tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23782809409033696242024-03-13T12:03:08.318-05:00crow with no mouthjessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.comBlogger264125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-51269024720671666562014-10-30T03:58:00.002-05:002015-05-09T02:32:39.102-05:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Pleased to announce a new site for my music writing; please follow this<b><span style="color: red;"><a href="http://crowwithnomouth.wordpress.com/"> link</a>.</span></b></span></span></div>
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jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-32419541382496691332014-09-01T03:45:00.002-05:002014-09-01T03:45:36.243-05:00wandelweiser and crow<a href="http://changewisely.tumblr.com/%20wandelweiser%20and%20crow">on the eve of the crow with no mouth/wandelweiser festival</a>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-63730578365436788202014-06-27T00:22:00.000-05:002014-06-27T00:22:56.675-05:00consider it unnameable<br />
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span><br /> </i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The
pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words
being there, written in invisible ink, clamoring to become visible.</span><br />
<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Vladimir Nabokov<br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Another way to approach the thing is to consider it unnameable.</span><br />
<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Francis Ponge</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5qIyiQQv6pI/Unr0kQDb4wI/AAAAAAAAB1o/ZFFHFkifPZs/s1600/artist_300.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5qIyiQQv6pI/Unr0kQDb4wI/AAAAAAAAB1o/ZFFHFkifPZs/s320/artist_300.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Architect
and sound-maker Darius Ciuta has joined with Bruno Duplant on three duo
releases to date; the two documents offered here, released closely
together earlier this year, clarify how simpatico the pair are, how
effortlessly they work with near-invisible materials in dark, dark
waters.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Ciuta resides in Kaunas, Lithuania, employed as an architect. Like <a href="http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.com/2011/07/on-jamie-drouin-and-lance-austin-olsens.html">Lance Austin Olsen</a>,
who came to experimental music from many years as a painter, Ciuta
followed a similar trajectory, his sound experiments beginning in the
90s cassette culture under the noise <i>nom</i>, Naj. Olsen came to mind
for another reason - the two share a practice of meticulously reducing
their sounds by a self-limiting means of sound production, and a
sensibility that privileges minute particulars over overt shapes and
forms. Even the titles of Ciuta and Duplant's releases are acronymic and
runic, yielding no textual clues about the music.</span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-U910FPvJGHA/Unr00ZVrKDI/AAAAAAAAB1w/LwlaGtURiBs/s1600/duplant.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-U910FPvJGHA/Unr00ZVrKDI/AAAAAAAAB1w/LwlaGtURiBs/s320/duplant.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Duplant,
by my last count, has appeared on about 30 releases since I became
aware of him in 2009. Prolific, to be sure, but also as recondite, where
personal/biographical information is concerned, as can be imagined in
these exhaustively linked-in times. I have amassed much of that
improbable output, and think Duplant's best work can be found in the
projects that connect him to playing partners of like-minded temperament
and aesthetic biases.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">As I said, that
is the great strength of these two releases, as distinct and divergent
as they are, at times: within the context of a rather severe micro-sound
continuum, <i>(G) W (3) </i>is, measured against<i> Shed I, </i>luxuriant, aqueous, and occasionally serene.<i> Shed I, </i>even
with location recordings that include the by now de rigueur barking
dogs/sloshing water sorts of narrative signposts, is a work of
impressive, insistent severity and reduction. Close listening, and time,
bring the overall shape into focus, invisible edges and patterns
emerging, and one is struck with how the duo's melded sensibilities
barely hint at discrete parts. In a fashion, the work and its authors
are unnameable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.mysterysea.net/">(G) W (3)</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://triplebath.gr/">Shed I</a></span>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-3061074277202229682014-06-08T17:00:00.000-05:002014-06-08T17:00:01.872-05:00i don't mean that much can be explained<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NEVPIVv5ms8/U5TR6pud8YI/AAAAAAAAGsA/j0_ejUiajzQ/s1600/laurence-crane-at-kettles-yard-spring-2008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NEVPIVv5ms8/U5TR6pud8YI/AAAAAAAAGsA/j0_ejUiajzQ/s1600/laurence-crane-at-kettles-yard-spring-2008.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b>The Unwonted Beauty of Laurence Crane’s <a href="http://www.anothertimbre.com/laurencecrane.html"><i>Chamber Works 1992 – 2009</i></a></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />Clarity<br />In the sense of<i> transparence,</i><br />I don’t mean that much can be explained.<br />George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous (1-22)”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />I offer a few lines of my favorite Objectivist poet advisedly – in these few lines I find as fine a distillation of what composer Laurence Crane is up to in this generous and overdue constellation of chamber works as any I might manage. These 20-odd pieces are kindled with an adamantine clarity and transparency, the sort of blue fire rarely heard in contemporary composition outside of the Wandelweiser collective.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />But then there is Oppen’s last admonitory line, and its aptness to Crane’s work is perfect -anyone who is struck, as I was immediately upon hearing my first Crane composition last year, by the embarrassment of harmonic beauty and architectural rigor throughout these works, will soon sense another, recondite quality to the music. Composer Michael Pisaro refers to this quality as “quietly crazy”, owning a beauty that is “hermetic” and “fragile.” Contained within Crane’s elemental materials there is much that cannot be explained, something necessitating that I use that often inappositely used word, ineffable. I find the suchness of Crane’s music eludes explanation despite immersion and repetition; this is unusual in my experience. However much I might welter and flail when setting out to write about many of Crane’s contemporaries, there eventually comes some sort of hook on which to hang a few ideas. I have lost track of how many times I have heard these mainly miniature-scaled pieces, and yet I cannot tell you precisely why I agree with Pisaro that this is music at once subversive and ordinary, recalcitrant and inviting, frugal, even abstemious, yet sounding like a gift offering generous clarity and transparence. Experienced this way, Crane’s compositions are koans, another model of concision and clarity, where both conceptual rigor and poesy rule, contradictions and dualities obtain, and the listener, confronted with all this, is invited to, essentially, get over it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />The chamber works are not without occasionally distinct referents, even seeming melodic and harmonic echoes, however transitory – I hear Feldman, Satie, Peter Garland, Thomas de Hartmann’s Gurdjieff works, reaching way back, Early Music, and, most saliently, Howard Skempton, who inspired Crane to compose music based in tonality. His transparence, to return to one of Oppen’s bare-bone qualities, is manifested in these intermittent evocations of his predecessors. “I take to my room and let small things evolve slowly,” Satie said. Crane has done so as well, outside of any spotlight, with only a few available releases of his work, prior to this one.<br />Crane is most rigorous in subtracting any elements in a piece that might obstruct the direct experience of the ineffable; in this way his music owns a humility that brings to mind for me Jurg Frey, whom Crane apparently admires a great deal. There is humility in how improbably patient Crane is in his rhythmic and harmonic development. There is humility in the melding of sly humor and rigorous beauty, especially in the piano works. There is humility in Crane’s fealty to the most basic elements of composition, coupled with their raw and rigorous repurposing, that has clarified his work since at least 1992.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />It was in 1995 that Crane began his association with the ensemble Apartment House, whose core members are heard on this recording. For all I have said about the ineffable nature of this music, a few meat-and-potato observations: Crane likes the clarinet – only five of the pieces in this collection are sans clarinet, three of those being for other solo instrumentation (piano, cello and electric guitar, respectively); Crane likes Andrew Sparling on the clarinet – the pieces bearing his name, Sparling (two iterations) and Sparling 2000, serve beautifully as a spine for the first disc - they are programmed at the beginning, middle, and second-to-last place on disc one, the clarinet sounding a sort of simple dawn chorus, with each iteration shaded and colored variously by Sparling’s accompanists; there is no fast music; Crane, like Satie and Feldman, enjoys a wacky song title, e.g.,<i> I Saw Alexander Bălănescu In Safeways</i>; and, as I have said, Crane holds a long, loving regard for the first principles of tonal music.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />What can I add to clarify how I hear the unwonted beauty of Crane’s work found here? I heartily recommend, of course, that you live with it a while, available to the koan encased in its simple attractions. Crane’s chamber works, stripped bare and being of two realms – the implacably logical and the ineffable – endlessly moves these two realms close together and far apart, music at once clear, transparent, explaining nothing. This is a remarkable achievement, and my thanks goes to the Apartment House ensemble for its impeccable musicianship, Another Timbre’s Simon Reynell for his patient work in bringing this release to fruition, and, of course, to Laurence Crane, whose music has been an environment I have spent considerable time in lately, one that has changed me.</span>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-70654386306612083192014-05-07T18:23:00.001-05:002014-06-28T01:24:57.041-05:00lance austin olsen's footprints<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MlmsqwOXdes/U2q__XA_jjI/AAAAAAAAGrQ/UxpY3PUkpek/s1600/Olsen-Scores-and-Markings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MlmsqwOXdes/U2q__XA_jjI/AAAAAAAAGrQ/UxpY3PUkpek/s1600/Olsen-Scores-and-Markings.jpg" height="223" width="400" /> </a></div>
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Last week musician / photographer / label owner Jamie Drouin asked me to contribute a text to a release paying homage to Lance Austin Olsen, a surprise gift to Olsen to be released as a free download on Drouin and Olsen's imprint, Infrequency Editions. A week later, and here it is!<br />
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The release, as you shall see for yourself, includes five pieces by musicians associated with Olsen, seven reproductions of Olsen's artwork that served as scores for the music, and my text.<br />
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It is a privilege to share this with crow readers. Lance Austin Olsen is a remarkable artist, I hope you will take the time to investigate his work.<br />
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<a href="http://infrequency.org/?p=507">Lance Austin Olsen's Footprints </a><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Toshiya Tsunoda, liner notes of <i>O Respirar da Paisagem (2003)</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I am confident, after spending time with Donato Wharton's 2013 release <i>Place and Presence</i>, </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">that Wharton concurs with Tsunoda's notion. The four pieces here are made of deftly threaded sine tones, high and low, and the sparest of location recordings.</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">A restrained harmonic series is heard across the pieces, and whatever the shape of the wave, or its density, heard as the lightest of tracings - faint, translucent, and, until we reach the conclusion of the final track</span>, <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">without crescendo or capstone. I immediately thought of two referents upon first hearing Wharton's sonic mizzle - Michael Pisaro's brilliant <i>Transparent City </i>cycle</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">(although Wharton foregrounds his sine waves in a very different mix, to very different ends, than Pisaro)</span>, <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">and the effect of faint impressions on fibrous tracing paper (as in the work of artist Ida Lawrence, above).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Putting forth some of the familiar plaited elements - airplane thrum, piercing sine skeins, spiraling turbines sounding like a radically reduced electronic variant of Ligetti's <i>Lux Aeterna</i></span>,<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> electric white mist - might understandably evince a <i>been there/heard that </i>response.</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">That is why I generally avoid trying to convey much about materials and their assemblage in blow-by-blow reports of sounds, and the like. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Which brings us to presence - that is, Wharton's presence, which makes all the difference after all.</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">He is guided here by what Howard Skempton called<i> the virtuosity of restraint,</i> offering both place and presence</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">as tracings that draw us to listen more keenly for whatever details we might recognize.</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">A lovely work.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.donatowharton.com/">http://www.donatowharton.com/</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Drawing: Ida Lawrence, <i>untitled/2009</i>, pencil/folds/light on tracing paper</span>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-13917174050170322802014-04-15T02:14:00.000-05:002014-07-31T00:23:05.562-05:00zeit lassen<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Gertrude Stein, <i>Portraits and Repetition</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I<a href="http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-spirituality-of-subtraction.html"> wrote </a>about composer Eva-Maria Houben last Spring, observing that ...<i> Houben (is) notable, however, for sustaining our attention in music exquisitely poised between a sound and its decay, a melody and its absence, and the vitality possible in repetition and iteration. Listening to Houben...I am faced with that fluid and volatile thing, my preferences, as Wallace Stevens said,</i> between the beauty of inflections/Or the beauty of innuendoes. <i>One night, listening through</i> 'orgelbuch' <i>repeatedly, I sensed preference drop away, and I heard the presence of silence, and I realized how incredibly rare a thing Houben is creating. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Spending time with Houben's <i>Lost In Dreams - works for piano, </i>released in June 2013 on Edition Wandelweiser Records, reinforces my appreciation for the depth of Houben's exploration of sound <i>and just after</i>. Equally, in these six piano pieces played by Houben, I am alerted to another fantastic quality of her work - the relationship between what, on one level, is mere repetition, but on another level can be heard/felt as a gentle <i>insistence</i>. This is an insistence perhaps best conveyed in an indication found throughout an earlier Houben piano piece<i>, go and stop -</i> zeit lassen. In his liner notes for Ms. Houben's excellent<i> Piano Music </i>(Irritable Hedgehog), William Robin suggests <i>zeit lassen</i> might be understood as an indication that the pianist grant silence<i> and</i> forget about time as conventionally understood. It is indeed the sort of insistence one can experience in dreams.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>Lost In Dreams </i>comprises six pieces - <i><span class="tracklist_track_title" itemprop="name">Traumverloren I Für Klavier (2010),</span></i><span class="tracklist_track_title" itemprop="name"> unfurling for over 30 minutes, its duration suited to Houben's clarifying this soft insistence embedded within mere repetition; and five dedicatory pieces of much shorter duration, bearing the titles <i>in memoriam - Mussorgsky, Enescu, Schumann, Liszt and Messiaen. </i>These brief epitaths privilege the presence of silence as much as any of Houben's works, with a surprisingly spry turn in the Enescu piece, sounding a little reminiscent of some of Cage's toy piano </span>naïveté. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">How is repetition - perceived by many as an irritant when present in art (Stein suffered this criticism constantly - her essay, from which the above quote is lifted, is in part a response to her detractors, one worthy of a zen master's "slap" to the errant novice during dokusan) - also heard as the quality of <i>granting</i> or allowing time, and silence, to be present? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I've no idea - I only know that when listening through<i> Lost In Dreams, </i>my thoughts kept returning to a line in one of Rilke's <i>Sonnets To Orpheus </i>I copied and recopied years ago from Poulin's translation:</span><br />
<b> </b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Though he works and worries, the farmer<br />never reaches down to where the seed turns<br />into summer. </span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>The earth</i> grants.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I have always loved the choice of <i>grants,</i> or in German,<i> zugeben,</i> a lovely turning word, conveying how nature, in her manner of operations, really works, despite the repetition of work and worry. This is why learning that Ms. Houben indicated <i>zeit lassen</i> in her piano work grabbed me - grant time, her work seems to insist, there is no such thing as repetition, simply making music that grants time, sound, and silence.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Anyway that is the way it is. And you hear it even if you do not say it in the way I say it as I hear it.</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.wandelweiser.de/_e-w-records/_ewr-catalogue/ewr1305.html">Lost In Dreams </a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Italicized quotes from Stein, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>Portraits and Repetition</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=628711424&searchurl=an%3Drainer%2Bmaria%2Brilke%2Btranslated%2Bby%2Ba%2Bpoulin%2Bjr%26amp%3Bbsi%3D0%26amp%3Bds%3D30">The earth grants.</a><i><br /></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">My thanks to Michael Pisaro for providing the word zugeben.</span><i>
</i>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-27492552599357943892014-01-17T02:20:00.000-06:002014-01-17T14:49:08.283-06:00the angel would like to stay<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Rg7OIoPNN-c/UtjPaxv-J0I/AAAAAAAAB8Q/N9KTxYNQCFc/s1600/Paul+Klee+Last+still+life++,+1940.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Rg7OIoPNN-c/UtjPaxv-J0I/AAAAAAAAB8Q/N9KTxYNQCFc/s1600/Paul+Klee+Last+still+life++,+1940.jpg" height="237" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I cannot be understood at all on this earth, for I live as much with the dead as with the unborn.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual, but not nearly close enough.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">~ Paul Klee (words used as his epitath)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">But a storm is blowing in from paradise, it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">~ Walter Benjamin, writing upon Klee's death in 1940 about Klee's <i>Angelus Novus</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>This Star Teaches Bending</i> is Vancouver sound artist Mathieu Ruhlmann's audio documentaton of the corporeality and spaces of his mother's final days in 2012. Valerie Joy was diagnosed with a lung disease that introduced into her life the battery of machines the dying are often tethered to at the end of days. Anyone who has been present in those rooms, and sat cumbrously amid their hoses, lines -in and -out, and medical monitor displays, knows these sounds in a visceral way. Ruhlmann chose to capture them with pickups and mics, offering them here as the music of aspirations, deep-throated rattles, amplified emptied stomach and, widening the frame, footfalls, banal traffic noise, and the continual presence of room tones.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The sounds might be regarded as an audio death mask, their traces and resonances at once discomfiting and entirely abstract.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Ruhlmann selected as titles for his five tracks titles Paul Klee gave some of the paintings he made in his final year of life. There is, in Ruhlmann's brief note about Klee found inside Akos Garai's beautifully designed CD booklet, a sense of admiration for Klee's five year-long dedication to making art while suffering an illness without a cure - more precisely, suffering purposefully, as the last paintings and works on paper reveal. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>This Star Teaches Bending</i> joins a growing number of releases of abstract music issued from a musician's personal losses - notably, Tilbury and Rowe's <i>Duos For Doris</i>, Jason Kahn's <i>Vanishing Point</i>, Jason Lescalleet's <i>The Pilgrim</i> - and may well generate fruitful conversations about the fact that a document like this exists at all. It is, of course, a terribly intimate listening experience, bringing Valerie Joy's dying out of the isolation of those rooms, with that equipment that sounds like it owns a life coterminus with her own</span>.<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Ruhlmann's documentary of the magnified sounds of his mother's living-into- dying might well stand as a strong work of abstract music heard sans the personal narrative. I'll never know - I first heard it upon arriving home in July 2013 from Las Vegas, where I spent three days at the hospital bedside of my dying mother-in-law, Lynne. As family gathered amid a battery of blinking, ceaselessly noisy medical machines, Lynne died at age 63, the same age as Valerie Joy. Returning home from that experience, I found a package from Ruhlmann in the post; <i>This Star Teaches Bending</i> may well have been the first music I heard just days after Lynne's death, I can't recall. I cannot pretend to hear it unmoored from that experience.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">This star has taught Mathieu Ruhlmann to bend himself to a most personal, most ordinary, experience, the loss of a beloved, which he offers here as truly extraordinary music.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.3leaves-label.com/releases.html">3LEAVES </a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.mathieuruhlmann.com/">Mathieu Ruhlmann </a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Painting from Klee, 1940, the year of his death </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Benjamin quote from <i>Theses On The Philosophy of History </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">For Mathieu Ruhlmann, with respect and admiration</span><br />
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<br />jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-36661196013405934622014-01-09T02:47:00.002-06:002014-04-18T20:37:59.381-05:00beastwind<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The fox knows many things...</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Isaiah Berlin</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Tim Olive moved recently to Kobe, Japan, driving deeper and deeper into the beastwind he roils up with various playing partners. The beastwind is, at times, grinding, plangent, massive. It is also - and in this regard he overlaps with folks like Kevin Drumm, or Will Gutrhie - shape-shifting, labile, windshear giving way to thin sheets of electricals, solar squalls subsiding to something like soothing particle rains. The spatial and dynamic scale of Olive's sound-world is really impressive. I can be done with wind metaphors, but listen to Olive's last two releases on his own <a href="http://845audio.org/">845 Audio </a>label, you'll hear how easy it is to slip into the nomenclature of<i> thermals</i>,<i> gale-force</i>, and the like. Olive produces this impressive scale of densities, timbres, even mimetic sounds of the natural and supra-natural world, with quite simple materials and means - pared to essentially one amplified string, some pick-ups, a mixer, and springs and stuff applied to the pick-ups. Played with great alacrity, endless ideas in fluid motion, and an unswerving patience and attunement to playing partners. Olive knows many things, and channels them through a reduced instrumentation -<i> I love limits</i>, he said in an interview last year.</span></span><br />
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<i>33 Bays</i>, Olive's 2012 duo release with Alfredo Costa Monteiro, is stellar; the pair collaborated in Barcelona and Osaka five years ago, and happily have sustained their rattle and roil in occasional meetings like this one. Monteiro has not released a weak recording in the years I've followed him, whatever the variance in their grip on me. His two working groups with Ferran Fages, Atolón and Cremaster, are as good as it gets in electro-acoustic music that moves from high-wire tensions of silence to bruising fun. Monteiro's solo organ release, <i>Umbralia</i>, is a work of amazing attention to the interstices and spaces between notes, Monteiro the colorist, and certain to baffle those who associate him only with the blistering Cremaster.<br />
So <i>33 Bays, </i>whose duration does not overstay its ideas nor malinger past necessity, enjoins and rips apart two simpatico improvisers who often sound as if they're making music from inside a Richard Serra sculpture. The occasional dynamic drops in density and volume are hypostatic, you'll literally reel and wobble from their effect. This is music that is at once driven (I'll skirt the meterological here), and nuanced, and should be heard and huzzahed about alongside stuff like Drumm's<i> Humid Weather</i>, or Daniel Menche's<i> Field of Skin.</i><br />
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.<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">..but the hedgehog knows one big thing.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Ibid</span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ez-tsHDNvzA/Us5VoM2QcCI/AAAAAAAAB7w/bpDqTW9lnb0/s1600/tim-katsura.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ez-tsHDNvzA/Us5VoM2QcCI/AAAAAAAAB7w/bpDqTW9lnb0/s1600/tim-katsura.jpg" height="214" width="320" /></a></div>
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Olive joined forces with turntablist (and more) Katasura Mouri for <i>Various Histories</i>, another superbly paced release, five tracks of concise exploration of a mutual map - akin to <i>33 Bays</i>, an impressive expanse of textures, fine details, and a vague sense of an unstable pulse threading through the whole affair. Katsura released at least eight CDs with the turntable group-turned-duo, Busratch, from 2000-2009; I haven't heard that project, making my discovery of Katsura here especially a blast. As relatively low-tech as Olive, Katsura, like the fantastic Hong Chulki, coaxes, cajoles and throttles the table. This is another pairing that must have been, as Keith Rowe said about his first encounters with Toshimaru Nakamura, a <i>relief </i>for the players - how often do musicians share this level of confidence, guts and ideas, and manage the ground between them (I think of Scenic Railroads for one, the occasional duo of Mike Shiflet and Joe Panzner) so skillfully?<br />
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I think Tim Olive knows one big thing that is multi-faceted and, to date, unexhausted - he knows how to dive deep with simple materials, and he knows how to combine with similarly gifted playing partners.<i> I'm a hedgehog</i>, Olive told an interviewer,<i> I concentrate on my ground, I get down in there and root around and explore all the parameters and minute variations. </i><br />
Sure - but a fox as well, in terms of Berlin's elegant, cartoonishly simple dichotomy. Olive brings to his deconstructed table, and his meetings with remarkable musicians like Monteiro and Mouri, an embarrassment of ideas and a barrage of effects. <i>I am a hedgehog</i>, says the fox.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Photos: Monteiro/Olive, Victor E. Perez, A Coruna, 2010 / Olive/Mouri, Minoru Ikekita, Kyoto, 2012</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Hedgehog-Fox-Tolstoys-History/dp/1566630193"><u>The Hedgehog and The Fox</u></a>, Isaiah Berlin</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Tim Olive<a href="http://timolive.org/interviews/"> interviews </a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Title: I like the word <i>beastwind</i> - it is a track title from Olive and Monterio's first duo release, <i>a theory of possible utterance</i> (zeromoon, 2011), and an apposite descriptor of their sound.</span></span><br />
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jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-43514934393050544582014-01-01T19:56:00.000-06:002014-01-01T19:56:07.179-06:00a mirror of our mind: Anais Prosaic's documentary, 'Eliane Radigue - L'ecoute virtuose'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bG685cy0EH4/UsPZ21yFpeI/AAAAAAAAB6I/r6gfS9UHMBM/s1600/elaine4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bG685cy0EH4/UsPZ21yFpeI/AAAAAAAAB6I/r6gfS9UHMBM/s320/elaine4.jpg" width="234" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Our mind is a bright mirror, free from dust.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">~ Hui-Neng (638-713)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The work is first of all a mirror of our mind.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">~ Eliane Radigue</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">There is clearly something happening in our time, this ninth decade in composer Eliane Radigue's life, that is mirrored in the recent, sharp increase in attention to her body of work, the proliferation of archived and contemporary pieces available lately, and the on-line resources easily accessible to interested parties.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Consider this - when I published <a href="http://www.junkmedia.org/index.php?i=2602">my appreciation </a>of Radigue only four years ago this week, there were such scant articles/interviews available in the aether, it was necessary to reference the same several texts, even photos, as everyone else. Radigue assistant, archivist and tireless advocate for her work, Emmanuel Holterbach, has done much to remedy that paucity of material related to the composer, as has composer Jennie Gottschalk, whose <a href="http://www.soundexpanse.com/rs12-radigue/">sound expanse</a> blog provides links to numerous articles and interviews of recent vintage.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">From 1983-2003, there were seven releases more or less available of Radigue's synthesizer and tape compositions; from 2003-2013, 15 releases came in waves, five of them in 2013. These are spread across numerous labels issuing from several countries, and are of improbably consistent high quality. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">In 2006 came the 14 minute </span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Institut Für Medienarchäologie (IMA) documentary,<i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=D2U0q4lZiFg"> Portrait </a>#4, </i>providing just enough of a glimpse of Radigue to whet our appetites for more. One of the two camera operators and editors on <i>Portrait #4</i> was Anais Prosaic, who released her lovely 61 minute documentary<i><span style="font-size: small;"> <span itemprop="name">L'Écoute Virtuose / Virtuoso Listening </span></span></i><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">in the Fall of 2012. Prosaic is a documentarian based in Paris who has made films with subjects ranging from Patti Smith to Ethiopian singer Mahmoud Ahmed.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">I revisited <i>Portrait #4 </i>as a companion to my multiple viewings of<i> Virtuoso Listening, </i>struck by a couple of threads that tie these impressions of Radigue, separated by seven years, together. Filmmaker Prosaic can be credited with binding these elements visually, with clarity and a light touch.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">First, the flow of two of Radigue's elemental metaphors for her compositional approach, and the concomitant listening experience: water and the mirror. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">Near the conclusion of <i>Portrait #4</i>, in a brief section entitled</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name"> Écoute,</span></span></i></span> Radigue says, in reference to listening to the Arp and tape works she composed between 1967-2000, <i>...it's like looking at the surface of a river...it's never completely the same, according to the way in which you look...regarding these kinds of sounds, it's that they act as a mental mirror. </i>Forward to her 2012 interview with Max Dax - <i>I use this river image myself to represent one of my </i>Adnos<i> pieces...if a stone in the river moves, the river is not changed, but after a long time it becomes something different</i>. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">The eight chapters of </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"> <span itemprop="name">L'Écoute Virtuose / Virtuos Listening</span></span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">are</span><i><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">demarcated by images of the surface activity of water, both the water imagery and titling foreshadowed in the 2006 film. Prosaic is content to allow her portrait of Radigue to be limned via the conventions of such documentaries: archival footage, anecdotes, interviews and performances. She trusts the subject to be sufficiently compelling without the superfluous and self-conscious filmic gestures that irritate the viewer in less confident filmmakers. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">The imagery is distilled down to water and the mirror-mind experience of hearing Radigue's music. The listening experience is filmed chiefly during the staggering Triptych concert series, an event honoring Radigue's work held June 12-26, 2011 at various venues around London. Of the eight concerts comprising that event, Prosaic focuses on performances by, and interviews with, Rhodri Davies, Bruno Martinez, Carol Robinson, Charles Curtis, Kaffe Matthews, Kaspar T. Toeplitz, Ryoko Akama, and Emmanuel Holterbach.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">At the conclusion of <i>Portrait #4,</i> a text appears on the screen stating <i>currently Radigue is composing only for acoustic instruments</i>; with the exception of the laptop ensemble The Lappetites, comprising AGF, Matthews and Akama, the concerts glimpsed in </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name"></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"> <span itemprop="name">L'Écoute Virtuose / Virtuos Listening </span></span></i><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">are of the growing wave of acoustic musicians realizing Radigue's work (since this event add to that list Nate Wooley, Julia Eckhardt, Robin Hayward and others this author is no doubt unaware of).</span></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-a--EWHFio-c/UsS3n5XKzjI/AAAAAAAAB6Y/ck2pE6Mzotg/s1600/6920503589_c7ce3b1a8f_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-a--EWHFio-c/UsS3n5XKzjI/AAAAAAAAB6Y/ck2pE6Mzotg/s320/6920503589_c7ce3b1a8f_o.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name"> </span></span></span><a href="http://www.discogs.com/artist/703283-Carol-Robinson"> </a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">While each performer essentially reiterates their regard for the composer, the rigors of performing her works on their respective instruments, and their subjective states during and after performance, there is an interesting aspect to their reports of how they collaborate with Radigue. They talk about entering into a relational process that involves minimal explicit cues/clues from the composer and zero actual scores; instead, in a sort of lineage process of transmission of a seed idea, with an expectation from Radigue that the musician will then realize the work by their own lights, another mirroring is seen- that of Radigue's four decade practice of Tibetan buddhism. Tibetan buddhist practice, like that of the zen lineage, involves the student initially receiving pointers from a teacher who encourages the student, verbally and tacitly, to move beyond the teacher in their own fashion. Radigue exultantly states at the conclusion of </span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">L'Écoute Virtuose / Virtuos Listening, I have musical descendants like I have biological descendants! </span></span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">I do not make a work for the instrument, but for the instrumentalist, </span></span></i><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">Radigue said in her 2010 WNYU interview. Filmmaker Prosaic entered the flow of events in the composer's life at a crucial point, as the woman cellist Charles Curtis describes as <i>persistent, critical, alert and full of self-doubt </i>was transitioning from a self-imposed, nearly four decade musical practice of rigorous solitude, to an intensely intimate, collaborative one. Radigue would work on <i>Naldjorlak</i>, her first piece for acoustic instruments/instrumentalists, from 2005-2008; Prosaic's documentation intersects this vital new chapter for the composer appositely.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">It is a remarkable development - a remarkably flexible, fecund and moving one. If like me you have experienced the power of Radigue's </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name"><i>Trilogie de la Mort - </i>a massive composition in many respects, the composer's response to the loss of her young son and cherished spiritual teacher, Pawo Rinpoche - witnessing via Proasic's film her joy in connecting with a couple of generations of musicians and composers affected deeply by her work is a profound experience. Talking about working with Radigue, Kaspr T. Toeplitz says <i>What she is saying is that the score is now me. </i>Anais Prosaic's film documents the mirroring of Eliane Radigue's life, in her music, her practice, and her <i>descendents'</i> lives. This is something to be witness to, and I encourage you to see this film.</span></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.dvdfr.com/dvd/editeur.php?editeur=397"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name"> La Huit</span></span></span></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0096PBCXE/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0096PBCXE&linkCode=as2&tag=httpappsfa08c-20"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span itemprop="name">Amazon </span></span></span></a><br />
<a href="http://www.discogs.com/artist/703283-Carol-Robinson"><br /></a><br />jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-64726675561006859792013-12-12T00:29:00.001-06:002013-12-12T00:29:27.466-06:00seeds dreaming beneath the snow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">This<a href="http://bodhidog.wordpress.com/"> link</a> will take you to a site dedicated to news and updates about a possible 2014 crow with no mouth concert series.</span></span>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-67518330722436895462013-11-30T00:01:00.001-06:002014-01-02T15:26:02.490-06:00everyone is in the best seat<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Notable releases of 2013</span></span></b><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Antoine Beuger's music arrived throughout the year in waves - variegated, ingenuous, and however much his work continues to be characterized as spare and near-silent, generous. Four labels with distinct curatorial approaches saw fit to release Beuger's music, signal, I think, of an increased awareness of the adamantine nature of his compositions. Whether sounded through the single-pointed focus of the Ensemble Dedalus and the Cantor Quartet, the appealingly patient unspooled time of guitarist Cristián Alvear, or the numinous goings-on with Michael Pisaro in their most surprising entry in the Erstwhile catalog of ongoing surprises, Beuger's combined rigor and munificence grab me like no other music today.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Lh2_WsscyGE/UpkPqjH_mWI/AAAAAAAAB2c/la7QZE6lhi8/s1600/beuger+pisaro+(238x211).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Lh2_WsscyGE/UpkPqjH_mWI/AAAAAAAAB2c/la7QZE6lhi8/s200/beuger+pisaro+(238x211).jpg" width="200" /></a> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Olivia Block's <i>Karren</i> explores something deeply familiar and personal for me, while sounding at the same time entirely of the lineage that flows from her auspicious release of nearly 15 years ago, <i>Pure Gaze.</i> This is an ingenious aspect of<i> Karren</i> I'd suggest you experience yourself, so I will, for now, postpone describing that quality, except to say Block places the listener squarely in the best seat in the house.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zkypEnbxqyM/UpkP1kYONTI/AAAAAAAAB2k/2CmuFYPtiJM/s1600/block.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zkypEnbxqyM/UpkP1kYONTI/AAAAAAAAB2k/2CmuFYPtiJM/s200/block.jpg" width="200" /></a> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Nearly four years ago, the first week I launched this blog, I enthused about Stephen Cornford and Samuel Rodgers' collaborative work, and have heard whatever they've released since. <i>Boring Embroidery</i> is the jewel-result of their ongoing partnership, exquisitely suspended, ductile sounds that float, never over-staying their welcome. Simply gorgeous, allow yourself this.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I am , for the first time, inclined to offer a mild disclaimer about a release I recommend wholeheartedly; that is, Coppice's <i>Compound Form</i> was recorded in performance in my 2012 crow with no mouth concert series (on an amazing evening shared with Jeph Jerman). I received four Coppice releases in the mail this year, as fecund and fertile a year for them as it was for Nick Hennies. I can say I respect and enjoy aspects of the other releases, but return most frequently to this one. I recall the evening Coppice's bellows and sundry sound-sources lapped throughout the Studio Z space - at the completion of their set another regular attendee and I agreed it was a highlight of the crow series. I am pleased this will be heard beyond that evening.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Much has already been written about the extraordinary historiography of Dennis Johnson's <i>November</i>; it's an enjoyable account of compositional sleuthing, excavation and restoration, fit for a proper documentary. Composed in 1959, it's pretty well established that we have available now the wellspring of the minimalism lineage that carried La Monte Young, et al, to our ears. The fine imprint that dedicated itself to bringing us <i>November</i>, Irritable Hedgehog, joined forces with Andy Lee, the astonishing pianist who seems to live within the four hour piece's structure, waiting for our return visits. Much as Simon Reynell (Another Timbre) and pianist John Tilbury teamed up in 2009 to retrieve from the dust bin of forgotten works Terry Jennings' (Johnson's fellow time-bending minimalist) amazing<i> Lost Daylight</i>, we have, nearly 50 years following its creation, <i>November</i>. Seriously, do not give a thought to its duration aforehand - you will return avidly to <i>November </i>keen for its elegant, intuitive math, and Lee's sensitive, empathic touch.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The antipode to all of the above comes strongly recommended as sui generis noise, Jason Crumer and Joseph Hammer's <i>Show 'Em The Door</i>, easily among the strangest things I have enjoyed in some time (sits well alongside Gerrit Witmer's 2013 solo release<i>, Making Real</i>). Crumer and Hammer are far from familiar names, even to many experimental music fans, so this one may well have eluded most. I'm not even going to try to describe it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Its hardly a requisite for new music, as its hardly ever achieved, so count it as good fortune that Joe Panzner and the extraordinary percussionist Greg Stuart elevate their duo music from superbly detailed and nuanced noise to a thing of, in some respects, genuine confoundment. For reasons perhaps self-evident to others, but lost on this listener, numerous responses posted on the internet to the duo's sound and fury have concluded Stuart's role is somehow ancillary to Panzner's. I have given <i>Dystonia Duos</i> my abraded ears in numerous close listens, and have my own, contrary, conclusion - what confounds those listeners is that the pair's dissection puzzle brings with it a Greg Stuart they couldn't imagine, and a duo that fits so finely together, discerning its discrete parts is a fool's errand. A great release.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Percussionist Nick Hennies has been indefatigable in 2013, and one result of all that activity has been, along with performances across the U.S.. a clutch of fine releases. The severity and insistence of some of his work may leave many high and dry; I find it generally gripping, and at its best, thrilling. A paladin for the lonesome and lowly triangle, wood block and snare drum, among other instruments seldom privileged as worthy of consideration for solo exploration, Hennies released two strong solo works, as well as a duo with Greg Stuart that will no doubt confound listeners freighted with inapposite expectations as to what <i>that</i> should sound like. A remarkable overtone scientist equally capable of producing sounds of improbable delicacy and of overwhelming intensity, Hennies remains faithful to sound sources relegated to an infrequent role in music. Given what he, like Greg Stuart, has unlocked from these unlikely sources, the effect is revolutionary.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Search this site for my regard for musician Lucio Capece, if you are unfamiliar with his body of work.<i> Less Is Less</i> is an amazing release - you can read the programme notes provided by the Intonema imprint for the how of its finely detailed sound spectra, with Capece's typically sensitive and critical thought about making music, and making environments conducive to each specific piece of music. You can also opt to simply play the disc and enjoy how warmly and affectively Capece makes spatiality and acoustic phenomena matter. A beautiful release, among my favorites of the last several years.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Michael Pisaro's three releases on Gravity Wave in 2013 (the latest, <i>Closed Categories in Cartesian Worlds</i>, for crotales and sine tones, only arrived last week, more on that at another time), combined with the aforementioned duo with Antoine Beuger, <i>This Place / Is Love</i>, confirm for me that the composer, while maintaining an affinity with the Wandelweiser ethos that has shaped him for several decades, is chiefly guided by whatever musical problems engage him at the present time. This fealty to current concerns/interests over history or legacy, is admirable. That following it produces works as gripping as<i> The Middle of Life </i>and <i>The Punishment of the Tribe by its Elders, </i>each unsettling and deeply moving in quite divergent ways, is remarkable. <i><br /></i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Sarah Hughes was involved with numerous projects in 2012/13 that merit our attention - of particular note were her contributions to a couple of ensembles documented on the Another Timbre label (whose honcho Simon Reynell recorded the tracks heard on <i>Accidents of Matter Or Of Space</i>) , and her fantastic duo release with Kostis Kilymis, <i>The Good Life</i>. Earlier this year a new imprint, Suppadaneum, produced the lovely <i>Accidents...</i>, a CD-R with a letterpress score and a fine essay by Dominic Lash. The three realizations of Hughes' 2011 piece (<i>and can never exceed unity)</i> are akin in personnel and execution to what you'll hear in the quintet's contributions to the stunning<i> Wandelweiser und so eiter </i>box set of 2012. This shouldn't suggest stasis or stagnation in the least - what Hughes is exploring via scores with fixed time brackets and sustained single-tones lies beyond the page. Hughes has happily dived fearlessly into those expanding, overlapping waters of current experimental music -composed/improvised, noise/tonal, precise/chancy, et al. Her energy and brio are evident, here and in <i>The Good Life.</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Some patterns obtain, in every sphere, large and micro-small. For my annual<i> works that will slip away largely unheralded even in this firmament, </i>I offer<i> </i>Christoph Schiller's <i>Variations</i>, a canon in seven parts for the seldom-heard spinet, piano and amplified stuff. Initially I heard only the rigor of the piece - at some point I heard the flow and the play on memory that seems to be a byproduct of much of the music coming from the Another Timbre label. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">If I hadn't already taken the <i>this is sui generis stuff, don't ask me to try and describe it</i> tack with the Crumer/Hammer release, I'd sign off with it here.<i> </i>Suffice it to say <i>Sinter</i> appears here as<i> </i>it is indelible in at least two essential ways - first, more than most releases of even somewhat similar ilk, you cannot listen to the duo's process without an intense, slightly discomfiting sense of voyeurism; I am not sure why that is, maybe something in the way they draw you toward the mystery of the very small sounds and interactions you are hearing. As strange as it is,<i> Sinter</i> is immediately and intensely intimate, almost <i>implicating</i> the listener. Secondly, and related to the first quality, Kamerman and Guthrie create a very specific environment around these small, largely inchoate sounds. It is a well-ventilated, spacious sounding work, so the intimacy of it isn't quite a claustrophobic one.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />Toshiya Tsunoda has done little wrong to my ears, seeming to have an impeccable sense of what to release that serves what is released strongly. This one is a hue and cry from the amazing vibration studies he has produced for many years. The subject is field recordings themselves, and Tsunoda treats the subject with great skill and humor. His titles for the sections are suggestive of the areas of sonics he slices, dices and loops The effect ranges from so nuanced as to confuse the matter, to so overt as to approximate similarly plangent loops heard by Choi Joonyong and Park Seungjun. Always acutely attuned to the timbres of our overwrought world, Tsunoda, like Cage, approaches much of what we defend against with a microphone and an invitation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Everyone is in the best seat.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">~ John Cage</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Labels represented: </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.anothertimbre.com/">Another Timbre</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.wandelweiser.de/">Edition Wandelweiser</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.potlatch.fr/">Potlatch</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://erstwhilerecords.com/">Erstwhile</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.sedimental.com/">Sedimental</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://cathnor.com/">Cathnor</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://triplebath.gr/">Triple Bath</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://irritablehedgehog.com/Irritable_Hedgehog.html">Irritable Hedgehog</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://accidierecords.com/">Accidie</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.weighterrecordings.com/">Weighter Recordings</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.senufoeditions.com/">Senufo Editions</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://consumerwaste.org.uk/">Consumer Waste</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.intonema.org/">Intonema</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://michaelpisaro.blogspot.com/">Gravity Wave</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.suppedaneum.com/">Suppadaneum</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://toshiya-tsunoda.blogspot.com/2013/03/this-is-one-of-my-trials-to-present.html">Edition T </a></span></span><br />
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<br />jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-86009777060132582542013-11-06T20:34:00.001-06:002013-11-06T20:53:25.848-06:00breviary<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html">Breviary</a> is a place-holder name for shorter reviews, generally 500 words or less. Click on the breviary tab atop the page to check on those sorts of pieces. Feature-length writing will continue to be found on the main page.<br />
Breviary is in no wise an indicator of my esteem for a release; rather, it provides an option for writing more frequently about more releases, while continuing to develop feature-length pieces.jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-68855975901811542652013-10-23T05:58:00.000-05:002013-10-23T06:13:05.549-05:00nothing was lost<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Nothing was lost when everything was given away.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">John Cage, <i>Experimental Music </i></span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PdEo1Souxgg/UmeOZcuR5mI/AAAAAAAABzU/_t6gmMjKhNE/s1600/laughing+guylaine.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PdEo1Souxgg/UmeOZcuR5mI/AAAAAAAABzU/_t6gmMjKhNE/s320/laughing+guylaine.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">frederic blondy / guylaine cosseron ~ may 2013<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The 2013 crow with no mouth concert season drew to a still-point with Michael Pisaro's solo guitar performance on a bracing October night. <i>I can only say, there we have been </i>- and what a ride this year. I am immensely grateful for all who participated, from every point inside and outside a great listening room, Studio Z. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">As in previous years, many potent conversations, many laughs, a few bruises. This season clarified a few salient things for me about how to do what we do, and for that I am grateful. Several musicians were particularly helpful in offering their experience and perspective around generating such events, and super supportive of what I am working for in the cwnm series.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JYExJ2eCZ2A/UmeTgHF6DeI/AAAAAAAABzk/GI4wJG1cc6Q/s1600/trio+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JYExJ2eCZ2A/UmeTgHF6DeI/AAAAAAAABzk/GI4wJG1cc6Q/s320/trio+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">bonnie jones / bhob rainey ~ april 2013</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I want to share a few of the metrics I prepared for the year-end report I submit to the arts organization that partially funded the 2013 series. Before doing so, this is the place for me to once again express my gratitude to the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, an extremely generous individual donor who wishes to remain anonymous, and the 66 individuals who contributed through our Indiegogo campaign. This material support enabled us to rent Studio Z and to compensate the musicians, and our amazing poster artist, Jason Zeh. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">What follows is a break down of our efforts to present a music rarely heard in the Twin Cities (note that 28 of the 50 musicians we've presented were Minnesota debuts; of the 22 who <i>have</i> performed in Minnesota, eight are local).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The period reported on is 2.5 years (May 2011 - October 2013):</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b>2011: </b>4 concerts / 10 musicians / 84 attendees</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b>2012: </b>7 concerts / 20 musicians / 116 attendees</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b>2013:</b> 8 concerts / 24 musicians / 127 attendees</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The 2011/12 seasons were unfunded; musicians played for the door, cwnm paid for the studio rental, food and, unless the musicians made other arrangements, provided lodging.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">In 2013 musicians were paid a fee and travel expenses, as well as being offered lodging.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C2wCnw56qbY/Umeb6V4iwvI/AAAAAAAABz0/LP2TWsRYjmU/s1600/IMG_0293.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C2wCnw56qbY/Umeb6V4iwvI/AAAAAAAABz0/LP2TWsRYjmU/s320/IMG_0293.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">blake edwards a.k.a. vertonen ~ august 2013</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">For purposes of reporting to our funders (as well as being of interest to me), we track how many new individuals attend a crow event. In 2013 that number was 36, which pleases me greatly. Our audience is generally quite new to the music offered, with some few exceptions. That we are creating an environment welcoming to both new and core, returning participants strikes a value important to me. Every seasoned concert-goer knows how it feels to attend an event in which cliquishness and the like are contaminants.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">ken palme / jason soliday / jon mueller ~ march 2013</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I am, at this date, uncertain what is in store for 2014; most likely we will seek funding for a combination of some planned events, as well as preserving funds enabling us to respond to a few musicians' requests to perform here. Or I may forego this in 2014. Whatever the case, I am immensely grateful for what has developed within our series to this point.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Where I stumbled, it was principally in allowing my ego to set the tone, momentarily tightening my grip on things, rather than, as Cage says, giving it all away. This year clarified the matter - I want to participate in events in which all experience the possibility of something new, sharing the risks and the rewards. Michael Pisaro and I enjoyed a lengthy conversation about, among other matters of consequence, the ethics of events like our crow series. The experiences of like-minded, if disparate, curators such as the Wandelweiser collective, the Dotolim crew in Seoul, and Jason Soliday's locus of activity for many years at the Enemy venue in Chicago, have been truly inspiring. I have been fortunate to present concerts, share meals, and gab with individuals integral to all three of these scenes in the past year. As scattered as they are across the globe, and as different as the paths have been leading to their participating in the crow series, I have benefited greatly from getting to know most of the creative people who have visited us. I can only say, there we have been.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OG1xljy2G5g/UmelB1VmfDI/AAAAAAAAB0Q/nHyUHUSFwIc/s1600/j+and+c+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OG1xljy2G5g/UmelB1VmfDI/AAAAAAAAB0Q/nHyUHUSFwIc/s320/j+and+c+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">hong chulki ~ february 2013</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qXBYyuNN_uo/Umeqh3-bLNI/AAAAAAAAB0k/xDvfYKAzL3k/s1600/allie+crow.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qXBYyuNN_uo/Umeqh3-bLNI/AAAAAAAAB0k/xDvfYKAzL3k/s320/allie+crow.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">allison goin ~ crow confrere</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor
fleshless;<br />
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance
is,<br />
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,<br />
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor
towards,<br />
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still
point,<br />
There would be no dance, and there is only dance.<br />
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say
where.<br />
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">T.S. Eliot, <i>Four Quartets </i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i></i></span>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-87492933314330202602013-10-01T17:07:00.000-05:002013-10-02T13:31:40.474-05:00invisible to its time<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3Pam_Nvv4kk/UkspJDckByI/AAAAAAAAByc/YvTw8kTT9jI/s1600/cage+1980.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3Pam_Nvv4kk/UkspJDckByI/AAAAAAAAByc/YvTw8kTT9jI/s320/cage+1980.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Cage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1980</td></tr>
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Composer Michael Pisaro's process, since at least 1992, when an affinity with the Wandelweiser collective became a membership, might have had its origin in a mind-stopping, serendipitous encounter at age 19. In 1980 Pisaro wandered into an outdoor performance by Cage at Lincoln Center, where he reports that crucial experience - <i>I knew something was happening but had no idea how to describe it.</i> I think Pisaro's process - within composition, within Wandelweiser, within the current experimental music scene, and within the improbably vast nexus of concerts of the past 20 years - flows from that event, and we, as listeners, travel its trajectory with Pisaro, replete with our own experiences of that sort of confusion, a gift of the encounter with the ineffable.<br />
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As someone who occasionally attempts to put words on similar events, I appreciate Pisaro's further unpacking - 24 years later, in an essay published as <i>Eleven Theses on the State of New Music - </i>of that indelible encounter: <i>It was, in short, an encounter with the event of Cage...something that cannot be accounted for by what is 'known' at the time: it is invisible to its time.</i><br />
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My initial encounter with the music of Michael Pisaro occurred in 2006, and I have adjoined some of my activities around music, such as they are, to his<i> </i>own. Since launching crow writing activities in 2010, I have written over 6,000 words about Pisaro's work on this blog, and in <u>The Wire</u>; I have presented two Pisaro compositions in my concert series, including the inaugural crow event in 2011, the world premiere of <i>A Transparent Gate</i>, as well as Haptic's realization of his <i>Concentric Rings In Magnetic Levitation </i>in 2012; and in a few weeks, Pisaro, along with composer Vanessa Rossetto, will close our 2013 concert series in his Minnesota debut performance. I feel now I have made some sort of response to a question asked of me three years ago when I attended a local jazz event, and a musician said, <i>Who is this Pisaro you're going on about?</i><br />
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There are numerous reasons for my interest in Pisaro's unfolding work - he is unabashed in asserting there are truths to be discovered in art that merit our fidelity; his fealty to the encounter with Cage has resulted in his own threshing out of Gertrude Stein's koan, <i>if you can do it, then why do it?</i>; he has extended his inquiries into the essential Wandelweiser elements of silence/noise/tones into fruitful collaborations with brilliant musicians outside of the collective, like Toshiya Tsunoda, Barry Chabala and Taku Sugimoto; and so it goes. Pisaro remains faithful to his initial encounters with Cage, Beuger, Frey, et al;<i> and</i> continually moves forward, assimilating, adducing, shredding and shedding such elements as set theory, John Ashbery, Oswald Egger, Robert Earl Davis (D.J. Screw), Marcia Hafif, metal music...<br />
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If these aspects of Pisaro's process weren't sufficiently persuasive, there is the most essential quality, for this listener, of all - again, Gertrude Stein: <i>the first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame. </i><br />
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Pisaro's music lives outside its frame, in the flow of my own life - his work cannot be managed by frames, it is too fecund, assured and, crucially, unmoored to fixed ideas about composition or, needless to say, but worth saying anyway, success. Pisaro regards composition as<i> a stopping point as opposed to an endpoint. </i>Flowing, as he does, from one piece to the next, intuiting his materials from outside the framing device of composition, he seems to regard himself as much as a<i> host</i> (his term) to archetypal ideas and forces, as he does their author. Pisaro might describe his efforts of the past 21 years as a continuum; I hear them as mandala - there is a specific, meticulously composed geometry to mandalas, but they are, to the active participant, living, experiential, and without frames. They are highly participatory, a quality I find in Wandelweiser music generally, and Pisaro abundantly.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-61wWP3nr7Vc/Uks4bkV4cMI/AAAAAAAABy0/-VTHGXW9rKA/s1600/vrossetto.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-61wWP3nr7Vc/Uks4bkV4cMI/AAAAAAAABy0/-VTHGXW9rKA/s320/vrossetto.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>...as a wandering ear. </i><br />
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Vanessa Rossetto has, remarkably, been working on her music for only about seven years; I am confident the listener would not guess this listening through her process from the self-released <a href="http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html">recordings of 2008 </a>that brought her to my attention, to last year's <a href="http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-bestial-floor-with-vanessa-rossetto.html">Exotic Exit.</a> You'll find a couple of thousand words about her on this blog; I am especially excited to present her in concert with Michael Pisaro, as she seldom appears <i>anywhere</i>, holding fast to her self-description as being not an improviser or performer, but<i> a wandering ear</i>, a descriptor attributed to Luc Ferrari.<br />
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As divergent as their respective sound worlds are, Rossetto and Pisaro share some distinct, overlapping characteristics. Part of Rossetto's process has been the gradual integration of voice and text into her concrète works, somehow adhering, even with these immediately recognizable elements, to making the invisible only a little less invisible. While Pisaro frequently achieves this with sine tones, Rossetto appropriates conversations, street noise, and other location recordings, and through obsessive assemblage, creates a narrative without a specific center, author, or event. In both composer's work, there is a sense of what R. Murray Schafer called <i>self-caseura</i>, what in zen is referred to as <i>the unlocatable self.</i><br />
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This is your way into the musical worlds of Pisaro and Rossetto - they offer not fixed works for your reaction, but environments in which you enter, moving and living inside and outside the frame. <br />
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When asked about entering the environment of Cage compositions, David Tudor said<i> I feel alive in every part of my consciousness. </i>Rare are such environments, musical or otherwise, and I am grateful for the music of Michael Pisaro and Vanessa Rossetto.<br />
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<span itemprop="description"><span class="fsl">The final scheduled event
in the 2013 crow with no mouth concert series is October 19, at Studio Z in St. Paul, </span></span><span itemprop="description"><span class="fsl"><span itemprop="description"><span class="fsl">the Minnesota debut of
composers Michael Pisaro and Vanessa Rossetto.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span itemprop="description"><span class="fsl"><span itemprop="description"><span class="fsl"></span></span>More information<a href="http://cwnmconcertseries.wordpress.com/"> here</a>.</span></span><br />
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<ul>
<li>Photo of John Cage, NYC, 1980, the time and place of Pisaro's initial encounter with the composer.</li>
<li>Photo of Pisaro: Yuko Zama </li>
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Quotes in italics sourced from:<br />
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<li>Gertrude Stein, <i>Tender Buttons </i>and <i>The Geographical History of America </i></li>
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<li>Pisaro, <a href="http://www.wandelweiser.de/_michael-pisaro/11theses-12-06.pdf"><i>Eleven Theses on the State of New Music</i></a>, 2004/2006, <a href="http://erstwords.blogspot.com/2009/09/wandelweiser.html"><i>Wandelweiser</i></a>, 2009, <a href="http://object-collection.blogspot.com/2008/01/michael-pisaro-interview-concert-125.html">Interview </a>with Travis Just, 2008</li>
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<ul>
<li><a href="http://dharmafield.org/studies/courses/dependent-arising-and-the-unlocatable-self/"><i>the unlocatable self </i></a>is an essential buddhist principle; I have been helped in my understanding of interdependence and emptiness by the writings and course offerings of the long-time Minneapolis-based zen teacher Steve Hagen.</li>
</ul>
<br />jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-32061808110780411582013-05-30T00:37:00.000-05:002013-05-30T00:52:46.880-05:00that hideous strength<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-P5vwJPRFFk4/UabO7_nYpfI/AAAAAAAABuE/8g4iGTxU4Pk/s1600/Fergus+Kelly+photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-P5vwJPRFFk4/UabO7_nYpfI/AAAAAAAABuE/8g4iGTxU4Pk/s320/Fergus+Kelly+photo.jpg" width="211" /></a> <br />
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They have pulled down deep heaven on their heads.<br />
C.S. Lewis, <i>That Hideous Strength</i><br />
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As I sat down to write about the Dublin artist Fergus Kelly's gripping release from 2012, <i>A Congregation of Vapours</i>, word came across a news feed that Jack Vance died two days ago. Vance is the author of the <i>Dying Earth </i>fiction quartet, four novels spanning 1950 to 1984 (a long, attenuated death, with a long-held fatalistic tone, and characters enduring a bleak Earth under an exhausted sun). This was an apposite event at the edges of writing about Kelly's work (I am not being heartless, Vance was 96, outliving his cosmos), as today I settled on the title above. <i> </i><br />
<i>That Hideous Strength</i> is, of course, the title of the third, dystopian novel in C.S. Lewis' allegorical space trilogy, a favorite of mine from many years ago. It attached itself to my many listens through <i>A Congregation of Vapours, </i>as I sensed in Kelly's whorling salmagundi of aspirations and gasping, enervated storms, a pulled-down heaven.<br />
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I then reluctantly visited Kelly's blog, <a href="http://asullenrelapse.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-congregation-of-vapours.html"><i>A Sullen Relapse</i></a>, where he very occasionally posts about his working process - reluctantly, as I try to avoid such details from the musicians I am writing about until I have finished writing. Amidst Kelly's descriptions of the elements used to create <i>A Congegation of Vapours</i> - the meticulous stitchery of no-input mixing board, tape, homemade instruments, and location recordings - there is an interview in which he refers to Hamlet's stake-in-the-heart speech from which he derived his piece's<i> </i>title. Hamlet offers in a pith four-line trajectory his sojourn from good-natured lad to dystopian Prince - <i>this most excellent canopy the air,</i><i> look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this Majesticall roofe,</i><i> fretted with golden fire: why, it appeares no other thing</i><i> to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. </i>Deep<i> </i>heaven is pulled down, and Kelly's alternately seething and subsiding sound work is the soundtrack.<br />
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So dystopias align today <i>-</i> along Vance, Lewis and Shakespeare's references to firmaments that are insubstantial enough to collapse on our heads, vaporous and burnt out - and in Kelly's sonic swither of unstable emanations, in his raw and rough structures whose clarity and brilliance are only gradually apparent Kelly's blog post will fill out the specifics of his painstaking working process, but I suggest two things - obtain a copy of this remarkable work, and live with it awhile before reading how it was made. The experience of immersion in a work that does not readily reveal its elements is rare enough - <i>one met bees in the garden, but never found a bee hive</i> - Kelly is reminiscent of Joe Colley in delivering the visceral goods with that sort of ambiguity and unease. Heaven has folded like a cheap suit, we might as well enjoy the music.<br />
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<a href="http://farpointrecordings.com/">the music</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~martinh/poems/HAMLET">the bard</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/c-s-lewisthat-hideous-strength-1945-38">that hideous strength</a><br />
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<i>one met bees..</i>. ibid<br />
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photo: Fergus Kelly (photographer uncredited at source)<br />
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jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-3555224850564006652013-05-17T15:16:00.000-05:002013-05-18T01:06:23.993-05:00on the bestial floor with vanessa rossetto<br />
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<i>The true mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible.</i><br />
Oscar Wilde<br />
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Imagine Luc Ferrai producing a work entitled <i>Presque Rien à Austin</i> in 2012, and you might conjure something that approximates Vanessa Rossetto's <i>Exotic Exit</i>. Making the invisible visible for your listening discretion, Ms. Rossetto alternates the mysterium and the quotidian between an often startling foreground, and the burr and clatter of her mixed and massed backgrounds. What you hear is the result of a working process in which she amasses an improbable number of sound sources which she then assembles with an impelling drive for compositional clarity. <i>Exotic Exit</i> is shot-through with contingency and precision, collagist choices that are both lurching and stealthy. The tissue between aural chaos and a self-evident coherence are part of the great illusion - background/foreground, numinous/annoying, uncontrollable mystery/the bestial floor.<br />
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This collage, Ms. Rossetto might be saying, is what I see and hear through bus windows, in Pick 6 parlors, as well as in the firmament above Austin. In a stranger's detached voice, in the numerology of Lotto callers, in the tension of massed strings, Rossetto finds the material for her slightly bruising assemblages. They are no less narrative, and no less abstract, than those of fellow Austin visual/audio artist Cecil Touchon, who describes his <i>Massurealism</i> sound works as <i>an overreaching popular culture mind- world maintained by daily exposure to mass media.</i><br />
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From snatches of wheezing public transportation, braying passers-by, and the world-is-too-much-with-us plangency of cities, to <i>Exotic Exit's </i>organ coda, gloriously reminiscent of Arvo Part's <i>Annum per annum, </i>we are confronted with a sensibility<i> </i>that discerns between the overtly beautiful and the ugly with only one question - is it musical? Rossetto trains her eyes and ears on the whole mess, the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.<br />
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<a href="http://www.musicappreciationrecs.com/vrbio.html">Vanessa Rossetto</a><br />
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<a href="http://kyerecords.blogspot.com/">Kye Records</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.matthewrevert.com/">Matthew Revert</a>'s current dire message aside, he does stunning visual design for books and records, and <a href="http://penultimate-press.blogspot.com/2012/09/vanessa-rossetto-exotic-exit-lp-kye-20.html"><i>Exotic Exit</i></a> is as good a sample of that work as any.<br />
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Title from William Butler Yeats; <i>The Magi</i>, 1916<br />
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Collage: Cecil Touchon <br />
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Photo:an Austin, Texas strip mall - <i>presque rien</i><br />
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<br />jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-19159644575599327302013-05-03T17:29:00.000-05:002013-05-03T17:29:02.909-05:00return<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2013 has seen fewer pieces here than ever; since the end of December 2012, when I received the announcement I'd been awarded an arts grant for my <a href="http://cwnmconcertseries.wordpress.com/">concert series</a>, I have written little. I am averse to writing record reviews, and so I think from time to time how I might develop a more substantive approach to writing about this music, if I am going to continue writing about it at all.<br />
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I do intend on returning to posting here following the May 10th crow concert, as it is the last scheduled event in the series until August. As always, my gratitude to those musicians and labels who have generously shared their releases.jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-47456872469877002162013-03-01T20:06:00.002-06:002013-03-03T05:26:22.148-06:00the spirituality of subtraction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Long before the current practices of musical minimalism, whatever creative matrix you consider proper to minimalism - long before the pedagogy of Joseph Fux, Pärt's tintinnabuli<b>, </b>La Monte Young<b>'</b>s High Tension Lines<b>, </b>or, of more recent fascination among many readers, Wandelweiser<b> - </b>the 13th century Neo-Platonist and Dominican Meister Eckhart wrote at length about the process of joining our creativity to that of divine influences, a process<i>, </i>he observed,<i> not of accretion, but of subtraction.</i> Eckhart died just before Dogen Zenji was born, another philosopher whose insistence on stripping away the superfluous and attuning to the immanence found in emptiness, silence and the<i> nearly nothing</i> (<i>presque rien</i>), to borrow one of Eva-Maria Houben's favorite musical annotations, was rigorous and revelatory.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">This is to say that this listener hears in the recent music of Joe Houper<span style="font-size: small;">t</span> and Eva-Maria Houben<span style="font-size: small;"> the insistence of these 13th century writers</span> that the listener's attunement to the bare bones of a thing - here, music - is where true treasures lie. Of course creativity is always a process, in part, of subtraction; Houpert and Houben are notable, however, for sustaining our attention to music exquisitely poised between a sound and its decay, a melody and its absence, and the vitality possible in repetition and iteration. Listening to Houpert and Houben, I am faced with that fluid and volatile thing, my preferences, as Wallace Stevens said, <i>between the beauty of inflections/Or the beauty of innuendoes.</i> One night, listening through <i>orgelbuch</i> repeatedly, I sensed preference drop away, and I heard the presence of silence, and I realized how incredibly rare a thing Houben is creating. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ITxXn2QrAIo/UTEXDr9He_I/AAAAAAAABr0/JE5ZSy9KFck/s1600/BachFugueBar.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ITxXn2QrAIo/UTEXDr9He_I/AAAAAAAABr0/JE5ZSy9KFck/s1600/BachFugueBar.jpg" /></a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Joe Houpert </span>releases his contrapuntal miniatures for synthesizer and loops under the<i> nom</i> Praye<span style="font-size: small;">r. </span></span></span>Prayer has titled his two solo releases to date <i>First</i> <i>Species </i>and <i>Second Species, </i>ensuring the curious, non-musicologist listener (hopefully they are among his listeners) will grasp the centrality the rules of the counterpoint game play in his music. I won't pretend to any sort of substantive grasp of the pedagogy of species in counterpoint, except to say it is self-evident Prayer uses this strictest form of the practice to make a bare bones beauty from very few notes. Progressing from a cantus firmus you'll find yourself whistling or humming long after the music ends, Prayer applies timbral/textural gradations of fade, decay and incremental erasure to his braided melodies with impressive timing; almost as soon as a new counterpoint sounds, it begins to vanish, and so it goes throughout both species' brief lives. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The earliest authors on species counterpoint stressed how crucial it is that the cantus firmus, the unchanging tonic, the unchained melody on which the species' rests and to which it returns, possess an adamantine beauty. While I prefer some of Prayer's cantus firmi over others - they are all lovely, a few are simply gorgeous - Prayer has been meticulous in establishing the ground for his process of melodic accretion and subtraction. Within the rules of the species, a real fire crackles in Prayer's work; the beautiful melodies are smeared and streaked with noise before they are gradually extinguished. Prayer's music gives you something impossibly lovely for a brief time, but subtraction is inherent in these strange species; it is counterpoint made to fade.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span></span>Eva-Maria Houben's<i> orgelbu<span style="font-size: small;">ch,</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> 14 short works for a rigorously restrained organ, is an exultant example of subtraction's creative possibilities<span style="font-size: small;">, and is, </span></span></span>along with her releases from 2005 and 2007, <i>Abregistrieren</i> and <i>Von Da Nach Da,</i> among my favorite works found in the Wandelweiser catalog. There is about her organ works a quality so self-evident and natural, you wonder how it can sound so bracing and new - the elemental sound of air, of breath, of streams sustained by stops and pistons and by the composer and musician. On the earlier <i>Abregistrieren, </i>Houben brings forth the luxuriant, stately presence of streaming air, in a drone work that creates a <i>sphere of time </i>as enveloping as those of Eliane Radigue (this piece, among a few others by Houben, are sampled in Michael Pisaro's stunning <i><span itemprop="name">Asleep, Street, Pipes, Tones </span></i><span itemprop="name">2011). On <i>orgelbuch, </i>Houben works within self-imposed strictures, rather rigorous parameters for the manual and pedal stops. The result, as I suggested above, is that Houben inhabits the spaces between dramatically delimited sounds and silences. Her brief sonic excursuses, some flutey, some grave and grounded, seem offered to the air for a brief flight or a suspended moment, before they vanish. This is the music of <i>nearly nothing</i>, as Houben would have it - the blackbird whistling,<i> and </i>just after. It is among the most extraordinary music I have heard in some time, brought into being - breathed into being - as much by subtraction as accretion.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name"><a href="http://www.dustinthelight.net/">Prayer </a></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.timescraper.de/"><span itemprop="name">Eva-Maria Houben</span></a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name">Title from<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name"><span style="font-size: small;">Shizuteru Ueda, <i>Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchbruch zur
Gottheit. Die mystische Anthropologie Meister Eckharts und ihre
Konfrontation mit der Mystik des Zen-Buddhismus</i>, Gütersloh: Mohn, 1965.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name">Notation: Bach, Houben</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name">Photo: Houben (Fergus Kelly)</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name">In <i>Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird, </i>Stevens closes the well-known referenced stanza thusly:</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name">I do not know which to prefer,</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name">The beauty of inflections</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name">Or the beauty of innuendoes,</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name">The blackbird whistling</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name">Or just after.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span itemprop="name">I would suggest Houben's music tosses off that duality, and so I wrote <i>the blackbird whistling, </i>and<i> just after</i>. This, to my way of thinking, makes all the difference.</span></span></span><br />
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jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-59946695304775659182013-01-17T05:09:00.003-06:002013-01-17T05:11:21.829-06:00cwnm interview with KMSU program host David Perron<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JVjBOmNsL6w/UPfa2wxCdmI/AAAAAAAABrU/TvoICjL3WkE/s1600/rowe-rig-1-oct-2012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JVjBOmNsL6w/UPfa2wxCdmI/AAAAAAAABrU/TvoICjL3WkE/s320/rowe-rig-1-oct-2012.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">David Perron <span style="font-size: small;">i<span style="font-size: small;">s the host of </span></span>a long-running radio program of experimental music at KMSU in Mankato, Minnesota called Free Form Freakout. Our interview about the cwnm 2013 concert series is<a href="http://fffreakout.blogspot.com/2013/01/in-fffocus-crow-with-no-mouth-2013.html"> <span style="font-size: small;">here.</span></a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">photo: <span style="font-size: small;">Keith Rowe's table, cwnm concert, October 2012</span> </span></span></span>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-481561252502454832013-01-06T23:45:00.001-06:002013-01-06T23:47:20.524-06:00music recites itself<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-T23-UFFDLT0/UOo7_EiOdzI/AAAAAAAABqQ/SDO6_QMxKfk/s1600/Will%27s+Heygate+photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-T23-UFFDLT0/UOo7_EiOdzI/AAAAAAAABqQ/SDO6_QMxKfk/s320/Will%27s+Heygate+photo.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">...the sun's of an end
/<br />Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
/<br />Engines stop running but I have no fear... </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">London Calling</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Will Montgomery is an obsessive diarist where the Elephant/Castle area of London is concerned. With some five years of documentation of the South London neighborhood's blight and concomitant gentrification, the inexorable urban cycle endemic to our cities, Montgomery's encoded narrative work, <i>heygate</i>, is an abstract chronicle of place, a housing project scheduled for demolition. Released in early 2012 on a split album with Robert Curgenven (on the unfailingly lovely <a href="http://windsmeasurerecordings.net/">winds measure</a> imprint), Montgomery has achieved a fine paradox of sound - grounding his painstaking documentation of place in the aether.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Non-linear and episodic, <i>heygate</i> owns a distinct compositional shape, a sound-diary of a living and dying environment, without a terminal line. Repeated listens enable your memory to engage in <i>heygate'</i>s growing specific, its flow of inchoate, organic sounds gradually revealed to be conversation, treated crowd buzz, demolition and reconstruction. The encoding of place in an active listener's memory is a fine experience, and Montgomery offers this possibility here. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Montgomery has been documenting the Elephant/Castle verities for a number of years in journal, lecture and sound formats. Wielding contact mics and receiver, Montgomery presents the flow of things in a specific place, energies, not images. The result is a composition that resists easy access, and so resists the easy exhaustion of its plies, folds and waves, in which real lives are heard.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W2mpu9qE6mw/UOpRaxn3FNI/AAAAAAAABqw/A2nsQCtwj6Q/s1600/robert-curgenven_setup2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W2mpu9qE6mw/UOpRaxn3FNI/AAAAAAAABqw/A2nsQCtwj6Q/s320/robert-curgenven_setup2.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I thank Ben Owen, musician, master word press artist, and honcho behind winds measure, for introducing me to the work of Robert Curgenven, whose<i> </i><i>looking for narratives on small islands, </i>another exquisite offering of abstract evocation of place(s), can be found on the flip side of this shared L.P. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Curgenven's itinerant sounds were sourced from Australia, Germany and Japan, and serve as striations and sound ribbons, mixed with the liquid-y crackle and pop of vinyl on Curgenven's transparence dub plate (pictured above), resulting in a sonic environment at times reminiscent of Michael Pisaro's superb <i>Transparent Cities. Music recites itself, is its own context, narrates without narrative, </i>Adorno wrote; in Curgenven's micro-world of hiss, sine waves and billowy pressure build-up, we provide our own narrative skein, as is the case with the Montgomery piece. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">This is a fantastic pairing of two musicians who may or may not be intentionally manifesting this idea - ..<i> not in the music, but in the plot imagined by the listener </i>(Jean-Jacques Na<span style="font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">t</span>tiez) - this idea that we are all looking for narratives in our endless sifting and shaping from the overwhelm of people, places and things. The best such works hold a space within their whorls of sound, for the listener to imagine their plot, to return the call.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Lyrics from<i> London Calling</i>, Strummer/Jones </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Top photo: a detail from the Heygate housing complex</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Adorno and N<span style="font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">att</span>iez quotes from <i>Musicology</i> (Beard and Gloag)</span></span><i> </i><i><br /></i>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-25983485377237363602012-12-28T23:43:00.000-06:002012-12-28T23:43:04.588-06:00the 2013 cwnm concert series<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wi-Ajej1a3o/UN6AoEgqbwI/AAAAAAAABpw/EINYPnW3utE/s1600/cwnm+logo+2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wi-Ajej1a3o/UN6AoEgqbwI/AAAAAAAABpw/EINYPnW3utE/s320/cwnm+logo+2013.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I am pleased to announce cwnm promotions received a Minnesota Regional
Arts Council grant for the 2013 concert series. While it is a relatively
modest sum, it will enable us to budget for the rental of Studio Z, as
well as provide a small artist’s fee, and a stipend for some travelers’
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">All series information from now forward can be found <a href="http://cwnmconcertseries.wordpress.com/">here.</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I will update this dedicated <a href="http://cwnmconcertseries.wordpress.com/">page</a> throughout 2013 with concert information, as well as features related to the participating musicians.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Thank you for your continued visits to this site for writing about new music, and <a href="http://cwnmconcertseries.wordpress.com/">this</a> site for information about the crow concerts that lie ahead.</span><br />
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<a href="http://cwnmconcertseries.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/legacy_logo_bw.jpg?w=150" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="legacy_logo_bw" border="0" class="attachment-460x9999" height="200" src="http://cwnmconcertseries.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/legacy_logo_bw.jpg?w=150" width="104" /></a></div>
<a href="http://cwnmconcertseries.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/mrac-logo-bw.jpg?w=150&h=137" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="MRAC-logo-(bw)" border="0" height="137" src="http://cwnmconcertseries.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/mrac-logo-bw.jpg?w=150&h=137" width="150" /></a><br />jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-20300059135683780202012-12-09T21:24:00.000-06:002012-12-09T21:24:49.437-06:00with the moon on their wings<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">In 2010 my year-end favorites list was quickly appended with four additional picks - such is the silliness we engage in when listing towards one or another of the glut of each year's releases. With a self-limiting top ten we add a few more (the ancillary approach); with a top 25, or so, we become so expansive as to become, as Keith Rowe would have it, <i>promiscuous.</i> Or we adopt the strategy of compulsive list-makers such as <u>The Wire</u>, spreading our taxonomies into wafer-thin sub-genres (<i>Outer Limits</i> - really?).</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Last year I opted out; this year I include a clutch that reveal a very significant dynamic range and an apparent list towards composition. I enjoy posting, as I seldom do when writing about music, the album art. Curious, I counted the number of musicians who appear on both my 2010 and 2012 lists (eight).</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">There is no ranking intended within the three sections; however, the sections represent my favorite releases in descending order.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">As has been my rule since launching crow, these lists extend the principle, as Shamrayev says in <i>The Seagulls, de gustibus aut bene, aut nihi </i>(<i>let nothing be said of taste but what is good</i>). Here is a necessairly partial list of the good of 2012:</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kfwj67iLTpc/UMVCtiJM0EI/AAAAAAAABlw/COaLWvO2ATI/s1600/erstwhile066-2-500x500.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kfwj67iLTpc/UMVCtiJM0EI/AAAAAAAABlw/COaLWvO2ATI/s320/erstwhile066-2-500x500.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Michael Pisaro/Toshiya Tsunoda <i>Crosshatches</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qD_gJY4P9kA/UMVEHFKBMRI/AAAAAAAABl4/rHmI48JzcDY/s1600/beuger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qD_gJY4P9kA/UMVEHFKBMRI/AAAAAAAABl4/rHmI48JzcDY/s320/beuger.jpg" width="317" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Antoine Beuger/Barry Chabala/Dominic Lash/Ben Owen <i>s'approcher s'eloigner s'absenter</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K7aSZwYTmrY/UMVEyJBO4aI/AAAAAAAABmA/2rqybF7hgPo/s1600/keithrowe_september.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K7aSZwYTmrY/UMVEyJBO4aI/AAAAAAAABmA/2rqybF7hgPo/s320/keithrowe_september.jpg" width="316" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Keith Rowe<i> September </i></span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uP5kATdpMdE/UMVFMukL6AI/AAAAAAAABmI/mis96GkWYK8/s1600/wandelweiser.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="312" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uP5kATdpMdE/UMVFMukL6AI/AAAAAAAABmI/mis96GkWYK8/s320/wandelweiser.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Various Artists <i>Wandelweiser undt so weiter </i></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j3Tskpe3Q2Y/UMVFdk2AZwI/AAAAAAAABmQ/-G6OJyCL4C0/s1600/outwash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j3Tskpe3Q2Y/UMVFdk2AZwI/AAAAAAAABmQ/-G6OJyCL4C0/s320/outwash.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Davies/Lazaridou-Chatzigoga/Mukarji <i>outwash </i></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vg9xVdkwbSU/UMVF0W-1m6I/AAAAAAAABmY/UzWMISXYzpg/s1600/ee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vg9xVdkwbSU/UMVF0W-1m6I/AAAAAAAABmY/UzWMISXYzpg/s320/ee.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Vanessa Rossetto<i> Exotic Exit </i></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-l4fM0sw7H5I/UMVGDvUXbSI/AAAAAAAABmg/fo48uzQ1LW4/s1600/lescalleet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="287" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-l4fM0sw7H5I/UMVGDvUXbSI/AAAAAAAABmg/fo48uzQ1LW4/s320/lescalleet.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Jason Lescalleet<i> Songs About Nothing </i></span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4BhyWIVFLjs/UMVGe9ZvprI/AAAAAAAABmo/zIqNzJUk2bc/s1600/mike_shiflet-the_choir_the_army.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4BhyWIVFLjs/UMVGe9ZvprI/AAAAAAAABmo/zIqNzJUk2bc/s320/mike_shiflet-the_choir_the_army.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Mike Shiflet <i>The Choir, The Army / Sufferers / Merciless</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-H-MyExTCHKA/UMVHRH1E-oI/AAAAAAAABnA/bymhtS8196s/s1600/grisha.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="289" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-H-MyExTCHKA/UMVHRH1E-oI/AAAAAAAABnA/bymhtS8196s/s320/grisha.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i> </i> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Mites (Grisha Shaknes) <i>Passing Resemblance</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Nathan McLaughlin <i>Echolocation #4 / Echolocation #6</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EM9ydKjYQ14/UMVKE6G01hI/AAAAAAAABnY/uK58rQcregE/s1600/capece+malfati.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EM9ydKjYQ14/UMVKE6G01hI/AAAAAAAABnY/uK58rQcregE/s320/capece+malfati.jpeg" width="316" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Lucio Capece / Radu Malfatti<i> explorational </i></span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SXxJHVuNoxA/UMVKfLxSScI/AAAAAAAABng/_vYhzperUzY/s1600/guthrie-sticks-stones-broken-bones.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="288" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SXxJHVuNoxA/UMVKfLxSScI/AAAAAAAABng/_vYhzperUzY/s320/guthrie-sticks-stones-broken-bones.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Will Guthrie<i> Sticks, Stones & Breaking Bones</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tMqrTqAcC18/UMVKzdmb0iI/AAAAAAAABno/bKpKps6mFJ0/s1600/insubcd06_frontweb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tMqrTqAcC18/UMVKzdmb0iI/AAAAAAAABno/bKpKps6mFJ0/s320/insubcd06_frontweb.jpg" width="252" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Cyril Bondy / Phonotopy (Yann Leguay)<i> Komatsu </i></span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mLb--7I0-S8/UMVLLOtTNDI/AAAAAAAABnw/N72nFvadHe8/s1600/lafkas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="141" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mLb--7I0-S8/UMVLLOtTNDI/AAAAAAAABnw/N72nFvadHe8/s320/lafkas.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Andrew Lafkas<i> Making Words </i></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2vLyrQRj0GM/UMVLaKiAZtI/AAAAAAAABn4/JJqNkXfoqh0/s1600/prayer+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2vLyrQRj0GM/UMVLaKiAZtI/AAAAAAAABn4/JJqNkXfoqh0/s320/prayer+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ffQ6R-tAEP0/UMVLh806ozI/AAAAAAAABoA/7TUjONOvqKw/s1600/prayer+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ffQ6R-tAEP0/UMVLh806ozI/AAAAAAAABoA/7TUjONOvqKw/s320/prayer+3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Prayer (Joe Houpert)<i> First Species / Second Species </i></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KXpRT8nGxlc/UMVMB85utgI/AAAAAAAABoI/fneph6aDzYg/s1600/soliday.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KXpRT8nGxlc/UMVMB85utgI/AAAAAAAABoI/fneph6aDzYg/s320/soliday.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Jason Soliday<i> Nonagon Knives </i></span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PM5RQ1fffMA/UMVMfAl1UwI/AAAAAAAABoQ/pEysXVtptFo/s1600/KelleyResolution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="282" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PM5RQ1fffMA/UMVMfAl1UwI/AAAAAAAABoQ/pEysXVtptFo/s320/KelleyResolution.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Greg Kelley / Olivia Block<i> Resolution</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ipBhgMBUejw/UMVMuIguy8I/AAAAAAAABoY/l6LmwQ_QQ4w/s1600/SkogenGeFallen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ipBhgMBUejw/UMVMuIguy8I/AAAAAAAABoY/l6LmwQ_QQ4w/s320/SkogenGeFallen.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Skogen (with Angharad Davies and Toshimaru Nakamura)<i> 1st gefallen in den Schnee</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uEI6fZD5sFs/UMVOYvZ92AI/AAAAAAAABog/j2VqT6dDkSE/s1600/kelly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uEI6fZD5sFs/UMVOYvZ92AI/AAAAAAAABog/j2VqT6dDkSE/s320/kelly.jpg" width="230" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Fergus Kelly <i>A Congregation of Vapours</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JApH8jbid4Q/UMVO5SvdiBI/AAAAAAAABoo/3B6KYJ4jcfM/s1600/ferran+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="199" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JApH8jbid4Q/UMVO5SvdiBI/AAAAAAAABoo/3B6KYJ4jcfM/s320/ferran+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Ferran Fages <i>For Pau Torres / Radi d'or versio per a ensemble / pluie fine</i> (Cremaster with Angharad Davies)</span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tsZQVjhMNF0/UMVRJQyY0wI/AAAAAAAABow/RRfR5IMHLl8/s1600/ullmann.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tsZQVjhMNF0/UMVRJQyY0wI/AAAAAAAABow/RRfR5IMHLl8/s320/ullmann.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Jakob Ulmann<i> Fremde Zeit Addendum</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-n_AwwXtqy-s/UMVRj4FWfrI/AAAAAAAABo4/62fl8D6iO8s/s1600/morton-feldman1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-n_AwwXtqy-s/UMVRj4FWfrI/AAAAAAAABo4/62fl8D6iO8s/s320/morton-feldman1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Morton Feldman<i> Crippled Symmetry </i>(Eberhard Blum / Jan Williams / Nils Vigeland)</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FvjxVkXsSZQ/UMVSVxaoX4I/AAAAAAAABpA/sOceMpmBGnU/s1600/radigueFeedback.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FvjxVkXsSZQ/UMVSVxaoX4I/AAAAAAAABpA/sOceMpmBGnU/s1600/radigueFeedback.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Eliane Radigue<i> Feedback Works 1969-1970</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>wild geese that fly /with the moon on their wings / these are a few of my favorite things </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Rodgers & Hammerstein, 1959</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-58463934903921278052012-12-08T07:07:00.001-06:002012-12-08T07:20:34.826-06:00on this threshold<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">This Jurg Frey composition, <i>Paysage pour Gustave Roud</i>,
realized here by Frey (clarinet), Stefan Thut (cello), and pianist
Dante Boon, is a distillation of the Wandelwesier elements I most love.
It is, along with Antoine Beuger's <i>Lieux de passage</i>, the latter found on</span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i> Wandelweiser Und So Weiter</i>,</span> the new six-disc release on Another Timbre, the most beautiful compositions I heard in 2012.</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">As
frequently as I read about Wandelweiser composer's penchant for
silences, these two pieces reveal how those silences are integrated with
breath-length melody in such a way as to make their distinction
artificial and useless. There is always only <i>presence</i></span> i<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">n this astonishing music. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Frey
and Beuger consistently create a music that is uniquely generous, both
in the presences it offers, and how it is offered - not pushed at you,
but rather, <i>granted</i>, as soil grants its yield.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>On this threshold</i>, Frey wrote in 2004, <i>an
airy, mobile threshold that is entirely elusive as a place, but
occasionally allows music to be experienced as a place – there is still
enough scope, uncharted territory and vitality to inspire the
compositional process and pose a challenge.</i></span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/LpJG3sw5HSA?fs=1" width="480"></iframe>jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2378280940903369624.post-64178951860228431212012-12-03T22:20:00.000-06:002012-12-04T03:38:13.146-06:00to pool their mutinous energy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BmJUmV9GY-c/UL13RX1oTaI/AAAAAAAABlU/Ei9kFe_GsME/s1600/Greifer_Booklet_03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Imagining a release by three conservatory-trained zither players does not evoke <i>mutinous energy</i> as a descriptor. The Greifer Ensemble quickly set that matter straight with the opening composition on their conventionally titled release, <i>Neue Musik Fur Three Zithern</i>; it is composer Manuela Kerer's <i>Solitudine Vaga, </i>structured as five episodes of altered, extended zither scratching, string-stroking, and koto-like plinking. The trio engage in highly frictive parallel play, evincing the paradox imagined by the composer, as suggested by the title, soltitude-for-a-trio-setting. Musicians Leopold Hurt, Reinhilde Gamper, and Martin Mallaun make use of this strategy in various ways, alternately approaching, covering and ceding space to each other's contributions. Pooled, but far from seamlessly blended on this opener, Greifer's mutinous energy yields to a breath-taking spaciousness on the second of the four compositions included in their programme, Burkhard Stangl's <i>Mellow (My Feldman).</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I was fortunate to receive an unreleased version of this exquisite piece from Stangl earlier in the year, performed by the composer on guitar. My enthusiasm for Stangl's homage, equal parts Feldman and the immediately identifiable touch and timbral felicity Stangl fans know from his Erstwhile work, prompted Stangl to sugest Greifer send this release along. Curious as to whether the trio version diverged from the composer's, I played the two simultaneously. They are precisely matched in tempo and overall feel, their variance lying in the contrasting characteristics of the string instrument played. Harmonics-rich, woven with the patient, time-suspending patterns familiar to Feldman fans, Stangl adds to what I hope is an emerging series of such homages (cf. <a href="http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.com/2012/06/variety-of-matter-both-of-judgement-and.html"><i>My Dowland</i>,</a> released earlier this year).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The third composition, Burkhard Friederich's aggressive, distortion-driven <i>(D)evil Song,</i> assaults the listener even as the Feldmanesque hung-notes decay, making for a transitional rude awakening. I don't doubt the sequencing is intentional, but find it a nuisance every listen. Considered by itself, <i>(D)evil Song</i> is a somewhat exhilarating romp through zithers smeared and sullied with the timbres and resonances stealthily avoided in the instrument's traditional folk canon. This is the sort of approach I imagine retains a confrontational quality in recital halls, but to seasoned listeners of experimental music, that aspect is negligible.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">This last point raises a question I am idly curious about, upon the welcome arrival of Greifer on the performance and recording scene - who is the intended audience for their work? Wolfgang Praxmarer's liner notes seem pitched to the New Music audiences of "adventurous" concert programmers; a glance at their winter concert schedule shows performances in a few German cities, as well as Wien. I am curious to see if Greifer find new listeners in the EAI realm, many of whom have embraced the Wandelweiser composers with enthusiasm. Of interest to me is not comparing their respective sound worlds; rather, it is in the periodic erasure of boundaries that persist between composed and improvised music audiences, and their occasion. It is easy to imagine Greifer on Simon Reynell's Another Timbre imprint, for example.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Whatever niche the trio occupy, their musicianship is superb. Hurt, Gamper and Mallaun all compose and perform in various contexts, participate in many ensembles, and are clearly steeped in Weiss and Dowland, as well as contemporaneous composers. They are in some respects the conservatory counterpart to improvisers like Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, approaching an ancient instrument replete with baggage extending back to antiquity with anarchistic brio. Their mutinous energy might struggle to continue finding commissions from the academic realm, perhaps leading them to open-ended works with a greater latitude for improvisation. Whatever the case, Greifer are making vital music, and with any luck at all, will receive invitations to be heard where genuinely adventurous listeners gather.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The zither is a rich sound-source in another trio recording released in 2012, </span>the beautiful <i>outwash</i>, released on Another Timbre. <a href="http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.com/2011/07/as-you-might-take-your-pulse.html">Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga</a> collaborates here with pianist Tisha Mukarji, whom she met in Berlin in 2009. and violinist Angharad Davies; the latter two released an overlooked gem, <i>Endspace</i> (also on Another Timbre) in 2007. Seek it out, it serves as a great companion volume to this trio's comparably poised work.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">As much as I might praise <i>outwash</i> for its sound qualities - every string sonance conceivable issues from the trio - it is their low-boil, keening intensity that makes <i>outwash</i> a stand-out release in another year surfeit with releases. A brooding ballast is sustained throughout, Mukarji's aperiodic tolling piano grounding the string rasps, scrapes and haptics.The trio achieve the sort of ventilated interplay I find most gripping in this area of improvisation - as on <i>Endspace</i>, the level of consideration given each sound is impeccable. I might offer <i>outwash</i> especially to ears jaded by over-exposure to small group improvisation using orchestral/folk instrumentation.</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">A work of extraordinary poise and dark beauty, <i>outwash </i>sits high on my list of favorite releases of 2012.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Title from Burkhard Stangl's liner notes for <i>Neue Musik fur Three Zithern</i> - </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>...Time-stands-still-music...Thoughts come to rest, only to pool their mutinous energy afresh.</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.anothertimbre.com/page133.html"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Another Timbre </span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.trio-greifer.com/Greifer___Start_english.html">Greifer </a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Photos (top to bottom): Greifer / Lazaridou-Chatzigoga's zither rig / Mukarji / Davies / Lazaridou-Chatzigoga </span><br />
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jessehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05361749761580302506noreply@blogger.com0