Rowe/Tilbury - Duos for Doris

Keith Rowe/John Tilbury
Duos for Doris
Erstwhile

I should begin, I suppose, with a few caveats. One, I’m a good friend of Jon Abbey, the owner/producer of Erstwhile Records and was fortunate enough to be in attendance with him at this session. Two, I’ve gotten to know Keith Rowe quite well over the last few years and am currently working closely with him on his biography. For that matter, though I had only met Tilbury fleetingly prior to this date, I came to like him very much personally and recently published a profile of him for WIRE, generating a tiny swirl of controversy.

Despite having known each other since the mid 60s and having been together in AMM since 1981, this is the first time the two had performed, much less recorded, as a duo (“Except”, as Keith mischievously remarked, “when Eddie stops playing.”) The event almost didn’t occur. Three days prior to the recording, Tilbury’s 95-year old mother, Doris, had a stroke. She died the next evening and Tilbury, understanding the lengths that had been gone to arrange the date, originally scheduled for two days, agreed (insisted, in fact) to come down from England to France for a single day of recording. This was accomplished in the same Vand’oeuvre theater, and with the same rented piano, that AMM had recorded ‘Fine’ two years before. At dinner the evening before the session, Tilbury asked Rowe if he had any ideas for the next day. Keith replied no, that he thought when John touched the piano he’d actually be using, the ideas would flow. At the session, aside from the two participants and the recording engineer, Jon and I were the only ones at hand; a very special day.

They created five pieces over the course of about three hours of playing, three of which were selected for this two-disc set. Tilbury warmed up by playing some Chopin, a little Schoenberg (a quote from which he interjected into the proceedings, much to Rowe’s amusement, in one of the improvisations not used for the final release) and a few English folk songs. The first piece on ‘Duos for Doris’, was also the first performed, a 70-minute construction of immense range and depth. Tilbury begins by rubbing a drumstick on the brass inner frame of the piano, treating it as purely percussion for the first six or seven minutes. Rowe, as has been more and more the case in recent years, is very much content to provide a “canvas” for his collaborator’s activity (though not necessarily a featureless one by any means), positioning his music as an element as integral as it might be unnoticed. He arranges laminae of drone-like sounds, with low, middle and high tones of varying and complementary textures. The swelling nature of these drones creates a highly dramatic sense of anticipation, one deeply rewarded when Tilbury finally enters from the keyboard with several low, pulsing chords. The release that occurs about fifteen minutes in, when the improvisation seems to acquire a life of its own, is one of several extraordinary moments to be found here. The music is redolent with emotion, giving lie to the charges of aridity and stoicism often leveled at musicians such as these. Granted, knowledge of the immediate and tragic events surrounding Tilbury’s personal life may have played into my perceptions, but it seemed (and does still seem) clear the emotional depths he plumbed. Some of his playing will be recognizable in general type by listeners familiar with his work in AMM, other aspects find him exploring entirely new territory (a judgment rendered not only by myself, but Rowe as well). The piece quiets down noticeably for fifteen or so minutes, remaining fascinating in a rustling, chittering way, before building to great intensity at about the 40-minute mark. In fact, the volume level rises enough, Tilbury pounding the keyboard with fury, so that some distortion sets in for a minute, although nothing that detracts from the force of the music. He builds to it with piercing chords, struck in a slow but nearly regular pattern that generate a huge amount of psychic pressure, accompanied by screeching metallicisms from Rowe, before the inevitable explosion. A series of funereal chords from Tilbury lead to contrastingly bright, Feldman-esque arpeggios, ushering in a kind of entropic process, the two musicians scraping and plucking in a dark, cavernous space for quite some time, almost to the point of a-musical activity. But in the last few minutes, Tilbury finds an amazingly delicate, single note “melody”, more like some faint, ghostly chorale, with which he brings the piece to a close over the poignant, Rowe-generated sounds of a distant propeller plane and what briefly sounds for all the world like an EKG monitor. Here, as everywhere else on this release, Tilbury’s incredible sense of touch and of pure note placement is beautifully apparent; always fluid, always the slightest bit off the cadence.

This second piece begins with the sound of birds over a faded, swing-era jazz recording. Tilbury quickly emulates the birdsong, trilling in the upper register. Rowe utilizes the radio more often on this track than elsewhere, though it rarely appears with clarity, instead appearing buried under distortion and static. Tilbury has placed nails, dowels and metallic balls on his strings, generating gamelan-like sounds from his keyboard when he’s not attacking the piano’s body with drumstick or fist. Rowe is operating at least four or five levels of sound here but all occupying such distinct zones that it’s difficult to comprehend them at the same time; different listenings almost necessarily cause one to concentrate on different aspects. Here as elsewhere, especially in the album’s closing moments, Rowe employs a tactic that might be initially irritating but, I think, serves a meta-purpose: when things get a little too beautiful, a bit too smooth, he will cause some rude noise to erupt. The crinkling of a scrub pad on the guitar strings or the harsh buzz of one of his many small fans will interrupt the sonic bliss, reminding the listener of the real world, one in which any thoughts of a peaceful heaven might be as ultimately meaningless as they are understandably desirable. There’s some remarkably anguished playing by both musicians about 20 minutes in, Tilbury eliciting frantic sounding yelps and Rowe ripping brutal, strangled roars from his machine. Eventually, a deep, throbbing drone develops. When it gradually peaks and begins to dissipate, Rowe conjures up a surprisingly (for him) rhythmic little motif, a casual thump accompanied by a metallic swish, boom-shee-boom, a beguiling nubbin that jauntily carries the next several minutes of the improvisation. This gets subsumed beneath a billowing hum as the music enters a cloudlike steady-state feel for a while, Tilbury casting about as though swimming through darkness, seeking elusive shards of light. Toward the end, Tilbury floats to the depths of the keyboard, phrasing the dark chords with more a sense of acceptance than surrender.

The final piece, in some ways the most moving, is in two distinct parts, each of equal length. Tilbury plays two high notes off a chord that sounds almost as though lifted from a processional while Rowe maintains a steady white noise pattern that feels subtly ominous. There’s very much a dark and light sensation here, the piano striving to remain optimistic, even rosy, the electronics steadfastly insisting that there is no way out, threatening each dreamy Feldman-esque arpeggio with a deluge of feedback. After a brief pause, Tilbury stands and begins to stroke one of the piano strings between his fingers, eliciting an extraordinary ghostly tone. One by one, he fashions a simple, lovely melody with these coaxings, just on the edge of audibility. Ever so subtly, he transfers this ethereal song to the upper reaches of the keyboard, a single note threnody heartbreaking in its purity. It’s difficult to imagine any other companion not letting this hymn stand on its own and gleam but Rowe just will not allow this illusion to remain untouched by reality. He scrapes and rubs his devices, quietly enough not to totally interfere, but with enough presence to make his point. It’s a tough lesson, and one that many listeners may actually object to, but that’s one of Rowe’s great strengths: no easy answers.

“Duos for Doris” captures two musicians of immense intelligence, probity and aesthetic rigor at heights arguably unscaled by either. It’s as powerful a performance as I’ve ever heard.

Brian Olewnick