crow flyer

For the second event in the 2011 crow series, my friend Casey Deming spent no small amount of time creating this flyer for the Fraufraulein/Nathan McLaughlin show. Casey's work, whatever the net result of posting flyers around the city, adds a dimension to the concerts I hope continues throughout the series.

h a p t i c

I am pleased as hell to announce the fourth concert in the crow with no mouth 2011 series: Haptic, the trio of Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills & Adam Sonderberg, will present, the day following its world premiere in Chicago, a new composition by Michael Pisaro, concentric rings in magnetic levitation, for sine tones, radio, tape, piano and percussion.
The performance will be at Studio Z in St. Paul on October 23, 2011, at a time to be determined.

I am pleased as hell as I have enjoyed Haptic's work for some time, as well as the myriad other projects associated with these three fantastic musicians; these latter are, well, myriad, so use the Discog or the Google search, and follow the links. That a second Pisaro work will be included in the 2011 crow series is a deeply gratifying touch.

More information to follow - follow the link on the crow promotions side-bar for updates on all of the concerts.

on jamie drouin and lance austin olsen's scaffold

The haiku is, paradoxically, a poem about silence. Its very core is silence. There is probably no shorter poetic form in world literature than the classical haiku with its seventeen syllables, and yet the masters put these seventeen syllables down with a gesture of apology, which makes it clear that words merely serve the silence.

All that matters is the silence. The haiku is a scaffold of words; what is being constructed is a poem of silence; and when it is ready, the poet gives a little kick, as it were, to the scaffold. It tumbles, and silence alone stands.
~ David Steindl-Rast















I have listened and listened to three releases on the Infrequency Editions imprint these past several months, three works by the life-long painter and decade-long sound artist Lance Austin Olsen, and a musician with considerable experience in the exploration of how environments and humans interact, Jamie Drouin.
Many of the sounds in their collaborative work, considered as discrete elements, are familiar to my ears, and certain referents come to mind upon repeated listens - the multivalented, jigsaw assemblage of Absence & Forgiveness is somewhat reminiscent of the Annette Krebs/Taku Unami's duo release, motubachii; the sustained interest in extreme pitches, heard on Savonarola and 1498, particularly those on the frequency scale that get my dog's alert attention, invoke the Stasis Duo, as well as the invariable touchstone for this area, Sachiko M and Nakamura.

They are, however, set apart in the field not by a sui generis sound palette, but by their approach as a duo who clearly work with a heightened, joint intuition for the placement of sound and silence, and the subtlety with which the scaffolding for the ephemera created by their poor man's arsenal of sound-generators - a suitcase analog, some scarred amplified copper plates and a toy guitar - is created, then kicked away. Drouin and Olsen no sooner have their sounds meticulously stacked, layered or threaded together, and they send them tumbling, sometimes precipitously. Every sound that is jettisoned impinges on us with the sound of its subsequent, frequently sudden, absence.


Given the length of the three releases considered here, 51, 42 and 31 minutes respectively, it is crucial, if the duo are to sustain interest in this approach, that they maintain a balance between subtle, intricate construction, sound canvases built up largely with minute sonic strokes and textures [though they can snap you to with an occasional tossed bomb of noisy grit and scree] , and the recurring collapse and disintegration of their definite and indefinite pitches.
They do so, over and over; non-linear, seldom assuaging us by allowing the ear to get comfortable within a certain area or development, yet supremely unhurried, Drouin and Olsen make music like they have spent no small amount of time reflecting on and linking their sound work to their visual work. Music, of course, makes it possible for the duo to return our attention,
again and again, to the silence at the core of their eventful, often near-silent, sound world.



















1498 approximates an electrical storm - about two weeks ago, my part of the world experienced just such a hella storm, during which I happened to be listening to 1498's skitter, clatter and roar. This made for a near-perfect milieu of sound and weather. Olsen's amplified copper plates, recycled from his dry point engraving works, hold a world of unstable ambient sounds, and Olsen unlocks them all.
Savonarola is the release that has the sort of guitar string scrapes and smushed Brillo-pad effects Keith Rowe developed with his restless tool accretion years ago - I mention these as they are really among the very few familiar sounds along the way, where Olsen's toy guitar is concerned. Drouin generates great clouds of black, smokey low-end rumble and distressingly high tones that fake and feint toward a Shepard scale, making their abrupt disappearance the more startling.

There are more than a few passages of solemnity and, insuring the duo never settle into the dronesphere, alarm, tension and apprehension. This is another distinct quality of this duo, one difficult to attain, I think, in such abstract music - a sometimes powerful sense of reportage or narrative about the current state of the world. Only on Absence & Forgiveness do Drouin and Olsen allow into their materials an explicit hint of that anxious world, what is on the end of every fork - nearing the end of the piece, radio captures of a woman being interviewed about a murder and the absence of justice, her voice gradually clarified in the white hiss and other racket it is embedded in. The emergence of this report is unnerving and moving, and the fragments of words like forgiveness and justice hang for a moment in the air, before collapsing into a loud hum of bass, then silence.

I am, as often as not, drawn especially to the work of musicians in duo; the pairing of Jamie Drouin and Lance Austin Olsen bears the sort of fruit that makes the duo form so compelling - no place to hide or obfuscate, the great potential for a unilaterally-generated disaster, but equally the potential for what buddhists call the one taste - that is the state in which the boundaries between dissolve, and, as in Drouin and Olsen's music, what is revealed is one mind. Or as Steindl-Rast has it, the form is scrapped, and we return to silence.



Drouin/Olsen

Pictured: Lance Austin Olsen and one of his dry point engravings

David Steindl-Rast is a brilliant Benedictine monk, holding degrees from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and a PhD in Experimental Psychology; he has, as well, been a post-Doctoral Fellow at Cornell and has received years of zen training from Eido Roshi and others zen masters.

what is on the end of every fork, from William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 1959

Do yourself a favor and go to the Con-v net label site to download Drouin and Olsen's recent collaboration with the ridiculously over-looked musician and visual artist Mathieu Ruhlmann.

RIP Lucian Freud

I'm only trying to do what I can't do.
~ Lucian Freud
December 8, 1922 - July 20, 2011

through erstwhile

On July 11 I began what I hope to maintain as a daily discipline of revisiting every Erstwhile Records release I own, one disc a day, in chronological order. I will write as I can about each one, whether that be a few sentences, or a more fully developed consideration.

Since 2004, the Erst catalog has been a source of wonder, vexation and, with two notable releases, what I regard as masterworks of new music.

Anyway, the side-bar link will get you there, I simply wanted to alert new readers. Do feel free to post comments - I read every one I receive.


photo: Yuko Zama

as you might take your pulse

What I want [not yet what I produce] is music to question, to ascultate, to approach the problem of being.

~ Henri Michaux

On Stroke By Stroke, Dimitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga's remarkable solo work released this very hot and humid July, 2011, on Organized Music From Thessaloniki, the windows in Chatzigoga’s house are thrown open; you can hear the streets of Athens enlaced in her apothegmatic pieces for a radically prepared and refashioned zither. Knowing this, anyone even somewhat alert to the events in the streets of Athens from May of 2010 to the present, almost precisely the period of time bracketing the home recordings heard on Stroke By Stroke, will inevitably bend their ear for aural evidence of the crisis and conflagrations staged in the public spaces of Athens. I do not hear the explicit sounds of police brutality or the massive organization of strikes and demonstrations conveyed with heavy-handedness, say, by dint of T.V. or radio captures [cf. Tony Conrad’s Bryant Park Moratorium Rally [1969], a recording of similar street energies infiltrating via a composer’s windows], or troweled on with field recordings . I do hear alarm [and alarms], pieces bearing up under tremendous tension and distress, the sounds of sheared metal, what sounds like bowed iron gates, and the unnerving shuttle of warp beams on a ghostly loom. Chatzigoga has articulated [or as the poet Michaux has it, more surgically, auscultated] the spirit of her adopted city with great subtlety, juxtaposing the mechanized and harsh strokes of some of the 21 tracks, with moments of calm, clarity and tenderness.

The title Chatzigoga chose for her solo release comes from a late collection of prose poems and ideogramatic ink drawings by the French poet Henri Michaux. Chatzigoga has chosen well, as one can easily unpack multiple apposite meanings from stroke by stroke; listen to the full- spectrum, tactile approach she takes to this oldest of folk instruments. Caresses and dandles are at play, but you would expect that with a zither – what I was not expecting are the sounds of saxophone multiphonics, granulated train whistles, inchoate radio signals, looped looms and, as baffling as anything heard across the 21 strokes sounded here, unmistakable, sustained sine tones. Chatzigoga found it necessary to include the following information with my advanced copy – “all the pieces are played solo and are used as recorded, without electronic effects, overdubbing or processing, except for tracks five and 17.”

Chatzigoga has reimagined her chosen instrument and remapped its territories like only a few artists I can conjure up who have produced anything remotely similar to Stroke By Stroke– Annette Krebs, with whom Chatzigoga has just shared a festival stage in Slovenia this July; here and there that other Berlin guitarist who practiced a rigorous, but less radical erasure of his instrument’s baggage, Hans Reichel; Andrea Neumann , whose innerklavier bears some overlapping resonances ; and to my ears, most remarkably, Arek Gulbenkoglu, the Melbourne-based guitarist whose 2005 release Points Alone, for solo acoustic guitar, owns a strikingly similar quality of subverting whatever possibilities and parameters you thought obtained in a solo work for an acoustic stringed instrument,

The links to Michaux are not limited to the titular one; Chatzigoga obviously shares with the poet the status of artistic outlier. Born in Thessaloniki in 1981, her entrée into this sound world came about while she was obtaining a Ph.D in theoretical linguistics at the University of Barcelona in 2004. It wasn’t long before Chatzigoga found an affinity with the improvised musicians she met there. She formed the working duo Ap’strophe with Ferran Fages, collaborated with Tishe Mukarji, Felipe Araya Munoz, Birgit Ulher, and many others.

Chatzigoga clearly has found an affinity between her music and language, outside of her doctoral specialty, the linguistic notion of indefiniteness [a cursory check of her work in this area – at this date, Google produces nearly as much about Chatzigoga’s doctoral thesis as her sound work – gave me a headache, along with that familiar sense of ego-puncturing that is concomitant to every reminder that there is an immense amount of investigative work going on in the world that I cannot possibly get my arms around]. The connective tissue between her music and language I can grasp is her love of poetry – Corgroc, her fantastic duo with Fages from 2010, is structured in two sections bearing the broken line of the e.e. cummings poem spring is like a perhaps hand.

Chatzigoga’s regard for the poet Michaux, whose dark, ruminative and entirely unsentimental poetry yields to her a title that makes more and more sense with each listen to Stroke By Stroke, sent me to a considerable review of his collected works. It struck me that much of his later writings are, like these 21 darkly-imbued offerings, epigrammatic, and also braid together the brutal and the tender. Suffice it to limit myself to only a few lines, to illustrate; He who leaves a trace, leaves a wound. The bird’s ravings have no interest for the tree. He who sings in a group will put his brother in prison when asked.

I will set those lines, as unsparing as anything from Beckett, against the anxiety and strife carried through Chatzigoga’s windows in the heart of Athens, and alongside the pneumatic-jackhammer-with-sine-tones heard in her piece any and all, or the insistent, floating siren of emergency.

But there is also this; He who hides his madman dies voiceless. And I wanted to draw the consciousness of existing and the flow of time. As you might take your pulse.

I will set those lines alongside Chatzigoga’s beautiful, terse tone poems woody woodpecker and common ground – the first owning a silly title that does not convey its floating gamelan rhythms, the latter a similar dance of sprung rhythms amid the dire sound worlds of pieces like parasite and torrent.

Or even draw your attention to Stroke By Stroke’s opening stroke, gargaretta, 12 seconds comprising its entrance and exit, the windows thrown open to Athens’ streets, the moment at which I knew I was in the severe and tender hands of a remarkable musician.

Organized Music From Thessaloniki

Lines from Michaux are found in Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology 1927 - 1984, University of California Press, and Selected Writings: The Space Within, New Directions.

Ideograph from Stroke By Stroke, Archipelago Books

RIP Cy Twombly

I sit for two or three hours and then in 15 minutes I can do a painting, but that's part of it.
Brush is boring, you give it and all of a sudden it's dry, you have to go. Before you cut the thought, you know?

~ Cy Twombly
April 25, 1928 - July 5, 2011

gestures rather than signs

I do not know how to make poems, or regard myself as a poet, or find, particularly, poetry in my poems, and am not the first to say so.

I write with transport and for myself,

a) sometimes to liberate myself from an intolerable tension or from a no less painful abandonment.

b) sometimes for a companion whom I imagine...

c) deliberately to shake the congealed and established, to invent.

Readers trouble me. I write, if you like, for the unknown reader.

~ Henri Michaux, quoted in Rene Bertele's Panorama de la Jeune Poesie

Soon, a piece on Dimitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga, and her fine solo release, Stroke By Stroke, available in July 2011 on Organized Music From Thessaloniki.

Title from Michaux, Stroke By Stroke, 1984