RIP Charlotte Joko Beck

To have a 'self' means we are self-centered. Being self-centered--and therefore opposing ourselves to external things--we are anxious and worried about ourselves. We bristle quickly when the external environment opposes us; we are easily upset. And being self-centered, we are often confused. This is how most of us experience our lives.
~Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen


My deepest gratitude for the life of Joko Beck; she has had a profound effect on my life, a tough-as-leather teacher, truly one of the least self-deluded people I have met on this road.

take out your spell for me

And there I travel, looking, looking breathlessly.
~ Don Juan


No doubt many if not most readers of crow regard the linkages I make between things musical and extra-musical in these pages as my being fanciful [and that only occasionally with success]. No sweat - one reader's kismet is another reader's karma is another's blind idiot god. I mention this as these small efforts are always occasioned by such effortless links, happy synaptic surprises, for which I say "thanks!"

This time around the unmapped intersection is my simultaneous revisiting, after 40 years, of Carlos Castaneda's 1968 classic, the peyote-soaked, pseudo-anthropological study of the brujo Don Juan, The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, with my many listens to Anáádiih, a collaboration of phonographers Mathieu Ruhlmann and Banks Bailey.

If you are unfamiliar with Castaneda's work, the briefest of sketches; the book is a very strange account, a sort of synthesis of an academic précis, and Confessions of an English Opium- Eater, involving an anthropology graduate student hanging out with a Yaqui indian, who serves as his guide through a number of consciousness-altering experiences. Some are fueled by Castaneda's ingesting peyote and other organic, psychedelic herbs; others involve shape-shifting, dream-work, and the like. All of these alternately harrowing and comic episodes take place in the Southwest desert, amongst generally taciturn indians who frequently howl with laughter at Castaneda's morning-after accounts of his experiences Critters factor into many of the earnest, freaked-out grad student's tales, including, in a most significant passage, crows.

As I said, this is a book I have very recently returned to, one recalled fondly from my youth. Returning to the books' environs [Arizona and Sonora] to soak in the nocuturna, flora and fauna, and the indelible sense of Otherness encountered in the most natural of natural worlds, I find in Castaneda's prose aspects of what is found in listening to Anáádiih. More on this connection in a bit.

You can be forgiven if you come to this completely unfamiliar with the name Banks Bailey; he has released, since at least 2008, numerous works, but some on a Belgian net label, some releases being runs of 10 copies, you know this map well if you're still reading. Many of Bailey's works are culled from field recordings made in Ohio and Arizona, privileging birdsong and water-sources, assembled via meticulous mic placement and keen ears. Bailey brings his Arizona
surroundings, suffused with sky-shattering bird screech and close-miked insect swarms, to the duo's collaboration. His world overlaps the Apache National Forest, and he brings its sound world to our startled ears with clarity and force.















You are less forgiven if you fail to recognize the name Mathieu Ruhlmann, as crow recommended the Vancouver artist's abundantly rich work last October. How Ruhlmann and Bailey stitched together the enveloping animalia of Anáádiih, I don't know. Whether their collaboration was from a distance, the keening and baying of their respective environments conveyed digitally, or, as I prefer to fantasize, huddled together around an open fire, phono-stitching snippets of British Columbia and the Navajo territories into the crazy quilt of Anáádiih, it little matters. The work's layering of critters' cries and events [there is a distinct narrative feel, breaking forth explicitly in a passage of sturm und drang bearing the true meaning of this hackneyed phrase-storm and urge] is fantastic; as much as I admire the decisive moments caught in the field recordings of documentarians like Chris Watson or B.J. Nilsen, Anáádiih owns the potent story-telling that is possible when phonographers like Bailey and Ruhlmann, or kindred spirit Eric La Casa, point their mics carefully at the natural world, and then get to work.

As I read Castaneda and listened to Anáádiih, the sad fact comes forth - for those of us who live among tall buildings and do not count among our allies a brujo or another source of crazy wisdom, the sights and sounds of these worlds will sound alien, unnatural, Other. Ruhlmann and Bailey provide a taste of that Otherness without the harrowing aspects of ingesting datura, or leaving our safe havens under familiar skies.

I remain intrigued, no matter how many spins I have given Anáádiih, at the strangeness and the allure of many of its sounds. This is a work that casts a spell; as Castaneda discovered, there is the possibility of expansion when we surrender to such spells. Ruhlmann and Bailey can give you glimpses of the unheard natural world; it's up to us to call back.

Today, take out your spell for me. Happily I hear again.





















Anáádiih

Don Juan, quoted in The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

Title and closing lines from House Made of Dawn, a Navajo night chant used in a healing ceremony; a few lines are included with Anáádiih.

Picture of the Navajo moon cycle, a distinctly separate cosmology from the rest of the world; Anáádiih is the name of the waxing crescent moon.

Photo: Mathieu Ruhlmann in performance

I strongly recommend several other Ruhlmann releases, all quite distinct from what is found on Anáádiih, specifically Gravity Controls Our Myths [2008], and Fourteen Worms For Victor Hugo [2009].

agnes

There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall .... Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting.

~ Agnes Martin

kill your idols

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
~ Theodor Adorno

Detractors of Miguel Prado's detournement treatment of composer Michael Pisaro's Within [3], and his Situationist prank piece Comedy Apories, which pillories [with a light touch] the Wandelweiser collective's aesthetic of isolated events, arranged in time, might disagree that no crime has been committed in these two releases. The offense, if there is one, is against the often humorless mien avant music fans show when their annointed ones are treated with anything other than reverence. It may be mere reflex to detect a whiff of the Oedipal in Prado's choice of Pisaro and Wandelweiser as the subject, however detourned, of his Heresy label's first two releases; his regard for this area of music is transparent, even affectionate. The label, however, is Heresy, and Prado's appropriation of the Situationist device, detournement, is pointed and purposeful. How Prado updates Debord's A User's Guide To Detournement is different on each release.








Within [3.2], the name conferred by Pisaro upon hearing the results of Prado's fuzzed-out, electric iteration of a work originally realized on classical guitar, unabashedly erases a signature aspect of Pisaro's early works - the single note granted the time and space it needs to arise, hang and decay naturally. Prado's version sounds each note with the distortion and sustain afforded by electricity; rather than peal, the notes clot, coagulate and smear the air. A luxurious, if sometimes grimy, drone supplants the tension felt when the silence between notes is present. The basic structure - six sections, 10 minutes each - is maintained, as are the silences between sections. Otherwise, this is a truly reimagined work, one I took to upon my first listen. Preferring the lacunae of Pisaro's acoustically realized pieces is a matter of taste. They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion, Hobbes observed, but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion. Right. Not to privilege the label name too much, though Prado says on his label site his intent is adding a heretical approach, I regard Within [3.2] less as heresy, more as after Michael Pisaro.













Consider now the follow up Heresy release, Comedy Apories - now you enter the interlaced ideas of Zizek, Brassier, anti-comedy, and, from my perspective, equal parts Pataphysics [for example, the clunky signifier Prado lifts from Zizek in describing his work as an interpassive composition], the Merry Pranksters' mockery of the banal, and the detournement of Wandelweiser.

Comedy Apories, at least as far as what I felt with the number of listens I gave it, is variously chilling, irritating, and apathy-inducing; append to your listening sessions the conceptual link Prado makes to the similarly structured Wandelweiser pieces that feature recurring, brief sound events along a lengthy skein of silence, and you have an experience closer to the Stanford prison experiment than, say, Weites Land, tiefe Zeit. It occurs to me as I write this how many of our friends and associates describe the music we listen to with avidity as torture, so don't toss off my analogy too quickly. The piece consists of aperiodic two second bursts of the most affectless laugh track you've heard since the equally distressing one used by David Lynch for his rabbit dramedy show in Inland Empire. It is a sterile and unappealing antithesis to the grimy sensuality of Within [3.2].

I can't say how deliberately Prado set out to release back-to-back works referencing the world of Wandelweiser in such divergent ways; both are variations on a given Wandelweiser aesthetic area, but to my ears the first amplifies and enriches its antecedent, the second renders it banal and insipid. Whatever his intentions, Prado stirs the pot, which is vital. Progress, this great heresy of decay, Adorno bemoaned; listen for yourself, see if you hear what I hear in Prado's detournements - not heresy, but the variously loving, exuberant, deadpan killing of idols.




Adorno quotes from Minima Moralia: Reflections From A Damaged Life, 1951

Detournement a GuyDebord text from the Firesign Theatre-esque Bureau of Public Secrets

Heresy Records

Photos: Prado performing, photographer unknown; a still from David Lynch's Rabbits

sculpt in hopeless silence

The time I burned my guitar, it was like a sacrifice.
You sacrifice the things you love. I love my guitar.
~ Jimi Hendrix

If you're trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked.
~ Gilles Deleuze

The longer one dwells in the fields of the music written about here [and there, cf. the honor roll to the right of this page], the more likely it is that one will lose his grasp on just how near-invisible all this work really is. The internet meme, sparked by that increasingly fetid banner-bearer of modern music out of London, states that about 150 folks regularly attend to these fields, world-wide. Whatever the scope of the thing, I like to remind myself of this-not at all because I confuse esoteric with virtuous [obscurity, Napoleon famously said, is forever!], but because I esteem highly those who labor principally for the sake of the work.










One such laborer is the Lisbon-based guitarist, Pedro Chambel. Chambel holds a doctorate in medieval history, works in academic research, and issues his solo works at the rate of three-per-decade, a refreshing antidote to the unfettered prolixity of many of his fellow improvisers.

From the first, the 2001 release Anamnesis, a work of unspooled, unstable micro-sounds that seem to consist of a guitar's entrails and viscera, to last year's exacting listen, Utpote, Chambel has drilled and distilled his guitar into the smallest pools and eddies of sound possible.

Utpote approaches Sachiko M's sine work in its focus and rigor. He is working with only the sparest reference to the guitar's historical characteristics, creating a substrata of noises that rise and fall around a continuous, 38 minute burred, possibly e-bowed, tone. Utpote seldom rises, the steady-state, spinal-tone aside, above nearly inaudible. Press up closer, and there's a world of febrile activity at work-pliant, tactile and aflutter, what is striking about these recondite sounds is how many of them issue from Chambel's hands themselves. You can hear his caresses, fussing and flickering over the instrument's body, the ceaseless tonal hum and what is at play around it more like some sort of light cast, than music.

Chambel, like Sachiko M, and a few other contemporaries, trusts his listeners to find in the sparest of sound worlds the evocative and vital, albeit heard quite often only if you incline carefully to sift through the sonic shavings and silt. The self-limits and rigor of his approach over the past decade, to say nothing of the modest release schedule, is intriguing to me. Chambel is dreaming his own sound; we should pause now and then, and consider the sacrifice.


Fractal Sources, for information on Chambel's three releases - Anamnesis [2001], bruit [2005], and Utpote [2010]. I recommend all three, as, considered together, Chambel's narrative is distinct, his distillation, starting from zero, the more impressive.



Let us sculpt in hopeless silence
all our dreams of speaking

~Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

jeph jerman's multiples

All around the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped or created.
~ Joseph Beuys

In the winter of 2010, Jeph Jerman released Arrastre, nine multiples of rich, resonant drone work, in three formats. The Arrastre project itself, the bare-bone visuals stamped on the LP, CD-R and cassette packages, and the little I know of Jerman's work since 1999, made me think of a few aspects of Joseph Beuys' approach to art and life.











One aspect is Beuys' concept of social sculpture, essentially the idea that if you are an artist, you are an artist everywhere. Jerman has said the idea for making nine pieces of music, ranging from five to 20 minutes in duration, sourced from pot lids, came to him while doing the dishes. Jerman scoured thrift stores for serviceable lids, approaching them like Tibetan prayer bowls [caressing them with dowels], layered and edited the resulting whorls and eddies of overtones, and stamped them with what appears to be an enso, the zen circle signifying elegance and enlightenment.

Beuys' multiples, the artist has said, made him feel linked to whomever came to see or to own them; whether made from felt, fat or fish-bones, Beuys' infused every day objects with energy, ideas and resonances.

Jerman launched the Animist Orchestra project in 1999, gathering musicians together to create improvised music from pine cones, bones, shells and feathers. Several years back he released a distressing recording of a rabbit he found dying near his home. Beuys' three days in a room with a coyote during his 1974 visit to America was similarly distressing, on a few levels. There is, whatever their divergences and differences, an overlapping animus, a drive to erase at least some of the precious, affected boundaries separating us from art. It's a big project, Beuys quipped about these sorts of intentions.

Many will find, laid out in writing this way, the concepts and the materials at work in Jerman's now 25 year inquiry into sound and the act of listening to be slight and suspect, if not ludicrous. There was no less ridicule when Beuys' picked up the cries of his surroundings, and began shaping his life to be a creative action, revealing many of the dualities stinking up the art world to be silly pretensions. Jerman has pointed his microphones at the desert, the animals, and the ostensibly inanimate detritus surrounding him in his adopted home in the Southwest U.S. for many years; given this seemingly inexhaustible alertness to the world as a sound-source, an epiphany in the kitchen was inevitable. If you are anything like me, and simply [as is possible] judge music by its sounds, Arrastre is engaging, radiant music, meriting its presentation as numbered multiples. There is, to be honest about my expectations entering a concentrated period of listening to a hundred minutes of pot-lid generated music, an improbable array of sounds heard across these three releases, with much ear-trickery as to what instruments precisely you might be hearing. I will take Jerman at his word that all that is heard is pot-lids.

If people ask me what I do, Jerman has said, I usually say that I am offering a chance to listen. A simple engagement with the listener is sought, bringing to mind something Beuys said in an interview-...just as you have come to me, because of what I've made, and we can talk about it.

There are no doubt [I have heard this sentiment expressed first hand by musicians I know] many, even among the readers of crow, who will aver that someone rubbing, stroking or striking bones, feathers or pot-lids cannot be regarded as making music on the order of someone who has studied theory, harmony and history, whether they be an academic or an autodidact. Those holding this perspective will certainly balk at another Jerman release from the winter of 2010 I like a great deal, Four Drivers, which consists of a piano harp's strings being excited by four battery-powered fans for a considerable length of time. Four Drivers, like Arrastre, is a further exploration of drone music, but relatively harsher at times, an edgy and unsettling sonance to Arrastre's serene overtones. The fan-generated spires of overtones and oscillations realize one of Jerman's basic values in music-making, the reduction of the musician's direct control over the direction a given process takes. Hardly a new value, but as I said, the resulting sounds matter the most, and Four Drivers has a cumulative complexity and power.

Beuys' living social sculpture was, whatever you think of the outcomes, a rigorous, vital way to contextualize his art- as Adorno wrote of Schoenberg, he sins against the division of life into work and leisure. I may have failed in my effort to convey how I see Jerman, whose Arizona desert milieu is a far cry from that of Berlin in the sixties, living a similar social sculpture of his own, making instruments from skulls and second-hand kitchenware, content to create multiples of what he hears crying out to be shaped or created.
The idea called music is not separate from sound in general, Jerman says, yet we have made it so by devising roles by which music may be known.

Like Beuys, Jerman's role, since reinventing himself as a musician called Hands To in 1986 [the year Beuys died] is in creating work that is antithetical to what the Berlin activist called restricted entry-that is, the restricted entry of who has access to creative work [remember Jerman's Animist Orchestra], what materials and means are legitimated by music pedagogy [pot lids! felt!], and the ostensibly extra-musical role of pointing listeners to dimensions beyond those of their quotidian materials and means. Jeph Jerman's Arrastre multiples sing because he is alert and attuned to the fundamentals all around us.



Jeph Jerman

Joseph Beuys

noises off

Noise, noun
Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.

~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Three releases from the latter half of 2010 raised an unholy and convincing din, each in their own way - Diatribes' complaintes de marée basse is borne along by torrents and tremors of percussion, not without its quieter, collected pools at times, but generally clamorous and plangent. This updating of free improvisation remarkably renders the trio's individual roles as anonymous as any aggregate of the electro-acoustic branch of improv, the specific sprung sounds and metal-scrapes seemingly sourceless.

Tomas Korber and Gert-Jan Prins' challenging long-form, live performance, RI 1.5442, also in its way propulsive and sizzling [Prins was a drummer in a free improv unit, and has collaborated with Mats Gustafsson and Misha Mengelberg], has ear-scrubbing episodes of excess audio and air raid signals. The duo make noise of a very different sort, however, than that heard in Diatribes' approach; Prins and Korber take their sweet time to develop striations of grit, hiss and crackle, somewhat like Radigue-on-Mego. Reduced to a single descriptor for the trio gestalt of complaintes de marée basse, I'd offer free motion; for Korber/Prins, seething.

Dotolim, a scored work by Jason Kahn, is realized by, for me, the most exciting musicians working in refined abrasion around, the Seoul-based crew of Ryu Hankil, Jin Sangtae, Hong Chulki, Choi Joonyong and Park Seungjun. This blast of ineffable noise, issuing from hacked, broken electronics, wrangled and wrested in a nearly alternate musical universe, has infused improvisation with an element far too absent for far too long - a willful, head-long charge toward the revivification of this music, achieved solely and wholly by risking complete disaster.

play free or die
















Diatribes is the duo of D'Incise [a.k.a. Laurent Peter] and Cyril Bondi. Since 2004, they have released a slew of stuff, often with a third element added, here Lisbon-based guitarist Abdul Moimeme. Bondi has been involved in multiple hip hop projects and free improv ensembles. D'Incise likewise channels his ideas and approaches through disparate playing situations. On this occasion, the trio offer up several signal qualities of the free improv branch of things; the 47 minute release consists of seven tracks, seven concise skirmishes as opposed to the 74 and 70 minutes respectively of RI 1.5442 and Dotolim; each player wields various percussion instruments, ala the era of the Art Ensemble of Chicago little instruments convention, a liberating approach to group improvisation that predictably became a time-stamped orthodoxy. No danger of stagnation in this trio's approach- the percussive churns and swells of Diatribes, colored to fantastic effect by Moimeme's two prepared guitars, are only occasionally of the diminuendo sort the AEC [and so many others] worked and reworked. While not averse to making big waves before subsiding into quieter squalls, the trio achieve much greater dynamic range and overall balance than that. Small sounds are raised by amplified springs, metronomes and cymbals; Moimeme dances over his modified guitars sounding at times like a balafon, pitched cymbals and, on track six, Pete Cosey; industrial park murk and metal scrapes yield to sections of muted but no less eventful buzzing and blooming noise.
This is really strong work, occasioning in me the rare feeling of regret that it will be lost to ears aversive to free improvisation, due to the area's inarguable exhaustion on many fronts. I want to hear more from all three of these musicians-they're not fucking around.


true grist












The occasion for Korber and Prins' long-form journey into the subtle shape-shifting of a seemingly static slab of noise, 1.5422, was a 2009 performance at the Utopian Royal Saltworks in eastern France, architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's visionary, if incomplete, mandala of a structure. Not even an Enlightenment visionary could have imagined this re-imagining of music as sonic grist-s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d-over-time, with incidents of chugging percussive patterns spun from pink noise, and the long seethe that is the form's intro and improbably lengthy, drawn-down outro. Korber has long been a sonic distiller, much of his music simmering like a rue that can soothe or sting. Frankly your affinity for this one will depend greatly on whether you are drawn into its long sizzle long enough to hear the nuanced and detailed play of its grain and grist. I am- as I discovered in my many listens to Korber's stellar 2005 release, Effacement [scroll midway down the page], Korber's finest work creates environments as akin to weather as, say, to painting or sculpture; much of his work, and 1.5422's 74 minutes mandate this approach, is best enjoyed by allowing it to rain down, sometimes pelting and stinging, sometimes soaking you.


god loves ugly










Dotolim is among the most exciting music I have enjoyed in some time, but that's not a recommendation. This is a steep climb for most, I am sure, as the Seoul musicians who have maintained Dotolim as a vibrant, if claustrophobic, performance venue [it's the size of a walk-in closet], are seriously pushing their music towards the brink of collapse with great humor and a serious intensity. If you thought their antecedents in improv and new music were appropriating the detritus of orphaned sounds for their lexicons of extended techniques, you ain't heard nothing yet-Dotolim bubbles, scrapes, screeches and lurches along, Kahn's score of abstract symbols for each player serving as hints for their wending their noisy way into a great, massed wall of undomesticated music, the sprung, teased out innards of the crew's cracked open disc players, hard disk drives, whacked out turntables and short wave radios [some great captures pulled into that hermetic room] coalescing and pulling apart with ugly beauty. The crescendo near the 60 minute mark is thrilling, no matter the sounds sourced, a hair-raising realization of Kahn's stated intention for the piece- I wanted [Dotolim] to emphasize the density of this group of musicians, both in terms of their sound... and of the space itself, which seemed at times barely able to contain the mounting blocks of sound [the group] generated during the recording session.
Dotolim is made of nearly every ugly sonic byproduct you can imagine issuing from the mechanized, throw-away toys of our time, with meticulous attention to the piece's overall shape, sound placement and the player's conjoining of elements. Hong, Ryu, Choi, Jin and Park, in their meeting with Kahn, sparked a recognition and embrace of the creative possibilities for music in the cast-off and broken. Kahn provided the score, and the rest is noise.





Jason Kahn

Balloon & Needle

Gert-Jan Prins

Tomas Korber

Diatribes