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Taku Sugimoto
Music For Cymbal
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I’m familiar with the work of both parties involved, however noting the album’s credits, I went in not knowing whatever to expect: composed by Taku Sugimoto and performed by Jason Kahn on amplified cymbal, it leaves one eager to learn more about the nature of such a score for such an instrumentation. Long, interspersed pauses (one of which commences the recording) featuring the quietest of accents confuse me among the curious episodes of 'tapped' and manipulated cymbal. The overtone byproducts of said tapping are the most fascinating aspect throughout. Akin to depressing a struck drumhead, the malleability of Kahn’s cymbal is as unpredictable as it is inviting, cast bronze heated mid-resonance. That’s where the substantial length of this disc makes sense. The repetition is near canonical in that the cymbal seems to invariably imitate itself ad infinitum.

Toward the conclusion of the music, what’s transpiring sounds like a hammered dulcimer paired with feedback at similar frequency. The repetitive pulse has morphed into a chant. The ears give way, forced to grant wide berth to the extrinsic gestalt of Kahn’s ringing metal, allowing what’s beneath to breathe freely. That of the performer trumps the patience required of the listener. This is the best jogging disc I’ve heard since the Charles/Ibarra duo.

Norbert Möslang
Capture
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For some reason “soothing” comes off as tired as “it flows” when reacting to music in print. Capture gives me the shivers. Unique in these three offerings is that here no axe is listed, though ostensible is that the electronics are indeed cracked and perhaps even everyday. Light-Sound Installation by Norbert Möslang recorded on the fourth of July, 2004 in Feldkirch, Austria; it’s no church in the fields but a hair over an hour of Aunt Bernice’s old Zenith hum.

Unlike a lot of installation-based music, this one doesn’t bring the luggage. Think of a Mathieu performance beginning shortly after he's received some terrible news (how beautiful Stephan’s recordings are on sunny days, though). Capture: huge slab of multiple layers, some hardly audible, others excruciating and/or out of place. After the fortieth minute Möslang brings pitches closer, crosses the streams, quivering minor seconds, the broadening crests and troughs of two converging notes when you're tuning a guitar. Repeated listening extracts layers further yet, but still there remains some hesitancy to divert course. As the recording ends, forced air abruptly shuts off and you’re left with that uncomfortable nakedness. I’ll not reach for this much. . .one to seduce goosebumps nonetheless.

Jason Kahn
Timelines
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This is it. A big, bubbling cauldron of sound, we’re dealt over seventy minutes all told. Note size of ensemble, it should come as no surprise that singular instrumentation is indiscernible and more importantly immaterial (save some effective contrabass accent, esp. that terrifying arco figure after twenty-seven minutes). The "graphical score" comes from Kahn as performed by the composer, Korber, Möslang, Müller, Steinbrüchel and Weber.

Colors are constantly changing. Restraint prevails throughout even in light of the restive whole. Each thematic shift in turn invents an entirely new vocabulary alien to the last. Obviously, many such shifts take shape due to blokes laying out and such, but that’s a reductive answer to a stupid question. This is a massive group effort, a timeline of an insidious virus capable of being parceled out into several albums. There is so much information to process that it’s impossible to give an accurate appraisal after a week of listening. I look forward to growing with this time and again. Do yourself a favor.

~Michael Schaumann