatellen commentator Rob Cambre for making the recording in New Orleans (in the venue from whence the title derives) that made it possible for Tatsuya and Audrey to share this piece with folks like me who relish the opportunity to experience through our stereos these sorts of one-time-only creations that would simply not otherwise exist for us. "Dragon's Den" is the real magic, a Trockeneisian, slow, lingering drama of quiet sounds that are both edgy and gentle, sustaining its focus for six minutes before shifting into frantic mode for the last minute. There are dozens of special moments I'd like to talk about, but let me suffice to zoom in on one that totally blew my mind, [0:54-0:56]. This little miracle has two basic parts. The first is an accelerating dull trill I believe to have been created by scraping a cymbal across a drum head (it sounds exactly like a passage I recall from From Between), and the much shorter second part is a whistling sound retaining a slightly trilled character, suggesting it was part of the same physical gesture. In this brief two-second space there is careening curve of pitch and velocity that gives the episode a thrilling feeling of boomerangy call-and-response. On top of that, an independent short rubbed sound (possibly Audrey using a rubber mallet on the body of her cello or Tatsuya activating a different surface himself) appears in the middle of the first part, creating a second layer of motion that provides rubbery resistance to the motion from the first part of this section but dovetails with the slithering wisp of the second part. The kinetic complexity continues at a fever pitch for the next six seconds with a mysterious sequence of clipped rubs, but the metrical expansion and contraction of that brief episode don't resurface.

Though her falters are far from frequent, Audrey's achilles heel is a reliance on cliched patterns of post-European expressivity, and [4:12-4:19] in "Dragon's Den" is an example of it, a tiny deviation from the aesthetic she otherwise achieves magnificently in this piece. This is a criticism I've heard from a handful of people familiar with her work, but noticing something so brief and insignificant can really be taken as praise for her all other moments of impeccable creativity. And to be frank, how many free impov vocalists are there in the world who don't rely heavily on the affected modulations of post- bel canto singing? (Audrey does have some advantage having specialized in that humorous category of European music they call "early music" as a student, and had the good taste to perform Bach, Messiaen, and Crumb more than other stuff in the latter phase of her academic activities.) My two favorite improvisors on female voice are Liz Tonne and Carol Genetti, both with a small but momentous body of recorded work. Besides Audrey and Ami Yoshida, they're the only female vocalists I know of who have really taken the instrument into the new aesthetic developments of the current musical era. Of course Yoshida has gone the furthest, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but of course that's okay too because soap scum can also be beautiful. One of my favorite topics of conversation when I encounter improvisors visiting from remote places is whether their local scene boasts any good lowercase vocalists. I've had a lot of these sorts of conversations and typically I'll hear of a vocalist or two who's really fabulous, but upon further inquiry it always appears they work in more traditional aesthetic territory. It surprises me that there are so many reedists and brassers (I mean, by now the list is getting happily unmanageable!) who doggedly emphasize extended techniques and reject earlier aesthetic models, yet so few vocalists have followed this path. It is especially odd considering how many recent wind instrumentalists have drastically shifted their vocabularies towards the wind and away from the instrument. (One of the great things about Bagatellen is that the gaps in a writer's knowledge can be elegantly filled in by the Comentellen and any misleading generalizations can be gratefully disputed, so I eagerly await news of the world's obscure lowercase vocalists.)

In gloriously classic icing-on-the-cake format, this stunning disc not only has an extraordinary guest on two extraordinary tracks, but the tracks were wisely placed at the beginning and end to set the duo work in effective relief. Susan Alcorn is the kind of musician who could win over folks otherwise staunchly deaf to experimental music. Her rich, sustained tones on pedal steel guitar are sheer ear candy, but she finds the nuances and extensions of this instrument that possibly noone else has before. Her playing was a smash hit at last year's High Zero festival, where many of us, myself included, heard her for their first time and wondered why she hasn't been on the cover of every music magazine and the roster of every improv label. She's been on her pedal steel path for over 30 years, but her work is sadly underdocumented. Hopefully that'll change soon, and her six-gig East Coast tour with Tatsuya and Audrey starting next week is sure to yield a surplus of music well worth releasing. In the meantime, Limn offers a truly substantial ten-minutes of delicate magic from the trio. The opening track is a floating, beautiful work that finds Audrey in a rare but appropriate state of romantic, lush cello playing for a stretch, but the main thrust of the six-minute invocation is slow, textural blends between the three, with Tatsuya's rich bowed metal palette never crossing the line into excessive harshness. The sense of ritual and solemnity really registers when I tune into the bell-like attack segments of Susan's long notes. A whole album of this sort of thing would be a bit wearisome, but it's a stunning and ideal way to set the mood for the harsh acoustica to follow. The final track shows all three digging into the less comfortable and accessible territory that feels like a seamless endcap to a truly experimental album.

Tatsuya's H&H Production label deserves to recognized for presenting such great music with comparably great packaging, not exactly something we can take for granted these days unfortunately. Limn is presented in an elegant, beautiful gatefold sleeve that respects the physicality of the CD and pleases the eye with graphic design by Toshio Kajiwara and some stellar abstract cover art by none other than Audrey's own four-year-old son Iven! The entire production is flawless.

Having wrapped up my thoughts on Limn, I'd be remiss not to do the same for Friday's festivities, which had some commendable "packaging" of their own in the form of Audrey's carefully-constructed stage setup and lighting, evident in the photos above. The room was both spacious and intimate, one part of an expansive loft floor that houses Audrey's apartment and serves as an occasional gallery and performance space, as do other floors in the downtown building familiar to anyone in the Baltimore underground. By incredible coincidence the building is called "H&H", the same name given to Tatsuya's Bronx studio years before there was any connection between the two scenes! The concert was well-attended, about 40-50 people according to my quick head-count. While for many of the regulars on the scene a gig like this may have been fairly routine, a handful of folks were tasting the Baltimore avant-garde for the first time, lured to the event by a rare flurry of media coverage lavished upon Audrey that week, including a lengthy interview segment broadcast twice earlier in the day by a local NPR-affiliate radio station and a generous, lengthy feature article in the Baltimore City Paper (also published online). It was attention well-deserved.

As with select other happy occasions at this private loft, the yet far larger room adjoining the performance space hosted a gloriously complementary event afterwards, a sweaty, intense ritual of go-for-broke dancing conducted by DJ Jason Willett, a legendary figure in the Baltimore music scene whose connoisseurship of rare 60s and 70s groove, often of a fabulously fuzzed-out psychedelic nature, has nearly eclipsed his storied activities as a musician and impresario. Among all the mind-blowing obscurities that I couldn't begin to identify in my aerobic excesses, I can always count on staple classics like "Oh, How to Do Now" by The Monks and "Popcorn" by Hot Butter to give me a second-wind, and a Fela Kuti wind-down is another mandatory service the good DJ provides. Great improv and then great grooves—life should be like that all the time. It's nights like this when I can really endorse the slogan printed on public benches all over the city: "Baltimore, the greatest city on earth"!

~Michael Anton Parker

Special thanks to Stewart Mostofsky of The Red Room Collective for sharing some incredible photos: the lead photo of Audrey Chen, the duo photo, and the photo of Susan Alcorn.

Posted by maparker on July 14, 2005 6:44 PM