ἅπτω

October 23, 2011

A crow with no mouth concert at Studio Z in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Haptic [Adam Sonderberg, Steven Hess & Joseph Clayton Mills] will perform a Michael Pisaro composition, Concentric Rings In Magnetic Levitation, for sine waves, piano, radio and percussion. This will be only the second performance of this piece [it premieres two nights before in Chicago, the city where Haptic formed in 2005].

This is the second Pisaro composition presented in the 2011 concert series; in May 2011, Greg Stuart performed, in its world premiere, A transparent gate [with six panels].

More soon.

gather

Readers acquainted with crow will not be surprised when I say my pieces average 900 words, assimilate a fair number of conceptual links, and generally provide little blow - by - blow reportage on the music under discussion. I can scarcely manage reading or writing with that last sort of approach, so I leave it to others to do so.

For reasons of time management, a sense of fairness to those who submit work hoping for a tighter turn-around time than four to five months, and clearing the deck for some imminent projects, I will try to gather together some more concise reviews. This gives me an opportunity to state what should be obvious - the relative succinctness of these reviews in no wise suggests the works merit less space, development or elaboration.

in saturn

...there was a time, five or six hundred years ago, when melancholy was identified with the Roman god Saturn. To be melancholic was to be in Saturn, and a person chronically disposed to melancholy was known as a child of Saturn. Saturn was also identified with the metal lead, giving the soul weight and density, allowing the light, airy elements to coalesce. Traditionally there is a binding theme in Saturnine moods.
~ Thomas Moore, "Saturn's Child", in Care of the Soul, Harper Perennial, 1994

In May of this year, upon the release of the trio Mohammad's second record, Spiriti, I referred to this triple-vinyl sound-sprawl on a music forum as lugubrious joy. Antifrost label owner and Mohammad member, ILIOS, affirmed my paradoxical descriptor. Continuing to plumb the sonic materials of their 2010 debut album, Roto Vildblomma, Mohammad's low-end basin brims with Nikos Veliotis' cello, Coti K's contrabass, and ILIOS' oscillators - brims and overflows into headstreams that roil and growl at frequencies more felt than heard. Lugubrious will be immediately apparent to anyone coming to either Mohammad, or the myriad other projects cellist Veliotis has been involved with for at least a decade, for the first time. The joy is in the swooping, soaring melodic lines the trio return to every so often, their unison lines rising like thermal columns carrying the ghost-tones of Palestrina. Despite the occasional gliding, melismatic moments, and ecstatic peaks, Spiriti is shot through with a saturnian vibe that pervades Veliotis' varied collaborations.

Veliotis brings the gravitas, but is a nuanced enough improviser to allow the light and airy elements of partners like Klaus Filip to glean through. On Slugabed, released in 2010 on Taku Unami's excellent Hibari imprint, Filip laces the duo's hour-long piece for computer and cello with silvery unison lines, braiding and unbraiding skeins of lloopp-generated sine waves, while Veliotis holds the center. On Slugabed, as is the case with his duo project Texturizer, and as heard in the series of performances from which Spiriti is culled, Veliotis contributes what Moore calls the binding theme of Saturnine moods - with his string-roots burrowing down into the earth, Veliotis' playing partners are free to circle, enlace or otherwise limn this massive tonal center from their own palette. In the case of Mohammad, all three musicians trouble the waters at the deepest level; saturnalia unrelieved by the sorts of ascending, slivery lines Filip offers.
I can hear Mohammad's tonal pools as a sort of tonic for our besieged, super-saturated ears, like those geothermal pools weary visitors submerge themselves in.

I am trying to tease out the quality in the drone work Veliotis has refined for many years that captures my interest, whatever playing situation he places himself in. It is saturn, lead, gravitas. It is the infusion of his cello's melancholic rasps and cries into various ensembles that sounds this essential human element - the music of Saturn reaches most of us, as we are all capable of at least brief meditations on what Saturn is saying. Veliotis is hardly the sole voice of saturnine moods [I have been spending time with Mahler's Song of the Earth, to name one heavy dose of saturnine moods]. He is a current one, an expressive and compelling one, and both Spiriti and Slugabed are bound with the earth-rooted, saturnine spirit that satisfies when nothing else will.



















Amusingly, the cover of Slugabed, a cartoon drawing of a clearly shit-faced horse [or donkey] by
Ikuhiro Yamagata, owns its own link to my preoccupation with the saturnian - when the Romans celebrated the holiday Saturnalia, it was a bacchannal of epic drunkeness. Lugubrious joy.

Spiriti, indeed.




Antifrost

Hibari

Pictured is an anonymous artist's depiction of a Saturnalia party that went a little late.

in praise of the swarm

This summer I was reading Multitude: War & Democracy In the Age of Empire [Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Penguin Press, 2004], and came across an intriguing descriptor that I copied for my records, thinking I might find a home for it in a future music review. In a passage describing the political concept of swarms, almost always used as a pejorative [think sheeple], the authors note, admiringly, that Rimbaud flipped the word, making of it an encomium. In his 1871 hymns to the Paris Commune, the poet sang of the communards’ anarchistic spirit as the “music of the swarm”. Critic Kristin Ross, writing of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, observes a sound-quality in his mad prosody she calls “insect verse”, and elaborates, “…[Rimbaud’s poetry] is a force field of unassigned frequencies, ominous or lulling, depending on the context.”

In the maelstrom and transitory lulls of Joe Panzner’s Clearing, Polluted, a three-part work he developed over the past two years in fits and starts [necessitated in no small part by dint of becoming a father, while persevering through a doctoral dissertation in musicology], I hear a force field of unassigned, sometimes ineffable frequencies. They are indeed alternately ominous [the extreme low-end frequencies that roil and gather force midway through the first section, Young Theorist], and lulling [the oscillating, consonant drone that concludes this section]. There is insect verse as well, sections of furtive clicks and rattling reminiscent of the scurrying and scattering guitar abuse heard on Kevin Drumm’s first few releases. The ferocious second section, Hindsight Is 50/50, might in fact be reductively referred to as the sonic love-child of Drumm’s Sheer Hellish Miasma, and Julien Ottavi’s Nervure Magnetique, raised in the nursery of Francisco Lopez.

These little passes at clever referents help convey a sound area, but also compel me to say I do not hear Clearing. Polluted as being derivative; on the contrary, I consider this surprising release, alongside the current work of folks like Jason Lescalleet, Mike Shiflet and some of Daniel Menche’s stuff, to be nearly redemptive in an area of music as stagnant and surfeit with shoddy releases as can be found in any genre. Panzner brings an acute attention to detail and precision to what his playing partner Mike Shiflet once dubbed “excess audio”; spatial detail, clearly obsessive levels of sonic-sifting for the most organic [read, not contrived or precious] elements of tension and release, and an improbably mature grasp on the possibilities of the entire frequency range. If your ears are high or low-end aversive, wait a while; the scope of Clearing, Polluted yields rich, if occasionally pummeling, sounds from across the dynamic range. While it is not as crucial that you listen with your fingers affixed to the volume control as, say, listening to Julien Ottavi or Giya Kancheli [the latter’s work rivals any noisenik’s for jolting the lulled listener out of their seat with his self-described “battle scene” passages], have a care if playing Clearing, Polluted around sonic tourists, or dogs with a high startle response.

I called this a surprising release, as I think even a reasonably seasoned listener to this area of music would not expect a work of such impressive structure and range to come in the trickle of releases Panzner has issued over the past five years - a couple of CDRs in 2006, a few stellar documents from Scenic Railroads, Panzner’s duo project with Shiflet, between 2004-2006. Panzner’s mastering of Shiflet’s essential, self-released 2010 work, Llanos, was a clue for attentive listeners that he has mad skills in that area of production. Nonetheless, I wasn’t prepared for this jolt of beauty. Clearing, Polluted enters the field of similar releases with assured blasts of gravitas and fury, and never treads water nor falters. Much of its 46 minutes is comprised of swarms of meticulously assembled noise that reminds me, oh yeah, Panzner-the-composer makes of swarms of noise what other composers construct with blocks, or sheets, or notated measures of sound.

I have listened through Clearing, Polluted many times; easily annoyed, and quick to bail from the extreme areas of the noise continuum, I am happy to report we have one more musician who brings both viscera and intelligence to the squall, both density and fine detail, and hits the pavement with a clutch of ideas in his fists. Massive, but also deft and brisk, and at times grippingly melancholic, Clearing, Polluted is the happy surprise for this listener of 2011. I am hard-pressed to imagine anything being released in the balance of this year that would dislodge it from my few, favorite releases of 2011. I am pleased to see it come out on Richard Kamerman’s Copy For Your Records imprint. May it not get lost in the ridiculous deluge of releases this year, as is, of course, the fate of any music with guts and ideas issuing from similarly small imprints.

The swarm metaphor was swiped from Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Verso, 2008

crow flyer

The third Casey Deming flyer for the 2011 crow concert series. The first was after Ellsworth Kelly, the second Agnes Martin; these were the artists I suggested to Casey for inspiration. On this one, he worked in the sort of collage area seen on many of his posters for the Tuesday Night Improv Series here in Minneapolis. The Tuesday Night series dates back many years; it was originally curated by bassist Andrew Lafkas. Casey holds down that task now, so his poster art is flourishing.

I am close to returning to writing for crow again; in August I was asked to write liner notes for two imminent CD releases, as well as a couple of press releases for labels I respect a great deal.

As always, thanks for reading.