catch it nimbly with soft cotton

When someone tosses you a tea bowl
-- Catch it!
Catch it nimbly with soft cotton
With the cotton of your skillful mind!

~ Ikkyu, Bankei Zen [Peter Haskel, trans.]

Wish the Twins had him.

unequivocal

We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.

~ Barnett Newman

consider the air [for tomas korber]

But if we all are Buddha, i.e., if buddha-nature is everywhere, why practice zazen?

Consider the air; it too is everywhere; but until we use a fan, we are not aware of it. Zazen may be likened to the fanning.

~ suzuki roshi, march 22, 1967

D'où Venons Nous? / Que Sommes Nous? / Où Allons Nous?

Gauguin's koan, inscribed in French on this late, great painting.

With this pith work and title, Gauguin is added to my roll call of non-Buddhists-more-Buddhist-than-Buddhists [Fernando Pessoa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Agnes Martin, Thomas Merton, et al].






Where Do We Come From?/What Are We?/Where Are We Going?

danger under the rainbow

You are well within reason to ask why a consideration of two of the artists on Graham Lambkin's Kye Records label [Lambkin himself, and Belgian composer Moniek Darge] should be headed by the odd menagerie pictured above. I will return to that.
Suffice it to say for now I regard both Lambkin and Darge as sui generis sound artists in any menagerie you place them in; and having spent a fairly significant amount of time immersed in the D.I.Y.- concrète of the four Kye releases I own [at this writing, there are six releases in the Kye catalog], I have come to hear their respective works [two by Ms. Darge, two by Lambkin] as not simply owning over-lapping ideas and approaches, but also, at times, a genuine symbiosis.
As Darge was born 20 years before Lambkin, the issue of influence is self-evident. The time frame of the Darge compositions Lambkin released in 2009, Soundies (selected work 1980-2001), bookend Lambkin's life from his middle school days, to the demise of his ten year [1992-2002] musical project The Shadow Ring.

Between 2001-2009, Lambkin has released three of his own solo projects on Kye in very limited editions, carried along by the whisper stream of music bulletin boards, blogs and a few write ups in the few places that bother. In 2009 and 2010, Lambkin issued the Darge works, the aforementioned Soundies, a sampler of earlier works ranging from the performative to Darge's strange concrète pieces consisting of tapes, animal glossolalia, and acoustic instrumentation. Crete Soundies, released this year, documents the three years Darge spent working with intermedia events in Crete; essentially collages of location recordings, shaped and edited by Darge, they share with Lambkin's Kye releases a number of common elements.

So what is the Kye ethos I hear, in works separated by as many as 30 years, created by a Belgian who studied music theory and violin at the Music Conservatory of Bruges, and a fellow who formed a band at 19 with his mates that integrated text, folk musics, cracked electronics and whatever else struck their restless fancy?

Well, there is the D.I.Y.-concrète, a perverse alacrity for sound sources and placements that disrupt the flow we anticipate from the antecedents of concrète; Darge has a piece from 1980 entitled Sand that is all contemplative, steady-state drone and sparse percussion shattered by an "audience participant's" vocal outburst; Lambkin has developed this discontinuous continuity to a degree that every work of his is replete with surprising, sudden and deliberate disjunctions and redirections. Stately, lachrymose violin recitals are slashed through with cackling and seemingly derisive laughter; from time to time a man is heard sobbing like a child, or snoring, or breathing in labored rhythms, while an aria floats on the air; and, to allude to the menagerie pictured above, both Darge and Lambkin integrate a considerable degree of animal sounds into their works- and not merely the by now de rigueur birdsong and riven rhythms of streams found in most field recordings. Theirs is the more complete approach to creature language- grunting, rutting, shrill cries and plangent, nasal honks, creature sounds that serve less to elicit serenity, than to convey the chaos of the babel of tongues we hear around us all the time.
There is also the shared approach to recording quiet sounds in a way that makes them hyper-real; small, quotidian noises [water running, baths being readied, ice cubes clinking, vocal aspirations, the lexicon of the throat, the distressing intimacy of listening to a stranger's weeping, houses creaking,and the ghost sounds of the inanimate world settling, groaning and whispering], recorded in a way that, again, subverts the process of the electro-acoustic antecedents that have clearly inspired Darge and Lambkin.

Darge has a piece from 1983, entitled Fairy Tale, that has a section of vocalizing that is virtually indistinguishable from the gamut of human vocal sounds found in Lambkin's softly softly copy copy [2009], Salmon Run [2007], or his amazing duo collaboration with kindred spirit Jason Lescalleet, The Breadwinner [2008]. These are alarmingly intimate vocal sounds, especially upon first hearing them- unmannered and emotive, but often unnervingly devoid of a context or narrative in which to place them, mostly for our own comfort. Darge and Lambkin share a penchant for unsettling juxtapositions, though Darge's work has closer ties, formally, to early experiments in electro-acoustic/concrète compositions.

So there is, in certain moments of disjuncture, in some of their improbable sound eruptions and fissures, a real simpatico between their respective sound worlds. I think Lambkin goes places much wilder, in a literal sense, than Darge. In his raw assemblage/collage working method, Lambkin has developed a startling gift for joining jaw-droppingly gorgeous material with what lies beneath the boards, the sounds of grief, anxiety and apprehension peeking out from under the skirts of sonorous chamber music and piano gravitas. There are amazing moments of this sort of yoked, muted anxiety and pleasing melody throughout his solo works. The concluding 10 minutes of softly softly, a long exhalation of back-masked tapes, a looped vocal aspiration, a funeral piano arpeggio, looped and phased subtly as it flows to the sound of water and silence, is improbably beautiful. Lambkin can unnerve and assuage within a few moments, and you never hear it as manipulative, as much as issuing from a complete sound world Lambkin has imagined and realized with the most ordinary tools- the body, the breath, the house, the creatures around us, the sound of danger just under that rainbow.
















Besides documenting his own and others' sound projects on Kye, Lambkin has recently published a collection of his drawings, Dripping Junk, as well as a collection of his poetry and lyrics, Dumb Answer To Miracles. Both texts are available from Penultimate Press. I have not read these, so cannot comment. I do know Penultimate Press is the imprint of Melbourne-based Mark Harwood, who once ran a lovely label of new music called Synesthesia.

So what of the creatures atop this page? They are evocative, for me, of Lambkin's sound world.
The chiaroscuro critters on the top are by Lambkin, a work entitled Faces.
Their doppelganger just below is a primate seldom seen outside of Africa. They are known variously as potto, or, by the English-speaking in Africa, as softly softly.






The Kye releases discussed are:

softly softly copy copy [Kye 04]

Salmon Run [Kye 02]

Soundies (selected work 1980-2001) [Kye 05]

Crete Soundies [Kye 06]

Also referenced:

The Breadwinner [Erstwhile 052] Jason Lescalleet/Graham Lambkin



For further information about the activities of polymath Moniek Darge, visit her site, the Logos Foundation.

To contact Graham Lambkin about any of his audio or visual works, write him at hawkmoths@yahoo.com

To obtain The Breadwinner, and to inquire about the available Kye releases, contact Erstwhile Records.




The phrase danger under the rainbow is the title of this Lambkin painting:

this

All compounded things are impermanent.
All emotions are pain.
All things have no inherent existence.
Nirvana is beyond concepts.

motubachii

The summer issue of Paris Transatlantic is now available, which includes an edited version of my review of the recent Annette Krebs/Taku Unami release, motubachii. I am providing a link to PT, as there is a lot of good reading to be found in this issue.

I am posting here the pre-edited version of my motubachii piece, as it includes, in its additional 240 words, a few references I think further clarify my regard for the release.

Enjoy!

It is the how of motubachii, Krebs and Unami’s first release as a duo, strange fruit culled from a series of recordings made last year in Germany and Japan, around which the online discussions I have seen coalesce. It is indeed a “puzzle box of sound,” as producer Jon Abbey has it in his press release. It is understandable that even seasoned listeners to radical, leading-edge music might attempt to solve the mysteries of such a disjunctive, ambiguous and, without intending this to be in the least bit pejorative, initially unmusical sounding work. Such ambiguities, disjunctions and even, one could argue, negations make a lot of listeners uncomfortable.

Motubachii, at first blush, seems to proceed without flow, logical transitions or even much regard for the musicality of many of its sound sources. The threads that are perceptible, revealing this 53 minute sonic diary to be quite coherent, and eventually disclosing some of its baffling structure, are several. One is Krebs’ recurring guitar/mixing board/samples, a clear lexicon of sound treatments, tolling tones and bell sounds, trebly string plucks and sonorous low tones, cycling throughout the constantly shifting locations and ambiences. Another is the paradox of Unami’s orchestrated panoply of slammed doors, sporadic hand-claps, tossed coins, bursts of hissing pipes, dragged furniture, manipulated cardboard boxes and something sounding like banjo plinks- for this listener, sounding random and tossed off for many [many!] listens- while actually every bit as arranged and intentional as Kreb’s relatively more conventional plectrum-sounds and samples [some of these latter familiar from her other recent duo releases, the excellent Falter I-V, with Ernst Karel, and the Kravis Rhonn Project, with Rhodri Davies]. And yet another thread is repetition, suggestive of a sort of circular travel from the first to the seventh and last track. [The first and last track are , in fact, identical, though the last reiteration enigmatically contains two additional seconds].

For reasons I may or may not manage to articulate, motubachii has, from the jump, sounded to me like a sound diary of the duo’s month or so together. The over-arching, kaleidoscopic structure is episodic, the duo’s music placed within continually shifting contexts of spaces and ambiences - various rooms, public commons, and both subtly and jarringly-edited inside/outside locations. The entire work is shot through with sounds that evoke transience, travel and impermanence- passing traffic, intrusive radio bursts, out-of-the-frame conversations, snapped-off phrases, truncated folk music-and, woven throughout, Krebs and Unami’s own unlocatable, unfixable sounds.

Repetition provides at least an illusory form, even as the duo shuffle and shamble through their shared journey, twinned tricksters upending any toe-hold you manage to gain for a moment along the way.

Most of the elements of motubachii are established in the terrific, opening five minute section-and, as I said, returned to at its conclusion. Initially, no doubt in my own reflexive attempt to establish some sort of analogy, I thought of Takemitsu’s work in the Kobayashi film, Kwaidan. Spare percussion, struck strings, collages of captured voices-there is some resonance with Takemitsu’s startling early electro-acoustic work.

Then the idea of a sonic diary took hold, and I cannot shake it. Sound phenomenon is turned inside out, dislocation and jarring segues are motubachii’s constant element. This is the sound of cognition traveling through the shopworn, well-trodden, banal and intimately familiar landscapes we inhabit. All the sounds that impinge- bursts of media, baby laughter, plangent construction sounds-interlaced with Krebs’ soft and swelling notes and tones.

Indulging for a moment in my own speculation as to how motubachii was put together, I would not be in the least surprised to learn Unami and Krebs stitched their respective contributions together in post-production, in parallel play, complementary conjurers, the two delighting in being the archetypal Reynards of sound.

I must mention the tri-fold package design by Yuko Zama, an apposite visual counterpart to the sounds within. Readers familiar with the Erstwhile catalogue know that Ms. Zama’s design work has emerged as an essential element of Erstwhile’s releases, and I am happy to have a forum in which to praise her work.

Whatever the how of motubachii is revealed to be, let this salience not be lost here- the force of its imagining, stopping the mind for reasons other than the mystery of its construction. While you can hear unmistakable elements in both Unami and Krebs’ sound choices in prior works, I am hard-pressed to imagine whom else could have created an experience quite like motubachii. It is, to lift a descriptor from Stanislaw Lem's The Star Diaries, which I am told both musicians enjoyed, “absolutely necessary and altogether impossible”. There is that persistent, but spectral sense that you are hearing an account or documentation of their joined imaginations, and that they have traveled together through time, returning and bearing the strange fruit of motubachii. It is unlike anything else you’ve heard in the Erstwhile catalogue, or elsewhere, and I am confident I have not heard everything there is to be heard from these kindred spirits, whether by revisiting motubachii, or in their future projects.

Photo: Yuko Zama

R.I.P.. Harvey Pekar

October 8, 1939-July 12, 2010

In the 1980s my friend Gary began collecting the comic anthology Raw, and American Splendor, insisting I have a look at Pekar's chronicle of working class tedium and enervation. Pekar ranks with Charles Olson or John Fante or whomever you wish, in writing about that slice of America without sentimentality or rancor.

















His jazz knowledge was also considerable, and some of his reviews are accessible online.



It makes you feel good to know that there's other people afflicted like you.
~ Harvey Pekar

Buster and Sam

Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.
~ Buster Keaton













I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
~ Samuel Beckett




Stills from Film
[Dir: Samuel Beckett]

In ideal circumstances there is no unique authorship

I really don't sweat my inability to distinguish the what or whom of collaborations like the one heard on Tomas Korber and Ralf Wehowsky's Walkurnen Am Dornenbaum. I am fairly surrendered to the ambiguity and the erasure of discrete roles this duo achieved, the result of their three year exchange of sound files drawn from basic material created over several days of playing together in 2006. This hasn't always been the case in my history of listening to difficult music. Walkurnen Am Dornenbaum sounds like interactive concrète, the signifiers of improvisation and composition, not to mention authorship, rendered irrelevant.

Wehowsky aims for this, as he said in a 2005 interview- In ideal circumstances there is no unique authorship, no separation between composer and performer, and a constant exchange of ideas and musical material. Hard on the ego. Happily, collaborator Korber seeks these sorts of confrontations, subsuming his guitar-based sounds within the duo's joint chopping, mixing, transpositions of speed and source material, and general sonic fuckery. The six tracks comprising the whole are little more than suggested demarcations, as Walkurnen lurches and reels through myriad micro-structures, fun-house events and dramatic crescendos that gasp and expire into barely audible hiss. This is a fantastically shaped, raw and ragged collage. Attuned specifically to its striations of ideas and details, you'll hear many of its musical cells reiterated and echoed, a snip of sound disappearing, then foregrounded with added distortion, oscillation, mangled leitmotifs, even recurring themes. There are wisps and whips of thin ghost tones, wheezy Carnival of Souls organ chords, saturated noise and moments of sustained serenity.

It is easy to imagine there must be some sort of back story dish in the creation of a work drawing on equal parts collaboration and confrontation, drawing two distinct personalities into a three year exchange of ideas, temperaments and sound file isomorphism. As stated at the outset, we'll never know, as Walkurnen is, to my ears, a realization of what Wehowsky called constant values like confrontation and discontinuous continuity.

I came to Walkurnen remiss in my exposure to Wehowsky's nearly three decades of experimental work. I totally bypassed the P16.D4 project, as well as his like-minded collaborators Nurse With Wound; I was a little familiar, in that area of music, with SPK. I also, despite having the acronym on my radar for some time, never heard the RLW solo stuff. Wehowsky has been at this sort of meticulous treatment of given material a long time, disabusing casual listeners of the notion Walkurnen is an entirely new creature. As far back as 1984, in reference to swapping tracks for the P16.D4 album Distruct [the cover is pictured above], Harry Poole of Smegma called their collaboration a complete tape, a thousand miles apart.

On the contrary, I am quite familiar with Korber's work, owning 20 or so of his releases. So my ears were predisposed, before a couple of listens relieved me of the effort, to locating Korber's sound and sensibility in this collaborative project. As I said, Korber has documented his frequently self-effacing approach to collaboration on previous releases; he limns and outlines more than he asserts or exerts himself, and brings this well-honed instinct to specific playing situations.

Wehowsky and Korber have resisted, or resolved, or simply ignored the edges of each other's personalities, and the tissue between improvisation and composition, and their fusion makes Walkurnen a furious, fun ride. Rendering, pulverizing and refining tape work, acousmatics and noise, Korber and Wehowsky clearly treated each other's contributions with patience, acute attention to detail, and unmistakable warping. In the same year Wehowsky stated his ideal of the anti-auteur approach, Korber said everything is a little part in a puzzle-let's talk about this again in 40 years. I hope these two don't take that long before creating another stunner like Walkurnen Am Dornenbaum. Should I relapse from my weak vow to forego Top Ten lists this year, this one will sit in the upper berth.


Wehowsky quotes from Paris Transatlantic interview, 2005.

Korber quote from Tokafi, August 2006.

Walkurnen Am Dornenbaum was released in 2010 on the excellent Entr'acte label.

Perhaps in homage to the Rolling Stones' injunction, in the liner notes to Let It Bleed, to PLAY THIS LOUD, Walkuren's inner cover exhorts us to BE PROUD, PLAY LOUD!

when this breath is cut off, you let go of the whole universe

Thanks to Robert for posting the title quote, taken from the film Amongst White Clouds, on his blog, A Spiral Cage.

the gateless gate

A note to mention a few things in process for later this summer; I was asked by Etude Records to interview Catalan musician Ferran Fages to serve as a press release for his next album, Lullaby For Lali. I am pleased with this, as Ferran is a musician I think more people should hear, and he can be heard in a variety of contexts, engaged as he is with both composition and improvisation, ranging from spare and laconic solo guitar works, to the synapse-jolting noise of Cremaster.

Additionally, my review of the Taku Unami/Annette Krebs duo, motubachii, should appear very soon in the Bastille Day edition of Paris Transatlantic; I will be interviewing Taiga Records honcho Andrew Lange for a label profile of an imprint close to home for me; I am reviewing the film Amongst White Clouds for Cosmos Pictures; and the queue of releases awaiting my, let's say deliberate pace, is growing. My thanks to all the musicians who have sent me work and refrain from impatient emails as I deliberate through the queue.



Every day Zuigan used to call out to himself, "Master!" and then he answered himself, "Yes, Sir!" And he added, "Awake, Awake!" and then answered, "Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir!"

" From now onwards, do not be deceived by others!" "No, Sir! I will not, Sir!"

~ Mumon [The Gateless Gate, all 48 koans with commentary by Ekai]

dispel the misery of the world

Happy 75th birthday Tenzin Gyatso
ཏཱ་ལའི་བླ་མ་
the 14th Dalai Lama

















Pictured are [L] Khenpo Migmar Tseten, author, Buddhist chaplain at Harvard, and since 2001, the Tibetan teacher from whom I have received the most personal teachings; and [R] his boss.

I was fortunate to attend 3 teachings given by His Holiness the Dalai Lama when he visited Minneapolis in May, 2001. I had met Lama Migmar several months before this, and the hook was in immediately. He is droll, unnervingly savvy and perceptive about his U.S. students, owns an unerring radar for bullshit, and wants happiness for everyone he meets.

It is impossible for me to express my regard for these two men, except by my inept efforts to try, and fail, and try anew, to act on some of what they have taught me.


For as long as space endures
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I too abide
To dispel the misery of the world.

it may seem like nothing is happening at all

Phase, the title of a 40 minute piece constructed from recordings taken during Jason Kahn and Jon Mueller's U.S. tour of a few years ago, conveys a few meanings. First, it signifies a slight paradigm shift in how this area of music is being made available. Released on FSS, the duo's music is accompanied by a very tactile set of four silk-screened prints designed by Jason Kahn [as well as a cool button]. Listeners familiar with Kahn's Cut label, for which he designed the CD covers, will immediately recognize his visual style in these prints. Phase is available solely as a digital download, an entry in FSS founder Bruce Adam's burgeoning catalog that serves as an experiment in encoding digital albums of long form music. Adams was the co-founder of Kranky records, and sold his share of that label five years ago, launching FSS in 2008.

The second sense of phase is heard in the long cloud form drone Kahn created, editing in post-production from multiple live performances of the duo. The elements of drone music familiar to listeners of the duo's previous collaborations are here- the duration, the overtones and partials, the sound of a metallic tambura holding the center, the duo's seamless fusion of their personalities- but also at play is a shifting of these elements in and out of phase, presaged in the early minimalist works for orchestral instruments and, occasionally, tapes. This phasing produces the beats and secondary rhythms similar to those early works, the off-parallel rhythms generating sonic ripples and resonances. Unlike the systems music of the early minimalist composers, who essentially jettisoned changes in timbre and texture, Mueller and Kahn generate countless layers of continually changing, highly malleable overtones, partials and harmonics, swirling up a long vertical axis that threatens to gyre out of control. The illusion, encountered also in those early works of Young, Reich and Riley, is that little changes, beyond the scrim of the duo's hissing static, amplified cymbals, and throbbing low tones. It's easy, and convenient, to forget that the history of listening to new music is a personal history of being fooled, over and over.

This was brought home for this listener a few weeks ago when Jon Mueller performed his piece for amplified snare drum and electronically processed gongs. Sitting no further than 15 feet away, I was carried along this vertical axis of swarming ghost tones and howling partials, gradually aware I was hearing elements of sound I could identify, and much I could not. I asked Mueller after the performance if there were pre-recorded voices in the din, as I could distinctly hear what sounded like the howl of lamentations in the mix. There was not, to our mutual amusement. I have since learned of the phenomenon of formants, an acoustic resonance created by overtones that can actually mimic vowel sounds, so I am not certifiable just yet.

This experience of the possibility of hearing in yet another iteration of an archetypal music great detail and change, heard here in the physicality and viscera of Kahn and Mueller's joining of percussion and electronics, is bracing stuff. Both musicians have long been about expanding the field of what we hear within a certain degree of stasis and defined parameters. A seeming stasis, apparent parameters; in fact, Phase is a brewing, boiling mass of sound that generates a secondary quality, the seeds of which are heard in the duo's solo works. Releases as disparate as Kahn's Vanishing Point, and Mueller's Metals, own traces of this secondary quality. It is what not a few musicians reach for in similar efforts, something incantatory, a sort of singing that results from that push for what can be created along drone's vertical axis if one keeps pushing. Very difficult to name this quality; it issues, though, from the tension inherent in their work, the self-evident gravitas and sustained concentration of pieces like Phase. It lies just beyond that first threshold of listening to drone; Eno, describing Music For Airports, said it was as ignorable as it is interesting. This doesn't obtain with a work like Phase. There is a sense of timelessness, and of two musicians surprising even themselves. It issues from the cloud of Phase like a ghost choir, tempting me to suggest a new placeholder for this duo's work, like ecstatic drone.




The title of this post is a quote from Jason Kahn, in his interview in Paris Transatlantic, 2004.

Phase is available by following the FSS link above.

Photo: Gregory Davis

nothing but grief

suddenly nothing but grief
so I put on my father's old ripped raincoat

~ ikkyu, crow with no mouth
















Pictured: Jesse W. Goin, pere & fils,
Toronto, 1954