crow with no mouth

returning soon

2012-01-30T00:46:00.002-06:00

2011/2012

2011-12-31T23:59:00.002-06:00

Catract that this world is, it is remarkable to consider what does abide in it.
~ Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

T e n f o r 2 0 1 2

2011-12-31T19:16:00.014-06:00

t e n

~ released in 2011

~ if i received them after dec 1, they're not included here, as i have to live a good while with any music to assess its staying power - this omits, for this list, some really strong releases i have just begun to spend time with; and some just released in dec. that i am anticipating with high hopes, e.g., ew1102 and ew1103/4; and. as i said, i have heard a few post dec. 1 releases sufficiently to say they are glaring omissions e.g., kelley/block, and a real year-end revelation for me, rale/william hutson's some kissed charms that would not protect them, a gem...AND, a few i have heard for many months, but will not see release until 2012 [one will no doubt be on my 2012 list, whatever else may come next year]; this goes to jon abbey's point about the folly of making a list in december].

so in the spirit of folly & ambivalence [in no particular order]:

[1] michael pisaro: asleep, street, pipes, tones/hearing metal 2/hearing metal 3

[2] thomas ankersmit/valerio tricoli: forma II

[3] jason kahn/hong chulki/jin sangtae/choi joonyong/ryu hankil/park seung jun: dotolim

[4] haptic: scilens

[5] jamie drouin/lance austin olsen: savonarola/1498/absence & forgiveness

[6] nathan mclaughlin: echolocation #5

[7] mohammad: spiriti

[8] nicholas szczepanik: please stop loving me

[9] joe panzner: clearing, polluted

[10] keith rowe/radu malfatti: Φ

The come from outta the blue pick is panzner's stunner.

p/s a lot of list-maker's enjoy an also-ran, close-but-no-cigar sort of ancillary list; i'm not going there, but understand the tic - there are some close contenders just outside the boundary of these 10.

p/p/s no need to point to the inclusion of three by the olsen/drouin duo, and by pisaro, i've done the math: it would be a lengthy exchange if i were to clarify how i hear all of pisaro's works of the past several years as one, whatever distinctions between them obtain. the case for the multiple inclusions with drouin/olsen is even more literally true.

an echo of nothing

2011-12-29T14:01:00.006-06:00

Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
~ John Cage

Every something is an echo of nothing.
~ John Cage

Ben Owen, the Brooklyn-based animus behind some of the most striking visual and musical work coming out of the worlds of microsound and letterpress art, comes to mind here. Owen's clearly makes discerning choices in his sound assemblages, but curiosity and awareness seem to guide his explorations as much as anything. On birds + water 1, released on the Notice Recordings imprint, the listener is invited to attune their curiosity and awareness as finely as possible, in order to hear in the illusory stasis and quietude of this cassette release's two sides, the fluent life within.

The context for birds + water 1 was a residency Owen had at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, N.Y., in 2010. The ETC enjoyed a 40 year history of supporting media artists, long before, let's note, mixed media works were de riguer. From early experiments by Cage biographer Richard Kostelanetz, to Nam June Paik, to Keith Rowe collaborator Kjell Bjorgeengen, to Ben Owen, the ETC provided a stream and a lineage for works like birds + water 1. Owen's residency came just before ETC ended its multi-generational run, and with that in mind, this work serves as a lovely coda. [Note that birds + water 2 & 3 are available on the Russian sound art imprint obs].

We are, of course, a bit hobbled by hearing the audio separated from the visual; both sides are unedited, I believe, in duration and content. Each offer the pleasures, as I suggested, of attuning our ears to what seems at first blush to be generally steady-state frequency waves, but as our attunement continues, reveal a teeming world of detail and echoes of something. This is brought home dramatically when the B side piece ends just like that, and your listening environment rushes into the sudden vacuum.

Having heard a number of works by Owen, and having spent hours looking at the letterpress work he creates through Middle Press, I sense he is a kindred spirit of Akio Suzuki, another musician who communicates a deep respect for his materials, his environment, and his listeners. Owen's visual works are alert to issues of sustainability, for example, using soy ink in his letterpress designs, and he appears ever-mindful of the super-saturated world of sound and vision we are all caught up in. This awareness manifests in these sound works, seeming to aspire to the zen edict leave no trace.

Notice Recordings

ben owen

photo: The Experimental Television Center, Owego, N.Y.

When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.
~ Shunryu Suzuki

el otro piano

2011-12-29T00:26:00.013-06:00

I am, presumably, similar to many of you who read these sorts of reviews; we occasionally suffer from a surfeit of challenging music, with the peculiar symptoms of information-sickness and innovation-enervation, the predictable consequence of avidity in extremis, of too-much-of-a-good-thing-is-a-bad-thing. The anodyne that acts most immediately, for me, is silence; the middle ground is discovering music that has a little surprise in its folds, what I consider fresh tangents, as very little comes along in a lifetime bearing that most potent medicine, radical innovation.

Sometimes my delight is in the perfect storm of musical surprises, when the where [geography], the what [in this instance, two instruments so overly-familiar as to raise in us a demand for a fresh yield of surprises], and the when and how [delivered to us from a label so small, it has folded from a largely cd-r catalog, chronicling the work of many musicians completely unknown even to improvisation's miniscule market share, to a digital download net label, and struggles mightily to survive at all - and is based in Florida!].

I am referring to Travis Johnson's Ilse imprint, for which I wrote the liner notes for one of the label's last releases. Johnson's efforts to maintain Ilse are hardly the stuff of sob story nor self-pity; what I know of his efforts does convey a familiar story of obsessive fidelity to a music that risks failure so intentionally, madness [and the concomitant financial stress] eventually ensues.

Let me break that down - the where is Argentina, the what is a piano approached and sounded from every conceivable angle, and an analog mixer with the inputs connecting to the outputs - you've heard this before, right? - and the when and how, as I said, is music borne from a parlor recording made in a musician's house in Buenos Aires, by a Floridian who just loves this kind of shit. The result is piano + no-input mixer, the duo of Ana Foutel and Federico Barabino.

As I have said Ilse documents music that risks failure intentionally, let me quote Barabino briefly - ...the error as a starting point for an exploration often denied...and a continuous search inside and outside margins are the very concept of this way of working. Much about this surprising release bears the ethos of courting error - the infiltration of the duo's playing, not by edited/integrated field recordings, but by the traffic outside their session; the plangent creaks and groans of Foutel's floors as she moves around the piano; the unwieldy, unstable sine tones loosed here and there, shooting through the sonorous piano clouds with an impertinent disregard for complementarity; and, still for many, the vast stretches of near silence, in which it occurs to one perhaps Barabino [and occasionally Foutel] have left the room.

In fact many listens will clarify that this duo are playing with keen, alert listening skills, a restraint that is signal of their respect for making the right sound, and that, to my ears, Barabino is always lightly limning and framing Foutel's pianistics, which are considerable. Barabino's mixer is emptier than many of his contemporaries here, and I suspect that is entirely intentional, given the results. Connecting inputs to outputs can raise holy hell, especially when the approach, as Barabino states above, is to move in and out of the margins of sound. That his playing serves the duo so well places him on my radar for future projects.

Foutel is an accomplished pianist who also moves in and out of the margins, as well as the pedals, keys and soundboard of her instrument. If I place too fine a point on her amazing technique, or the endless, liquid transitions from caress to pluck to rubbing to melodic inventions, I am afraid you will think meh, a catalog of techniques. Yes, in the service of two episodic unspoolings of potent improvisation, a considerable revelation of technique. But not a catalog - Foutel has integrated her approaches too deeply, and plays with too much regard for space, nuance and suggestion, to be guilty of exhibitionism.

She is the author of a 63 page primer of prepared piano, entitled El Otro Piano, demystifying the nuts and bolts method that yields such orchestral sounds. But again, all of this serves up piano music that swings, sways and, as often, ellides from one mood to another, at times desolate and bare-bones, at others a sort of hammered romanticism that animates Foutel's fierce, tough, beautiful playing.

As a duo, Barabino and Foutel manage to evince a quite rare quality in encounters between improvising musicians wielding such disparate sound-sources - an unmistakable respect for the encounter itself, for the ground shared, and for the vast ground between them. explored in an affecting, but slightly at-a-distance, parallel play.

gather 3 / pure and stripped

2011-12-18T16:52:00.014-06:00

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.

~ Henri Bergson

The gathered releases considered here are as disparate and divergent as any I might bundle for review. These gatherings are selected by no other design or consideration than their place in my review queue This batch, however, possesses a quality of intense focus and minimal means that brought to mind the descriptor stripped down. Listen to them in rotation, as I have done these past weeks, and it becomes very clear that the scope of stripped down is actually as vast as the ocean.

Several are organized around, as has happened increasingly in my sphere of listening projects, location/field recordings. Many of the releases I wrote about most enthusiastically last year integrated similar recordings within composed and improvised works for conventional instrumentation; they were, however, characterized largely by a fecundity and abundance of sounds, their weft and weight the result of many sonic layers and striations, both organic and otherwise [Pisaro's July Mountain, Rossetto's Mineral Orange]. The offerings here, excepting a couple pieces on the Chabala/French duo release, Trammels, can be placed on the continuum between stripped down and bare bones. As I said, vast is the acousmatic ocean.

As I was considering stripped down, how close so many musicians I dig are getting to the very marrow where sound and silence manifest most dynamically, I stumbled upon Sciarrino's pith phrase about such things - acousmatic silence is, he said, a silence which itself is an infinite rumbling of microscopic sonorities.

That definition certainly comes to mind listening to much of the recent output of fellows like Jez Riley French, Barry Chabala, Daniel Jones, et al. On Trammels, French and Chabala offer four pieces, three photographic scores by French, and a long-distance sound file collaboration. The first two scores are interpreted by Chabala alone; these are works of medium duration and considerable dynamic range. Chabala's assurance and deft handling of appositely placed sounds and silences continues to impress. He works with seamless segues between silent and near-silent sustained tensions, and surges of floating guitar tones that are simply gorgeous.

These are photographic scores that blend, blur, and cross-fade naive guitar melodies, the shimmer and aura of chromatic droneage, the throbs and oscillations captured on recordings of traffic, both aerial and earth-bound, and, on the third piece, where French takes a solo turn, a mesh of elemental colors issuing from French's arsenal of salt, glass, paper and coiled wire. This last, entitled (...) a coda, ranks easily alongside the aforementioned Daniel Jones' exacting When On and Off Collide [Cathnor 007], as the quietest music I've listened to in a long while. [While I am referencing Jones' work, I'll mention it overlaps with Chabala's approach to sustained silences and surges, and you'd do well to check it out].

Weft and mesh are apposite words for this excellent release, as a trammel [one example pictured above] is a net woven of both very fine and very coarse materials.

Graham Lambkin continues his mission of presenting Belgian composer Moniek Darge's prescient, effulgent work from the past three decades to a new audience, one largely saturated with, among other offerings, today's surfeit of available processed field recordings. To my ears, Lambkin, as I wrote last yea r, finds in polymath Darge's work a deep resonance with his own, and we are the richer for his restoration act.

Sounds From Sacred Places [Kye Records], first issued in 1987, is comprised of five pieces, all involving Darge's strange, lovely sonic embroidery around site-specific machinery and mechanisms, like those used to toll abbey bells, or the archetypically familiar thrum and drone of power plants [the one pictured above is found in the Turkish Square in Darge's native Gent, yielding my favorite sounds of this release]. There is a remarkable acuity to Darge's listening, manifested in her subtle use of processing, looping and, on Turkish Square, enlacing the natural overtones and resonances at the source of the recording with oscillating tones in such a way that the boundary between Darge and the sacred place is erased. Easier said than accomplished, as evidenced by so many current works using location recordings. The last two pieces are overtone-rich bell-tolled waves of pure energy, far ahead of similar works to come in the ensuing nearly three decades.

Every Darge release Lambkin has reintroduced on his Kye imprint [this is the third] merits your attention, if you are at all keen on music made by composers who know where to place their attention in any noisy environment, alert to the possibilities, and sift and strain from the blooming, buzzing confusion, particles of the sacred.

Speaking of archetypes, Taku Unami.

Initially some cast him as an enfant terrible [no], and lately he's been discussed as either the anodyne for an enervated area of music, or the naked emperor. In my review of Unami's delightfully vexing duo with Annette Krebs, motubachii, I quoted Erstwhile Records' Jon Abbey description of their work as a puzzle box of sound. Earlier this year, in his raucous stand [face it, relative to most EAI performances, Unami is raucous] at the Amplify 2011 festival, Unami dashed the puzzle, and made his sounds from boxes. To my ears [handicapped by not yet experiencing Unami in performance], he is the archetypal trickster, manifested in Japanese popular consciousness [and occasionally popping up in Miyazaki's fantastic films] as the kitsune. They are any scenes' heterodox, garnering both, as witnessed on music fora, opprobrium and hero-status. These are equally silly takes; Unami, I am confident, loves mischief - but mischief made skillfully and, at times, elegantly.

His two duos on the elegant winds measure imprint will do nothing to mollify the detractors, and may well solidify his kitsune status. I am, despite many listens to both, especially reluctant to say much about these releases. am wind, d±50 pairs Unami with Wandelweiser composer Stefan Thut; one side is comprised of wind recordings and measured silences, the other of Thut's cello, Unami's subtle sine tones, and a hella amount of environmental noises leeching and limning the duo's sound. I will break my reluctance [some stuff for me just necessitates as little verbiage as possible, if you think, as I do, that our responses as listeners are accretions that become attached to the music itself] to say this is a lovely release that sits, on our continuum of the pure and stripped, at the most austere point [alongside French's (...) a coda] of the works gathered here.

Unami's duo with Angharad Davies, two hands, seems to have pushed a few of my fellows into the naked emperor contingent. Both sides consist of much sporadic clapping; on one side, Unami claps, Davies, a remarkable violinist, scrapes, rubs and plinks in parallel play; on the other side, both clap. If this doesn't piss you off, or strain credulity adequately, most of the hand claps are at ppp or pppp. Unami's embrace of the stripped down - on antecedent works, such as motubachii, he claps amidst many other generated sounds - comes across as vulnerable, and anti-virtuosic. The degree to which you regard this sort of offering as precious or calculatedly naive will determine how you feel about my favorite kitsune's current work. I am confident that you will agree winds measure is producing the most beautifully designed packaging available.

I was pretty effusive about Ernst Karel's last location recording, Heard Laboratories, taking the opportunity to reprise Truman Capote's pith observation I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. This is Karel's great knack, his intuitive selection of sounds, sound-shaping, and - I hasten to add as one who feels the onus of every new release that insists on 70-80 minutes of sound because the media allows it - concision, privileging the scissors as much as the pencil [the total time is 78 minutes, but spanning nine tracks offering an amazing variety of sounds and rhythms].

Works like Swiss Mountain Transport Systems, its prosaic title redirecting your attention back to the music, where it belongs, evince in me a feeling I value a great deal - as much as the important question is do I like the sounds, the work reminds me I have a kindred spirit in these realms, the realms of music I hear daily in nearly every environment I pass through. Karel hears machinery singing, in this instance the gondolas and chair lifts that transport humans into a vastness of space that makes attunement to their music an antidote to the feeling of total engulfment that must visit anyone riding and rising to such altitudes.

Machines like the one above do sing, and we only occasionally hear a human voice penetrate their secret concentus. Upper partial winds, droning continuous cable systems, and singing tramways - Karel reveals, as he did with the research labs at Harvard, as Darge has for many years, that it is people, places and things that make music, whether we pass by or not. Karel passes into these sound worlds, pointing his microphones, and our attention, just where they are needed. Of course, this is the documentarian's gift to us, a glimpse of otherwise inaccessible worlds, pure and stripped of everything but what we need to hear the music.

...the blooming, buzzing confusion... is from William James' studies in categorical perception.

The kitsune, the Japanese archetype for the trickster, is depicted as a fox. While the Amerindian trickster, the coyote, works as well, when I think Unami, I think fox.

the 2012 crow with no mouth concert series

2011-12-17T03:45:00.017-06:00

Update/February 10, 2012

The Minnesota Regional Arts Council convenes on March 21, 2012 to review, discuss and grade the 20 submissions they received. The MRAC Board will then review the council's choices on March 27, with an announcement of the grant awards shortly after.

Should crow with no mouth receive a grant, the 2012 series planning and promotion will begin immediately. The maximum grant is $5,000; the council has the discretion to award whatever amount at or below that maximum they see fit. Of course the scope of the series depends on the generosity of the grant. Should cwnm be awarded $5,000, approximately 23 musicians will perform from April or May to December 2012.

The musicians who have agreed to participate represent crow's catholicity and nothing more or less. I hope very much to be able to announce soon MRAC has chosen to support music that is rarely heard in these parts, and that I am confident will find a new, enthusiastic audience.

December 17/2012

I am working on grants for the 2012 crow with no mouth concert series.

Whether I receive foundation support or not, I intend on presenting concerts at Studio Z in St.Paul again in 2012. I want to hear from musicians who have a fairly good idea that they will be performing in the Midwest any time between February and December 2012.

Studio Z offers a great acoustic space, P.A. system, and seating; the crow series in 2011 established an environment of attentive listeners, who participate for no other reason than the music.

Musicians Nathan McLaughlin, Anne Guthrie, Billy Gomberg, Jason Kahn, Mike Shiflet, Jason Zeh, Adam Sonderberg, Steven Hess and Joseph Clayton Mills all performed at Studio Z in 2011, and to a person found the space, sound and audiences to be excellent.

Please send me a private message if you'd like to discuss a show - I can offer some compensation, good promotion, housing and hospitality.

Update/January 7, 2012

I have 20 musicians included in the grant application at hand, so the proposed funded 2012 series has been submitted ; please feel free to contact me throughout 2012 if you think you will be passing through this area, and wish to discuss a concert with crow promotions.

crow with no mouth promotions was founded in 2011 to bring seldom-heard, vital music to Twin Cities audiences.

2012 Advisory Committee ~

Jon Abbey ~ owner/producer since 1999, Erstwhile Records, festival and concert curator for performances in NYC, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Cologne and Tokyo [USA]

Jacques Oger ~ owner since 1998, Potlatch Records [France]

Heather Barringer ~ Percussionist and Artistic Co-Director since 1990 with the new music chamber ensemble Zeitgeist [USA]

Brian Roessler ~ Composer, Improviser, Bass instructor [ Minnesota State University, Moorhead ], teaching diploma from L’Institue International Francois Rabbath [USA]

2011-11-28T19:17:00.001-06:00

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

~ Wallace Stevens, The Snowman, Harmonium, 1921

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

~ Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Reality & the Imagination, 1951

gather 2

2011-11-19T21:23:00.021-06:00

the medium is the message

I want to get after you all a little to look into the music of a tape composer from Bowling Green, Ohio; Jason Zeh has been focused for some years on making intimate, meticulously crafted sound works by every means possible within the medium of cassettes. He has looped, posted, manipulated, burned, frozen and punctured magnetic tape in compositions that, should you give them your close attention, reveal hermetic, muted worlds of endless, super-saturated detail and activity. Zeh's skeins and spools of sound almost always play out around a hushed, submerged column of smokey droneage, Zeh bending, warping and mangling the details as they appear and float away.

Magnetic tape has conveyed musical content for so long, the lineage of musicians who have turned their sights and manipulative hands on the medium itself are really few and far between [Zeh's contemporaries, limiting the field to instrumentation, are most notably Howard Stelzer and Stephen Clover, a.k.a. Seht]. Zeh shares aspects of an overlapping sensibility with Jason Lescalleet and, specifically in his predilection for nearly entombing rich sonic details in tape-murk, Graham Lambkin.

I heard Zeh in 2005 in a crappy record store/head shop, where a sparse audience crowded around as he knelt on the floor and let loose a deftly orchestrated, improbably structured wall of cassette-generated noise, his hands flying between [as memory serves], seven or eight cassette machines of self-evident low-fi status, working without any apparent fuss or faltering. Six years hence I was fortunate to present a set of his current work in my 2011 concert series. I am pleased now to urge you to hear two of his duo releases from earlier in 2011 and late 2010, respectively Circulation Decay, with Blake Edwards, and the stunning Dots, with Ben Gwilliam.

Circulation Decay, a 37 minute work that essentially follows along the schema I referenced above - an at times barely discernible spine of steady-state tonality is entwined, encrusted and pleasantly corroded with the duo's fine sonic grit, loopy and, eventually, chugging and roiling to its terminus. It is [and more and more I see why my esteemed fellow Brian Olewnick makes a point of this in this age of "well, a CD holds 80 minutes of space, why not fill it?"] of a near-perfect duration. Edwards, who has performed for many years in noisier realms as Vertonen, is a stellar partner here - a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but ErstLive 004, involving Fennesz and Pita come to mind, in terms of musicians who can blast florid and full-frontal, bringing restraint and exacting sound choices to the table.

Zeh's duo with Ben Gwilliam, Dots, was one of those Extrapool residencies in the Brombron series that provide funds, time and material resources for selected musicians to make shit happen. Zeh and Gwilliam didn't waste a dollar or a minute, judging by the 45 minute textural study here. Dots is a work of considerable subtlety, exploiting the surface and substrata of tape itself, peaking here and there from an ultra-quiet baseline with furnace blasts of noise, banking down again to move, slowly and surely, to its last rasp. This is an assured sounding work, and its commission, happily, provided the pairing of clearly simpatico minds and energies. Darkly cast, intimate as a whisper, I may well cheat and place Dots on my Best of 2011 list.

nemo propheta in patria

Thomas Ankersmit released one of 2010's most auspicious records, Live In Utrecht, remedying at least a little the scarcity of available recordings of his saxophone/analog synth investigations. He returns in tandem with Valerio Tricoli on Forma II, on Bill [a.k.a Family Battle Snake] Kouligas' Pan imprint.

Tricoli has expressed a frustration familiar to musicians who deal with provincialism in their search for like-minded musicians [in this case, in Tricoli's native Palermo] with whom they might collaborate. He has struck sparks and seemingly inexhaustible ideas with Amsterdam native/Berlin ex-pat Ankersmit. The duo's spacey sound world has great range, at times crepuscular, at other's explosive, and - goddamn, it reminds me of the admonishment of the zen teacher who said to the nascent haiku writer, when you see lightning strike, don't think, enlightenment! - it is highly evocative of starry fields and twinkling satellites. The heliocentric worlds of Tricoli and Ankersmit join together Teufelsburg's radar station, analog sub-tonics, sonic squelchs, bleeps and other other-worldly pitches, assembled, refined and propelled with real elegance. However many their materials, the music here never sounds cluttered or claustrophobic.

The album concludes with a piece perversely disparate from all that precedes it, and to my ears, to great effect. Ankersmit layers, and layers, and layers his caterwauling sax lines, braiding them like Niblock, but looser, occasionally perturbing the reedy droneage with the introduction of yet another unstable, ear-scouring held horn tone. I don't know if Tricoli has a hand in this one - I heard it, at first blush, as Ankersmit's homage to Niblock, with just enough sour notes and scary keening to distinguish it from Niblock's reltively smooth, refined, antecedent work in this area. It is Ankersmit's exultant, cracked coda to this duo's fantastic outing, a pairing I hope will be revisited.

Remarkably mastered by Rashad Becker, Forma II is a jewel.

... a denser gloom
Even now is being produced. It sets
A foundation for silence.

~ Attila Jozsef, Night On The Outskirts

I have encountered a composer of auspicious talent who has maintained her anonymity so well, I am given to posting a photo of the Hungarian poet Jozsef [who suicided at 32, linking him to an early 20th century great poet's [Mayakovsky, Yesenin] version of the dead at 27 club of our time]. With any luck at all, I will clarify why Jozsef's visage and poem fragment sit atop a few words about Anett Németh's terrific release on Another Timbre, A Pauper's Guide To John Cage.

Part of Simon Reynell's Silence and After series, works curated from the younger, current fold of musicians influenced by Cage and [clasp!], reductionist-improvisation, A Pauper's Guide..., it is safe to say, came out of nowhere. You can try in vain to learn anything about Ms. Németh, as I did in preparation for this piece, and come up empty-fisted. Nothing wrong with being sent solely to the music at hand, however frustrated my predilection for learning what I can about its creator.

A Pauper's Guide... consists of two pieces, 27 and 17 minutes respectively; the title work, for piano, clarinet, field recordings and household objects, realizes a simple idea - the piano track was laid down as the backbone for the piece, while chance operations were used to determine the time brackets for the other sounds. The resulting connections and collisions are Németh's obvious nod to Cage. In her interview with Reynell, Németh recalls Christian Wolff's averring that two sounds that initially sound incongruent together, heard repeatedly, will come to sound congruent. Well, set that alongside Cage's famous if something seems boring the first time, rinse/repeat/rinse/repeat will reveal that in fact nothing is boring maxim, and you have sufficient fodder to turn any music forum thread into a conflagration in no time.

The household objects and low-fi electronics Németh employs here, as she states in the interview, gave rise to the piece's title - use what's around you and available for free...the means for producing this music were so simple and meagre. I don't hear meagre at all - A Pauper's Guide... develops with striking confidence and clarity, and the sourced objects are skillfully integrated so as to not draw attention to themselves. Composing, Németh says, is partly about struggling with...mundane material. While hardly sounding impoverished for its materials, the piece does sound like an elegant assemblage of quotidian stuff; the piano and clarinet no more privileged than whatever Németh rummaged from her pantry or attic, or the field recordings that yield passing autos and the recondite whimper of a dog. In this piece, with these materials embodying Wolff's maxim, I hear a kindred spirit to Michael Pisaro's work.

The second work, Early Morning Melancholia, might be heard as the antithesis of the Cageian elements of the first. As overtly emotive as the title suggests, Németh's manipulated recordings and everyday electronics are unapologetically affective, albeit the emotions of fugue states. In fact, a sort of dissociative drift is the flavor I get, and this leads me to the Hungarians, Attila Jozsef and Bela Tarr.

Early in my listens to Németh, I scribbled perfect for a Bela Tarr film. I subsequently learned that A Pauper's Guide... comes with a quote from the poem cited above. I did not know this, as the review copy I received has no poem fragment included. At this writing, I don't know what lines are quoted from the Jozsef poem [I couldn't find them in an internet search], which is quite long. O.k. - I hear Németh's music as evoking Tarr's similarly languid, melancholic imagery, the poet she chose to reference is another depressive Hungarian, and I can turn up nothing about the composer, so you get a photo of Jozsef, and the three lines I think might make sense if you get a hold of this impressive work for yourself. Németh's foundation for silence is a dense atmosphere, perhaps not of gloom, but close - for me it's above all sad music, she says. It is, beautifully realized. I think I should just keep on with whatever feels interesting to me, Németh says ending the interview.

I do too, Ms. Németh.

November 21
~ addendum ~

Ms. Nemeth responded to my piece via email, and consented to my posting some of her words here; for this I am grateful, as the boundaries she sets around what she regards as extra-musical matters are clear. I find her thoughts and approach interesting, and thought some readers might as well.

Dear Jesse,

I apologise that I am late in responding to you, but I do not look at my emails every day. Simon Reynell told me that you wanted to write a critique of ‘A Pauper’s Guide to John Cage’ and ‘Early Morning Melancholia’. Simon was keen for me to become involved in your researches, and sent me some examples of your writings. I see that you have already posted your critique and I am very content with what you say. I do not wish to appear secretive so perhaps I should have sent you some informations, but in truth I talk about my music only with hesitation and difficulty. Music is something that I do ‘for fun’ in my free hours, if I have enough energies left. I am not a professional musician, and have never trained as a composer, and so do not have prepared thoughts or explanations for my compositions. I explained it recently to a friend that in the same way that I spend a lot of time thinking about politics, and get involved in small campaigns and signing petitions and so on, but I do not call myself a politician, or want to be considered as one. So with music - I think about it a lot, and spend a small time playing with composing pieces, but I do not think of myself as a musician, and do not want to be considered one.

I hope you understand this and are not annoyed that I did not respond sooner. But thank you for your kind critique.

You are right that the poetry of Attila József is close to me. The lines that were cited on the CD cover were these lines from ‘Night on the Outskirts’:

Slowly the night’s net is lifted

out of the yard, and the kitchen

fills with darkness

like the hollows deep in a pool.

….

Dampness seeps into

the shadows, the branches

of a fallen tree.

The dust on the road grows heavy.

.....

Beautiful words from one depressive Hungarian to another!

Sincerely,

Anett Németh

Photos: Jason Zeh, Blake Edwards, Ben Gwilliam, Thomas Ankersmit, Valerio Tricoli, Attila Jozsef

gather 1

2011-11-05T13:27:00.021-05:00

Che Chen refers to the two sides of his seven inch release on Pilgrim Talk, Pulaski Wave [Violin Halo]/Newton Creek Mirror Lag, as more like a kind of geography or weather than music. I can hear that in the mesmeric waves and pulses offered here, in the violin/tape-sourced throbs and undulations rooted in Brooklyn environments where Chen walks, gathering the intangibles his less alert fellows filter out as noise. References to Tony Conrad are inevitable- I'd suggest Vanessa Rossetto as an artist of a closer affinity. Chen serves up enough grist to the mill to thicken the plotted drone with tiny feedback squalls, intemperate pitches and the sort of cries and whispers heard when we attune our ears to our most familiar surroundings.

Jurg Frey's Metal, Stone, Skin, Foliage, Air, realized by the superbly subtle Austin-based percussionist Nick Hennies, is so ventilated and multi-faceted a piece, so encompassing a sonic environment, I can safely surmise none of your friends could imagine the sound when you tell them it is a 65 minute percussion quartet.

The piece was composed between 1996 - 2001, premiering in 2002 - there is little doubt, listening to this realization, that in the ensuing years Hennies gained the sort of intimacy with the work that makes, from my perspective, auteur-attribution [cf. some of Michael Pisaro/Greg Stuart's collaborations of the past several years] a little ambiguous. Pace much of the Wandelweiser work I am familiar with, strict time durations and other structural elements only support the sense of an organic shaking-out, as the piece comes to life through stages of insistent pulses, rustle and flutter, and [my favorite section, due in no small part to evincing Hennies' lovely recording of another percussion quartet, Radu Malfatti's l'effacage [2008] ], a deep, deep sonority that seduces and summons the ears from the core of the drum.

Abdul Moimeme, as I pointed out in my review of his work with Diatribes last year, is a guitarist mining the possibilities of a guitar approached as a sound-generator that happens to have a fret-board and an improbably long history. On Khettahu, Moimeme plays two prepared guitars simultaneously, in the busiest passages bringing to mind the startling cross-handed technique of pianist Borah Bergman. Moimeme's partner here, Ricardo Guerreiro, wields an interactive computer platform that enables him to capture and select Moimeme's output, reshaping and resending Moimeme's shards of sound, spatiality and synchronicity played, being co-equal elements to pitch and timbre. Their interchange is fluid, at times rivetingly so. What Moimeme brings to the work is a distinctly developed knack for the percussive potential in his hacked guitars, as often as not sounding sculptural, shearing rather than plectoral, sending great sparks and scraps of electricity to Gurreiro to refine or refuse. I hope a few more of you discover Moimeme's work for yourselves.

Inveterate Chicagoan Brent Gutzeit, whose work in his 18 year stint with T.V. Pow merits the hackneyed adjective prescient, and whom I regard as that tiny cartoon devil sitting at the left ear of us all, whispering into whatever musical mix he's involved with, fuck something up, released a couple of projects in late 2009 and 2010 that deserve a wider listen. Enemy, his duo with EVP maven Michael Esposito, is, and I say this confidently, irrespective of whatever has graced your player the past year, like nothing else you've heard. Esposito labors in the paranormal field of capturing ghost voices, integrating them, as base tracks, into collaborations with people like Kevin Drumm, CM von Hausswolff, and John Duncan.

The project with Duncan was created from a visit to Duncan's childhood home, where the somewhat skeptical Duncan was startled to hear, via the 50's sci-fi era-looking equipment Esposito wielded, a spirit greeting him by name. Skeptics [count me in!] be damned, Enemy is an alternately unnerving and amusing ride, Gutzeit layering into the paranormal activity subtle striations of field recordings, guitar chordings, and the like. Near the conclusion of the piece, Rola Esposito is heard engaging in word prompts to an unseen voice, a creepy See-n'-Say exercise that evinced an involuntary shudder from this skeptic. Esposito owns a unique place in the terra incognita of outlier sound art; as early century cartographers had it, when labeling areas of maps with what lies just beyond the known, here be dragons. My wife will be relieved that this devilish duo is going back to the shelf for awhile.

Gutzeit labored, as the title Five Years of Work For A Strange Result connotes, in a file exchange with Francisco Meirino [nee Phroq]. I was introduced this year to Meirino's duo work with Gutzeit, and the lovely Music For An Empty Cinema [with Jason Kahn]. While the latter is an enveloping work of steady-state-with-minute-particulars droneage, the back-and-forth with Gutzeit has passages of concrète that evoke Ferrari, with episodes of finely shaped noise, out-of-the-frame voice captures, and the sort of eructations, sonic ruptures and deceptive rests the finest musicians working with junk electronics can create. Five Years... is made all the stronger by the pair's respective approaches being swapped for reduction, reassemblage and respectful fuckery.

I am so taken with Minnesota sound artist Nathan McLaughlin's Echolocation series [pieces somewhat akin to Basinski's Disintegration Loops, in that both composer's unspool thematic material of both bell-like clarity and the smeared, indistinct sonics of decay that tape affords], that I asked him to bring another chapter of this area of his work to a show I presented earlier this year. McLaughlin obliged, despite the fact he has left this series behind, now working in entirely new areas. McLaughlin owns a near-phobia to having an internet identity, resides in a small farming community in Minnesota, and generally is in possession of a humility I've seldom encountered in working with musicians. I mention this as you are no doubt seeing his name for the first time, and so unaware of the especial pleasures his meticulous reel-to-reel compositions offer.

Notice Recordings, whose attention to the important details in producing cassette works places them in the company of Winds Measure and Tone Filth, among a few others, released Echolocation #5 earlier in 2011. While McLaughlin numbers the pieces, the enigma of their sequencing, about which we shared a laugh, remains - # 3 and #2 were issued in 2010, #5 this year, and # 4 and #1 are to follow. Whatever the relevance or irrelevance of this, Echolocation #5 extends McLaughlin's exploration of the elegiac and the dirge, adding some crunchy, roiling passages as well. Often McLaughlin's loops gather, in small enough increments to avoid overt, ham-fisted drama, a strong sense of the ominous. These tensions, as well as the fine structural drift McLaughlin is patient enough to permit, make the Echolocation series a fluid one, without a start or an end. Echolocation #5 should be heard as an installation in a big-hearted work, issuing from a musician with an immense gift for subtle music. They are sent from a recondite artist who may well disappear before you receive them, so there's no time to waste.

For the second time this year I get to draw your attention to the fine imprint Copy For Your Records, on which Anne Guthrie's work, Perhaps A Favorable Organic Moment, came out earlier this year. A strange brew of Scottish balladry, a warts-and-all essaying of a Bach cello suite on her battered French horn, and Guthrie's remarkable synthesis of traffic, room tones, pedestrian cacophony, and beautifully limned sine tones, this one eludes words as much as anything I have written about. Guthrie's work in this area [do yourself a favor, and locate a copy of her standing sitting, released in 2010 on Engraved Glass, another gift of treated field recordings] is highly intuitive, with a finely developed capacity for fitting together disparate sonic elements in a way I find disarming-somehow Guthrie gets right to the heart of the matter in her solo works, no dross or superfluities. She has, and this is my highest praise, whatever sound area is under discussion, very big ears; and, like the aforementioned McLaughlin, a big heartedness to her music.

photos: Chen, Frey, Hennies, Moimeme, Gutzeit, Esposito, Meirino, McLaughlin's rig for the Echolocation piece at Studio Z, and Guthrie's high school-vintage French horn, also at Studio Z.

For Adam Sonderberg

2011-10-29T19:20:00.003-05:00

keep the great things alive

We are living in a dark age. And we are not going to see the end of it, nor are our children, nor probably our children's children. And our job, every single one of us, is to cherish whatever in the human heritage we love and to feed it and keep it going and pass it on, because the Dark Age isn't going to go on forever, and when it stops those people are gonna need the pieces we pass on. They're not going to be able to build a new world without us passing on whatever we can - ideas, arts, knowledge, skills, or just plain old fragile love, how we treat people, how we help people: that's something to be passed on...and all of this passing things on, in all its forms, may not cure the world now - curing the world now may not be a human possibility - but it keeps the great things alive. And we have to do this because who are we to decide that it is hopeless?

If you wanted to volunteer for fascinating, dangerous, necessary work, this would be a great job to volunteer for - trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important.

~ Michael Ventura [with James Hillman, R.I.P.], We've Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and The World's Getting Worse

breaking bad

2011-10-13T00:45:00.001-05:00

Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.

~ William Butler Yeats

like doors into the earth

2011-10-10T22:31:00.011-05:00

Cet arbre sera là pour mille ans

(This Tree Will Be Here For a Thousand Years)

The French bassist, composer and improviser Bruno Duplant has emerged in the last several years as a musician plumbing the fertile area where composition and improvisation leak, leech and, at times, coalesce. We are growing accustomed, as listeners, to such musical rhizomes; some listeners regard discussions of how one like Duplant organizes sound – the roots struck and the branches on which he and his compatriot’s sounds wobble and quaver – passé and played out. Should I reach that point and find my enjoyment of such aspects of the music under discussion exhausted, I hope I might recall when I marveled at the agility and ardent interrogations of players like Duplant. In the last two years he has released works of radical distillation such as Intermediate State and Slow Breath [the latter bearing an apposite dedication to Radu Malfatti]; Duplant seems to have grasped the spirit and intent of much of the Wandelweiser collective’s balancing act of the dual energies of grounding and ascending sounds.

The rhizomes Duplant is cultivating are not breaking new ground, of course; they can be heard, for example, in the early 1960’s trio of Giuffre, Bley and Swallow [Free Fall], where you find the antecedence of such musical values as make every note matter, the displacement of the individual ego, and the thrill of the improvising composer’s retrograde motions. Duplant likewise favors the trio format, which usually includes the Portuguese reeds player Paulo Chagas. The intuitive, mutual play unspooled between Duplant and Chagas is of the sort gained through their privileging equally highly attuned receptivity, occasional spirited interplay, but above all, the creation of a very specific atmosphere suggested by Robert Bly’s phrase [in his poem An Empty Place], …like doors into the earth. That sort of plumbing, root-striking music hits a deep nerve – it is only later one considers the means by which such an atmosphere is created. Both the composed and the freely improvised works Duplant has restlessly produced in a very short period of time own this quality of braiding the two energies – rising and burrowing down – the flight of Chagas’ clarinets and soprano saxophone [cf., for example, Evan Parker and Steve Lacy’s Chirps], the earth-bound rumbles and bellows issuing from Duplant’s bass, prepared and otherwise, and, in the case of this fine recording, Lee Noyes’ piano [innerklavier and otherwise].

So consider The Bias of the Things as a fresh tangent along the curve of contemporary composition and free improvisation. The five pieces are sufficiently spacious for the trio to hang their discrete sounds, as well as to occasionally rattle and roil like an updated entry in the Incus catalog [the affinity of Chagas’ reeds with that era of Evan Parker is self-evident]. When the trio incorporates strings attacked in every conceivable way, microtonal clarinet, and the warped audio of old ballroom recordings, as in the sly Tango For Small Things of Everyday Life, they bring forward the sort of low-fi gestalt heard on bassist Kent Carter’s essential 1976 document Beauvais Cathedral.

The pleasing, dislocating experience of listener uncertainty as to what precisely one is hearing, and what sound is issuing from whom, threads throughout the pieces. Chagas’ contributions alone are foregrounded, as he plays mainly within the range of his reeds made familiar by Lacy, Parker, et al. Duplant occasionally pushes his bass through a small Danelectro Honeytone amp, producing distorted timbres that supply the trio with grain and grit. This is my first encounter with percussionist Noyes’ piano work; happily in this context he approaches the piano chiefly as a percussion sounding board, inside and outside, both plangent and dulcet. Noyes is, as I have heard him be elsewhere, a sensitive and alert improviser, and sustains the trio atmosphere superbly.

So consider this dynamic trio’s work a fresh tangent, flowing from the dual tributaries of John Cage, and the animus of self-determination that informed small group improvisation on labels like Emanem and Incus. Derek Bailey, whatever one makes of placeholder names like his non-idiomatic improvisation, knew well the imprecision [including his own] encountered when one tries to articulate too fixedly what this sort of thing sounds like. Suffice it to say I find the trio’s branch of a very old tree bracing, owning a loving fealty to where it came from, and a determination to contribute to where this music is going.

This piece will be included as liner notes in the forthcoming The Bias of the Things

Ilse Records

This Tree Will Be Here For a Thousand Years, Robert Bly, Harper & Row, 1979

wake up & die

2011-09-29T17:24:00.004-05:00

On October 3, 2011, I begin working as a volunteer coordinator for a Minneapolis-based hospice program. This follows many years of volunteering in oncology hospice, HIV/AIDS foster-care, and reading and reflecting on a fairly wide range of material on the death & dying process.

From August 1983 - January 1984 I was, along with a single hospice R.N. and my step-father, my mother's principal care-giver; I lived with her as she was dying from small-cell lung cancer, providing palliative care and no shortage of laughter and tears. She died four months from her biopsy, age 56, so we knew the big squeeze of what buddhists call this precious human birth in the realest of real ways.

The great matter and I came face-to-face in September 2001, when I was diagnosed with cancer and underwent both tumor surgery [orchiectomy], and a series of radiation treatments. The latter, inducing constant nausea and weakness, seemed worse than the alternative, so I discontinued the radiation course about midway through. That was 10 years ago this month.

A little context that might suggest the thoughts and feelings I have entering this new adventure, which is primarily supporting volunteers who provide respite and, hopefully, some laughter and tears, with the families they stand with.

To honor entering this latest bardo, I have launched the side-bar wake up and die, a placeholder for pith quotes about living with dying.

The dead are often just as living to us
as the living are,
Only we cannot get them to believe it...
To be dead is to be unable to understand
that one is alive.

~ Samuel Butler

ἅπτω

2011-09-21T03:38:00.003-05:00

October 23, 2011

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

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

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

More soon.

gather

2011-09-13T14:20:00.005-05:00

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

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

in saturn

2011-09-06T15:59:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

Spiriti, indeed.

Antifrost

Hibari

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

in praise of the swarm

2011-09-06T02:06:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

crow flyer

2011-09-05T02:29:00.004-05:00

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

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

As always, thanks for reading.

not one word

2011-08-19T02:32:00.005-05:00

clouds very high - look,
not one word helped them get up there

~ ikkyu, crow with no mouth

August writing is slower than usual - the show on August 6 captured much of my energy for a couple of weeks. I have a house guest this week, and a trip planned for next week. I am trying to return to finding some words for what I am listening to.

I'm thinking the first part of September for new postings; if so moved, sooner. September 17 brings three great musicians to Minneapolis for the third in the 2011 concert series.

Thanks to each of you for returning to crow; behind the cyber-wall of silence and darkness, I see the map of the world provided by the site tracker. Readers from every direction visit and revisit crow daily. I hope I can make that worth your while soon enough.

For Joe Panzner

2011-08-08T23:02:00.005-05:00

The Devil, Original sin. Man as good. If you would, you could be the Tyrant's favorite; it is more difficult to love God than to believe in Him.

We are all hanged or hangable.

A difficult matter, to rise to that divine callousness!

Though I have sung the mad pleasures of wine and opium, I thirst only for a liquor unknown on earth, which the pharmaceutics of heaven itself could not afford me; a liquor that contains neither vitality nor death, neither excitation nor extinction.

~Charles Baudelaire
selected from Le Fleurs du mal, 1857

Belgian artist Odilon Redon's fantastic print from his interpretations of Le Fleurs du mal, 1890

crow flyer

2011-07-30T20:07:00.004-05:00

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

h a p t i c

2011-07-27T01:16:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

on jamie drouin and lance austin olsen's scaffold

2011-07-25T22:49:00.010-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drouin/Olsen

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

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

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

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

RIP Lucian Freud

2011-07-22T02:22:00.003-05:00

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

through erstwhile

2011-07-16T03:19:00.008-05:00

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

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

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

photo: Yuko Zama

as you might take your pulse

2011-07-11T03:21:00.005-05:00

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

~ Henri Michaux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organized Music From Thessaloniki

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

Ideograph from Stroke By Stroke, Archipelago Books

RIP Cy Twombly

2011-07-05T14:07:00.003-05:00

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

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

gestures rather than signs

2011-07-01T01:14:00.005-05:00

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

I write with transport and for myself,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Title from Michaux, Stroke By Stroke, 1984

RIP Charlotte Joko Beck

2011-06-30T04:53:00.003-05:00

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

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

take out your spell for me

2011-06-23T22:24:00.013-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anáádiih

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

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

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

Photo: Mathieu Ruhlmann in performance

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

agnes

2011-06-15T22:11:00.002-05:00

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

~ Agnes Martin

kill your idols

2011-06-14T23:59:00.008-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heresy Records

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

sculpt in hopeless silence

2011-06-14T02:08:00.007-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us sculpt in hopeless silence
all our dreams of speaking

~Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

jeph jerman's multiples

2011-06-10T00:15:00.009-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeph Jerman

Joseph Beuys

noises off

2011-06-01T00:27:00.016-05:00

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

~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

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

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

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

play free or die

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

true grist

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

god loves ugly

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

Jason Kahn

Balloon & Needle

Gert-Jan Prins

Tomas Korber

Diatribes

arrange whatever pieces come your way.

2011-05-24T23:06:00.005-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the date approaches, I will provide venue details.

New music by Fraufraulein on the stellar net label, Homophoni

Title from a Virginia Woolf diary.

yesterday's clarity

2011-05-24T10:17:00.003-05:00

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

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

the sense of multiple worlds

2011-05-16T23:37:00.009-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

All photos: Tom Stuart

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

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

for adolphe sax

2011-05-10T21:00:00.008-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

b o d h i

2011-05-05T22:32:00.001-05:00

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

you have to talk about love

2011-05-03T02:24:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pointless equations

2011-04-28T22:33:00.004-05:00

I am wrapping up my work at one job tomorrow [adieu! adieu! adieu!], beginning a new challenge Monday.
That long malaise, my eight months in a bad work situation, is ending. Everyone who has been in the workforce longer than a few years knows the grip of a bad work situation, the simultaneous dissipation of energies and the fattening of grudges, the quotidian havoc, the sweet relief when you exit.
I am close to resuming my post here, with a great deal of vital music to say something about. Thanks for continuing to check in.

Ten thousand pointless equations left just after
dawn,
the city's air heavy with the fat of countless dieters.
Saw Ummon strolling down Wilshire with Yunmen,
unperturbed; disappearing into each other, emerging
with laughter. Saw thirty-three green, walking parrots
watch a single black cat raising the dew as she walked
across the golf course, the first one to the seventh
tee.

Jim Harrison, After Ikkyu

Photo: a crow's egg

what is the word

2011-04-24T03:31:00.005-05:00

folly
folly for to
for to
what is the word
folly from this
all this
folly from all this
given
folly given all this
seeing
folly seeing all this
this
what is the word
this this
this this here
all this this here
folly given all this
seeing
folly seeing all this this here
for to
what is the word
see
glimpse
seem to glimpse
need to seem to glimpse
folly for to need to seem to glimpse
what
what is the word
and where
folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where
where
what is the word
there
over there
away over there
afar
afar away over there
afaint
afaint afar away over there what
what
what is the word
seeing all this
all this this
all this this here
folly for to see what
glimpse
seem to glimpse
need to seem to glimpse
afaint afar away over there what
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what
what
what is the word

what is the word

samuel beckett
what is the word

his last work, written not long before he died in 1989

photo still from Beckett's teleplay Eh Joe, 1965

crow with no mouth promotions

2011-04-13T23:00:00.004-05:00

Minneapolis musician, graphic artist and generally swell human being Casey Deming has created this flyer to promote the inaugural crow with no mouth promotions event in Minneapolis. I asked that he look at a few Ellsworth Kelly works, listen to several Pisaro/Stuart pieces, and make a poster. I have liked much of his poster work for Tuesday Series, a long-running bi-monthly series of concerts of improvised music in Minneapolis, featuring local and touring musicians, which Deming co-curates. I want to thank Casey for his work, and look forward to future collaborations.

with a watchful and elegant mind

2011-04-09T23:53:00.026-05:00

Look at poet Gary Snyder's face - it is easy to see the lion's share of his 80 years have been lived in the Sierra foothills of Nevada City, California. It is a face limned, lined and carved by Snyder's practice of the wild, the poet's phrase for a life of logging. fire-looking, hiking, and learning [as he has it in his What You Should Know To Be A Poet],
all you can about animals as persons/the names of trees and flowers and weeds/names of stars/ and the movement of the planets/and the moon/your own six senses/with a watchful and elegant mind.

Snyder is visiting here next week to read some of his work. I traveled a bit about 12 years ago to hear him read at a small college in a small town in Minnesota. The occasion was the publication of his epic Mountains & Rivers Without End, literally a life-long work gathering together and naming the wild things in the poet's well-spent life. Improbably rigorous training in Japan's zen monasteries, a brush with hagiography in the various chronicles written about the Beat Generation, several wives and numerous children, an unwavering dedication to the ecology, both local and global, and his practice of deep listening in order to speak plainly about mountains, water and wind - this is the journey engraved in Snyder's face.

Anticipating seeing and hearing Snyder again, I have traveled back much farther tonight, recalling my first encounter with him. I was hospitalized in 1969, confined to bed for several days, constrained by IVs and fever. I shared an inhospitable room with a garrulous fellow, maybe 30 years older than me. I was an avid reader - he saw this and handed me a copy of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, saying, "Read this kid!" Kerouac's relatively straight-forward narrative of meeting and hanging with Gary Snyder [Japhy Ryder in the picaresque fictional account of their days together] blew my mind. It was my first taste of a number of subsequently acquired tastes, including Buddhism of the Japanese lineage. I mention this to frame the deep [and long] appreciation I hold for Snyder's infusion of Buddhist ethics and a genuine sense of stewardship of earth's resources into the drug-soaked, happily aimless lives of many of my generation. Snyder rendered listening to the wild cool, and worthwhile, in a way the John Muir minions could not.

When creeks are full/the poems flow, Snyder wrote, binding the elemental surrounding him with his own creative urge. Also this - Your water is light/to my mouth/And a light to my dry body/your flowing/Music/in my ears/Flowing free.

Eric La Casa has spent 12 years listening to the wild, 10 of them documented on his 2010 2-CD release W2. With acutely attuned ears and intuitively placed microphones, La Casa focused from 1998 to 2008 nearly exclusively on the sounds of water and wind. He describes his work as improvisations with the sonic locale, less interested than many of his contemporaries in capturing and evoking a location, more interested in what he calls, variously, the pulsing of the world, an ineffable tumult, and the alchemy of water and stone. You won't be far into W2's chronicle of La Casa's last decade of traveling, listening, and recording, before you are pole-axed by the drama, intensity and elegance of what he heard. Some of the pieces own tensions and frissons akin to any orchestral works I could cite; several are laminal and offer an envelopment rivaling that of machine-made drone works. How does La Casa create work so distinct from mere field recordists? I couldn't tell you, but I can offer a few reflections that arose as I listened to W2 with the best suspension of discriminating between instrumental music/location recordings I could muster.

Like Snyder's immersive and immediate effects when he writes about the elemental, La Casa has a sensibility and approach that regards all that he records [and shapes with some post-production] as alive, sentient, and thus co-equal with the poet/sound artist. In other words, he is pointing his mics with a specific, from my perspective, rarified, state of listening. Beyond technical protocol, La Casa writes, listening becomes tied up in the surfaces of the world. What a fantastic articulation of the sort of mind it requires to hear the constant music in the natural world. While Snyder obviously cultivated, in part, his attunement to the music of water, wind and stones with formal zen training, La Casa's words might as well be a page from a similar sutra - Listening is always situated in what I would qualify as the extreme present, he
said in one interview, the instant when listening, landscape and time become one.

wind - void - word

The two CDs bear the rubrics Wind and Water; you will hear both forces on both CDs, even, occasionally, humans and machines. The ineffable tumult La Casa references is pervasive across both discs; these are not recordings offering a tamed natural world, much less a soporific one. There are startling moments of hell-raising racket [there is, as well, the percussive play of the plinks and droplets of water's small, patterned sounds, and some assuaging, at least temporarily, breezes]. It is the wind disc, however, that most strongly evokes for me the idea of La Casa's orchestration of the rawest elements - while the water disc offers a range of sounds from pointillistic [droplets] to thunderously symphonic [great cataracts and torrents are loosed!], the wind music is terrifyingly forceful at times, impossible to gild with romantic or lyrical associations. La Casa shapes the high-pressured, gathering power of a wind storm like a hair-raising, ascending orchestral work. In one piece the wind is exciting and agitating some sort of metal structure, and the resultant protesting groans and howls of metal, well, bring that aforementioned pole-axing I promised.

Your water is light/to my mouth

The water music La Casa presents from various locales reveals how inadequate a descriptor
water music really is; most such signifiers strain to convey what a sound sounds like - words like location recording, electro-acoustic improvisation, modern classical, et. al. La Casa's water music, in other words, owns such a vast range of sources and sonics, how could they all be contained in water? You are presented with sections and movements of engorged rivers, rain pelts, cave-reverbed drips and plonks, oscillations and waves that sing and cease altogether. La Casa's contemporaries, at least those who approach this level of richness, sonic diversity and uncontrived drama, are Toshiya Tsunoda, Chris Watson and, with a gusto akin to both Snyder and La Casa, Jeph Jerman. In literature, there is Gary Snyder, the poet who, as he put it long ago, moves in and makes home in the whole.

I wanted to say something about Snyder's deep connectedness to the elemental by drawing attention to his most lived-in face; his incantatory poetry speaks for itself. I also wanted to say something about how disconnected most of us who listen to this music are from the practice of the wild, at least a practice that includes actual exposure to the elements heard in La Casa's music. Perhaps another time I can write about the strangeness of our listening to the heaving, pulsing cataracts of the natural world through stereo speakers, rather than being engraved, as both Snyder and La Casa are, with the sources of this music. Some of us clearly want to be moved by these forces, seeking them in the music and poetry of these watchful and elegant minds. Eric La Casa's W2 is essential, elemental music, give it your ears.

Herbal International

All of Gary Snyder's lines quoted here can be found in No Nature: New & Selected Poems, Pantheon Books

wind/void /word/i bow in roadside gravel is from a glimpse through a break in the storm of the summit of the white mountains

your water is light to my mouth is from running water music II

Eric La Casa's quotes are culled from several interviews, as well as a few notes on his web site.

illin'

2011-04-03T01:28:00.003-05:00

A nasty, recalcitrant virus has hijacked crow [and everything else in my computer]-down for a week or so, I will return.

most people are perfectly afraid of silence

2011-03-23T00:32:00.005-05:00

There will be new writing soon-I just submitted a piece for the May issue of the Wire [cf. the photo above] ; I am working as well on several concerts to take place in Minneapolis in May and September.
Plus, wage-slavery!

This part of the world has given up Spring's ghost-rain and sleet are flying as I type this, people couldn't be paler [shining like cadavers]. Every place has its difficult seasons-ours is the long malaise of winter/not-quite-winter [what you call Spring]. Ours is the incremental attrition of optimism.

I had dinner at a friend's restaurant the other night- he was a political exile [his entire family, actually] in 1979, fleeing his birthplace in Kabul for Lausanne- Paris-Virginia-Minnesota. He has a ridiculous collection of Indian classical music [and a personal narrative intertwined with that of Vilyat Khan, the great pandit my friend was thrilled to learn I heard in performance in 1980]. His competing passion is for free jazz/improv. For several decades he has amassed and absorbed these musics, and supplies from this personal retrieval system all the music he programs for his community-based radio show in Minneapolis, now in its 16th year.

Under gray skies, heads bowed over great Afghani food, we each said at separate points in our rambling chat that music has saved our lives; without drama, self-consciousness, fear or favor, saved our lives.

crow.

heading from e.e. cummings

a transparent gate with 6 panels

2011-03-20T01:29:00.012-05:00

I am happy to announce the first in a series of concerts presented by crow with no mouth promotions.

It is auspicious that the first event is the world premiere of a Michael Pisaro composition, a transparent gate with 6 panels, for Greg Stuart [percussion/electronics].

The space in which this work for eight speakers will be heard can be viewed here.

The following is Michael's press release about this new work:
A transparent gate with 6 panels is a series of portable landscapes (or sound reliefs) for Greg Stuart. Imagine a large door, which instead of carved panels (like those made for the Florence Baptistery by Lorenzo Ghiberti and Andrea Pisano) has near transparent out-facing windows of various colors and designs (perhaps translucent versions of Ellsworth Kelly's series of reliefs). These windows allow a view to the landscape behind them. But they set certain features of that landscape in relief by overlaying patterns made from elemental sounds. Each panel is ten minutes in duration, which includes a border of thirty seconds of silence on either side (creating silences of one minute between internal sections). Individual panels combine different collections of live percussion playing with slightly altered recorded versions of the same instruments emanating from an array of eight miniature speakers.

A work in the reliefs series, with percussionist Greg Stuart again performing solo, will next be presented in September at the Amplify 2011 festival in N.Y.C.

For a number of years I have wanted to focus some of my energy on presenting music that is very rarely heard in Minneapolis. I am grateful for this opportunity, as Michael and Greg are creating some of my favorite music, a body of work that has, as Thomas Moore has it, a piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth in every new sounding.

Pictured: Lorenzo Ghiberti's door and an Ellsworth Kelly relief.

let go of everything which gets in the way

2011-03-18T01:04:00.006-05:00

There is a music in which the time-space of sound and the time-space of silence appear in their own particular realms. Even when the sounds are often very soft, the music is not about falling into silence. The sounds are clear, direct and precise.

There are long time spans for the presence of sound, and long time spans for the absence of sound. The two together form the "time present" of the piece.

Silence can also be present in the sounds. In order to have silence in sounds, one must let go of everything which gets in the way of this silence.
This sound is the Dai-sein [being there] of sound. Its presence and charisma make themselves felt in the composition.

Silence requires one decision: sound or no sound.
Sound requires a great many more decisions.
Both stamp time and space, in that they come into appearance, in an existential sense.

Together they comprise the entire complexity of life.

Text excerpts from Jurg Frey, The Architecture of Silence, 1998 [translation: Michael Pisaro]

Photos: Yuko Zama

http://www.erstwhilerecords.com/catalog/060.html

j a p a n

2011-03-15T03:15:00.005-05:00

Text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10.00 on behalf of the Red Cross.

Doctors Without Borders is there.

Mercy Corps is there.

These three, among others, are well vetted and graded by Charity Navigator and the American Institute of Philanthropy.

o n e s o l u t i o n

2011-03-12T14:58:00.005-06:00

wish i could be in madison.

raub roy's funhouse

2011-03-07T01:32:00.010-06:00

Under the name Horaflora, Raub Roy released three works in 2010 that issue from the borderland between audio terrorism and absurdist high spirits. Craterellus Cornucopioides and The Gland Canyon are from the Install Digital archives, and are solo works; the 17 minute duo work considered here is from a split 12" on Hot Releases [the other side being songs from Secret Boyfriend, the nom of Hot Releases owner Ryan Martin].

Roy's partner for this session in 2009, recorded live in the KALX radio studio, is Andrea Williams. The few reviews I have unearthed of this record do a piss-poor job of clarifying the role of joint conspirator Andrea Williams, whose laptop and real time field recordings flow seamlessly with Roy's truly cracked sound sources [expelled balloon air, street sweeper bristles, and other transduced and filtered noise makers]; the duo's flow is a nearly ceaseless caroming, careening one, dropping abruptly [and beautifully] at around mid-point to a still-point of pinged, singing bowls and near silence, before chugging again into the skillful maelstrom of their funhouse stereo field.
Raw, manic [and only lightly edited], Roy and Williams maintain momentum and ballast throughout the 17 minute ride; the flux and rapid segues, nonetheless, reinforce the funhouse affinity.

The duo do like gizmos- the three Horaflora releases I have heard comprise some of the strangest sonics in my collection- and mash their low-fi electroacoustics with apparent giddiness. What supports repeated listens is the shape and intrinsic coherence of their sound field. Roy has been at this for a decade; Williams has contributed to events ranging from a 2009 performance of David Tudor's seminal Rainforest VI, to Soundwalk events at venues like Issue Project Room and the Whitney. On the way to skull-ringing meetings like this one, Roy studied sound art at Hampshire College, and Williams is finishing an MFA in electronic music at Mills College.

Horaflora's works place him in sharp relief from his many more mannered and studied contemporaries. His improbable instrumentation [toothbrushes and balloons diffused through cracked electronics], DIY-performance spirit, and occasional deft collaborations like this one with Williams, are a fresh wind blowing through the at times arid landscape of EAI. The fuck-all velocity and bizarre sound sourcing of this date will fall on the deaf ears of listeners who require a whiff of the decorous and high concept in their electroacoustics. Good on Raub Roy for bringing a little impertinence and evident fun into this area of music. It may be a funhouse, but it's serious fun.

Horaflora

Andrea Williams

sublime frequencies

2011-03-04T11:22:00.007-06:00

I am happy to return to the music of occasional collaborators Samuel Rodgers and Stephen Cornford, as the well they draw from for their 2010 release Zinc (extracts) is far from dry.

In what was my first spontaneously written review for crow, a short consideration of the duo's release on Another Timbre, tuned moment, weighting, I made reference to the process of their work for piano and piano feedback being akin to the duo of the underrated pianist Gabriel Paiuk and Jason Kahn [on the beautiful Cut Records release, Breathings], as well as to the Marcus Schmickler/John Tilbury piano alterations heard on Variety. There is also, on a grander scale, Cor Fuhler's role as sonic saboteur [again, to the long-suffering Tilbury] on the jaw-dropping MIMEO release, The Hands of Caravaggio. All of these pairings involve a pianist sounding keyboard and innerklavier resonances, filtered through transforming electronics.

Cage famously said ideas are one thing and what happens is another. The process, as sculptor Stephen Cornford sets Zinc into motion, is to jolt his piano works with the aperiodic, aleatory and unstable influences of Rodgers's electronic tweaking. The result is far from chaotic or merely of interest for its concept. The piano on Zinc, approached by two musicians with acute ears and empathic hands, billows, rattles and breathes; this is tactile, sensuous music.

If you view photos of Cornford's constructions for piano, turntables and guitars, it is clear sound sculpture can refer to more than a precious placeholder to describe fuzzy, inchoate music. Cornford's kinetic creations whirl, vibrate and move in space, sending waves and plies of timbre and overtones into the air [there are samples aplenty on Cornford's site]. On Zinc, the duo adhere to a more restricted palette, largely extracting and mining the rattle and thrum from the grand piano, with a steady dose of sustain. The first word I jotted down following a few listens to Zinc was sustain. Cornford and Rodgers make music with a feeling of vitality and sustain- it is music that rises and spirals upward, even when sounding, as happens on the second track, the bent blues note.

I will mention in closing that Zinc (extracts) is music culled from the same sessions that yielded tuned moment, weighting. The music here is in no wise leftovers or afterthoughts. I have spent time with both, and Zinc owns a qualitatively different feel, a concision and concentration of elements that merit a separate release. The sustain of the piano's sublime frequencies and feedback gather in the air, something like the idea of massed cicadas, or an electric storm brewing.
Cornford and Rodgers are sculptors, lend an ear.

Zinc (extracts)

thinking of this music while reading francois jullien

2011-03-03T14:07:00.009-06:00

All flavors disappoint even as they attract. Persuading the passerby merely to "stop", they lure without fulfilling their promise. They represent nothing more than an immediate and momentary stimulation that, like sound sifted through an instrument, disappears the moment it is consumed.

In contrast to such superficial stimuli, the bland invites us to trace it back to the "inexhaustible" source of that which constantly unfolds without ever allowing itself to be reduced to a concrete manifestation or completely apprehended by the senses; that which transcends all particular actualizations and remains rich in virtuality...the value of savoring it is all the more intense for being impossible to categorize.

~ Francois Jullien, In Praise of Blandness

For Daniel Jones

2011-02-24T23:56:00.003-06:00

Things that are empty make a noise, the full is always quiet.
~ the buddha
sutta nipāta 3.726

happy birthday, crow

2011-02-23T16:27:00.006-06:00

It was one year ago today I posted my first entry on Ikkyu and the intentions behind launching crow. In that time, riding a significant wave of personal changes and the usual vicissitudes, I have managed 40 reviews and profiles of musicians. The reader response, much of it from musicians, has been gratifying. Thank you to each musician and label owner for sharing your music with me. Thank you to each reader. I do this for fun and for free, so your comments help to sustain me.

This year I am going to contribute the small influence of crow to promoting some shows in the Minneapolis area. A significant number of the musicians I would like to see perform here fly over the Midwest; those who visit this area generally hit Chicago and pass on.

I am already looking forward to May and late September performances by musicians highly regarded by readers of crow. If you plan on performing in Minneapolis in 2011, and need assistance setting up a show, feel free to contact me, we can discuss the possibilities.

I am nothing, I see all

2011-02-20T19:35:00.006-06:00

It will be found in many places that the notation is irrational; in such instances the performer is to employ his discretion
~ Cage's instructions to the pianist, in his score Music of Changes

I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing, I see all.
~ Emerson, Nature