most people are perfectly afraid of silence

There will be new writing soon-I just submitted a piece for the May issue of the Wire [cf. the photo above] ; I am working as well on several concerts to take place in Minneapolis in May and September.
Plus, wage-slavery!

This part of the world has given up Spring's ghost-rain and sleet are flying as I type this, people couldn't be paler [shining like cadavers]. Every place has its difficult seasons-ours is the long malaise of winter/not-quite-winter [what you call Spring]. Ours is the incremental attrition of optimism.

I had dinner at a friend's restaurant the other night- he was a political exile [his entire family, actually] in 1979, fleeing his birthplace in Kabul for Lausanne- Paris-Virginia-Minnesota. He has a ridiculous collection of Indian classical music [and a personal narrative intertwined with that of Vilyat Khan, the great pandit my friend was thrilled to learn I heard in performance in 1980]. His competing passion is for free jazz/improv. For several decades he has amassed and absorbed these musics, and supplies from this personal retrieval system all the music he programs for his community-based radio show in Minneapolis, now in its 16th year.

Under gray skies, heads bowed over great Afghani food, we each said at separate points in our rambling chat that music has saved our lives; without drama, self-consciousness, fear or favor, saved our lives.

crow.



heading from e.e. cummings

a transparent gate with 6 panels

I am happy to announce the first in a series of concerts presented by crow with no mouth promotions.

It is auspicious that the first event is the world premiere of a Michael Pisaro composition, a transparent gate with 6 panels, for Greg Stuart [percussion/electronics].

The space in which this work for eight speakers will be heard can be viewed here.

The following is Michael's press release about this new work:
A transparent gate with 6 panels is a series of portable landscapes (or sound reliefs) for Greg Stuart. Imagine a large door, which instead of carved panels (like those made for the Florence Baptistery by Lorenzo Ghiberti and Andrea Pisano) has near transparent out-facing windows of various colors and designs (perhaps translucent versions of Ellsworth Kelly's series of reliefs). These windows allow a view to the landscape behind them. But they set certain features of that landscape in relief by overlaying patterns made from elemental sounds. Each panel is ten minutes in duration, which includes a border of thirty seconds of silence on either side (creating silences of one minute between internal sections). Individual panels combine different collections of live percussion playing with slightly altered recorded versions of the same instruments emanating from an array of eight miniature speakers.

A work in the reliefs series, with percussionist Greg Stuart again performing solo, will next be presented in September at the Amplify 2011 festival in N.Y.C.











For a number of years I have wanted to focus some of my energy on presenting music that is very rarely heard in Minneapolis. I am grateful for this opportunity, as Michael and Greg are creating some of my favorite music, a body of work that has, as Thomas Moore has it, a piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth in every new sounding.


Pictured: Lorenzo Ghiberti's door and an Ellsworth Kelly relief.

let go of everything which gets in the way

There is a music in which the time-space of sound and the time-space of silence appear in their own particular realms. Even when the sounds are often very soft, the music is not about falling into silence. The sounds are clear, direct and precise.

There are long time spans for the presence of sound, and long time spans for the absence of sound. The two together form the "time present" of the piece.













Silence can also be present in the sounds. In order to have silence in sounds, one must let go of everything which gets in the way of this silence.
This sound is the Dai-sein [being there] of sound. Its presence and charisma make themselves felt in the composition.

Silence requires one decision: sound or no sound.
Sound requires a great many more decisions.
Both stamp time and space, in that they come into appearance, in an existential sense.

Together they comprise the entire complexity of life.

















Text excerpts from Jurg Frey, The Architecture of Silence, 1998 [translation: Michael Pisaro]

Photos: Yuko Zama

http://www.erstwhilerecords.com/catalog/060.html

j a p a n

Text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10.00 on behalf of the Red Cross.

Doctors Without Borders is there.

Mercy Corps is there.

These three, among others, are well vetted and graded by Charity Navigator and the American Institute of Philanthropy.

o n e s o l u t i o n

wish i could be in madison.

raub roy's funhouse

Under the name Horaflora, Raub Roy released three works in 2010 that issue from the borderland between audio terrorism and absurdist high spirits. Craterellus Cornucopioides and The Gland Canyon are from the Install Digital archives, and are solo works; the 17 minute duo work considered here is from a split 12" on Hot Releases [the other side being songs from Secret Boyfriend, the nom of Hot Releases owner Ryan Martin].

Roy's partner for this session in 2009, recorded live in the KALX radio studio, is Andrea Williams. The few reviews I have unearthed of this record do a piss-poor job of clarifying the role of joint conspirator Andrea Williams, whose laptop and real time field recordings flow seamlessly with Roy's truly cracked sound sources [expelled balloon air, street sweeper bristles, and other transduced and filtered noise makers]; the duo's flow is a nearly ceaseless caroming, careening one, dropping abruptly [and beautifully] at around mid-point to a still-point of pinged, singing bowls and near silence, before chugging again into the skillful maelstrom of their funhouse stereo field.
Raw, manic [and only lightly edited], Roy and Williams maintain momentum and ballast throughout the 17 minute ride; the flux and rapid segues, nonetheless, reinforce the funhouse affinity.

The duo do like gizmos- the three Horaflora releases I have heard comprise some of the strangest sonics in my collection- and mash their low-fi electroacoustics with apparent giddiness. What supports repeated listens is the shape and intrinsic coherence of their sound field. Roy has been at this for a decade; Williams has contributed to events ranging from a 2009 performance of David Tudor's seminal Rainforest VI, to Soundwalk events at venues like Issue Project Room and the Whitney. On the way to skull-ringing meetings like this one, Roy studied sound art at Hampshire College, and Williams is finishing an MFA in electronic music at Mills College.

Horaflora's works place him in sharp relief from his many more mannered and studied contemporaries. His improbable instrumentation [toothbrushes and balloons diffused through cracked electronics], DIY-performance spirit, and occasional deft collaborations like this one with Williams, are a fresh wind blowing through the at times arid landscape of EAI. The fuck-all velocity and bizarre sound sourcing of this date will fall on the deaf ears of listeners who require a whiff of the decorous and high concept in their electroacoustics. Good on Raub Roy for bringing a little impertinence and evident fun into this area of music. It may be a funhouse, but it's serious fun.

Horaflora

Andrea Williams

sublime frequencies

I am happy to return to the music of occasional collaborators Samuel Rodgers and Stephen Cornford, as the well they draw from for their 2010 release Zinc (extracts) is far from dry.

In what was my first spontaneously written review for crow, a short consideration of the duo's release on Another Timbre, tuned moment, weighting, I made reference to the process of their work for piano and piano feedback being akin to the duo of the underrated pianist Gabriel Paiuk and Jason Kahn [on the beautiful Cut Records release, Breathings], as well as to the Marcus Schmickler/John Tilbury piano alterations heard on Variety. There is also, on a grander scale, Cor Fuhler's role as sonic saboteur [again, to the long-suffering Tilbury] on the jaw-dropping MIMEO release, The Hands of Caravaggio. All of these pairings involve a pianist sounding keyboard and innerklavier resonances, filtered through transforming electronics.

Cage famously said ideas are one thing and what happens is another. The process, as sculptor Stephen Cornford sets Zinc into motion, is to jolt his piano works with the aperiodic, aleatory and unstable influences of Rodgers's electronic tweaking. The result is far from chaotic or merely of interest for its concept. The piano on Zinc, approached by two musicians with acute ears and empathic hands, billows, rattles and breathes; this is tactile, sensuous music.

If you view photos of Cornford's constructions for piano, turntables and guitars, it is clear sound sculpture can refer to more than a precious placeholder to describe fuzzy, inchoate music. Cornford's kinetic creations whirl, vibrate and move in space, sending waves and plies of timbre and overtones into the air [there are samples aplenty on Cornford's site]. On Zinc, the duo adhere to a more restricted palette, largely extracting and mining the rattle and thrum from the grand piano, with a steady dose of sustain. The first word I jotted down following a few listens to Zinc was sustain. Cornford and Rodgers make music with a feeling of vitality and sustain- it is music that rises and spirals upward, even when sounding, as happens on the second track, the bent blues note.

I will mention in closing that Zinc (extracts) is music culled from the same sessions that yielded tuned moment, weighting. The music here is in no wise leftovers or afterthoughts. I have spent time with both, and Zinc owns a qualitatively different feel, a concision and concentration of elements that merit a separate release. The sustain of the piano's sublime frequencies and feedback gather in the air, something like the idea of massed cicadas, or an electric storm brewing.
Cornford and Rodgers are sculptors, lend an ear.



Zinc (extracts)

thinking of this music while reading francois jullien

All flavors disappoint even as they attract. Persuading the passerby merely to "stop", they lure without fulfilling their promise. They represent nothing more than an immediate and momentary stimulation that, like sound sifted through an instrument, disappears the moment it is consumed.

In contrast to such superficial stimuli, the bland invites us to trace it back to the "inexhaustible" source of that which constantly unfolds without ever allowing itself to be reduced to a concrete manifestation or completely apprehended by the senses; that which transcends all particular actualizations and remains rich in virtuality...the value of savoring it is all the more intense for being impossible to categorize.

~ Francois Jullien, In Praise of Blandness