deep calls to deep

My works always take their bearings from a human stimulus; an event, an experience, a text of our life touches my instinct and my conscience, and demands of me that as a musician and as a human being I should bear witness.

~ Nono [1958]

Tubist Robin Hayward studied Nono's late works in Avignon 20 years ago, focusing on Nono's work for solo tuba, Post-Praeludium per Donau. This was when he first became aware of flautist Roberto Fabbriciani, who collaborated closely with the composer in the last years of Nono's life.

In the ensuing years, Hayward noted Fabbriciani's name on the Nono recordings he was checking out. These are the tendrils that eventually entwine; in this instance, the two musicians first played together in 2008, in Freiburg. The piece that combined their sounds was Nono's Risonanze Erannti. At that meeting they were, of course, responding to the composer's notations. A year later [September 28, 2009, nearly a year ago to this writing], they would meet again, responding to each other in an extraordinary setting, the Basilica di San Domenico of Fabbriciani's birth-place, Arezzo, Tuscany.

Another Timbre head Simon Reynell proposed to Fabbriciani that he record a duo with Hayward, the flute maestro's first recording of improvised music. Fabbriciani told me, in an email exchange- In reality, improvisation has always been part of my cultural and professional baggage, as I am an experimenter; therefore, the recording with Hayward was a natural choice. His esteem for Hayward, he told me, assured his saying yes to the project.

Hayward reciprocated the admiration for his playing partner- There is a sound-aesthetic of risk and imperfection in Nono's late works which Roberto had talked about when we'd met while playing Risonanze- they shouldn't be played too cleanly. This is something I can easily relate to, as it's also an aim I sometimes set myself when improvising, the reason I try to leave space for the instrument to come up with things I wouldn't have thought of.

This last quality, the provision of space for their dialogue to include the unscripted and natural sounds every dialogue includes- the plosives, rasps, tongue-clicks, whispers and throat-clearing- contribute to Hayward and Fabbriciani's encounter being much more than one of dual virtuosity and the mere exploitation of their respective modified instruments' potential for exotica.

Their twined sounds are, for the duration of Nella Basilica's 45 minutes, almost entirely subaqueous, seeming to rise from silent depths, in liquid forms and shapes. Fabbriciani told me he conceived of the sounds before he had the hyperbass flute in hand; the instrument, when completed by the commissioned craftsman, enabled Fabbriciani to realize what he could already hear-I have been able to realize absolutely the unknown sounds that have stimulated my fantasy, he wrote me.

Independently of their 2009 encounter, Hayward was developing a microtonal valve system for his tuba. While Hayward had begun exploring the microtonal sound worlds possible with the conventional six-valve F tuba in 2003, his modified system was fitted just two months prior to recording with Fabbriciani. The newness meant Hayward discovered some of its sounds as he improvised the Nella Basilica session. This was consistent with Fabbriciani's observation that one shouldn't approach Nono's works too cleanly, maintaining the sound of surprise.

Nella Basilica is structured as five tracks, 5-15 minutes in length. In fact, the duo's sound is of a piece, flowing effortlessly from pool to pool, gathering a head in moments of eddied, inspired, insistent dialogue [the final eight minutes of Riflessione are a bracingly glottal, spitty confrontation, in sharp contrast to the duo's overall pooled waters]. As I said, their combined voices are subaqueous, improbably so, given the extended tonal range of their modified instruments. The low frequencies that flutter and fall out of our hearing range remind me of similar sonics produced by electronic artists. Perhaps the best word picture of what a hyperbass flute sounds like is conveyed by the title of Fabbriciani's 2007 release for hyperbass flute and tape, Glaciers In Extinction. Much of Nella Basilica might be characterized as glacial- but also murmuring at depth, soughing as heard deep within a dream-state, wind rustles and whispers at 20,000 leagues. Hayward and Fabbriciani are so musical at these unprecedented depths, you are preoccupied with neither the innovation of their instruments nor their technique. This is, for me, high praise for a meeting that on paper looks fraught with the risks attending novel instrumentation and material [anyone remember Braxton essaying bop standards on the contrabass sax?].

I won't pretend to understand Reynell's artistry in microphone placement; suffice it to say, you hear Hayward and Fabbriciani's sound in the most visceral, even corporeal manner imaginable. Throat, tongue and lips should be listed with the flutes and tuba employed as instrumentation. Reynell placed room mics in a fashion that occasionally pulls in sounds from without the basilica, which frame the musicians perfectly.

When I was first considering writing about Nella Basilica, informed that it is the inaugural recording of Fabbriciani-the-improviser, I figured that aspect of the release would be foreground. I am happy to report otherwise. There is no sense of the hybrid or of two disparate worlds meeting here- Hayward and Fabbriciani engage, as heard in the best of improvised encounters, in the moment, each sound placed with acute care and the utmost regard for the unspooling, low-end waters these fantastic musicians are trawling. Reynell deserves considerable praise for drawing maestro Fabbriciani from the festivals and concert halls of the classical realm into this intimate encounter with Hayward. While the seeds of their collaboration can be seen retrospectively in their shared regard for Nono, someone has to have the imagination and do the work to bring such a fruitful pairing about. Reynell, who continues to stake Another Timbre to such risks and adventures, has produced a beautiful document in Nella Basilica. Deep calls to deep, and we are privileged to hear the conversation.

The photos are from the interior of the Basilica di San Domenico.

The title is from Psalm 42:7.

My thanks to maestros Roberto Fabbriciani and Robin Hayward for their immediate and enthusiastic responses to my email queries.

Be sure to investigate further the remaining three brass duos available on Another Timbre- there is much good music to be heard on these projects as well.

ALC Champs 2010

There should be joy in the chase.
~ Branch Rickey

play things as they are

This summer I received three releases from three guitarists, solo works all [except for the inclusion of one track of a guitar duo]. The guitarists are unlinked, to my knowledge, by any past collaboration. All three engage in disparate musical projects that bear little or no resemblance to their solo output. The releases come to me from Pozman [Poland], Barcelona, and London.

Upon repeated listens to all three, practicing the colligating that makes writing about music pleasurable, I hear these three guitarists linked and simpatico in interesting ways.

The guitarists, Jeff Gburek, Ferran Fages and Michael Rodgers, all imbue their solo projects with doses of melancholia and a strong sense of the crepuscular.














That last quality is heard, most overtly, in Rodgers' lovely Twilight, Birds, the inaugural release on Rodgers' imprint Lost Lights. Rodgers' new imprint [he was once the co-honcho of the TwoThousandAnd label] combines audio, visual and tactile elements in a way that makes Twilight, Birds literally a felt experience. Rodgers assembled seven color photographs of trees at dusk, their branches filled with barely perceptible birds; a hand-stamped 3" CD; a printed postcard and envelope; and a bare bones recording of guitar duende and birdsong, its extemporaneous and primitive melodies reminiscent of Rodgers' similarly naked guitar poetry on his Black Petal release, Curtained Moon.













The ink art on the cover of Rodgers' work bears no little resemblance to that found on Gburek's Impatience, released this summer on the Nothing Out There imprint. Gburek centers his guitar improvisations here around ideas and approaches seeded in John Fahey's Charley Patton-raga solo guitar works, such as Fare Forward, Voyagers and Of Rivers and Religions. Between spirited finger-picking there is the pensive, darker hues heard in Rodgers' twilight melodies.

Ferran Fages' Lullaby For Lali begins with a somewhat dolorous, blues-inflected melody as well, breaking into brighter skies only in its second section, a reiteration of Lali's simple melody orchestrated for mallet instruments, acoustic guitar and a supportive, chugging bass line. Even as this sunny melody extends to Lali's horizon, there is a very gradual subsuming of the song by distant, keening electric guitar feedback, as Lali's song disappears into the soft din.

Fages and Rodgers share a concision in their releases reminiscent of the album-length works of Fahey. All three, pace Loren Connors, are developing the blues idiom, braided with other elements of their respective approaches. All three develop their ideas with insistent repetition and minimalist motifs. And all three, heard in the context of several decades now of table-top, disassembled and chopped guitars in improvised music, are engaging in a rapproachement with the conventional handling of the guitar, melodic/song-form improvisations, and working within fairly constricted and boundaried harmonic ideas. The guitar is off the table, and these three are returning to the primitive and naive traditions [please read this as intended-the sense of primitivism and naivitie suggested by anarcho-primitivism, heiroglyphs or musical nascence, not in a pejorative sense]- much of what was jettisoned, even by the guitarists at hand in other works, is returned to for further exploration.

Gburek concludes Impatience with a duo with Tetuzi Akiyama I return to multiple times when spinning this fine release. Akiyama's acoustic guitar is all pointillism and strikingly placed dark chords, strongly reminiscent of the guitar parts of Peter Maxwell Davies' haunting Dark Angels. Gburek, in the releases' sole inclusion of electric guitar, limns subtle slide guitar colorations in and around Akiyama's sobering chord sequences, the result being a beautifully strange, carefully sculpted guitar duo that completely erases the privileging of composition or improvisation in this music.

Fages, Gburek and Rodgers are shearsmen of sorts; they play a tune beyond us... of things exactly as they are.



Jeff Gburek

Michael Rodgers

Ferran Fages



The images: Juan Gris, Harlequin With Guitar, Michael Rodgers' Twilight, Birds, Jeff Gburek's Impatience.





The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You cannot play things as they are.’

The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

And they said then, ‘But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.’

~ Wallace Stevens, The Blue Guitar

I was conducting a collision

I was asked by Pau Torres, musician and label head of Etude Records, to write a press release for guitarist Ferran Fages' soon-to-be-available solo record, Lullaby For Lali. We discussed the interview format as a means of providing an overview of Fages' musical activities, leading to a discussion of Lali.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the lengths Ferran went to in articulating his thoughts and feelings about his music in English. We had initially thought my questions would be translated by a friend of Fages. When this option fell through, we began [in July] the email exchanges that resulted in this dialogue. Ferran speaks Catalan. I do not. Happily, Ferran speaks English, though he is unaccustomed to writing in English. This created an opportunity for us to work collaboratively on expressing as precisely as possible his ideas about creativity, no small task. I want to thank him publicly for his effort and patience with my follow up questions and clarifications. Ferran's music, from my perspective, deserves a much wider audience, so my part in our collaboration was a privilege.



Talk about your origins a bit, and of your earliest experiences with music, as a listener and as a musician. You were born in 1974, in Barcelona. What do you recall?

My musical roots are not very exciting- nobody in my family shares my musical interests, and the music I heard growing up was basically my sister’s 80s pop. What I remember is the radio was a source of surprises, not for most of the music played, but for the occasional new sounds I was introduced to for the first time. I was captivated by presentations of classic literature, aired by a state broadcaster. Now I recall it as something that marked me.

The next thing I remember is making recordings with friends at home, using a tape recorder. At the age of 14 I built my own nylon-stringed guitar. At 16 I got my first real guitar.

After some time studying and playing, I realized that listening to new music interested me more than academics. At 21 I decided to study music, though my family didn’t like it. Despite taking lessons and studying music for two years, I consider myself a self-taught musician. A key moment was attending an AMM concert in Barcelona in 1995. At that time I wasn’t familiar with AMM, nor their sort of improvisation. It was a slap in the face! I couldn’t believe three old guys were creating such melodic noise.

Following the concert I bought Keith Rowe’s release, A Dimension of Perfectly Ordinary Reality. The internet wasn’t accessible, so I couldn’t get information about AMM music. That Rowe CD was a Bible for me for several years.

What do you think is present and relevant in the music you are making now that might be traced back to the seismic shock of confronting AMM and Rowe’s solo work? What did you hear specifically that opened up new possibilities for you as a musician?

Basically what shocked me was there was no separation between harmony and noise. AMM created a net in which the music integrated a very complex sound environment, at least that was my impression at the time. Nowadays I consider this a normal way to create music. This means that our ideas about music have much to do with the schools we have been in. The new possibilities were the use of a classical instrument with extended techniques, or the use of non-musical objects to produce sound. To understand this way of producing music was, for me, a rupture, and for some years I couldn’t find musicians to share this with.

So from that pivotal AMM concert, when you were 21 and just beginning guitar studies, to 2000, when you began collaborating with simpatico improvisers such as Alfredo Costa Monterio, were you focused primarily on just the guitar?

At that stage, everything I could imagine musically was via the guitar. Then I began to treat the guitar as a noise-generator, using effects, feedback and preparations. At the conclusion of the 90s I began to use turntables, tape recorders and a mixing board. So when I started working with Monterio, I hadn’t played guitar in over a year. He saw me torturing vinyl, with a great deal of feedback, and proposed we play together. A few months later we called our project Cremaster.

Cremaster’s activities were intensive, producing from the start a significant amount of documented work. Did Monterio share many of your musical concerns and approaches to sound when you met? Was part of the mutual attraction your shared interests in making strong music from noise, abrasive sounds, broken stuff and altered or prepared instruments?

Yes, we shared the same approaches from that initial encounter to this day. We have similar ways of thinking; Alfredo, like me, comes from a non-academic background. There are differences-he is 10 years older than me, so we are from different generations. We listened to different music and have different musical backgrounds. We have different ways of working as well. This is also important.

When we started to play together, our musical interests went beyond Cremaster. Around 2000 we started to play with trumpeter Ruth Barberan, forming the trio Atolon. There are some funny stories about us listening to our recordings as Atolon, unable to tell if it was Atolon or Cremaster. At the beginning of Atolon, I played electronics. If you listen to stuff from 2002-2004, our music was very harsh and noisy. Mainly it was made with acoustic instrumentation.

How frequently do you work these days within the Barcelona music community? How many of your activities are global?

Barcelona has a small scene for this area of music, and shows are not well attended. Sometimes you feel the scene is quite scattered. The lack of places to play makes it difficult to have a circuit of venues for this kind of music. Barcelona is not a cheap city anymore; it has become a trendy city, where spaces of any kind are closed to non-lucrative activities. There is not a meeting point for musicians and audiences interested in improvised music. What is making some work possible is the presence of a few individuals programming events with a larger perspective. Since I have been involved with the improvised music scene, I have been active in organizing concerts. The busiest time for me was from 1999 to 2006, when I was a member of the IBA collective.

The interrelationship of my work and the work of fellow musicians around the world makes sense of my job as a musician. Maybe in other kinds of music this isn’t so evident, but in this area of music the way to exist is to understand that the small local scene is a node within a larger network. We are not self-sufficient and the feedback often comes from very far distances.

You continue to be involved in a variety of performance and recording configurations- solo, duo, trio, some centered on melodic improvisation, some on noise, as well as other discrete musical identities- what can you say about these various contexts? Any personal preferences at this time?

I don’t have a preference between solo, duo or trio. It has more to do with whether I am playing in a project I am intimate with- Atolon, Cremaster, Ap’strophe [Ferran’s duo, since 2006, with zither player Dmitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga]- or whether it is a situation with musicians I have not played with before. The perceptions vary with each. Playing solo is of course different. It is the most dreaded situation, the most intense, where nothing you do is hidden. I like it.

How do you think about the dual roles of improviser and composer? What is distinct about these approaches to making music, and how do they overlap?

The question of the difference between composing and improvising has been a constant concern in my work since 2004. Prior to 2004, I treated them as two separate worlds. My path as a musician started with my playing anything I liked and was able to play. Then I realized music is a game of cards, and started composing.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by I realized music is a game of cards?

When I started to compose I didn’t know much about harmony. My intuition at that time was to work with developing chord relationships and combinations that I enjoyed a lot. I would take a chord on the guitar and move from there, trying various fret positions. The guitar is very visual when you are playing- you are able to easily memorize positions of the fingers on the frets. The same can be said with harmony- you can compose, understanding how it works, if you think of it as mathematics.

Around the 90s I made the transition to playing my own compositions. This was a difficult transition. Eventually I realized I was unable to defend my composed music with any conviction. In this moment of uncertainty I discovered free improvisation. To be an improviser you must be an intuitive and self-confident musician, and have developed a proper language. At that time I had none of this. Happily I met other musicians who taught me a lot, and I started playing with like-minded individuals. Soon I became interested in certain aspects of Reductionism. I am not sure this is the sort of improvisation I practice today, but there is a layer of this in my approach to playing and thinking about music. I am interested in improvisation as an introspective process of breaking through musical parameters. Now I understand improvisation and composition are two complementary creative mechanisms wherein I move with confidence. I am intimate with improvisation by dint of my generation and the aesthetic issues I have been interested in. Currently I feel more comfortable using harmonic material for composing, rather than abstract material. I think first of the overall structure of a piece, then focus on each part. The structure determines how the piece is shaped, which elements are notated. Also it gives me ideas about timbre and the different qualities of sound.

This work in the borderland between composition and improvisation is what we are doing in the Atolon trio. The idea of composition with an open form or improvisation with some fixed aspects is what I enjoy the most. It’s a powerful tool for learning and having a solid experience as a musician.

Let’s talk about your new release on Etude Records, Lullaby For Lali. I have listened to it many times-it is comprised of two sections, the first electric, the second primarily acoustic, each 17 minutes in length.

The first section, from my initial listen to my last, brings to mind Gertrude Stein’s line Repetition is not insistence. The first section is certainly repetitious and insistent, an example of your developing a piece along melodic and harmonic lines. There is, essentially, many reiterations of a fairly simple chord progression, until the second section where you gradually break down and attenuate this simple tune. As Lali progresses, it becomes increasingly abstracted, until it evaporates altogether. Is your current intention to return to the song form with the inclusion of many of the elements of abstraction, noise and reductionism folded into the song?

Well, your question is half of my answer. Lullaby For Lali came from two simple ideas [Lullaby-electric and Lullaby-acoustic] that I tried to put together. The composition process was related to the use of an editing program. This was a new way of working for me.

I work with repetition quite often. I like the analog of human repetition. It brings me to another kind of tensión on which I build structures. To play and record the main riff of Lullaby-electric has been one of the most difficult and painful things I can recall. For a guitarist, with a simple sort of chord, you don't have any problem. The problem starts when you resonate all of the guitar with a 2 string chord, playing it slowly for nearly 10 minutes.

The same for the repetitive chord in the acoustic version. To be able to play one chord for a long time and have a purpose for this is my intention. It's something I admire in Morton Feldman’s work. His music is repetitive but never mechanical.

And you are right; one piece is harmony-based, the other is more abstract. Lullaby-acoustic changed and grew from the moment I completed the first version and sent it to Pau Torres [of Etude Records] for his advice. Lullaby-acoustic is the mixing of a long dissonant sound with bits of melodic sections.

For me it was a very pleasant situation, to mix elements from experimental and popular music together. I was conducting a collision. As I mentioned before, I am pointing to different directions.

As I have said to a few people, Lullaby For Lali is my pop record.

It’s pop music, informed by Morton Feldman, Scott Walker, surf-twang guitar and avant-blues. It is, perhaps most saliently, seductive and addictive listening.

It's nice you understand it like this. I'm not sure if all the artists you’ve cited were influences when I was composing Lullaby For Lali. What is certain is that all of them are pointing in different directions. When I was starting to compose Lali, I had in mind this idea- to point somewhere far but not to a specific point.

Ferran Fages home page

Etude Records

Honey On The Razor's Edge; my piece about Fages' solo work, and his duo projects with Ap'ostrophe and Cremaster

reset to zero

One day Yanguan called to his attendant, "Bring me the rhinoceros fan."

The attendant said, "The fan is broken."

Yanguan said, "Then bring me the rhinoceros!"




The Blue Cliff Record is the primo source book for zen koans. For all it's length [100 koans], antiquity [10th c.] and the daunting, even insulting sport it makes of our sort of logical, discursive minds, it's intent is simple and accessible- reset the mind to zero. Restore beginner's mind.
This is best practices for folks such as myself, attempting to hear new music from zero. Every argument I raise against this attempt is useless. Being awake and fully alive to the moment is resetting the mind to zero.
I have no interest in reading reviews or criticism from experts. I enjoy the more rarified encounter with a mind reset to zero, which makes it at least possible they can engage with what they are actually hearing.



The koan above is Shoyoroku 25 from The Blue Cliff Record. It is an invaluable guide to listening to music, not to mention doing dishes.

fare forward, voyagers

Violist Julia Eckhardt, an integral member of the Q-02 sound art collective in Brussels, Belgium, conceived of a way to play chinese whispers [known by its less polemical name, telephone, to several generations of children in the U.S.] with nine fellow musicians; she set the following parameters- beginning in January 2009, she sent a seven minute sound file to her successor, who was to listen to it and create their own seven minute piece within four weeks, then send their creation on to the March recipient...you get the idea. The result, concluding by design in December 2009, and released in April of this year by the unfailingly interesting imprint Compost & Height, is 2009. Imagine playing telephone with your playground mates, if they included John Cage or Charles Ives.

The length and working deadline were the sole formal rules set out by Eckhardt. She articulates the possibilities she imagined for the completed project- ...misunderstanding could lead to creative interaction, presupposing that there is an active and open listening.

You say I am repeating/something I have said before. I shall say it again, T.S. Eliot wrote in his syncretic master work on time and karma's circularity, The Four Quartets.
Eckhardt says the participants are catching up with the noise and flow of time. Indeed, and the sorts of sound choices, as well as the intrinsic partial and limited elements each successive artist brings forward, are the marrow of 2009's creation. Whether you approach its 10 tracks alert to whatever connective tissue is established by each compeer, or simply enjoy the trajectory, 2009 yields both overt and nuanced relationships.

The musicians involved, several of whom are associated with the Q-02 collective, use both electronic and acoustic instrumentation, some creating their seven minutes as explicit responses to their predecessor, some abstracting elements of what they are sent as pigmentation or basic shapes, making of their iterations mists and sound clouds that, leaned into long enough, reveal the seeds played forward.

Let's review Chinese whispers briefly- you whisper a phrase to your listener, who repeats what they hear to their listener, and so on. A chain is established, and what we hear may send what was said in startlingly new and unanticipated directions.

Not farewell,/but fare forward, voyagers.

















So it goes in the chain of linked and interdependent musicians here. Ms. Eckhardt has the inaugural piece, a relatively lively, abstract dance for a prepared viola. With equal parts rasp, scrabble, keening arco and breathy, tactile viola aspirations, Eckhardt provides the aural seeds for 2009. In catching up with the noise and flow of time, some, like Chiyoko Szlavanics on track two, work in a concrete and accessible manner. Szlavanics uses Eckhardt's piece for a base track, limning it with her own striations of crackle and hiss, producing the most mimetic of the 10 tracks.
Szlavanics studied with James Tenney, and frequently bases her sound art on abstract drawings, with dedicatory titles to Eva Hesse and Agnes Martin. The minimalism in her additions to Eckhardt's track make sense heard in that light. She laces the replayed viola parts with filigree details, openwork with no intention of changing the essence of Eckhardt's offering.

The change in course heard in the ensuing eight tracks is a gradual divergence from that approach. On track three, Mieke Lambrights, who has studied with audio artist Esther Venrooy, sounds especially attuned to space and silence, working mainly with low thrumming tones, beginning the departure from Eckhardt's opening salvo. Lambrights' contribution is lovely, if difficult to hear at lower volume levels. On that point, Eckhardt assures us, in a liner note addressing the considerable dynamic range of 2009, soft sounds are intended!

On tracks four and five, Manfred Werder and Annette Krebs respectively, the whispers become, for the first time, uttered in very specific locations and times. Both Werder and Krebs' offerings are comprised largely of field recordings of the streets of Brussels, a diary of Babel, with the pitches and inflections of ordinary, conversational speech making the music. Krebs edits the conversations, as she does on several of her recent releases, and the result is like a truncated, real-time version of Cage and Tudor's Indeterminancy.

I really like what Krebs is doing with sampled speech and her tolling, vaguely kulintang-sounding guitar work, here and elsewhere. She clearly labors over her sound placements and juxtapositions, but the resulting sound is fluid and unstudied.

















I have listened to track 6 in the great chain of 2009 with a conscious effort to hear how it might be linked to what comes before and/or after its nasally, plangent intrusion into the flow of things. The piece is for melodica and percussion, the sand-in-the-vaseline offering of Wandelweiser composer Tim Parkinson, whose cello and solo piano pieces I enjoy greatly. Suffice it to say it is the improbable diffraction of Parkinson's piece I dislike intensely, not its putative attempt at a radical divergence from 2009's overarching shape. After multiple listens, I simply skip over this artless cheese, regretting only the impedance it throws into 2009's flow [and you can rightly interpret flow here as the popular psychologist Csíkszentmihály intended it- a state of complete absorption in what's happening in the moment and in the flow of things]. Understanding I am clueless as to Parkinson's intentions, track 6 simply sounds clumsy and insensitive. I hope my follower speaks German, Krebs reportedly said, referring to the abundant German speech heard in her contribution. That's the least of the problems with what follows. A pity it follows Krebs' pith work

And the end of all our exploring/will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.

Happily, genuine alchemy ensues in the three subsequent tracks. On track 7, Olivier Toulemonde, who might have justifiably distanced himself from the preceding clam note, opts instead to rework the melodica strains by embedding them in location recordings, a brief capitulation to the street cacophony of tracks four and five. The whisper stream is inexorably coiling back to where it began.
Track 8, a beautifully vaporous drone piece from Manu Holterbach, also carries forward, to my great surprise, wisps of the offending melodica, by now transformed into part of Holterbach's sound envelope, rendered musical. Holterbach has at least two prior releases worth your trouble, one an Eckhardt composition entitled Permutations of the Key of G, for fans of Young or Niblock. The other is found at Compost & Height's web site, a sound installation piece entitled Belladonna Borealis.

Track 9 by Aernoudt Jacobs [Arnaud Jacobs, for those keeping score at home] is as lovely as the preceding cloud music. It serves to bridge the vaporous, misty diffusion of Holterbach's track to the concluding piece, in which Anne Wellmer completes the attenuation of 2009's noise and flow.

And this is how the sound arc Eckhardt has launched 60 minutes prior to 2009's concluding track ends- neither a bang nor a whimper, but an attenuation delivered by each musician prior to and following Parkinson's track. The last 4 tracks in particular can be heard as transitioning from a sort of formal, conceptual approach, to a much more intuitive sounding stream-of-consciousness. The whisper stream gradually evaporates, a process of diffusion carried off perfectly by Wellmer's ending the year, and the recording, with a walk through dunes, holding aloft loop antennae that capture the music of the ionosphere. The Chinese whispers are finally exhausted, having traveled from Eckhardt's opening flux of string scrapes and rhythmic rasps, to the desuetude that concludes every ceremony and celebration.
In my beginning is my end.




Bold sentences are lines from Eliot's Four Quartets

The first score pictured is Julia Eckhardt's piece. The second is Tim Parkinson's piece.

Stone sculpture, entitled Chinese Whispers, by West Wales artist Perryn Butler

Compost & Height [there is a link to the Q-02 organization on the C & H site]



There is an anecdote concerning Chinese whispers from the trenches of WWI.
The story goes that a besieged battalion, hoping to get reinforcements before being wiped out by their enemy, passed along the troop thread in their trench the following message: Send reinforcements, we're going to advance!
By the time the message reached the last troop relaying the entreaty to the soldier on the radio to HQ, it was Send three and fourpence, we're going to dance!