

A visionary ability in the assemblage of concrete and electronic sources can take you a long way, the constrictions of low budgets notwithstanding. Greek label Triple Bath, run by Themis Pantelopoulos, published only 96 copies of Red Rose For The Sinking Ship by Jeff Gburek, a 45-year old guitarist and composer who uses extended guitar techniques, signal processing, open source applications and field recordings to engender a unique electroacoustic brand. The man collaborates with Michael Vorfeld and Michael Walz in the ZYGOMA trio, has played with the likes of Keith Rowe, Tetuzi Akiyama, Kyle Bruckmann and - in 2006 - was a student of Helmut Lachenmann in Darmstadt. Recent releases appeared on A Question Of Re_Entry (the excellent Virtuous Circles), Con-V and on the Mattin website. Additional info about earlier works can be found via an attentive search through this very website.
The album’s title is impenetrably arcane, considering that “...Red is a kind of sympathetic individual who loves people” and that “rose” is pronounced as, and exchangeable with, “rows”. In Gburek’s words, “…the sinking ship will leave behind survivors, more appreciative of simple human care”. The overall plot emphasizes “revolutionary nostalgia” and “the naivety of utopianism”, as this five-part composition should be considered a sonic essay about the figure of Mao Zhedong. Quite sincerely, I couldn’t think of a farther connection after having heard the music, dynamically variable and often very intense, the representation of a physiochemical complex rather than a reminder of revolution.
Each setting is fairly incomparable, featuring a comprehensive gamut of protuberances and radiations - mildly synthetic to shortwave to ear-biting noise. The originator depicts his fantasies through processed carillons, modified guitars, birdsongs and - utterly baffling for this writer - tapings of ongoing activities at the main railway station in Milan, the incessant hubbub interspersed with computerized announcements of delayed arrivals and upcoming departures appearing like illusions in a haze of humming presences and altered ambiences. Beyond the studio treatment, there is substance in this music’s backbone: Gburek is seriously endowed with architectural talent, allowing the single scenes to maintain a logic of “anomalous occurrence” while functioning coherently as a whole. Their consecutiveness is almost visible, the changes expected yet disconcerting, the listener embraced by a pale-skinned gratification throughout, until a softly unsettling finale (which will be left unrevealed).
A work that grows with every listen, definitely recommended.
~ Massimo Ricci
Posted by massimo on July 10, 2008 12:05 PMThis sounds interesting. Thanks for the info, Max. I think Jeff's stuff has been getting better and better lately. Would like to check this out.. just as soon as I listen to the EIGHTEEN new Creative Sources discs that appeared in the mailbox yesterday!
Posted by: Dan Warburton at July 11, 2008 11:32 PMThat's right. And we have a whole summer to dedicate to the new Creative Sources (Seaside? What seaside?)
Kind of errata corrige: Jeff emailed me to report that the Mao Zhedong connection is actually non-existent, just a "press release idea" born from the cover artwork. Nice bait!
Posted by: Massimo Ricci at July 12, 2008 7:27 AMhello all, there is a connection to mao in fact... it is just not exclusively a history of that particular situation...there was some confusion when themis made the press release...i will get back to you tommworrow...just returned from ecstatic and exhausting experience in poland the last 10 days...must sleep...
greets from liege...
jg
Composition (resolving into improvisation, or how two hands come together, on a different scansion, geological) as an anti-delusion mechanism. How to compose not pieces of music but tracks of time (thresholds). Hypertextual relations (laminae without that “anchorage” in the slippage of signs that leads us to only the fascism of opinions that made god, another faux, out of a question mark (in drones or swarms algorithmic sieves or “the runs” or clusters or gestures). To make work that does not “pose” as question but instead travels through where we might answer some questions (personally and objectively). Spectral methodology, the topology of shadows in the wall, the break in the wall, energy surges. Music as a form (of) waiting for something to happen. We are waiting to play or to hear or we are in the playing waiting for it to be finished, waiting for events to bring us to the “end” which actually is the “neant”—the space where desire is born again through a kind of rebus. Music as actual compositional redissolution to the flow of time (seizing space into the potential of transactions of value)—We always coincide---Cage’s open window was the same a Ives’ and it looked out over Hegel’s desk reaching the threshold resolutions that Napoleon had about Nietzsche—a conclusion East of Romanticism, standing on the open tongue of Eurasia, the salivary glands in fact numerous grape clusters bunched inside the craniums of the nomads that… maybe only the nomad refuses to “wait”. If an ideology spreads over the world quick enough to die like a summer love affair in a child’s mind with glimmers of no idea yet what movement or extension means, it is also contrarily true who will refuse love will refuse the revolution and who refuses love suicides. This is hard-wired. The contraptions of ideologies fall apart around this coming erect into space. Massimo could know this “music” as almost a piece of his own memory train. My favorite reaction to the last threshold was a mail from a friend of one word. “Rain”. Music is not ultimately about notes or techniques but the actual joining of ecstatic vectors, suffering, amor fati,“waiting”. My life rushes forward to a meeting with someone I do not know, an open encounter. There are great vehicles and lesser vehicles. The last phase of the struggle with Mao is actually more a question of how this great head now standing between China and India creates the crevace equal to its protrusion. We are going to be living in that valley when that head implodes from the pressure on both sides. This head that is “a mirror for what is in your own heart”. If I am able to open my own and let her live there to freely come and go. I hope I have expressed some of my concerns and that no one need share them to listen or think them consequential in anyway. If the cd will be reissued there should be inside a text of some kind for orientation or disorientation, a gift on the table for the guest we dont know.
thank you once again for these reflections.
regards, jeff
I'm left speechless indeed.
Thank you very much for the enlightening explanation, Jeff.
Posted by: Massimo Ricci at July 16, 2008 1:31 AMHey Dan eleven , minus one !!!
Cheers ????? yes I am working
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