arrange whatever pieces come your way.

I am pleased to announce another crow with no mouth promotions show in Minneapolis.

On August 6th, 2011, there will be two sets of music - Fraufraulein, the duo project of Anne Guthrie and Billy Gomberg, and a solo set by Nathan McLaughlin. I discovered these three musicians in the last couple of years through the usual skein of linked curiosity, serendipity and, in the case of McLaughlin, this site [McLaughlin contacted me, expressing interest in a Minneapolis performance].

Anne and Billy have a working duo called Fraufraulein, integrating field recordings, electronics, French horn and sundry other sound sources. I came to know Anne and Billy's work when Richard Kamerman sent me a couple of Delicate Sen releases on his Copy For Your Records imprint; Delicate Sen is a fantastic trio comprised of Kamerman, Guthrie and Gomberg. At nearly the same time, someone sent me a copy of Gomberg's solo release Comme, lush song-forms shaped from real-time software/Juno-synth improvisations. Across these three projects it is evident Gomberg has developed diverse, even divergent areas of music - at times pitch-based, moored by soft pulses, reminiscent of Supersilent or Steinbruchel; in the duo and trio settings, he is focused almost totally on fitting and folding discreet electronic textures and timbres into the mix. Gomberg is refreshingly unensnared by style/genre biases, and these three projects are evidence that his omnivore's approach to sound does not result in diminishing returns.

Guthrie I discovered through her stunning release on Engraved Glass, Standing sitting, three location recordings subtly limned with sine tones and a nearly invisible contextualization that sneaks up and reveals itself upon repeated listens. Guthrie the improvising French horn player I encountered first in Delicate Sen [in which at times, contrary to what you might imagine would be the case when a French horn is embedded with two electronicists, Guthrie's is the least delicate voice]. Trained as both a composer and an improviser, and like Gomberg, genuinely indifferent to the limitations of genre-adherence, Guthrie can put the French horn through Bill Dixonesque paces, or float warm, sustained tones over the crackle and jangle of her compatriots.

It is refreshing in ways you must hear to understand that Gomberg and Guthrie interface as they do, in terms of both their instrumentation and their brio; nothing studied or dry where Fraufraulein are concerned - the duo bounces and zings sounds across the space between them, sounding intimate and intent on keeping things fresh.

Nathan McLaughlin's reel-to-reel and synth-based creations, Echolocations # 2, 3 & 5, own moments of authentic beauty and mystery - some of his loops sound like chopped and screwed ambient music, some like a less dire Jason Lescalleet. Though the Echolocation series is, according to McLaughlin, of a specific time and approach to melodic development now in his rear-view mirror, I asked him to bring the reel-to-reel work to this concert. I am pleased as hell McLaughlin will make the trip here, as he rarely plays out.

As the date approaches, I will provide venue details.


New music by Fraufraulein on the stellar net label, Homophoni



Title from a Virginia Woolf diary.

yesterday's clarity

Natural, reckless, correct skill;
Yesterday's clarity is today's stupidity
The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change
One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.

• Ikkyū and The Crazy Cloud Anthology : A Zen Poet of Medieval Japan (1986) by Sonja Arntzen

the sense of multiple worlds

Time, of all things, will not permit me to write at length about the world premiere in Minneapolis on May 7th, 2011, of Michael Pisaro and Greg Stuart's A transparent gate [with six panels]. These few photos, and my few words, will not convey the intensity of that hour; it was the quietest performance I have ever attended, replete with tortuous audience audio - chairs and men alike groaning, programs noisily, pointlessly consulted while a triangle decayed in the air, stomachs complaining of missed meals, motorcycles passing outside the fantastic Anotello Hall environs.


There was for me, eventually, absorption and single-pointed attention, as well; the six sections of this work-in-progress were joined, like many recent Pisaro works, by silences that the audience generally regarded as rests in which to move about and discharge whatever noises they had [sort of] contained for the prior ten minutes. The efficacy and integral placement of these silences couldn't have been better underscored, as annoying as this was, than by their serial breach by this audience. In other words, I was mildly shocked, then amused, that to a crowd unfamiliar with the Wandelweiser apotheosis of the ultra-quiet, the bardo between sounds meant make a move. To my ears [and happily, to my son's, who has heard only a little of Pisaro and Stuart's work prior to attending this performance, yet said afterward the silences were "unbelievably intense"], the six panels are successfully framed by each developing silent interstice.














The music?- simply beautiful - concentrated, caroming and pinging around the space, flyblown gently through the air by the spidery spatialization of eight small iPod speakers, music without waste, self-conscious gestures or calculated effects. Stuart was pulling off a mobile meditation of sound, something I remarked on following the show. Whether the panels consist, at any given moment, of a few spare, micro-tonally tweaked pitches hanging in the air an improbable moment longer than seemed possible, or of the forceful whoosh! of massed bowed wood blocks, their presence in this piece recalling their deep layering in the striata of July Mountain, there is no waste, no extra; there is only the ventilated, aired out tones and spaces that blow through Pisaro and Stuart's growing body of collaborative compositions.













David Tudor once said, in reference to his role in realizing Cage's compositions, that as a result of the freedom Cage afforded him in sound choices, I feel alive in every part of my consciousness. This is, if I may use such a full-blooded word about music that can be so spare it necessitates an improbable acuity of attention from us as listeners, what is so god-damned glorious about this duo's work - I am, as I listen, alive in every part of my consciousness.






Some panels of A transparent gate [with six panels] will be heard this September at the Amplify 2011 festival in N.Y.C.

All photos: Tom Stuart

The sense of multiple worlds in the title is taken from Pisaro's program notes, quoted in part as follows:
That stillness runs parallel to everything we do–as a dimension of reality invisibly interwoven with the world of objects.
That we can hear into the stillness only opaquely; only through and with the natural commotion of an environment.
The sense of multiple worlds penetrating each other without however coming into physical
contact.
The necessity of accepting flow and change, of the inevitable movement from neutrality to joy to disaster and onward.
That sound is a remnant of a physical process, not truly a thing unto itself.
These are a few of the thoughts that emerged from the process of working on A transparent gate


















I did not say so in my introductory remarks at the concert, not wishing to draw attention away from the music, but I am honored Michael has dedicated A transparent gate [with six panels] to me. Thank you, Michael and Greg, for the music.

for adolphe sax

Bertrand Denzler's titles bear a sense of utility and reduction - tenor, filters, signals, air tube - but these close, close timbral variations are, at times, robust and visceral, as full-throated as a Don Byas essay, and as micr0-focused on the salivary details of tongue and air as the sonics of Axel Dorner and Franz Hautzinger.

With a self-restricted palette and sustained, one-pointed reworkings of small modulations and extensions of single notes and breath, Denzler at times invokes Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell's similar studies from the Delmark days. On Filters, phrasing simply follows the breath, each iteration coarsening, thickening, eventually splitting each held note, until the one-note motif becomes an over-blown wail, rising and falling, riding the breath. Signals may well be just that, sounding like an inchoate message for properly, perversely attuned ears. As he does in Filters, Denzler mutates the incipient tones, and an attractive admixture of precision and a slightly unformed and freak tonality are braided together and teased apart.

It is this last quality of Denzler's playing on Tenor that holds my interest throughout many listens; Denzler creates a unified field of the altissimo register, with its odd harmonics and unstable pitches, and an obsessive, deliberately self-limited focus on unpacking one note [or small sound area, as on Air Tube, where Denzler basically reduces the saxophone to finger pads and fingerings]. His method, in other words, is nearly surgical, but the music extracted is, as I said, robust and vital.

Strangely as I listened one more time tonight to Tenor, I leaped to an association with William Blake's Auguries of Innocence, that poetic line even non-readers of poetry have heard - to see a world in a grain of sand - this is Denzler's drilling down in each iteration of a note, insisting, literally, that one might discover a world within a single note. Blake continues and an eternity in an hour. While just short of an hour, Denzler's Tenor reaches a state I find pleasing: fullness and a sense of illimitable possibilities in the smallest grains of sound.
















Tenor is available from Potlatch, a great label whose catalog includes Denzler's work in Trio Sowari, a fantastic project with Phil Durrant and Burkhard Beins.

Label owner Jacques Oger is unabashed in his advocacy for saxophone, releasing most of the key improvisers one might regard as the fecund and wayward streams issuing from Adolphe Sax's headwaters.

Top photo: Adolphe Sax
Bottom photo: Sax's unholy progeny, Bertrand Denzler

John Butcher Stéphane Rives, Bertrand Denzler, Christine Sehnaoui Abdelnour, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Michel Doneda, et al.

b o d h i

My adoptee from Project Pitbull, chez crow, May 5, 2011.

you have to talk about love

This is my review of Tables & Stairs as it appeared in the May issue of The Wire. It was edited from the original to excise about 230 words.

The heading above is lifted from Robin Hayward's explanation of the title he suggested for the trio's intimate recording. He said, tables and stairs’ is actually a play on ‘tables and chairs’ which in English you use in the context ‘you have to talk about love as if it were tables and stairs’ i.e. talk about something romantic and heartfelt in very everyday language.

The skillfulness of the musicians in Tables & Stairs is evident in their ability to transcend geography, lack of a shared language, the spontaneity of the occasion, and the instrumentation (customized tuba, sine generator, and cello) to create music of considerable dynamic range, tension and balance. Add one more potentially self-limiting element: Tables & Stairs is, overall, yet another drone structure, a form fraught with the risk of the best players lapsing into monotony and an enervating bliss.

This recording brings together musicians from Catalonia, Greece and England-by -way -of-Berlin who encounter each other for the first time. The occasion for this trio’s serendipitous music-making speaks volumes about the matrix in which such music is formed and sustained: in June 2010, the three were in Athens , Veliotis and Fages participating in a music festival, Hayward meeting them while there on other business. Invited to yet another Athens-based musician’s apartment to play, the trio set up for a few attendees, issuing forth thirty-one minutes of spontaneous, meticulous and restrained improvisation.

The musicians’ poise and apposite sound selections never lapse nor slacken, as each sustains the braiding and teasing apart of oscillating sine waves, microtonal tuba plosives and horsehair rasp. There are several distinct episodes across the thirty-one minute droneage, Fages and Hayward in particular supplying the grain and grist essential to making one more iteration of drone compelling.

The scope of pitch and timbre made possible by Hayward’s microtonal tuba sounds illimitable. Strangulated cries and part-singing swell and subside amid the low-end thrum. An instrument assigned too often to the lugubrious end of the spectrum, Hayward’s tuba is discursive across five octaves.

While Veliotis’ cello serves as the effortless foundation and sometimes sedimentary base for the trio’s spiraling pitches, drifting textures and occasional ebbs to near silence, it is Fages’s sine work that is most subversive. Beyond the keening, head-ringing sounds associated with the vaguely pathological sounding sinusoid, Fages introduces, in several striking moments, sine waves massed like strings, strongly reminiscent of those heard in the allegro nervosa movement of Ligeti’s Second String Quartet. These startling braided waves rise above the rumble, are held briefly to shimmer and excite the air, before subsiding. Fages is spare with this effect, making its appearance the more dramatic. I have never heard sine waves fashioned this way, and their inclusion here is perfect.

It is signal of these three musician’s sensibilities that a casual session, unintended for release, could produce such rewarding work. From this unfussy occasion comes music that will gratify fans of both intelligent, nuanced drone, and, for those who drill down, improvisation made from minute particulars. This half-hour drone piece ends not with a bang, nor a whimper, but something satisfyingly other.