on behalf of the raw object

There are few things in my experiences of hearing new music more gratifying than the serendipitous discovery of a heretofore unknown musician whose sound world links to favorite and familiar artists.

In 1987, the Walker Art Center curated a Brothers Quay film fest, introducing me to works like The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, Street of Crocodiles, and The Epic of Gilgamesh. It had been nearly 10 years since I had my head blown off viewing David Lynch's Eraserhead at a midnight Bijou in Iowa City. The Quay brothers stunning animation of doll parts, wood screws and raw meat [among many other quotidian and improbable objects chosen to visually explicate the narratives of Bruno Schulz, Kafka, et al] opened up many doors for story-telling and film language in animation. Like Lynch, they seem to be drawn to animating grotesquerie and the unsettling and fantastic. Viewed another way, they have simply been bringing to life the stuff of those abandoned and neglected drawers, cellars and recesses that populate our dreams. Bringing to life meaning giving these murky and frequently deformed beings a stage, with music and dance, on which to show themselves for our cringing enjoyment.

I have no idea if visual and sound artist Mathieu Ruhlmann has viewed the works of the Brothers Quay. It is, however, no surprise Ruhlmann is drawn to the poetry of Francois Ponge, whom he quotes in the liner notes to his 2010 release as a leaf or a stone. Ponge published
many works that also present everyday objects [food, furniture, books] as having a voice, and, despite their appearance of inanimation, an elan vital. Like the film-making twins and Ruhlmann, the poet found his material and sources very near at hand. Ponge's best known translated work, in fact, is entitled The Voice of Things.

The title atop this page comes from as a leaf or a stone's liner notes, an apt phrase for what Ruhlmann achieves on the several works of his I am familiar with. Ruhlmann builds musical episodes and dream fragments from bird skulls, denture cleaners and the like. He is authentically elemental, his music sourced from paper, metal, water, wood, pine cones and unnerving snippets of human voices. When I hit the 5th or 6th listen through as a leaf or a stone, I thought, this sounds like The Brave Little Toaster as imagined by Lynch [in fact that 1987 little charmer was the work of several future Pixar talents. House-hold objects do come alive, but they sing show tunes penned by Van Dyke Parks, not concrete manufactured from skulls and kitchen scullery].












Then I revisited the Quay brothers imagery, and the affinity between Ruhlmann's ruminative found objects and the Quays' dramaturgy of doll parts and animal skeletons was clear, and was sustained as I listened through his work while looking at stills from the last two decades of the Quays' films.

Frequently, throughout as a leaf or a stone's six discreet tracks, there are sounds that might be the creaking, churning gears of Ruhlmann's imagination itself, the mechanized hum of another world, as Donald Fagan had it. Perhaps I am overly-smitten with the Quay affinity, but I hear Ruhlmann's work as equally a stage for his meticulous sonic scraps, and a reflexive portrait of the director, his dreams and fantasies worked out with kitchen utensils and an unbridled imagination.













For all my efforts to articulate the ghost-world Ruhlmann populates with his nuanced, insistent, sometimes sinister sounds, there is genuinely something ineffable here. You can hear it for yourself, something just beyond the groans, drones and plangent music. Another way of approaching the thing, the poet Ponge wrote, is to consider it unnamed, unnameable.



as a leaf or a stone

Photos: stills from the films of The Brothers Quay

The title comes from a statement by Francis Ponge, found in as a leaf or stone's liner notes:
May my work be one of continual rectification of expression on behalf of the raw object...

Francis Ponge

each time the wave breaks

Driven to distraction and passing thoughts of annihilation today, not my general state. At first, every thing I see is a problem. Every person I see is an asshole. Every thought I have is tediously, oppressively about me.

Then, medicine comes in this container:
Each time the wave breaks
The crow
Gives a little jump.

~ Nissha

Another dose in this Latin maxim:
In corruptio optima pessima.
[In corruption, the best becomes the worst].

In one day, everything, from a certain perspective, is certainly shit- and from another perspective, everything is medicine. These are not far apart [much less contradictory or mutually exclusive]-they are mind.

One more- this one Shiki's apt description of my mind:
sweet juice drips from the knife blade.

For Gary Sisco

Men Untrained To Comfort

Jason Needly found his father, old Ab, at work
at the age of eighty in the topmost
tier of the barn. "Come down!" Jason called.
"You got no business up there at your age."
And his father descended, not by a ladder,
there being none, but by inserting his fingers
into the cracks between boards and climbing
down the wall.

And when he was young
and some account and strong and knew
nothing of weariness, old man Milt Wright,
back in the days they called him "Steady",
carried the rastus plow on his shoulder
up the high hill to his tobacco patch, so
when they got there his mule would be fresh,
unsweated, and ready to go.

Early Rownaberry,
for another, bought a steel-beam breaking plow
at the store in Port William and shouldered it
before the hardly-believing watchers, and carried it
the mile and a half home, down through the woods
along Sand Ripple.

"But the tiredest my daddy
ever got," his son, Art, told me one day,
"was when he carried fifty rabbits and a big possum
in a sack on his back up onto the point yonder
and out the ridge to town to sell them at the store."

"But why," I asked, "didn't he hitch a team
to the wagon and haul them up there by the road?"

"Well," Art said, "we didn't have but two
horses in them days, and we spared them
every way we could. A many a time I've seen
my daddy or grandpa jump off the wagon or sled
and take the end of a singletree beside a horse."

~ Wendell Berry, Leavings

to be held for a long time

Nearly a decade after their 1999 release All Angels, the collective string-effects of the trio Cranc [Angharad Davies, violin, Rhodri Davies, electric harp, and Nikos Veliotis, cello] were recorded during their 2008 residency at the Brussels performance venue QO-2, and released earlier this year as Copper Fields.

I have spent some time imagining how this trio's individual trajectories manifest in Copper Field's seamless, stunning gestalt; I have accordingly referenced some of my favorite releases from the trio members at the end of this piece. Anyone familiar with either the improvised or the composed projects of Cranc's members over the past decade will realize the massed, intuitive droneage of Copper Fields is the result of each musician concentrating, distilling and boiling down their respective techniques, approaches and ideas. In other words, these are three musicians who could dazzle with a virtuosic, and, pace their 1999 version of Cranc, busy form of trio improvisation.

Instead, Cranc works with the edge-of-the-seat acuity of listening and apposite sound-placement that keeps me interested in this area of improvisation. More remarkably, I am referring to a 55 minute drone piece owning these felt elements. Cranc complexifies the drone template not via electronics or the iterations of process music, but by the pitch and textural changes and permutations created by their fingers. You can hear that, unmistakably; Cranc has an exquisitely tactile sound, and this is the quality I think you can discern by listening through some of their respective earlier releases.












The title atop this page comes from La Monte Young's notation for a very early drone piece, Composition 1960, #7. The piece [I haven't heard it] consists of two pitches, B and F#, with Young's lucid instruction to be held for a long time. This notation can be applied as well to Cranc's eleven year affinity; that's a long run, however infrequently they perform or record, for an ensemble of this nature. The results of that affinity, and their approach to holding a sound for a long time, is heard in Copper Fields' unfolding surprises. There is that quality of how they function as a trio being invisible, even negligble, as you listen. You realize after you drift awhile this is three individuals generating this sound field, and, listened to with that thought foregrounded, indeed you'll hear Angharad's whistling, singing violin strings come forth and recede, Nikos' grounding cello, Rhodri's ability to plumb even lower into the depths of his excited, e-bowed table harp. There is no fuss to their sound, however-it seems to arise and develop from the collective unconscious. This is their affinity, the first fruits of holding their sound, individually and as Cranc, for a long time.












Such distillation. when the results are this musical, brings to mind what Lester Bangs said in his entertaining essay on Lou Reed's 1975 cause célèbre, Metal Machine Music-referring to the relentless feedback drone of Reed's polarizing experiment, Bangs said Lou just got rid of the guitars. Keiji Haino, referring to his project of doing cover songs, resulting in abstracted noise and droneage, said he was simply liberating sound from the constraints of the song. Cranc might be heard as engaged in a similar process of reduction, in their case, of gesture, dialogue and overt displays of their considerable techniques, resulting in an over-arching and organic unified sound. I cannot get over how much restraint and subsuming of their individual personalities this necessitates; almost equally, I cannot get over how electronic Cranc can sound.

Henry Flynt wrote an essay on a composition of just intonation for harpsichord. In that essay he refers to the [paradoxical] development of drone music in this way- ...the next step is to invent a system driven by improvisation, monitored by conscious perception of the process.
In somewhat clunky prose, Flynt might be referring to what Cranc achieves on Copper Fields I would very much like to experience Cranc's affinity in a performance setting. Without that option, I will settle for Copper Fields, which has been a rich and routine pleasure for many weeks.


Organized Music From Thessaloniki

Recommended listening:

Angharad Davies/Tisha Mukarji ~ Endspace [Another Timbre]
Angharad Davies/Axel Dorner ~ A.D. [Another Timbre]

Rhodri Davies ~ Trem [Confront]
Rhodri Davies ~ Midhopestones [Another Timbre]
Rhodri Davies/David Lacey/Dennis McNulty ~ Poor Trade [Cathnor]

Nikos Veliotis/Michael Francis Duch/Anita Kaasboll ~ The Sea Looks Green When The Sky Is Grey [Sofa]
Nikos Veliotis/Costis Drygianakis ~ 28/04/2001 [Absurd]
Nikos Veliotis/Dan Warburton ~ VW [Absurd]
Nikos Veliotis/Coti K/ILIOS [Mohammad] ~ Roto Vildblomma [Antifrost]

The image atop the page is a drawing based on a view of the crab nebula constellation, seen through a 72" telescope, circa 1848.

Cranc is a Welsh-Romani word, meaning crab.

beginner's mind

I am finally beginning to learn how to paint.
~ Titian, near death at age 90, having completed almost 100 paintings.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.
~ Shunryu Suzuki

Behind all this,
Some great happiness is hiding.
~ Yehuda Amichai

work on what has been spoiled

Thomas Ankersmit is a 31 year old musician based in Berlin and Amsterdam who personifies, even in this small corner of the sound universe, terms like recondite and low-profile. With only a few ridiculously-limited releases behind him [duos with Jim O'Rourke and Kevin Drumm, the latter being essentially an Ankersmit solo work with his reworking of a single Drumm base track], Live In Utrecht comes to us out of a great silence. Consider, then, a few more dimensions of Ankersmit's sparse output-Live In Utrecht is barely 39 minutes in duration, was recorded in 2007, and owns none of the qualities suggesting an agenda of amending Ankermit's long recording drought with a perfectly shaped, worked over opus magnum.

Bringing to the momentous occasion of his first proper release, supported by the considerable promotion and distribution imprint of Touch [actually released on the Touch subsidiary Ash International], is Ankersmit's sound generator of choice- the saxophone. For many improvisers in this stage of the game, the saxophone is arguably a self-selected liability. Certain to raise the hackles of the legions who argue the sax is still being used to create new and vital work, I approached Ankersmit's Utrecht performance, with its instrumentation listed as alto sax, computer and synths, with a milder version of Diaghilev's entreaty to Cocteau-astonish me! [Coupling a young, untried poet's text with the music of Satie justifies Diaghilev's high-bar demand-but I digress].

If you suffer a similar satiety where saxs are concerned, you will find in Ankersmit's sound world a welcome subversion of expectations. Even more potently, you can hear an improbable fusion of sonic elements that might seem, on paper, as being at loggerheads- the economy, pitch-sculpting and symphonic partials of Phill Niblock, braided together with the yakuza sax squeals and squalls of Borbetomagus. Ankersmit is working on what has been spoiled in these respective, seemingly dualistic musical lineages- intuiting as he has that the serenity of Niblock's drones include much that is disquieting, and that the surface abrasions and harshness of Borbetomagus can serve to burnish, polish and refine what the ear initially hears as noise.

















So on this occasion Ankersmit unspools a 38 minute skein of countless micro-events; initially carried along by a slightly unstable, reedy sustained drone, the music lurches and caroms, at times scarcely under control, pitching forward before collapsing into several episodes of near silence. Ankersmit encrusts his droneage with striations of pre-recorded sax lines [the contributions of Valerio Tricoli], ungainly, piercing upper partials, stacked throbs and pulses, and supernova bursts of freak register sax squeals. As soon as he has established this meticulous cacophony with frightening velocity and forward momentum, Ankersmit will deliver a hypostatic drop to a tiny, fragile pitch or buzz, and begin rebuilding and amassing anew. Without intending a spoiler, I must say the concluding 10 minutes or so, with its incremental movement toward a gorgeous cloud of sustained, massed reeds, is awesome. True to the overarching form of the entire piece, the mighty cloud of ecstatic sax voices get teased apart and distilled to a single frail line that fades as it emerged 38 minutes earlier.

Like Maryanne Amacher [R.I.P.], whom I suspect might be an influence, Ankersmit's sound-sculpting clearly would benefit from the in situ experience. Like Amacher, Ankersmit has been involved for some time with installation projects and reportedly pushes the air around with no small attention to the particular acoustic properties of a chosen space, not to mention the potential power and potency of playing loud.







The great discovery for me in this release is how Ankersmit is working on what has been spoiled by the inevitable, organic rotting of every played out area of sound; the balls-to-the-wall sax assaults hobbling many moribund free improvisers, and the steady-state ennui afflicting many drone artists. Ankersmit's work reinvigorates and fructifies these stagnant pools through their intelligent and visceral fusion. Live In Utrecht is among the most exciting music I have heard in some time.

His tour itinerary for the balance of 2010 has him alternating between stints with Niblock and Borbetomagus. He'll have no trouble crossing between these realms- Live In Utrecht does just that, and single-handedly.


Ash International

Work On What Has Been Spoiled is the title of an 1981 release by Borbetomagus and Hugh Davies.

Work on what has been spoiled is also the commentary title for the 18th hexagram [ku] found in the I Ching. The hexagram is pictured above. Its literal meaning is translated, in the James Legge classic version, as a bowl in whose contents worms are breeding-this means decay.

Borbetomagus stated in an interview with Dan Warburton [Paris Transatlantic, 2006] they chose their band name as it means City of Worms.

They didn't listen to Buddha. That's why we have Buddhism.

~ Krishnamurti

You tell me you're innocent
& you're clutching the loot.

~ Wumen Huikai

i am the holy ghost

You wouldn't know it from reading this blog, but I am an apostate of the church of free jazz. From around 1975 to not so many years ago, I amassed, attended to and proselytized around the fire music of Ayler, Brötzmann and other first generation improv pentecostals. I have an endless supply of the sorts of war stories that attend such evangelism- the alienation of affection that tears houses asunder when true believers spin Kalapurasha McIntyre's Humility In The Light of the Creator during dinners with in-laws; the room-clearing effect Cecil Taylor/Jimmy Lyons/Sonny Murray possessed in the 70s, despite affinities of blood and marriage; enthusiasms riven by tears and genuine entreaties by partners attending concerts ["can we just go, please?"].

Even as my more aggressive outreach to others cooled, becoming a fatuous and self-serving sense of superiority [witnessed aplenty by today's devotees of EAI and noise, of course], I carried the flame for free jazz through the ensuing decades of permutations, even as that area of music became moribund and, inevitably, codified and markedly unfree.

For nearly 10 years I steered clear of my own record collection, having exhausted the sides I accumulated in pilgrimages to record stores like Rick Ballard's Imports in Berkeley [where, in 1986, I drained my savings account upon discovering Ballard's bins held the complete FMP catalog in used and new editions]. I sold off 350-400 albums throughout the waning years of the 90s, retaining only what I regarded as the Tanakh at that time- the first edition ESPs [Ayler! Bob James!]. I occasionally revisited the Horos, Saturns and Incus treasures that had cost me so much affection and troubled so many friends and neighbors, but essentially fell away from the ecstatic glossolalia of free jazz until around 2005 or so.

What accounts for my prodigal return to the pews of the New [Old] Thing? Hard to say, as with every passing year what guides my attention in music is intuitive, attuned to pleasures and interests outside of the constraints of genre or the onus of aesthetic criterion like is it new? Is it, in some Platonic sense, authentically innovative? Having dived deep and surfaced for nearly seven years now in the different waters of EAI, I am content to listen to whatever improvisation reaches me through whatever sensorium. I have known the samadhi induced by drone, the pleasures of the ineffability induced by onkyo, and spent more hours than my readers might believe dwelling in the nerve-ending interstices of silence and near- silence found in microsound/ultraminmal music [Sugimoto, Malfatti, et al].

I intend this less as an apologia than as an amusing setting forth of the bona fides I bring to hearing The Ames Room's In, the 2008 recording of the roots and branches of Ayler's holy hell raised by saxophone-bass-drums.
Will Guthrie isn't close to exhaustion in his plumbing of free jazz for its inexhaustible joy, frenetic esprits de corps and unabashed high intensity/high volume working methods. Guthrie, along with saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet and bassist Clayton Thomas, create music in a great range of areas- the concrete of works like Guthrie's Spear and last year's fantastic, improbably concise Spike-s, the noise of Cinabri, his duo with Ferran Fages, and now the fire-breathing, pummeling trio of The Ames Room.

Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost.
~ Albert Ayler

Like Ayler's music, with its roots in R & B and the church, this trio maintains an exultant, dancing quality throughout the records' two 20 minute live performances. Dubbed maximal minimalist terror jazz by Guthrie, approach without concern that the music is brutal or bruising. In fact, the trio sings, swings and gallops through their paces, with a cohesion and unity that suggests considerable playing time together. Guionnet is more virtuosic than Ayler, spewing endless, sinuous lines on the alto sax, often cantilevered lines on which Guthrie plays in and out of time, at times locking into tongue-and-groove sections of the trio dance. They are a little reminiscent of the Trevor Watts/Barry Guy/John Stevens trio of No Fear.

The best aspects of fire music are heard here- music that is at once visceral, articulate and determined to move the body [think Marion Brown or the testifying of early Shepp, informed by the trio's respective experiences in elecro-acoustic settings]. Obviously if you have decided Ayler's lineage is exhausted, played out and dead-on-the-vine, you may have trouble attuning to the trio's self-evident joy, writing in the air with brazen, ecstatic tongues, another testament of the holy ghost. For this prodigal, returning to Ayler's well after many years and divergent roads, The Ames Room is the perfect chorus.


Photo: The Ames Room trio-L-R, Thomas/Guthrie/Guionnet

Monotype Records