Killer choice, Nate! I suppose I needn't even indulge in an understatement of my fondness for this album... It's my impression that this album has rather quickly attained a pervavise reputation among connoisseurs as one of the truly essential recordings in the history of improvised music, and is starting to be recognized as an aesthetic breakthrough on par with MIC, AMM, Zorn's game pieces, Nmperign, I.S.O., etc. Long lingering on my list of things to do is an extended textual response to this music, but I don't see it forthcoming in light of my embarassingly torpid attention to musical matters higher on the list, so I'm still left to be underrepresented by my terse and skimpy remarks in the quickie that served as the disc's first review last June... I'd also had it in mind to whip up a piece capturing my experiences seeing the trio twice on their US tour earlier this year, but alas the moment has passed and I've got nary a string of 0s and 1s to show for it, just some extensive reweightings of synaptic threshholds...

Nate, as a matter of probing your experienced ears, I'm curious whether this is an album that knocked you on the floor right away or an album that took a few spins to get into. As I found it so unfamiliar despite the extreme familiarity of the three musicians, it was the latter for me.

[Nate] The resulting music is far from austere: a kind of gradually unfolding micro drama, comprising a series of tiny vulnerabilities, frayings, insinuations, and stretches of miniaturized song.

[Mike] Nate, I should also mention how much I loved this sentence of yours, especially the dead-on characterization of "gradually unfolding micro drama", although I'd be inclined to dispute its notch on a scale of austerity, as I find the music so singular largely because of its simultaneous extremes of austerity and drama.

Yeah, I had to find time to listen to this one over a longer duration--it's been in my CD changer nearly constantly for the past several months, in part because I buried the darn case for it but also because I wanted to keep it spinning. One annoyance of this is that, having received it only in late August & not really absorbed it until December, I'd long since submitted my year-end top-tens before I'd realized it belonged there.

I should make it clear that I'm not terribly well-versed in this particular area of the music--I've heard Wright & Doneda on occasion but, for instance, don't have any nmperign releases. That said, this really doesn't sound quite like anything else in my CD collection. But I'll leave the question open what kind of aesthetic breakthrough it might represent!

[Mike] I'll belabor a point here for fun... :-)

[Nate] I should make it clear that I'm not terribly well-versed in this particular area of the music

[Mike] Nobody's well-versed in this particular area of the music! It's been around for less than two years! In any case, you certainly mustered a brilliant concise description of the music above, and your specific thoughts (e.g. "thin wire-drawn", "micro drama") resonate strongly with mine, which is a pleasing occasion for such subjective music.

[Nate] That said, this really doesn't sound quite like anything else in my CD collection.

[Mike] It doesn't sound quite like anything in anyone's music collection!

[Nate] I've heard Wright & Doneda on occasion but, for instance, don't have any nmperign releases

[Mike] There's some irony in the topic of Nmperign, which was only mentioned above in a very general context of unrelated improv aesthetics of paradigm-multiplying significance, with the fact I often completely forget that Tatsuya was in that group for a brief while in its earliest days. His playing in this newer context--and pretty much all of his newer contexts for that matter--is so completely different that I never even noticed until this minute that the surface instrumentation is quite similar!

If you ever get down-trodden with Nmperign-curiosity, I'd recommend the 2002 recordings on their collaborative disc with Günter Müller released by Rossbin, more gloom, more light, as a first acquisition. Besides the track capturing the dynamic duo alone as well any of the other four CD releases, the pieces with Müller's cooperative and non-inhibitory inputs violently robbed me of some heartbeats, even with the putative jading from a few years of nmperign fanhood preceding the listen. With its complementary and complimentary exposition of Müller's craft, which has only elicited lukewarm or neutral responses from me otherwise--with the other exception of his rapturous and astonishingly well-realized tapestry of alien sounds in duo with Lê Quan Ninh (the Erstwhile release)--including a sheer masterpiece of a Müller solo work of no relation whatsoever to the Nmperign aesthetic, the Rossbin disc is an unusually profitable venture for any contemporary improv listener. As a second acquisition, I'd recommend the 1999 Intransitive disc, which bears comparable virtues in capturing both prime duo work and a successful (not the only kind in the world), non-real-time collaboration with another edgy electro-acoustician, Jason Lescalleet.

[Nate] One annoyance of this is that, having received it only in late August & not really absorbed it until December, I'd long since submitted my year-end top-tens before I'd realized it belonged there.

[Mike] In a related travesty, I'm just now finally hearing the monumental Doneda/Bosetti/Baltschun/Baghdassarians disc on Potlatch, certainly some top-ten material as well. I've got a "for sale" sign up next to my cave now, such is my guilt and shame.

Yeah, this is a really great disc. I've come back to this a few times this year (and not only to try and fathom out the type on the rather lovely sleeve... If it wasnt for your review Nate I would still be none the wiser about what label it was on!)
I've just put it back on again after reading the comments above and it sounds even better...(you guys have such powers..!) Beautifully slow yet never minimal, somehow achieving the rare quality of sounding both tense and restrained both at the same time. This is just so nice to lower the lights and listen to.

I've got Mr Wastell at Sound 323 to thank for reccomending me this one as before this I'd heard nothing of Mssrs Wright or Nakatani. If they've released much in the past its either not been picked up on a great deal over this side of the pond or I've just missed it. I've never been that inspired by Michel Doneda in the past either although the Strom disc on Potlatch that Michael mentions is indeed another little gem. He is playing a few dates in the UK over the next couple of weeks and I intend to catch at least one of them, A trio with Rhodri and Angharad Davies looks the pick.

So is there anything more by Wright or Nakatani that I should be listening to? I've a feeling that after this one anything else would be a let down but suggestions greatfully received!

[Richard] Beautifully slow yet never minimal, somehow achieving the rare quality of sounding both tense and restrained both at the same time.

[Mike] Yes! Exactly! And "slow" is such an important word for this music. I think it's because a concept of velocity actually doesn't even exist for a lot of recent improv.

"So is there anything more by Wright or Nakatani that I should be listening to?"

http://www.bagatellen.com/archives/reviews/000854.html

tatsuya's duets with p. kowald on quakebasket

[Mike] Yes! Exactly! And "slow" is such an important word for this music. I think it's because a concept of velocity actually doesn't even exist for a lot of recent improv.

Well I think the concept probably has been there Michael, but from a listener's point of view the last few years have been so preoccupied with questions about density and texture of sound that velocity has taken a bit of a backseat when this kind of music has been discussed. If I stop and think about it, most of my favourite recordings from the past few years have been pretty slow, but its only now I notice it.

Oh and just re-read your comments on Nmpereign and Gunter Muller... I totally agree about More Gloom, a really nice disc, and Le Voyelle Liquide remains amongst the best two or three Erstwhile releases.
Mr Muller is capable of churning out a good few run of the mill releases but every now and again he reaffirms my faith with a gem. Blinks with Jason Kahn is my most recent favourite.

I'd hesitate to offer recommendations given that your lack of enthusiasm for Doneda's extensive catalogue is in sharp contrast to my own, so I'll cautiously proceed in detached descriptive mode. Certainly Jack's new solo epic Up for Grabs is an inexpensive proposition that will tie a brain into knots like his earlier solo classic Places to Go, while also reflecting some of the more recent concerns channelled on from between.

However, as far as a panoramic view on the Wright oeuvre, possibly my all-time favorite improv recordings are by double-sax, double-cello quartet with Bhob Rainey, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Bob Marsh. That music is basically a thousand ideas a minute with a strong tendency to de-emphasize instrumental identity with extended techniques on the eminently blendable instruments of sax and cello. Pretty much the reference standard for musical complexity. Of course not everyone enjoys these kinds of extremes.

I'd be hard-pressed to exclude Signs of Life from my all-time improv top ten either, but be aware that this disc of collaborations with Bhob Rainey takes the piercing reed/brass concept past many people's comfort zone and resists assimilation to either a lowercase aesthetic as in Nmperign or Wright's more recent work (not publicly documented much to speak of yet) or the high-density, action aesthetic of the aforementioned quartet. Jack and Bhob play in trios with Tom Djll (trumpet) and Matt Ingalls (clarinet), and it's a case of virtuosity, total communication, and unity of intent. It would be very difficult to predict someone's reaction to this album because it sidesteps most trends in improvised music. It is reeds and trumpet playing very sympathetically, abstractly, and harshly, with both stop-on-a-dime moments and textural passages.

If you like pianos, Jack's duo with Bob Falesch, Clang, is a safe bet, especially if you dig linear melody and less timbral harshness. I suppose Parker/Schlippenbach, Gratkowski/Graewe, and Mitchell/Shipp are reasonable references for this album, which I deeply love despite my lack of enthusiasm for macrotonal instruments like piano.

I'd have to leave my Wright short-list at that for the moment at risk of getting lost in my own obsessive fanhood. Specs available on Jack's website.

Nakatani doesn't really have anything else remotely comparable to from between, though I like all his work a lot, my least favorite being the duo with Assif Tsahar. The first two Nmperigns are, of course, classics of ultra-sparsity and acoustic-instruments-as-electronics. His duo with Kenta Nagai is a little known album that I'd rank as his best work besides from between, a fretless acoustic guitar and drumkit duo out of time and place. They claim it's very "Japanese", and I almost buy that line. It's not likely a Peter Kowald fan would be disappointed with the Kowald/Nakatani duo album. Maybe the best bet for a from between convert would be the Blue Collar disc, which has pretty advanced playing from him in the abstract ritualism mode of from between, with the two brass instruments creating a thick, diffuse context with non-brassy plumbing sounds in contrast to the thin, penetrating context of Doneda and Wright. I greatly enjoy that disc and I'm anxious to hear the new Blue Collar disc coming out, uh, any day now, supposedly representing a more aggressive side of the group. All that said, I'd also recommend his solo percussion albums in the Green Report series. Tatsuya has a website. Based on my observations very close to this circle of musicians, we're going to be seeing a lot of mind-blowing work from Tatsuya in coming decades. This cat is just getting warmed up and the past two years or so have been one mind-melting performance after another. The disco might take a while to catch up to the present reality. There's a disc on Locust with Vic Rawlings and Ricardo Arias whose release has been delayed for a while, but that's more a sidepath of opulent thorniness and deconstructionism than a reflection of his primary work.

Richard, as far as Doneda, have you tackled any of his solo albums or the soprano trio on Potlach with Rainey and Bosetti? I find all this work pretty revelatory.

Thanks for taking the considerable time to make the above reccomendations Mike (and Emory). I will pick up a couple of your Wright suggestions and give them a whirl. (probably the Wright/Rainey/L-Holm/Marsh and Up for Grabs and will let you know what I think.
I intended to listen to the Blue Collar disc on the strength of another review I read someplace without realising Nakatani was involved, so will pick this up too.

To be honest I just haven't listened to many of Doneda's works, probably as I come to improv from a non-jazz background and have always had a basic (and horribly unfair I admit) dislike for the sound of a saxaphone!
That said, having heard some great sax recordings of late from the likes of Rhainey, Fagaschinski, Butcher and Kuchen I am finally opening my ears. As I said the Strom disc is really nice as well as From Between so maybe I have just got Doneda wrong.
I sense he is a man of several guises though. he is playing two gigs in London this coming week, one with Rhodri and Angharad Davies that I hope to attend as I mentioned, and the other with Lol Coxhill. I would imagine two very different musical styles. Anyway I will let you know what I think of the London show.
Thanks again for your thoughts

Its just occurred to me...

Was Michel Doneda part of the Open Paper Tree group with Le Quan Ninh and a bassist? If he was then I caught this trio live a good few years back at an LMC Festival in London and they were really good. I believe they released an album around that time but I didnt ever manage to get hold of a copy.
So maybe I have definately got Doneda wrong..!

"Was Michel Doneda part of the Open Paper Tree group with Le Quan Ninh and a bassist? If he was then I caught this trio live a good few years back at an LMC Festival in London and they were really good. I believe they released an album around that time but I didnt ever manage to get hold of a copy. "

yes, on FMP, the bassist is Paul Rogers.

[Richard] To be honest I just haven't listened to many of Doneda's works, probably as I come to improv from a non-jazz background and have always had a basic (and horribly unfair I admit) dislike for the sound of a saxaphone!

[Mike] Ah, thanks Richard, that's very interesting. I wish more people would express this kind of useful information about their listening experience! There's nothing unfair about disliking certain timbres; it's as legitimate and fair as anyone else's taste! So when you say non-jazz background, I assume you mean rock or academic music, but I'd be interested to read your clarification. Like so many others, I grew up in a guitar-centric musical culture and I seriously disliked saxophones when I began listening to jazz in high school. I persisted in my jazz listening mainly because I was so drawn to the sound of the hi-hat cymbal, and thankfully I quickly encountered Ayler, Ornette, late Coltrane, Gayle, Ware, etc and found that kind of jazz so exciting rhythmically that I accepted the saxophone sound as part of the package. The gradual process of liking that sound more and more continued to the point of obsessive preference and in recent years has become almost a fetish as my listening centers around unconventionally played reed instruments and other harsh and complex acoustic timbres.

[Richard] I sense he is a man of several guises though. he is playing two gigs in London this coming week, one with Rhodri and Angharad Davies that I hope to attend as I mentioned, and the other with Lol Coxhill. I would imagine two very different musical styles. Anyway I will let you know what I think of the London show.

[Mike] I'm not sure he has more than a guise or two at present, as I get the impression he's unusually focused on a specific improv aesthetic, though historically he's certainly covered a lot of territory--check out the Downtown funk of the 1988 General Gramofon disc for a shocker! Given his intensive involvement with multi-media and site-specific performance, it's not likely that his recordings will represent him as anything besides one of the most creative, extreme, and technically advanced saxophonists in history, though that's more than enough to keep me happy! There are some critical Doneda recordings I've not heard yet, but of the 19 discs I'm familiar with of his music, my favorite and the one I've played most often is Three Day Moon: Live at Egg Hall Farm, a 1999 recording of his trio with Kazue Sawai and Tetsu Saitoh, closely followed by from between and his three solo discs. Egg Hall is dramatic, tense, sometimes almost violent, with the seething precision I like in Doneda's playing matched by Sawai and Saitoh's precision and economy of gesture. Yes, economy of gesture--if you're looking for the most aggressive acoustic music that still has this quality, this disc is what springs to my mind as the best example. I think from between is something like that aggression approximating stillness.

Open Paper Tree on FMP is a killer record, but I think Doneda and Lê Quan have long since abandoned that style of playing...

I greatly look forward to your remarks on the London show here in this convenient space!

Mike, I come from an alternative rock background, playing a bit but on the whole just digesting huge amounts of music. (one thing that hasnt changed!) In my late teens I began to be more interested in the more avant areas of rock, listening to the likes of Can, My Bloody Valentine etc, taking more interest in the sound and texture of music rather than the lyrics or message. This lead to a London show by Faust and Tony Conrad in 1990 that had AMM as the support act which changed my listening habits forever! My tastes widened over time to include contemporary composition and in particular the electroacoustic and so called reductionist elements within improv.

So apart from owning a dozen or so Miles Davis discs from the electric era and a few Sun Ra essentials, straight Jazz has pretty much eluded me although I own about a thousand free improv discs....

My dislike for the sax probably comes from this personal history but I also dont much like its basic sound, something about the texture and colouring of the sound that just grates a bit with me though as I said this is changing.

my favorite Doneda disc is Direct Chamber, a trio from 1998 with Günter Müller and Fabrice Charles on 33 revpermi. no love for that one, Michael?

As far as I know, there shoul be a new Doneda solo release on Sofa.

Jacques

[Jon] my favorite Doneda disc is Direct Chamber, a trio from 1998 with Günter Müller and Fabrice Charles on 33 revpermi. no love for that one, Michael?

[Mike] I've got lots of love for everything I've heard by Doneda, definitely including Direct Chamber, but I find that disc very inconsistent. In a number of passages I'm distracted by Müller's electronic beats, soft and ostensibly tasteful as they may be, and some trombone parts that are exactly the kinds of things I'm always fearful of hearing when a trombonist is present in a free improv session--to give two specific examples: 1) gratuitous animated semi-jazz phrases and 2) diffident bass trill drones. It's a corollary of my enchantment with reed timbres that my threshhold of trombone-tolerance is precariously low. I think I'd prefer the music if it was just a Müller/Doneda duo, but only by a slim margin. For any of the passages I have these quibbles about, there are several passages I find absolutely sublime and beautiful. It's the kind of album that I'm tempted to edit for my own listening enjoyment, as I find about 80% of it suited for high-rotation listening. I'm glad you mentioned your preference here, Jon, because it now occurs to me that it's the only Doneda recording I've heard that would seem suited to Erstwhile and it further corroborates my perception of your taste in terms of a static/ambient quality I think Müller largely exemplifies on that album. Given the absence of electronics and the foregrounding of reed timbres, I'd be very curious to hear what kind of experience you had with from between.

[Richard] So apart from owning a dozen or so Miles Davis discs from the electric era and a few Sun Ra essentials, straight Jazz has pretty much eluded me although I own about a thousand free improv discs....

[Mike] Given my own rather extreme love/hate relationship with jazz, that's one of the most beautiful things I've ever read! It's a perfect counterexample to the ridiculous attitude in the jazz world that improvised music has some kind of automatic debt to jazz. Thanks Richard, your case is very inspiring!

"I'd be very curious to hear what kind of experience you had with from between."

I got about halfway through it once, and wasn't digging it at all. after your raves here, I looked for it again, but I think I already gave it away. I thought about asking Chris to put another one aside for me, but I don't think my taste and yours overlap much, although it's pretty interesting to read the intensity of your feelings regarding records and musicians which leave me pretty cold.

a couple of more questions, as long as we're on this:

what did you think of the Doneda/Leimgruber/Rowe disc?

also, did you make it to NYC for the AMPLIFY 2003 fest, where nmperign played in three different trios on consecutive days, with Ninh, Günter Müller (a decidedly more successful set than the one on the Rossbin disc, for me a case where the combo should have waited a bit to release a record, not gone with the first meeting), and Jason Lescalleet. it's always very revealing for me seeing improvising musicians play in different contexts in close proximity, you learn very quickly how open they are to change given what the different combos require, so I was glad I got to see that.

FWIW, my background is sort of parallel to Richard's. While not coming from alternative rock--I got to free improv from contemporary classical composition and disliked pretty much everything I'd heard of jazz until Cecil went atonal and Mahavishnu & Miles got really noisy. I've only gotten into bop etc. over the last 7 or 8 years. Kind of had to when Cadence wouldn't let me restrict my reviewing only to stuff I had some idea about. There are several roads to free improv (and ea-i), and some of them don't have much truck with saxophones.

[Jon] what did you think of the Doneda/Leimgruber/Rowe disc?

[Mike] I don't trust my memory about this one beyond a vague "thumbs up" or whatever, a very challenging record I haven't played in several months, so I'll take this as an excuse to revisit it, hopefully today or tomorrow, and then report back. (Er, perhaps I should finish my Maneri feature today too...)

cool, and as long as I'm swamping you with questions, I'm curious for your opinions on John Butcher, as it seems to me he'd be right up your alley, but you don't mention him in your pantheon.

for me, he's easily my favorite of current saxophonists, so I'm curious why you prefer Michel and Bhob to him, since you seem good at putting these kinds of personal taste matters into words.

FWIW, my background is sort of parallel, too.

"as far as early 70s hard rock bands, I hope you're hip to Mountain, a truly brilliant band and the cream of that crop I'd say." (Michael)

Mississippi Cream if you know what I mean :)

oops wrong thread

[Jon] also, did you make it to NYC for the AMPLIFY 2003 fest, where nmperign played in three different trios on consecutive days, with Ninh, Günter Müller (a decidedly more successful set than the one on the Rossbin disc, for me a case where the combo should have waited a bit to release a record, not gone with the first meeting), and Jason Lescalleet. it's always very revealing for me seeing improvising musicians play in different contexts in close proximity, you learn very quickly how open they are to change given what the different combos require, so I was glad I got to see that.

[Mike] Sadly I didn't make it up for Nmperign's set with Ninh, but happily I caught the trio (plus two dancers) a few days earlier at the Red Room and it was one of the most powerful performances I've ever attended; to me that trio is one of the greatest units in the history of improvised music. They'd played together a fair bit before then, mainly in France, but as I recall Bhob saying they've got very little in the way of recorded evidence of the magical peaks they've achieved, which is depressing to me as someone who certainly wasn't at those French gigs! Aargh... Message to musicians: PLEASE RECORD YOURSELVES!!! THIS STUFF ONLY HAPPENS ONCE!!! I did make it up for the night with Nmperign + Müller, and that set basically left me grumbling about Müller's electronics ruining what could've been a great Nmperign set, with it being a rare occasion to see Nmperign in the first place. It was that whole "ambient" thing wiping out all the critical space and shape in their music, though as I mentioned above I was completely blown away by the Rossbin recording, for which I noted Müller's contributions were non-inhibitory--I didn't hear that disc for at least another year and in fact had completely forgotten about that (uh, forgettable) performance until just now writing these remarks! I do recall being totally engaged by the Lê Quan/Müller/Nakamura set though, with Ninh's incomparable precision of gesture feeding off Nakamura's ultra-slowness to create that disturbing tension I enjoy in improvised music. I didn't have any strong feelings about the other sets that night, generally music I'd probably enjoy in the more favorable context of a recording and private listening; I recall simply being bored by Ninh's duo with Rowe, and I think I would've needed to have been seated in the front row with less environmental distractions to enjoy the Nakamura/Akiyama/Barnes set, about which I simply have no opinion, just sounds passing through my ears. Well, in any case, I must say that reflecting on that festival in retrospect here, it was a stroke of brilliant curation on your part, a laboratory of permutations for a very fertile group of musicians, even if Bhob, Greg, and Ninh are the only ones I take enough interest in to justify a concert outing.

I played The Difference Between a Fish last night for the first time in many months and having both enjoyed it so much and sensed there were details eluding me, I just gave it another listen with headphones this afternoon, so here are my fresh thoughts on this magnificent and special recording. My vague memory of the disc was that it was brilliant, yet enough on the punishing, difficult side to discourage frequent replays, an impression which I can now verify, but also clarify as a specific result of the somewhat ugly, flat background feedbackish sounds Rowe contributes and the occasionally artless squealing of Leimgruber. The word "difficult" can often be a euphemism for "unpleasant" when the listener wishes to defer a definite evaluative stance, but this is a case where I quite literally refer to a challenge I undertake as a listener with considerable confidence of copious rewards.

Being so familiar with Doneda's vocabulary, I found myself repeatedly focusing on his gestures at the expense of the composite structures of the trio, but these structures were so vivid and consistent that I rarely lost my feeling of thrilling engagement, precisely the feeling I seek in foreground music. It was a very successful listen. I found the trio generally sustained a unified, dynamically even, anti-narrative sound field that relied more on informationally-dense microstructural variation in saxophone gestures than continuity or texture, but benefitted strongly from both structural dispositions. As a somewhat trivial observation made to contextualize my remarks, all three played with similar restraint in both dynamic maxima and dynamic variation. That said, it was definitely not a case of instrumental blending, as the separation and distinction between Doneda and Leimgruber's playing jumped out at me at all times, and the distinctions were almost always unfavorable to Leimgruber, who I have greatly admired for many years on the basis of OM, his hat recordings with Fritz Hauser, the LSM trio, and the Victo quartet with Crispell, et al; this is the first time I've encountered an attempt by him to work in the more recent lowercase aesthetic, and it's clear he simply lacks the technical command and comfort in this style of Doneda, Wright, Rainey, Butcher, Bosetti, etc. In the first piece there's an extended section where he wailed with the relentless abandon of Charles Gayle's 90s tenor playing, albeit with great restraint in volume, and throughout there was a strong contrast between his raw, somewhat frantic playing and Doneda's clean, precise, deliberate playing, not to overlook the sheer sonic extremism they share. Modulo the intense restraint again, the relentless, punishing quality of Dave Gross' controversial Fetish disc is present in Leimgruber's playing. Just like I've come to love the Fetish disc, these qualities I'm describing give this disc a special tension and intrigue that I savor, and I certainly don't intend any negativity here beyond acknowledging my preference for other saxophone symmetries with Doneda. With the intense perceptual microscopy and freedom from convention in lowercase improv, I find an interpretational latitude that makes it fairly easy to find pleasure in the diversity of instrumental personalities.

As much as in any other example, I was astonished by Rowe's virtuosity in controlling his sounds and inserting faint and delicious nuances (although the presumably radio-sourced ultra-faint bass grooves that enter the first piece for a few moments strike me as distracting gimmickry instead of a contribution to the sound scultping that was at hand). This recording affirms the importance of his delicacy of touch on a physical instrument as a bridge between the acoustic and electronic components of recent electroacoustic imrovised music, and justifies his status as an inspiration and icon in his community. At such a soft volume, his sounds flirted with perceptual threshholds and modulated the saxophones, whereas they'd likely be run-of-the-mill overbearing, monochromatic electric guitar and amplifier drones at medium dynamics. I found the static continuity of his sounds gripping and immersive, a kind of unmetered firmament for the saxophone lines, although I'll admit to occasionally wishing there was a different instrumentalist mediating the saxophones, something with more drama and less drone, perhaps, say, Tatusya Nakatani! Needless to say, such a thought reflects my even more immersive and intense experience with from between, and there is something revealing about the macrostructural similarities between the two trios that amplifies my gratitude for each as distinctive contextualizations of a saxophone duo. In comparison to my passionate engagement with The Difference Between a Fish, my far more passionate engagement with from between owes more to the inexhaustible riches of Wright's playing as a true equal partner for Doneda than a categorical preference for Nakatani's punctuation over Rowe's drones, and it's bears noting that the second piece here doesn't support any such overarching dichotomy, as Rowe's contributions include a great deal of isolated scrapes and rustles whose structural effects aren't especially dissimiliar to Nakatani's own scrapes and rustles.

Speaking of saxophones duos, that's precisely what briefly emerged at the very end of the first piece. For a minute or so Rowe was completely irrelevant to the proceedings while Doneda and Leimgruber lapsed into a really stunning laser-etched old-school dialogue. Another noteworthy passage came in the last ten minutes of the second piece, when the music downshifted into an incredibly beautiful, sparse, and meditative mode that lingered long enough to be thoroughly transcendental. This is something I hadn't noticed until my totally focused listening session this afternoon, and it'll likely beckon an attempt at experiential duplication. I absolutely love this disc and to me it's further proof that in his current phase of playing Doneda simply cannot fail to produce extraordinary music in any situation.

"I did make it up for the night with Nmperign + Müller, and that set basically left me grumbling about Müller's electronics ruining what could've been a great Nmperign set, with it being a rare occasion to see Nmperign in the first place. It was that whole "ambient" thing wiping out all the critical space and shape in their music, though as I mentioned above I was completely blown away by the Rossbin recording, for which I noted Müller's contributions were non-inhibitory--I didn't hear that disc for at least another year and in fact had completely forgotten about that (uh, forgettable) performance until just now writing these remarks!"

see, this is where perspective becomes very interesting. I thought the Tonic set (their second set ever together) was decidedly more integrated and a much more interesting, sophisticated statement than the one on the Rossbin disc (their first together), and I wonder if you'd heard the concert a year or so later how you would have reacted to it.

I also don't especially like nmperign in duo, live or on record, they're simply too comfortable for my taste. I far far prefer them in trio where they're knocked out of their regular routine, or separately in other collaborative projects (I saw Bhob do a beautiful duo with Barry Weisblat here a couple of years ago, for instance).

I agree about the nmperign/Ninh trio being incredibly strong live performers, and even stronger with Yukiko Nakamura adding her input (the other dancer they toured with was dreadful). I'm not sure it would translate so well to record, but I'm also sure you'd disagree. I have recordings of that whole festival, including the nmperign/Ninh set, which aren't ideal fidelity, but they're probably pretty adequate (I never spent much time with them, as I was already in the throes of assembling the AMPLIFY 2002 box set).

"I do recall being totally engaged by the Lê Quan/Müller/Nakamura set though"

for other's benefit, this is again dancer Yukiko Nakamura, not Toshi (it's Toshi later in Michael's recap in the Akiyama/Nakamura/Barnes set).

agreed, that set was really intense. I believe that's the first and only duo set those two have played since La Voyelle Liquide came out five years ago.

[Jon] I also don't especially like nmperign in duo, live or on record, they're simply too comfortable for my taste. I far far prefer them in trio where they're knocked out of their regular routine, or separately in other collaborative projects (I saw Bhob do a beautiful duo with Barry Weisblat here a couple of years ago, for instance).

[Mike] Ah, I suspected as much and was thinking to query for confirmation. Needless to say, Nmperign itself as a duo has been a profound and revelatory experience for me both live and on record. Further, by far the most intense and satisfying solo saxophone performance I've experienced was my first encounter with Bhob, and it wasn't purely novelty, because the second solo set I caught much later was just about as great. And I'm totally knocked out by both of his solo albums--and Greg's work of course too--so that should clarify my feelings about Nmperign!

[Jon] I agree about the nmperign/Ninh trio being incredibly strong live performers, and even stronger with Yukiko Nakamura adding her input (the other dancer they toured with was dreadful).

[Mike] Ah, the really tall French guy--can't recall his name. My opinion about him is precisely the opposite, but I'm not in the mood to attempt a recounting of his Red Room performance; it was just too intense to even think about right now. Suffice to say, he somehow did things that multiplied the intensity (and surrealism) of that performance by a hefty factor and was equally vital as Yukiko Nakamura to the composite experience. A pairing such as those I'm sure I'll never encounter again!

wow. I only saw him in quintet with nmperign/Ninh and Nakamura in Boston and his presence was so inappropriate and jarring, so antithetical to the spirit of the performance, that Yuko and I really had to try hard to not laugh out loud, and we weren't always successful. Brian O. was sitting next to us, pretty sure he felt the same way, Walt was there also. Pascal something?

[Jon] wow. I only saw him in quintet with nmperign/Ninh and Nakamura in Boston and his presence was so inappropriate and jarring, so antithetical to the spirit of the performance, that Yuko and I really had to try hard to not laugh out loud, and we weren't always successful. Brian O. was sitting next to us, pretty sure he felt the same way, Walt was there also. Pascal something?

[Mike] At the risk of diluting the topicality of this thread, I can't help but enjoy this exchange a bit more. It's quite likely I'd've felt exactly the same way you guys did if I were at that Boston performance, as your description is a fairly good match for the Baltimore performance as well! I can well imagine the scenario and the perspective from which it could be taken as dadaistic nonsense. Nevertheless, I can only report the objective facts of my experience, which was quite profound, while acknowledging the almost absurd subjectivity of this kind of performance art, to the point where it amounts to something like a radical gestalt flip-flop. I might suggest that the three musicians and Nakamura had such an unbreakable focus and unity of affective presence that Pascal Delhay's [I googled] antithetical behaviors were subordinated to the possibilities for meaning that the quartet defined and controlled. Or perhaps more accurately the music and Nakamura's dance already created such a disorienting experience that his antitheticality elaborated and amplified the struggle to find musical, social, and kinaesthetic meaning in the unfolding events. After all, you've got a completely nude woman projecting utter bleakness and abjection via some kind of dark ash on her face and labored, faltering squirming on the floor, and two guys sitting with calm and neutral expressions creating irregular patterns of buzzing and squealing sounds, and Ninh somehow enhancing the jarring irrationality and structural elegance of the whole thing. Perhaps it's a space in which human actions are stripped of their ordinary meanings and we're forced to experience their brute patterns of motion, stillness, and sound in terms of some kind of semantics of bodily presence, or perhaps simply experience the drama of grasping for such a semantics. Or perhaps it was that Delhay's actions were at some level of abstraction actually not anthithetical at all to the others' performance, but rather in tune with their pacing, phrasing, etc. I do recall him simply standing on a chair in the middle of the performance space for a long stretch, letting the bare impact of his posture, clothing, facial expression, etc be assimilated to the timing and tension of the others' actions. As ridiculous as some of his behaviors were, they seemed uniformly sympathetic to the underlying seriousness and confidence of the other performance. His movements did have a formal clarity; it wasn't like some weirdo just goofing around randomly, but more like some weirdo with training and experience who took himself very seriously. I do recall he concluded the piece by going into the bathroom adjoining the performance space and very audibly performing some kind of oral hygiene event at the sink, and while this may seem humorous in theory, in practice it somehow put the others' actions into greater focus and didn't seem gratuitous. I don't think I've succeeded in capturing anything more than a confusing hint of the experience here, but experience is truth and it really worked for me. While I don't wish to even remotely suggest there was anything similar in terms of specific sounds and movements, I'm pasting below a full paragraph excerpt from my review of High Zero 2003 in which I struggle to account for a conceptually analogous tension between two superficially conflicting subgroups of performers in a similarly profound and successful performance. Perhaps this will clarify what I'm trying to get at above. (As some weak connection to this thread by way of uncanny coincidence, it was none other than Michel Doneda who happened to be in the audience for this High Zero performance, and who I exchanged impressions with immediately afterwards--he was visibly moved and enthused about it in much the same terms I did.)

[Mike, September 2003] The trio of Paolo Angeli, Audrey Chen (cello, voice), and Catherine Pancake (drumkit) was tentative and forgettable, despite seeming like a well-matched combination on paper, but there were two wonderful passages where Pancake and Angeli let loose and generated rhythmic excitement that led Chen to give up her cello in favor of some perfect scattish singing. If this set demonstrated the potential pitfalls of "polite improv", what followed was an antidote of impolite improv at its finest. The set pivoted around the violin and voice of Chiara Giovando, who suggested Gunda Gottschalk or Iva Bittova in her self-contained intensity and focus, sustaining lines of subdued beauty with a folksy, droney distillation of indistinct emotion. The other three actors in this set, Dan Breen (unidentifiable miscellany, electronics), John Eaton (alto sax), and Edgar Um Bucholtz (unmusical objects, trumpet), responded with sparse and wanton soundings that posed unacknowledged threats to Giovando's plane of musicality, without actually rupturing it. Bucholtz's soundings were less impactful than the actions that produced them, as he walked about his area on stage capriciously kicking his heterogeneous and improbable objects, kneeling down to disturb and violate them, and even smashing a ceramic plate (accidentally cutting his forehead in the process). Far from being a crude schtick, his agitated immersion in the moment and confident projection of undefined purpose invited the experiencer to let unfamiliar meaning seep into each event. Music relies on the coincidence of sound and meaning, the former easily supplied and the latter created anew out of the materials at hand whenever conditions permit. With minimal debt to the baroque semantics of pitch and time, meaning arose from the desire to participate through acts of perception in an unpredictable shared space of events at the fringes of human behavior. Giovando's violin and voice immediately established a reason to engage this space, while the other three amplified the inherent tension of four spatially and behaviorally independent loci of human action, recontextualizing Giovando's performance as a narrow slice of possible sound experience that must coexist with other unsympathetic possibilities. This is the kind of uplifting set that reaffirms my enthusiasm for the whole High Zero endeavor.

yeah, he was definitely trained, I'm not questioning his talent, just his appropriateness. he didn't do much standing still in Boston, a lot of running and jumping that I recall, climbing the sides of the stage behind the musicians. was the Baltimore set the one where he actually tried to scoop up Yukiko? I almost couldn't believe that when I heard about it...

I just wouold like to add one short comment.
I have been listening to Michel Doneda since the late 1970s. Every time I have seen him, he was amazing in any context. (Again recently with pianist Sophie Agnel)
Last year, I saw him several times in duo with this great Buto dancer Yukiko. It was an incredible experience, kind of "shaman" performance. A lot of energy in the breathing. This duo worked perfectly well.

FWIW, I didn't mind the male dancer that night. I thought it was eerie when he was just hanging on the wall--like a bat or a bug or something. The female dancer was, for me, more....let's say....distracting. I must admit, however, I don't know anything at all about dance and am as far from an expert on that subject as I am about, I don't know, calligraphy.

One thing I do have to say mystifies me on this thread is Mike's enjoyment of Gross's "Fetish," a recording I think is really really bad.

Jacques, man, you're one lucky/smart cat! Say, you must've attended some of the Doneda/Wright/Nakatani performances in France recently--any thoughts?

Also, your remark about the breathing makes me step back and happily note how appropriate is to be discussing dance in reference to Michel, Jack, Tatsuya, Ninh, et al. In many ways, my own strong interest in improvised dance accounts for my predilection for this musical territory (though we could go chicken-and-egg on this one.) To be somewhat blunt and detached, it seems there is something about the drama and tension of human action that can be more important than sound in itself, and this aesthetic dimension is not restricted to live performance, but rather something that is also communicated through a recording to the extent that the sounds are encoding referential meaning about bodily experience (e.g. breathing, pulse, gravity) as a separate layer from their normal non-referential sound meaning. It's my serious impression that Michel and Ninh's habit of collaboration with dancers reflects more than just ordinary openness towards juxtaposed media, extending to an actual integration of these two media in their individual performance vocabulary. I also believe Jack's passionate agenda to promote dance/music interbreeding reflects a similar aspect of his musicality. From the perspective that accepts bodily experience as a sufficient aesthetic medium, I could accept a music that sought nothing other than kinesthetic referentiality. Perhaps at this level of abstraction everything I'm saying applies equally to punk rock, as certainly the space of kinesthetic possibilities is about as large as pitch-time space.

[Walter] One thing I do have to say mystifies me on this thread is Mike's enjoyment of Gross's "Fetish," a recording I think is really really bad.

[Mike] Well, hence the word "controversial". I think "unlistenable" would be a better description than "really really bad"! I had to just turn it off after a few minutes my first time or two, but one day a few months/years later I put it on in the right mood and I just loved it. Something clicked. I consider it to be a polished realization of an innovative musical concept. I'm not recommending it to others or encouraging you to suffer any further though! I'm not very keen on so-called "noise" music, but I imagine there's something similar happening aesthetically when people enjoy that stuff, even though Fetish is just saxophone, doublebass, and drumkit. (Say, funny coincidence, I just remembered that Tatsuya's actually on that record!) A perfect example of, uh, "challenging" music. But which is harder to enjoy, Fetish or Borbetomagus? The little bit I've heard of the latter (a very popular group I might add) has seemed too far into the high-volume histrionics and sado-masochism end of things for my taste, whereas Fetish seems vastly more subtle while still achieving some kind of comparable perceptual paradigm shift. For that matter, I don't see how a record like do is any more or less unlistenable than Fetish. I mean, gee, it seems like there's a whole musical subculture based on extreme perceptual experience. I gather a lot of that No Fun stuff is in that vein. I'll pass on beer/moshing/rock-antics/nihilism/ear-damage, but I'm fairly receptive to extreme aesthetics and I'd reckon value judgements are even more moot than usual in these cases because there's no demarcation of idiomatic territory.

But which is harder to enjoy, Fetish or Borbetomagus?

I'll go with "Fetish"--I generally like Borbetomagus.

I think "unlistenable" would be a better description than "really really bad"!

I prefer "really really bad." It's not unlistenable, IMHO, because the bass player and drummer are both good, and their contributions on the disc are mostly OK. I think it's bad because of Gross's squeaking--if he didn't keep doing that, it probably would be pretty good, I think.

[Jon] was the Baltimore set the one where he actually tried to scoop up Yukiko? I almost couldn't believe that when I heard about it...

[Mike] I don't recall one way or another, but that seems like a normal "dance move", no? :-) You know, I may have wasted a lot of time writing the above stuff, because it might be a simple case of tension through contrast. Okay, that's not really simple.

[Walter] I prefer "really really bad." It's not unlistenable, IMHO, because the bass player and drummer are both good, and their contributions on the disc are mostly OK. I think it's bad because of Gross's squeaking--if he didn't keep doing that, it probably would be pretty good, I think.

[Mike] Surely this is a classic case of using criteria from the wrong aesthetic paradigm, like criticizing Ornette for not sounding like bebop, which of course many people did. I think Fetish is operating far from the idiomatic territory of "reed narrative atop doublebass/drumkit rhythm section" you seem to be citing it as a failed example of. I'd suggest that in Fetish the figure-ground relationships of free jazz are actually inverted, and this observation also distances Fetish from ordinary free improv, in which it has long been par for the course that figure-ground relationships are neutralized.

Surely this is a classic case of using criteria from the wrong aesthetic paradigm...

Maybe you could say "surely" if you could find three or four (impartial) people who agree with you. But you may be the only people in the world--(I'm not even sure about the band members)--who agree with the particular "aesthetic paradigm" you're espousing here.

Anyhow, I'm certainly not citing it as a bad example of "reed narrative atop doublebass/drumkit rhythm section"! I'm citing it as a bad example of well...let's say good European-style free improv. (I was tempted to say "of anything at all" but I'll let that pass.) I don't think it can reasonably be claimed that that album is sui generis: it sounds like (i.e., it's in the same style as) many other Emanem-type recordings I'm quite fond of--it's just much worse than they are (though Nakatani is good).

What I'm saying is just that, in my opinion of course, "Fetish" is a really bad album simpliciter. You obviously disagree, which is fine. But let's not make this a paradigm thingy or appeal to Ornette. I'm pretty familiar with the style of music being aimed at there. I just believe it falls short of its own actual goals by several leagues.

Just for clarification, not that it's crucial to my point, in my view "reed narrative atop doublebass/drumkit rhythm section" is a paradigm that overlaps with both free jazz and the Emanem-exemplified "Euro-improv" (not too comfy with this term, so can't let it out of the scare-quotes). What is crucial is that I don't hear any similarities with the latter area of music and I'm almost certain the musicians weren't aiming for that style of music at all. It really is a matter of aesthetic paradigm. My take is that you don't enjoy the album because you attempted to hear it as traditional free improv, and I hated it at first for the same reason, since traditional free improv is more or less my default aesthetic paradigm when listening to free improv, especially with such familiar timbres as saxophone, doublebass, and drumkit, and a squealing and squeaking marathon is not a recipe for good traditional free improv by any stretch! On the other hand, I had the good fortune of enjoying it eventually because I made a special effort to discover a different aesthetic paradigm to experience it under, and on the basis of listening to Dave's music in other contexts, especially solo and in duo with Liz Tonne, I think I've sort of tapped into something pretty close to Dave's own intentions. For starters, based on observation and conversation, I'm certain he's personally preoccupied with large-scale form in his music, in direct contrast to the standard moment form in traditional free improv, somewhat exemplified by Emanem. That in itself is a huge gap in aesthetic goals, besides the point about figure-ground relationships I mentioned above. I'm actually pretty shocked that someone would listen to that disc and conclude the musicians were aiming for anything at all like familiar free improv. But Walter, I hope our minor philosophical disagreement won't cause you to revisit the disc! You seem like a fine fellow and I wouldn't wish that upon my enemies! [wink, grin, etc] I doubt there are more than ten people in the world who actually like that disc, and it doesn't bother me at all to be one of them. Wasn't it Kafka that spoke of "minor literatures" or the like? Well, the way I see it, music today is all about an exaggerated analogue of micro-genres, unlikely and somewhat perverse arrivals at the Siberias in the space of possibilities for sound-experience. I'm completely comfortable with radical subjectivity and extreme marginalization, and I think the relatively greater (but still absolutely tiny) success of dozens of examples of even more difficult music than Fetish is just a reflection of arbitrary sociological conditions like artist image, media coverage, commodity aesthetics, social context of consumption, etc.

Reply to Michael :
No, I couldn't attend last performance of Doneda/Wright/Nakatani. Maybe Dan could tell us about it.
In fact, I am not a big fan of "From Between". But maybe I should try to listen to it again.

You are generous to musicians, Michael, which is laudable. I've listened--several times over because of reviewing duties--to two of Gross's discs and seen him twice in concert. I believe he's not a very good musician, but you listen repeatedly until you find/create some new paradigm on which his music can occupy the top--indeed only--shelf. One can do that with everybody I believe, even Kenny G., and perhaps, being so generous, you would do so.

On the other hand, you aren't too generous to listeners, who, if they differ from you, you claim that they must be missing something fundamental, that the music must be too "difficult" for them. Perhaps, but I maintain that your bass-figure-ground assumption doesn't fit a very substantial part of Euro Free Improv, including some almost archetypal stuff like SME. In fact, as we're being shocked(!) here, I'm a bit shocked you think that approach is applicable throughout any considerable portion of that field of music: I'd say that if anything, it's more of a throwback. If it were a significant element of what is being sought by the musicians, perhaps 2/3 of what most observers consider the best EFI would miss its mark. That paradox suggests to me that you are mistaken. In any case, it is easy to test your "it's too difficult for Horn" theory by simply getting from you a list of recordings you consider MORE difficult and seeing whether I enjoy (i.e. GET)any of that. (Nmperign, e.g., I like a great deal--as I'd wager do many others who don't care for Fetish--but of course you can make them LESS "difficult" so I have to await your list.)

What you've done, I believe, is attempt to make your admittedly almost universally unshared "Fetish (or Gross) is good" theory unassailable by concocting a "microgenre" that no other musician or music occupies. As I said, IMHO, that's very, indeed TOO, generous.

I think I probably know 5 or 6 people that like Fetish. I don't remember well (it's like 5 years old?) but I remember liking the long sax multiphonics workout quite a bit when I heard it.

I played with Dave once and liked it okay, last time I was east-coast, 2001.

Umm, which point should I reply to first here? Yes, the Wright / Nakatani / Doneda trio was superb when I saw them in Feb (was it?). And, I know you're smiling Jacques, I think from:between is the best thing Doneda's appeared on since your Potlatch triple soprano release with Bhob Rainey & Alessandro Bosetti (yes, I know, sorry about that lukewarm Wire review of Strom.. at least it was mistakenly credited to Julian Cowley haha).
I haven't played Fetish for ages but I seem to recall enjoying it enormously, so make that 7 people you know who like it. (I think I already crossed swords with Walt about that too!) Anyway, vive la polemique.. screw the paradigms, let's talk paradiddles.

so make that 7 people you know who like it.

Of course, three are in the band, one other has gigged with a member, and one admits to not liking late Schoenberg....

:>}

Anyhow, I'll trade you three paradiddles for one (good) parapsychologist.

"Wasn't it Kafka that spoke of "minor literatures" or the like?" (Michael)

That was actually Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure, from 1975, (cf Kafka's diary entries from 25 and 26 dec 1911), not Kafka himself. One of the great minor books though (pace G. E. Moore).

While I would prefer that listeners enjoy the music I play, I try to make it my buisness not to care if someone does or does not like it. I'm very happy about the music I play I and feel privlidged to play the music I do and to associate with the musicians with whom I have and do perform. It's sad that it actually does not go without saying that everyone is entitled to their oppinions and reactions to music and I wish I didn't feel the need to comment. Still, FETISH, was indeed intended to be provocative (among many, many other things). I could write a long list of the things that I (and my cohorts) tried to accomplish with FETISH, however, I believe the music speaks for itself and don't like the idea that 'explaining' it would make it more 'listenable' or 'understandable' especially in the context of this discussion. Also, I think it is unfortunate that having a negative oppinion of something is so much more powerful (something which recieves more intense attention) than a positive oppinion. Again, I have no problem when people don't like my music because it's not intended to be liked by everyone, and especially FETISH because it was intentionally provocative and part of the motive is, volia, to have people not like it (score one for Mr.Horn). The reason I am posting to this list is because I do have some serious reservations about what Mr.Horn said in his reviews of me and on this list, however, I'm onlygoing to comment on one thing that he said. To say "I just believe it falls short of its own actual goals by several leagues" is outragous and at best very pretentious. Dear Mr.Arrogance, Walter Horn, tell me o great critic who knows my mind better than even I do, I beg you tell me of what of my own goals am I so clearly falling so short? How can I become a 'good' musician. Clearly my record collection isn't big enough and having played the saxophone for almost twenty years isn't long enough. Lead me to the path of righteousness so I can save myself from the bad musician self of my self's self.

Dave:

You're brandishing sarcasm, right?

Walter cannot help you.

It kills me when musicians reiterate they're o.k. with the full spectrum of critical responses they receive, and undoubtedly proffer to the work of others-BUT-get snapped up when they actually receive it.

Nothing peculiar about this. Whatever most humans say, they really squirm with unvarnished feedback.

Jesse

I'm afraid I can't lead you to the path you seek, David.

Look, I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings by expressing my opinions. If it's any consolation, I've gotten a couple of bad reviews myself. It's unpleasant, but it comes with the territory.

Anyhow, it's advice you can take or leave, but I personally agree with Trollope's suggestion that artists let the critics alone--neither thank them for raves nor argue with them about pans. I mean, do you think you can change my mind about your work? If you're content with it--that should be enough. What's served by jawing about it? Do you really want to hear more from me on this subject?

One other consolation I can offer you is that I'm no longer reviewing recordings. Maybe others will be more congenial to your approach. Mike Parker is, anyhow. He'll write you some favorable review, I bet.

Finally, I remind you that I wrote a pretty nice review of "EED"--I don't remember hearing from you then. Mr. Arrogant may giveth but not taketh away?

Plus, it reads to me like Walter is contending much more with MAP's zealotry, than your work, Dave.
Zealotry is of course my word, and my read of MAP's style.
Again, in my experience among the thin-skinned (some of my best friends & family members were/are mprovising musicians), the lips say "Fire away!", while the covert reaction is indignation.

I've said it before, but it's singular enought to bear repeating: that is one big prop I extend to Milo Fine. I have caught him many many times over the past 25 years, and he niether solicits criticism, nor curries praise, but if you offer either, he's open. Actually, it tends to be a tad more questioning of positive enthusiasms, than of critical remarks!

Jesse, et., al,

Of course I was being sarcastic!

Just to be clear, what I'm saying is that obviously some people aren't going to like the music I play (even people who like the 'type' of music I play) and that just comes with the territory so I accept it. My criticism of what Mr.Horn has to say about my music is that when he is talking about my intentions he has gone far beyond the line of what criticism actually is and has entered some sort of fantastical psychoanalysis. Believe me, Walter, I certainly am very well aware of what I am doing, what my intentions are and also the context in which my music exsists.

Errata:
The last sentence should read, "Actually, he tends to be..."

Fucking typos.

I think Dave is right that that I overstated my case.

[Walter] On the other hand, you aren't too generous to listeners, who, if they differ from you, you claim that they must be missing something fundamental, that the music must be too "difficult" for them.

[Mike] Well absolutely yes, but in case we're not on the same wavelength about the underlying assumptions of such attitudes, I hasten to emphasize that this entire domain of discourse is essentially individual reports about degrees of success in achieving pleasure in reference to specific external conditions (e.g. a certain album being played on the stereo), and not a determination of supra-individual value for the external conditions. (That is, beyond a pragmatic social value of "album A1 mediated 500 maximal pleasure experiences whereas album A2 mediated 10; therefore, A1 has greater social value", but that angle is not relevant at present.) Further, I don't acknowledge any determination of value for listeners in terms of competence in pleasure-experiencing across a set of external conditions. In other words, listener L1 isn't "better" than listener L2 because they enjoy album A while L2 fails to do so. The term "difficult" connotes some kind of virtuosity of listenership, but it's neither necessary nor desirable to align this with any concept of goodness of personhood, especially since this virtuosity can be seen as a pathology, not a positive accomplishment or net positive contribution to the listener's quality of life. Further, a notion of difficulty is crosscut by cases where competence for pleasure is not the issue, but rather something like willingness for pleasure. For example, I'm a big fan of The Partridge Family; I think it's stunning, brilliant pop music I can thrill to time and time again, whereas I have empirical evidence that others in the same loose avant-garde community as me consistently experience a dramatic failure to achieve pleasure by listening to The Partridge Family. (Sorry about the boldface; I couldn't help myself!) Nevertheless, I can also see how this conceptual paradigm can have a negative social function by communicating arrogance through "This is difficult; I understand it and you don't" type statements. In practice, though, there are so many dozens of "challenges" sitting out there for us as listeners and our personal navigation of the music world is so dependent on other factors besides sheer competence for facing these challenges that we all simply wind up with big messy scorecards with no pretense of final tallies. In other words, nobody actually judges a listener for their failures to achieve pleasure; we all fail and succeed so often for so many different things that it's moot in and of itself. From this perspective the word "generous" creates a misrepresentation of my attitudes towards other listeners. Indeed, they patently will miss something fundamental for some music and likewise so will I. Finally, let's turn this whole matter on its head: the person who reports a positive experience of pleasure should be celebrating, jumping for joy, thanking all involved in the process, etc, not trying to be sensitive to the feelings of others who failed to have such an experience!

[Walter] In any case, it is easy to test your "it's too difficult for Horn" theory by simply getting from you a list of recordings you consider MORE difficult and seeing whether I enjoy (i.e. GET)any of that. (Nmperign, e.g., I like a great deal--as I'd wager do many others who don't care for Fetish--but of course you can make them LESS "difficult" so I have to await your list.)

[Mike] My above remarks should already suffice as a disavowal of any kind of unilinear metric of difficulty. The specific obstacles to pleasure presented by different music will generally be independent of each other. Nevertheless, it's a great opportunity for insight to speculate about similarities of difficulty in different cases, like Fetish vs. Borbetomagus. I don't really have any great lists to offer here though, because I think I have a clear sense of why Fetish can be so repulsive to many listeners, and I find it's pretty unique in this specific way. Actually, you know, even such widely acclaimed works like from between, The Difference Between a Fish, and Placés dans l'air are probably repulsive to most listeners in their extreme harshness of timbre. Perhaps Fetish is distinguished as much from these works in being fairly loud (or at least not whisper quiet) as in anything intrinsic to timbre. loud + harsh = listener crisis? quiet + harsh = sublime beauty? It recalls my speculation about lowercase music as "noise music at the threshhold of silence"...

[Walter] What you've done, I believe, is attempt to make your admittedly almost universally unshared "Fetish (or Gross) is good" theory unassailable by concocting a "microgenre" that no other musician or music occupies. As I said, IMHO, that's very, indeed TOO, generous.

[Mike] Well, by all means the empirical factuality of an individual's success in achieving pleasure is gloriously unassailable! That's nothing more than the truism that taste can't be wrong. That's why positive reviews (assuming they're honest of course) are always more valuable than negative reviews; they report that something specific happened, a pleasure-experience, instead of reporting the absence of the relevant cognitive events, which may only reflect arbitrary gaps in the listener's music grammar or any number of other uninteresting obstacles to pleasure that may have prevailed in that specific case. Positive data is definitive; negative data is vague. And yes, I firmly believe in the existence of such microgenres. For you to dispense a value judgement ("too generous") about a listener's willingness to engage music on its own terms, such judgement based on how uncommon those terms are, suggests you are promoting some kind of underlying restriction on the quantity of "x is good" statements that are valid in "critical" discourse, which to me is like trying to prescribe how many apples should be allowed to grow on apple trees to ensure an equitable distribution of sweetness--obviously we cannot control the genes and soil conditions for every apple tree in the world. In short, your approach is normative and prescriptive, whereas mine is zealously descriptive. (Um, zeal = good.)

This propensity for value judgement reflects something conceptually incoherent in your above statements, which I'd like to deconstruct step by step here. First, you refer to a "theory" that "external condition x is good". In no sense did I posit a theory about value. Instead, I reported a fact about experience. The distinction is profound. Second, you say "concocting" a microgenre. I'd argue that it was the musicians who did the concocting, not me, and that I was simply discovering one of the cognitive states compatible with their concoction. Of course there's the important matter of the listener [experiencer] taking equal or greater responsibility for generating the actual content of the music [aesthetic experience] in many crucial cases, but for the music that demands such listener-as-composer interventions, what is one to do but supply them?! If you're to reject this entire mode of aesthetic activity, then I would abandon the discussion, because a remarkably focused thread on some fairly tightly knit contemporary improvised music related to from between is hardly the place to embark on apologetics for Cage, Oliveros, Ono, et al!! In any case, your construal of my listening and discoursing paradigm tries to reduce it to your obsolete paradigm of good vs. bad critical discourse, a paradigm I generally reject in favor of experiential reportage about success in achieving pleasure in reference to socially signified externalities (e.g. musicians, live performances, CDs, etc).

Man, I sure wish Joe Milazzo would resume active Bagging; I bet he'd have a load of insight on this meta-topic that would be vastly more readable than my bloated contortions... Maybe if we all send him emails begging... "er, I hereby beg you to Bag..."

I don't agree with a good deal of that post (that I think I might understand), Mike, but it's too much like work to respond in detail, and I'm too lazy to do so at present. (It's made particularly hard by stuff like First, you refer to a "theory" that "external condition x is good". In no sense did I posit a theory about value. Because, e.g., I don't even know when or where I said anything about you committing to some theory according to which "external condition x is good" and even if I did, I don't believe that your saying of some "external condition" x that it's good actually IS a theory of value.) I mean, there's just too much there--accusations of being "conceptually incoherent," a bunch of stuff about social utility, the claim that the recording made the micro-genre, not you, etc., etc. Way too much. Maybe some day, but not today.

Some of this is reminiscent of the grad school/student union philosophy slams I remember participating in.

They were robust & impassioned & far-reaching & entirely without consequence, post grad shool.

[Walter] I don't even know when or where I said anything about you committing to some theory according to which "external condition x is good" and even if I did, I don't believe that your saying of some "external condition" x that it's good actually IS a theory of value.

[Mike] Walter, I quoted you directly above that! Here's the key part again: "Fetish (or Gross) is good" theory. Those are your own words in black and white. Also, how can saying something is "good" not be about value?!?

[Walter] I mean, there's just too much there--accusations of being "conceptually incoherent," a bunch of stuff about social utility, the claim that the recording made the micro-genre

[Mike] I did explicitly explain what I meant by "conceptually incoherent" and precisely which passage it referred to, so it wasn't an off-handed or loosely directed insult; I hope it's taken in the analytical spirit it was intended.

There's only one short sentence about social utility, and it's in parantheses with an explicit note about its irrelevance!

I hesitate to enter since I haven't had time to follow the thread until yesterday, and so some of my comments relate to concerns a week (and several pages) ago as I reread it in entirety. My mind travels in different paths than I find in these discussions, besides, you have all listened to far more contemporary music, and more critically think about it, than I can imagine. At the same time, I am highly curious and learning a great deal.

I am interested in the discussion of fetish, but as a partner of some of the players it would be inappropriate for me to comment. So let me bluntly insert some remarks that might be of interest, but please continue the thread where it has been going.

First some background of the players in relation to reductionism. The three of us on From Between--Michel, Tatsuya and myself,--have all come out of a music that would have to be classified as free jazz--piles of notes, racing speed, high volume and constant intensity, and quite emotional. Tatsuya and myself, at least, still do this occasionally, but it is not the focus of the trio. However, in the past eight years we have all come to develop close relations with Nmperign and lowercase (reductionist) musicians--Tatsuya was in the original Nmperign with Bhob and Greg, while he lived in Boston in the late 90's; Michel has played and recorded with both Bhob, Greg and Alessandro Bosseti (Places dans l'air on Potlatch). I myself was strongly influenced by Bhob, back in 2000 when we toured together extensively, although I came to Michel through playing with Le Quan Ninh. Despite these connections, none of us have been fully identified with reductionism, certainly not that of Berlin in its heyday. The orientation of our group, where we have found our greatest response, has been in France, not Germany. For one thing, we do not insist on quiet playing, dynamic levels vary considerably and often reach a high pitch. Also, I can't recall any periods of absolute silence.

There is another issue that is harder to define, and that is drama, and I think it safe to say that reductionists have been cautious around this. I had a discussion with Kai Fagaschinski about this a couple years ago and I think we agree about drama if what is meant is a cliched form, the frame around the music conveying a familiar emotional meaning, the "skin" rather than the "body", as kai put it. The Germans traditionally are "sentimentalisch", in fact this was often a french criticism of German culture, to which they are sensitive. So when Berlin players like Kai speak negatively of drama, I think they mean the sentimentalism, the emotionalism and expressivism of free jazz, which was so much the musical environment when reductionism appeared. Similarly, Michel says, "no expression", meaning the effort to make music express the personality, the feelings of the individual, as jazz is supposed to do.

Too often, however, the drama that is discarded is associated with intensity, and From Between is intense, no doubt about it. But it is an intensity of sustained textures which are collaborated and not a background for solo, as in the drama of jazz. This is hard blowing, even if the sounds seem to be actually suppressed rather than "expressed" (I am largely muting my sounds with my leg). So I'm curious what is the response from people who have been attached to reductionism as a primary musical interest, and whether what we do is associated with free jazz or not, because it does have that intensity in common. In general, I would guess that aesthetic particularism is more prevalent in europe than the states.

Also to be pointed out. Often people speak of musicians' music as a single thing, as if it followed an aesthetic that developed as a single line, or at least there were one form which was noteworthy and quintessential in a hierarchy of a player's musical output. Especially for Tatsuya and myself, this is not the case. Michel is relatively consistent, as European players tend to be, though no doubt he will be doing something different with Rhodri Davies than in our trio. But Tatsuya plays in a bossa nova band and truly loves doing that, as well as Blue Collar, wild free jazz blowouts, and just playing on the street, without placing one music higher than another. For me, each person or group I am in is the major determining factor in my playing, sometimes playing nothing but real pitches, other times not a single normal saxophone sound.

Finally, the music of From Between was at the beginning of our playing together, two years ago. Since then we had two tours, in the US and France, and our music developed considerably after 26 performances. There is a recording from the concert in Le Havre which we're hoping will become available in the near future.

Mike, I see you like these kind of philosophy tussles, and I hate to just leave you hanging so....

1. Do you really mean to say that to say something is good is to have a theory of value? You don't have any 5-year-olds, I'll wager.

2. Do you really mean to say that to turn "Fetish or Gross is good theory..." into "some external condition x is good" is directly quoting "in black and white." I'm glad you're not a district attorney!

3. Are you really denying that the following is about social utility?-
in case we're not on the same wavelength about the underlying assumptions of such attitudes, I hasten to emphasize that this entire domain of discourse is essentially individual reports about degrees of success in achieving pleasure in reference to specific external conditions (e.g. a certain album being played on the stereo), and not a determination of supra-individual value for the external conditions. (That is, beyond a pragmatic social value of "album A1 mediated 500 maximal pleasure experiences whereas album A2 mediated 10; therefore, A1 has greater social value", but that angle is not relevant at present.) Further, I don't acknowledge any determination of value for listeners in terms of competence in pleasure-experiencing across a set of external conditions.

4. I'm not insulted by your accusation of my conceptual incoherence. You may, as Jesse says, slam away. We're cool. I just don't have the energy to untangle such a big (in several ways) post! All I ever intended was to say I don't much care for "Fetish"--if my responsive posts suggested a general aesthetic theory from which I inferred this judgment, I'm happy to recant.

Finally, I'd like to thank Jack Wright for his interesting post (and his excellent music)! I absolutely agree that he is capable of finding drama in unusual places and look forward to his new recordings.

[Walter] Do you really mean to say that to say something is good is to have a theory of value? You don't have any 5-year-olds, I'll wager.

[Mike] Again, the words "theory" and "good" both came from you, and I was objecting to them. It's a basic fact of English semantics that "good" refers to value, so I don't understand your meta-responses here.

[Walter] Do you really mean to say that to turn "Fetish or Gross is good theory..." into "some external condition x is good" is directly quoting "in black and white." I'm glad you're not a district attorney!

[Mike] Well, obviously I wanted to make a more general statement instead of just referring to the specific external conditions of Fetish or Gross! The point was about discourse philosophy, and nothing specific to Fetish's or Gross' music. It's your terms "good" and "theory" that I was isolating.

Again, not that it's even relevant, but in that passage you quote above, there's only one sentence about social utility and it's parantheses! I don't understand why that wasn't trivially clear the first time!

FWIW, Mike, what's most nearly "trivially clear" to me is that many (if not most) of your remarks in your last several posts have been about nothing but "discourse philosophy"! As indicated above, I hope you're not in the criminal prosecution line.

;>}

"If I am asked 'What is good?', my answer is that good is good and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked 'How is good to be defined?' my answer is that it cannot be defined and that is all I have to say about it." (G. E. Moore)
...so it cannot be defined in terms of pleasure either.

Er, that is, if Moore's statement is to be taken as anything other than a cliched copout. "good" has a meaning just as much as "chair" or any other word, and can be studied by cognitive scientists as much as any other brain event. Defining things is for lexicographers, whose role in the world is similar to janitors, and anyone who wishes to use technical terminology, as in "let me define what I mean by 'attack centroid' for this waveform".

You'll note I never used the word "good" except in my complaints about Walter's introduction of it, so I certainly have made no attempts to "define" "good", and in terms of pleasure or in any other way, not that I'd be categorically unwilling to.

(Many thanks, c.l., for that great correction about Kafka above!)

Judging from your response, Mike, I've only got myself to blame for not getting my point across in such an oblique manner, which was simply to serve as a reminder of how fond Walter--quite unlike myself--is of that British philosopher (or so he says).

Yeah, I don't just say I'm fond of him, I actually am. I think E. Hall's criticisms of his intuitionism are pretty telling, though.

OTOH, I'm not terribly moved by Michael's "It's just like 'chair'" point. My general sense is he should read "Principia Ethica" and see if Moore might have considered that suggestion. BWTHDIK?

[Mike] Oops, I was clearing my scratch pad and noticed that I forgot to copy over the entire first section of my above reply to Walter about discourse philosophy that I wrote yesterday! Sorry about that, but here it is now, somewhat out of "the flow" of things.

[Walter] You are generous to musicians, Michael, which is laudable. I've listened--several times over because of reviewing duties--to two of Gross's discs and seen him twice in concert. I believe he's not a very good musician, but you listen repeatedly until you find/create some new paradigm on which his music can occupy the top--indeed only--shelf. One can do that with everybody I believe, even Kenny G., and perhaps, being so generous, you would do so.

[Mike] Well, the generosity is primarily to myself as the person who ultimately experiences pleasure through this kind of dogmatic aesthetic optimism, but there's indeed a social dynamic at work in the cases where I feel a sense of shared community with certain musicians. The case of Dave is a perfect example because he's an old friend (interesting story actually) and a swell guy, so I had the extra incentive to give that dreadful Fetish disc another shot that one unsuspecting day when it clicked for me and gave me pleasure. You do have a good point. However, it's not always true that I listen repeatedly. In the Fetish case, it was the first time I'd actually really played even the first piece all the way through that I figured out how to enjoy it. As a further clarification, it's definitely not the case that there's only one shelf, the top shelf. There are certainly gradations of pleasure, and Fetish is not a top shelf album for me, just an album I love. On the other hand, Dave's duo with Liz Tonne is most definitely a top shelf album for me! (I don't want to go too far afield defending Dave's musicality, but I will say that I think he has a very strong concept and very skillful execution of it. That's a topic I'm sure I'll delve into in some upcoming review or another.) Nonetheless, despite the existence of more than one shelf, you're again making a good point, or at least approximating one, because I do maintain a conceptual bias in favor of a radical relativization of "quality" or "value" in terms of some underlying cognitive metric of pleasure that tends to destratify at the higher end of pleasure, a kind of levelling of greatness that allows indefinitely many things to be equally great as individual slices of space/time-delineated experience. It's a common bias, but perhaps I push it a little further than most. And yes, you're absolutely right that a kind of interpretative generosity can be applied to anyone, even Kenny G. I have succeeded in enjoying smooth jazz for a brief segment--maybe about 5 mintues at most--from time to time before lapsing into the ordinary disgust state.

Welcome to Bags, Jack. As you can see we're having a jolly GOOD chat. Look forward to that Le Havre recording enormously. Where did you play? Le Bokal?

[dan] Welcome to Bags, Jack. As you can see we're having a jolly GOOD chat. Look forward to that Le Havre recording enormously. Where did you play? Le Bokal?

[jack] We played at the Piednu loft, which in Feb. was cold and heated beforehand only by an oil stove, which was turned off when we played. It was still making some strange sound, however, and I mistook it for Michel's playing, so I continued at the end of a piece, responding to the heater. The audience knew, of course, so it was something of a joke on me. And Michel, I suppose. Of course, musique concrete is still a strong French musical category, so it made sense.

As to the GOOD chat, yes, I find it engaging and provocative, so much to think about as I climb on the roof to paint my house. And this morning I had correspondance from mike relating to emails exchanged with joe milazzo about the validity of blogs. The bags chat, certainly the argument over Fetish and all issues related, is not a blog, but it shares the immediacy, and openness to all who can type. From the musicians' perspective, this is a great blessing, even if it doesn't do much to increase cd sales, and even if some "naive" writing is so ill-informed and self-serving.

I've never participated in any such writing, since I usually have to think things through thoroughly, dotting every "i", editing and re-evaluating...by which time the subject has moved on. But I was brought up in a different era--the first text I took seriously was the bible, hardly on the conversational level--and I have a strong resistance to being hip and casual. Part of that is the fear that something in print, that I haven't thought through, has a power to confuse me when later I revise my thinking, as if I should have been right the first time. But that caution is nothing I ultimately respect. So it is challenging to be on the border between conversation and text.

Anyway, the debate of mike and walter seems almost archetypal in its display of opposing needs, as in two sides of the coin. I bounce continually between the two. I am always amazed that mike can find value in things that I can't spend one minute Is time really the factor, or do I just need some kind of hierarchy to guide me? So part of his function as a critic is to remind me that all those who are working with sound have something like the same basic impulse that I do. This eliminates some of the genre gap which plagues those in the obscure category of improv and avant-garde, who tend to disidentify with commercially successful musics, for instance.

But mike goes farther than finding reasons to value every music on the planet; there is actually little that he does not find pleasure in. This is similar, for those who don't know him outside his writing, to his eating habits--he is truly the only omnivore I know. But he would protest, I'm sure, that he is discriminating, and that's true, it's just that he does have the rare urge to taste--and test on himself--the pleasure of everything--at least in the realm of music and food.

To prove that I'm discriminating I just wanted to say that I really hate contemporary R&B pop music! :-) (But, man, gimme some of that old stuff! Yeah!) Wow, that's a great story about the oil stove! But, Jack, you'd better be careful, because you seem to be getting very hip and casual these days! :-) Geez, you've even been wearing matching socks lately! I like your phrase "between the border of conversation and text"—gives me goosebumps.

As for hipness, I assume that matching socks is not at all hip; I must be behind the times, hard to keep up. Todd Whitman, the most obscure sax player in the country, or at least in Buffalo, introduced me to unmatching socks fifteen years ago as a kind of passion (and not a matter of haste). I glommed onto it until it proved financially unfeasible (colored socks decidedly expensive).

Only to say that hipness, in music, is one of the most fluid of terms. Musicians are very hip to say they don't care what the audience likes, but of course that's the very "independence" audiences expect to see, and reward musicians for. Avant-garde stances are very hip, so long as they are understood as representing an "advance". Could it ever be hip to say you took your cue from, at least were influenced by trends, which is obviously what so many of us do? Hipness is what a certain taste-making crowd thinks is not hip with those more powerful others they imagine define taste. The avant-garde must always see itself as underdog to the "larger culture", that is one of its rules.

Hence the tricks musicians play to the crowd. Only to find, of course, that sooner or later they represent the past, because there is a new crowd, i.e. musical generation, that has seen through their elders (of maybe two years, in the avant world). For instance, reductionism is no longer hip, it has passed its prime. What is a reductionist to do? Defend the past? Move on to the next micro-genre?

What motivates changes in musicians' playing, interests, partners? What segment of the audience are we trying to attract, do we look to for validation? These are the questions I ask myself as I shift among different versions of improvisation myself. I'm not sure the audiences we play for have much idea of the process of thinking we go through, partly because if we were to reveal this it might disturb the myth that audiences sustain themselves with.

For instance, reductionism is no longer hip, it has passed its prime. What is a reductionist to do? Defend the past? Move on to the next micro-genre?

Realise there was more to life in the first place? ;^)

What motivates changes in musicians' playing, interests, partners?

Well lots of things like being bored to death by philisophical solo marathons in dialectics (and other big words). :~? Not you, Jack.

Haven't had my coffee yet today. Perhaps I never will.

M

";^)"

":~?"

Well who pissed on your chips? :)

Dude, I'm pretty proud of my ";^)"! The ":~?" I'm not too sure, I wanted something ambiguous as to frown or smile . . .

I'm one of those people for whom it takes longer to recall what FWIW and IMHO and AOOIJMJ actually stand for than to read them just spelled out normally!

The nuclear-holocaust-surviving-hyper-intelligent-cockroach that is the overintellectualisation of music (or anything for that matter) pissed on my chips when I Just Wanna Rock salt. Now I'm full of piss & vinegar. :-€

M

Does anyone know where "No Stranger to Air" can be ordered from ?

Y'all forgotten Michael Anton Parker??!!

i too miss MAP, his pieces were adventurous, his comments (love 'em or skip 'em) equally so. the whole site has toned down since he left.

as for "No Stranger to Air", the sleve mentions a web site (sproutandflora.com), but the site contains nothing at the moment. i suppose you could ask jack if he has a copy

I'm sure DMG will have them as soon as they're available, dtmgallery.com.

No, I mentioned MAP because No Stranger To Air is on his new label. As you no doubt read elsewhere, Tadeusz
http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/monthly2006/04apr_text.html#8
So if you know the man's email (I'll send it you) you should be able to get hold of a copy of the CDR from the source.

i'm sorry dan, i guess i got a bit sentimental
:-)

Hi folks, many apologies for some technical delays on the website for the label!!! It should be in full swing later this week. I've got plenty of the discs ready to be sent out, so feel free to email me directly (michaelantonparker@gmail.com). It's $10 with free shipping to anywhere in the world. DMG will have some to sell very soon too! Thanks to Dan, Jon, and Kostis for jumping in to help answer Tadeusz's inquiry and many apologies for the unprofessionalism as this rickety new endeavor gets off the ground...

I just read Tom's piece on Bill Evans. Awesome. If I still was writing for the site I guess I would do a piece on how I shaved my head this morning so that not all the attention was given to hair on the lower part of the head.

come back MAP!