Fantastic. Nice line of work, Al, Kaiser is working as a research diver in Antarctica this winter.

Prejudiced, of course, but it sounds great. Unfortunately, I'm at work and retaining my job precludes me from playing it at the proper volume. Looking forward to doing so at home!

Al, I was at Keith's place the weekend before this was recorded and he talked about the project quite enthusiastically at the time and was really fascinated bythe whole idea of working in a submarine environment, acoustically and otherwise.

The piece is reminiscent of Radio Tirana, circa 1967.

"Fantastic. Nice line of work, Al, Kaiser is working as a research diver in Antarctica this winter."

ooh! What exactly will he be doing? I'll have to tell my pop, who spent two years down there on Operation Deepfreeze.

Brian, Keith's hipped me to a UK artist who is working with underwater field recordings, sounds transmitted and captured in rivers and other environments. Some very real possibilities there, so I'm fully intrigued.

I haven't had a chance to sit down with this yet, but I'm actually looking forward to it (this coming from the keyboard of an avowed eai-philistine).

I'll be curious to learn w/ Jon thinks of it.

Though the guy does a little too much composing with his source material for my taste, David Dunn's piece using sounds of underwater insects is pretty nice. http://www.earthear.com/catalog/angels.html

cool, Steve. Thanks for the link.

Finally spent some quiet time with this piece and my Luddite ears are predictably slow to warm to the layered transmissions. I plan to take another trip through this afternoon after a palate-cleansing spin of Paul Desmond’s Easy Living.

Jon’s silence on this thread is pretty deafening.

dunno what you want me to say, Derek. I grabbed it, played it a couple of times, didn't get too much out of it. but I'm pretty focused on other things right now (upcoming releases, imminent festival),

I'll revisit it when I start seriously working on Keith's upcoming solo disc in a few months (titled The Room, debuting a new subseries, ErstSolo 001).

Jon: If you're doing an ErstSolo series, can we hope that some of Keith Rowe's older unreleased solo things might appear?

you can hope for whatever you want, sure. :)

the reasoning behind ErstSolo is that quite a bit of the strongest work in this area over the last couple of years is solo, and some artists are more suited to solos than collaborative contexts. I don't expect to do many, I don't have any others planned for now, and any that I do will have to be special in some way, not simply another solo record. The Room will be Keith's third solo full-length release, after A Dimension of Perfectly Ordinary Reality and Harsh, and will hopefully be out next spring. it's going to be a very personal statement, I think probably the most "composed" piece he's ever done, but it's still a work in progress.

there is also at least one older unreleased solo recording of Keith's in the works on another label, but I'm not sure if it's quite definite enough for me to be divulging details, or if I'm the one who should be doing so.

I wanted to hope for something rather more specific. After all, the brief piece featured here does (as I wrote above) resound of Radio Tirana. In 1967, Albanian radio had quite a cult following ... as I'm sure Keith Rowe well knows.

I don't really understand that post, but I don't think Keith did any solo recordings (that I'm aware of) in the sixties, if that's what you're hoping will be unearthed.

Early AMM performances regularly featured Radio Tirana, courtesy of Keith Rowe's short-wave radio. (Radio Peking too). It had a certain political impact. But perhaps not many Americans were aware of it at the time.

ok, that's three times you've basically said the same thing, and I still don't really get your point. mind spelling it out for a dense American who was barely born when early AMM performances were going on?

Heavens Jon, please don't get upset! The appearance on this thread of a solo KR radio piece, plus your mention of other unheard solo Rowe adds up to some pretty obvious conclusions. So my hope was simply that somethings from KR's past might emerge. Lord, there must be an awful lot of it.

sorry for getting frustrated, I felt like you were hinting at something without just saying it.

again, Brian O. (or anyone else) can correct me, but I'm not aware of Keith ever playing solo in the sixties, I've never heard bootlegs or stories about that.

Graham, I think if Jon was interested in releasing old stuff, the Erstwhile catalogue would be about 60 times its present size :)

dunno what you want me to say, Derek.

I just figured, given your close relationship with Rowe, that you would be one of the first to sound off with an opinion on the piece. But I can understand & relate to being busy with other things. Best wishes on upcoming festival. That planned solo series sounds pretty interesting.

I think we are all wish that the Erstwhile catalogue was 60 times its present size. Unheard Keith Rowe must exist in mountainous form. Such a musician knows what he has done and he has recorded. So perhaps Jon and Brian O could develop their charms more subtly and help reveal it to us!

"So perhaps Jon and Brian O could develop their charms more subtly and help reveal it to us!"

and maybe you could learn to communicate a little bit better, we all have our dreams.

at a quick count, I've released around 19 hours of Keith's work from the last five years, so I'm pretty sure I'm doing my part in that area. I also did e-mail him this afternoon for some details on the history of his solo work, so I'll report back when I get details there.

Jon; "there is also at least one older unreleased solo recording of Keith's in the works on another label, but I'm not sure if it's quite definite enough for me to be divulging details, or if I'm the one who should be doing so."

Yeah after spending some time last weekend talking this through with Keith it will happen, but not until well into next year when enough time can be spent on doing it real justice. More details then! :)

I cant imagine that there is much unreleased solo Rowe out there that predates around 2002, but I'm probably wrong.

Back on topic, I've yet to spend much time with this piece either, but first run throughs sounded good.

I actually spent some time Sunday morning listening live to the sounds of underwater insects with Keith and a few others courtesy of Lee Patterson. The sounds that exist in an everyday stagnant pond found in an everyday English village were simply amazing, a real ear opener.

The sounds that exist in an everyday stagnant pond found in an everyday English village were simply amazing, a real ear opener.

The smells can be pretty powerful too!

My god, I've never in my life seen someone so much up someone's ass as Jon Abbey up Keith Rowe's. My God, man, get some self-esteem and stop embarrassing yerself! Seriously.

C’mon, Troll. Play nice or go back under your bridge. And while you're at it, how 'bout sending us some spare dollars?

Man, what it with my chronic case of typoid fever?

"My god, I've never in my life seen someone so much up someone's ass as Jon Abbey up Keith Rowe's. My God, man, get some self-esteem and stop embarrassing yerself! Seriously."

that's funny, there are at least three other people who have posted in this thread who I'd guess are fans of a bigger percentage of Keith's work than I am (Brian, Richard, Graham). thanks for the feedback though, it's really made me reexamine my belief system.

Wow. Sometimes I do feel like Keith Rowe fans get mistaken for EAI fans the same way Ken Vandermark fans get mistaken for improvised music fans in Chicago.
Not like it is a problem either way but it can create confusion...

Anyway, that kind of childish lame criticism might hold water if the Abbey/Rowe partnership was not producing such important results.

or if I wasn't holding a festival next weekend with 25 musicians over 20 sets, not one of whom is named Keith.

"My god, I've never in my life seen someone so much up someone's ass as Jon Abbey up Keith Rowe's. My God, man, get some self-esteem and stop embarrassing yerself! Seriously."

If anyone here should be embarassed it should be you. Jon Abbey and Keith Rowe have a symbiotic relationship--a relationship that has brought us some of Rowe's best work. If that means Jon is stuck up Keith's ass, then I'd like to see more label heads stuck up asses.

Nice to see this thread coming to life at last.. love the KV line, Damon :) - but I have to say I find Keith's Location piece, Albanian radio or not, pleasant enough but nowhere near as satisfying as his last few Erstwhile releases. Like the recent N:Q disc on Esquilo. Maybe it's something about radios.. Then again, [Stockhausen's] Kurzwellen has long been a personal favourite. Oh yes, and Mr Trolling For Dollars, if you're going to grace this thread with hard-hitting manly talk about heads up asses, why can't you be manly enough to tell us your real name?

Here is an old Cathechism question they tried to solve early 19th century at Vaticano after too many children asked the same .... :

"If Drink its my Blood" and "Eat its my flesh"
"what is Caca then ?"

never could give a proper definiton, it s remained vague

enjoy

n

For the record, Jon, wasn't there a third solo Rowe disc called "City Music for Electric Guitar", from 1993, on a very obscure American label? I spent months trying to track down a copy and never succeeded.

Yeah ....that s on Steeplechase with Rolf Khun as a guest on third track

n

"For the record, Jon, wasn't there a third solo Rowe disc called "City Music for Electric Guitar", from 1993, on a very obscure American label? I spent months trying to track down a copy and never succeeded."

not an obscure label, Table of the Elements is pretty prominent in the experimental world. that was a single, about 8 minutes of music total, long OOP.

as a public service, here is a link to MP3s of the two sides, info below, available for the next seven days:

http://download.yousendit.com/CD3BE36B0E57299F

KEITH ROWE: City Music For Electric Guitar
(Table Of The Elements, 19993)

Keith Rowe, guitar.

1.) "We Want Some Minutes, OK?"
2.) Scratch music

Recorded August/September 1993 in Montbert, France; additional material recorded on buses in Moscow, on Moscow rail station and in Kaunas, Lithuania.

there's also the very strong live set on sound 323, that's been OOP for a while. but I was talking about CD-length releases, The Room will be the third of those.

All those Table of the Elements 7" were great. that was around the time I was first getting into this stuff, I bought them all when they came out.

As far as the quality of this work goes, part of the "Listen" concept seems to be to do something at least a bit different than what you normally do.
Just like My duo with HK is a departure from what we normally do.
I also like how they do seem to fit together really well.

I don't think this is meant to stack up to the next 2cd set Jon releases by Rowe (full disclaimer: my only relationship to Abbey is satisfied customer).
This is a very interesting work to my ears. I think it needs to be heard against his existing body of work, sort of like the way Richard Serra's drawings are interesting in the way they sit next to his sculpture, or the way Twombly's photographs are given more weight when you take them with his whole body of work.

Many thanks for the info, Jon. Back in 94, no-one I could come across had heard of the Rowe disc on Table of the Elements, but then we didn't have much of an internet then. I didn't even know it was a single. Agreed: the mini-Rowe on Sound 323 is first-class, as is the Rowe/Wastell duet from March this year on Confront.

There's also a solo piece issued by Gino Robair on one of those compilation/magazine discs in the early 90s. An excellent piece, using (iirc) frog sounds as a source. And something issued on a disc that came with Avant magazine around '95 as well. Apologies for the haziness--I'm at work and don't have the data handy. Will check back later if no one's filled in the gaps or corrected my mistakes.

There's also the untitled piece on the CD from the LMC 13th Annual Festival: Guitar Soloists. We played it in show 10 of audition, which is still up for d/l at the website (www.auditionradio.info) - second track, after the Marclay and some idiots stumbling over their words.

According to Keith it's some of the guitar tracks from "Rabbit Run", but I believe this is disputed elsewhere.

"All those Table of the Elements 7" were great. that was around the time I was first getting into this stuff, I bought them all when they came out."

Wasn´t that the start of TOTE? That series of "guitarists" on 7"? I think they were like $6 or $7 at the time and I waved them off as too expensive. Damn sharp looking series.

yeah, that was right when TOTE was starting, they were definitely a strong influence on Erstwhile, although too many of their releases suffer from looking better than they sound.

anyway, TOTE held a big festival in Atlanta in 1994, which included AMM. on their way back to the UK, Bruce Gallanter of DMG managed to set up a rare NYC show for them at Context, which was the first show I ever saw in this area of music (actually, either that or a Christian Marclay/Gunter Muller set around the same time, I'm not sure which was really first). the set was included as the third disc of Laminal, I didn't get much out of it live and I've never been a big fan of the recording.

but soon after that I bought another AMM disc (Generative Themes, I think my fourth by them), and suddenly it all snapped into place for me. it's pretty amazing that that was only 10-11 years ago, seems like a lifetime.

Alastair; "According to Keith it's some of the guitar tracks from "Rabbit Run", but I believe this is disputed elsewhere."

I think its material from the Rabbit Run recording sessions that was not used. Jon will be able to clarify, but I think that album took all sorts of shape and form before its final release and the Untitled track uses some of the discarded material.

If we're making trainspotting lists Rowe contributes a version of 4'33" to a compilation called 45'18" which is essentially nine versions of the Cage piece, but not sure if it can be considered a solo seeing as its basically a composed piece and he doesn't play anything either!
There's also a short version of The Room due out any day on the Swedish Ideal label as part of a compliation called Idealism Vol.1

The problem with all recorded versions of John Cage's 4'33" is that they all feature performers beautifully playing the rests. Weren't we supposed to hear (according to Cage) everything ELSE that was happening simultaneously?

I happen to have recently ordered the 4'33" compilation. Judging from the people involved, I'm guessing the performances will run various gamuts butI'll report back when I get it.

Who's involved Brian? Have to admit it sounds like the kind of pseudy project I usually run a mile from. Though perhaps our other resident Brian - Marley - 4'33" expert that he is, might be able to enlighten us.

I'm all out of enlightenment today . . . and probably always have been.

Rowe, Artificial Memory Trace, Thurston Moore, Pauline Oliveros and guests, Jio Shimizu, Voice Crack, Clive Graham, Toshiya Tsunoda, and Alignment.

On the whole its pretty uninteresting musically. The standout tracks bar far come from Tsunoda. Some of the artists also seem pretty flexible about the score, The Moore track for instance is a pretty bad punk rock track that is anything but silent.

Its on Korm Plastics and has been out a while but seems to have slipped under the radar a bit. I'm not sure if it was a 'proper' release really, the packaging looks half finished and I've never seen it in a shop.

I think all of you already know it, but I'll write it anyway. Next month the Ukrainian label Nexsound will release the 2CD set "Perlonex & Keith Rowe/Perlonex & Charlemagne Palestine". And there will be one more Keith Rowe's disc around.

What are the dates of those Perlonex sessions, abc?

Sept. 18, 2004, both shows from the same night, I believe.

Thanks to abc and Jon for the early-warning and the info.

"Rowe, Artificial Memory Trace, Thurston Moore, Pauline Oliveros and guests, Jio Shimizu, Voice Crack, Clive Graham, Toshiya Tsunoda, and Alignment." On the whole its pretty uninteresting musically.
It sounds it. Did any of these crack artists record the piece in a noisy place? (The idea of 4'33" 'played' by Thurston Moore is bizarre in the extreme..)

I happened across it a few weeks ago while looking around for recorded versions of 4'33". I hadn't known about the Rowe piece so, between that and the presence of Tsunoda, it was an automatic buy. Not sure how the judgment "pretty uninteresting musically" can be applied...."offensive musically" perhaps, but uninteresting? Still haven't received it, so we'll see.

Keith recorded his on his roof at 4:33 AM, if I recall correctly.

Haha - wonderful! I hope that means we hear what Keith heard, other than the rests.

If you're wanting to be exhaustive about kieth rowe solo stuff, there's also a quick two minute thing on the table of the elements 7" that features o'rourke, youngs, faust, and gate i beleive. it's a one-sided 7" with lots of etching on the other side.
i was at that TOTE festival in 1994 in atlanta and it changed my life. i went to see faust and got a WHOLE LOT MORE, as well as a lot of freaknik. AMM, knowing nothing about them at the time, were a true sudden revelation. Ah, to be 17 again.

Many thanks for all the tips gentlemen!

Ah, to be 17 again.

What are you now? 28? 29? Hard to believe you can still read these pixels! Stay warm out there, old fellow.

Hi ....

i m 4 and i m so Happy

n

yah i'm 29.

but, like noel, i'm 4 where it counts.

is someone, say me, wanted to submit a new set of short pieces made from recordings taken from things that make the motel i work at run to who should he send a cdr. i cant find a link to als email? im sure the roster is full with upcomingh stuff but i dont mind waitying in line, i just thinkn these pieces would be really nice and fit in here with the kinds of stuff used so far, and also i would love to be here. someone in charge could reply here or drop me an email.
thanks yall
j

The link seems to be dead. Can someone restore it or provide another location to d/l the piece? That would be appreciated.

Sorry, schiksal. The Listen series entries were limited time offers. There may a cd release sometime down the road.

That prospective CD release sounds nice, Derek. Hopefully it can be worked out!

And schiksal, most of the Listen tracks can be easily found in SLSK (that's where I've gotten the older ones).

The possibility of a cd is basically in Al's highly capable hands when he returns to dry land & is so inclinced.

Here's a non-rhetorical question: What *doesn't* SLSK have?

Me as a member?

Welcome to the club, Walt. I think we're in an ever-dwindling minority.

I doubt you'd find any Bruce Hornsby albums there ;)

Probably not, but I'd take stock in the likelihood of a few Dead boots w/ his name on the roster.