has anybody heard the duo of Tim Blechmann with Klaus Filip?

yeah its great Robert

All being well we should be playing an extract on audition this evening.

By the way I'm sending this from an iphone in the London apple store. I have to say I'm impressed!

thanks richard!
is the duo similar to "re-reading"?
I am enjoying it quite a lot

The Goldie disc would have been fine if he'd chosen about a quarter of the material. His duo with Mattin last year Luxury kicked ass. This bruises. As for Attention, it now overtakes Songbook (whatever Volume you care to mention, but the first was particularly excruciating) as Mattin's most irritating project to date. Which I imagine it's supposed to be! At some point he says "you paid for this album.. and if you didn't give us your time".. well, I didn't pay for it but I did give it my time and I'll now give it away to some poor unsuspecting victim.

Hey Dan, what do you mean by "irritating"?

I would have thought that the word was sufficiently clear. But if you don't understand it how about.. aggravating, annoying, arduous, bothersome, distressing, disturbing, exasperating, galling, labored, laborious, onerous, painful, problematic, severe, tiresome, toilsome, trying, vexatious and wearisome.
It's a pretty arid listen, and I suppose it's meant to be. Every recent review of Mattin I've read dwells on what seems to be deliberate audience provocation on his part - why should his releases by any different?
Dunno, I'd like to hear from people who actually enjoyed this, and why they did.

Well I enjoyed Unami's guitar part at least. Otherwise I can't see me listening to Attention again. I didn't really find it that provocative to be honest, I was expecting to be made to feel a little uncomfortable by Mattin's words but not really. I had a smile on my face here and there over some of the comments but it became boring very quickly rather than challenging.

To be provocative these days, you're pretty much relegated to Celine Deon stuff or smooth jazz. He doesn't have the balls, though.

Mattin seems to be doing now all this one punchline pretty innocuous jokes. This is not provocative, this is only bullshit!

Will the real Mattin please stand up? Perhaps we should have some kind of biometric scanner installed to verify the real identity of the poster!
No, I didn't like Unami's guitar either, Richard. Seems he's really gone in for that ultra dry, almost muffled short pinging sound that Sugimoto was using about a couple of years ago. I find it unattractive, but then again maybe it's supposed to be.
If you are out there Mattin, Happy Christmas mate!

Dan, you 're right. 'Attention' is more a project of Unami- he provided the guitar score which in his words deliberately 'ultra boring'. There is a good write up from argentinian percussionist Diego Chamy of their recent 'Attention' live concert in Berlin here:

http://www.mattin.org/essays/Diego_Chamy.html

Dan, you 're right. 'Attention' is more a project of Unami- he provided the guitar score which in his words deliberately 'ultra boring'. There is a good write up from argentinian percussionist Diego Chamy of their recent 'Attention' live concert in Berlin here:

http://www.mattin.org/essays/Diego_Chamy.html

Nice article. Well, maybe it works better in a concert situation than it does on disc.. Meanwhile, I liked Diego's album with Axel Dörner quite a bit. Funny noone seems to have mentioned that one in these forum site places.. or maybe they did and I missed it

When you listen to a CD of improvised music, where is really the improvisation taking place ?
Many would say that improvisation happens only among the musicians while recording the CD.
The musicians spontaneously create a musical piece in the moment of playing,
that the audience is supposed to then simply enjoy and appreciate through the recording
- especially if they have paid for the CD. This way of thinking favors clearcut boundaries between producers and consumers.

“Attention” questions the fictitious divisions that exist in hearing recorded improvisation:
isn't the listening experience also an act of improvisation?

There is no outside to improvisation.
While hearing the CD that you have put in your CD player, you cannot isolate the sounds coming from the CD from those coming out of the CD player, or the computer, or the washing machine or the street. The improvisation is happening in the head of the listener, it is impossible to take a CD as a finite statement that can be constantly replicated through a perfect listening experience.
Something as simple and important as choosing the volume of how to listen to the recording is a very strong decision that determines the sound and the meaning of the work. Other aspects determined by your economic possibilities also affect your listening experience, such as the quality of your stereo, or whether you have download the piece or bought it.

You are constantly improvising with your immediate surroundings!

“Attention” is an attempt at addressing the listener directly, making him/her engage in a process of self-reflection. It suggests that any listening experience is mediated both by the context and the choices made by the listener, which alter the meaning of the work and become part of the creative process, even if people at the top of the music production chain – musicians and producers - might say it is not.

"“Attention” is an attempt at addressing the listener directly, making him/her engage in a process of self-reflection."

Good thing "the listener" has someone around to make her reflect on herself! OUR SAVIOR HAS ARRIVED!

hi GI,
no SAVIOR here,
do you know other CDs that address the listener in such a direct way?

Hi Mattin

Thanks for sharing that. I'm a little disappointed that Attention seems to be less about deliberately annoying people and more about a post-Cage idea of musician/listener interaction you know ;)

My problem with Attention is not the ideas behind it, which I find quite interesting, but the music itself. Once the idea has been transferred there really is nothing left to listen to and I don't think I'll play the CD again. I imagine that's not important to you though? ;)

Happy New Year

Dear Mr. Mattin,

Based on above reviews, how would you rate the improvisation that goes on in Mr. Olewnick's head while listening to your music?

“Attention” questions the fictitious divisions that exist in hearing recorded improvisation:
isn't the listening experience also an act of improvisation?

Sure - but that applies just as much to a listening to a Beethoven quartet as it does to a Mattin disc. What's so special about "Attention"?

to me "Attention" feels like Lou Reed's "Take No Prisonners"...

Dan, with all due respect I don't agree with you! Tim Goldie's by far one of the most exciting musicians working today. What he's achieved with the drums is fascinating - virtuoso technique channelled into making some beautiful, compelling and strange music. Conceptual, intelligent yet so very musical. But he's capable of turning it all upside down too - the second disc is really disturbing - I've never heard vocals like it. Did you see his solo in Berlin recently? The trio with Philip Best and Mattin was very very intense. Who else if anyone is working like this?

As I live in Paris, nipping out to catch a gig in Berlin is a bit tricky, so 'fraid not. Would have liked to though. I agree he's an exciting performer and that disc with Mattin is one of the best things either of them have done (to remind you, below is what I wrote about it in The Wire). But this new one is, I repeat, too long. Instead of a double CD, one 40 minute killer punch - choosing the best tracks, which, yes, are more often on disc two - would have attracted me more. Anyway, I guess it's all deliberate. But if the intention is to challenge folk by pissing them off, well, it doesn't always work. If I'm pissed off by the something I'm unlikely to want to play it very much. How many times have you listened to this double CD all the way through? (Pauses to make cups of tea etc allowed) Me once, and then a second listening choosing the tracks I liked which I then played a few more times.
Anyway, here's that old Wire review I was on about:
"The long awaited debut release of Deflag Haemorrhage / Haien Kontra aka Mattin (guitar, vocals and computer feedback) and " " [sic] (real name Tim) Goldie (drums) is a 74-minute tour de force compiling 15 tracks recorded between July 2002 and November 2003 and one truly scary field recording made by Zoe Broughton at Huntingdon Life Sciences back in 1997, where she was working undercover for a Channel Four documentary to expose the notorious animal research facility's appalling cruelty to animals (see http://www.shac.net/HLS/exposed/broughton.html). A concert or album of unrelenting ferocious noise, whether by Hijyokaidan, Borbetomagus, Merzbow or the Dust Breeders, may be a highly enjoyable rush of pure adrenalin, but it's no longer exactly a surprise. Mattin and Goldie can burst eardrums as well as the above – watch your speakers on the apocalyptic "Submucosa" – but they've learnt their lowercase lesson well, and use disturbingly quiet passages and slow menacing drones to equally devastating effect. Mattin is, as ever, predictably unpredictable, lurching from the kind of delicate laptoppery that graced his Grob release Building Excess with Klaus Filip, Dean Roberts and Radu Malfatti to blasts of unmitigated sonic terror that will melt the fillings in your teeth. His guitar work and vocals are just as extreme, especially on the splendidly-titled "It's Not Your Fault You Are The Authentic Version Of What The Rest Of Us Can Only Imagine", apparently recorded live (listening to the screams of terror and the vicious thudding of heavy chains I'm glad I wasn't there). Goldie's drumming is savage and ritualistic, from the isolated explosions of the opening "Humiliated" to the all-out blitzkrieg of his solo offering "Lacguage = Noumenal Sarcoshyce [sic]" (a whole page of similarly impenetrable logorrhea adorns the 6" x 8" album cover), but it's refreshingly far-removed from both free jazz and improv percussion cliché, even though I suspect his collection includes a fair number of Eddie Prévost albums. Luxury is an album of awesome intensity, one that deserves to be blasted mercilessly from a 40000W PA outside Huntingdon Life Sciences every day until the torture ceases."

Or Kenny G's Songbird..

I don't know Dan

I don't own the release of course so I have absolutely no place to comment,

BUT

I'm never so sold on the whole cut-down-and-edited-is-best idea. Usually I'd prefer most (if not all - if that's feasible) of the material from a given session is included (bar anything the musician(s) feel is completely off) so I can make up my own mind as a listener

Interesting review of Attention:
http://negativepotential.blogsport.de/2008/02/08/mattin-and-taku-unami-attention/

"Sure - but that applies just as much to a listening to a Beethoven quartet as it does to a Mattin disc. What's so special about "Attention"?"

Dan, I am finally replying to your question:

No other types of music making contradicts itself through its recording like improvisation does. In improvisation one always tries to make the most out of the situation, trying to understand and play with the specifics and characteristics of this situation. The relationship between the instrument, the other players, the space and audience (if there is) gets intensified through a mutual understanding that everything is at stake at every moment. Everything can be changed at any point because the future is unwritten in terms of music and producing new sets of relations with the other musicians, the audience and the space. This awareness produces an agency and responsibility among the people involved towards the present questioning established structures and norms of behavior. There is not outside to improvisation, no end, just what Walter Benjamin calls pure mediality or pure violence which is human action that which neither founds not conserves the law. In this sense we could say that improvisation is the ultimate site-specific form of performance- impossible to document in its totality. How can we translate this kind of activity into the making of a record, an object, how a performance that is so specific, can be then put forward in the future in to something that could be, heard read or seen anytime by anybody in the future ? Into an end? Into a much more identifiable commodity? Into something that can be consumed again and again?
Attention is an attempt to open up the improvisational framework that usually is confined to the moment in which musicians are playing. In Attention, the focus of the action of improvisation is on the listening experience, the listener is not treated as a merely subordinate to the action of improvisation but as a collaborator- having a crucial part on making something out of the CD. What is that something? That is a good question.

Thanks for this, amigo. I wish I had more time to respond at length but I'm busy packing up suitcases here - expect a discussion thereof in the Autumn issue of Paris Transatlantic! Meanwhile have a great gig in Portugal with Jean-Luc (who I saw this afternoon) and Taku, and.. keep it musical ;-))

Have a great summer boys & girls.

Hi Mattin

Thanks for the explanation above. The question of how you can possibly translate the immediacy and interactivity of a concert setting via a recording is of course an old one with one simple answer; you can't do it. A live concert and a CD are two very different things.

Attention then raises this question through a different medium, the CD itself, and perhaps a few people may now think about the above question that perhaps hadn't before, but for me your paragraph above is enough, the CD doesn't add anything to the question.

As for "making something out of the CD" well yes we all make something different out of every CD we hear depending on where we play it, how we listen etc... The problem with Attention is that every time I tried to interact with Taku's guitar playing on the CD some bloke kept talking ;)

Have fun in Portugal, sorry ~I'm not there, I really wanted to be.