Markus Eichenberger . Halbzeit

“We enter an open landscape, rich in impressions, and then leave the beaten track. Here and there we notice something that merits closer inspection. After a shorter or longer pause, we venture a little in another direction. We might simply take the day as it comes and without concern let everything that has been and that we have experienced go to the winds. Or perhaps perceive the singular aspects shown by this landscape with an acute awareness. Use them to recall past events and experiences, thus enriching the feeling of simply being in the present moment.

When we listen to Markus Eichenberger’s solo improvisations Half Time, we feel that he is taking us along with him on such a journey of discovery. A journey into the day’s events, but no less a foray into a landscape of memory. The intimate wealth of sounds produced by his instrument, the clarinet, evokes the most diverse associations. For Eichenberger, it is not the instrument of a virtuoso who wends effortlessly through all the meanderings of Alpine folklore, classical music and swing. He almost has us perceive the oscillating column of air in his instrument with an astounding clarity. He gives himself time to listen precisely to every tone, as it were from various acoustic angles, in all its colour and fullness of register. He swells the spaciousness of a sound, lets acoustically complex events arise, illumines each tone in several distinct ways, at times sings softly along.

We hear melodies, with simple intervals, whereupon memories arise spontaneously: of nature or meditative experiences, or melodies engraved deeply in our collective cultural memory. Only a few sounds, and the entire tradition of the instrument resonates along: classical, jazz Ð but not least also Alpine folklore. Indeed, the longer that we penetrate into Eichenberger’s improvisations by listening, the more do we have the feeling of being present at a solemn act of memory. In a completely contemporary spirit, the clarinettist brings forth melodies of the most diverse origin that have so far accompanied him in his life. And they are completely integrated in today’s world, in his eminently individual, singing, corporeal tone language. Only rarely do they really feel like a citation, such as when elements of Albert Ayler’s Ghosts suddenly appear in rare dynamically highlighted moments. Or when the German folk song Thoughts are free surges boldly into the foreground.

Otherwise, Markus Eichenberger treats such Çculturally-loadedÈ melodic material in a refined and differentiated way. He turns the idea of memory into a sensual experience. Sidney Bechet’s Petite fleur may be heard, but from a context that now has little in common with the origin of this wonderful melody. In the same way, fragments seem to emerge from their secret hiding-places, of BŽla Bart—k or Charlie Haden, from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s A-major clarinet concerto, the familiar Swiss nursery rhyme Chumm, mir wei ga Chrieseli gwŸnne, Willow Weep For Me, and Anton Webern’s Goethe songs Opus 19. They appear almost imperceptibly, blend with the present moment, and suddenly the passage of time becomes apparent to the senses, as we move into the future with alert ears and a wakeful mind.”-Alfred Zimmerlin, from the liner notes

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Tony Dryer, Jacob Heule, Jacob Lindsay : Idea of West

The instrumentation comprises contrabass, drum set and clarinets. A personal favourite in this batch and, in general, CS’s recent output. A sort of dim-lit chamber music – described as “pragmatic applications of controlled improvisations and compositional structures” – thoroughly relying on the power of extremely low frequencies, contrapuntal answers often consisting of gritty secretions generated by the reeds’ overtones and by the bowing of cymbals and other parts of the percussive arsenal. A critical condition of suspension between the subtle rippling of silence by sparse elements, a “pinch-but-don’t-awake-me” maintenance of a semi-lethargic awareness that nevertheless lets us carefully consider any incident, minuscule or important, which manifests its weight one way or another. Apparently dispassionate, the interaction of the musicians is on the contrary revealing an utmost responsiveness to the slightest movement, a reciprocal will of listening actively which translates into numerous instances where auditory fulfilment becomes almost physical. Diversified approaches to a well-known palette that discard automatic actions in favour of a persistent fragrance of purposeful investigation, with more than a few sections worthy of admiration for the respect of the pure essence of instrumental connectivity. Massimo Ricci (Temporry Fault)

2118

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Scott Fields : drawings

What’s your framework? Every creative musician, even the freest, operates within one. Consider Scott Fields, for example. There’s a lot of spontaneity in the Chicago-born, German-based guitarist’s music, but it arises from carefully selected structures. In the case of Drawings, he has both internalized and responded to another artist’s process in order to stoke his own. Each of its 99 brief performances is an immediate response to an image by Swiss artist Thomas Hornung.

The album’s sleeve notes portray Hornung, who is apparently so obscure that he is virtually Google-proof, as a man of rigid habits. He spends each day following the same schedule, lives in two identically furnished rooms, and each night he spends an hour dashing off images on one piece of A4 paper every minute or so, with time out for cigarette breaks. Fields, in turn, took a sheaf of Hornung’s drawings (which are reproduced on the tray card) and tried to play for as long as Hornung had drawn; the denser the inking, the longer he played. But nothing lasts too long, and the whole CD runs just 46:20.

This brevity may be a formal triumph, but it makes for frustrating listening. There’s a fair bit of variety, from Nels Cline-like shredding to swelling feedback to elegantly plucked shapes to music box-like chimes. But none of it develops. Of course, these tracks weren’t supposed to, but the result is still a choppy and unsatisfying listen. Ironically the soundtrack to an accompanying video by Arno Oehri, which shows Hornung and Fields at work, is more engaging. It is comprised of raw material from the sessions, drastically slowed down and pitched so low that it doesn’t sound like guitar anymore. Since the video has no other sounds, one has plenty of time to savor Fields’ slow-mo gestures, and plenty of motivation; the video’s 55 minutes is way too long to watch Fields play divorced from anything you here.

By Bill Meyer
Dustedmagazine

Scott Fields – electric guitar

2110

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paura: the construction of fear

Dennis González has spent time touring and recording in Portugal in recent years, and The Construction of Fear marks his first effort for Lisbon’s Creative Sources label. It’s nice to hear the trumpeter playing with violist Ernesto Rodrigues and his son Guilherme (cello and radio). Along with tenor/soprano saxophonist Alípio C. Neto and percussionist Mark Sanders, they make up Paura. They play music that is a bracing amalgam of scratchy Euro improv and bright lyrical declamations. Unlike a lot of music in this area, Paura doesn’t play with the kind of obsessive detail-driven retreat from expressionism that often creates tedium. Rather, they combine a feel for the meaningfully small with a feisty energy (a winning fusion that characterizes the opening piece). González can really show his range in such a setting: his soft wheezing and overtones on the spacious opening minutes of “Fear 2” make for a tasty synthesis of AACM genre-gestures and London insect music. Neto and G. Rodrigues provide fine contrast with a series of gutturalisms and insistent groans that glue things together. The album as a whole has a nice suite-like structure, with sweet’n’sour tutti passages that suggest chamber compositions, and lots of sub-groupings (the father/son strings are especially tight in the middle sections), all culminating in the slashing, thudding conclusion. Jason Bivins (Signal to Noise)

2107
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Davies / Rives / Rodrigues / Rodrigues / Santos : Twrf Neus Ciglau

I usually shift colds really quickly. I get them bad but they don’t last long. This one is still here and it is still really getting me down. I feel like one big snotty tissue right now, and am getting fed up that they only make one flavour of Lemsip. Ah well. If you’ve got swine flu what are the first symptoms? Are these trotters I’ve grown normal? So anyway, music. Despite having very blocked up ears and a headache for most of the day that gets worse when I stare at a computer screen your valiant blogger has still managed to listen to one CD a couple of times today and here I am writing about it. I returned to the pile of Creative Sources discs today, feeling a little guilty that I hadn’t played anything from it in a while. I picked out a disc I really wanted to hear from the recent batch anyway, the quintet of Ernesto Rodrigues, (viola) Guilherme Rodrigues, (cello) Carlos Santos, (electronics) Rhodri Davies, (harp and electtronics) and Stéphane Rives (soprano sax). The album title is Twrf Neus Ciglau. (no prizes for guessing which of the group came up with that little gem!) When run through an online translation programme the title translates from Welsh to read Noise Conquer Ciglau, which helps a little, but not much. Rhodri if you read this let me know? Anyway the music…. The disc contains a single thirty-four minute live recording made a year ago this Sunday at a festival in Lisbon. The music actually follows a similar pattern to one or two other releases involving Rhodri Davies of late, not quite drone-based but certainly music involving layers of shifting sounds that slip and slide over each other, transparent in places, opaque in others and all very beautiful. A little like the recent Midhopestones release on Another Timbre there is a nice blend of acoustic and electronic instrumentation here that is combined into one delicate mass of sound that travels along at a slow pace with little change in dynamic but plenty of diversity in colour The beauty comes then from the constantly changing textures and tones that are placed over one another, kind of the aural equivalent to a kaleidoscopic being turned very slowly. This shouldn’t suggest that the music is all pastel shades however. It isn’t always easy to tell which sound is coming from where, but certainly Rives’ sax can be heard sending out shrill blasts that set your teeth on edge, and the two Rodrigues scratch and scrape a gritty belly to the music throughout. Things never really break into any real to-and-fro interplay though, with the quintet happy to work their individual sounds over and through those of their colleagues rather than respond directly. So as a nice, detailed example of laminal improvised music Twrf Neus Ciglau works really well for me, containing some really beautiful moments. (the part thirteen minutes in when all sounds coalesce into a high pitched stream for a few moments is gorgeous) Certainly there is nothing groundbreaking here and, given the quality of the musicians on show no real surprises, but despite a throbbing headache I found it easy to lose myself in the Twrf Neus Ciglau’s drifting layers. Maybe this won’t be one I will come back to as often as I should, but as a document of a nice concert one summer’s day in Portugal I like this CD quite a bit and I’m pleased someone thought to share it with those that weren’t there on the night. Richard Pinnell (The Watchful Ear)

Ernesto Rodrigues – viola
Rhodri Davies – harp, electronics
Stéphane Rives – soprano saxophone
Guilherme Rodrigues – cello
Carlos Santos – electronics

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Powertrio : what we see while we walk and what we walk while thinking

Powertrio are Eduardo Raon (harp, electronics), Joana Sá (piano, toy piano) and Luís Martins (classical guitar). In the 33 minutes of this CD they reveal themselves to be a very interesting ensemble, working in serious commitment at the margins of a somewhat disturbed quietness, even if not exactly in a “reductionist” sense (on the contrary, occasionally erupting in full-exhilaration mode in pieces such as “Improvisation II” and “Hart Auf Hart”). The notes played and the noise made are always clearly exposed, perhaps slightly modified by the electronic treatments while maintaining a degree of palpability which generates a welcome tension in the music. Their structures are often scraggy and ill-coloured yet possess an evident definition and show personality to spare. The resonance factor is in great evidence, and the ability of letting every event manifest visibly before fading to grey is worth of praise. And, what’s more, the record is greatly functional also in the habitual “open-window” test which I systematically run with this kind of stuff: it meshes gorgeously with the environment, but the presence remains commanding due to its bigger body of sound. Excellent, sober, intelligent work at times surrounded by a late XIX century classic aura. Recommended. Massimo Ricci (Temporry Fault)

2104

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Swiss Improvisers Orchestra : Zwitzerland

The Swiss group is probably less of an orchestra and more of a large group, consisting as it does of just nine musicians. The music they make across the album’s seven tracks is more free jazz with an improvised element to it than pure improv. At the heart of most tracks there is a simple melody or series of repeated lines and rhythms that propel the music along in a medium paced, bouncy manner. This element, which does seem to be the music’s central concern doesn’t interest me a great deal. there are however plenty of nice little moments throughout the album, ironically usually when only two or thee of the musicians are playing, and often in the little moments of calm between the more busy, melodic elements in each track. The fifth track for instance, named Tales opens with a lovely, subdued passage of quiet tones played by either the group’s cellist Sabine von Werra or bassist Markus Fischer (I suspect the latter but can’t be sure) alongside one of the several wind instruments played very quietly and softly. This little vignette is beautiful, but is brought to a halt after two minutes by the other instruments suddenly bursting in, still quite quietly, but without the degree of subtlety the duo showed. Throughout Zwitzerland these moments keep occurring, but all too often they are seen as openings or endings to more jazzy tuneful pieces with two or three musicians at the heart, and others following along with sudden jabs, wails and other flourishes. What isn’t clear to me though is how much is composed. Certainly the music is divided into sections, parts that allow free expression, others that clearly don’t, and good use is made of an instruction to suddenly cut from one section to another, often halting the music in full flow and letting something different swell up from underneath. Whether the melodies and rhythms are pre-ordained or not I am unsure. I suspect not, but still they are the weak point of the album for me, the drumming in particular, which is the one part that seems to pull the music away from improvised freedom than any other, often giving the music a marching feel to it that I just couldn’t live with. Zwitzerland is a well played, technically assured album, but the group make a music that overall just isn’t something I am that interested in. Richard Pinnell (The Watchful Ear)

Ursula Maehr – recorder
Carles Peris – saxophone, flute
Francis Petter – saxophone, bass clarinet
Valentin Vecellio – baqsset horn
Marco von Orelli – trumpet
Sabine von Werra – voice
Christoph Baumann – piano
Markus Fischer – double bass
Jacques Widmer – drums

2102

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millefleurs

Millefleurs is a vocal ensemble led by Christoph Schiller. More precisely: an experimental choir. Imagine a dozen vocalists in the vein of Phil Minton and Joane Hétu joining forces. It’s a nice surprise. Twelve pieces, each featuring a different line-up of singers (between one and ten). Abstract, textural, guttural pieces without words. It gets long (70 minutes), and with two or three selected tracks edited out the album would have been tighter and better sustained the listener’s attention, but it’s still a strong album. François Couture (Monsieur Délire)

Abril Padilla – voice (2, 5, 6, 7, 9)
Agnès Palier – voice (2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11)
Anna Nemes – voice (2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9)
Carl Ludwig Hübsch – voice (3)
Christoph Schiller – voice (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11)
Dominique von Hahn – voice (2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
Heike Fiedler – voice (8, 10, 11)
Izumi Ise – voice (5, 8, 11)
Irina Ungureanu – voice (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)
Mitch Heinrich – voice (3, 8, 11, 12)
Marei Seuthe – voice (2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11)
Rudolf Häfele – voice (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12)

2100

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Carrier / Lambert: nada

For their third duo recording, Canadian saxophonist François Carrier and drummer Michel Lambert, play no less than twenty short improvised pieces, varying between 44 seconds and 6 minutes. In stark contrast to most other releases by Creative Sources, the music is relatively accessible, there is melody and rhythm, even implicitly, as opposed to the “organised sounds” that the label is better known for. The two musicians keep delving deeper into the essence of music, delivering their little miniatures with an immediacy and authenticity which also characterized their latest albums. The effort makes the music go away from the long Coltrane-like expansiveness that Carrier used in his live performances, yet transforming the spirituality into the more compact form, somewhat analogous to the short Japanese “haiku” verses. The music is indeed not epic anymore, it’s poetry. Even in the wildest and most expressive pieces, lyricism and subtlety are omnipresent. There are moments when Carrier sounds like Dewey Redman, both in his warm tone and melodic phrasing, and Lambert is, well, himself, creative and light of touch. The shortness of the tracks also forces the two musicians to focus on the tunes’ essence: a feeling, a sound, a rhythm. Creating it, wondering at it, playing around it, and closing it. But each piece has a story to tell, giving impressions from nature, and expressing a reaction to it, whether serene, as in “Growing”, sad, as in “Tabula Rasa”, or distressed, as in “Transformation”, joyful, as in “Clouds” or “Unknown”. The sound itself is very organic, with notes and rhythms growing out of their predecessors, quite naturally, without pretence, without a clear plan, yet definitely part of the same piece, and beautifully. The sound of life. Again, a great album. Gtef Gijssels (Free Jazz)

2090

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Rodrigues / Rodrigues / Santos / Drury : eterno retorno

I really like the style of free improvisation adopted by Ernesto (viola) and Guilherme (cello) Rodrigues, the Portuguese father-son duo. On this, they form a quartet with electronician Carlos Santos and percussionist Andrew Drury. Improvisation that draws and retains your attention, its games of interplay and silence weaving a soundworld that has a lot of depth and an extremely flexible timeline. Good work from Drury, whose minute playing mimicks the strokes and scratches of the strings. Santos’ electronics are subtle and tasteful. A demanding but revelatory listen. François Couture (Monsieur Delire)

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V/A : canaries on the pole #2

The Canaries on the Pole #2 are Brussels-based Jacques Foschia (eb and bass clarinets), Christoph Irmer (violin), Georg Wissel (‘prepared’ saxes) and Mike Goyvaerts (percussion, etc.) Canaries show uncanny affect for surroundings, whether bandmembers or ambient neighborhood (hours sounding and carillon from church outside their open window on “In/Out”). Sonic variegation of instruments assures a certain degree of timbral and textural interest, even if the gamut runs lean – the tenor’s wheezes and mouthpiece squawks or bass clarinet trills and grumbles; the violin’s dry pizzicato and eerie harmonics. Still, overall, the date is kinda tetchy, wispy, faint and bone-dry. Since the longest stretch of pitched sounds come from a church carillon across the street on “In/Out” (and occasional brief altissimo lines and the odd tremolo from Irmer’s fiddle) this may qualify the album’s genre as ‘real-time atmospherics’. Chicken scratchings (fiddle, percussion) and cluckings (two horns) account for much of the rest. Whether the barnyard rants run fast and funny (“Fur Lotte”) or slow and hazy (“Compression”) or faint coyote-yodel-y (“Once Upon”), the players’ insistent preoccupation with bizarre sounds for their own sake soon grates. Only on that latter track does Foschia play – for a hot minute – a gritty, sforzando-rich passage that sounds like…a bass clarinet! Fred Bouchard (All about jazz)

Jacques Foschia – eb & bass clarinet
Christoph Irmer – violin
Georg Wissel – ” prepared”alto & tenor saxophones, objects
Mike Goyvaerts – percussion, objects, toys

2078

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Speak Easy (Wassermann / Minton / Lehn / Blume) : Backchats

After dying my hair the color of tangerine — with grapefruit and black olive blotches — at age sixteen, my mother, unable to grasp why I insisted on rebelling in ways that garnered bruises and black eyes at school, ended a tearful conversation with the desperate query, “Why are you just trying to make yourself look ugly?” I imagine a similar dialog occurred once or twice between vocalist Ute Wassermann and her parents: “Honey, sing the Hayden. Why did we pay for all this schooling? Why do you only make flatulence and joke sounds with your mouth? You make the dogs howl!”

Created from Thomas Lehn’s analogue synthesizer, Wassermann and Phil Minton’s unaffected voices and Martin Blume’s percussion, Backchats is an inventive, nervous, unsettling-yet-resplendent collection of tracks that belie the mild-mannered photo of the quartet, set up in an airy Cologne loft, from the sleeve insert. Going beyond mere lip smacks and pops and into demonic territories with unprecedented, infernal, guttural purges, Minton and Wassermann lead the works with innumerable unhinged extended vocal techniques: they squeak, snarl, groan, manifest as reverent phantasms, whisper with perverted intent, offer aborted mid-frequency radio broadcasts, resemble police sirens summoned due to mating marine mammals on the Interstate, rise from infant mites to wheezing elderly giants — and back again — form sentences with only consonants, shout obscenities using only vowels, flutter like wild horses, spasm uncontrollably from near-throat singing to mongrel scat, et cetera.

Lehn follows with his EMS Synthi, reeling out gravely pops and clicks, staccato pings of spring reverb, brief washes of high-pitched sine waves, thorny horns, sputtering bird calls, bits of Morse code, vinyl cracks and arpeggiations. In the background, Blume works with shadows of this already obscured imbroglio, maintaining his own penumbra of wispy cymbal rolls, murky tom-tom thumps, bassy bells, bongos, two-second outbursts, bowed cymbal, Gamelan, grumbling bass drums and brushed snares; though often drowned out by Wassermann and Minton, his gentle output stabilizes the group like the foundation of a flamboyant modern structure — one made of balloons, multi-colored ribbons and braided cellophane — that would otherwise float away.

The album might, on the surface, resemble live Foley work, a recount of a twelve-hour conversation compacted into fifty-three minutes and/or the soundtrack to the “too odd, even for us” Looney Toons archives, but the quartet’s work is far from gimmick. The sheer number of patterns and transmogrified personalities each member dexterously flaunts confirms a complexity very few can grasp let alone perform. Though their mothers might not understand the aesthetic (Minton’s singer parents probably wonder why they shelled out all that money for trumpet lessons), possessing the ability to sound as “ugly” and “strange” as possible puts the members of Speak Easy at the top of the ladder.

- Dave Madden

Ute Wassermann – voice, whistle
Phil Minton – voice
Thomas Lehn – analog synthesizer
Martin Blume – percussion

2070

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Milton / Thomas / Jewell / Farmer : Bear Ground

First of all thank you to everyone that wished me a happy birthday either here or elsewhere. As birthdays go I didn’t have a bad one at all. Cheers
So back to listening to music again today after a bit of a palette cleansing weekend. I played a new release this morning by the UK quartet of Matt Milton, David Thomas, Ryan Jewell and Patrick Farmer, playing violin and objects, viola and bamboo, snare drum and voice and drums and objects respectively. The album, released on Creative Sources is called Bear Ground.
Patrick gave me a copy of the release when I spent a little time with him and his delightful other half Sarah up in Glasgow last weekend. Because I had spent a bit of time in their company, and also because Patrick has a forthcoming release on Cathnor I wanted to put a week or so in between him giving me the CD and me listening to it, to at least try and stay somewhat impartial. It is indeed a very nice little CD though, an itchy, scratchy, breathy, crackly little number.
Of the four musicians on the disc I only really know the music of two of them very well, Farmer and Milton. One real joy of the music though is that I cannot tell who is doing what. Although on occasion its easy to tell strings from a drum (and not as often as you might think) I still couldn’t tell you which of the musicians did what. This isn’t a release that projects forth strong musical voices, rather it showcases the ability of four like minds working together towards one common outcome. I’m not really sure how I am meant to classify the music either. It is all acoustic, and yet rarely are the sounds we hear obviously instrumental. In places it is busy, but in others (like during the charged four minute silence that emerges amidst the final twenty-five minute long third track) the music slips into complete inactivity. I am reminded of the music of Jeph Jerman in improvisational mode, all clicks and scratches and dry whispery sounds as if made with all naturally found objects, as Jerman has been known to do. The sleeve imagery only reinforces this feeling, consisting of a series of Patrick’s natural photography, all leaves and wood and feathers.
Bear Ground is a very restrained, gentle, detailed album. It doesn’t shout and scream at you for your attention, and requires a lot of patience to listen to it carefully enough for it not to slip past virtually unnoticed. Taking the time to listen carefully has its rewards though as immersing yourself in this miniscule soundworld is a rewarding experience. Oh and that silence. It just appears with some eleven minutes remaining in the third track and just stays there for four minutes until a faint crackle, like dried leaves blowing on the wind appears. On other releases the silence might have been edited out, or shortened at least, but here it works well where it is, as if the music was just taking a natural rest to catch its breath, and reaffirming the feeling of honesty that Bear Ground gives me. Maybe not one for everyone, but certainly a release I like a lot. Richard Pinnel (The Watchful Ear)

2068

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Magda Mayas, Tony Buck : Gold

There’s just 36 minutes of music here, but every second of it is interesting. Pianist Mayas plays chunky, bell-like clusters that seem to observe a slowly evolving musical logic, neither obviously melodic nor conventionally harmonic. Drummer Buck for the most part works a parallel path, working busily but delicately round his kit. The opening minutes of “mercury machine” are full of light, skittering figures on the metal parts and big, damped clusters on the piano, some of them hand-damped inside the sound box, I suspect. It opens out thereafter, but there’s no attempt here to emulate the iconic piano and drum duos of the past – Coltrane and Ali, Taylor and Roach. Mayas and Buck create their own intimate languages and in the process deliver something very special and exactly the right length. Brian Morton (The Wire)

2065

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Wick / Greenwald : 37:55

A trumpet (Wick) and percussion (Greenwald) duo; don’t recall having heard other music from these two but I might be wrong. Classic CS release, a study in the pneumatic exploration of conduits as opposed to the subtle crackling of objects inserted in a percussive kit and expertly manipulated. Good recording quality, very detailed sound (especially by headphone). Wet (h/k)isses, sucking and popping against scraping, brushing and rubbing (and some eruptive drum outburst, such as a considerable fraction of the third track). Never in a frenzy yet apparently aroused sometimes, the musicians chart their path across the genre’s obvious references with a degree of class and reciprocal attentiveness, thus producing an artefact that’s much more listenable and significant than several hypothetical musts from Zen-ish labels and artists whose subordination to expectancy – even in a theoretically enlightened mindset – makes me vomit. Massimo Ricci (Temporary Fault)

2059

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Quatre Têtes – Figuren

I won’t bore you with another story of my tough day tonight. You know how it goes by now… Just tomorrow to get through and then I have four days off, three of which will be spent at the Unnamed Music festival in London and Leeds. Sorry if I keep mentioning the festival, but it deserves my support and yours. Say hi if you come along. Today then I listened to another release on the Creative Sources label (I am determined to listen to each one properly and write something on it!) Actually it wasn’t easy to listen more than once to today’s disc. I really didn’t enjoy it much. The CD in question is a new release by an all female quartet from (I think) Switzerland named (really rather badly) Quatre Têtes. Their album of ten shortish tracks is called Figuren.
I’m not actually sure how to describe the music they play, but Quatre Têtes are mad eup of two pianists Gabriela Friedli and Claudia Ulla Binderand two wind instrumentalists, Susann Wehrli (flutes and melodica) and Priska Walss (trombone and alphorn) In places their music is definitely very jazzy. There are several patches of melody to be heard, and a tendency for different instruments to come to the fore and almost solo on different tracks. Elsewhere it has a new music feel to it though, almost a kind of loosely played Earle Brown. It is certainly improvised, as in places it meanders slowly all over the place. It is busy, but somehow it doesn’t quite have the spark and energy of good old-school improv. It actually feels a really polite recording, with no aggression and no real surprises.
I have to be honest, I just don’t like this CD at all, but I am really struggling to pin down exactly why. It just has a certain sound to it, a mixture of groaning (often farting) wind instruments and quite annoyingly persistent piano. It spends a lot of time developing ideas that just don’t interest me much, little loops of repeated melody from one of the group mixed with rhythmic patterns from elsewhere and the odd dissonant moment thrown in by one of the others. I hate being so negative about music but I have to be honest, this CD bored me to tears. Maybe to others with completely different expectations of what they want from a quartet of this type Figuren is a good record. I’m obviously only voicing one opinion but there was very little here that held my attention. Richard Pinnell (The Watchful Ear)

Susann Wehrli – flutes, melodica
Priska Walss – trombone, alphorn
Claudia Ulla Binder – piano
Gabriela Friedli – piano

2057

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Birgit Ulher / Heiner Metzger : Blinzeln

One is, as always, attempting to deconstruct the normal sounds of a trumpet; the other works on something called “soundtable”, which says everything and nothing, given that the noises that he conjures up range from bowed wood and metal to zing ’n’ sting sharpness and close-microphone scrubbing and scratching of (maybe) sandpaper, or plain paper, or (insert your object here). The combination is functional, despite the fact that we’ve already wandered through these lands time and again: Ulher’s flapping, hissing, sucking, gentle tooting in her stimulation of zillions of irregular upper partials do have repercussions on the listener’s part of the brain that’s more oriented to irony, whereas the extreme concreteness of Metzger’s manipulations add a touch of thickness to the overall sonic tissue. While the record is nicely conceived and completely pleasurable, it also shows that the well of expressive means for this kind of improvisation is not bottomless. A good release sounding like another hundred of similar efforts, the whole masterfully executed but – at this junction in history – hardly groundbreaking.
Massimo Ricci (Temporry Fault)

2055

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João Lucas : abstract mechanics

The choreography “It was a very abstract thing” arose from the will to challenge the strange world of abstraction – whatever that may be, or whatever it is we may want to abstract – restraining the drive of wanting to say something, in order to plunge into an expressive abnegation of sorts. Building on the assumption that movement itself contains ideas, we sought to create a language whose meanings and significants only last for the duration of the moment in which they are created. We began at the “starting line” and progressed as a flux that must come from behind in order to move forward, in search of movements that reveal themselves as thoughts, but not allowing themselves to be fully understood, but giving the piece a narrative feeling. The music, as “abstract matter”, shapes this feeling and tosses it into continuity, acting upon this created reality as a transfiguring spirit that opens and guides the various possibilities of interpretation, in the very moment of building the present. This unspoken speech has the pretension of being beautiful because all formality must chase beauty and all that exists just for a moment has the delicacy of its own transience.

João Lucas, piano, accordion, electronics; Miguel Mira, cello; Thiago Lucas, voice.

Andresa Soares, May 2009

2053

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Schindler / Holzbauer / Lillmeyer : rot

UDO SCHINDLER, free player of the soprano saxophone and bass clarinet in Wörthsee (Upper Bavaria) – joined here by Munich cellist MARGARITA HOLZBAUER and the Munich incomer, guitarist HARALD LILLMEYER, both of them crossover daredevils firm in the depths of newest and still nameless music – doesn’t let himself be stopped by anyone when his city lights have turned red: ROT (cs151). The three met through playing in the Munich Instant Orchestra. Lillmeyer is the best-known among them having interpreted Scelsi or Riehm, guested with Ensemble Recherche and played with the electric-guitar-quintet Go Guitars. As far as extended techniques are concerned his partners are in no way behind him, which makes this suite of 15 improvisations scratch the guardrails of tonality with a bruitist and microtonal gusto which mellows the distinctions between acoustic and electric sounds generated by Lillmeyer, and even blurs those of the instrumental voices. Whatever the fingers might tickle or the mouth may bubble, what lips may breathe, what the cello may bow or the plectrum scratch, can only be found out during concentrated listening. Yet right at the next moment, at the next breath, contrasts bubble up only to get right back into the river of sound, which the three impassioned wrong-way drivers always take against the current. Once a cello sounds solidly full-bodied it begins to fray at its fringes, once the music sounds sustained and soft the electronics scream its poison in or corrode a yawning hole inside the boom minimalist soundscape, having macro and micro voltages alternately hum along, sizzle or fly sparks. Into jagged, scabby or laboriously smoothed-down sounds the estranged guitar enflames stinging or indefinably rustling sounds, which turn out to be the sigh of the cello, soon as the guitar surprisingly begins. Much is deceptive east of the ROT and you’re listening unauthorized so to say and at your own risk. Bad Alchemy (Rigobert Dittmann)

Udo Schindler – soprano saxophone, bassclarinet
Margarita Holzbauer – cello
Harald Lillmeyer – electric guitar

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Giampaolo Verga : Fadensonnen

Giampaolo Verga – an Italian composer who is also actively involved in the encouragement of artistic creativity during the recovery processes of psychically disadvantaged persons – seems to be genuinely aware of the value of silence. With violin, voice and electronics he reveals what his mind is made of, meditating with semi-closed eyes at the farthest fringes of audibility, utilizing indistinct radiations, feeble reverberations and also acute frequencies to concoct electroacoustic settings that seize our concentration, often veritably enthralling in their mixture of profundity and legitimacy.
The rarefaction of the materials, the whispered straining of the sources, the timorous comparison between voices that we imagine deriving from lamenting ghosts and elongated percolations of frail instrumental sketches are just blurred suggestions of the essential traits of something that’s both unmistakably perceptible and manifestly indefinable, glimpses of silent commitment looking for liquids in serious acousmatic drought. With my windows open in a peaceful afternoon, remote urban presences and ever-singing birds making themselves heard from long distance, Fadensonnen sounds just perfect, at least until the sudden breakup of the final “Limbisch, Limbisch”, a startling – but not less interesting – departure from the general subject.
As opposed to certain Mediterranean tormentors who would like us to walk through interminable corridors of vacuous blessedness hiding bestial deficiency, this man discloses the hand and shows a few coins in the palm. It’s all he has, yet those little riches command respect, and could constitute the opening deposit for a future of insightful observations and, hopefully, significant intuitions.
Massimo Ricci (Brain Dead Eternity)

2048

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Guionnet / Rodrigues / Rodrigues / Murayama : Noite

Bizarrely, it seems that improvising in presence of metropolitan-tinged sonic circumstances can cause factors such as mental strain and edginess to be taken out of the equation, perhaps due to a strange counter-reaction: the noise of a neighbouring street, which ideally should not correspond to a practical background for playing, regularly inspires introspective examinations of space and shapes to certain breeds of musicians. This quartet, whose instrumentation comprises alto sax, viola, cello and percussion, seizes the shadows of a nocturnal view in a neighbourhood by superimposing a collective being to that particular scenario, the outcome captured in an album where active listening is required more than ever.

Both tracks start with the above mentioned inner-city reverberations, as to set the definite context from the beginning. Evidently, the distant air currents generated by the passing vehicles – and the silences between – represent a major inspiration for the players, all of them tending to circumspection and limited motion with just a slight raspy edge in the infrequent percussive implications of the improvisations. The instruments appear in near-spirit, singularly or in different combinations, seldom emerging as a true ensemble. In that sense, a magnificent if too short droning section materializes in the first few minutes of the initial track “Story Board” in one of the record’s most emotionally charged moments, and another – dissonant, yet utterly breathtaking – towards the very end of the disc. Only rarely their voice needs to cry to be heard and, when that occurs, it’s via a series of rapid signals, without a real necessity of “affirmation of personality”. Essentially, the artists succeed in camouflaging themselves in darkness, as marvellously demonstrated by the whispered motionlessness characterizing a long part of “Drama-Like” which starts around the 12th minute.

Throughout Noite we become aware of close relationships and compatibilities springing from the attraction between opposites: instrumental and human, sound and silence, full notes and frail overtones. It takes special ears to individuate the peripheral connections and the invisible-yet-efficient mechanism that allows these artist to relinquish individuality in favour of a hazy picture of rigorousness. Once the mood is established and everything but the nutritious quintessence of this music has been erased from the mind, the first lights of a new day – typically a symbol of recovery after sleeplessness and apprehension – suddenly look undesirable.

Touchin Extremes

Jean-Luc Guionnet – alto saxophone
Ernesto Rodrigues – viola
Guilherme Rodrigues – cello
Seijiro Murayama – percussion

2046

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Toshimaru Nakamura & Mark Trayle : Stationary

A near hour of incessantly fizzling activity, laptopian Mark Trayle and no-input mixing board operator Toshimaru Nakamua apply a fastidious concentration on the minutiae of textural and coloristic detail within these unpredictably evolving modules of activity. Both deal in subtle gradations of texture, dynamic, and harmonic interval, moving from slow glacial slides of tone to static pops and sibilant blasts. While extremes of loud and soft is something of a cliche of such new music, the duo here telescope the material into a detailed middle ground, where everything resounds like the different browns and reds in a Rothko. Trayle nudges melodic intervals away from equal temperament into a spectrum of micro-intervals, and Nakamura deals lucidly with finer tones, playing with a coolly objective approach that suits the material well. This results in a series of compositions that are both enigmatic and deadpan and expansive and elongated.

The disc opens with an opaque stream of grey static, gurgling and retching. It is initially entirely impervious to any manner of decipherment, but is gradually opened up to a subtle phrasing of expansive and contraction, which becomes ever more explicit on the other two works presented here. At nearly half an hour in length, the rubberized tones and bristling static of the second composition are at once controlled and stable and yet white-knuckled and high-strung, oscillating with ease from a surprisingly deep calm to modest blasts of thick sonic mud. In this way the sound palette constantly upsets itself while remaining consistent and orderly enough to sustain interest. The final work is even more of a winding aural road trip that travels from dripping coats of sheen to whining static emissions and clouds of chopping noise and billowing aural dust. In packing potentially common gestures into short durations, the work becomes spidery and well incised, and contributes to the albums obliquely communicative nature.

- Max Schaefer 2009-04-08

Toshimaru Nakamura: no-input mixing board
Mark Trayle: laptop

Recorded by Lorin Parker in January 2007
Mixed by Toshimaru Nakamura and Mark Trayle
Mastered by Toshimaru Nakamura
Design by Mark Trayle and Carlos Santos
Produced by Ernesto Rodrigues

Released in 2008

2044

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praed : the muesli man

cs120

Without making too much of the correlation, it’s likely that the filmic involvement shared by Beirut-based bassist and electronics manipulator Raed Yassin and electric bassist and clarinetist Paed Conca from Bern – the duo Praed – combine to make The Muesli Man one of the most sonically cinematic recent releases.
Melding found and sampled sounds plus additional triggered electronic bursts and emphasized timbres from their acoustic instruments, the duo’s achievement is also notable because the CD’s aural imagery doesn’t even suggest the wide-screen story telling of cinemascope or HDTV. Instead, the split-second jump cuts, rapid editing and tincture blending that have long characterized experimental film making are expressed aurally on this notable disc.
Reminiscent of some of John Zorn’s 1980s sound collages, careful listening is recommended to pick up all the allusions and interjections incorporated into the session’s 40 short tracks. Throughout, the vector of the production changes direction so often that a new timbre often gallops onto the aural sound stage before the listener has fully grasped the pictorialist significance of the preceding one.
Yassin, associated with Lebandon’s MILL association for improvised music – whose members include trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj and guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui – is also a theatre and video artist. A decade older, Conca, who regularly composes for theatre and film productions, works in addition with the musicians such as Swiss reedist Hans Koch and British bassist John Edwards, and has also played with Kerbaj and Sehnaoui.
Cunningly the booklet graphics for The Muesli Man play with Asian and Middle Eastern stereotypes and bring into focus many of the musical inferences expressed on the disc. Along with improvised, notated, minimalist and electro-acoustic impulses, the blurry samples most consistently utilized here are evidently sourced from those areas’ most celebrated productions: Japanese action films and Arabic cinema singing. This transformation is especially obvious on “The Man who lost all his Friends (with Japanese Subtitles)”, a cut-and-paste tour de force, which takes up the CD’s first 34 (!) tracks. Its multi-faceted resonance alters in multiples of seconds – not minutes.
Nuanced and deconstructed, this sonic film begins with what sounds like a rifle shot and concludes with a locomotive whistle dissolving intro sobbing clarinet intonation – another cinematic allusion. Along the way, the polyphonic production involves such split-screen commentary as curvaceous clarinet trills balancing on top of piston-like electronic drives; reed pops and blunt bass thumps intersecting with Japanese dialogue; a sequence encompassing radio static, Arabic music and backwards running tapes; heraldic trumpet samples abutting Europeanized clarinet glissandi – and what sounds like pressurized pop bottle caps being released.
Modernism, traditionalism, primitivism and post-modernism constantly vie for aural supremacy, with triggered oscillations and muezzin-inspired chanting mated at one point; stereotypical Oriental cackling and a gentle Lebanese lullaby contrasted at another; or replicated California-style surf bass guitar runs introducing agitato reed chirps, sawing string impulses, pitch and velocity-altered soundtrack dialogue, bell pealing and abrasive buzzing timbres. Before the final fade-to-black in fact, the penultimate variations reintroduce non-sound-manipulated acoustic sequences with electronic flanges underlining a broken octave exploration between vibrating clarinet and thumping bass.
Arrayed throughout the remaining tracks are further variations on these themes. Additional studio and laptop triggered signals are mixed in with blustery and blurry shrills, electronically reworked vocal and orchestral outbursts plus shuffle-bowed and slapped string lines, faint reed slurs, and recreations of percussion ratamacues and ruffs.
“Half a Rabbit, Probably” provides the proper summation of the project. Built on spherical interplay, the fortissimo, undulating textures on the track evolve into neatly wrenched-apart drones that by its finale almost obliterate the flanged bass-string tones and single-stroke percussion that precede it. As metal abrasions meet bulky clangs, a machine-processed explosion succeeds a signal-processed wave and wraps up the interface.
If well-made indie films can have sequels, so should indie filmic CDs. Perhaps it’s now time for collective auteur Praed to create an equally stirring follow-up to The Muesli Man. Ken Waxman (JazzWord)

Paed Conca – electronic bass, clarinet, electronics
Raed Yassin – double bass, tapes, electronics

2005

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Robert van Heumen : fury

‘Fury’ is the first real CD by Robert van Heumen, a name that may not ring an immediate bell (perhaps, who knows), but who is an active driving force in the Dutch improvised electronic music. He’s active with such bands/collectives/projects as OfficeR, Skif++, RKS, Shackle and founding member of N Collective, if not organizing events for Steim in Amsterdam. His primary instrument is the laptop running software like LiSa (live sampling) and SuperCollider, sampling everyday sounds and making them sound like anything but everyday sounds. On his debut CD he has two pieces. The four part work ‘Fury (After Anger)’ and ‘They Would Get Angry Sometimes’. The first uses texts about ‘Dust Bowl migrants living in Farm Security Administration camps in central California (1940-1941). Many Americans fled the Great Plains looking for work and a better economical and ecological environment”. The texts however do not play a big part in the composition. There is a bit of guitar like sound to be spotted (self-played? taken from the original recordings), and a bit of text, but throughout the title piece is a racket of noise tumbling through the bits and bytes of the computer – but beware it’s not noise in the traditional sense of the word. It’s dynamic, ever changing, crackling, loud and soft, buzzing and hissing. Even without being able to understand the text, which doesn’t seem to be absolutely necessary, this is a very nice piece, shifting back and forth between abstract sound and more melodic passages. The second piece uses some similar sounds but is altogether a strict abstract piece of music of an even harsher quality type of noise. Vibrant music this is, great music – moving away from the delicate structures of microsound into the land of noise based textures. More Mego than micro. Great start!
Frans de Waard (Vital)

cs111

#1-#4 fury (after anger)
#5 they would get angry sometimes

Robert van Heumen – electronics
© 2008
Recorded in the Netherlands
Cover design Robert van Heumen

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Burns / Rodrigues / Rawlings / Hirvonen : refrain

cs097

The 26+ minutes of “Refrain” were recorded at Seattle’s Gallery 1412 during the local Improvised Music Festival. The instrumentation comprises piano, viola, amplified cello, surface electronics, loudspeakers, electric guitar and electronics. It’s one of the “obscure” releases in the history of the Portuguese label, both in specific terms of sound and intuition of where the musicians are directed, which is still unclear at the end of the piece. That is not to say that the performance is not good, au contraire: there’s a feel of eeriness in this improvisation that forces us to stay under the shadows of suspicion throughout, as when troubled individuals try to worm a way in our mind by suggesting impossible doubts on someone we trust blindly. The alternatively radical and familiar quality of the timbres exploited by the accomplices contributes to this state of unhinged interest: clear piano notes stain otherwise persisting static superimpositions of feedback and drones, viola and cello attributing a component of normalcy in otherwise unclassifiable clutters of small noises let loose by the guitar. Sinister scrapes abound, as the quartet seeks out for rust and residues – not a hint to any kind of tidiness. When they manage to achieve the aim – with a little suffering – it just looks like when it stops raining, but the sky remains threateningly black. Massimo Ricci (Touching Extremes)

Gust Burns – piano
Ernesto Rodrigues – viola
Vic Rawlings – cello, surface electronics, loudspeakers
David Hirvonen – electric guitar, electronics

© 2007

Recorded in Seattle, 8th February 2006

Cover design Carlos Santos

1998

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